 So, welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to talk about workforce tech and an investor's perspective. My name is Jean Shaw, I'm head of portfolio and investment at the Autodesk Foundation. And today we're joined with a group of panelists who are some of the most active investors in workforce tech, including Jason Palmer from New Markets Venture Partners, Aiman Anderson from Acumen America, Sonali Kotari from JFF Labs, and Elizabeth Garlow from Lumina Impact Fund. So why is Autodesk a technology company convening this conversation around workforce? And why is Autodesk Foundation involved as a philanthropy? So as many of you may know, Autodesk is a maker of design software and technology for architects, engineers, people in the manufacturing construction industries. And our philanthropy specifically focuses on design and engineering solutions and innovations to drive social and environmental impact specifically around climate change mitigation, resilience and adaptation, and helping workers thrive in the era of automation in service of a more equitable future. So to kick off our conversation, I thought I'd bring in some recent headlines that are coloring the conversation around future of work. So all right, this one comes from Bloomberg just October 4th of this year. Robots are catching up to humans in the jobs race. Another one from the New York Times. Evidence that robots are winning in the race for American jobs. And then another headline with a different tone. Where are workers when we talk about future of work? This is from the American prospect. So with that as a general context in terms of both voices from our society saying it's a race to the bottom between workers and machines, as well as workers are getting left behind. Where's the equity issue and the worker and the human voice and all of this. So that as a starting point, I'm going to join you guys on the chair and ask each of you to introduce yourselves by way of kind of two questions. One, what should the world know about each of you as a workforce tech investor? And what problems are you trying to solve? So all right. Yes, Jason. Sure. So I'll jump in. So I'm Jason Palmer with New Markets Venture Partners, as you mentioned. And we're a series A and B investor. We've been around about 15 years and we invest in companies. Historically, they've only been education companies, but in the last five years, we now call ourselves an education and workforce investor. And we've made our first five investments in companies that kind of bridge that education workforce divide. Now, in terms of what we look for, what we're looking for, we definitely see this trend towards bifurcation in the economy that you've read about in many articles towards more hourly workers and then more of these salary jobs, but salary jobs not being filled that are kind of half tech, half service jobs. So we've invested in companies that are at the forefront of credentialing because we see that there's a faster growth in credentials that yield 50k or higher jobs than there are in the number of degrees being minted each year. So more certifications, more certificates, more micro credentials, those are actually mattering in the labor force and actually allowing people to get what are pretty broadly now called new collar jobs. So blue collar jobs were the path to the middle class in the 50s and 60s. New collar jobs which are kind of technology plus an empathy service component. That's where most of the 50 to 75k jobs are and so we invest in that. The other trends we're investing in are on this soft skills or sometimes now called power skills dimension. We've invested in a virtual reality and education and workforce company there that's both training teachers before they go into the classroom to do a simulation in front of a kind of a mock classroom in a simulated environment. It's also being used to train, to do leader training at McKinsey. It's being used to do customer service training at places like Best Western. So the credentialing company is called Creadly and the virtual reality empathy training company is called Merzion and I'll talk to you about the other three companies when we get a little further. Great. Hello everyone. My name is Amon Anderson from Acumen. Jean, thank you and Autodesk for having us here. Really excited for this conversation. Jean's mission is to change the way the world tackles poverty and we've been doing that for almost 20 years by investing in entrepreneurs around the globe that are building innovative businesses that serve low income communities worldwide. I joined Acumen almost 11 years ago in Nairobi and but four years ago we launched Acumen America and for the first time brought this idea that entrepreneurs hold an important set of keys to the innovative changes that we need in the future for a more inequitable and just world. That's a reality that's very much true here in the U.S. as well and so we've been building out this portfolio now invested in 19 companies and this theme of work is very much at the core of what we're building here with Acumen America. So what you need to know about me as an investor or Acumen as an investor, we're looking for innovative models that are predominantly serving the 100 million Americans that live in households that are in less than $50,000 a year. There's not enough innovation. There's not enough capital that's targeting these households yet these are the folks that are being left behind all too often. As I think about this theme of work, prior to 50 years ago there was a coupling of productivity and wages and then 50 years ago those have uncoupled and wages have grown only marginally since then. Yet prices for some of the most expensive slices of our pocketbook pie chart have gone only up so healthcare, education, housing, these have all significantly outpaced the moderate rise in wage growth over that time. You see the changing nature of work simultaneously, manufacturing jobs on the decline and it's not just robot and it's not just Lyft and Uber drivers that are replacing those but increasing hourly workers as Jason mentioned. What I think about here is you know there's an atomizing of work and a change that will be taking place and what I worry about is that those most vulnerable are the lowest income communities here in this country and we're building an investing thesis that's backing companies that are ensuring that all Americans have an opportunity to participate in the opportunity and the good jobs of the future. Hi everyone. So building right on those headlines and what you just said, Aiman, is when we think about the hundred, number, 103 million Americans and that is 41% of the adult population. This is not just robots taking our jobs, this is the power of us as humans and technology together to make a future where we're really tapping human potential. That's the excitement I think that I want everyone to hear as opposed to these headlines of fear, it's in our power and I think that's why I'm excited that the investing space in particular is now looking at workforce technology. There's a lot to be built from the investing that