Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Turning Trusted Books into Personal Learning Agents with Aibrary
Frank Wu is the Co-founder of Aibrary and a Harvard Kennedy School MPP graduate. He led 20+ edtech and AI investments at TAL, helped build Think Academy in the U.S., and previously taught 3M+ students.
Susan Wang is the Chief Growth Officer at Aibrary and a Yale and Harvard Business School alum. She led creator and product operations at TikTok and worked in strategy at TAL, with deep experience scaling edtech products.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- How AI is reshaping lifelong learning and adult skill development.
- Why Aibrary turns trusted books into personalized, bite-sized audio.
- How Idea Twin customizes learning using your goals and context.
- How Aibrary blends learning with action to drive real-world application.
- Aibrary’s long-term vision to build an AI-native university.
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:01:00] Frank Wu on the fragmentation of adult learning.
[00:03:00] How AI is increasing the urgency for lifelong learning.
[00:08:22] Susan Wang on converting books into daily micro-learning.
[00:13:53] Why Aibrary grounds all content in trusted, authoritative sources.
[00:20:06] Personalization through goal-setting and AI agents.
[00:23:54] Applying ideas to real life as the core of true learning.
[00:29:39] Why Aibrary started with audio and when video is coming.
[00:33:29] The bridge from consumer learning to enterprise and micro-credentials.
[00:40:09] How future education will merge self-knowledge, world knowledge, and action.
[00:48:58] What’s next for Aibrary’s evolving AI learning companions.
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[00:00:00] Susan Wang: The second barriers when we think about the true learning happens is, okay, I digest the information, I understand it, then I need to apply it. Application is very important. If it stay with the theory, the information you never apply to your daily work. I don't think the true learning actually happens. So in the idea between what do we think about this?
Because they know your context a little bit, so they will think about what are the. Real case, you could apply those concepts or knowledge you learned from the books into your daily life.
[00:00:36] 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 here at
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We have a really exciting episode of EdTech Insiders. Today we're talking to Frank Wu and Susan Wang of. Aibrary, that's Aibrary, A-I-B-R-A-R-Y. As you can imagine, it uses AI to do really amazing things. Frank Wu is the co-founder of Aibrary and a Harvard Kennedy School, MPP graduate. He was previously at Tal Education Group where he led over 20 investments across education, content and ai, and he helped build Think Academy in the us.
He's a former educator to over 3 million students and serves on the board of the Harvard Beijing Club. Susan Wang is the Chief Growth Officer at Aibrary driving Growth Creator strategy and product scale initiatives in the AI learning space. A Yale and Harvard Business School alumna. She previously led creator strategic operations, product operations, and agency Partnerships at.
TikTok and worked in corporate strategy at Tal. She's a seasoned EdTech operator focused on building impactful learning products. Frank Wu and Susan Wang, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks very much Alex. Very glad to be here.
[00:02:26] Susan Wang: Thank you, Alex. Great to be here.
[00:02:29] Alex Sarlin: We are so excited to speak to you today. This is a really exciting product.
So we just read your biographies, you both worked in amazing IT education, one of the absolute biggest ed tech companies in the world. TikTok, let me start with you, Frank. You've invested and built learning products across China and the us. Tell us about your overview of how you've seen the education, adult, especially adult education system evolve and how you see Aibrary fitting into this really interesting moment.
[00:03:00] Frank Wu: Yeah. Well first of all, definitely thanks very much Alex, for this opportunity to be on the show. As you mentioned before, I worked in the entire education group for many years, particularly managing the overseas investments. So at that time I would a big fan of ad tech insiders because I had to meet the thousands of a.
Companies across different parts of the world. And finally, I became an entrepreneur myself, even though we are building a platform for adult learning. But, uh, frankly speaking, talent education group is predominantly a K 12 space, a tech company. So we got to invest in. A lot of ad tech innovative startups in different parts of the world.
Personally, I also confounded a Think Academy, which is a leading afterschool tutoring K 12 program in the us. But joining from all those experience, I decide to build this complaint in the adult learning for several reasons. Why is I think a lot of you have heard. One of the most innovative university called Mineva University.
So we were proud to be one of the main investors for Minerva. And personally, I really was fascinated about the concept, how it reimagined the university should be so personally be found of that. And also, especially when the AI came, I just feel like. Lifelong learning is the nearest to be impacted.
Everyone is discussing, cannot find jobs, what kind of jobs can be replaced. So definitely fascinating place to start with. As well as if you look at the market size, the big companies at Lingo. Coursera, there are many doing the in the lifelong learning space, and what's more importantly is that like one of my favorite professors, which now became our advisors, Harvards, Chris Didi, he wrote a book.
The 60 year curriculum. When I read that book, I was really amazed about that. If you look at the K 12, we say, Hey, we got 12 year curriculum to develop the students' skillset. But if you look at lifelong learning, you have 60 year. Of that curriculum. So that was really fascinating. But as you mentioned, there's huge gap on that.
