Week in Edtech 7/29/26: Gates Foundation Shakeup, OpenAI's AI Workforce Push, Y Combinator Backs AI Tutors, Coursera Invests $100M on AI Learning, and More! Feat. Kavitta Ghai of Nectir & Aidan McDowell of UniqLearn

Join hosts Ben Kornell and Alex Sarlin as they break down the biggest stories shaping AI, edtech investment, philanthropy, the future of work, and AI-powered learning.

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:33] Bridges AI Summit brings district leaders together to discuss AI adoption, pilots, and edtech purchasing
[00:05:19] Imagi raises $4.5M with backing from OpenAI, Lovable, Will.i.am, Kahoot!, and ElevenLabs
[00:09:18] AI, cross-sector platforms, and portfolio consolidation drive edtech investment trends
[00:10:40] Gates Foundation leadership shakeup signals a new chapter for education philanthropy
[00:15:45] Gates Foundation and the future of philanthropy in an era of AI wealth
[00:20:30] OpenAI report explores how AI is expanding workers’ roles beyond traditional job boundaries
[00:21:00] OpenAI launches a campus leaders program to build student communities around AI tools
[00:31:00] Y Combinator calls for startups building personalized AI tutors
[00:37:35] Coursera invests $100M in a new AI-native learning company founded by Andrew Ng
[00:41:15] Time’s top edtech companies list sparks debate over how the industry is ranked

Plus, special guests:
[00:44:39] Kavitta Ghai, CEO and Co-founder of Nectir, on AI in higher ed and K–12, student outcomes, and privacy
[01:00:13] Aidan McDowell, Founder and CEO of UniqLearn, on personalized learning, career exploration, and student curiosity

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Transcript

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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: Innovation in pre-K to grade learning is powered by exceptional people. For over 15 years, edtech companies of all sizes and stages have trusted Higher Education to find the talent that drives impact. When specific skills and experiences are mission critical, Higher Education is a partner that delivers.

Offering permanent, fractional, and executive recruitment, Higher Education knows the go-to-market talent you need. Learn more at hireedu.com. That's H-I-R-E-E-D-U.com. 

Even something as complex as health, which I know you talk a lot about, you know, the health system versus the ed- education system. Like, I think even the goals are not always shared in education, right?

I mean, in health, at least people know they're trying to get longer lifespan and more cures for more diseases. Like, there's some underlying foundational alignment. I feel like in education, people are still debating the baseline purpose of education. The Gates Foundation has done a lot of work on trying to get to the ROI of universities.

That was, I think, some successful work because I feel like that conversation has changed a lot over the last few years. It used to be universities could just sort of sit on their laurels and say, "Yeah, you gotta come through us if you want a good job. That's just how it works." And now the discussion about is it worth it, what's it for, have come to the forefront.

I think Gates has really been part of that.

Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, 

K-12, higher ed, and work, you'll find it all here at Edtech Insiders. 

[00:01:38] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out Edtech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and 

back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

Edtech listeners, it's another Week in Edtech. Alex Sarlin, Ben Kornell back at you with everything happening in edtech. Alex, it was great to see you last week in New York City. 

[00:02:13] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. Uh, it was really fun to be in the city. That's my, my hometown, and we got to meet up and actually do some, some real face time and meet some great people and connect with a lot of really interesting people.

I can't wait for New York Edtech Week. It's coming up in just a few months. That's probably the next time I'm gonna be in, in New York, but it's always a blast, and it's always fun to see you, uh, in person. 

[00:02:33] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I had a blast. Um, the Bridges AI Summit was kind of the big event that got me and a bunch of other people out.

It was so interesting because most edtech events that I go to, you kind of have a ratio of four to one of edtech people and kind of institutional decision-makers, and this one was flipped. There were, like, superintendents, CIOs, CTOs everywhere, and a very, very small number of edtech leaders. It was really refreshing, and also people were taking the gloves off and were really, like- You know, being pretty clear on what they can and can't do or want to or don't wanna do when it comes to AI and education.

Uh, main headlines, I know there will be a newsletter article coming out about this, but main headlines are really thinking about coherence across school systems, across university systems, and then clearly defining the outcomes and goals that you're wanting to move, working through pilots to move those.

There was actually a lot of skepticism about third-party research. They're basically like, "Everybody can buy a third-party research study. It doesn't mean it's gonna work in my context." And so it was like, oh man, some salty CTOs. And, and the CTOs were the best because they're also like, "Everybody that does bottoms-up skips me.

Everybody that does tops-down skips me." "But I'm, I'm the one that makes you live or die." So like, be the friend of the CTOs. It was overall, like kudos to the Starbridge team for pulling off a really great conference in the middle of the summer in New York. It was really, really fun. 

[00:04:11] Alex Sarlin: I mean, you, you had like Arman from Brisk there, you had Adeel from MagicSchool there.

A few sort of select edtech companies really in the mix, maybe getting a little bit of the punching bag energy, but at the same time, getting access to these huge suite of amazing superintendents, CTOs, people from all districts all over the country. So other edtech folks listening to this should probably take note, this is a brand-new conference.

This is the absolute first time it came out, and seems to be drawing a lot of amazing, amazing people, especially on the buyer side, so that's always great to- 

[00:04:40] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, I would've guessed that it would be hard to get people to show up in July, but actually the engagement from, you know, the sessions I was in was primarily K-12 district leaders.

They don't have meetings and stuff going on at school sites that they've gotta get back to. Makes sense. And they get to go to New York in the summer and enjoy time in New York, so the turnout was amazing Other things that surprised me this week were announcements of deals. We've had this drumbeat of new funding deals, and for all of the talk about this being a, a tech winter and it being challenging, there's some pretty great deals getting done.

Can you share some of the highlights that you've seen? 

[00:05:19] Alex Sarlin: I absolutely will, but I also wanna make a little quick pitch for some upcoming podcasts. You, you, you usually ask me, and then I always, I'm always like, "Wait, wait, I gotta look it up." What is it? I have it ready this time. So, you know, we talked to the Columbia edtech group that was basically, like, four or five different edtech companies all doing really interesting work out of Columbia University, as well as the Colombians in edtech crew.

The, the head of that organization is really, really neat. That's c- that's out this week. We talked to Edna Martinson from Bottle Learning, who's been a, a real under, slightly under-the-radar, radar success story over the last few years, doing really great gamified learning. She was a blast to speak to, amazing founder.

And Joy DeLiso Osborne from Student Achievement Partners, just continuing to be amazing people. And then I think coming up later this month, Tony Wan and Betsy Corcoran from EdSurge. We interviewed them about the history of EdSurge, its trajectory. It's been amazing. And Anish Sahni from Teach For America.

So that's a pretty killer lineup this month. Anyway, back to your actual question. The big funding news this week, the one that was sort of most visible to me in all of my feeds and p- one that people were talking about a lot, was Imagi. I think I'm pronouncing that right, Imagi, which is Dora Palfi, a Scandinavian edtech company trying to do sort of the safety layer.

And we interviewed her on the podcast. She was terrific. A- anybody who hasn't listened to that, definitely go back and listen to that. But they got a, you know, a, a $4.5 million seed round from kind of a who's who for, of AI people. They-- OpenAI in there, Lovable, they have a direct connection to Lovable.

Will.i.am, who's a sort of edtech investor journeyman, and Kahoot!, as well as Eleven Labs. That's some pretty amazing investors there. So did that one, uh, jump out to you, Ben? 

[00:06:58] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, you know, everyone's been thinking about the harness and what are the wraparound tools, services, or, you know, when you think about the stack, what's the kind of safety layer?

What's the intelligence layer? And for edtech, that's one of our most compelling areas because it is so highly regulated with lots of sensitive data and so on. So I think there's a compelling play there. Interesting to me that it's coming out of Europe, where there's not the fragmented buyer ecosystem that we have in the US, and it makes sense that this k- would kind of grow out of the EU, where departments of education or ministries of education can make purchasing decisions that are large dollar and affect huge swaths of students.

And, you know, obviously GDPR is the most regulatory limiting, uh, privacy standard. So one of our things that we've followed for years is just the emergence of European edtech. And in the AI race, they may be the most relevant in terms of creating tools that are safe for schools to use because they have all of that infrastructure.

[00:08:09] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. A-and in this case, it's specifically Nordic edtech. There's a great, uh, newsletter about the Nordic edtech scene, which is very robust, but this is founded in Sweden. Sari, I'm gonna butcher her last name as well, but Sari, who's an old friend of the podcast, we've i-interviewed her. She was the CEO of Kid-Kida Science, which got sold out a couple of years ago.

Really amazing founder, is the chief growth officer. It's sort of like a all-female leadership team and some really awesome people coming out of, out of Scandinavia. We saw Sana Labs, you know, sell earlier this year. I always love the Nordic edtech companies. That's the Kahoot connection, that's the Lovable connection, but it's really exciting to see that.

And, you know, it comes on the heels of two other funding rounds we've seen over the last couple weeks also of sort of edtech startups that we've had been following closely. We saw DoWeLearn last week, our friend Luyen Cho get a $5 million Series A, and the week before, I think it was a $13 million Series A for Advisorly.

Manny Smith, yeah, $13.3 million, which they're do-- they do really amazing stuff for sort of community college people sort of navigating their way through community colleges. But it's been a pretty good, uh, summer month for some of these edtech startups, especially ones we've been really following closely.

I-I'm always happy to see that. 

[00:09:18] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Normally, summer is really quiet. I will say, like, a trend here is, one, like AI is still like something people can invest behind, and we're seeing a bifurcation between AI-centered, AI-enabled products and those that aren't. And, you know, I think investor appetite is high for those that have scalability and extensibility.

The other is that People who can move beyond one single domain like K-12, but who can work across multiple domains. Advisory has the ability to work in K-12 higher ed community colleges, as well as higher ed four-year, as well as workforce. And, you know, Imagi is thinking about this layer existing for all sorts of areas.

