Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Why Flashy Valuations Fail in EdTech: Juan Zavala of NMVP on Sustainable Growth
Juan Zavala joined New Markets Venture Partners in 2019 and is a Partner. He is responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and executing new investment opportunities as well as supporting existing portfolio companies and firm operations. He serves as a Board Director for Brains and Motion Education, Nexford University, and CreatorUp, and as a Board Observer for App Academy, BetterLesson, Censia, Climb Credit, Concentric Educational Solutions, Datapeople, Motimatic, and Regent Education. He is also actively involved with Mantra Health and Acceleration Academies.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why sustainable, capital-efficient growth beats flashy valuations in education technology.
- How NMVP evaluates impact and efficacy before making investments.
- The challenges and strategies of scaling edtech companies within slow-moving educational systems.
- Why aligning incentives across stakeholders—from district leaders to entrepreneurs—is key to success.
- How AI fits into edtech’s future and why infrastructure partnerships may outlast flashy standalone tools.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:18] From private equity to impact investing in edtech
[00:04:52] Only 15% of the U.S. is well-served by education—huge market gap
[00:05:51] Balancing mission and money in edtech investing
[00:11:30] Why VC might not be right for every founder
[00:16:36] Insights from NMVP portfolio companies like Nexford and BetterLesson
[00:27:22] CreatorUp as a case study in workforce and content innovation
[00:36:37] The importance of aligning with existing school infrastructure
[00:42:54] AI in edtech: picks and shovels, not gold rushes
[00:48:12] Why most edtech exits fall below $300M
[00:54:23] Creating shared success across founders and investors
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:
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[00:00:00] Juan Zavala: I mean, that would be my advice. Like don't look at raising a lot of money at high valuations as the metric of success. The metric says to be like, raise the right amount of money from the right source and get to a cashflow positive business. Because you don't really have a business unless you're generating cashflow or else it's just you.
You're spending money to make less money, get it to real business, and then sell and have everyone on your cap table and everyone, whoever supported you and yourself. Make a return, and then hopefully that goes to a big buyer who can see the impact the company's had and the financial growth it's had, layer on more cash and grow, the impact and the financial side.
[00:00:41] Alex Sarlin: 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
[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: here at. EdTech insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
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[00:01:20] Alex Sarlin: Juan Zavala joined new markets Venture Partners in 2019 and is a partner. He is responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and executing new investment opportunities, as well as supporting existing portfolio companies and firm operations. He serves as a board director for Brains in Motion Education, NEX Oxford University and Creator Up, and as a board observer for App Academy.
Better Lessons Sensia Climb Credit, concentric Educational Solutions, data People Matic and Region Education. He's also actively involved with Mantra Health and Acceleration, acade. Juan Zavala, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks Alex. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you. You, we spoke for the first time a few months ago, and you have done such interesting work in your life and at New Market Venture Partners, which is a really interesting venture firm.
Before we get into anything else, tell us a little bit about how you got into sort of education, technology, and your background leading up to new market venture partners.
[00:02:18] Juan Zavala: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I started out at Cambridge Associates about 14 years ago. It's an investment consulting firm, and there I was researching private equity managers, everything from venture to growth buyout, and all sorts of sector specialists and generalists.
And then I went over to a firm called Singular Goff, which is a multi-strategy private equity firm, and they're always on their lower middle market buyouts fund. And I think that that's where I really cut my teeth, you know, pretty traditional leveraged buyouts and was looking at companies in the US.
That were older companies, 30 to 40 years old, owned by families typically, but good products, sticky products, high cash flow, but problems like high customer concentration, maybe not the most financial sophistication, and also a generation that wanted to retire and sell, but maybe their kid didn't wanna take it over.
So good opportunities. And from there I went to business school and then over to new markets. And new markets is based in Maryland. I'm from Maryland, so it was nice to go back. I'd been in Boston and. Philadelphia for a while, and the analysis was very different, you know, because these were earlier stage companies not generating cash flow and really trying to find their space in the market.
And of course it was education. And at the time that I joined, education didn't have the spotlight that it does now. Right. That it got from the. I really liked that because when I was at Sigler Goff, we were looking at these small companies in the middle of the US that most big funds and strategics were overlooking.
And once we got 'em to a point where they were more sophisticated, had more products, were generating better margins, they were attractive to a whole host of buyers. I saw something like that in new markets where we could get, you know, these small education companies to be attractive for other buyers, you know, whether they were strategic acquirers or bigger funds.
And at the time, new markets had been around since 2002, but the larger funds that were investing in education were just kind of starting up. Right. Certainly, you know, throughout the 2000 tens more education VCs were starting up, but we had KKR raising their fund and Bain starting the Double Impact Fund and TPG Rise and all those folks and I joined and said, this is probably a good host of buyers for the company's new markets, likes to invest in and build up.
And yeah, I've been there for, for six years now. Education is. It's a broken system, I think in the us so there's a lot of opportunity and our research shows that only 15% really of the population is served well by the education employment system. Wow, that's interesting. Which means there's, yeah, there's 85% of the population that can benefit from products or services if you know their efficacious and, and we can get them to scale.
[00:04:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I've never heard somebody put a number on it like that. I believe that that number resonates with me, but I've never heard it quantified in that way. That's really interesting. So let's talk about that serving properly. One of the things that's so interesting about education technology, doing many, many interviews in the space and working in for a long time is that you have these double bottom line kind of thinking.
You have financial impact. There are companies that can be fast growth, especially pandemic fast growth. But there's, there's large scale, there's small scale, there's family run, there's a business side to all of this. And this private equity, of course, is involved in a lot of ways. Then of course there's this other bottom line, which is impact educational quality.
How do you actually change the lives of young people or adults throughout their life, including K 12 higher ed, and workforce education and career training. So when you look at a company, whether you're investing in it, whether you're trying to sell it, whether you're just trying to think about it as an entity, how do you balance that sort of double bottom line thinking between.
Is this a good financial vehicle and is this actually good for the world? Is it expanding that 15% that's properly served?
[00:05:51] Juan Zavala: Yeah. I guess if I put it like a phrase to it, I think the phrase is slow and steady is kind of the mindset. So for starters, I mean, when we're looking on the financial side, we're looking for things that obviously have good unit economics.