has happened in ed tech and that's really exciting and what's the difference and one difference is just the population. So thinking about K-12 versus thinking about adult learners and workers and how we actually haven't invested a lot in adult learners and workers who are those that are disadvantaged, so these 103 million. So Employment Technology Fund is a workforce, appropriately named employment technology is solely focused on workforce tech or employment technology. ETF was started in 2017, so it was really early, it's been a few years and I work for Jobs for the Future and JFF Labs, which is part of a nonprofit that has been working in education and workforce for 36 years, 46 states, program, policy, practice. We built JFF Labs to really bridge the innovative approaches of forward-thinking leaders and entrepreneurs to traditional systems like community colleges, workforce boards and of course we knew that part of supporting entrepreneurs was investing in them financially, so luckily I wish all marriages were this easily but ETF had the very same mission alignment with the JFF, so two months ago ETF became ETF at JFF Labs and what's important to know is definitely that we are an impact first investor with ETF that we are focused on this population and we're seeing really exciting innovations but it is really early. We are a catalytic funder so we are investing really early with non-recoverable grant dollars, that's the role that we play, we hope that will bring more investors into the space traditional and non-traditional. Really exciting that the first set of investments that ETF made, diversity and inclusion was really a focus and we have 50% founders who are women and in our portfolio and 60% who are people of color, so there's a lot of opportunity here and really excited to keep talking about what's going to push this space forward. Great, hi everyone my name is Elizabeth Garlow, thanks for being here at 3 o'clock on a second day, I don't know what day it is, I was telling Jason earlier it's like conference season as I'm sure everyone's experiencing so I lost track of what day it is, so I work with the venture investing arm of Lumina Foundation. Lumina is a private foundation that is focused on building a more robust post-secondary education system in this country and so what we're looking at is how to bolster education attainment in the US with a focus on closing education attainment gaps by race, ethnicity and income in particular and so when we look at the Great Recession and what happened the vast majority over two-thirds of people who lost their jobs in that period did not have a post-secondary credential, so there's some evidence around the impact and need for post-secondary education as a mechanism to build a resilient career and livelihood. At the same time we know the post-secondary education system is necessarily evolving and should evolve in order to meet the needs of the workforce in order to provide people with affordable quality post-secondary education experiences and so what the Foundation is doing is through a grand-making strategy, through a policy strategy and through our impact investing work, we are trying to open up learning pathways for individuals to get them a credential that leads to further education and employment. So through our impact investing strategy we've invested in 13 companies across the US that are doing things like building new credentialing infrastructure, they are alternative education providers that are working with employers and colleges and universities to solve key pain points, develop new pedagogical models and try to meet learners where they're at. I think what's interesting with this conversation is we've seen really sort of three categories emerging in this education and workforce technology investment space. One is this sort of huge explosion of informal learning tools and mechanisms, so if you think about the penetration of mobile devices and the ways that's changed our education landscape, the number of people using and going to informal learning tools and the ways those are being packaged to actually deliver new skills and competencies. The second is workplace learning, so we know right now, especially given the current conditions of the labor market, that there is a demand, I think it's estimated that by 2020 we'll have about a $31 billion market demand for workplace learning in this country. So a number of employers are launching new education benefit programs, tuition programs, etc. And then the third that we look at really is the incumbent education provider. So how do we make investments in companies that are working with colleges and universities to help them better serve their student populations? Great. Thank you, everyone. That was really comprehensive. I want to drill down a little bit to the end beneficiary of this work, not necessarily the customer per se, but the end beneficiary and I have a short anecdote. Yesterday, my Lyft driver and I had a very long conversation and he is someone who lost his job as a security guard who works 14 hours a day and he missed a shift, which his alternative was to come out of pocket to pay somebody else to take his shift. So now he's driving Lyft. He's a high school graduate with some trade school training, but no college degree of any sort. And so can the solutions you're investing in help reginald? And can you make money as impact investors doing that? We still all have our shirts. Will we have them five years from now? Yes. So the most recent research from RTI consulting is that there's 1,010 boot camps around the country now. And most people are reading about boot camps in the form of tech boot camps, learning to be a coder, data scientist, developer, et cetera. But these boot camps actually range far more widely than that. We've invested in a company called Climb Credit that actually provides, last year we provided loans to 10,000 people like Reginald. More than 70% of them did not have a college degree to go to these one month to 12 month boot camps, oftentimes in blue color or kind of mixed color is what we're calling it, jobs that involve some technical skills and some, and I say technical, it could be pile driver. It could be truck driver, but not your regular truck. This could be a refrigerated truck with lots of different compartments and you need to know how to use technology. There are best estimate about 40,000 jobs that were created in that boot camp industry last year. It's growing at about 25 to 50% per year. And you don't have to have a college degree. But as long as you apply yourself over one to 12 month period, you could get a loan to do that. You could even get an ISA, which is an income share agreement to take those programs. And these will just continue to accelerate summer in college, but most of them are outside of traditional colleges. Yeah, I yes, yes, and I hope so. My two answers. I am heartened by the opportunities that we've seen we've had the opportunity to co invest with Jason and new markets and climb our big fans of the work that they're doing. I mean, I think that there is a transformation in our skills delivery