I think being able to break out of your specific category is almost a prerequisite, and it's native to AI, is this i- idea that you're category undefined. The other thing that I would say too is that there is a bit of consolidation of bets for edtech VCs. So if you notice the Lu Yen announcement and Advisory previously backed by edtech VCs.

And so I think there's some sense of we've got to double down on our portfolio winners right now, rather than spreading as many bets as we might have in the past. 

[00:10:40] Alex Sarlin: 100%. I think that's really right. One other piece of news that jumped out to me this week, and I think we-- it's an interesting sort of can of worms to open, but I think it's worth a little bit of discussion.

We just saw, this is sort of breaking news today, Alan Goulston, who is the president of the US program at the Gates Foundation, who they've done a huge amount of education work over the last decades. He's been there for 27 years, is stepping down from Gates, and I think, you know, it's a, it's a little bit of an interesting-- I mean, I, I think it's an interesting signal for a major change in one of the major education philanthropies in the US, but it also, I think, signifies a little bit of a sort of changing of the guard from this kind of philanthropy.

And, and Gates in general has already-- he has announced a little bit, you know, it's a couple decades from now, but a, a sunset of, of some of the things they're doing. Am I allowed to say that, Ben? I'm just-- I think so. 

[00:11:28] Ben Kornell: Yeah. 

[00:11:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's been announced. 

[00:11:30] Ben Kornell: I mean, I think so. I mean, we're not that much of Edtech Insiders that we would know that and others don't.

[00:11:35] Alex Sarlin: I don't think so. 

[00:11:36] Ben Kornell: I believe that it's December 31st, 2045. So from my standpoint, that sounds like a long time off. Maybe 2045 will be here before we know it, but absolutely signals some big changes afoot at Gates Foundation, especially when it comes to education. 

[00:11:54] Alex Sarlin: 100%. And I mean, do you feel like there's anything, I don't know, like should we be reading into it as, as, uh, changes in the larger landscape, or do you feel like this is just one person moving who's been very central to edtech philanthropy over the years sort of moving to his next chapter?

[00:12:10] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, I mean, I know Alan pretty well, and, you know, 27 years is a long run with any organization, so I think there's a fair amount of this that is about his personal journey. But there's also this sense of, there's still room between now and 2045 for someone to really put an imprint on the US strategy, especially in education at the Gates Foundation.

And, you know, you also had Bob Hughes step out, who was a key member of the Gates team. So there's really like some open space for a 19-year plan here to take effect. So in that sense, I think, you know, Alan was on his own personal journey, and then it intersected with this opportunity to kind of have this final chapter of the Gates Foundation under vertically aligned new leadership.

I think the third element here is that technology has changed a lot of things, and so the idea of how a, a 22nd century foundation should operate, should they be developing R&D tools? Should they be working with product organizations as well as social impact organizations? There's a bunch of really big questions.

And for someone like Alan, who you know, is interested in shepherding in this new era, for him to answer those questions probably is not as good as whoever the new leader is answering those types of questions. Overall, I would say there's a big shakeup in philanthropy. One is really shifting towards outcomes, research, efficacy, evidence, and probably that's driven by dissatisfaction with some of the longitudinal impact of past efforts.

But it's also because new measures and new ways of getting more up-to-date r-reality checks on how things are going makes people excited about not waiting three years for your efficacy study. And then the other is that there's this new entrance to the billionaire class of all of these AI folks and high-frequency trading people who are like, "Why would we work on a 20-year plan when we're accustomed to like every six months the world is changing?"

And so- I think this is really some good foresight from the Gates Foundation to say, "Okay, we're ready to play differently in the sandbox here over the next 20 years." You know, Allen, I'm sure, is gonna help shepherd in the new leadership. Let's bring in a leadership team that's ready to dynamically move with the opportunities that are now open to us.

[00:14:42] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And there's been some really interesting AI infrastructure plays coming from multiple philanthropies where they're thinking, "Okay, as this new era of technology and this new e- era of education is starting, how do we get ahead of it and make sure that, that AI and, and technology in general, but sort of rolls out in a way where we don't sort of get stuck with some of the status quo?"

You know, think of all of the work that Gates has done over the last couple decades. It's like, it's astounding how many different grants and investments and initiatives there have been, but we're still not seeing the PISA scores. We're still not seeing the NAEP scores. Like, you know, it's, it's pretty hard.

And I'm, I'm not saying that's causal or anything, but it's just education is so hard to move. And for an organization with ambitions that large, that they really want to move the, the, the entire education system in a positive direction, maybe the levers are changing. The, a- as you mentioned now, and I think, you know, you need to be agile.

Not that Allen Golston is not agile, but it's just we're gonna have to get to this really interesting moment where everybody's figuring out how to navigate. 

[00:15:41] Ben Kornell: Well, and we have to figure out what's intractable and not gonna move- 

[00:15:44] Alex Sarlin: Exactly ... 

[00:15:45] Ben Kornell: and what can move. But I do think that Allen, some of his success stories include, like, small schools movement, community-based grant making, this idea that Gates could invest in for-profit companies that have a social impact.

The other thing I would say is under Allen's leadership, Gates decided not to go it alone and to really be community aggregators where the entire funding community's coming together around key initiatives. You know, things like Common Core, high quality instructional materials. These are all things that kind of, I'm sure if Allen was on, he'd say, "Well, that wasn't me, that was this team."

But it all starts with- Exactly ... this kind of orientation around being a galvanizing citizen in the philanthropic community One thing that is interesting is there's 200 billion left for the final two decades. So that's a huge amount of money. At the same time, there's talk about the AI money coming online as 200 billion per year in philanthropic contributions coming.

What does that mean? What would that look like? If that comes to pass, I would say it would feel very much like the railroad baron times where maybe it was like- 

[00:16:58] Alex Sarlin: Yes ... 

[00:16:59] Ben Kornell: the JP Morgan and banking families did some philanthropy, and then all of a sudden you have the Vanderbilts come on, and you've got like Carnegie and all these big basically putting a zero or two zeros after every check size.

That's the possibility. What I think is the most scary thing, and we, we should probably write an article about this, is there is this perception among tech insiders that education is intractable and that the best dollars spent are on climate, on health, science and research breakthroughs, you know, poverty, economic mobility, and education itself is just such a a social dilemma that I think it's an easier thing to stay away from or to just give money to your own kid's school and like let it, let it play out that way.

So I'm hopeful that whoever comes into the Gates seat will continue the, the legacy of galvanizing philanthropy, and ideally they can build bridges with the new AI philanthropists and bring them into the fold and help support the things that are working most to change outcomes for students. 

[00:18:12] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. That would make a fantastic article.

I love that take because I really agree with that. And you've seen it, I mean, you've seen some of the tech giants of the last decade who, you know, put their ankles into education and really get burned, right? And get blamed for things and get in trouble for things and not-- they, they don't get a whole lot of kudos for it.

And I think, yeah, it's the perception of the education system as being intractable, as you say, being really hard to move. I also think it's just, it's a-- I think e-e-- unlike even something as complex as health, which I know you talk a lot about, you know, the health system versus the ed-education system, like, I think even the goals are not always shared in education, right?

I mean, in health, at least people know they're trying to get longer lifespan and more cures for more diseases. Like, there's some underlying foundational alignment. I feel like in education, people are still debating the baseline purpose of education. You know, the, the Gates Foundation has done a lot of work on trying to get to the ROI of universities.

That was, I think, some successful work because I feel like that conversation has changed a lot over the last few years. It used to be universities could just sort of sit on their laurels and say, "Yeah, you gotta come through us if you want a good job. That's just how it works." And now the discussion about is it worth it?

What's it for? What do they have to do? What do universities owe society? What do they owe their own students have come to the forefront. I think Gates has really been part of that. But that kind of, like, deep change in the way people even perceive the system is the kind of thing that you need a lot of big players sort of working together to really work on.

And in the AI era, I hope that there is some alignment between some of the big AI companies and some of the big philanthropies, but where they align is gonna be a really interesting question. We covered a few weeks ago some of the things happening in like data centers where like, you know, they're offering like training in data centers for electricians and things like that, and you're like, "That's so clearly self-serving."

It doesn't mean it's bad, but it's so clearly self-serving. And we covered the anthropic, you know, Claude for Teachers launch just two weeks ago. Like, you know, people are just trying to figure out how to put their chips in and help out. And, and sometimes it's ju- purely philanthropic, sometimes there's a business angle without just getting excoriated, and there's not a great track record of it in education.

Uh, so speaking of big AI, a couple of interesting announcements from OpenAI this week that are sort of relevant to education and jobs. Do you wanna lead us through some of them? 

[00:20:30] Ben Kornell: Yeah. The first one is a report from OpenAI on how the workforce is changing. It's a fascinating report, definitely worth reading.

If you check out Leah Belsky, who leads their education team, it's all over her LinkedIn. But ultimately, takeaway conclusion is that AI is changing the work that people do. It's not necessarily replacing their job, it's just making their role bigger in scope. And I think that that's really self-serving for OpenAI.

Like, "Hey, we're not causing economic collapse." But it also does point to what does education need to point to? We're going to be having more and more careers where having an AI co-pilot means your role is very expansive in terms of what you need to own from end to end, and that could be horizontal or that could be vertical.

The second is they're launching a program for campus leaders, kind of like a student in residence program where students sign up to be a campus lead and they rally college students to learn how to use Codex and how to use OpenAI tools and sponsor campus events. It reminds me of my Teach For America days where, like, you have a Teach For America rep on campus who's, like, bringing people together who are excited about these things.

I think it's a, a clear play from OpenAI of we want the future coders of the world, the future builders, to really fall in love with our tool set and our suite, and they're tapping into ambitious college students who understand that to get a job in today's market, like starting as early as possible and doing these types of things is really important.

I love it because I think it's an alternative to campus recruiting, where that to me feels like a meat market where ultimately, like credentials on paper often win out. This kind of technology lends itself to, "Hey, you've been here for four years, you've had access to all these tools for free. What have you built?