One is, of course the, the how we learn this kind of learning for adult is really fragmented. So Alex and or the audience, imagine when was your last time to watch a full episodes or four course of Coursera. So very low completion rates. A lot of that contribute to, for example, TikTok and the people are used to learning at the same time.
A lot of the learning is more standardized. It's not that personalized like people care. Why should I care? Especially for lifelong learning, like everyone have different goals at the same time. The world is developing so fast, there are still like big ai, technology Z, so the university are outdated. So a lot of things combined.
We feel like there's a huge gap for that. So that's why we want to leverage the expertise in education, develop curriculum, and also work with consumers to solve the big problems in the adult.
[00:06:15] Susan Wang: Yeah. Just to add one thing, Frank and I both have graduated from like a top university in the world, but literally the JI came, we actually saw the jobless rate for Harvard actually are increasing.
Literally just like students from the top university in the world are literally finding difficulty to find a job. I think that's a very strong signal sending to us. AI is. Changing the future of the work and also especially impacting how people learn. I would say lifelong learning, probably before J AI Arrow is optional, but today with all the uncertainty and the changes in the job requirement, the skillset, it's a must.
It's a must. I think that's one of the reasons, as Frank mentioned, we actually decided to start with this lifelong learning or ad love learning space with the long-term vision. Thinking about maybe the university should be changed in some way in the future. Yeah,
[00:07:13] Frank Wu: so the ultimate goal is really. To become the largest lifelong learning ecosystem in the A IH, even to build a AI native university, even though we started from library as a book podcast, et cetera.
But we are gradually moved towards our end goal of building the AI native university.
[00:07:32] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. Let's start with what Iber is right now, because I think it combines a lot of the things you're saying in a really intriguing way, right? You use the sort of bite-sized nature of TikTok rather than long form courses.
You work with the work of Chris Didi about lifelong learning and this continuous curriculum, this 60 year curriculum, and you're putting together, as you said, Minerva University. One of the most interesting things to me about Minerva is how interdisciplinary it was. It really tried to sort of. Reinvent curriculum from the ground up, rather than saying, oh, we have to have biology and we have to have economics, and they're all separate.
And you do a lot of that in library. So Susan, lemme throw it to you. You've scaled creator and learning platforms at TikTok. You mentioned how lifelong learning is now a must. It's not optional anymore. What are you doing with library to bring lifelong learning into a format that people can access on a daily basis?
[00:08:22] Susan Wang: Yeah. A couple of things we actually see is, I don't wanna see a little bit like evil TikTok, but the social media clearly are making people's attention window become like so short. Like literally we have a way thing at a TikTok. When we look at the content, we always look at the seven seconds completion rate.
So it's like in every video, if you not hook the audience within seven seconds, you are losing them. So people's attention is getting shorter and shorter. It's very difficult today to imagine, especially like Gen Z. Are they reading all those books? People are just so busy. So people get used to just grasp the information just in bite size, I guess that turns into ivory.
We decided just embraces change. So we keep thinking how could we do the real learning? Like in bite size, naturally fit into people's daily routines. Thinking about the busy parents, busy professionals, young professionals, they wanna learning on the go. So that's why we decided use like every day with these two, the wisdom from the books into like 10 minute podcast.
So we be perfectly fit into people's daily life. So that's one thing we decided to do. And then the second trend we were saying is. Today because ai, especially thanks to large language model, they made content generation super easy. That's very good. But however, it's also adding confusion, illusion, and also very little trust there.
So the other day, just give you a personal story. I was using Sora and I literally creating a video for myself with my baby. I was like making that photo, closing my baby in the sky, and I pass that video. Into my family WhatsApp group. Even my mom, she was saying, you should be careful. Don't do that with your eight months baby.
[00:10:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, but that's
[00:10:18] Susan Wang: fake. That's
[00:10:19] Alex Sarlin: fake. She has
[00:10:20] Susan Wang: no idea. She has no idea. It's fake. It's just so real. I mean, like people today with all those content generated by ai, but very little people has the domain knowledge or expertise to judge what is right, what is wrong, what is truth, what is fake, so. For us, if we emphasize our learning, the most important thing is building the trust.
So Frank and I, our co-founding team, we talk aloud when we trying to do the bite-size, the learning, what are the information source we should start with? We debated a lot and we decided to start with books 'cause we feel like books at list, it's structured. Systematic and we think along the human history, most of the human wisdom are actually coming from the books.
Books have all those rich knowledge. It's just the format doesn't work with today's consumption pattern. So we wanna start with the transverse sources. So we pick books and that literally reflecting our, the name, the AI library. And the third pattern we see is. Thanks to the elabor driven content generation, like content distribution, people always say in their content bubble.
So you just use those social media, whatever you like. You just keep scroll. I like it, you comment. Then the aism just keep pushing you the similar content again and again. So you just say it's your own bubble, but we know when true learning actually comes, you need to see critical thinking, diverse perspectives, like even Gen Z, this younger generation even look at news from TikTok, not only entertaining content, they are truly like digesting information from those social media, like Instagram, all those.