Right. High gross margin. You're actually, you're making money on the revenue that you're generating. Good management team and high potential to scale. Right? Is there a market for this and can you serve this 85% that we're talking about? Right? And obviously it's 85% doesn't have the capital to buy it. So usually we're looking for funding streams in government, right?
Or corporations. Obviously the top 1% has always had the means to buy the most innovative and effective tools for forever. And so we're trying to find a way to make this accessible to the other folks. And so when we look at the efficacy side, we try to focus on has there already been third party research that has shown a certain type of product or service has the effect they're looking for.
And a good example of presence learning is a, a company that's well known in this space, right? And we were early investors there, and really we found research. That showed that teletherapy was just as effective as in person, right? The conjecture was that it wasn't, everyone always preferred someone in person, but there was a control study that showed that it was.
So when we found presence, we knew that if they could get that right, the efficacy would be there. And then it was all about how do we scale this business model, which was a tough business model to scale, but obviously with the pandemic and everything going virtual. It's a highly successful company now, and obviously took a while from early to, I think we got in there sub 5 million in revenue.
Now it's, you know, a lot bigger, right? And now it's TPG Rise and, and Spectrum that owns it. But that's kind of how we balance it. We look at third party research and then the slow and steady part is as much as the financial and the impact side. Right. There really isn't a get rich quick strategy in education because like in other industries, people are kind of thinking in decades.
Right? And it's hard to change behaviors and you don't wanna mess with something that's working. And at the same time, there's a lot of bureaucracy and things like that. And so we're very careful to invest in things where there is that efficacy and that it's not gonna experiment on students. And obviously monitoring that the efficacy's there.
And we have an impact framework that we use to monitor what's the reach, what's the depth of the impact, who are the stakeholders actually being impacted? Are we actually targeting the right population? Things like that. And on the financial side, we recognize there's not an infinite market here. Right.
Our market's really just K 12 higher ed and the workforce. We don't do a lot of B2C, right? But it's not like Amazon or Uber where the whole world is your market, right? So you can't infinitely raise money. And so we're very careful to be capital efficient with the companies and when you're capital efficient.
If you throw enough capital at anything, you can make a brick fly, right? I mean, it could. You could raise money forever for companies and it'll keep growing, right? If it spends enough money. But that might not be sustainable because eventually there might not be somebody to raise money from. I. So we try to be very capital efficient and grow at a steady pace and make sure the company doesn't run out of money, and that we also don't run out of money so that we can continue to support the company in the future and eventually gets to a point where we're really building it for a buyer, right?
We like to speak with all the public companies that are, some are now private, right? We can talk about that. But some of have gone private again, but speak with them on a regular basis and with the funds that own these companies and understand what it is they're looking for so that we can build companies for them.
So it's this balance of. Who's the next buyer? What do they need? What's the impact we're trying to have and what's that speed of growth? I don't think there's a traditional three to five year hold period here. Our average is five hold period, but we've held things as long as nine years with really great outcomes, and we've held a few things for two years that we're good outcomes too.
But those were unexpected. They were kind of unsolicited bids. And it happened, and which brings our average down, but I think it's more long term, slow and steady. Don't run outta money. And obviously that initial underwriting is really important on making sure as you're investing that it really is an efficacious solution.
Because if it's not, eventually it gets cut from budgets. From K 12 or higher ed or wherever it's that we're selling.
[00:10:03] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And we've seen that in the post pandemic era. There's just been a real snapback in budgets. So I wanna double click on a couple things you said there. 'cause I think they're incredibly interesting.
You mentioned that you didn't say this in these words, but I will add onto it a little bit. A lot of ed tech entrepreneurs come into it. With, you said this, sometimes they're family run, they've been in the space for a long time, or they're sort of young, sometimes very idealistic entrepreneurs. Sometimes they're teachers or people coming outta the education system.
Principals or just people, TFA alums who are saying, I think I can make a difference here. I really wanna jump in. I have an idea. But they aren't always the most financially savvy people or people with a lot of financial expertise and background. And then they have to sort of balance the idealistic product vision, the design vision, and the financials, the actual efficient use of capital, efficient use of money, and try to sort of like navigate this startup world with.
Understanding enough about the financial side to make it work. I'm curious what advice you'd have. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to this show and they all wrestle with this in different ways. Some people come from the finance world and they're like, I totally know how to run my budgets and how to raise and all that.
And some come from the education world and they say, this finance world is not my strong suit. What kind of advice would you give to startup founders who are trying to keep both balls in the air impact and growth and product, but also. What's the unit economics? How do you make sure you're putting your revenue in the right place?
How do you make sure you're raising at the right time and not getting into much debt before you can? I'd love to hear your advice for how they should balance these things.
[00:11:30] Juan Zavala: Yeah. I mean, typically my advice there is consider all sources of capital, what their incentives are.
[00:11:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:11:36] Juan Zavala: Right. So sometimes venture capital isn't necessarily the right capital for every company, especially in education and at the early stage.
Right, and I, I personally, we don't believe that traditional invest in many, many companies to find that one or two unicorns that really, that that VC model works in education because as I had mentioned, it's slow and steady and you need fast, high growth to really make that work in the timeframe of most venture funds, right?
So for early stage education, I mean, there's a lot of grant funding, right? There's different sources of capital that can get you to a place where you're really showing. That your product has efficacy, right? And that also your customers are buying it and renewing and they're using it, right? So those retention metrics, I mean, obviously for some reason VC has become all SaaS, or a lot of it has, right?
But initially it was investing in manufacturing, right? And another things that were true ventures. And now for summary, VC has this alignment with technology and SaaS, which is fine, right? Everyone wants to be a SaaS company, but those SaaS companies need to have really high margins. And in education, sometimes you don't, right?
And SaaS also has retention metrics, right? Are you retaining customers? Are you expanding with them? Are you not turning them or are they using the product? And to get those metrics to raise venture money to try and get those metrics, it's gonna be really hard. So I'd consider other sources of capital and what those incentives are, right?
If you get a grant from a foundation, they might be looking for a very specific outcome. And so if you're generating that outcome, they might renew that grant, but if you don't consider their incentive, they might not renew that grant and then you're out again. Right. So it's really this message of what are people's incentives?