Let's see if you could work for us or work with companies or et cetera, et cetera." But it's a, it's interesting because it's an unabashed classic tech play, which is get students to use your suite so they imprint and then they become life-- whether they work for us or don't, lifelong, they're going to be Google Suite users or OpenAI Suite users, et cetera, et 

[00:22:54] Alex Sarlin: cetera.

And to spread it to others and to, to literally be ambassadors to other people, you know, be-- they won the bet that, you know, a student at a college is maybe more likely to listen to another student at that college and what they're doing than, than top-down training from the company. One thing that was also called out in the announcement here by, by Leah herself, which I thought was interesting, she, she mentioned that they're looking for community builders, not only technical experts.

And I think that's actually really core when you think about this, 'cause as you're saying, if you're a student right now and you're thinking, "How do I get a leg up in the AI world?" But you may or may not be a coder, you may or may not consider yourself a technical person, but you're like, "Well, I could throw amazing events.

I could throw amazing hackathons. I could bring people together for, you know, lunch and learns." 

[00:23:35] Ben Kornell: Alex, you and I should sign up for this. What are we doing? 

[00:23:38] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. Also, actually, it's interesting because I think it ties into the OpenAI re- jobs report, too. One thing stood out to me in this report that... And I'm curious if the listeners looking at how people use AI in their own companies are seeing this, you know.

Well, like, three things stood out. The core of the report is they, they evaluated how much people were messaging and asking questions of the a- of, of ChatGPT that were outside their occupation Like, so if you're in one occupation, but you're asking questions that are pretty specific about how to do work in another adjacent occupation, that sort of implies that people are expanding their role or doing other things.

The one thing is that there's more expansion in smaller businesses. So that makes sense, right? They, they always talk about wearing multiple hats in the small businesses, so that bears out here, that if you're in-- working in a small business, you may be asking legal questions, you may be asking finance questions even if you don't work in those departments b- to help out.

But the three roles that they said are asked the most, and it's actually the, the majority, the, a big majority of the things they ask are not in their domain, are customer experience, so like customer success and account management, that kind of thing, designers, and human resources. And some of the things that are most asked about are engineering and marketing.

I think that's really interesting because if you think about it, those are roles that have technical expertise, but they're more customer-facing roles. They're more roles where you're sort of people-oriented rather than designer maybe is halfway, but you know, more than, than heads down, you know, working in tools.

And in the past, it would be a customer experience person might say, "Okay, customers keep asking for this kind of thing. I better go to my engineering team. I better go to legal and ask them about that." They sort of act as a liaison, and now they're saying-- they say 77% of the messages from customer ex-experience folks are outside their domain expertise.

They, they're asking about other things like marketing, like engineering, like legal, like sales. I think it's really interesting to sort of see directionally that you have job titles that are a little softer, I would maybe say, or a little less sort of tech-focused, asking about things that are maybe a little more technical at this point, especially engineering, but marketing as well.

I don't know. Did that jump out to you, Ben? I thought it was an interest-- They're sort of borrowing tasks from what were traditionally considered harder, more technical domains. 

[00:25:49] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, the question that that line of thinking raised for me is which is better... Like in the past, we've kind of separated the world into technical and non-technical.

[00:26:00] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. 

[00:26:01] Ben Kornell: And now we have this horizontal layer of AI that is bridging the two. Is it better For our future entrepreneurs and educators to have a deep technical background and then be able to use AI to go horizontally into marketing and sales and business operations? Or is it better to have those business and operations skill set and leverage AI to go into the technical space?

Previously, I would've strongly said technical first expansion out because LLM was showing so much potential as a communication layer, as like a thought partner, as an organizer. But now over the last, I'd say year, the coding level has just exploded. The ability to like one-shot a webpage or the ability to like build some really, really complex systems that are durable and work, that leveling up means that you're seeing people with more well-rounded skill sets or, you know, more humanistic skill sets- 

[00:27:05] Alex Sarlin: Yeah

[00:27:05] Ben Kornell: really finding a lot of Advantage. So probably if you ask me today, I'd say it depends. It depends on what kind of company, depends on where your strategic advantage is. But all in all, no one can be siloed anymore. You've got to have the critical thinking and the competencies, all these nice things we say in K-12.

You actually do need that all now to be the kind of multi-tool player you're going to be need, need to be in the workforce of the future. 

[00:27:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Some of this is a little counterintuitive, but, but you also see, like to your point, I used to-- It used to be the thing that everybody would say is, "Oh, people train in technical fields, but they don't, they don't learn how to collaborate.

They don't learn how to communicate." That was the go-to line for, for-- Is like, "Oh, technical people need to learn to be connected more to people." And you are seeing in this study that engineers are the group that is least likely to look at other tasks, at least from what they found. They looked at 800,000 messages.

The engineers are not necessarily looking to do human resources. Engineers are not necessarily looking to ask about customer experience, but the opposite is, is quite true. You have a lot of people asking about engineering, exactly to your point. One thing that surprised me a little is that you have designer-- Th-there's not as many people asking about design.

To your point about like a one-shotting a website, and I think maybe that's because this is within companies, right? You know, if you're a customer experience person or if you're a finance person, you're not gonna like design your own landing page for the finance team and then launch it to the world. Like there's, there's a little bit of a barrier to entry for design, not in terms of learning how to do it.

You can make a beautiful page, but you can't necessarily actually get it out in the world. Whereas the other way around, I think customer-- They, they mention how, you know, people are using engineering skills to troubleshoot software, to work within technical systems to like make sense of the engineering infrastructure that they're working in, which they usually, they would have to rely on asking an engineer to even know what's going on.

So it's not like it's super, super clear, but it's really interesting to think about this concept of task crossover, and I agree with your take. I think it's-- And that's why I tied it to the campus ambassador program. The idea of being like, let's find a really charismatic community leader, and they can learn the tech.

They can learn how to do the engineering, and they can learn how to help people do websites. We'll learn how to do-- have people do agents and, and apps where that's different than being like, let's find the most technical, brilliant-- the people who are unbelievably good at coding with AI and get them to turn them into community builders.

That seems like it's less the strategy, and I think that actually makes sense. 

[00:29:38] Ben Kornell: Yeah. It's gonna be interesting to watch this space in that some AI companies may find that they're going to have to go really down technical paths and be specialists. OpenAI has raised too much money. They've gotta be generalists, and they've gotta be available to lots of people.

The thing you mentioned about design, Claude actually des- designed by our own Andrew Sutherland, founder of Quizlet. He led the launch of their new Claude Design. So does that mean that you no longer need designers? You know, we've been using it. I don't think so. It actually accelerates what a designer can do, and the coding is the part that gets outsourced to the AI.

So I think there's just this musical chairs or reshuffling of what all the hats are that people need to wear, and many of them might even be new categories of work. 

[00:30:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, Figma has, uh, has put in something where you can take your designs and automatically code them. You literally make a website from the designs, and then you can launch the site because it does all the underlying coding.

But you don't yet see the other way around where you say, "Oh, I'm an engineer, but I want incredibly beautiful design, and AI, you're gonna do everything." Claude Design, I think, is one of the closest we have, but as that field, you know, accelerates, you're gonna have crossovers the other direction. There are a couple more things I think we should get to 'cause they're arguably the most edtech-specific things that are happening.

One is, I think this stood out to a lot of people this week. Y Combinator puts out these requests for startups, these RFSs every season, and this time around they're the top one or the one at least at the top of the page that they launched, but I think it's sort of implied at the top one, is basically asking for an AI tutor.

And, you know, it's saying, "Hey, it's, it's all, it's all based on the concept of the primer in Neal Stephenson's famous novel, 'The Diamond Age,' which is this sort of adaptive AI tutor that works with somebody. It's hyper-personalized. It also brings in human teachers and then creates hyper-accelerated learning and can transformative learning.

And they're like, they use that as the metaphor. They said, "If you're working on this, if you're doing the primer, if you feel like you're doing it, come apply to Y Combinator." And I bet a lot of people listening to this are like, "Yeah, I am." I mean, I know I saw a lot of people on LinkedIn saying, "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm working on."

It's been a very hot project in edtech, and it's nice to see that. Y Combinator doesn't, you know, they, they invested in Bloomi recently. They've done Frizzle in the past, but they don't do that much edtech investing, and it was cool to see them sort of a-actively searching that out. What did you make of that?

[00:32:07] Ben Kornell: One of their original investments was Clever. 

[00:32:10] Alex Sarlin: Right. 

[00:32:10] Ben Kornell: And Tyler Bosmeny, the co-founder of Clever, is actually there at Y Combinator. So I don't have any inside intel as to whether there's causal relationship, but one has to surmise they have some expertise in that. And then the second thing is it continues to be top three use case of AI is learning.

And, you know, I think Google continues to embed AI learning into all of their services, and I think that Y Combinator sees that opportunity. And then I, I think the third one is, you know, for entrepreneurs, like doing something that has an impact angle has always been an appeal in Y Combinator. There's been a number of healthcare ones.

There's been a number of clean tech and environmental ones. So I read this as refreshingly consistent with what YC has done, but it really is putting this idea that Someday there's going to be this game-changing AI tutor at the forefront. That's the holy grail that people are, are chasing after. You know, my take is that I think it's gonna be a fragmented future where there's not a single AI tutor that teaches everything.

I think that different areas of specialty will have different types of AI tutors that are custom-built for that use case and that age group because the kind of learner friction needs to be adaptive to the actual content itself. But others have a take that there's going to be one winner takes all moonshot AI tutor that will be, you know, one of those household names in the future.

[00:33:45] Alex Sarlin: I think my bet would be further on the side of not consolidation exactly, but you know, there'd be-- I mean, right now we talked to, to Brilliant. Brilliant just launched a really interesting AI tutor trained on all of these student interactions. We've talked to Ello, they're doing something very similar to what Y Combinator is asking for here, ages children 4 to 10, that teaches reading and phonics and early writing.

