 No, I should have gone Monday. After you. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Tizia Babilochin. I'm from Uncharted and we're moderating this panel. Feel free to come sit close to us because it'll be less awkward than talking to you all the way over there. I'm looking at you specifically. So it's 3.45. If you're like me, not long ago, you ate lunch. Maybe you sat in another panel. Maybe you're really tired and low energy and you're gonna listen to four people talk at you for another hour. So I thought we'd start this session by playing a game in the spirit of early childhood. So we're gonna play a quick, just, energizing game called Super Paper Rock Scissors. So I'm sure all of you are familiar with Paper Rock Scissors, right? So in this version, we're gonna play like this. So I would play Nicky. All right, we'll play really fast. Best two out of three. Ready? Rock, paper, scissors. We'll go on shoot. Sorry, it's my bad. Bad moderation right there. All right, ready? Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. All right, so I win that one. All right, Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Okay, so I won two out of three. So now what happens is Nicky becomes my cheering squad. So she follows me around and yells, Teju, Teju, Teju, as then I go and play Matt. And then if Matt beats me, we both become his cheering squad. So everyone stand up, find someone to play Rock, Paper, Scissors with, and we'll go until we have two big groups at the very end in the finals. All right, go. You guys can play too. You can get out there, make some noise for the people. Yeah, I'm here. Oh, damn. Okay, I'll ask them to turn off the mics for this just part. And then you've got the play. Okay, we can. What's that? We'll cheer him for you. We'll cheer him for you? Okay, that's fine. This game really is very fun. Yeah, that's good. What's that? I'm stealing this one. Ashley. Yeah? Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna ring on here. Wait, are these the finals? Are these the last two? Oh no. Okay. Are these the finals right here? The last two groups? Wait, so this, this is Matthew over here. And what's your name? Catherine. Catherine over here? All right. Catherine. No. A winner. You're the winner. Yeah. All right. That's great. All right, guys. Thanks for playing our game. Hopefully you're a little bit more energized and enthusiastic now to hear stories from the field of early childhood. So basically panels are boring. Let's be honest. So the way that we're gonna structure this panel is by doing some quick intros from the panelists who have been doing amazing work in the early childhood sector. We're gonna hear a little bit from them. But it's really gonna lay the foundation for Q&A. And we really want you guys to be very deeply engaged in this panel to ask questions, to share challenges, to share your own stories. So we're gonna start just basically by hearing about who our panelists are, what's brought them to the work that they're doing, what are some of the challenges they face, what are some of the opportunities they see. And from there, we're really gonna open it up to general discussion. The panelists have been told that not every single one of them needs to answer every question, which I think will keep us moving. And that disagreement is okay, respectful, but disagreement is okay, we don't all need to reinforce each other. So keep that in mind, that's what you can expect, and let's jump into it. So, Nikki, why don't we start with you? Just tell us in three sentences about the work that you're doing. Sure, so I'm focused on, founder of Versamee, and we're focused on early childhood education, really optimizing the early years from zero to four when 90% of brain development happens. And the most important info for that, brain development, is language. And so we build tools and services, really to help optimize, leverage, and increase that language exposure in those early years. Awesome. And what brought you to this story? What's your origin story? Education has always been pretty deep rooted in me. I was fortunate enough, I was single parent family and my parents, my mom prioritized education. And so it always sat, I had a 10 year career in investing and finance, but it always sat sort of pretty deep in me. And so four years ago, I came to Stanford to do a program to really think about my personal mission in life. And out of that program, with two of my two classmates now, co-founders, founded this business. And we're a full profit, but we are largely mission driven. And we ended up focused on this very early years where we believe you can have the most impact. Awesome. That's great. Thanks, Nikki. Matt, how about you? Tell us in three sentences about the work that you're doing. Yeah, so by background, my primary career has been as an entrepreneur. I've started a couple of companies in this phase now. I'm more helping other entrepreneurs. So I spent half my time teaching entrepreneurship at Samford Business School. And the other half of my time, I'm working with OMADR Network to create a venture studio, we're calling it, to help entrepreneurs who are focused on low income early childhood development. Awesome. And tell us your origin story. What brought you to this work? Yeah, what brought me to this field is I, there's really two things. The primary one was my first startup was babycenter.com, which is still the leading internet resource for pregnancy and a new parenting. And I started in the 90s, it's now part of Johnson & Johnson. And it really exposed me to what I think a lot of people don't know is just the importance of the early years and how absolutely critical they are and how much we still don't pay enough attention to it. So I wanted to swing back to this other part of my career and focus more on that. The second piece is I was involved a lot in a bunch of different K-12 education nonprofits. I had worked at Teach for America. And part of my inspiration is to say, just like we've kickstarted a whole movement of entrepreneurship, new people in the field in K-12 education, that same thing should exist in early childhood for obvious reasons that we can go into in this panel. Awesome, thanks Matt. Luis, in three sentences, tell us about your work. So my name is Luis, I'm from Mexico, born and raised. I am the founder of Quinedu and Quinedu is a company where we encourage and empower parents to have more quality interactions between them and their babies. We focus on families with babies who are minus nine months or still in conception and up until two years of age. Awesome. And what brought you to this, your origin story? I've been an entrepreneur for my whole professional life that my previous company is a corporate childcare chain in Latin America, which is still going well. And during that time we were a bit frustrated about how slow we were because in Latin America, early childhood is still a missionary type of concept and we need to transform the culture of the marketplace in a way. And so one of the things we did is try to answer a question what would happen if we would provide the same quality of education we provide at our childcare centers, but for every parent in Latin America and that's how Quinedu was born. Awesome, that's great. So for each of you I'm curious and we can go in backwards order here. I'm curious what your grand vision is for your work. If a magic genie showed