So at ivory, when we think about we wanna balance, so. First we still need Aris. 'cause you wanna make the consumer sticky to your apps. So you wanna understand their interests. So what they like the content, but it's not only Aris. We also think about what are the skills, what are the knowledge needed in the next generation, and then what are the books could contribute to that skills.
For example, maybe communication skills are more important, or critical thinking skills are more important. Then we find the classic books to talking about that. And then when we design what we should recommend for the users to read, it's a combination between the algorithm and also the skill or knowledge based graph.
We build that to recommend something for you to read. To give you a vivid example, I talked to another user of Ivory the other day. He's A-M-I-T-B school student, and his interest is more like in AI and the business. And he said the other day he used Iry one, like a really fun moment for him is truly exploration.
He found something in philosophy like Plateaus book, like he literally read in his high school, like without Iry. He won't even think about, I wanna read this. But he found this reading list from MIT and talking about this book, and he pick it and he said, oh, that's a really good way for me to learn something.
So that's the experience we wanna create here.
[00:13:33] Alex Sarlin: Some of the things that I wanna call out about, what you're saying that I think are so interesting is this idea of taking trusted sources, right? Grounding the truth and trusted sources. We all know in the social media era, it's all about user generated content.
Everybody can sort of come on and it's very hard to tell signal from noise. And then in the AI era, like your story with Sora. You can't even tell real from Kate.
[00:13:53] Frank Wu: Yeah.
[00:13:57] Alex Sarlin: So using these trusted, authoritative sources, which are books, it could be maybe research papers or academic papers in the future, but it's trusted academic sources. But then changing the format of them so that they're incredibly digestible. They're 10 minutes, they're podcasts that you can actually tell.
The system. I'm an library user and I've, I've done this. It's really amazing. You can tell the system what you're looking to learn about from any particular book. So you can take that philosophy book and say, I'm actually a MIT business school and AI engineer. I'm curious about how this philosophy book might be relevant to me, and then it'll create material specifically for you.
Just speaks to your point about personalization, Frank. That's a really interesting combination of taking trusted sources, but taking them into, you mentioned the consumption patterns have changed, Susan, right? Turning them into consumption friendly material that actually work in short form, that work in audio, and that can be personalized to the user.
I mean, Frank, you mentioned that this is your first step on this huge vision of reinventing the university and making it more personalized, more relevant. Tell us a little bit about that vision and how this idea of taking trusted sources and making them personally relevant and digestible feeds into it.
Yeah, definitely. I would put it into
[00:15:10] Frank Wu: several ways. Why is the reason we put it trustworthy? Very important in to our philosophy is that exactly as what you mentioned currently outside in the world, content is everywhere. You can get information everywhere and, uh, read all kinds of AI generated things, but do we really trust them?
And also like we can gradually become even more relied on GBT or those large language models tell us what we should do, but are they really trustworthy? So that's why we. Begin by using books as the sources because we believe that's from those publishing exaggerates. So from time those are trustworthy content.
But beyond that, in our new versions, we also have like trustworthy papers, podcasts, for example. We believe Ad Tech insiders are trustworthy content if you want to keep updated with ad tech information. Instead of some other like random sauce. So you should ask Alex about what is the training topics in at space instead of just random ask a large launch model where you can get some hallucinations.
So that's something we really hope to build to help you do the cut. From all the analysis outside the world to use your time wisely at the same time, uh, we believe personalization is really, really important. I know you everyone's talking about the impossible triangle in education previously, whether you can achieve high quality of education, personalized, but at a scale, you know, affordable way.
But traditionally it's hard to do that. But we believe with gen ai, the personalization is indeed very, very. Feasible for everyone, especially for lifelong learning, though, like personalization is even more important in K 12 space. Imagine you have a set curriculum. Depersonalization means different students have different paces or different level of understanding, but then lifelong learning.
The things you learn are very different from others, like levels. Nothing's the same. So you want to learn engineers, others want to learn whatever, marketing, et cetera. So. People have different goals. So first step for our personalization is really to understand your goal. That's why when we build the agent AI for lifelong learning, the first step we talk with our agent.
We understand your personality, your goals, what you want to achieve in your career, what do you want to be marketing expert or understand the AI better or get promote or even you are a new mom and dad, you want to be a better parent. Like Susan and I, we were both. Mom and dad, so very excited, but don't know what to do.
So we need those content so we'll, based on the content to first distribute the books you need based on the algorithm. So most of the team members came from TikTok actually. So we use all the algorithms to make sure it it is right for you, but at the same time. We also do the personalized content, actually also tried the ideal Twin podcast, right?
The idea thing is just to build a framework to, in the in the future versions, the idea Twin will evolve very, very fast. We will have very, very different involvement of Ideal Twin, but the basic principle is that we believe. The things you learn even is the same book, the same content. CL mix or marketing will be very different.
For example, the book principle for you doing media will be very different for me doing a startup or for others doing investments. Those are totally different. So generally for each individual. So that's the most important thing. And at last, we build a learning companion. We have three very cute avatars.