In venture, obviously you raise capital from investors who are looking for return and in impact, they're looking for an impact too. Right. But these funds have 10 year life cycles with some extensions, so you don't have all the time in the world. And there's this incentive to grow the company fast enough to sell it and get money back to LPs.
Right. And if you read all the news now, yep. There's lack of distributions and big allocators aren't happy about that. It's affecting how they're allocating the new. Managers. And so if you take VC money, look, you might be pressured, right? The other end of that is if you do take VC money, consider what pressure you really do want there, right?
Because if you take it at a very high valuation, which it's fine, I mean it's less dilution. But the venture capital fund is expecting for the company to grow beyond this valuation in a reasonable amount of time. And so you might end up in a place where you are spending a lot of money to try to hit those milestones.
And there were some, I think McKinsey or BA report a long time ago that said the biggest detractor of value is growth milestones. Like when you set these growth milestones, that's the thing that really destroys value. And so sometimes if you raise at a lower valuation, maybe take less capital so that you're not getting diluted at the same, you have more time, right?
You have more time and more flexibility. I mean, that would be my advice. Like don't look at raising a lot of money at high valuations is the metric of success. The metric says to be like, raise the right amount of money. From the right source and get to a cashflow positive business because you don't really have a business unless you're generating cashflow or else it's just, you know, you're spending money to make less money, get it to real business, and then sell and have everyone on your cap table and everyone, whoever supported you and yourself make a return.
And then hopefully that goes to a big buyer who can see the impact the company's had and the financial growth it's had, layer on more cash and grow the impact and the financial side. I think that it should be the metric of success, but I think through the media and kind of mainstream sentiment, you see the news and raised a hundred million dollars at a $2 billion valuation, and that's what seems to be a metric of success today.
But it comes with a lot of pressure and a very binary outcome, right? Either you raise the next round at a much higher valuation or. I mean, there's clear examples in our space. Right. Probably the largest ad tech company, right. That went to zero, I think. Was it last year or two years ago?
[00:15:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah,
[00:15:41] Juan Zavala: last
[00:15:42] Alex Sarlin: year I think.
[00:15:43] Juan Zavala: Yeah.
[00:15:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Which I think was a real surprise to a lot in our space because it followed that just explosive. Like you say, when people talk about it in the tech media and the startup media is about big valuations and big rounds and just this growth narrative, but. It doesn't always map very well to education.
You mentioned presence learning, which I think is a terrific example and we've talked to Kate Ely Walker on the podcast. That's a really interesting model, and as you said, it's one that it could be hard to break into, but once you're in, you start getting traction. It makes a lot of sense. You serve as board director for a couple of different organizations that are all really interesting and an observer for a lot more would be okay with doing a around the world of markets.
Some of the companies that you work really closely with and just give us a little bit of an overview of sort of how you see them and how you see them. Again, I love this two-sided way of seeing things, why it's a good business model, and then why it's an impactful organization. Are you down to do a little like speed round on it?
[00:16:36] Juan Zavala: Sure.
[00:16:37] Alex Sarlin: Let's start with N for university. We've talked to foal several times. He's a real idealist, has really big vision for what education higher ed should be. Let's talk about N expert. How do you see it?
[00:16:47] Juan Zavala: Yeah, F's a visionary and he's a really great entrepreneur and he sees things very clearly. And with Nex word, it's like what's called a, a challenger university, right?
Which obviously comes with challenges because you're trying to disrupt a system that's been in place for a while, but that system is not really working for, from the majority of people, the higher ed, at least in the United States. There's no real accountability for once people graduate. Did they improve their economic mobility?
Right. And I think N Expert's mission is really that, right? Improve the economic mobility for their students. And it's twofold. One, deliver degrees that are in demand and certificates that are in demand and not much else, right? I mean, NEX for very purposefully built their degrees for something that's in demand by employers.
And that changes a lot, right? And then the other side of it's make it affordable, right? And higher ed costs keep going up. And they've come up with a innovative business model on monthly payments, right? And go at your own pace. Utilize the resources we have on asynchronous technology and find spots where there needs to be human faculty support and keep that cost down while maintaining efficacy.
I. So certainly, you know, experts had great growth, very happy with how ALS built the company serving majority International right now. And I think that's the future really targeted, specific skill building at an affordable price. Now, affordability is relative, I. So we'll see how that changes, especially with what's going on in the world right now.
Right? Yeah. But other university have done it, like Western Governors did it, right? They grew, I think they serve 170,000 students now or something. And they have skills taxonomies, and they're always building on how you can measure certain skills and what degrees you're gonna train people on, et cetera, et cetera.
And then for N Expert, they're following the same kind of disruptive path. And we'll see. But I'm excited with what FO's doing at next. Yeah,
[00:18:39] Alex Sarlin: no, I think that's a great description. I'm a huge fan of the alternative challenger University space because it feels like the higher ed space over time has had to treat its learners more and more as customers, but without having the burden of having to actually satisfy the customers for the thing they're coming for, which is often career services.
It's often, I'm looking to make money coming out of this. I want a job that I like and. They say that over and over again when you ask people what they're doing there in higher education. But that hasn't been the burden for so many schools. And I think that places like NEX Expert and and WGU and Southern New Hampshire and a lot of those have said, okay, well if we're gonna take seriously that goal, we have to cut costs.
I remember asking F, how do you cut costs to be able to make revenue while charging so much less? And he said, we look incredibly careful at all of our flows and all of the things we're providing. Pa it down to what is truly needed and automate everything else and get rid of things that aren't needed and majors that are not gonna serve that.
And we've seen it over and over again, and I think it's the time when these universities are really breaking through as the rest of the higher ed world starts to be shaky. We just talked to Matthew Kard. Let's talk about Better Lesson. Better Lesson is a really interesting model. I think it's another great example.
He's also somebody with a financial background. It's another example of a company that has a very clear financial vision and a very clear impact vision. I'd love to hear you talk it through.
[00:19:57] Juan Zavala: Matt came into the company I think now, four years ago maybe, and Matt was before at Learn Zealand, so he's, he's a proven operator.
And BetterLesson of course was probably one of the first ed tech companies that really came about, and you know, it was a professional development coaching in-person workshops and they built this really great library of coaching, of course, very dependent on school district budgets, right? And what the goals were for that year and what teachers wanted or needed that year.