up and said, what you tell me I will make happen if you describe your vision very clearly, what is that vision? And if you can add on to that, what is one success story you've had that helps you believe that your vision is coming, that you're bringing forth that vision? So one of the things we want to achieve is that we can give parents everywhere the tools so that they can actually encourage development in their kids, so that they know that they have to talk to their kids and they need to spend time with their kids and they need to do games and play and read to their kids now. Our vision is that every parent in the world can do this. Our vision is that parents don't need Jimberry or an early learning center to do this, but they can do it at home where the nurturing is much, much, much more quality than you would find at an early learning center. I think the only story I can share with that is that in Mexico, there's a consumer goods company that is sponsoring the app and making the app for free for everybody right now. And so in our own little country, we are trying to live that dynamic. And now the challenge is not, how do we get parents to use it, but how do we use the right technology so that every parent has access to it, which is a different challenge. Awesome. Thanks, Lisa. Matt? Yeah, my vision is that we significantly close the gap that exists between kind of higher income, children's and higher income families and lower income families, first in the US and then around the world. And the fact that there's just more potential to do that in the early years and it's easier to see that particular impact. So I see us doing that by, one, encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs in this field to really figure out new solutions and new ways to reach parents and influence their kids. And then that should create a movement that would allow politicians and policy makers to prioritize this more, get more dollars flowing in the field and I think we'll have a symbiotic relationship of more success begets more interest in the field which begets more success. That's great. And is there a story that helps you believe that your vision is on the route? Yeah, I think, and we'll talk about this. It's obviously an interesting and challenging field because you have, there isn't one field here. You've got a healthcare component to it. You've got an education component. You've got social service component. It's one of the few fields that's focused on a whole age range rather than a particular activity. But I think that's part of the opportunity now is there's this emerging body of science that we know, that if you talk to people in the field, it's all kind of a lot of the same basic things and emerging technologies that allow you to reach parents in much more fine-grained ways and influence their behavior. And so I think we're at a point where we're just at the formation where I think that the spark's gonna start to fly and there are many examples where you see entrepreneurs like we have on stage many more beyond that. You see a bunch of academics who have actually applied their innovations in the field and are looking to scale them. So I think where the green shoots are starting to come up. Awesome. Okay, Nikki? Well, I had this function of going last here. So I'm gonna be building on a lot of what Luc and Matt just said. So I was gonna talk both from a sort of big picture perspective how we view ourselves as advocates of a change in mindset to think about the early childhood years being most important. There's a lovely graph or an awful graph actually, which talks about shows brain plasticity being completely inverse to spending on education. And so we need to be shifting the dollars which are spent in the later years to this period when there's so much brain plasticity. And I consider us and all of us really advocates for that movement. And I think Matt talked about some of the complexities with these intersection of different fields. It's a very hard to reach period, which I think has been historically one of the challenges. And then if I think about more selfishly, what's the vision for my company? It's how can we touch every child? So, you know, the first manageable big goal I think is can I get a styling on every baby leaving the hospital to be a smart companion specifically with a feedback loop to both parents and to the broader stakeholders in a child life, to improve outcomes, to close the achievement gap, to increase parental confidence and really change the trajectories of those kids right from the day they're born. Awesome, love that. So, transformation that reaches everyone is a theme that I'm hearing across all three of you. I'm curious, what are the big challenges that you have faced in making this work, real? Yeah, we talked a bit about this before. I think one of the challenges or frustrations I've felt is that a lot of what we're doing is serving less advantage, low income populations who don't have the capital to buy things themselves and we produce a device. So, it's not like software, I can't give it away for free and there's a number of people who are excited and enthused but won't put capital behind that. So, I've been asked for, you know, 10 year, 20 year large scale studies. Well, I spent three years building this and just released it and so I don't have them. So, I guess I would encourage or like one there to be more interaction between the for-profit and non-profit impact sector and secondly, I'd probably like to see more innovation or risk taking potentially around funding to get some of these innovations off the ground. Got it, so funders are funding what's proven with 10 years of data, but that really stifles innovation. That's a challenge you've been up against. Great, Luis, what about you? What are challenges? I was thinking about this and I think that there's a lot. I don't want to kill my comparison. There's a lot of bullshit out there in terms of what works and what doesn't and there's a lot of people selling, you know, hocus pocus theories of what works and taking advantage of parents at what they really want is the best start to life. And we also get accused of that. It's predatory what you're doing, you're charging for an app, it's not the same. But I think that sort of misalignment between what families want and are beginning to want and what some people are just throwing out at the market to see if it sticks is creating a really weird dynamic in the market for quality to really shine. And is this a challenge you personally have experienced? I mean, is this something that you faced on the way to figuring out something that works? I think as a parent is something I face. So I have twins that are 19 months old and then you go online and try to read or find something and you find a lot of stuff that you don't know really how to discern what's real and what's not or what's valuable and what's not. So it's a challenge for the consumer to understand it and there's a lot of noise out there. And so breaking out from the noise is something that can be complicated. Got it. So discerning amongst all the stuff, what is quality, what really works, knowing that is a challenge for sure. Okay, that's good. Yeah, so the way I look at the field is, I mean, its strength is its weakness. You've got this bridge on the one side of, this is a field and I spend some time in this field sometime elsewhere that's