Nova at Orient. In the later versions, the team's functions will be more obvious. We help you understand yourself, understand the world, and also take action to highly integrate into your daily schedules. We believe that, you know, learning is hard. Very hard. Nobody loves learning. No, I like it. No, we like learning, but a lot of people don't like, also because of TikTok, you know, it's so distracted, but the real to accompany you to become better version of yourself every day.
Both provide practical. Help, for example, help you know what kind of things you should learn, and also to push you, guide you just like a lingo. At the same time, also provide the emotional help. It's just a feel like, I don't know whether you have this kind of feeling when you enter a bookstore. Or a library, sometimes your mind is coming down.
You just feel like the other side of the world is like, it's not easy, but your mind is just the cooling down. We just want to provide that kind of experience for
[00:20:06] Alex Sarlin: everyone. That cool down of I, I love bookstores more than anything in the world, but bookstores and libraries are like my happy place, and I know exactly what you mean when you go into them and you have so much going on in your head and you just say, wait, everything is in here.
There's ideas everywhere. You can cross pollinate, find new things, find things, you know, refamiliarize things with yourself, with things you haven't encountered in a long time. It's totally amazing. I wanted to talk about the idea twin. Feature that you're mentioning here, Frank, just a little bit because again, I'm a user of this and I'm gonna do my best to splice in some of the podcasts that are created by Aibrary using the idea Twin into this episode.
Or maybe we'll release them alongside it because it is truly amazing. I mean, what it does right now, and I know you have other visions in the future, but you can literally. Tell Aibrary about who you are, what you're interested in, what you're trying to accomplish. Like you said, give it context, give it context.
Engineering. Apparently they're calling it now, I just learned that, but give it some context, but then you can give it your voice sample. And then what it'll do is literally create podcast conversations between you and another host that basically tailored the content directly to what you're trying to learn.
[00:21:15] Aibrary (AI): Alex. We're in a strange moment for education. Student disengagement seems to be at an all time high, and many people, students and parents alike are questioning the very value of school. It's a real crisis.
It absolutely is. Orion, from a product perspective, in EdTech engagement is the metric we chase constantly, but it often feels like we're just treating symptoms not the root cause.
We add points, badges. Leaderboard, but the fundamental problem of disinterest often remains.
[00:21:46] Alex Sarlin: So it's like almost inject yourself into the content and then the representation of you represents who you are. So. When I put into Aibrary that I've been doing education technology for many years and that I run a podcast in it and that I've been a product manager and these are all the things that I'm interested in and I love AI and I wanna learn about it.
And then you go to any book, I mean literally, it could be a parenting book, it could be a science book, it could be a current events book, and the podcast will bring that angle to it and make it relevant to somebody who cares about AI and education and technology in 2025. You can do it with the Art of War, you can do it with.
Anything, which I did. I mean, it's amazing. It's spectacular and so it's, it's really fascinating and I think it just speaks to exactly what you're trying to get at here with this idea of lifelong learning is hard. So if you can use media transformation, if you can sort of literally throw yourself into the experience with this idea twin feature, and then use the learning companions as co-hosts and the learning companions each have their own.
Personalities. So as you say, you could say, I want it to do this, I want it to do that. Hey, you know, what do you want to actually be getting out of this moment? You can transform this material that is, is static and that is, comes from all different angles, but it's, it's not designed for your use case and actually make it transferable.
You know, for the parenting use case, it's really interesting because you do have parenting books in there, but you can do things like tell it the age of your kids or tell it what you're struggling with at that moment. Maybe it's temper tantrums or not sleeping. And it'll tailor all the content to that exact problem and give you action items.
Literally tell you, you might wanna try this based on what this book says. You might wanna try that. You know, rather than reading a 200 page book for that three sentences, you're like, oh, I'm gonna try that one thing. You go right to it. It's really an innovative learning experience. So Susan, you know, coming off that idea, one thing you've talked about is describing the learning as, as moving from a passive consumption of sort of reading or watching videos to active reflection where you're actively making sense and transferring what's happening in the content to your actual context.
That feels so relevant here. How does Aibrary do that now? And how are you hoping to expand that in the future?
[00:23:54] Susan Wang: Yeah. That actually also goes back to our idea, twin thinking pattern behind it. So when we think of what the true learning happens, it's actually starting from asking the right questions. So it's always very difficult for people to ask the right questions, just thinking about you have abundance of content there.
The very high quality information today is not scarce. So you could get easy access to that, but you are not digested them. First the barrel there is, you don't know what's the right question to ask. So when we trying to create this idea, twin, we're trying to understand you a little bit. Create a digital twin for you, but ask the question on behalf of you.
So thinking from your perspective, then the content will be more digestible for the user itself. That's the first step. And when we build it, it's actually has some solid learning science behind it. It's called the zone of proximal development. Just to easily explain. So the best way for people to learn is when you set the goals, just five centimeters, little bit above yourself, not too high, not too low.
So the task won't be too difficult or too easy for you to achieve, then you are in the sweet spot for you to learn. So when we build this idea Twin, when we use the prompt engineering or those context behind to do this, when we think about what's the right question for the users to ask with this books, with this learning goal.