I. And at Mets really come in and found a, a great way to get larger contracts and really understand the needs of the districts and make it a little more recurring, right? Because really, workshops, if you think about it, are very consultative, right? They happen and then maybe they happen again next year.
Maybe they don't. And Matts really built a model where. It's more of a necessity, the continuous training and professional development, and really got it from a traditional PD company to more of a technology company and, and the data company.
[00:20:57] Alex Sarlin: I mean, they use data. So Assiduously, it's really interesting.
[00:21:00] Juan Zavala: Yeah, I mean the, I think it's called BL Labs, right? Where you can kind of look for the exact training you need that day. Or that year and it's there because they've been doing it for over a decade.
[00:21:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I
[00:21:11] Juan Zavala: totally agree.
[00:21:12] Alex Sarlin: Let's do two more. These are ones I think our audience may be familiar with, but I describe their models.
I think it's just I get a lot out of hearing you think about how it works because I think it's different than the questions I usually ask of C-Suite or entrepreneurs. I think you think about it in this really structured way that I really admire. Let's talk about brains in motion. Tell us about that model and specifically with this one, you know, you mentioned how the 1% people with a lot of dispensable income can spend a lot on education.
That's true all around the world relative to the population, but definitely in the us. But something like Brains in Motion has so much potential benefit, especially if it can expand its reach a lot. Tell us about how you think about that.
[00:21:46] Juan Zavala: Yeah, so I mean the thesis there really was. Kids are only in school until about two or three, but the extended hours of three to six, there's a lot of opportunity for learning there.
And not just learning, but keeping kids in a safe environment in addition to kind of what's the efficacy that we're looking for in education? There's a lot of barriers that. Do not allow kids to continue in their education. Right? And we look to remove these barriers. A good example is like Mantra Health that does mental health therapy, right?
Mental health is a leading cause of dropping out of higher ed. Same thing with our prison education company origin, right? Having gone to prison is a major barrier to education and getting a job. And so we provide education, but in any case, brains in motion. Lower income districts, a lot of times if you're not the three to 6:00 PM time, and I spoke with a principal who was a customer, said, you know, my kids are on the streets, and they might end up dropping outta school or joining a gang or something, but if I could keep 'em from three to six in these formative years, I can prevent a lot of that.
And so we look for a lot of that. What Brains in Motion is doing is providing these programs ranges from stem to art and sports after school. And in the summer, I. And we do provide directly to parents, but the vast majority of our business is district paid. And what that allows us to do is really reach the students that I think mostly need it, and you can deliver high quality programs.
It's a lot of RFP and there's a lot of customer success with the administrators there because they have to feel that. The students liked it, right? That it was worth the money. Because when they go next year to look at their budget, they have to say, this is a necessity, right? And we're not gonna switch just because someone offers us a lower price.
So there's a lot of nonprofits operating in the space as well, right? So they can offer lower prices, but you wanna get to a point where your customers saying. I'll pay the extra because I can't risk this being lower quality. Kind of like make him as mission critical as you can to their daily operations.
And Bart Epstein's the CEO there and he's done a really great job at increasing customer satisfaction. I mean, know when, when he was doing the print and review, I think that was. A big part of his job, right? Making sure customers were satisfied with the service they were getting. And obviously the summer's a big part where students either do something productive or they don't.
So this is a way to give them something productive due to come back to the next school year and really excel. And we spoke to some district administrators and principals about it. They recognized that. A lot of their kids fell behind during the summer. They came back and they just, they didn't remember what they had learned.
Right? And so the summer's a great opportunity to reinforce those skills or learn new topics in a fun way for those, we're serving mostly elementary, middle school students, right? High school students tend to have their own thing going on by that age in the summer. And look, we look all the time on how to make sure margins are, are high enough that we can run the business.
Sometimes that means maybe getting a better deal on the space that's getting rented, right? And pushing those facilities to give us a good deal or, or something else, but never enough where we're gonna sacrifice quality, right? Yeah. Gotta make sure the instructors are getting paid enough and that they're good instructors and we're sourcing them well, and they're coming back, et cetera, et cetera.
And that we're not, obviously the district has their budget and we gotta work with that.
[00:25:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. One of the things I really admire about new market venture partners sort of perspective on the space, and I've pointed out your frameworks to a lot of different people because I think they're just really fascinating and listeners should definitely go look at how they think about the space.
'cause you think about K 12 and higher ed and workforce sort of as a continuum and where can you sort of plug holes to keep kids on track? And the way you just described that was, I think, incredibly clear. It's like. Not only is brains in motion, closing gaps of areas, times of day, and populations that have the high potential to sort of go off track with their education, get disengaged, drop outta school, or just not do well enough to have a very clear next step after their elementary or high school secondary education.
Not only is it that what they're actually doing is often STEM classes, they're learning robotics and coding and ELA and sports programs that have. Collaboration components and all these different things, and it actually becomes a vehicle by which the rest of the ed tech world, so companies like Code Combat or Lego Legos building stuff, the robotics pieces or Minecraft, other pieces of the education and ed tech and gaming ecosystem don't always have a clear home in schools, but they do have a home in afterschool programs, in summer programs where the goal is not explicitly curricular learning, but it is engagement, excitement, learning to connect, I think brings emotion is a really good example of something that.
Brings together different pieces of the ecosystem, and I think this is true of presence and better lesson as well, to really enhance the entire system. And then when you can have districts, especially low income districts, say, wow, this is really, like you said, kids love it. We love the relationship we have with them.
We are willing to pay enough and maybe more than a nonprofit. I like the way you're describing it as something that has both very clear. Impact metrics, both in terms of keeping kids in school, but also teacher quality, quality of delivery. But it also really feeds into the education ecosystem as a whole and into the ed tech ecosystem as a whole.
So it's really interesting to hear you talk about it. Let's do one more. This is one that I've actually not fully gotten my head around it. I've talked to these folks several times at conferences. I've never interviewed the CEO, but I'd love to hear you talk about creator up. Creator up sort of comes from a very different part of the EdTech ecosystem.
It's really about creating. Materials creating high quality instructional materials at all different levels. Talk to us about creator up and how you see it both as an impactful business and a smart business model.
[00:27:22] Juan Zavala: Yeah, I mean, training has all sorts of avenues, right? And video's a big one. Yep. And so, you know, with creator up there, Mike, the CEO there, these incredible filmmaker, really smart guy, and the way they viewed the industry was that.