We've talked to a lot of people who are heading towards this, and we've talked to people who are doing really dedicated math tutors, of course. I think that the dynamics of business over the years, I mean, do you remember when we, we used to talk about Google versus OpenAI? I, I don't, it's, this is obviously not, not settled, but I was always like, i-in the last few generations, the big tech companies have had a huge advantage.

And not just big tech, the incumbents have had a big advantage. If you start to get a real accelerated advantage and people start to associate you, but you become the sort of household name of a certain element of education, you get a big advantage. And we've seen that with Coursera, we've seen that with Duolingo, we've seen that with a few different edtech companies.

Not that many, but a few. And I'm sort of surprised, frankly, already. If you had asked me two years ago, "In two years, is there gonna be a sort of leader in the AI tutor space?" I would've been like, "Heck yeah." I don't think there really is. We, we talked to Curiosities. People are taking all of these different approaches, as you're saying.

They're saying, "Is it curiosity based? Is it hyper personalized? Is it a domain expert? Is it trained on particular types of data?" And there are all these different sort of slices of how it's being done. I mean, when we did our market map, so many tutors, so many interesting takes on tutoring out there. But I'm surprised.

I mean, we, we-- you see sort of in the app store some apps taking off as the sort of tutor. There's some interesting ones, especially out of Asia actually. If you look at sort of the top apps out there, there's a couple of ones in Asia that are like doing really, really well as the sort of like go-to tutor.

They're not here yet, but they're, they're there. I don't know. My instinct is that not that many can survive in sort of niche ways. I'm not sure you'll have a tutor for different subjects or a different tutor for different age groups, you know, that aren't that far apart or things like that. I feel like if a couple of companies start racing ahead and actually become synonymous with AI tutoring The same way that, you know, Duo is synonymous with language learning.

It's gonna be hard for others to keep up. But I might be wrong. I could be wrong, and I think there's lots of spa-- I mean, certainly nobody's done it yet, so there's lots and lots of space for competition. 

[00:36:04] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm just not seeing defensibility in AI even amongst models like OpenAI and Anthropic Just the open models are so close behind, like, why wouldn't an air conditioning company be able to build their own air conditioning AI tutor that's fractionally less good on the AI side, but infinitely more contextually better?

And why would they pay an outsource company to provide that service for them when they have a flywheel in their business? I think we're gonna just be bombarded with AI tutors on every surface, and it's all gonna depend on the integration with the content, not on the quality of the AI itself. 

[00:36:45] Alex Sarlin: I can see that future being true, but I, I don't know.

I-- We saw Khanmigo, of course, you know, do all sorts of stuff. I, I think that, you know, a really clever AI tutoring company would enable that air conditioning company to very easily load their- 

[00:36:58] Ben Kornell: Could be ... 

[00:36:59] Alex Sarlin: context in there. 

[00:37:01] Ben Kornell: And it could be also some of these layers that we've just talked about a little bit earlier, like a safety layer or a knowledge graph layer or something like that.

You may not perceive it as the tutor, but it is this universal thing that everyone builds on top of. Um, most software stacks have these kind of component parts that everybody uses that are universally extensible. But we will see, will there be a Kleenex or a Xerox of AI tutoring? Like that's what YC is betting and, and there's a lot of big tech betting on that.

[00:37:35] Alex Sarlin: My guess is that there will, but, uh, we-- I'm surprised we haven't seen it yet. Nobody's sort of raced ahead. Two more edtech stories. I know we're, we're running a little low on time here. Coursera, uh, Coursera is doing their earnings call, uh, this afternoon. They're moving along. They're, you know, they're, they're doing all their stuff.

Their Udemy merger is complete, and they just announced that they're making a $100 million strategic investment in a new AI native learning company founded by Coursera founder Andrew Ng. And you know, I have a Coursera background, and I think that's a very interesting take. I know Andrew Ng has-- is not only the founder of Coursera, he's sort of been core to their content strategy.

He's f- The s- m-many of the most popular courses ever on Coursera were created by Andrew Ng. He's obviously an AI guru that is known all over the world, e-even outside of the education context. In some ways, it's like going back to the well when you see this, but at the same time I'm like, Coursera has been trying to find the right way to not only use AI as a content layer, but as an actual learning experience differentiator for a while, and I think they're hoping that this could be the sort of white horse that comes in and, and does it.

And Andrew Ng and his, his teams that he puts together tend to have a very good track record. So something to keep an eye on. 

[00:38:49] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, Andrew is one of the few people who really, really understands teaching and learning. He is a teacher. He teaches at Stanford, and built Coursera, which I know you were a part of that journey.

He really built it with strong pedagogical underpinnings from the beginning. You know, if you think about the origins of Coursera, it was in this era where everyone thought MOOCs are gonna take over the world. Coursera's the only one standing from that entire era, and it's because they understood how to build modular courses that were tied to learning objectives and outcomes that had real ROI for the learners.

So now he's been running AI Fund, which has been giving him the breadth of what is AI doing in all these spaces. So I'm really thrilled that he's jumping back into the learning space in this way. And you know, the only question I have is, like, is this his full-time play or is he the chairman and then there's a bunch of other people working on it?

That's my read on 

[00:39:53] Alex Sarlin: it. He, he's, he's always has 100 irons in the fire, always. There's no way that, that he, he's, this is his full-time play. I just, I can't, can't even imagine. 

[00:40:02] Ben Kornell: But nonetheless, I think it's really exciting and nothing like having a first client that's your former company, Coursera. 

[00:40:09] Alex Sarlin: It's also, I think, a way to sort of do disruption from without, right?

I mean, we, we've talked to a bunch of Coursera folks w- recently and in the past about all the different things they've been building internally for AI, but the idea of having an external company that focused on nothing but this, that w- is gonna work dir- you know, work with you, it's an interesting way to sort of separate out this project from, and not have to do it within.

And Coursera's a pretty big company at this point, so doing it from within is a little bit of a-- Coursera, I think, is big enough to maybe be facing the innovator's dilemma. They've been around a while, and there's people doing AI native stuff all around them, but they're a pretty big company with a huge content library, lots of partners.

They may not be as agile as they once were, and I think this is a way to sort of outsource the, the agility. 

[00:40:49] Ben Kornell: On that front too, that Coursera is a, an international company now. I mean, I don't even know what percentage of revenue the US represents anymore. They're kind of like four companies beyond what they were founded as.

So I think this is a great way for them to reignite their innovation engine. 

[00:41:09] Alex Sarlin: Yes. There's one more story, and it's a little bit of just a, I just, a little bit of a rant, and I don't wanna rant too hard here, but like- 

[00:41:15] Ben Kornell: Let's do it. I always love your rants. 

[00:41:18] Alex Sarlin: Oh, man. So, I mean, Time Magazine came out with their, their new list of, you know, the world's top edtech companies.

They always work with the Statista, the sort of data company on this, and it is just the wackiest. I mean, not that there aren't great companies on there, but boy, is it wacky. It's just such a weird list. It doesn't correspond at all to how I see the field. They try to do a thing of rising stars. They try to-- They do a thing about the world's top companies and, you know, they have Duolingo at the top by a wide margin, and you can sort of see why.

They, they-- the financials are there, the impact is there. But as you start going down, for one thing, the, the scores start becoming incredibly close to one another, but also you just get these incredibly weird things. I just, I-- It always shocks me that like this field is pretty mature. There's like so m- there's hundreds and hundreds of companies on this list, and yet it just like makes so little sense to me.

And I, I imagine others looking at it would also be really surprised. I mean, a, a bunch of companies you would expect to be on it, like Newsela, and Amplify, and Discovery, and Clever don't appear anywhere on there, right? I mean, Cornerstone, Anthology, Blackboard, not on there. And it's just wacky. It's super global, which is great, but it's weird.

And I don't know. My rant is just that I hope that people don't look at a list like that and say, "Oh, this is what the edtech world is like," because it's wackadoo. It just like doesn't correspond at all. They don't have Physics Wallah on there anywhere, but they have like four Indian companies in the top 20, and Physics Wallah doesn't make the list anywhere.

It's just weird 

[00:42:50] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, suffice to say, our roles at Edtech Insiders are safe for another day. Popular edtech journalism is not a high bar. I remember seeing a Time Magazine name company, not to be named here, one of the world's changing innovation companies, and I personally knew that they had just done a layoff that resulted in their team having, like, 10 total people.

So it's like, you know, one thing we have to recognize is, like, popular press has just gone to shit. And then second, any of these listicle things are really around generating clicks and, you know, selling ads. 

[00:43:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and being able to give people certificates that they can put on their site that said we were named a Time best top company.

But this one just feels particularly crazy to me. It's very odd. I, I, I recommend everybody here go look at it, but it's Prodigy Finance is there in a top 30. That's a British company that basically offers financial support for students. But Prodigy Education, much bigger, much more successful, doesn't make the list anywhere in the 500 company list.

It's just like, you're like, "Come on, guys." So I don't know, not a very vehement rant, but I, it's just like I, I wanted to find signal in here and I just could not find it. There's like, I, I got nothing from it. 

[00:44:12] Ben Kornell: By the way, Edtech Insider listeners, when Alex gets angry, you know you've really done something wrong.

So, well, I think that's a great point for us to wrap up on is keep tuning in to Edtech Insiders, 'cause if it happens in edtech, you'll hear about it here. And we're onto a couple great interviews, so please stick with us for that coming up. Thank you all so much. I hope you have a great sprint to the finish of your summer 

[00:44:39] Alex Sarlin: We are here with one of our favorite guests on the Edtech Insider podcast, Kavitta Ghai, CEO and co-founder of Nectir.

That's N-E-C-T-I-R, which revolutionizes how high schools, colleges, and universities implement AI. Kavitta built Nectir from her experiences as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, and has since secured over $18 million in venture funding, we'll talk about some of that today, to fill demand for scalable school-controlled AI that doesn't compromise learning outcomes or academic integrity.