So in order to make the question I ask in this podcast will just be a step of a little bit like future. You are better, you. Guiding you up towards that journey. And then the second barriers when we think about the true learning happens is, okay, I digest the information, I understand it, then I need to apply it.
Application is very important if it stay with the theory, the information you never apply to your daily work. I don't think the true learning actually happens. So in the idea between what do we think about this? Because they know your context a little bit. So they will think about what are the real case you could apply those concepts or knowledge you learned from the books into your daily life.
Just to give you example, I still go back to the book Principle by Ray Dalio. 'cause uh, that's one of my favorite author and my favorite book. So I think I read. Principle, I don't know, five or six times already, but I not really apply that truly into my daily work until I use Idea Twin. So they literally mentioned like, I'm a growth hacker for ad tech startups and I'm drawing like a truly global company.
So they literally saying principle dimension, like radical transparency is actually very important how you could apply into this context. If you're building a global team, how you should do that. And also when you are evaluating candidates, who you should hire, how you evaluate candidates principle, you actually mentioned you should have some aism behind it to think about what are different candidates, how you evaluate them, how to see their potential, their capabilities.
So when I heard that idea twin I made for myself, I was like, okay, I need to take down notes for this. Maro, I wanna do this. There are a lot of inspiration coming from that. So I would say that's some aha moment I heard. Yeah,
[00:27:17] Alex Sarlin: that is worth its weight in gold, right? The turning a treatise that's about a business book like Ray Dalio's principles that has all of these big ideas, and you read the big ideas.
I mean, we've all had this experience so many times, right? You read the big ideas, you say, oh, that's really interesting. That sounds really relevant. That sounds really, you know, important. I wanna apply it. But the work to say, how do I actually take this? High level idea that's written for everybody in any kind of business and apply it to, as you say, you know, growth hacking in a global ed tech startup.
The help making that transfer leap and as you say, you know, moving it to within your zone of proximal development, moving it into the context and into the the level that you're comfortable with. That's a huge amount of what the work of learning is, especially in the context of. Learning from books or learning from static content.
So I'm so excited about how you're thinking about this with I and you mentioned soa. I have to ask both of you. You know, your current output is mostly in audio format, which is incredibly digestible, very usable. Do you envision video output coming soon from Iber? Definitely. Yeah. You'll coming soon? Yeah, more,
[00:28:26] Frank Wu: yeah. I'll quickly explain the thing of that. So the ultimate goal is really to help people. Grasp, understand the materials in their casual in a casual way, micro learning scenarios. The reason we didn't start from videos, uh, like many companies, is really we notice that there are a lot of scenarios in your life.
You have to use your ears to audio, to consume knowledge, driving, exercising where you cannot use your eyes. And as long as you are convenient with your eyes, there are so many options. Either you. Take some very serious courses in Coursera, but I know it is hard to finish. But because of the TikTok, like because of human nature, sometimes when you get into your phone, you begin by saying, Hey, I want to learn something, and then quickly switch to TikTok, then two hour pass by still didn't find anything.
So that's why we started from. The scenario, so you cannot use TikTok, but gradually with the involvement of our like workflows, content workflows, and also the power of large language models, exaggerated multi-model models. So we are definitely move towards those directions and you welcome soon
[00:29:39] Alex Sarlin: very quick.
But your point about audio is really key. I, you know, there are certain physical situations where audio is important, but you're also, we're in this strange world where people consume multi-hour podcasts. They can't consume multi-hour anything else, right? I mean, nobody wants to spend two or three. I mean, look, we're all learners here.
The listeners are all learners here. We all, you know, read books and things like that, but. Book reading has gone down a lot, and as you say, video has gotten to such short form that it's even sometimes hard for people to concentrate on video. So there is a lot of power in that audio content because it, as you say, it allows you to put down your phone, do something else, or just put on headphones or just drive and do these long stretches.
It's really been interesting to watch the audio format sort of blossom over the last few years as a learning mechanism. That said, to your point, Frank, there are certain things where video is gonna be incredibly useful, right? Anything visual, anything physical, anything where you're learning to build something.
Anything where you're learning through diagrams or infographics or seeing processes in real life. There's a lot of places where video can be very, very explanatory. So even when you move to video, I imagine that you'll have both formats and, and they'll be used in different ways by different people.
Definitely. Absolutely. Susan, when you look at the future of I and how you're developing from, it's worth noting that, you know, I is set up as a consumer platform. It's direct to consumer, it is app store. It sort of competes with other consumer apps, but you also have these broad visions, both of you, about how I could actually become a truly immersive, long form educational experience.
And I, I'd love to hear your visions of what this looks like, but I'm curious how you're sort of thinking about the. Consumer product versus sort of anything that may be accredited in the future or something that might dovetail with something that with traditional educational institutions like a university or a school, how do you weigh those?
That's obviously one of the biggest questions for anybody in ed tech and I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it. Uh, Susan, let's start with you.
[00:31:34] Susan Wang: I think, uh, one day all these pieces will come together. We specifically pick from like consumer side. I would consider it's more like a consumer. So once you have consumers really love your product, that means they actually learn something.