It was really hard to get a project kind of scoped out in this very fragmented industry, a lot of independent agencies. And so when a big training provider wanted to get a video done for training purposes, it just took forever. And so they created a platform where it was easy to scope out the work.
Every stakeholder could go in and see what's the scope of work, what's the price, how long is it gonna take, who's gonna work on it? And that was really the creator of kind of, or impetus to do the deal. Where we said, well, you can really make it easy for the Pearsons of the world to deliver a high quality video training.
And so never heard any customer complaints. Like they, there's really high customer satisfaction with creator up. I mean, they, they deliver on it Exactly and probably even more than what they say they're gonna do. And the other side of that thesis was the creator economy. There's just a lot of creators in the world that who incomes aren't as steady as they might like it to be.
And so it was, it was a segment of the market. We were looking at how, how can we serve this segment of the market? And, you know, creator creates a platform where. Soon as there's a project, they can reach out to the right creator and they have a project to work on. And it also builds their portfolio. I mean, the way I understand the creator economy, your portfolio is uh, your currency, right?
And it's hard to get a project as an independent creator with a Google or a YouTube or a Twitter, but with creator up you who These are customers, right? You can get on a project and it suddenly becomes part of your portfolio, and now you're maybe more employable than you were before, which I think is highly impactful.
Right? It's kind of that. I was reading a book the other day by Kathy Lansky from the Education Design Lab, and she, you know, she a phrase called the experience chasm, right? Where everyone ask for experience, but you can't get the experience unless you get the job first for the entry level job. And I saw.
They're closing that experience chasm and giving people good experience to be able to, to get the next, the next high paying job. That's a little on creator up. And you know, Mike's a fantastic CEO. He is really smart. You know, I think it's been a good ride with the guy so far.
[00:29:40] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting model.
I, I think a lot of the investments that you make with new market venture partners, I, I don't know, it just strikes me again and again, I sort of like filling these core needs. It's very product driven. I mean, better lesson. Is filling this need of aggregating and making much more high quality teacher professional development in a space that's actually very, when we talked to Matt Kenard, he's like, people have traditionally not had great connotations with ED and professional learning.
It doesn't always feel satisfying. Same thing is true if we're trying to find a video vendor. Same thing is true for students who are looking to, you know, get an affordable degree. They're looking at a million options, but they aren't very affordable in most cases, and they don't always align to what people are really looking for.
It feels like, you know, you identify these different broken micro markets, places where people can't find what they're actually looking for from both sides. Creator up is a double-sided marketplace where you have your creators, your video creators, your studios, basically sort of all these independent makers who can do fantastic.
I. Graphics, they could do fantastic instructional design, they could do fantastic video development, but they have to go find their clients. And that's the hard part. And then vice versa, it'd be all these individuals and companies trying to find really high quality vendors. So I really admire the, the structured thinking that comes with these types of investments.
I think they're, they're not always the most flashy, you know, we talk about all these. AI companies. We talk about all these really flashy I ideas and they appeal to me. I'm a big, you know, shiny object kind of guy as any listener to this would know, but I really admire the frameworks that you all use to make sense of the space and to, to move it forward in really meaningful ways.
I wanna talk to you about two. Other things. I do wanna talk about AI because we, we have to, and I'm really curious how you're thinking about it. But before we do, let's talk about some of the challenges in the EdTech space. You sort of touched on them before you said EdTech. For VCs, it's slow and steady because there's a lot of headwinds, just natural to the space.
It's a big space, a lot of bureaucracy, limited resources and changing budgets, changing initiatives. There's a big stack. You know that we talk a lot about how the buyer and the, the users in EdTech are usually very different people, especially in, in B2B or, or school-based. I'd love to hear you just talk about what are the things that make EdTech difficult, but then how do you stay optimistic and how do you sort of support all of these companies waiting into them?
A place like, you know, brains in motion, having really high customer success, making sure you can work with schools, become sticky, high retention, high satisfaction, high impact. Paint the picture of the obstacles and then, you know, tell our listeners some of the ways to get over them and really succeed in this space.
[00:32:06] Juan Zavala: It goes back to the, the same thing I said about entrepreneurs and and finding financing. It's incentives. If you can find out what someone's true incentives are, you can pretty much navigate anything. So in education, the incentives, you know, and this is, it's, it's just from conversations and, and conjecture, right?
The district administrators, they have a budget, right? And obviously the incentive is that they don't go over that budget, that they serve their students well and that they remain a district administrator, right? Or superintendent. I think no one wants to get. Fired. So it's not like our business where, sure, look, if we do a ton of bad deals, eventually we won't be working.
We won't have a fund, right? So we have to be very careful. But we're also risk takers, right? Like we're we, we have to take risks in education. I don't think anyone's really incentivized to take risks, right? I mean, you can see it in the higher ed space and even in K 12, no one's really incentivized to take a risk on a brand new.
Shiny object ed tech innovation, and especially with the limited budgets they have and, and probably the, the limited budgets that are, that are coming now. And so I think the, the last time I heard this, it was like 90% of school budgets are buildings, buses and teachers, right? So you have 10% left for the rest, and will they risk it on a brand new ai?
Something tool maybe, and it depends on the district, depends on the state, depends on, maybe there's a governor or a senator that came in with an agenda and they wanna deliver on that agenda, so they're gonna motivate and incentivize their school system leaders to bet on these kinds of things. But that's, that's hard to know.
And so we try to go towards things that. Are a little more What kind of stand the test of time. A little more recession proof. I mean, graduation Alliance, which is one of our companies for a long time that we sold to KK Global Impact. That was a great example. I mean it was, it was solving me a clear pain point, right?
High school graduation. Right. Dropouts. And obviously we had read the research that if you complete high school, you get a high school diploma, your lifetime earnings are about a third more than someone who dropped out. We liked what they were doing. It was difficult to scale, but eventually the, the business model was figured out and it went back to the incentives.
Like why was the district really contracting graduation alliance? At first we were selling, we'll en enroll the dropouts and we share, there's a, an allowance per student you have enrolled. It's in their interest to have enrolled students for more funding. And eventually we went to only pay us for the graduates.