very evidence-based which is a good thing and, you know, Heckman is a Nobel Prize economist who's focused on the returns, not only the impact but the actual dollar returns from that impact of improving child development pays off better than almost any other societal bet that we can make. So I think that's, it's hopeful that the field is held to a high evidence standard that doesn't exist in actually many other places. And then there's entrepreneurs who are starting new ventures and they get held to that evidence-based standard. And so I think there's a role for investors to play that even in the low-income world where it's more government funded to play essentially that venture capital role to feed the innovations that will then tie into programs that will scale via government funding. And I think why it hasn't happened as much today is, again, because it's a complex and fragmented field and because the science wasn't quite there and the technology wasn't quite there. So I think now you have individual entrepreneurs who are braving, you know, the markets and I think as you have more success to me I've seen this in other fields like EdTech is a good example when there were one or two companies they almost all failed. Once you started having a movement of a lot they just started to be, more people paid attention to it. They helped each other, they pushed each other, they weeded out the lower performers. They drew more attention, more people in the field. And so I think that's where we are right now. The two bridges are starting and over the next few years and that's part of what I wanna do with this new venture is try to help connect those two. Got it. And you have a unique position, Matt, advising Omidyar Network. How do you make use of that position to address this challenge that you see in the sector? Yeah, so my work with Omidyar really came out as there's, to me, what's encouraging in the field just in the last three to five years, a number of funders, non-profit funders, for-profit funders, a number of researchers have all just started kind of coming to the same conclusion that we can do something about this. So really it was not a coincidence it was that we were both kind of working on the same problem and I think we've made a huge amount of progress just over the last three months and kind of devising what a venture studio would look like to support entrepreneurs in this area. And that's just because of the work that's been happening over the last few years where a lot of people are thinking not high level about how the opportunity but actual brass tacks of like how we can actually make significant progress and drive results so new organizations can get funded, new businesses can be built. That's great. Okay, and then one last question we'll turn it over to the audience, which is with all that you have learned in the work that you've done in the early childhood sector if you were starting over right now but you had the knowledge that you now have what advice would you give yourself as you're starting out on a new effort to address early childhood development? I don't want to say I wouldn't do it, but I would, you know, I knew it was gonna be hard. I doubled the challenge by building hardware that makes it really hard, really time consuming. It's all hardware. Yes, yes, yes, the clues in the name. So it's probably better that I didn't know, frankly because I'm not scared of a challenge but when Everest is insurmountable then so I'm positive. I am positive. I am an optimist, an optimist realist and encourages me that events like this happen and there is a conversation. We are moving forward and people like Matt are doing what he's doing. So yeah, I'm not sure I have a good answer to that question. So when I started Baby Center which was my first startup in the 90s I talked to a venture capitalist who was at that point already been in the field 30 years so he went back to the beginning and his advice to me of looking at companies over dozens of years is the one factor that predicted success for an entrepreneur is if they could hang around long enough to get lucky. So I think the main thing I would say to a new entrepreneur is like timing is everything and I think there is getting to be more support in the field and so I think a lot of critical mass is coming together so timing is working in your favor whereas even those who started a few years ago had an Everest insurmountable. So I'd say I would start now rather than a few years ago. Okay, so don't hang around for a long enough time, Louise. I think one of the things that happened to me over the last three, four years is that when we went to funding meetings with potential investors, I wouldn't say everyone but most of them had different opinions and I would take them all seriously and you cannot take all the opinions seriously because sometimes they contradict and I think that my main takeaway would be to try and take the opinion seriously but eventually listen to our own story and listen to our own vision and just understand where our true North is and just try to follow it. Regardless, if an investor wants to come in based on that grade, if not maybe he's not the right match or she. Got it, so know what advice to ignore basically and really follow your own North Star, fantastic. Awesome, so we have an amazing resource and these three panelists who are rare examples of real practitioners in a very difficult field but who are making significant progress. They're here for us and so we wanna turn it over to all of you guys. What are your questions? Why are you here? What are you wondering about that this panel can help think about or address? Yes. Thanks everyone. So my name's Elizabeth. I work at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT and so we do a lot of work in education early childhood development and I was just wondering because you guys talked about the difficulty of figuring out what research is legitimate, what might not be, figuring out what works and what doesn't. What is a good method for academia to transfer this results to the practitioner world? Like what, in what format would be helpful for all of you? Yeah, sounds like a good question for you Matt. Yeah, the question was for academics, how would they translate their work into? Yeah, there's all this research out there. Yes, right. How do you know what research is good and then how do you get that research to the practitioners who can do something with it? Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. And again, this is a case where I think the crowd helps. So you said you're at MIT, is that right? So maybe I'm sorry if I'm provoking a rival but Harvard Center for Developing Child is just on the other side of town from you and it's a great resource for anyone who's an early childhood. One, they have a website that actually harnesses, it's kind of catalogs and presents in really easy to use formulas, the stuff that Luis mentioned and Nicky mentioned as well. What are some of the basics for how children develop, how their brain develops, what affects them for good and ill? So one, that's a great resource that's continually updated with new science. And then secondly, they have a program to focus on how you can go from an intervention that works in one population to expand that to other populations. And it's a very sophisticated methodology to look at not just what works in a black box way but what elements decompose the whole process so you can say what is it about this particular intervention that worked, what different sub-elements so that you can help figure out how to scale it. And the venture studio I'm planning is actually, I think we're gonna work closely with them, it's a little bit of a, trying to create a Reese's peanut butter cup of a little bit of chocolate and peanut butter is even better together in that there's I think the business side of that creating kind of the business model which could be a nonprofit, business models apply to any particular entity. That same journey of how do you translate this? How do you go from one step to the next? How do you scale? I think the combination of those two are the studio that I'm in the process of creating and their work would help, will help academics get this in the field. And for those who are not in the field, I think this is one of those opposite of most fields, there's a ton of academic research that's actually quite applied and showing good results. So compared to other fields where there's lots of research and the results haven't gone there yet, this is one where it's the opposite so that's what gives me encouragement and excitement. That's great. One question on that Matt is, I mean there's a lot of meta-analyses normally in research heavy fields that look at the research and assess the quality of the research. Is that true in early childhood? Are there a lot of meta-analyses of the research studies out there? Yeah, there's everything from studies to meta-analyses to it's probably a little bit old now but that center produced, before that center created there was a book called From Neurons to Neighborhoods that sort of is I think still pretty good and I'm actually reading it as a textbook so I'm about a third of the way through. It gives you pretty good overview of all the research and all the different areas and not just the pure science but kind of how that applies to neighborhoods in the development. Awesome. Other thoughts, questions? Yes, Stephanie. So we didn't hear very much about the companies that Nikki and Luis are running. Can you talk a little bit about them? Matt, that sounds like you again. No, yeah. It's okay. It's okay. Thank you. Yeah, so my company's called VersaMe and we have a mission to help all children fulfill their potential in the world and we started really at the core. It was born out of Stanford four years ago and inspired by a professor there and for now he works in this field of early childhood development to particularly around the importance of language and so the first product we built is nicely modeled here. This little device called the Starling and it is in essence a wearable device for babies and young children and it measures the quantity of language that they are exposed to and then it's paired with an app where we gamify trying to nudge parents to engage more. So we have a daily goal, we give sort of tips and tricks around quality of engagement and things they can do and then we are adding additional sensors to this to gather other input data on a child or baby's environment. Again, to turn into actionable insights and feedback to parents to try and encourage them to do the best thing they can for their child's brain development and in terms of closing the achievement gap and reaching low income families we are supplying to non-profits, pediatricians, libraries, speech therapists and schools who are deploying these in populations of children to use to maybe measure the impact of what they're already doing or as a tool to leverage up that impact. So yeah, that's a little bit more detail. Awesome. Hello. Is this still on? Still on, all right. So Kinedu, it's a company, we try to empower adults to have better interaction with their kids and that means many things but we started with our, we call it Baby Brain Development app and what it is, it's an app that gives parents daily lesson plans for them to implement with their kids. The app works very simple. You log in, the first time you log in you answer an initial assessment which are questions based on what your baby's able to do or not to do. For example, can your baby identify different colors? Can he walk? Can he crawl? If he's younger, can he raise up his head, et cetera? And then we give you activities per day. These are video activities that parents can watch and then leave the iPhone alone and then go play with their kid. Then they come back and fill out the milestones again and it just keeps improving. So that way we recommend not only based on baby's age but also the baby's level of achievement or level of development. We're doing some, quite some research in a couple of avenues. One of them is actually looking at the data. We've actually just finished a two year project looking at all the milestones data we had. We restructured it, we clustered it in new different ways and we're gonna relaunch the assessment and the app in a month or so. And the second part is actually looking at the effectiveness of the videos and we finished a small RCT, 60 kids in the San Jose Children's Museum. And what we found at that small scale is that videos are more effective at conveying activities purpose and more effective at getting parents to speak more but they speak in more repetitive fashion than the control test. So we need to do further research on that and see how that feeds back into the application because in itself that's feedback for us to make the product better. Hi, my name's Lupe Leasy. I run a research lab for digital teaching and learning at Arizona State University and most of my background has been in the private sector creating enterprise learning applications for digital markets for early childhood all the way up to higher education and beyond. Being inside the belly of the beast now in the institutional market, it really is a profound gap between the flow of capital into the marketplace, maybe not in your experience, but by and large the norm is the flow of capital into this marketplace and the invention and research that's happening at a university. The chasm is really growing larger. So what do we need to be doing to sort of exponentially scale some of these research-based inventions with the capital flow to actually get the scale that we need? So to summarize, what do we need to do to scale research-based interventions with the flow of capital is to close the gap between research-based interventions and capital? Yeah, so I think, sorry, it's really hard to hear the questions coming back that way. So yeah, I think what happens is the field is based on sort of these RCTs and there's this whole body of work in kind of a startup world around lean startup and lean experimentation. So I think it's actually sort of expanding everyone's minds. It's really more a mindset thing, too, that we need to look at really three kinds of evidence. One is the lean startup evidence, which is when we're in sort of learning product market fit, how can we do some level of evidence? And even Luis is, I think, actually doing something well beyond what people do, where he's doing an RCT on a small scale. That, I think, leads to that second part of innovation, which is more of a quicker, faster study or some more of rapid cycle testing. Needs a different name, because that's also RCT. And then there's still room for traditional randomized control trials. So I think, and this