They are like probably working big companies. Most of our early users are knowledge workers. Just imagine some people like working in Microsoft or some people working in Google. They love our products, and then they could propose to their learning and development like team. Maybe this time you should try this ad.
So we're thinking starting from the B2C end and then longer term it could definitely go into like enterprise and the B2B end for the learning and development that area. And also I would say right now it's more serious learning is more like micro learning. But think about. The true learning actually start from micro learning is stick with this journey.
You accumulate enough time here, the outcome will actually be the, I would say it's actually the same. It's usually, it's easy to pick up. And as long as you stick, it's very difficult to stick with your personalized learning plan. That's what we are trying to do. But if you could stick with it as a time passed by the outcome, the learning outcome will come and, uh, if we could actually record how people learn.
In the micro learning way, it could also become micro credentials. We talk about the nano credentials a lot. If you are like completing some personal learning journey here, like just reading 10 books or 20 books in marketing. I would say if you also apply that into your work, it could also be like similar to you have a linking certificate in some way, but it is more better fit into your busy daily life.
You don't need like a dedicated time sit there to finish those certificate or course. So that's how we think about this.
[00:33:29] Frank Wu: Fully understand in the US market, you know, especially, you know, in K 12 space, majority of the companies are doing the B2B selling to school and also in the lifelong learning sectors.
Coursera, those companies are increasingly selling more to corporate training, which definitely we will move towards that. But, uh, besides for the market consideration, there are some philosophy. From our understanding of learning, because we believe learning is your personal thing. You should be the main owner of decide what you want to learn instead of your boss or HR who foster you to learn anything, you should be responsible for yourself and learning.
It can be out of. Like survival. You want to improve your learning skills, whether you want to be better fit in current job or you want to explore different possibilities in are sectors out of your interest, or it can be pure curiosity. You want to explore something like. Different in the world. So we want to make sure that every individual, they in the new world, because of the power of technology and also the possibilities will becoming more and more.
As long as you have in mind, have a curiosity, then you can learn whatever you want to learn. So this is the core idea for that and we believe from the consumers we do want to like develop the product to refine and then gradually move towards other sectors. So, you know, you know the team is a good combination of both consumer product and also P two B products.
So Susan and I working in the consumer products for many years and my another founder, Sen, who was the founder of F Classroom, which is AD Dean. B2B education SA for public schools. So he has a lot of experience on that, but gradually we all hold the same value I just mentioned
[00:35:30] Alex Sarlin: before. That's a really interesting philosophy and I think it's a really powerful, and especially at this moment of great transformation of great people, frankly, in the education system, which we, we talk about on the podcast all the time.
I wanna double click back with you, Frank, and then I'd love to hear your take on this, Susan as well. Just to acknowledge, you know, that idea of going to consumers and then from consumers. Consumers are in environments, they're in enterprise, they're in universities, and that's a well proven path for a lot of EdTech companies.
We've seen, you know, Coursera and Udemy and at Masterclass, you know, we've seen a lot of companies sort of do variations on that, so that makes a lot of sense. But I love this idea that. Learning is a personal journey of being able to sort of tailor, you know, the, your curiosity, your upskilling, your future proofing, your job.
Transitions are all sort of on the individual. I feel like that's very in line with where the education system has been moving recently, where institutions are becoming a little less and less cutting edge and people are getting more and more empowered to create their own. Personalized learning paths, both through LLMs and through other ed tech tools.
So, Frank, lemme double click back with you that, because I think that's such an interesting stance. You know, let's imagine the future five, 10 years from now in a world where it is becoming even more obvious that every individual sort of has to curate and maintain their own lifelong learning journey.
Tell us a little bit about what that world looks like and how you feel like library can enable an upleveling of that type of personalized learning. Yeah, definitely. I think like there are a lot
[00:37:01] Frank Wu: of debates, whether with ai, people still have to learn. I don't know if there's any answer. There is also debate within the team, but my understanding is you still need to learn.
There are definitely two types. One is still. I don't know, like maybe still in, in five years, new technology emerged because of ai. You still have to compete for better, better lives, better jobs. Those skill-based learnings still have to do that. But our ideal way is that because of the productivity of the society has expanded, there are more space for people to explore things they they love.
Maybe it's not that job related. So that's why we have so many books through own philosophy. Like ours. So those things, I think that's like underlying in the human wisdom. But sometimes because of the faster pace of work you have to do the job training, corporate training, et cetera. I don't have time for those.
And we believe because of the personalization, we can really have the, improve the efficiency of your learning and also tailor to your. Own journey or your own interest and help help you understand it so many times that when you stand in front of a museum, it's hard to, for a lot of people, to appreciate the great arts and also understand the history, the philosophy around that.
But we believe those are a lot of very important parts of that. So from my understanding, vision of future learning, there are two parts. One is really the core. It's just like when you play basketball. Besides the like skillset. You, you, you have, you throw the ball, keep the ball, but still you have to do pushups.