Already trusted by over 150,000 students at more than 130 college campuses, Nectir is backed by independent peer-reviewed research demonstrating a 7.5% campus-wide increase in GPA. I'm gonna repeat that. Nectir is backed by independent peer-reviewed research demonstrating a 7.5% campus-wide increase in GPA.

Incredible. Kavitta, welcome back to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:45:41] Kavitta Ghai: Thanks, Alex. It is so good to be back here. This is my favorite show to be on, and so much good stuff has happened since the last time that I was here, so I'm excited to share. 

[00:45:49] Alex Sarlin: 100%. E- the last time we saw each other was on the big Bandshell stage at the end of the ASU+GSV Summit.

You had already won the pitch competition for the higher ed category, and you were pitching in front of the giant crowd there. You've had a huge year, right? At the Series A funding, the growth, that incredible finding from the research. Tell us about these milestones and how they're feeding into your vision of Nectir.

[00:46:14] Kavitta Ghai: Yeah. It's been absolutely incredible. I mean, first of all, the market for anyone going and raising a Series A right now is really tough. But then you add on that we're in edtech, which is a classically underfunded category, down 90% over the last two years, and then you add on top of that the fact that I am a first-time female of color CEO, 0.4% of VC funding goes to women that look like me.

So we're just so happy to be in this place where we not only were able to do the round, but to bring together through it such incredible investors from around the nation who are specifically investing in impact, in female founders, in education. This round was led by Rethink Impact, and we're so excited to have brought on the right investors who can let us build this product in the right way, the way that we know it needs to for students and teachers across the nation to actually get real usage out of it, and to move the needle in the right ways that we care about, and that's why everything we do is backed by, like you said, this peer-reviewed research.

[00:47:14] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. So let's just get into the actual facts 'cause we haven't said them yet. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise? And w- I mean, it- I agree, this is a tough time for anybody to raise money, and seeing Nectir's big Series A round was incredibly exciting. Tell us about the round, and also tell us a little bit about that research, 'cause that research is just unheard of in education.

I feel like people may not realize how impactful that actually is. 

[00:47:37] Kavitta Ghai: Thank you. So we raised $12.5 million in our Series A round, led by Rethink Impact, joined also by Strada Foundation, ECMC, and Gingerbread Capital. So really excited about the partners that we brought on. These are people that I've built relationships with for years, so I really trust them.

You know, I know that they're coming in for the right reasons at the right time, and we need their help to scale. And so with this funding, it's really for us to be able to expand, not just within higher education, but now also to K-12 as well. We have started finally implementing Nectir within high schools across the nation.

We took a very long time to get to that point because we wanted this research to tell us, yes, we are building this in the correct way, and we're implementing it, more importantly, in the correct way, and it's moving the needles that we care about. That's the most important thing and why we have built this company very slowly and methodically when the normal advice is move fast and break things.

And we said- ... "No, I don't think this is the part where you wanna break things." So again, I'm just so happy that we found the right investors that allow us to move in that way. And the research that we've seen so far, you know, we started it from day one. We released Nectir AI in May of 2024. Immediately in June, started doing our very first campus-wide research study with LAPU here in California.

And they found that if students even just utilize Nectir three times in the semester- That they led to having a 7.5% on average increase in GPA, and that was on a campus-wide basis that they found that. And that was incredible for us for two reasons. It found that what we're asking for is not for students to talk to AI all day long about everything.

It's just meant to meet them when and where they need it to make sure they don't fall through the cracks. And sometimes that's literally just having a burning question at 3:00 in the morning a couple times throughout the semester, and you need someone to be there for you, and that's where this customized guardrailed AI from Nectir can be there in those moments, and then you do see that needle move.

And so now that has led us to doing research studies, at this point, the biggest one being across the entire state of California with the California Community College system, and we saw a huge increase across the state in retention, specifically in this one, which is even more amazing. So we're really excited for those study results to come out later this year.

[00:49:53] Alex Sarlin: It's spectacular. So for those who have not heard Kavitta on the podcast before, she's always an amazing guest, and she has this-- You know, she founded, you and your co-founder founded Nectir as undergraduates at UC Santa Barbara really based on this insight that people were really hungry for communication systems where they could talk to other people within the campus, they could talk to other people within their class, they could talk to professors, and there were all these just different sort of groups, basically like a Slack that works for, for universities.

Then, as AI came in, you built in all of these really powerful AI tools so that students could get answers about all different things within the campus, grounded in the curriculum, grounded in the university, uh, database or knowledge base, and I'm sure you can describe it better than I can. But, uh, the reason I wanna do a little of the history there is that now you're starting to move into K-12, and some of the value propositions that you've seen, the increases in GPA, the increases in retention, just the feeling of community and connection are so valuable to high schools as well.

Tell us about how you're taking some of the learnings and transferring them into a K-12 environment. 

[00:50:58] Kavitta Ghai: Yeah. That's a phenomenal question. I'm so excited that you asked, because it was something that we took a very long time to expand into, right? We said that it just makes sense for college students. They have so much work to do.

They're spending so much money on this education. We know that there is this very strong use case for them, and more importantly, they're adults. That was where we wanted to start with putting AI in the classroom. And I was specifically the one on the team who was like, "Oh, uh, guys, I don't wanna go into K-12 unless we know for a fact those students need it, that it's gonna work, that it's safe for them."

And so finally, we found a high school who approached us, and they were extremely AI-forward and tech-savvy. You could tell that they had just thought about it extensively, and were gonna be great partners with us to not only do the research studies, but also implement it in the right way across campus.

And what we found was incredible. 96% of students on that campus are daily active users. Wow. I have never seen that with any other edtech tool ever. And they're sending on average 500 messages per day per student. That is- Oh my God ... insane. And I wanna be clear here that Nectir is not this you can go talk about anything.

It is AI specifically for education. So they're asking questions just about their course material, the classes they're taking, college prep. And it made us realize, we had this duh moment of, "Oh my God, those kids need this in a lot of ways even more than college students do." There's no TAs in the classroom.

Their teacher is left to answer every single one of their questions, and then help guide them through applying for college, rewriting their essays, figuring out, "Why do I even wanna go to this college specifically?" And I remember being in high school and growing up in the Bay Area seeing people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a college prep advisor, and my family couldn't afford that.

And so imagine if I had access to AI that could actually help me bridge that gap, could help me figure out why am I applying to these schools, and how do I apply in the right way? That is what made me realize, oh my God, these students need AI in the classroom right now because they have more gaps than ever to fill.

And if we can get more students from high school to college right off the bat to have them feel confident in the decision that they're making going to that school, that's a game changer 

[00:53:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, these are incredible statistics across the board. I feel like you're really rewriting in lots of ways what success looks like for edtech companies.

I mean, these incredible usage numbers, and Greg, the research is showing some really astounding, you know, results. And, and you've been working across the entire California system at a college level. As you start moving into K-12, I'm curious how you're thinking about the combination. You mentioned, you know, you don't necessarily want students to be working with AI all day every day, right?

In the, in h- in the college environment, even accessing it a few times during the semester, accessing Nectir can make a big difference. But then you're saying high school students are, are using it a lot. I'm curious where you see the sort of sweet spot being for Nectir being able to both be a sort of community hub and collaboration area within a school environment, a single class or a school or the staff, and then where you-- it's, it's a sort of back and forth between AI to, as you say, get the questions you need answered to extend the reach of the instructor or TAs.

Like, there's a combination of person to person and person to AI. How do you see those working together? 

[00:54:17] Kavitta Ghai: You know, we talk about this a lot. Do we want students to be sending 500 messages a day to Nectir? Right. Like, that sounds great from a company usage perspective- Right ... but then I think about what kind of world do I imagine that I wanna live in?

And I think that's the job of startup founders, is to live in this universe that doesn't yet exist and then bring it into reality because we believe that this is a better one for all of us to live in. And I think what we found, to be quite honest with you, is I love how much help that they are getting from this, but I would like to find a way for them to honestly use it a little less.

I don't want them to be reliant on asking every single question to AI. And that's what's been great about working with these schools who we can go and say that to and say, "Okay, what are the ways that we could maybe adjust for that?" And so now we're doing things like putting into the prompt that at a certain point the AI actually redirects the student and says, "Hey, you've asked some really great questions.

I think it's time for you to go talk to an advisor in person. Here's their office hours. This is where they are on campus. They're actually still there for another hour. Why don't you go chat with them about this? And here are some questions that you can go ask them." And so it's helping students figure out even when to use AI, when is the right time to use it and to not use it, to have the AI be the one to direct them on that.

And I think it leads to what, for us, is one of the most important things about the work we're doing in both K-12 and higher ed. It's actually about delivering AI literacy, and I think that's a really fluffy, big word. Even I don't like using it. What it really means is we're at a whole new paradigm shift of technology on a global humanity level scale.

The best thing that we can be doing right now and that any AI company can be doing is making sure that we are teaching people what this technology can and cannot do, how quickly it is heading into the next stage, what that means for us as a species, and then how do they utilize AI in the right way on a day-to-day basis to make their lives better and to prepare for this very quickly changing future.

That's really what we're delivering at this point. It's less about the technology and the platform itself. It's more about teaching you what this brand-new world looks like and how to use that technology in the right way. 

[00:56:24] Alex Sarlin: Final question for you, and I know it is a little bit of a big one, but we, we-- you just a, a couple minutes left, which is that y- one of the things I think that's been so powerful about Nectir is that from your very origins, you were like, "Why can't we use Slack?

Why can't we use things like this in a university environment?" And, and what you found is this, all these regulatory and compliance issues, and you have really navigated this very well and Nectir is, is safe. It's designed to be very responsible. It's designed to be compliant. It is something that universities can pick up even at a massive scale, like the entire California Community College system, which is, like, the biggest system in the world.

And n- now as you're going to K-12, there's a, a different set of sort of regulatory environment issues. I'm curious how you balance this sort of really exciting ideal vision of students talking to AI, students talking to each other and being really connected with all of the hurdles that are sort of necessary to get into that kind of regulated environment that's compliance, privacy, security, data.

