 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had an awesome guy called Jonathan Shaw that came to podcast with me all the way from Tel Aviv in Israel. Very kind of him, just to stop off and see me. We spoke about ed tech, so education technology, and he's the founder and CEO of an awesome company called Code Monkey. And Code Monkey are teaching kids how to code. They start from eight years old and they use it in schools. So they're teaching teachers how to teach kids how to code, using their game online and using the app and stuff. It got bought by a Chinese firm recently and they're rolling it out in China. So they're huge in America as well. So it's a really interesting company and we hear a little bit about its thoughts on education, on coding, and on getting kids interested in coding. And of course, how he started his business. Hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Cool, I'm alive. Jonathan, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. Pleasure, thanks for coming all the way from Israel as well. Oh, my pleasure. Just for me. Just for you. So what is ed tech? So ed tech is short for education or educational technologies. Yeah, simple as that, yeah. And that's like a recent. Well, it's I think that the specific name like word came up like recently, like maybe five or 10 years ago. But actually, even I remember when growing up, we had like an hour week at school where we go to the computer lab and play educational games. They just didn't have that word for them back then. Yeah. So I think it's a new name for an old thing. Probably. I don't know if I can't remember if I played educational games at school when I was growing up. Probably. I remember we had our first Amstrad computer or like the floppy disks. Yeah, the Commodore and the Apple computers. Yeah, yeah. So they had math games, English games, you know, in Israel, practicing English letters or like that, yeah. Nice. And what's your what's your story? So I've been coding from a very young age, both my parents are software engineers. So we've been growing up like with the first Apple computers at home in writing lines of code since I was like probably eight or nine. Crazy. And yeah. Love that. That was fun. And I did that with my young brother and my childhood friend, which ended up being my two co-founders at Code Monkey 20 years later. Wow. That's a pretty cool story. To know each other since you were like seven, eight. Yeah, yeah. The story is after high school in Israel, you go to the army and if you don't do that, you usually go do like community service type of thing. Okay. I did education. I was building in a development town in the south of Israel. So you went for the community service route? Yeah, yeah. And I did education. So one of my initiatives was creating coding classes for kids elementary school children after school classes. And I came up with a gamified concept creating like little puzzle for them to solve using code. And it was very successful. I was 2001, 13 years later together with a childhood friend and my young brother. We started a company out of it. Very cool. Called Code Monkey. And you went to university after the community service? Yeah. And we actually tried to start a company without my brother, just me and the friend Ishai in 2007 but it was too early. I guess the ATAC word wasn't there yet. VCs didn't care about that market still. But in 2013, it became like a big trend. And my young brother also graduated from the Hebrew University with his computer science degree. He actually came up with the name Code Monkey with a specific code concept, game concept of coding a monkey to catch bananas. And then three of you. So what is Code Monkey exactly? So it's an online game-based platform for teaching kids the basics of computer science, coding basically. Five. And from like five, six? So we were doing like second grade to eighth, nine grade because the- Second grade, that's like- Second grade, like eight years old, six, seven, eight. Like it used to be that you needed to be able to read because we were teaching real coding in real programming language, like a Python-like, a coffee script it's called, that was special about Code Monkey. It's not just the drag-and-drop puzzle that teach you how to think like a programmer. It's actual coding in an actual coding language, but it requires being comfortable with reading and writing English letters and basic words. So that was a bar. But we're now really seeing first pre-reader's app. Your first pre-reader. Yeah, the field of the app for pre-reader. So we're going younger, we're going to kindergarten actually. Amazing. With symbol-based coding. So- Is that it will save in Python? No, so that would be like in just like symbols representing like specific commands. So it's not like a real programming language, but it teaches the concept of a sequence of commands, a loop, a variable, an object. So it's just the concept without any actual coding in a real-world programming language. Nice, I need to get my daughter into that. Yeah, definitely. My oldest one's five. My youngest one's two and a half. So five is perfect. Two and a half, I would wait, yeah, well. I need to get on that. And is that, well that's all online. Yeah. Everything's through the app and the website. So the stuff for older kids is on the, is web-based, you can access from an iPad, you just go to playcodemonkey.com. The pre-reader's app is called Code Monkey Junior. So you can just search it on the App Store or the Play Store. Yeah, fine. And did you kind of identify that there was a problem in the classroom? That they weren't being, people, kids weren't being taught coding well or at all? They weren't being taught coding on a large scale at all. It was only, it was just a niche like for, like if you had people like a DMF people or software engineer like my parents, so they would get you like into a coding summer care for something, but it wasn't something that was doing widespread. But the problem is more general, not just with coding, the problem is with schools and classroom becoming less and less appealing and relevant for kids nowadays. You know, the main place kids learn today new stuff is on YouTube actually. Really? Because yeah, my daughter is not even two, but she knows how to get on the YouTube app and search the videos and that's the way she learns about stuff. No, mine too. So, and a teacher using the old methods of, you know, a blackboard and a book. It's very hard to have your student, keep your student engaged to that when on the other hand they have all those, you know, apps and. Are you seeing that they're, I mean, I think in the UK, I'm saying in my kids' school that they're using like an interactive board, which is connected to the computer and. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's a step in the way where I see that eventually you have more and more learning being done, self-paced like self-serve where a child can just choose the content that is interesting for him or her to learn online and the teacher just acts as a facilitator. That way you can also get more personalized learning both in the subject areas that are interesting for each kid and in the pace, which is very critical because you probably remember like the smart kids getting bored, very quickly and the struggling kids getting lost very quickly, you know, so it will also allow more, what we call adaptive learning. And so there'll be more owners on parents because you can't just leave your three-year-old to the room, you cheat. Right, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, that's, well, so the internet and, you know, it suggests also, you know, challenges and risks obviously for kids online, code monkey studios and companies like us, they make sure that there's also like positive or, you know, content available, interactive content available, but yeah, it is up to the parent or the educator to make sure that the kids get to the right content and, you know, not the bad content. Yeah, and do you find that schools are kind of catching on to this or that although it's slow to adopt these types of things? Yeah, so schools, you know, schools, public schools are, you know, government entities eventually, so they change slowly, but that's not always a bad thing. But yeah, if you think about it, classrooms today, you know, putting aside, you know, they sometimes use that interactive board, but teaching in classroom today is still being done exactly the same way or like, give or take the same way it was done like here in London, like I don't know, maybe six, 700 years ago, which is pretty crazy because anything else changed dramatically, you know, the way we do business today, we consume content, read news, you know, interact with each other, health, everything changed, so travel dramatically and education stayed the same, so changes happen slow, but sometimes, you know, it has good sides to it because it's a large system and it's a very complex system and it's a very critical, you know, an important system you don't want, for example, you mentioned the risk of online content, you don't want all that to go into all the classroom, you know, just one day and, you know, it could be disastrous, yeah. Yeah, but what I find amazing with, even with podcasting and with YouTube is, you know, back in the day, even probably 50 years ago, you had to read to learn, whereas nowadays you can listen or you can watch and so in, you know, less developed countries where education isn't so good, you just need a good internet connection now. Yeah, exactly. Which is, I find amazing. Yeah, yeah. How effective have you found CodeMonkey to be? So it's extremely effective put directly in front of children, so actually the way that it is rolled out in Israel is not as a lesson or a curriculum, it's rolled out as a nationwide coding competition. Oh wow, so how does that work? We managed to get to 75% of the students in our age groups in Israel in just our second year of operation. Wow. That's due to the fact that the game is intuitive and highly engaging, so the kids just need to play, the teachers don't need to do anything except, like, you know, make the kids aware of the option. But there's only a certain depth you can go using that method in terms of really teaching a craft, teaching, you know, a subject, a complex subject like computer science. So if you wanna go beyond, you know, the basic introduction or just teaching the basics, you do need to get the teachers involved in understanding the concepts themselves, the concepts that are more abstract and hard to explain. And that can only happen, you know, at a certain pace because you do need to find the right teacher to train them. And it's a challenge because if a teacher, if an adult, you know, is proficient in those kind of things, sometimes they would choose working for a tech firm like Google, you know, or Amazon, probably make, you know, five times more. Yeah, yeah. Can you do, like, can you get, like, amazing developers to record videos, like how-to videos, stuff like that, which can then teach kids. We had coders in Israel go to visit schools, actually, to inspire the children and to also help them ad hoc when they get stuck in a more advanced level of code monkey. So we had that, like volunteers from large tech companies. And on videos, there's an organization called Code.org, the United States. They are the main educators of the importance of computer science education in K-12. They record videos of, yeah, people like celebrities, like Bill Gates, you know, but also, like, just like NBA players and people like that, you know, just appealing to young kids, talking about specific concepts in computer science and how important it is. And so it's- It's pretty amazing if you're in school in Israel and like some rock star coder is basically teaching