is where the concept to me of having multiple entrepreneurs working on this, I think anyone entrepreneur is gonna have a hard time introducing the concept of let's get data from lean experimentation. But if there are dozens of entrepreneurs doing that, I think that's gonna give investors the confidence to say, hey look, these ones are progressing a lot more quickly than others and then some will move on to that next sort of rapid cycle testing. And I hope that will be enough to be one of the pieces that will close the gap. That's also on, but I think the mindset shift needs to come from the investors as well, right? So there's a volume piece over this side and then there's a mindset shift over the side. Maybe there's another challenge there is, how do you pair up entrepreneurs and researchers who are coming up with new ways of solving problems? Yeah, and I think that's one of, I think anyone who's an entrepreneur in the room knows this and I teach design thinking as part of my startup class at Stanford. One of the good things about design thinking is they come up with great names for very simple concepts. Like I have an entrepreneur friend who's like, isn't design thinking just listening to your customers? And it kind of is, but it has a whole methodology around it. Oh shoot, and that made me lose my, oh yes, one of the other concepts in design thinking is radical collaboration. And the radical part is it just means people work together across different disciplines. So in design thinking that's bringing an artist together with a business person, with an engineer, and a musician and great things happen. So I think a lot of the good news is this field is actually smaller and so if we get the right balance of academics, practitioners, technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers, it's really not more than that. I think good things will start happening. The silos will start getting broken down. And the other part I'll add which on the, let's be honest, cause you started that is that, you know, let's be honest entrepreneurs follow, there's a herd mentality there. It's really tough social proof counts for a lot. So I think if we get more critical mass of entrepreneurs and critical mass of investors being interested, that will, you know, and we get the evidence in this early stage stuff. I think that'll be the kind of critical mass we need to accelerate things. Hi, I'm Kat. I'm an aspiring children's book author and I'm interested in, I hear that a lot of parents find out about products and books through word of mouth, even like, you know, parenting tips and tricks. So with this whole word of mouth thing, how do you actually reach parents for your audience? Or like what are the best distribution channels? Like is it magazine, schools? Yeah, it's a great question. And I remember in the early days being told that I had an impossible uphill task introducing a new product concept into a market because of the awareness challenge and then the specific marketing challenge. So on the consumer side, we are largely relying on word of mouth just because we understand it was gonna take some time. And then on the more sort of impact work that we do, where it's, you know, organizational partner buyers, be it schools or otherwise, we've, you know, we do a few conferences, but again, that's quite a tight knit community. So one does find out about things from others. And the advantage is that has a bit of scale to it. So each are buying 100, 200, 1,000 devices in my case. So yeah, it's a sort of multi-pronged approach. And sometimes, you know, frustratingly, you can't push things faster than they are naturally going to, time they're naturally going to take. So part of it is a bit of patience, which I don't do very well with, to be honest. In Latin America, their Facebook groups are a big thing. There's, you know, wiki mujeres in Colombia and Mexico lady multitask. If you fly out there, I mean, if your product takes off in those mom groups, you're all over the place. Like these are literally 150,000 people, big, only moms, only women, and they're just sharing different stuff, products, you know, anything from plumbing to the next website that they want to use, everything. Yeah, and I'll just add, this is a little dated because I built Baby Center in the late 90s, but we built it to be one of the top, it was really one of the top 50 websites and it only serve a small percentage of the audience and we did it on zero marketing. And that's if you build, the good thing about parenting is it's a time of great change and people are very passionate about it. So if you build a really, really good product and you figure out how to get it into their hands, if it's good enough and on an important enough topic, it will spread like wildfire online at parks in classes. And so the challenge in the early days is to be scrappy and figure out how you place it in, you know, you gotta go to parks, you gotta post online and find those initial users and really, you know, listen to them and usually you don't get it right at first so you've gotta keep working until you have a great product. I think this brings up a really good question which is in early childhood, you're a little bit, it's the distribution is a little different than it is in maybe school-aged children who you can distribute via schools. You know, you're getting all these parents and kids together in one place and that becomes one route to go for distribution but when you're just talking about people in their homes, they're much harder to reach. Have you, you know, noticed that there's something specific that has to be done to get into the home of, you know, get a book into the home or a product into the home of. It's a B2C question so it's, you need to get the attention of the end consumer all by yourself. Like there isn't a systemic channel that you can use that's not the Facebook or magazines or TV or. Yeah. And I think that's the B2C and then there's B2B. I think one of the challenges and we're working on in the early childhood space is there isn't one channel like there is in K-12 schools where there's a school district where 100% of kids are in school for, you know, six hours plus hours a day. So, you know, here you have health interactions where people are going to providers. You have early learning centers where kids are going to whether it's Head Start, Pre-K in home care and then you have some social service agencies. So those are kind of more B2B models and you have to figure out, you know, what's in it for a pediatrician to distribute something, what's in it for an early learning center to use it. And there are a number of other entrepreneurs that are working on quite interesting things, particularly in early learning. That's an area where the business is more evolved. There's plenty of existing for-profit companies. They're traditional companies and so we tend to see more entrepreneurship starting there on the B2B side. And even some of those, so we've sat and thought quite hard about this, you know, how do we meet, it's particularly on the sort of less-advantaged side of things, low-income families, how do we meet them where they are? And we ended up doing a pilot with some pediatricians who were distributing starlings. And one of the issues we saw was the attendance at doctor's appointments, even when they had the reminder the day before, was like 20%. And so, you know, even at