How do you balance those things? I know the-- it could be another hour, but what's the one-minute version of it? 

[00:57:24] Kavitta Ghai: The priority has to be, and will always be, the privacy and security. Like, you can think that, "Oh no, it's a balance of both of them." Yeah, it is always gonna be a balance, but there is nothing that is ever going to be more important than keeping our data safe and keeping our students' privacy safe.

And from the very beginning, it was never even a question of, "Hey, should we surface some amount of student messages to even the teachers?" No, absolutely not. I think that students need to know that their privacy is protected The kinds of questions that I would ask AI as a student who thought my teacher was reading my messages versus if I knew that they weren't are gonna be completely different.

[00:58:02] Alex Sarlin: Interesting. 

[00:58:03] Kavitta Ghai: And that's really what we're trying to do here is, again, create the behavior that we would like to see reflected in the world, which is to have technology that is truly safe, that doesn't share your data anywhere else, that is implemented in the right way in your classrooms and in your life in general, that you're taught how to use effectively.

But at the same time, it is not taking away your freedoms and privacies. We're never sharing that information back with the model providers. And schools have to know that they can trust us to not be-- We're not OpenAI, we're not Anthropic. Our job is to help take those technologies that they build and package it in a way that is safe to use in the classroom, and that is the first word we will always lead with.

We're not going out and saying we have the same exact technology that Anthropic does. We don't. We specifically have technology that is safe for students and schools to use. It is always the top priority. That will never, ever change. There is no world in which AI can be used properly in the classroom if it is not protecting your privacy and your data.

[00:59:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Fantastic. Well, huge year for you, where a big Series A round, moving into high schools, winning the, the GSV Cup 50 Fan Favorite for higher education, but also just expanding and continuing to grow that footprint, and o-obviously incredible results across the board, both from a, a outcomes and usage perspective.

It's always so much fun to talk to you. Kavitta Ghai is the CEO and co-founder of Nectir, N-E-C-T-I-R, revolutionizing how high schools, colleges, and universities implement AI. Thank you for being here on Edtech Insiders. 

[00:59:31] Kavitta Ghai: Thank you so much for having me, Alex. I am so excited to be here once again, and excited to chat with you guys next time when we've done even more crazy stuff.

[00:59:38] Alex Sarlin: Let's do it. 

[00:59:39] Kavitta Ghai: Yep. 

[00:59:40] Alex Sarlin: For our guest segment on the Week in Edtech this week, we are speaking with the great Aidan McDowell, the founder and CEO of UniqLearn, working on pushing the boundaries in education to unlock the most personalized learning experience for every student. And UniqLearn has evolved from just personalized homework, which is already pretty exciting, to career exploration, and is now working on a vision for the future of the entire system.

Let's talk more about that. Aidan McDowell, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[01:00:11] Aidan McDowell: Thanks, Alex. Appreciate you having me. 

[01:00:13] Alex Sarlin: So let's dig into that. You're expanding from personalized homework, already not a small task, to career exploration, and now this broader vision of how education might evolve in this 21st century.

What are you doing with UniqLearn, and what is it your vision for what education should look like? 

[01:00:29] Aidan McDowell: Yeah, it's been a fun journey, man. As you said, started really with the idea of personalizing practice for students. The whole journey of the company really stems from my experience as a kid and being disengaged, being bored in class, seeing classmates struggling with the same amount of boredom or with frustration with the material.

And so just have always had this inclination that we need to respect and acknowledge every student's individuality. And, you know, you have to start somewhere, right? So for us, that was homework. And over the course of building the original UniqLearn platform, distributing that across the country, we keep talking to schools, we talk to our customers every single day, we spend a lot of time in person, and in doing so, we uncover other pain points.

And one of those pain points we uncovered was one in career exploration. And I studied curiosity a lot in college. I study it a lot just as a curious person myself. And so when the topic of career exploration came up, you know, there's all these amazing platforms that do a really good job of structuring college readiness and how to prepare for the workforce, but I wanted to build something that really maintained the integrity of curiosity and exploration.

And so that's where UniqPath was born. So UniqPath gives students the opportunity to create custom courses for themselves about anything, something mainstream like teacher, doctor, lawyer, something more niche like an NFL head coach or a scuba diving instructor or a horse racer. And so they do these courses and these projects as a means of just exploring.

There's no grading, there's no standards. Everything that I'm against, which we can get deeper into. But really just pure curiosity and exploration there. 

[01:02:05] Alex Sarlin: Fascinating. UniqPath So that sounds like a lot of fun. And you know, it's interesting, I think the pain point you're mentioning the teachers have named to you is a real one that people have been trying to figure out for quite a long time.

How do you bring that understanding of the world beyond school, which is most of the world, into the school environment in a way that is non-threatening, is open-ended, is exciting, is meaningful, is informative? That's a really interesting approach, and I imagine there must be some AI under the hood if you're doing it for anything that people might say, or, or are these created by experts it-- or are they created by AI with experts?

I'm curious how these paths are, are made. 

[01:02:42] Aidan McDowell: Yeah. So they're created just in real time using generative AI. It's pretty rigorous structure in the back end as far as how these courses are creating, the video filtering system, the project creations and stuff like that. But as far as how we bring that in, I think one of the fundamental problems in education is we try too hard to create structures, and in doing so, we create structures that are way too rigid.

And so the theory with UniqPath is literally just let the kid explore. If they get five minutes into a pathway and they're like, "This sucks," then let them go to a different pathway. Let them create a new one, 'cause exploration is about finding what you like and what you don't like, what you value and what you don't value.

So why force a student to go all the way through something if they recognize in the beginning that they don't like it? So kind of the ease of it was let's just not be so rigid, and it opens up the door to that pure exploration 

[01:03:36] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting. So yeah, you're sort of maintaining that autonomy and agency, especially in a, in an explorative context.

If you're just trying to learn about something or you're just trying to be curious about things, you don't wanna be accidentally forced into a long course about a horse trainer because you had an idea one day, and now you're like six weeks into your horse, horse trainer course. I'm sure they're not that long.

But yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. One of the things you've talked about a lot, both in terms of all of these things, the homework, the career exploration, and your sort of larger vision, which we, we still haven't gotten into yet, but is this idea of holistically understanding the student, understanding them not just through their grades, not just through their, you know, attendance or their class behavior, but understanding them much more deeply.

What qualities of students are often overlooked in a school environment, and how do you envision having those qualities inform what education looks like? 

[01:04:26] Aidan McDowell: Yeah. So the holistic approach has been core to our work from the very beginning, and the catalyst of that for me was a paper by a Danish psychology professor named Jan Thonesvang.

He built a, a four-quadrant model, and he built it in the context of clinical psychology, so, you know, a therapist and their client. And the idea is in order to analyze any of your client's phenomena, you must first understand everything about all four of these quadrants holistically. And so these four quadrants were the singular internal, singular external, plural internal, and plural external.

Singular internal is your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, things that are singular to you and no one else can observe unless you share them, right? They're internal. Singular external is your behaviors, your relationships, your actions, right? Things that are still singular to you as an individual, but observable by those around you.

Plural internal is gonna be like your religion, your morals, your family values, things that are shared amongst an inner group, but still kind of internal to you guys as a community. And then plural external is like your government, your work environment, your natural environment, things that are just largely shared with those around you.

And so again, the idea is in order to analyze a client's phenomena, even if that phenomena lies solely in one of those quadrants, you must first understand all four quadrants holistically So we apply that theory to students, right? So we wanna know who students are as learners, but even more importantly, who they are as people.

And so that can mean understanding their interests, their personality, their character strengths, but it also means understanding, you know, are they getting good sleep every night? What kind of breakfast are they being fed every morning? How are they getting to school every day, right? These are real things that affect real people and certainly affect who a student is in your classroom every single day.

[01:06:12] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. What an interesting framework. I have never heard of that, and it is really mind-expanding, the idea of trying to understand all of those different aspects of a person and how they interact with one another. I can imagine how that would give a very thorough profile of, of who somebody is and sort of how they think, but what they identify as, all sorts of things.

So let's dig into how these pieces add up to the vision that you're starting to build, right? I mean, personalized homework, really exciting. Career exploration that's personalized and autonomous, really exciting. When you put this holistic vision of a student together, when you start to take some of the sacred cows of education like, you know, time-based education or everybody moving at the same pace or all those things, and start to take some of them off the table, you have some really interesting opportunities to do sort of proficiency-based learning or various kinds of much more interesting, I think, and, and, and sophisticated education models.

What does that look like for you and, and how are you helping make it happen with UniqLearn? 

[01:07:09] Aidan McDowell: The larger vision was a natural development of the work that we were doing, right? So we started with the UniqLearn platform, then we built the UniqPath platform. Then we had districts start coming to us to help them build kind of some custom operational efficiency tools, transportation, HR, payroll, purchasing, academics, just kind of the workflows of the people behind the scenes.

And then we had a district come to us and ask if we can build them a custom core curriculum. And we took the idea of these custom solutions from an operational standpoint and the custom curriculum, and I looked at that and I was like, "That's kind of an entire district," right? Like the learning and academic piece and then the operational piece, and you put those two things together and that's a school district.

So I took that as an opportunity to say, "Well, if I'm building a school district, what do I want that school district to look like?" And so we invented what we call a Neo District. And a Neo District is a school district that meets a defined standard of excellence from an organizational, technological, and pedagogical standpoint Inside of each of those pillars is a set of principles and criteria that a district must meet in order to become a neo district.

So we're working with a couple school districts right now to help them transform into the pioneer neo districts. Our team is writing a paper, and we'll be publishing that at the end of the year, uh, kind of describing the neo district, the framework, the process of transformation. This isn't something we plan on gatekeeping or keeping a secret.

We want this to be out there. We want people to start helping districts transform. We want districts to start trying to transform themselves, but we know ultimately that they'll need a transformation partner. And so really what this is, is we want a school district to run with the operational efficiency of a high-performing business.