'cause that's an even higher incentive. And obviously we can charge more for that because you're taking on the risk as the vendor that you'll actually graduate these students. And through years of data, we understood what led to graduation. You know, credit, pacing, things like that, and providing people with wraparound services, a ride to the in-person session, a knock on the door if they weren't doing their homework.
And that eats a little into gross margin, but if you, you raise the price enough, the district's willing to pay it, your gross margin can even go up. That's effectively what happened. And, you know, the pay for performance model and you got into, into more states. We got highly EBITDA positive and KKR saw that and said, well, I can get you to all 50 states.
I'm, you know, KKR, I would think. I think that's, that might've been their, and, and the companies, you know, excelled after that. And it was a great financial and impact outcome. So same thing. I mean, chronic absenteeism, that's a big issue right now. And it's the same incentive, right? If you get the kid in the classroom on enrollment day, not only is the kid back in school, the school has more enrollees and they can get more funding for all the expenses that, that the schools have.
Those are the kinds of things, and you know, brains in Motion is a similar idea. It's not an experimental. Potentially game changing binary tool, which would be great if, if we find it, but it's, you know, that's a needle in a haystack. This is more, alright, we know three to six are are empty hours and there's really good things that can happen in those empty hours.
And here's our evidence that kids who who participate in these programs are doing better in school. They'll stay enrolled, they'll graduate. Things like that. Right? That's more our pitch. And a lot of times these ends up being tech enabled services versus, you know, high growth technology companies. 90% gross margins are more, you know, in the 60 to 70% range.
And that's okay, especially if you're, you know, capital efficient, you can generate a good free cash flow margin and be attractive to a whole number of buyers. You know, sell the company, make a great return, and rinse and find the next highly impactful company.
[00:36:37] Alex Sarlin: One of the things you're saying here, which I think it resonates enormously with me, I imagine it does with a lot of our listeners, is this idea of, you know, aligning incentives and really thinking about even if you are a startup or an ed tech company of various kinds, that you have your own.
Vision for what you're trying to accomplish by going and reaching more students or teachers or whoever your, your end user stakeholders are. But part of what I'm hearing you say, and I totally agree, I think it's a really powerful way to look at it, is, you know, put your own vision of what you're trying to do aside and think about what the incentives are for your different buyers.
What are the incentives that are. Perennial, right? What are the ones that aren't just, Hey, this year my, the scoreboard is saying AI is hot and we have to use ai, so that's how we're gonna get in by being an AI company in a moment when AI is hot, that has the potential, at least to be a fad. I, I don't think it's gonna be a pure fad, but I, I can see why the argument is there.
But perennial needs, like, we need to keep our students enrolled. We need to see graduation, we need to see outcomes. We wanna, you know, make sure that absenteeism goes down, or classroom management issues go down, or teachers don't burn out. Like there are so many. Needs, really burning needs inside the K 12 system and in right now, definitely inside the higher ed system.
If you sort of come to the conversation with their needs top of mind and think about what are the core underlying incentives of why they're talking to you. Salespeople are amazing at this, but I think sometimes even, you know, the CEOs and product people and strategic people and companies don't always turn that around.
They sometimes frame things the way in the vision. They want to accomplish rather than the core. Sometimes slightly less sexy, you know, need of, oh, if I lose this many more students, I lose this much more funding. That means I have to cut even more. It's a downward spiral I need to keep students enrolled.
That's my core thing I need and I. Everything else is, is secondary. Okay. So how do you meet them where they are? And I think that's really interesting. So, so my question for this is, you know, we are in this AI moment. It is, AI is hot right now. We've been chronicling, you know, hundreds of, of AI startups that have all these different ideas of what they're trying to do and, and the changes they're trying to make.
What would you recommend for a company that is relatively new, that is coming in and.
Name the incentive alignment. How do they map their vision of, oh my God, we're trying to enable personalized education, or we're trying to enable interest-based learning. We're trying to enable AI tutoring. Is all this sort of like flash and bang there? How do you align it to this quotidian real world?
What's keeping administrators up at night needs of a district or university or a company doing training? Any of the possible buyers in the B2B market?
[00:39:03] Juan Zavala: I don't have a crystal ball and we all, we all just have opinions and hopefully some of our opinions will be right. I'd say the, the main thing is partner with the existing infrastructure and, and institutions that are there.
Right. Try not to rip it out because it's another one of those things where it's a risk to rip something out, right? And you want to partner with what's already there and where people have spent money and if they've been there for decades, you know, whoever the buyer is, they probably feel they have a lot of costs and if they rip it out, it's a sunk cost and.
No one likes to feel costs, right? They wanna feel that what they've invested in. Can be useful. And so, you know, in K 12 it's, it's a hard one. AI in K 12, I'm not very sure. We did have a company that was adaptive math, learn, think through learning, right? That was a great success, particularly in Texas. And that was sold to Imagine, and that was one of the early kind of adaptive, but it had a human intervention.
Like the adaptive was that if you were getting stuck on a problem. A tutor showed up and helped you through that problem. Right. And so now it's getting a lot more complicated. Certainly, you know, if you wanna improve people's literacy, I mean, I think there's a lot of research around third grade literacy, and if you can have AI improve that, that's great.
I'm not sure who the winner there is gonna be, or if there even is gonna be a winner or if. A human is still better than an AI tool. You know, may maybe an AI tool where a human isn't available, but then again, maybe where a human's not available is because there's not a lot of funding in that area. So can they even buy the AI tool that's presumably expensive to create?
I've seen, you know, AI obviously to, to, to streamline processes in K 12, right? To create instructional plans. Now I think that has the unfortunate consequence of probably reducing. Employees, right? Like instead of having a couple paraprofessionals. To help out a teacher. Now the teacher just has their tool, which might be good for the district.
Right? Especially in a, in a environment where there's less funding and everyone's being asked to streamline and they can create high quality instructional plans for their students. It does have secondary consequences though, and in our impact framework, for example, we look at that like what's the impact, risk, and unintended consequences That might be an area.
But again, I, I don't know, K 12 and in corporations I see it a lot more clearly, you know, where like, you know, Sensia is a great example. One of the companies we've invested in and, you know, they're, they're partnering with Workday to, you know, 'cause so many companies that purchase Workday and it's a necessity.