that, what you might think is a reliable way of meeting parents where they are from challenged populations turned out not to be, which is one of the reasons when I think about vision and I think about, you know, they're definitely in the hospital delivering a baby. So, you know, can you meet them there and provide information and have that as the first point of distribution or awareness? That's great. Congrats, you set a baby by all these products. Good approach. Any other questions, yeah? First of all, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. As a former entrepreneur, I get how hard it is to take the time, so thank you so much for sharing your stories with us. I'm wondering how do you guys think about exits? And we have an exit with Baby Center and we have Johnson & Johnson really taking it to the next level. We have Louise with your rapid growth in Colombia and a couple of other countries. How are you thinking about that next phase? And then Niki, similar. You have capital from learned capital backing you up, private venture capital firm. What's so fascinating about the three of you is that you're committed to the space also. And how do you balance that tension or that opportunity of building the right values into your company so when there's an opportunity for exit if there's one and if you're driving towards that those values are not missed. My thought is that what you want to do in the long term for selling or not selling is the same. So my mindset as an entrepreneur is in five or 10 years or wherever it is, I want a big company that's growing fast and that's profitable and that can give off good dividends. Anybody wants to buy a business like that, no. And so the financial vision of the company is the same in either case. The problem is not the financial vision. When I think about what we're doing here, it's we're not, I mean making money is important but it's just as important as it is for humans to breathe. We do not leave, our purpose is not to breathe. Our purpose is to do so much more but we will not do it if we don't breathe. And it's the same for companies. If you don't make money you're not gonna exist but we're here to do so much more. And for us, if we ever sell, it's gonna be to a group or a company or someone who can actually help, actually fulfill the purpose of the company better than we can do ourselves. That's the only reason why we would sell because the financial goal will be the same either way. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. What would drive an exit? It's getting division faster which is reaching more kids faster. But I'll make a point which I often make which is that if you're focused in on education as an entrepreneur or a generator in the space, it's likely that money is not your primary driver. Kind of fact and that means various things, one of which is that there are probably less VCs who are interested in you but there are now an increasing number of investors, bit of VCs or otherwise who are interested in both making money and having impact which is how I consider myself to be. And so we're lucky to have learn other investors who are both interested in the financial aspect of things but also the impact metrics that we can drive. And so I obviously think about being scrappy and bottom line and reducing burn but I'm thinking about impact and how do we reach more kids and have a positive effect on their lives. Probably first and foremost when I wake up in the morning before the financial piece. Wow. So one of my questions being on the foundation side, so that's more of your risk capital, your true risk capital. One of the problems that we see and not necessarily your examples here is that entrepreneurs are coming to the table all of the time with their solutions and oftentimes this solution very well for the middle class on up but we've got this from my side of things. It's hard for me to deploy risk capital when you're not talking about that when the entrepreneur themselves does not have a clear grasp and connection to the social solution in part. So it's a question for all of you but Matt I was wondering if you could address this if you're addressing this with from the omittier perspective of coupling these entrepreneurs with these stakeholders that are really trying to make that change so that when they're doing a pitch to someone in a foundation that it's clear to me that they're doing a social solution that's blended in with a for-profit solution and if you're not doing that do you know of anybody that is doing that? Yeah so good question and I'm glad because I'm glad to talk about the non-profit and the traditional foundation side. We're not in the studio we're gonna create we're agnostic as to what the business model is and so we haven't had for-profit examples up here but I think actually a lot in low-income early childhood development in the US will be non-profit and I think to me the gap I see is actually a mindset gap to be blunt and I haven't talked to as many traditional foundations but my sense is the issue is the way foundations funding is they fund projects they fund specific things and that's just a fundamental mismatch with a lot of non-profit entrepreneurs of which there are many out there who are very much focused on a low-income market but they have to go through the same sort of lean experimentation and iteration not only their products to find a product that works for whatever audience it is but also on their business model and for a non-profit business model that could be alright I wanna sell into you know into pediatricians I wanna sell into early learning centers so I think the traditional foundations need to work, I'm a consultant to OMDR so I'm not tuning around horn but like OMDR and other groups that fund both traditional and fund both non-profits and for-profits they've done a good job of thinking of like how do we bridge that gap and so I think there are ways for foundations to deploy their capital, essentially their grants in the same model that people are doing on the for-profit side and that's a huge thing that we have to change in the field so it's not about the issue is not about convincing people to focus on low income it's all around how do you help entrepreneurs go from step one to step two to step three and building their solution and then building their business model and I don't wanna sign defensive but we considered starting our business as a non-profit and made a very deliberate decision not to for a couple of reasons one we didn't want to be dependent on handouts to put it one way but and secondly we have an aspiration to become self-supporting or subsidizing the supply and distribution to less-advantaged low-income families so think Thomas shoes if you will so it was a very deliberate and conscious decision to do that and I don't think it definitely doesn't lessen any of my desire to really make a difference and on the lives of the less advantaged I think one thing I'd be curious to follow up on that is with low-income populations you're having to make trade-offs between things like rent and food and education and actually I think often the way that people prioritize meeting their needs is they start by paying their rent if they have money left over then they might buy food but they're willing to sacrifice food for rent and if they have money left over after that then they think about educating their kids how does