ecosystem that's taking place and with the emergence of boot camps for X and Y and Z. And I think that the model we have for too long push folks into a quarter million dollars of debt to pursue a degree that may not have a positive ROI. And so I think we've not just failed Reginald because we've made pathways to good skills inaccessible, but we've also prescribed a solution that doesn't always work for everyone. And many of the folks who start for your degrees don't finish. And it just isn't working. And it's leaving some people worse off. You take this debt, you don't leave with a degree. And so I think there needs to be a new model that is more bite size and there's more nimble and folks can, you know, whether it's through your employer, otherwise, you can have a more iterative approach to skills development because I think the shelf life will will shorten. But I don't think that jobs are going to be eaten up overnight by the by the computers. You know, I think that jobs will change and will change very quickly. There will always be trucking jobs may not be, you know, someone sitting in a rig and maybe someone sitting in front of a monitor. And I think, you know, the question is how do we make sure we are preparing folks, you know, to make that transition within these industries? You know, the other piece for me is also like, you know, you mentioned where is a worker voice? You know, how do we make sure there's agency in all this that we don't just continue to have a paternalistic model where we're prescribing solutions where pathways are clear, but then there's agency for job seekers to pick what works best for them clarity on how much that's going to cost clarity on how much that's going to pay off, but really putting the power back in job seekers hands so that they can navigate this new reality. I'm trying to figure out how to argue, but we're we're very aligned on the stage. So I'll say yes and maybe build on talking about the challenges, the statistic that Elizabeth brought up before about the recession and the job recovery. That was 1% of those who lost their jobs in this category. That was about a little over 5 million adults in 2016. Only 1% of those of those jobs were recovered there. They had jobs. There is a barrier that is really different than most of us have who are advantage and we've seen more investment in the blue collar jobs that we talked about than we have in this for this population. But what we're seeing is that technology can be what is used to really enable these barriers to move. And there's the first seven companies in the ETF portfolio were able to participate in field testing through our work and across the country really we partnered with World Ed who was able to really see these solutions out in the country and we've published a report around what work and you can see that what worked and what we learned and what we're trying to do by developing these solutions and these companies is product product thinking about human centered design and what these populations need. So everything from nudging and making sure that there's appropriate onboarding. I mean these populations are not all the same. They're women. They are immigrants. They are those who don't have the same digital literacy skills. But there are technology enabled features to all of the work that we're doing that are wrapped around these really powerful technologies. So this report is out there and I encourage people to look at the report. So I think there's a yes and and there's a there are still barriers and I know we'll you know we'll probably talk about this but examples like you know companies needing to hear about these solutions and adopt them into their hiring employing practices. And this is just around old mindset and new mindset. Just a few days ago we our acceleration program part of JFF labs did a scan of assessments. I think assessments are super exciting and there they will probably do a better job than humans do in thinking about who can get the right jobs and skill matching. So you know there's there's so much potential that we're just beginning but it's very early and we need cross sector solutions and multiple players at the table in order to change so that those headlines that we're hearing about are fake news. But we've got to miss them you know fake news. So I think that what the only thing I'd add is you know when you take a like Reginald's story I was also thinking about so I have I'm from Detroit Michigan I've had several family members go through multiple layoff rounds in the automotive industry and that's sort of at the heart of where there's a lot of just kind of really rapid transformation and required skills and and really I think it's quite clear that incumbent education and training and workforce providers aren't keeping pace with the demand for upskilling and rescaling and so that's why you see this sort of burst in interesting innovative approaches the 10010 boot camp set of emerged and other types of alternative providers. What I think is important I guess two things that may be concerned me so one is the ways in which these myriad types of providers are not connected with formal credentialing infrastructure or incumbent players that are accredited institutions that can issue a credential. Now we can have this debate and it's an active and live conversation how much does a formal credential matter in the economy today and moving forward. But as we engage with a number of these alternative education providers I'm often asking them about their journey to accreditation and what that looks like and how that how we can actually remove some of the friction in that process as well because some of these new education and training models can put appropriate pressure on our incumbent players to change and to be much more learner centered. So that's one thing. The other thing I think about actually is just the working learning blended models that we're seeing and how important those are. This country has been so reticent to adopt apprenticeships. There's a cult there are cultural barriers and challenges to that but we see a lot of evidence from other parts of the world that I think we should learn from on the role and value of work based learning and apprenticeships connected to formal education and training. And so this is where I think the boot camps and others are doing a tremendous job is thinking about those education industry partnerships and we need to see community colleges in particular and other educators doing more of that. Great. You're you guys are giving me hope and hope for original but maybe if we could kind of highlight if there are any kind of key differences. I think we've surfaced a lot of similarities and similar approaches and identifying opportunities in some key areas. Is there anything that you would highlight in terms of your approaches to the workforce investment landscape like that differentiates you from each other you know in terms of like are you all going to be investing all in the same deals at the same time or you know where where are the differences so that people kind of know how to understand the