It's their, you know, human capital management system. But all the things that Workday has created in, in terms of skills, clouds, and succession planning. No company can really use it because there's no data for the employee. So you can't nudge l and d. You can't estimate if someone's gonna leave or if they have approachability risk or you can't see if like, who's the right person to promote or, or do we need to let go of certain people?
It's very hard and it ends up being very biased, uh, without the data. So they've created the data to infuse and infer skills into the Workday platform. And that's through ai, right? It's through machine learning really just takes every data point on someone's work history and, and infers what skills they might have based on billions and billions of data points of others.
Right? And, and it's working. So I, I, I see AI as a big data play. I don't know so much as an automation play, maybe, you know, but with ai, I mean, my main concern is, you know, we had the.com bubble, right? And everybody was, uh, you know, creating websites. We have one Google, right? And if you remember, we, we had Yfu, we had Ask Gs, we had all the other ones, but one clear player emerged and I'm not really sure how to evaluate which one clear player that's gonna be in the different areas of ai.
But I can be sure that everyone is gonna continue to want to use data. And if you can manipulate and organize that data in a useful way, that's usually something people are gonna wanna buy.
[00:42:54] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a really interesting way to frame it and I think feeding back what I'm hearing, you know, I think the idea of, you mentioned Workday as a, you know, deeply established infrastructure player in the corporate space that's very widespread and we see similar ones in, in higher ed, things like Ellucian and Desire to Learn and you know, anthology.
And then we, of course we see them in the K 12 space. We see Google Classroom is everywhere right now. We see Canvas. Canvas. There's something very. Poignant, frankly, about the idea. You know, some ed tech companies come in and they say, oh, you won't need anyone else. You'll only need us. Right? We're like, we're the one stop shop.
We're the, we're the final piece that will solve all your problems, and you can sort of pull out everything else. But I think your insight about some cost or about even just loyalty to a company you've worked with for a long time, that everybody's been trained on, that everybody understands that you've already, you know, incorporated into all of your.
Finance system, it does cost a lot to pull something out and it costs a lot psychologically, I think, to change over, especially in K 12. So I think there's something really powerful about the idea of going in and reading the ecosystem and saying, what value can we add? You know, how do we play nicely with.
ERPs or LMSs or SISs or you know, IT systems, rather than going in and trying to sort of wipe the slate clean, which I think a lot of young, young entrepreneurs, that's how they keep themselves motivated. They say, we're at the end state of all these people. And instead say, well, how can we limit the size of the change?
Make it so that it works. And a lot of EdTech companies have learned this. The integration path, the, the hard way, right? They go do lots of sales calls and people say, well, hold on, unless you work with this system, we can't even begin to talk to you. And then they have to end up integrating. And that's, I think, healthy in a lot of ways.
It's a really interesting way to look at it. And then of course, what you're saying about data, but AI is really making sense of data. I mean, at the end of the day, that's really what it is under the hood. And so I love the idea of, you know, if you're trying to be a personalization solution, if you're trying to be a tutoring solution or something that improves learning outcomes through ai.
Teaching practices. Maybe you don't have to be the whole stack. Maybe you're the data layer, maybe you're middleware, maybe you're a piece that can sort of allow the systems that people already have to use AI effectively. It's a really interesting take and I think it's something that I don't know who the winners are either.
But I can imagine that some of the winners might actually pull away from the full customer facing UX and be like, they're not all gonna be chatbots. They're not all gonna have user facing interfaces. They may be internal data layers to make the existing systems work even better. And that would be really fascinating to see.
I'm probably putting lots of words in your mouth, but some of that resonate.
[00:45:22] Juan Zavala: Yeah. Picks and shovels, right? Like in the gold rush. You don't need to be the, the miner or the, the seller of gold, but you can certainly be the, the one selling the picks and shovels to, to mine the gold. Right? And like Nvidia, right, they're always gonna be around because people keep building on top.
They're the picks and shovels and there's other layers there. And you don't have to be the, the revolutionary AI company. Maybe you get lucky and you invest in the big one, but there's gonna be a lot of. Not big one and, and pretty much zeros in the process. And unfortunately in our space, if, if, if we do that too much in ed tech, that's gonna experiment with students, right.
And, you know, maybe introduce something great that they love, but it's too expensive and now it's gone and you just mess with a, a kid's 10-year-old favorite program or something. But I mean, I think that happened a lot in 20 20, 21. I mean, the funding was huge, right? Yes. And we had a lot of investment. Now, you know, I think you probably saw the hole in IQ data, right?
2.4 billion in EdTech vc, which is astounding because I think amongst the EdTech VCs, I. Concentrated with a few, there's more a UM than what was invested last year. Right? And so hopefully we're very judicious with the capital we're putting out there to innovate in education. Like I said, I mean, obviously we're incentivized to take risks, but our market just isn't.
And so it's that balance, uh, for what do you introduce and how long is it gonna take? How much capital is it gonna take? To get this to scale.
[00:46:51] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Let me build on that for a final question for you, which is that, you know, the data about that huge hump in 2020 and 2021 coming all the way back down to like many years ago, you know, just real retreat.
And we said we had, you know, 21 from Reach Capital and, and Ed Surge wrote a piece at the beginning of this year saying maybe that tech funding is starting to really bounce back. There are some positive signs, but. Overall, it's, it's definitely been in retreat. And as you say, the assets under management, the amount in the funds is still, there's still a good amount in funds that is not being deployed at the moment, but you could sort of understand why to some extent.
I mean, we've talked to a lot of VCs on this show and I think there's this feeling of, we know big things are happening. I mean, certainly government. The, you know, department of Education was just abolished a few weeks ago and we know big things are happening in tech, but nobody quite knows how It's where it's gonna land.
And the idea of there being 400 AI companies and you have to take your best guess, or, you know, maybe 15 in any given area, and you have to take your best guess about which ones are gonna win. That feels even higher risk than it has in the past. I'm curious, as a vc, as somebody who talks to a lot of VCs, like how do you, you think venture can thread the needle here and, you know, navigate this uncertain time, but not go in full retreat or full wait and see mode and sort of freeze the whole ecosystem, which I think we have seen a little bit over the last couple of years.
[00:48:12] Juan Zavala: Yeah, I mean, history's kind of repeating itself, right? Because this was the level of funding. In the time when I said that EdTech was kind of overlooked,
[00:48:21] Alex Sarlin: right?