that ordering of priorities when you're talking about low-income communities actually affect how an entrepreneur needs to design a solution to really make get traction in these communities? Yeah, well I think I'd say two things and one goes against my business a little bit one of which is that there is funding from be it state or other organizations aimed at serving and helping these people get out of their situation so they may not be actually paying for whatever the service is that they're receiving or by this evidence which says that if they don't pay anything they don't value it in any of us as humans the other thing I'd say and research has been done by the Kenneth Rainham Foundation on this is that the smartphone penetration in low-income population is close to 100% now so that is going up what's the hierarchy of needs that's coming closer to the top and so we are in a world where deployment of information technology if we think about apps and what Kennedy provides it can be done at lower and lower costs or even there's plenty of text messaging programs like that which we won't debate the merits off but again it can be done at pretty low cost so I think we are in an age where it is becoming more possible to reach the hard to reach in a low cost way. Yeah, the other thing I'll add is I think for a low-income population I don't think if your business model is counting on parent pay I think that's not gonna work so a lot of this is about in essence government funding, federal, state, local, health, education, social service there's money there, there's not enough of it we're gonna try and change that but there is money there and I think where you get into nonprofit for profit I think one, we don't know yet we'll see how that emerges but I think you'll see more nonprofits around the delivery model so just the way you see it in the world today you'll see more early learning centers if you're health clinics things like that that would probably be where you'd find more nonprofit models and I think you'd find the for profit models where you see it today in low-income populations that there's a lot of back off of solutions if you're trying to run build software for early learning centers that's probably gonna be for profit I think data companies as well and just again in the early learning and health world there's new emerging data around kind of both from the biomarker side as well as from the like you guys are gonna generate data that can actually help pediatricians help social service agents whether it's compliance things like not attending a pediatric visit or word-spoken child development milestones so I think the business model will vary based on the time of company but it's all, this isn't gonna be based on self-pay by parents but you hit on a very nice point which is just the creation of different innovations in early childhood creates externalities apart from those that consumers willing to pay and you gave a great example so we are all gonna generate data that we can share and that for us it's just marginal it's not part of the business model there are things we can do as like I think foundations could take bigger risks and just support the ecosystem as a whole because if we have more ideas the more externalities we can produce and that was something that was mentioned in the morning by the Fed, Minnesota Fed guy who said you know most of the dollars from early childhood investment are captured by society not by the actual recipient of help and it's the same thing when supporting the ecosystem of entrepreneurship in early childhood the innovation, the data that comes out the investment and distribution models is something that other people not necessarily the exact entrepreneurship funding will take advantage of but that data that we're generating like we have the biggest, the largest database collected of early childhood mouse and observations while we're doing it, we're doing research with it and after that we're gonna rebuild the assessment and give it for free to pediatricians that's something that happened funding a business that's mostly targeted at hiring from families now so I think that there is something to say for the externalities of investing in early childhood as a whole and not just on those that fulfill specific targeted missions Yeah, I mean if we look at if you refer to Heckman's work which you did earlier Matt and talking about generally the return on capital invested during those early years and that's you know from a bigger picture perspective rather than any individual solution service company et cetera So I guess what I'm hearing is if you're a for-profit your payer is not the low-income parent but if you're a funder interested in driving results for low-income communities you've gotta look at the payoff for society by investing in early childhood rather than the payoff for a specific business is that fair, fair something? Yeah, yeah Luis would you clarify? As the entrepreneur you could also find out who's gonna pay when we launched the corporate childhood in Mexico our average cost per month per child was like $350 I know that's nothing in the US but it was like two and a half times what the average child could cost in Mexico and so we got companies to pay for it it took us like four years but we got companies to pay for it somebody is willing to pay somebody why because there's an externality to providing the service we just need to find that someone Got it, that's great that's good stuff here yeah Luis or this gentleman here Minneapolis Fed guy that's a question I'm just gonna see what he's actually have we didn't hear what you said the Minneapolis Fed guy oh me sorry no that was good yeah any publicity is good publicity so how do your companies engage with the public sector and is there a policy change that could happen in the public sector that would be beneficial to your mission so I'll answer that in two parts the first one is how we engage we do we anything that comes from foundations government institutions that want to use our software for early learning centers or families as home visiting interventions or training for caregivers we do it for free as a general policy within the company that we we're working with Fundacionales to take this to Panama and we're working with remote communities Fundacionales is pitching in cell phone and tablet signals but we do everything we do with them for free that's how we engage whatever we can do to help we do terms of policy change I don't know in Mexico what can happen I mean it's hard to say it's hard to see policy around apps for the childhood changing or actually being relevant what's more important than early childhood it's other things it's home visiting programs it's early learning centers I don't see policy changing for us for me in my own personal way soon yeah I would say as the Minnesota Minneapolis Fed guy and hopefully the data guy you know there are a lot of fields that generate a lot of data you know the NIH does a lot of research and that leads to data the Fed you do a lot of programs to promote use of data I think with new technologies including from for-profit as well as from non-profit companies there's a whole new sets of data that can be created for you know for instance Nikki's generating data on word spoken which is one of the you know predictors of child development there's wrinkles around it's not just pure word spoken but you