You have to train your course. We believe that that's also part of the reason we start from books. I think books are like, train your course, but the same time there are a lot of new things everyday things. Coming out, those are extended capabilities. Also very important to, to learn the most updated technology information.
And, uh, but with the core, you can, you have the better capabilities to use those methods to be a better person. Both life and work. So that's the most important thing. At the same time, I think the credential system will also be very different. Traditionally, you have to like, it's just like a bundle sale, right?
You, you have to spend four years in college, but you a lot of things you don't need that. Like, not everyone needs us different, so like, I don't know what the world will look like, but for, for I, for us, we will definitely develop those micro-credential mechanisms to make sure, as long as you learn anything that can be credit.
And it can be recognized by the society, by your friends, by the job market, by by, by the world. So you, your own like trajectory can be recognized and also be seen by others. So I think those are very, very important. Change we an.
[00:40:09] Susan Wang: Just to quickly add on that, when we think about what's the future education look like?
I, I think a couple of things. First, people always wanna learn from the brilliant minds in the world. That's why teachers are very important for us. When we think of brilliant minds, we think about trust, diversity, information sources, and we start with books or library. And then the second thing people think about is personalized or hyper-personalized.
I just want the brilliant minds of those great teachers just for me. Not making me alone. 'cause also have a few buddies study buddy with me, but the teacher will have enough time just for me personalized enough. Like personal tutor. 'cause that's how you think about the best education. Then the third thing I would say at any time.
Anywhere. You don't wanna be limited to a certain place or a certain time. So when we think about the best education in the world is like you have the access to the brilliance minds in the world, it's hyper personal to you. You have a companion and you could get access to that at any time anywhere. So.
If you think about that, I was literally trying to deliver in that way. We're trying to even start from a very small starting point. We hope we could also contribute to that bigger landscape in, in some way.
[00:41:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:41:29] Susan Wang: Mm-hmm.
[00:41:29] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. Anytime, anywhere. Learning from the best minds, being able to combine, you know, workplace learning, but also learning, like you said, that sort of core training of understanding the world of beauty, you know, of fiction things that are not necessarily just, uh, transactional learning, combining that with transactional learning and credentials, that's a really exciting vision of where this all might go.
I think it's a, it's very positive and I think it. Even with, you know, the potential of ai, job displacement, even with, you know, all the changes that are happening in society based on everything happening right now, I think that's such a compelling and optimistic vision and, and one that I really share about where everything can go, where instead of learning being locked in.
You know, the first few years of your life and only when you're in connection with an institution, you have lifelong learning. You have accessibility to everything. One thing I loved in, I, I listened to a, a synopsis of Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, the, the famous Philip Dick novel, and it was.
Spectacular, you know, synopsis. It was amazing. It's a book. I, you know, I, I know the movie version. I've actually never read the book. And I was like, you know, I'd love to learn more about it. And I just walked away feeling like I really was immersed, I had new ideas. I was like, felt like I really got something truly meaningful out of it.
And one of my other favorite things to do with AI that I think is relevant to one of the things to what you're both saying is use AI in a museum. Right? When you're in a museum, literally looking at a painting and say. I wanna know more about this in this context, right? I wanna know more about it because I like this, or I wanna know more about it to tell my five-year-old, or I wanna know more about it because I'm thinking about writing a book about something else.
And I'm curious how this might be relevant. I love how I, and your philosophy in general allows people to sort of take any brilliant thing out in the world, whether it's a book, whether it's, it's it's fiction, whether it's a a paper, whether it's Sky is the limit. And then pull it into your own context and make sense of it for where you are right now, what you wanna get out of it, whether you're, you know, MIT, business school graduate, or a new parent.
I really experienced that when using it, and it feels like a really clear vision of how ai, because nobody could do this in the past, right? No individual teacher could say, I'm gonna take this particular book about, you know, the Warren Buffett's investment style, and then change it to be about your interest in growth marketing at a EdTech company, or to be about your experience parenting, or your experience, you know, taking care of an aging parent.
I mean. That's a hard thing to combine, but AI is really good at it and you really feel it in there. Let me ask a little more about this idea of this AI as a constant companion, because this is something that is implicit in what you're doing with I, it's like for anything you are curious about, for anything you need to learn, you have these go-to companions.
You talked about, you know, Nova and Oriah, and as these learning companions, they have their own personalities. They help you sort of bring ideas together. Do you think that this is another element that we're gonna see in the future, that AI learning companions are just gonna become ubiquitous? Everybody has one or many that they have access to.
Is this sort of par for the course for you and, and I'm curious in that future, you know, what role do you wanna play? Like how do you seek to evolve Nova and Oriah and all your different learning companion personalities to create a web of lifelong learning for any individual?
[00:44:51] Frank Wu: So I think the reason that we develop those learning companions, you know, sometimes you ask large language models, they have provide you the things.
It's kind of like a general, like from a general knowledge base. So we trained. Those AI avatars or companions into different personalities. So they can be practical use in different ways because they learn their domain expertise and the same time they also have their personality, which is more like emotional.