investor landscape. I can start so we can like give Jason a break. So I think you could you could look at that question from a couple of different angles. So one is tactically how do we make investments. Where do we like to play in the capital spectrum etc. So Sonali and I both mentioned that we're pretty mission first impact investors. So I'm doing investing inside of a philanthropic foundation. So we're not we're thinking a lot about how we drive mission through identifying investments in technology plays in particular. We tend to play in the earlier stages than maybe a new markets ventures. We do typically see late seed series A investments as well. But one thing I'd say that is a differentiator for us is the fact that we are connected to a philanthropic arm that does commission a lot of research in this space that has kind of a number of people who are much smarter than I education higher ed PhDs who are thinking about these things day in day out which has led us to look at our kind of education and workforce portfolio a little differently. So for example we've invested in a company called Bright Hive which is not an education provider is not solving a key pain point in higher ed but is tackling this issue of our data infrastructure and the fact that employers and education providers are not using the same data standards. So when we when we refer to credentialing or skills frameworks we're not using the same language we're not on the same page it makes it very hard to foster those types of education industry partnerships that I mentioned earlier. So what Bright Hive is doing is they're working on building data trust that bring in government education providers and employers to try and build a shared sense of a skills and competencies framework that's solving a pain point in the broader ecosystem that we think is sort of essential to move us toward more of a competency based education system. Yeah I think that you know so we invest both in work and in health and in financial services as well. You know what I do think that as we compare this future of work workforce tech theme to those other sectors it's relatively underdeveloped in our experience to those other sectors that we're investing and I think probably even less than traditional ed tech. And so I think you know we have co-invested with everybody up here we've looked at many of the same deals were invested in climb or you know invested in Bright Hive. So you know but none of us have the yeah it takes and but that's exactly my point I think that you know this is I wish there were a lot more people that we could you know we had a bigger stage and more people to put on it and compared with the you know the ecosystem that can really nest an entrepreneur to build a scalable impactful you know profit creating business in other sectors. You know it's not yet here and I think we're all driving at the at the forefront of that but it's it's not enough and I think you know one of the one of the reasons I'm excited for this conversation and to have all of you here in this room is to talk about how we bring more folks to this work and more folks that are thinking specifically with this lens of equity around how we invest in the future of work. So you know I think about you know what's Acumen's differentiator. I mean we are also invest in pursuit of mission you know much like others on the stage we're also look at early stage precede seed series A as well. I think we also look to roll up our sleeves and try to be active post investment sitting on boards of companies that we invest in and really trying to accompany these these businesses to success and you know that's no small feat but it's also not something that we can do alone and I think to be able to co-invest with ETF with any of the folks here next to me is a real gift to us because there's a real complimentary set of value and what I see that that's a you know a model for success for an entrepreneur is to be able to you know put a series of directors a series of investors around the board table or on the cap table that's you know together and are going to build a complimentary set of skills that are going to allow them to succeed because it's a it's a it's a very steep uphill climb. I just make one quick comment on that point. So we we did a we commissioned a report with learn launch in 2018 that looked at the sort of emerging workforce tech sector like what is this thing is it a real sector is it investable etc. And they found that there were 240 new companies formed between 2015 and 2018 that identified as workforce ed tech sort of a blend and that collectively they had raised about two point nine billion dollars but that 70 percent of them had raised under five million. So like this just goes to show I mean this is reflected in the types of investors you see up here we tend to be pretty early stage investors I think the the verdict is out on how as these companies mature how they will have access to growth capital you know what what the sort of later stage landscape might look like from a funding perspective. So two differences I would highlight are that so new markets has always been and started out as an education investor and we we got pulled by the changes in the economy into the workforce. And so when we look at things like I noticed that the demand for tech jobs that is so hungry that it's creating these thousand boot camps it has reached all the way down into third grade. And so when I go into third grade classrooms they're teaching Python and the first time I saw that I thought this is absolutely nuts. These parents and teachers have gone crazy but these kids learn languages quite easily and actually Python is a great language to learn if you're a third grader and I've been persuaded. And so we have not yet invested in a computer science elementary school middle school high school company yet but I have a great market map of the 12 companies and I'm keeping my eye out and eventually we will make a great investment in that area. And so we're not just thinking of the adults we're thinking all the way through the whole system. The other thing that's an awesome trend which is you know evident here in all the panels is that impact investing is no longer kind of niche seed thing anymore. You know when you have big players like KKR and TPG and Bain you know making big splashes with very large pools of capital that means that in fact new markets and SJF DBL a number there's there's now 38 different impact capital managers who are willing to stand up and say we are double bottom line we are focused both on financial returns and impact equally we are not a foundation we are not in this to just do good we believe that you can have market based solutions that actually do help millions of people and we now have 20 years of track record combined between the 38 impact investors in that group. That that we're you know I like to think of us as part of that class which now represents about 10 billion in capital and it's growing probably will be 20 billion in capital by the time of SoCAP next year and so we are we are we are all about market rate or better