[00:48:21] Juan Zavala: Right. It just goes back to get rich, slowly slow and steady, you know, and, and have high cash reserves. I, I think a lot of funds were invested very quickly in 21 and, and 22, and, and so those companies probably weren't very capital efficient 'cause they could keep raising.
Right Now they're, they're coming back and there's going to be probably amongst those, some very eff efficacious companies. That needs somewhat of a reset, right? A fatigue cap table. And, and look, we've been on, I think every investor has probably been on both sides of what's called a recapitalization, right?
If the company has a good product and it needs a breadth of new life, right? You can, you can work together to come up with, you know, the famous deal, right? And so I think there's gonna be a lot of those opportunities. And the reason you invest at a discount is so we can have that slow and steady timeframe.
Unfortunately, what's, what's happened is the reason it's treating, it's because the companies need more money, but now they're just not sure how long it's gonna take. And the valuations were so high and having that conversation is very hard, right? And so, I mean, it's just gonna be slow pace. I mean, I think we did one deal last year.
We started the year off with one deal this year. Probably do one more deal this year. But we've all, on average for the last 20 years, we've done about three deals a year. Three new deals a year on average. Some years we're zero, some years we're five. Right? But we've never done, you know, like two deals per quarter or something, which I think is, uh, maybe a more common.
And because of that, look, we make those slow bets and we keep high cash reserves because you want to support these companies when inevitably the projections that they put up don't happen. Because all we know about projections is that they're wrong, right? Whether it's to the, to the right or to the left, they're not gonna be exact.
Right. And so you want to make sure that you're able to support a highly efficacious company in times when it needs it, right? Maybe a district leader came in and said, I'm wiping the slate clean and lost a big customer. It doesn't mean it's a bad company or a bad product. There was high risk with that one customer.
I. But you wanna be able to support in those times and support well, and it's really hard to support if your initial investment was at a sky high valuation of the ingrow into it, right? Because now you're not getting compensated for the continued risk. And so it's a balance. And at the end of the day, the valuation on paper, and this might've led to people investing in those high valuations to say, well, it doesn't really matter because if the company's a a huge success, who cares what valuation I invested in?
Right. But that's a binary outcome. We like to keep the options open and really target that fat part of the curve, right? Where the majority of outcomes happen. I mean, in ed tech, I think like 90% of, of m and a happens below 300 million. I mean, uh, someone should do another analysis on that, but it's certainly not, you know, we have a handful of.
IPO companies and two of them just went private last year. Right, right. And I think then PowerSchool IPO in 21 and now they went private again in, in 24. And so IPO's not really the exit market for education. And it's been slow, even in the general market for a while now. And then m and a, you know the companies that are buying.
They're not typically buying, you know, for a billion dollars, a small EdTech company. I mean, it's mostly something in the 30 to 300 range, maybe 500. And then maybe the big funds also have capacity to do those nine figure deals. But that's where the majority of exits are gonna happen. So you can't really invest all your companies at a hundred million pre-money when they're doing, you know, 3 million of revenue because then they, let's say they go to 50.
They're probably getting bought for 200. So you maybe doubled your money or, or maybe you didn't. Right, right, right. And if, if they grow it from three to 50, that should be an incredible success for anybody and, and unfortunately, it's just not that way. So slow and steady a balance out valuation. There's so many stakeholders, the founder, the investor, the prior investors, the customers, and you really have to think about all of them and then get to a situation where we say in the.
Most likely outcomes. Are we all happy with the expected results and in the bad outcomes? Can we work together to keep the company moving forward? And then obviously in success, none of that ever mattered. Right, but you can't underwrite everything to huge success,
[00:52:40] Alex Sarlin: which is something that is the Silicon Valley ethos is sort of assume, at least.
You mentioned earlier that a lot of VCs, it's like spread your money among a number of things because one is going to be this stellar unicorn, massive success. You don't know exactly which one, but some will and some won't. And we haven't seen a lot of the NED tech frankly. I remember at the height of the 20 20 21, the and IQ unicorns list was getting longer and longer there.
All these. Companies having unicorn valuation and then it started getting shorter and shorter again. A lot of them, you know, some I pod, but still went down. Others just fell off the list for a variety of different reasons. But it feels like, you know, now we're sort of past that moment and, and I think the slow and steady credo feels a lot more sensible than the irrational exuberance.
[00:53:23] Juan Zavala: Founders and investors can make a lot of money with that slow and steady credo. Right. It doesn't have to be binary like unicorn or bust. The saddest thing is if it's, you know, if a founder sells their company for a hundred million dollars, everyone should be ecstatic. Everyone who supported the company, including the founder.
The saddest thing is when if that happens and the founder makes no money because there's a huge press stack or that happens and the investors make no money because they invested at a hundred million valuation and also 50, right? Maybe they get their money back. But, and it goes back to, do you really wanna take venture financing?
'cause what are the incentives? And so that should be a huge success for anyone. And the slow and steady, I think can get us to those outcomes. Being successes for everyone and people, you know, founders getting life changing money and going on to, you know, be serial entrepreneurs and, and changing the world.
I think, I mean, I'm not a founder, right? I'm, at the end of the day, I'm financier, right? We're, we're financing founders, but I think that's what the, the motivation, right? Change the world. Deliver on your mission.
[00:54:23] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. You mentioned how you don't do a lot of B2C, new markets, venture partners. I think the B2C ed tech market is one that I think there's a little more of that overlap between the, at least potential vision of an explosive growth company because you're playing in the same, at least world as.
Explosive SaaS companies and I think gives maybe somewhat false hope to the EdTech world that there are these huge wins that are B2C or, or obviously by Jews. We sort of, you know, mentioned without mentioning by name earlier, I think the B2C market has a different dynamic. Or at least a different perceived dynamic than some of the B2B, but it's, it's really interesting to, to hear how you think about it.
I feel like I've learned a huge amount in this conversation. I'm sure our, our listeners have as well, we didn't even talk about, you know, many of the other companies that you are a board observer for places like Mode is really interesting Company App Academy. But we'll do that another time. Once of all as a partner at New Markets Venture Partners has been since 2019, has a long history of investing prowess in different kinds of places, including private equity, and is a really sharp observer of the EdTech ecosystem.
Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:55:30] Juan Zavala: Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it.
[00:55:31] Alex Sarlin: 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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