can get around that but that those kind of data sets can be created I think you can measure what impact you have and then you can create public policy programs around it and I think this is a case where it really takes for-profit non-profit investors you know entrepreneurs and policy makers with a probably a competitor of yours so sorry to give them a plug and they're in the non-profit Bloomberg foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies funded Providence Rhode Island to do a program called Providence Talks which is something that you know Nikki would be a proponent of voluntary program to help parents track their word spoken and education intervention again it took some seed capital from a non-profit from a traditional you know funder they paired with city government that city government is now looking at how can we expand that elsewhere and so I think there will be a lot of kind of community you know local state and federal based programs that can be actually you know hard evidence-based programs and so you probably know better what element of data what element of funding is needed to pull together but I think you've got creative entrepreneurs will step in the void and sort of help generate those results Matt really fast on that and Nikki I want to hear your thoughts on this but there's a you mentioned that a lot of for-profits in this field are using data somehow do you think there's a role for foundations and government to buy data from entrepreneurs and that be a business model that can work if you're serving a low income population you're generating insights I think it is in the externality model so I think you know I hope foundations fund some of the work that you know the Nikki and Louise are doing because actually foundations do you know they do spend money and we want to do a program in this area and it's gonna cost X dollars and we're gonna give kids iPads or parents iPads so we can test this they all you know they've already done the R&D and so you could leverage a Starling to you know collect data you know influence behavior and at the same time collect data in a pretty cost-effective way you can even get it subsidized by a corporation go to Target and say hey this is a good community-wide effort target's gonna look good if you find fifty dollars you know per student that's gonna find a lot of her cost so I think foundations can help play a role in buying some of these products out of their own self-interest to actually influence kids and then the process generate data and I think that will get to a virtuous cycle of other innovations No I was just gonna have a gripe that if we had a different administration and more might have been focused on early childhood but we shouldn't get political so This will be our last question Thanks so much, Elliot Pence with AXN I had a double barrel question, the first was related to data who owns your data? Is there sensitivities with the parents obviously in the data? Second, what are you seeing cross-culturally? So how does a Nigerian parent or child different from a Mexican or American and what are those sort of top two interesting trends that you're seeing that maybe push back against best practices? So in answer to your first question we own our data but I definitely would be open to making that available to the extent it doesn't threaten our IP if it's going to move the field forward be it more broadly for specific research or otherwise and I'm in dialogue with a number of researchers on that topic I'm just gonna give you an anecdote on the second part of your question which is differences and I know Luis will have opinion on this as well but as we think about you know if you believe in one of the critical messages we're pushing around engagement and language Culturally in some places it's actually not not promoted to torture your children they should be sat in the corner ignored and for now he's our professor at Stanford she's done some research in places in Africa where actually if you look a child in the eye then there's this concept of the evil eye and so you know how do you even start encouraging more language if Culturally you're not supposed to look at your child and I don't have any good answer on on how to address that but I think it is something we We need to think about and should be thinking about as we you know being culturally sensitive as we promote best practices and things that we're seeing come out of research So for us it's similar We parents own the data linked to their name, but we own the right to use the data anonymously for research purposes and aggregated and all that In terms of what difference are we seeing per country or socio-economic level? That's what we're starting in November and it's gonna take us 12 months or so to do all the correlations within the mouse And it's gonna take us a while. So ask me in a couple of years And I'll add one thing I mean it sounds right, but it's really true parents You know new parents want the best for their kids no matter what environment they're in and early learn it You know Katherine's here from early learning lab. They did some research You might define what success is for your kids differently based on where you are You know what community you're in but everyone pretty much wants the best for their kids and parenting is the great level or so Everyone is kind of humbled in a you know, and and their mind is open at the same time So by the way that gives a good opportunity to actually get people to work across Neighborhoods communities and socio-economic divides because it's one of those rare leveling experiences So that's one and then second that sounds like it's the opposite way as though I think wherever you look you see the biggest predictor of Divergent outcomes is just socio-economic status and you know and for knowledge who you mentioned as well did she does research Which shows the power of what we can do now She literally tracks eye movements as a predictor of sort of not a predictor as a measure of Cognitive development as early as I think maybe 18 months Well, it's even earlier than I thought isn't it? I think it's like as early as six months So anyway quite early and she's done tests in the US and sees difference across socio-economic divides and she went to Mexico And found because she was working primarily with Hispanic population in the same thing and did it in a high and low Socio-economic status and found the exact same divergence between the two populations. So I think that's the you know what those of us who are here to care about social impact is parents we all want the same thing for our kids no matter where we are and You know like exists in other fields kind of where you're born what family are born into is the biggest predictor of success And I think we have the opportunity because we can reach people early and influence it and actually Measure it and see how we can have an impact that we can actually fundamentally break that curve You know that that divergence at an earlier age. That's great. Well, thank you all so much My father likes to say that you know you found a friend when your conversation isn't over and I think this is the start of a Conversation definitely not the end. There's a lot of meat to dive into here. So please continue to engage with the panelists Thank you to Gary community investments for putting this panel together and thank you all for being here