returns and investing in companies that can really improve people's lives and that does make us a little bit different I think than some of the other folks on the panel. I think I mentioned some of the differentiators earlier so you know the main thing that I would say is ETF just joined us and if we do this work well then it will be around the expertise of JFF who has been in the space and we haven't mentioned policy yet but that's a big part of JFF's work that could inform our portfolio companies as a small example but there's many crosswalks against some of the other work that we're doing with JFF labs I mentioned the accelerator and I mentioned maybe also our corporate action platform for example we brought together corporate leaders for the first time just October 1st around a working shifting mindset and a lot of that learning then we can bring into the portfolio but certainly you know I can't even use the word frenemies in the space we're all figuring out what are the roles we can play and sometimes it's different roles for example we're going to be working with Bright Hive not in an investment way but actually as a vendor and these are all exciting solutions and we talk to each other Jason Palmer is definitely an advisor to a lot of our work so you know again we invite more people to join the space and the most important thing is we do have different roles to play and we're thinking about our entrepreneurs and what is the best fit for these solutions in terms of what they're looking for including the actual instrument of investing that depending on their stage and depending what those founders are looking for need. Great so maybe expanding the conversation a little bit in terms of what I would call social determinants of work the kind of maybe wrap around services that you sometimes see in conjunction with investments whether it's you're not only provide investing in a solution to help upskill someone or provide a better access to career opportunities but to what degree do you also have to take into consideration things like serving populations with lots of barriers to employment including health care child care transportation etc. Does that factor into your investment in and how. Yeah you know this is a really interesting one for me. We we started out thinking about this social determinants theme in our health investing and the social determinants of health have become a little sub sector within health care and health tech and health investing and it's really you know what are all the upstream influences that have have that can affect health outcomes and how can we've invested actively in that as a theme in our health portfolio but what's interesting and one of the what I've realized is that if you try to medicalize the you know how's access to housing and access to jobs and access to food and access to child care that actually constrains the the impact that all these social determinants have in someone's life and these are the same things that are the social determinants to work and the social determinants to wealth and so you know I think what's hard about it is you know where do you draw the line that's a pretty expanse how do you build an investment strategy that you know encapsulates you know all of these upstream influences that determines whether someone can live a healthy life or find a productive and livable job and be able to build wealth for their family and I think that's a real challenge I mean where we do see it and I think where it's been clear is you know backing models and I think some of the innovative training models are a great example about where they are meeting learners where they are knowing who you're serving what their needs are and meeting those I don't think you can be successful we can't be successful in backing companies that are serving those hundred million Americans living in households that are in less than fifty thousand dollars a year unless you're developing these innovative training models and so we've invested in a company called Bitwise and Fresno co-invested with Lumina and others in this company and you know what they do is they have at its core it's a technology training model and so they are building a technology training solution that meets the needs of the sons and daughters of farm workers in the Central Valley but they recognize that to do that in Fresno you can't just build a boot camp plop it down in Fresno you know wipe your hands and wait for success you've actually got to really cultivate an ecosystem and so they built a physical space that's attracted all the technologists and innovators to one physical to multiple physical spaces now I think there's four buildings in Fresno they've also created an incubation model where they're helping build businesses that can create jobs they've launched apprenticeship models they're building a consulting company so that if a person of color is still subjected to the bias of a technology employer they're less subject to bias if you actually hire that consulting company and see that they're a killer coder then that by you know you have you can you hire them and they're starting to see that but they are but also what they're doing is you know thinking about how do we address transportation how do we address trial care how do we meet these folks where they are build solutions that work for them drop the price point I mean they really are being creative and hiring people that can really look to create these you know holistic wraparound services that can meet folks where they are but it's not just about bringing social services into workforce it's really about thinking creatively and in an audacious way around what kind of business models are required to do this and to you know to build a coding bootcamp and Fresno requires transforming the economy of that of that city I don't want to belabor this too much but I think that's really well said and the only a couple things that I would add so the more we look to try and serve adults with little or no post secondary education the more child care in particular the cost of child care in this country becomes a massive barrier and I think we are starting to try and think creatively so to Amon's point we are not we don't have the expertise to invest across all of the social determinants of work education and work but we're trying to think creatively about how we can use our convening power to help schools think a little bit differently about addressing these costs beyond tuition so one thing we're doing is helping schools think about opportunities own investments that do catalyze more affordable student housing we have some HBCU historically black colleges and universities that we're working with on teaching hotel concepts on our adjacent to their campuses so that individuals are provided with housing as well as much like a teaching hospital hospitality training programs and then we have seen some new technology companies that are trying to tackle this issue so for example there's a company we have invested in called edquity which is aggregating all sorts of emergency aid resources for students that are looking at