you via video. Yeah, yeah. Amazing what you can do now. Yeah, yeah, it is. Crazy, crazy. How much time does it take these kids to kind of grasp it and learn? I mean, I guess it's a language like anything French, English, German to learn. It's definitely like a language. They get the basic mechanics, like very quickly, you know, in the first lesson, in the first 45 minutes, they understand the concept that, you know, they have a place where they write the code on the right side of the screen and they push the play button in the monkey, executes the command. They get that very quickly. In order to get to more abstract concept, like let's say loops or arrays, variables, then, you know, we leave about, I don't know, 10 lessons, something like that. That's quick. Yeah, yeah, it's really quick. And then, so you just talked about the competition you did in schools. How did you go about actually getting schools and teachers to take this up and promote it to the kids? And the same 5% is like, more than the people that turned out to vote for Brexit in the UK. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that's always a challenge getting the word out and we were a small company. We always have been. So it was always about creating the right partnerships for us. So in Israel, Sandisks, you know, they do that. Oh, yeah, yeah. The USB drives. Yeah. The CEO found out about Co-Monkey. It was very enthusiastic about it and he assembled some other large tech firms in Israel. They approached the government and that was the way we managed to get into almost every school. They sent their volunteers from the tech firms, the Ministry of Education was orchestrating everything. That's in Israel, in the United States. So we used partnership with companies like Co.org, the nonprofit, which were doing an amazing job in getting the word out to first American schools and now globally, they expanded globally. Amazing. So it's about creating the right partnerships. Yeah. And the UK, did anything happen? In the UK, so it's interesting. In the UK, the UK was, I think, the first or the second country in the world to mandate computer science as part of the K-12 curriculum. Amazing. But it actually, so you would think that would be the first market for us, for a company like Co.Monkey, but it actually created an opposite effect, I think, because since it became mandatory, so the large curriculum providers who used to sell math and English curriculum to the school, so they had to also now tick the coding box. Yeah. So it just created something very simple and now we also have coding, we cover coding. So it actually made this market less... It's a bit more tricky to get into. Yeah, a bit more tricky to get into for us, yeah. And then, so once you got into the schools, then would you approach VC firms to get funding and... Yeah, so with VCs, it's a general purpose VC would not go into the education space or business because it's so different, especially if you're selling to school, there's a difference between like consumer education, like lifelong education or just educational apps that parents download for their kids and selling curriculum to schools because when selling to schools, just think of the sales cycle, they only buy once a year, right? So that's very hard for a VC to track unless it's a VC that's dedicated to the school. And you don't have those in Israel yet, you have a few in the United States. So we didn't take any VC money, but we were generating revenue very early from the government dealing in Israel. So we're able to sort of self fund the operation. Oh, brilliant, brilliant. It's great. I know you mentioned that it's in the curriculum here, but it doesn't feel like in the UK, we're quite as good or successful at tech and so forth and you guys are in Israel and America. There's a lot of great tech startups that come out of Israel. Yeah, definitely the startup nation. Yeah, the startup nation. Yeah, there's a good book with that title. Yeah, it's funny. It's a lot of people are trying to explain and to attribute that phenomenon. But one thing for sure, because Israel is such a small market, when you're starting a company in Israel, you're looking at the global market from day one. Yeah, yeah. And that's very helpful in generating, in creating those international companies. Yeah, good international mindsets. Exactly. And then obviously, you were very successful and the Chinese firm recently bought the firm and how did that come about? So actually, it started here in London. My partner, my co-founder, Ishai, he was presenting Code Monkey at the largest ad tech conference. I think that it's the largest international conference and it takes place every year here in London. It's called the BATCHO, B-E-T-T. So we had like a Code Monkey stand and just someone from Tal Education Group approach gave the demo, gave the pitch. And that's when the relationship started very early on. It was the first year or the second year of the company and they've been using our product since. They've been, you know, tinkering with creating like coding classes. Their main business is teaching. Yeah, their main business is teaching Chinese, English and math. But then they were making some attempts with coding and that started like three or four years ago. But then the government in China started, like in the rest of the war, started taking computer science into the mandatory curriculum. So that's when they realized this is the time to move forward more aggressively with coding. And that's when they decided to buy Code Monkey from the company. How did it feel to kind of sell something that you dreamt about from eight years old with your brother and your best mate? Has it been difficult to? So, yeah, there's an adjustment period, you know. But what's good about this specific acquisition is first we sold it to an education company. It's an amazing story that it's a young company that the founder of