So we believe that for learning. If you think about the teachers you like most. I think those teachers are both like they have great wisdom, they have great knowledge, but same time, they're so caring, they understand you. They have different personalities that you love. I think this is really something we will become.
Like gradually even lack more in the age of ai because everything is created by ai and those kind of human touch or this kind of emotional touch is become even more precious. That's why we believe that's different personality avatar. Sometimes they also have, for example, currently we are the, the main advertised Nova is like, it's like, like a, a big sister of you.
Understands you and can comfort you in, in your hard times. But also we also have Atlas who is a power of action is kind of push. You have to learn, you have to follow your learning path, you have set goals. So just uh, do that. So different personalities have different, uh, functions and the personality for each one will also be very different because they also learn with you.
It's not learn for you, they also learn with you. Their personalities also develop gradually. So this also we will develop a lot of like, uh, learning gamification mechanisms using all those avatars. We just believe it might be fun.
[00:46:53] Susan Wang: I just wanna double click on one thing. Frank mentioned before, we didn't randomly name Nova, orient and Atlas.
We, we specifically pick three angles here 'cause that's how we think about the true learning come. So NOVA stands for self. So it actually, the personality Frank just described like a big sister. 'cause we think the true learning is starting from understanding yourself. Different people have different learning habits.
What are you interested in? What are your goals? Understand your own bias, your unknown unknown. That's actually a starting point for the true learning. So the nova for yourself is like a big sister there, help you to maybe self. Yourself, understand yourself better. That's the starting point. And the orient just for the word.
So when after you understand yourself a little bit, you need to understand the word, how the market, how the government, how the society involves. There are different topics there, but it's more important, like interdisciplinary topics. Then you connect yourself to the world and then the atlas. It's for actions like chief growth, uh, chief uh, action officers.
'cause as we mentioned before, if the learning stops from the concept, only ideas never go into actions. That's not the true learning. So Atlas will be a little bit like pushy, or she or he will have very strong execution power there. Like you learn this, you write on notes there, maybe you should apply to your work.
Let me get access to your calendar. Do that in next week. Some, sometimes people just need a little bit nudge there to push them one step there. That's how you form a habit. So yeah, those are how we think about this. Three avatars, they actually have our learning philosophy behind it. Mm-hmm.
[00:48:45] Frank Wu: Alex, you know, building a startup is not easy.
There's so many things we have to do, you know, building from kind of status all the way to all the things we have mentioned. But I think we will achieve that pretty soon.
[00:48:58] Alex Sarlin: And a lot of this is already in there. I mean, I think, you know, you, you have big dreams about where it's all evolving to, but even today Aibrary has idea twins.
It has Atlas and Nova and Orion in there. It has. Other personalities that you can recruit for your podcast. It has synopsis and conversation podcasts I've done, you know, Carol Dweck's mindset book and applied it to different things in Ed Tech, Daniel Willingham. You know, why don't students like school?
You have a big library of books in lots of different topics. You're moving pretty fast. It's been exciting to watch and I wish we had more time, but as part of this episode, I am definitely gonna put out. I've already heard them as a listener because they're spliced in here or they will be sort of companion episodes.
Some of the outputs of what these podcasts actually sound like, they're really in depth, they're really interesting and as Susan just mentioned, they really bridge that ideas to action.
[00:49:51] Aibrary (AI): Alex, you've spent over 15 years designing educational technology. So you know the moment a student hits a wall in a learning app, one student's face lights up, they lean in muttering. Okay? This is where it gets interesting. Another student freezes. They feel judged, exposed, and they close the app. Same software, same problem, two completely different worlds.
What if the difference maker isn't the code, but a single powerful belief in the user's mind? That's the core of Carol Dweck's groundbreaking book.
[00:50:24] Alex Sarlin: That's it, exactly. That moment is the one we obsess over as product managers and designers. It's the fork in the road between engagement and abandonment. We can analyze, click through rates and user flows all day.
But what you're describing is the psychological layer underneath it all. It's the why behind the click. I'm fascinated by the idea that we can design for that, why
they really. Go outta their way to say, this isn't just a concept that is out there for you to understand. It's something you can actually use in your actual life, in your actual context tomorrow. And that's something that is so rare and exciting in learning. And you know, as Frank mentioned, you know, personalities actually shine through.
It's really interesting product. Incredibly exciting. You know, I'm a user so. Frank Wu is the co-founder of Aibrary. He's a Harvard Kennedy school graduate. He was previously a Tal education and Susan Wang is the Chief Growth Officer at Aibrary Yale and Harvard Business School grad, and she led all sorts of things at TikTok as well as at Tal.
Really amazing stuff, guys. I appreciate your time today and I really encourage people to check out Aibrary, it's AI, B-R-A-R-Y at the app. It's a really interesting experience. I think it changes the way you think about what learning is and how to literally take nuggets of wisdom out of all of these books and use them in your life.
It's really, really interesting. Thanks so much to both of you for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:51:51] Frank Wu: Thanks very much, Alex.
Thank
[00:51:52] Susan Wang: you, Alex.
[00:51:53] 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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