issues of food insecurity and housing insecurity and there's a huge surge in surge in the number of schools that are adopting emergency aid funds and they're kind of lacking sophisticated mechanisms to target and disperse that funding so this is where kind of new technology providers in particular are solving some of these interesting pain points because we do need much like social determinants of health as Amon is saying has kind of gotten this big lift from a narrative perspective I think we need the equivalent as well on education and work great so before I turn it over to the audience for questions I'm going to just end on final one where do you all think we are in the evolution of this field workforce tech investing? First inning this is just the beginning now there was a previous game that happened over the last 40 years but that game is done and a new game has started I mean the fact that you auto desk and you're not alone there are probably 50 employers actually JFF probably knows exactly how many you're doing that employer network building that now realize they're going to need to upskill their workforce they need to think in terms of a people centered economy now I'm curious to see if this lasts once a recession hits but I do think the companies that really think of their people as their most valuable resource are the ones that are going to generate the most value in the long run are going to be the most successful companies and just to take a somewhat radical example that I'm not sure if this will end up happening but if Uber finally realizes that all those people are not drivers but are actually their capital imagine what all those people could do so your Lyft driver who you were talking about earlier remind me of his name Reginald Reginald so all the Reginalds out there what if they were being upskilled to do other things in all the hours of the day that they have and I'm not talking about Uber Eats that's not the right solution it's really putting yourself in the mind of all the Reginalds and what upskilling do they need through YouTube like or other microcredential platforms so that they can do more with what time that they have there's a whole gigafying of the economy that if Reginald could really control his schedule and figure out the way to maximize his earning potential hour by hour you know that's just like unlocking an unused bedroom in a house we've now unlocked the potential of Reginald and so I'm looking for companies that in little tiny scalable ways are figuring out how to turn Reginald into Reginald squared and profiting from it yeah I agree that it's early but I'm also hopeful about the momentum that's building I think that's right you're seeing employers increasingly invested in innovative workforce solutions and I think that's a really important move and I don't think it's just about you know I think there is in a 3% unemployment environment there is a talent incentive that's at play but you know what's also interesting to me is somebody like Autodesk where you know or Salesforce where you know your market is limited by how many people can use that sophisticated tool to be productive and create value and so you know I'm excited you know for partnering with Autodesk and thinking about others that you know are not just thinking about how do we take our own direct employment footprint and leverage and think about how we can leverage that for a workforce of the future but also think about what are the constraints you know for our top line that the workforce that the status quo workforce system is you know is limiting us by so you know that that's something that gives me hope I also think that as we've seen you know over the last you know 20 years this rise in ed tech innovation that that's beginning to move sort of all the way up into this you know lifelong learning and you know getting people into jobs and to other jobs and that's a trend that also that also gives me some hope and you know I and I think that there you know how will this survive the next recession I think that's interesting I I I think that that will that will change this conversation a little bit but that's also going to create a huge demand for community colleges and and these 10010 you know boot camps that are out there and so the question for us now and that's urgent and hopefully not too late is that how do we make sure that you know as we move to the next phase in this cycle that we have that we are actively building this new model that's going to help folks reskill in a way that's going to prepare them to six for success when they re enter the job market and I think that's a hugely important question for us to tackle absolutely and I think this question about is a recession going to slow this down is a true question but I think that's not the bigger shifts that are causing us to need to invest in this area whether whether a recession comes or not right companies need to tap the potential of all these people who right now we don't even have a good conversation about what the skills we have are and don't have and that's something we're going to have to answer together regardless of a recession right even if we're in a strong economy companies for their self interest want to be able to grow and have a productive workforce and economy so I really am seeing that although early it's rapid we are seeing employers and community colleges come to the table and develop new solutions so you know just as an example to flip it on its head a little bit we talk about now learning is going to happen with while you're on the job right we talk about worse work based learning so what does that mean for colleges and universities and what is their role with JFF we partnered with Google who had built IT certification trading for their workforce initially realized that it made a lot of sense through .org to roll this IT certification out to a broader audience they use Coursera as an online learning platform while they realized that they need to scale and reach they called JFF and JFF actually was like you know how you can reach this population and for this population to have the wraparound services that they need community colleges JFF you know and they Google said well I don't know how to talk to community colleges we're like okay we can call them up so community colleges now working to really spread this really successful Google IT certification which we started with 25 community colleges but are now moving to 100 community colleges so in this model you know the training who's playing the role of providing the content versus who's providing the distribution I don't know but it's a really creative and good solution where people are playing roles are really strong with the worker, learner, mind and there's way more work to be done so now talking about the policy and the Pell grants that we would want to be able to use and utilize to fund this work so next big question really I think on the horizon or two are all around the financing of these models so while the workers have multiple jobs that they can't give up how are they paying for the training or getting paid for the