But rather than optimizing for output metric like profit or revenue, we want to optimize for an output metric of student achievement or student readiness or student wellbeing, right? And so measuring the inputs that then go into those outputs and maximizing those inputs, right? So working backwards from what our true goal is.

So that's kind of the idea of the organizational piece. The technological piece is the idea of-- and there's several examples, but one example is, uh, zero siloed systems. You cannot have a single system in your district that doesn't share or communicate data with all the others. If you do, you're not a neo district The idea of district sovereignty over subscriptions, right?

Owning your AI, owning your data, owning your stack. The reality is the barrier to build is so low that there's no reason to not build your own things or have things built custom to you. Pedagogically, this is kind of where you asked the question, the idea of shifting from a time-based model to a proficiency-based model, from a subject-based model to a skills-based model, measuring students relative against themselves, against their own growth rather than against the mean.

Demonstrating knowledge and demonstrating proficiency rather than bubbling it on a test. So these are just some examples. Happy to go deeper into any of those pillars or the idea of transformation, but that's the new vision. 

[01:10:07] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. So organizational, technological, and pedagogical, and then you're putting them together to this concept of a neo district.

That's fascinating. So I mean, one thing that excites me about that idea, there's many things, but I think one thing that excites me about it is sort of setting this very specific sort of North Star of what does transformation look like right, right now, you know? And, and, and it's all of these different elements.

How do you move to proficiency, move to skills? How do you think about optimizing for student well-being? It's optimizing for student achievement, all the things you just named. It's sort of like it's an entire system, and because it's an entire system with a very specific point of view, you can sort of have people make sense of it collectively rather than trying to move one thing at a time, which is how, how often districts are sort of forced to think.

They say, "We're gonna work on this this year. You know, we're gonna work on that this year." You say, "No. Change the whole system at once. Try this entirely new vision of what education could look like." I'm curious what the reaction has been so far. I, I imagine districts, many of them really, they know they need change.

What do they say when you describe to them this concept of neo district and offer to partner with them? 

[01:11:13] Aidan McDowell: Yeah, I mean, I, I'm very upfront with them and I tell them, "Listen, I, I know I'm crazy here." "I know what I'm about to say to you is nuts. I know that y- you might not like me afterwards. That's okay." I'm also very transparent to say we don't have all the answers, right?

You ask me how to get from point A to point B, I can't map out the whole thing for you. We have a core set of beliefs that are backed by research that we have seen work in practice in different areas, and we wanna just put them all together. So I've gotten responses all the way from, "You're crazy," to, "I can't even wrap my head around what you're saying," to, "I'm all in."

And so my thesis is there's about 13,000 school districts in the country. I think like 50 of them would even be open to hearing me talk about it. I've talked to like 15 of them, and all I want is three. And we've got two out of the three. And from there, we build these case studies. We save districts millions of dollars a year.

We lower their teacher churn from 14%, which is national average, to 3%. We increase the average superintendency from three years or whatever it's at right now to eight years, and student ac- uh, achievement goes way up, and all of a sudden I'm not so crazy anymore, right? But there's so many of these leadership factors too.

The superintendent one is one that kills me, right? The average tenure of a superintendent, I, I don't wanna misquote a number, but it's something low around like three years. Could you imagine if Amazon changed CEOs every three years, right? The company would never get anything done. Why is that acceptable in education?

So yeah, the responses have been mixed, but in a vision like this and in a movement like this, what I want is extreme believers and extreme non-believers. I don't want someone that's like kinda half believing what I'm saying and is kind of like, "Oh yeah, that's super cool." Like, no. I want 90% of people to tell me I'm nuts and it's never gonna work, and I want 10% to say this is awesome and that we work together 

[01:13:04] Alex Sarlin: One, if you're looking for three out of 13,000, that's a lot to start.

You know, that's, that's a lot smaller percentage than 10%, but that's, that's amazing. And then, of course, what's really exciting about that vision is you get your, your early believers, you get people saying, "I'm in, I get it. I see all the pieces working together. I see how this could be a much better system."

And then the proof is in the pudding, right? Then they, they start building the systems, and when the numbers change and the, the things look very different on the, the outputs that you mentioned, achievement, student wellbeing. What was the last one? 

[01:13:34] Aidan McDowell: There's a bunch of output metrics. They gotta define it, right?

But student achievement, student wellbeing, student readiness, lowering teacher churn, just staff happiness, right? There's a lot that goes into it. 

[01:13:44] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. So you see those, those output metrics actually move within the system. Suddenly it becomes a movement that everybody is paying attention to. I love that idea.

Plant that flag, explain how it all works, and then, I mean, school systems are big bureaucracies. A lot of people are traditionalists in all sorts of ways, so I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of pushback. But plant that flag, put it out there. What does the vision look like? I love that. And I guess the key question there is, you've mentioned some of the really amazing statistics that UniqLearn is already engendering in school districts.

You're lowering, lowering teacher burnout rates, for example. How are you intending to take UniqLearn and become that kind of partner in helping people really transform, even if it's, whether it's three, whether it's 50. What is the role that UniqLearn will play in helping make these neo districts come to life and actually achieve?

[01:14:29] Aidan McDowell: Yeah. So I mean, from a platform standpoint, the work that the UniqLearn platform has been doing in classes has kind of set the stage for some of the pedagogical pieces, right? And AI in general has done so too. It's not just our platform, but the idea that students can work on unique things at once, right?

Seven years ago, five years ago, even three years ago, the idea that you had a class of 30 kids and all 30 kids were working on something different was mind-blowing. Now it's kind of a given, right? Or at least in the schools that we work with. So the idea that students can work on individual things at individual paces tailored to individual pieces of content, et cetera, really laying the groundwork for that The idea that students should move through things based on proficiency and not based on the days of the week.

So some of those pedagogical frameworks really embedding through the UniqLearn platform. Through the UniqPath platform, the idea that we don't need all this rigidity, right? Students can just explore and learn and then demonstrate what they've learned, and the skills that are attached to each of those experiences is really what we should be focusing on, right?

So that's kind of the work that the platforms have done in the background. As far as UniqLearn as a company, how are we going to help districts transform into a neo district? Again, districts really needing that transformation partner. Saying that you're gonna go from an organization structure that looks like this to one that looks like this, you know, you're gonna need a partner to help you do that.

I love school districts. My heart is in education, but these five-year strategic plans that don't always get done and maybe go a little slow and all... No, no, no, we don't have time for that. Like, we gotta, we gotta go. I do think that a neo district transformation is a three to five-year process, but there's a lot going on in those three to five years.

[01:16:09] Alex Sarlin: That's right. 

[01:16:09] Aidan McDowell: Yeah. And the first couple years is probably something like getting your community on board, uh, building trust and credibility with some of, with some smaller movements. So maybe, right, you have all three of these pillars. Maybe you attack at one pillar at a time. And so maybe from a pedagogical standpoint, the way that you kind of ease people into it is you adopt a platform like UniqLearn, and you get people familiar with the idea of AI in a classroom and students working on unique things and the idea of pure exploration, X, Y, and Z.

So it doesn't need to be this monstrous shift overnight, but it's, it's a culture and a mindset shift as well as technology and everything else. 

[01:16:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's a really exciting vision. Let's talk about the skills piece of it, because you've mentioned it a couple times, and I think skills is a word that, uh, I think sometimes feels overloaded.

It's being used a lot in learning and development. It's being used a lot in lot-- There's lots of skills-based hiring, skills-based training. But y- I think when you talk about skills and moving to a, from subject-based education to skills-based education, you have a very specific vision of what that looks like.

Let's, let's dig into it. 

[01:17:10] Aidan McDowell: Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea th-this really birthed me in ge- in geometry class, all right? I liked math as a kid, but I could not stand my geometry class, and the thing that really killed me was the Pythagorean theorem. It wasn't 'cause I didn't get it. I, I like algebra. I, I'm comfortable with that type of work, but it was just so dumb to me.

And it was so obvious that I was never, ever, ever, ever going to use it, right? And I made that argument with a lot of things in school, but that was the one thing that I was like, "I promise you I'll never use this." And Alex, I still have not. So if you can present me with an opportunity where I will, I would gladly take it 'cause I still remember the stupid formula.

But that was the moment where I was like, "This, this is just not worth it," right? And so it really caused me to think, "Why are we learning this?" Right? I really was curious about if I know I'm not gonna use this, why do we have to learn it? And I realized it was n-- and by the way, this doesn't justify it, but what I realized is that it wasn't about the Pythagorean theorem, it wasn't about the hypotenuse, it wasn't about the right triangles.

It was the idea of being able to analyze and handle situations where there were known variables and unknown variables, right? It's the skill that underlies it. So then my question is, okay, is that the only way to learn about situations with known variables and unknown variables? Obviously, the answer is no, right?

Mm-hmm. But if it's the skill that matters, then why are we fixating on the subject, on the content? The answer for a long time was, well, because we had to pick something to teach the skill, and we had to standardize it because there was no way to really adapt it in real time and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, now there is. So enough of that, right? And let's really identify the skills that matter, and then let's choose content and subject that resonates with the student, that challenges the student, that draws a student in, and use that to teach the skill. 

[01:18:59] Alex Sarlin: That's pretty convincing. Pythagoras is a really interesting one too, 'cause he was almost like a religious, like almost like a cult leader in his, in his day.

So the idea that like this-- I mean, I, I take your point that this like theory that I think you're right, it's, it's simple enough. It has a couple of variables. It's very easy to remember as for a formula, and it's a way for people to sort of get into this concept. It's, it's obviously relevant if you're already doing geometry, but you know, the question of how does that type of math actually translate into anything meaningful for our lives is, is, is one that we've been trying to answer for a long time.

I interviewed Ted Dintersmith, just wrote a book called Aftermath that's, uh, very much in the same vein about this, about we, we teach math the wrong way because we're focusing on the content and these things that are just not transferable. So I buy it. So in this world where we sort of distill some of the core content into the core skills underneath them, then I can imagine it feeds into this concept of personalized, unique education because different students might have different ways to learn those underlying skills.