Tile Education. And they called Tile Education Group TAL. It's not much older than me. I think he's in his early 40s and he still controlled the company even though it's a 20 billion dollar company publicly listed in the New York Stock Exchange. So I actually had lunch with him and he's a math tutor. He was very successful at that doing that. So it feels natural on the personal level. In terms of the vision, they're very committed to the Code Monkey vision. They're running the Code Monkey business in China but they're letting us continue being dependent outside of China. So it's like, it's really nothing much changed for me on a daily basis. And have they kept, are they using the Code Monkey kind of name and brand in China? Yeah, they just translated the name to Chinese but they even used the same color, the same brand logo characters. And have you found it kind of added some interest or complexity now having a board, I guess, and investors to meet with? Yeah, yeah, that's different, obviously. But it's actually a more efficient structure because when we were in Bennett Startup, I was investing so much of my time in searching for new investors and managing the relationship with different several existing shareholders and now with just one owner that I need to deal with. So it actually makes me put more time into product and go to market, you know? Yeah, the Chinese market must be unbelievably big. Yeah, yeah. It's the appetite for learning and knowledge. It's amazing that it's a different world. I remember the first time going there to meet with them. So my partner, I was meeting them from early on but only when it became like, I started talking about acquisition. So me and my brother started joining him on those trips and it's a different world. It's amazing the way, you know, like supplemental private education is the main expense of a middle-class family in China. So rather than sending them to like, they call them public schools, the free schools there? Yeah, day schools, public schools. All the day schools are public there. You can't have a private day school in China. Okay, but if you can afford to send them to a private school? So that's an after school. That's after school. Yeah, so kids, like they learn from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Like they go to the day school and they go back home just to have a quick lunch and then they go to the after school, yeah. Wow, so they're on a hardcore? Yeah, yeah, it's hardcore. But it seems like they're enjoying it because the after school, since they are like for-profit companies, they have to be competitive so they make it. How long do you have to school? A real high-quality experience for the children. Yeah, it sounds great. So they finish school and then what's like two to four hours, I guess, or something after school to... They finish school, they go back home just for a short while and then it's different from, you know, they need to enroll into different after school courses, sometimes with different after school providers, but they spend, I think that they get the major part of their education. Those who can afford it, but it's more and more these days in China, you know, the growing middle class. They get the major part of their education in the after school centers. Yeah, yeah. Crazy, big pressure to invest in your kids, otherwise they're gonna miss out. Yeah, yeah, and you have like four adults investing in each child because of the single child policy they had up until recently. Oh, yeah, that got scrapped. So you have both parents and, you know... Oh, the fun... And actually six adults, you know, because two grandfather, two grandmother, a mother and a father all investing in the... Yeah, the future of those single parents. That's where their money, that's where their money tends to go. Yeah, that's where their money tends to go. That's before, you know, vacations or gadgets or, you know, or cars or... Yeah, yeah, that's... Crazy, is that the same in Israel? No, no, in Israel it's totally different. In Israel, you get most of your education for free from day schools. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, yeah, I mean, here it's a mix. It's a mix. We've got some good, like, I think, yeah, some good like state schools, free schools, public schools, and then the private schools, which are called public schools. Bit confusing. Oh. They are, yeah, I mean, if you can afford to send your kid there. There's always this debate. People have, like, do you send them to a private school, private school? Yeah, yeah. But the after-school clubs, there's more and more, but I think it sounds like China's way ahead. Yeah, yeah, in the after-school business, definitely. Oh, yeah. And also in implementing technology, back to your first question about educational technologies. So you go to those after-school centers and it's extremely advanced in the way that they use technology to run the class. It's all data-driven. It's all, they analyze performance of teachers, of students. They report to the parents because, you know, it's a business. It's a lot of money going through that. And, you know, for-profit companies competing with each other. So they have to be innovative in order to, you know, to win the clients. Crazy. That's crazy. From what age? From very early. I heard about companies doing English after-school classes for Chinese students starting at the age of three. So... Three. Man, my five-year-old's like, well far behind. We just, it's funny, we don't do that here. Even in, I mean, a lot of scans in avian countries, the kids don't even start schooled until seven. Right. Because they believe in play. Because they're kids and they should play and have fun and stuff. And I think they're starting to be concerned about that as well in China. I'm not an expert, but I know that they recently created an alternative path for getting into university, not based only on exams