training and how are we going to be able to keep evolving these solutions so that the unit cost is right for them to scale and for companies and employers to pick them up No crystal ball in my hands unfortunately but there are three things I would keep an eye on as this field unfolds so the first is pedagogy and learning science so as we think about the emergence of new educational models how are we thinking about the right combination of foundational skills what some might call uniquely human skills what some are calling soft skills da da da da like how do we think of the right combination of those with the appropriate technical skills that immediately signal to the work to the labor market what someone is capable of doing and so from a learning science perspective I think we need a lot more investment and time and energy and getting sophisticated on that front the second is the payment model piece so the combination of government of households of employers and mirrored other types of individual stakeholders that will share the cost burden of education in society and how do we think about the mix of those moving forward with the innovations of things like income share agreements which are an emerging legal structure there's a lot of unanswered questions about how those will be regulated, et cetera but interesting to keep an eye on the third thing is what I would call skills assessment and portability so as we think about machine learning and its sophistication in assessing someone's skills we see a lot of new tools coming into the market particularly those that have some sort of gamification component where they think that they can more accurately and adequately capture and assess what someone is capable of doing the question of course becomes who verifies that and then how does that person get sort of recognized for what they're capable of doing so there you know most of us probably have a LinkedIn account right all those skills that we click on our LinkedIn profile those aren't third party verified and so there is this question of well whose responsibility is it to say yes this person is capable of doing this and this is where we see this new kind of credentialing infrastructure like digital badges and workplaces where people actually say hey here's my skills profile this is portable I take it with me wherever I go in an increasingly dynamic labor market so those are three areas where I see tremendous sort of need for attentiveness, curation and thoughtfulness moving forward Excellent, thank you so open it up to you there's a mic in the back if you guys want or you just shout okay go for it Taylor's talked to 70% of these organizations that you found had received relatively little funding and you posed this question of how do we get them to the capital they need and I think that made me question what is the capital that they need especially when we're talking about this population that doesn't have a four year degree and a lot of times do need localized solutions with wraparound services that are addressing these social determinants of work and I guess the question for me is does that population and organization serving them always need fast-growing venture capital equity investments and what is that about? Yeah, it's an excellent question I'm going to call on Jason, you too, to weigh in on this from your perspective, but I think the simple answer is I don't know in part because one of the reasons we've seen companies in this workforce ed tech category raise little capital is that they're pretty newly emerging and the advent of informal learning and workplace learning is pretty new so the demand for these types of products and services is still in some ways quite new now will they be able to tap into so one of the things that's exciting from a growth perspective for these companies is that it's a heck of a lot easier to sell to employers and it is to sell to higher ed the sale cycle is shorter, budgetary wise things might be a little bit more predictable so maybe they'll be able to tap into that global market opportunity and it will accelerate their growth in ways that venture capital that landscape becomes less critical but I don't know, I'm gonna look to you to see what I'm saying I would jump in and give a shout out to Village Capital it's a great organization I serve on the board of and Village Capital is of a type of organization that's focused on solutions that go beyond venture capital that venture capital has been fetishized and over exaggerated and trust me it's a really tough job and it's not as sexy as everybody says at all I do love it because I get to work with entrepreneurs I get to invest in entrepreneurs but what we really need is a way to provide $100,000 to $1,000,000 amounts of funding to local based solutions that take advantage of technologies just as it's now much cheaper to start a high tech start up here in the valley you could do it for about $1 to $2 million what used to be $10 million the same thing can happen in local solutions all over the country and right now we don't have what we do have with folks like Village Capital and many other accelerators that tap into local pools of capital we do have the ability to go outside the venture capital model try different things like loans sort of like learning from small business type loans revenue based income share agreements with these companies I should know all the different various flavors but there are now five or six different non venture capital style investment tools that are being used out there to fund these local entrepreneurs who are really making a difference in real people's lives right now that's how those 1010 boot camps came into there's probably 1020 by now at the end of this panel like they're growing that fast and especially in workforce tech that is why ETF does do loans that capital variety of instruments for this reason so I think the answer is no they're not always going to have venture like returns or growth and we will see as the market continues to develop looks like there's lots of questions if you wouldn't mind stepping to the mic and realizing if yes go ahead and feel free to line up this is being streamed I think Yeah Amon you were mentioning earlier how you were really saying this is one of you said it was first inning but you were hoping to see a lot more and for example we're here in the Bay Area and there's so many players doing across a wide variety of spaces in marketing technology, security, data IT, software development, boot camps, online training, in company training like variety of spaces and when I go to these workforce kind of technology events you're seeing maybe three people on a panel and it's totally siloed way siloed do you see any players that are really convening and helping like systemically kind of catalyze this space and like helping bring partnerships together? Yes Jobs for the Future I was about to give you a shout out JFF, JFF I think both Jobs for the Future and Lumina I think I've really leveraged a convening power very effectively so to my earlier point around the we're sort of under index from an investor perspective I