Maybe some students love the Pythagorean theorem and they use it. That's their mechanism to learn about variables. Others say, "I don't care about this at all, but I wanna start a business," or, "I want to see how this works in, in sports context," or, "I wanna see how this works in a financial, you know, model or something totally different."

And I can imagine that that skills approach then becomes the foundation for all of this different personalized education. Is that how you're envisioning-- is that how it works within Uniclear or what you're envisioning? 

[01:20:25] Aidan McDowell: Yeah, for sure. It's definitely part of the vision. You know, the idea that students are really just exploring and curious and the agents of their own learning, and it's guided by the skills that underlie them.

There's a skill embedded in everything. There's a skill embedded in playing Minecraft. There's a skill embedded in playing flag football out on the field with your friends. There, there's skills everywhere, right? And so let's focus on those and let the student be a child, right, and be curious and explore.

And through that, we can kind of guide them based on those skills rather than kind of forcing them down a tube full of content that is really not relevant. 

[01:21:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And often just not inspiring e-either, right? I mean, we don't have to fixate on the Pythagorean theorem, but like, you know, it's famously off-putting for many students, creates anxiety, creates stress.

People have-- There's been, you know, a lot of ink spilled about the effect that math has on people who are-- don't love it, and it's-- that's most people That's most students. Hundred percent. And yeah, so that, that is something really, really interesting about that. So as you are taking the UniqLearn company through these different visions, I mean, I'd love to hear sort of how you're thinking.

It sounds like you're being very responsive to districts. It's like I hear this interesting dynamic where you're like, you know, "We go to districts, we find their pain points. They tell us that career exploration is a real issue, and so we build UniqPath for them. They tell us that they're struggling with this, or they have these superintendent turnover problems, and we're trying to address them in these really comprehensive, cohesive ways."

And at the same time, your vision, some districts, you know, may hear it and say, "You're crazy," right? That, that like you say or say like, "I don't know how to get my head around it." How do you sort of envision this, this interesting back and forth between yourself as an edtech, you know, UniqLearn as an edtech company, and your users and buyers and customers and partners who are on the ground delivering education in school environments.

And, and just writ large, uh, what do you sort of think is sort of the right relationship between those two entities in general? 

[01:22:25] Aidan McDowell: Yeah, it's a good question. People have definitely asked me your question, you know, "Are you distracting yourself? Are you taking on too many things?" I think the name of the company is UniqLearn, right?

And the vision and the mission has always been to personalize the experience for the student. It's always been to personalize education. From the very beginning, we've placed a huge emphasis on not only spending time with our customers, but spending time in person, shaking your hand, looking you in the eye, sitting there while we solve problems, right?

And the most consistent piece of positive feedback that we continue to get from the day we started the company till now, and it is the number one thing I'm most proud of about our company, is our customers always tell us that they are amazed at how we support them. They hear from their teachers how responsive we are.

They hear from the students that we're always talking, like they love it, and that is the number one thing I take pride in. And part of that is actually listening to them, right? It's easy to say, "Alex, yeah, yeah, tell me anything, man. Like, I would love to hear what you have to say." And it's another thing for you to tell me what you're thinking and then for you to actually see it the next day when you log into the platform.

Right. We work nonstop to make sure that your ideas and thoughts are addressed. And so we're really, really passionate and prideful about that, and we really have seen it as a natural progression of taking user feedback from the UniqLearn platform itself to just listening larger and larger and larger.

Combine that with environmental factors like where AI is at in terms of building and the internal makeup of our team, the infrastructure that we built for the UniqLearn platform in terms of engineering and being able to apply that as kind of a template to building anything. It's just on a c- it's just kind of all come together as now this place where we really can deliver unique solutions for unique people 

[01:24:15] Alex Sarlin: I love that concept of sort of listening larger, right?

Listening to larger trends, seeing how it connects to the environment. And, you know, you have a teacher and a student in a particular class, but you also have a superintendent turnover, or you have burnout at a high level in a district, or you have budget. A huge thing right now is budgetary issues that you-- people can't afford the, the, the equipment or technology they wanna be implementing.

And all of these things play, the micro and the macro play together, so it makes sense to be listening for the larger trends. And I think one of the large trends that I think is, is happening in the school world, in the educ-- in the K-12 world right now is this desire to really, you know, get it right. I mean, there, there's lots of constraints, but I think there's this feeling of like, we know we are not fully on track.

Like, we know we need some real adjustments to be able to achieve our missions, however they're defined in different districts, but probably some variation of achievement, wellbeing, and readiness, uh, as you've been saying, and, and factors around teacher morale and teacher turnover. Uh, they, they have their own internal metrics and they-- but they're-- I, I think a lot of people are really saying, "We can't just go on business as usual."

Like, it's not the time. Things are happening in all sorts of places, and we have to make changes. I, I imagine that your, your Neo district vision may really-- you may get more, more districts than you, than you expect, I, I-- is my guess, saying, "Yes, this is a very clear vision of something we can do." They're probably not gonna say, "I buy into it 100% and I'm gonna do all of it on year one," but saying, "Yeah, personalization, understanding skills, proficiencies, thinking about this in a really different way.

I'm excited about it." I wish you the best in being the ambassador of that vision. 

[01:25:50] Aidan McDowell: One thing you said that's super important and I wanna double down on is the idea of we're kind of off track and we're looking at our internal metrics, so on and so forth. First of all, I think we're measuring the wrong things.

That's like an undeniable problem I see in education. We are measuring the wrong things. I had a superintendent, we were sitting down here in New York. He, he was visiting his family, and his state, I'm not gonna name names or states, but his state had just changed the, the law around district funding, and the-- it breaks down instructional budget into three subsections, and I'm gonna butcher what they are, but it's like classroom instruction, special education, and like one other thing that has to do with like maybe English as a second language or like student accommodations.

And so those three subsections make up instruction as a whole. And what it was previously is that the instruction budget had to be sixty percent, and the makeup of those three subsections, I don't think there was a law around. And now what it is, is the classroom instruction subsection needs to be sixty percent, meaning that they're now needing to take away from the special education and the other accommodations budget to make the classroom instruction sixty percent.

And so the conversation the superintendent was having, he's like, "You know, why would they do this?" Like, "How, how would you help me rework this budget?" Right? 'Cause we're talking Neo district, we're talking restructuring your organization, right? Part of that is the way you're spending money, the way departments are built, the way teams are built, et cetera.

And I said, "First of all, I have no idea how you would fix that. Second of all, you're measuring the wrong thing here, and not you, but the state." Lawyers bill every tenth of an hour, right? They bill every six minutes. If I call my lawyer for three minutes, he's charging me for six. So guess what? I'm yapping for six, right?

But the idea there is their time sheet is so granular to the point where it's every six minutes. So what if instead of this two-dimensional pie chart that is currently on this state's website, we had like a three-dimensional or ev- more than that, a multi-dimensional kind of vectorized image of through lines of every person's time?

Because here's the reality. A superintendent, let's say they spend six hours a week in classrooms, right? Well, their entire salary on that two-dimensional pie chart goes towards administrative and operational stuff. It's not in the instructional piece 'cause they're a superintendent, right? But those six hours, they're directly impacting kids and teachers, right?

Those six hours should go to instructional 'cause that's what that time is. So if we had a way to almost audit every six minutes of every person in the district, and then we could draw this 3D image of where is money actually being spent Right? And so this superintendent's question to me was: How do we get 60% of the budget to this?

How do we get 70% out of it? I was like, "Listen, in reality, I think 90% of salary, of money should be going to things that directly impact kids," 'cause this is a school district, right? 90% of my salary as a company should go to making money 'cause it's a business, right? So as a school district, 90% of your money should go towards directly impacting kids.

So how do we draw that through line? And that's part of the transformation as well. 

[01:28:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And I hear in there the concept of sort of changing from, uh, measuring the inputs, right? Measuring where the money is going before, before things are-- the school year starts to do actually tying it to the outputs. So he's saying, "How does the money flow through into actual results?"

Which is something that I think we are not necessarily that good at yet in, in our education system. We-- But, you know, we, we, we're famous in the US for having spending more money per student and, and getting not as good results than, than many other countries because exactly the dynamics that you're mentioning.

The money is, is decided upfront, but it doesn't always flow through because we're not measuring it very carefully into the actual results we want, or we're not measuring it in the right ways. It's really, really interesting. You are full of big systemic ideas. I'm, I'm, I- ... you know, I mean it. I walk away from this conversation really thinking about the entire system in a different way, and I, I appreciate that.

That's not something that every edtech founder is spending their time on. Some of them are spending their time on, on much more, much smaller ideas, and I appreciate this way of thinking. 

[01:29:59] Aidan McDowell: I mean, for me, I, I think you don't become a founder if you don't wanna put it all out there. And as spiritual and fulfilling and enjoyable as the journey has been thus far building UniqLearn, UniqPath, at a certain point I realized, like, "Man, we're not gonna change education with a single platform," right?

It can be the best platform ever built in the history of mankind. It's not changing the system. The only way to change the system is to actually just go at the system. So that's kind of where we're at right now. I-- My mission is not just to have kids use a certain app or a certain platform. My mission is to fundamentally change the way that education works in this country.

[01:30:38] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And to do that, you need a very clear vision of what that looks like and, and to be a really strong partner to those who are on the ground making it happen. So it's a powerful model here. Aidan McDowell, founder and CEO of UniqLearn, working on pushing the boundaries of education to unlock the most personalized learning experience for every student, whether that's in UniqPath, uh, UniqLearn, or Neo Districts.

I appreciate it. It was really, really great to talk to you. Yeah. 

[01:31:02] Aidan McDowell: It was fun. Thanks for having me on, Alex. 

[01:31:04] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for being here on Edtech Insiders. Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the edtech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider, subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on Substack.

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