scores, but also on extracurricular activities, like they have in, you know, in American college. Yeah. Well, sports. So they're aware of the importance and the current lack of presence for those type of life skills. Yeah. I think they're adding those kind of options as well. Yeah. Interesting. It just feels like there could be a lot of pressure on parents and kids to just can't fall behind. You've got to like get on this stuff. Right. Yeah, it's definitely very competitive. Yeah. Crazy. Circling back to how teachers are implementing and teaching kids about the programming, are you providing also training to the teachers? Yeah, good question. Yeah. So we are, we gradually realized that there's only so far we can go without training the teachers, which was fine, which was great for the initial stage of just exposure, you know, and raising awareness that just the fact that coding is important and fun. But then, yeah, so now we're at this stage where we're sort of transitioning from a company, just providing those fun basic games to a company providing a full K8 or even K12 curriculum for computer science. And that involves also teacher training. Amazing. And do they, is it mandatory that they use it or do you have to kind of convince, let's say the teachers to use it in their lessons? So that's very different from country to country. So actually in the UK, it's mandatory, but that's actually a market that we're not very active in. In the United States, so it goes state by state, so I don't remember the exact numbers, but a lot of states already require students to complete at least one computer science course in order to graduate from high school. But then we're catering to the younger ages, so there it's still a mainly extracurricular, but it's gradually going there. Fine, fine. And are you finding that it's making teachers more effective at teaching coding and... The training? Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, definitely. Even if it's just like a half day on-site training and then just the fact that they know they can contact us, Code Monkey, the Code Monkey team, when they're running into a problem, because if you think of it, it's very scary. You need to teach a new subject and the subject that you yourself are still new to. So definitely the fact that they have that support and that basic training goes a long way. Yeah, yeah. And do you just go up to certain age group at the moment? Yeah, we're focused on second grade to eighth grade, and now we're expanding also to kindergarten and first grade. Fine, and will you go older as well? We don't have those plans right now, but we might. It's harder to go to the high school levels because that's where they have more specific requirements and they change from state to state and country to country. Right, okay. They have specific exams and some teach JavaScript, some teach Python, some teach those subjects and other subjects, so then it's harder to support that global operation that we have now. If you have to go into those specific stage in each location. Yeah, do you find that the particular game you teach them on is most effective for this age group? Yeah, definitely for that age, I think Code Monkey is the most effective solution. And can they learn any other way? Are there like supplementary? Yeah, yeah, of course. There are other products, other companies doing similar products. A lot of them, they don't use what we call, what's called text-based coding, like coding in a real programming language. On those young ages, they only teach block-based coding, which means those block puzzles that you drag and drop to create pseudo-codes. Block represents its equivalent command in a real programming language. So that's what most of the competing product use for the age group that we target. But we actually find that the fact that we teach real coding actually makes it more appealing to students, to kids, more engaging because they feel like that they're doing the real thing, you know, what the grown-ups do. You know, with our special game design and special technology, we managed to create that experience even, you know, not harder, not more complex. We do a lot in automatic feedback to the learner so when they type something wrong, our system automatically suggests a correction, you know, like when you're searching on Google, did you mean that? Yeah, yeah. So it's more engaging and at the same time, it's not harder, it's as intuitive. As easy. And you're finding boys and girls that equally is interested at this age? On CodeMonkey, yes. We're not allowed to ask, you know, because of online safety, you know, what's that? Childhood, it's called COPA in the United States, Childhood Online Privacy Protection Act. So we need to be very careful. We don't take the personal details of our users, not even the full name. But we have statistics based on, you know, Google Analytics that tell the gender, you know, approximately, and it's a 50-50 split on CodeMonkey between boys and girls. Oh, that's great. And so you're not allowed to take really any data? Any data, any personal data, yeah. Right. So you can just measure, I guess, how effective people are at the games and coding. The teacher, they have the data. They know the user, you know, Ly17, they know that boy or girl and they can, you know, but we're not allowed to have the personal data. Okay, fine. Interesting, great to speak to you. Yeah, thank you very much. Coming in, good luck with everything. Thank you. How can people find you? So it's CodeMonkey. So yeah, playcodemonkey.com is a URL. You just Google CodeMonkey, one word. And if you're on the App Store or Play Store, so it's CodeMonkeyJR. Awesome. And I'm gonna actually do it because my coding's rubbish. I missed that one, I was, yeah. Let me know what you thought. Definitely. Thank you very much. All right, thank you. See ya. Hey, folks, thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.