don't think that's enough and I think the question is how do we break out of the same community? How do we make sure that large fast growing employers are in the same room as the head of a community college system as the same room as somebody on the local workforce board as a worker in that same room as well I mean these are like what are the component parts to a successful system where job seekers can look at different pathways and have the sort of agency and ROI calculation to pick a job in a new skills ecosystem where we've got more nimble models to deliver those skills and financing models that work and the infrastructure to make all of that sing I mean we need all the folks that are gonna be a part of that which is everybody from the fastest growing tech employer to the worker him or herself in the room and I think there are some powerful convening work that these two in particular are doing that I'm grateful for but I think we need to expand the tent even more broadly and I don't wanna be too flippant about that I think there's some of the convening power is JFF recognizing that there's even more players that we need to bring into the room that had been done before and by the way you can't just bring them into the room the language barrier of these different organizations, entities and players is very different so there's still some work to be done or a lot more work to be done to connect the thoughts of these different players to be a trusted intermediary between these different groups I think what you're pointing out is the reality and the truth of all these different systems and part of what we're seeing is the need to bridge and that's going to happen both I think by conversation and by practice and the funny thing is it's not even just these different players connecting but even within the players them connecting so for example when we brought the different corporate leaders together part of it is they're not talking to each other and having peers of the same mindset and you can see that they're looking and reaching the same thing with community colleges or workforce boards so there's a lot there Okay, go ahead So Jason and Elizabeth said something that got me thinking so I'm hoping for all of you to put on your 10 year futures hat here a little bit and react so I was thinking about your examples of Uber as a disruptor on a national scale that essentially transformed industries that were at a local scale i.e. cabbies as well as A or B and B and we can look at others that actually where a national entity came in with a model that was able to in effect transform what had been local so in the context of education I was sitting here thinking about the contrast between things like the Google certification model which was done nationally and I of course work for I work for a national online university it's like how much of that's going to change such that the local marketplace is going to struggle to keep up with what could be done at a national level So 10 years from now 10 years is a great number because if it had been five I wouldn't say this In 10 years one of the large tech companies will finally wake up and there will be a Google university that will be global and I chose Google because I think it's most likely to be Google but it could be Microsoft it could be Amazon but right now they want to play infrastructure player to education as just another customer group they're not thinking of themselves as the educators of the world but one of them will at least figure that out now what's going to happen then in my opinion 80% of people still go to a college that's local and they will still want to go to a college that's local and the colleges will quickly adapt sort of like the JFF partnership with Google and the college will offer we have the Google program and you get your wraparound services here at local community college X that's how it will kind of morph in that next phase in five to 10 years it might happen sooner but what's really interesting to me is like when Amazon announced that they're gonna spend $700 million on upscaling their workforce I read the thing three times there's not a single college mentioned in there normally in the past when there's an upscaling announcement it would say we've done partnerships with these 25 community colleges or whatever Amazon's not playing that game anymore I know all the boot camps they're trying to work with they're going right around the college system altogether so it might happen faster than I think unfortunately we only have time for one more question as we're up to time so glad I made the grade so I just wanted to talk about teachers I'm really glad Jason you mentioned students because we were talking at the beginning about people who've lost their jobs and stuff but there's this huge number of kids coming into the workforce and the problem is that the workforce is getting more and more STEM savvy they need to be and so there's a lot of disinterest in science in schools and science teachers are leaving the profession at like 50% of them are gone in five years so I just wondered if some of your investments are in developing good teachers who in turn develop good students who in turn develop a good workforce that's my question I'm gonna answer that with a 90 degree turn so one of my favorite investments is a company called NEPRS N-E-P-R-I-S and NEPRS allows teachers to look for experts anywhere in the United States or even in the world now who they wanna invite into their classroom virtually so if you are a teacher in rural Texas and you want your kids to learn about hydroponic greenhouses you can actually find someone who runs a hydroponic greenhouse who came from rural Texas to get beamed into your classroom and teach students about that if you're teaching about slopes and you wanna explain to students why they should care about slopes you can invite somebody and who designs roller coasters for a living like it started out as kind of a really whiz bang thing and now they have 25,000 experts you know like NASA astronauts getting beamed into classrooms all over the country to talk about if you wanna be an astronaut you better take those STEM courses and you better ace those courses and in a little by little this little chugging train has gotten up to three million in revenue it is now in more than a thousand districts around the country they have corporate partners who wanna work with it to make it available to all the kids of the corporate employees so we do invest in companies that augment teachers to access the resources of the world is sort of how we think of it the teachers are gonna be with us for perhaps forever but definitely for the 50 year horizon that I see and they are the ones that need to be equipped with power tools they are the new collar employees right there every day working with those kids there's one device per child in many schools now with wireless access and the kids are digital natives actually I don't even think that term dates me there's even a better term for how digitally native they are so yeah. Well please join me in thanking the panelists thank you. All right.