 Ernest people at the entire conference, you're the folks who would show up at class and sit in the front row, and we love Ernest people like you. You are in for a treat today, so in fact, coming to the last session is gonna pay off because I'm joined by a group of the most thoughtful, committed, and compassionate investors in the education sector. I'm very fortunate to be with them today. We're also joined in the audience by some terrific colleagues and executives. One of my colleagues, Tammy Winkup, former executive of Everfine, now on the RISE team is here. But I wanna... Can I bring her up here? I can bring her up here. But I want to, we'll start and do a round of introductions and a handful of questions and then open it up to the audience for questions. This is a panel that's focused on talking about how you build scale and quality together in the education sector. I'm John Rogers. I'm responsible for education sector investing at TPG's RISE Fund, which is a $2.1 billion private equity vehicle focused on education but also healthcare, energy, and financial services. And our investor group, our traditional asset managers and also high net worth entrepreneurs and philanthropists who are focused on impact. So we have a mix of investors. Amy, maybe you could talk a little bit about the Omidyar network and how you're structured. Hi, I'm Amy Clement. I'm with Omidyar network and our capital comes from Pierre Omidyar who is the founder of eBay. We are a philanthropic investment firm. So we both make investments in for profits as well as give grants to nonprofits. Welcome Vivian. Vivian, Lou is in the house. All right. And we have deployed over a billion dollars in a variety of sectors, financial inclusion, I know that was tough. Financial inclusion, education, governance and citizen engagement. I lead our work in education globally. We invest in India, Africa, Latin America and the United States across from cradle to career. And I'll stop there. Excellent, we're fortunate to be co-investors with Amy and Omidyar in digital house. Matt Greenfield is up next. Matt told me a story that when he went out to fundraise the first time, he had two different decks. One had a few pages about social impact upfront and the other had a page about social impact at the back. So do you consider yourself a social impact investor and what do your LPs think? I have always considered myself a social impact investor and I guess we realized that everyone else also considered us a social impact investor whether we had it upfront in the deck or not. So we might as well own it and represent ourselves as we truly are. There was also, the story I haven't told you is that very early on we had an anchor investor that was a multi-billion dollar family office and we were drafting the legal documents and I developed an uneasy sensation. Eventually my co-founder also did and we had this sickening realization that we were gonna have to walk away from our anchor investor and we politely broke up with them and the moment we'd done it, it felt completely right and it was an immense relief. We realized we weren't aligned enough with them in values or rather we were aligned with a next gen but not with the parental generation in our values and so we did make that crucial choice very early on. It was hard to turn away a large pile of money at that stage. And next to you, Tori is somebody who also had a anchor investor who was a social service organization. Maybe you can talk about that and also how your investor base is evolving. Yeah, happy to. Tori Patterson, we run Owl Ventures, solely focused on education technology and the investor John is alluding to was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which I publicly announced and anchored our fund one. Since then our LP base has migrated towards university endowments, sovereign wealth funds, kind of the classic traditional institutions that back venture capital and alternative investments, broadly speaking. So while we take impact incredibly seriously, I mean I sort of equated a little bit to like healthcare investors, like biotech investors are rarely held up as impact investors, right? The market has just decided that they're not in that bucket even though the work they're doing I think is as high impact as anything any of us could imagine. We feel the same way about education, right? Like I don't think there's a deviation in investment strategy necessitated to succeed in the education space that draws a hard line between impact investors and return focused capital. So sorry for the cute response but that is how we think about it. And that's how we think about it, go ahead. If impact investing continues to be segregated from the main body of venture investing, we will have failed, right? Our goal is to persuade everyone that not thinking about social impact is an irresponsible act as a fiduciary. Totally agree, I see lots of head nodding. That's our first provocative comment of the day. Amy always nudges us to be a little bit provocative so good job man. So and at the end, thank you for joining Vivian who I know has a lot of stuff on her plate today so thank you for coming. So Vivian, please tell us about Chan Zuckerberg and also a little bit about, I guess we know who your investor is but a little bit about kind of the breadth that enables you to do. Sure, so I'm Vivian Wu and I apologize for being a little late. So I lead our venture investing at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which is a philanthropy that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan set up to build a better future for everyone. So we have three initiatives, education, science and justice and opportunity, the largest of which is education. And our objective is to really achieve our impact goals through different tools that we hope we can bring to the table with some unique advantages. So the four tools in particular are grant making as you'd expect from philanthropy, policy and advocacy, and then impact investing as well as engineering. And so the idea is we'd like to use the right tool depending on the right circumstance and we'd like to integrate those tools in a way that allows us to solve some of these problems in more unique ways than might have historically been possible. On the investing side, our goal is really to look for opportunities that we believe can truly scale high quality solutions per the title of the panel and where there's self sustainability that might not be possible through pure philanthropy alone. So most of our investments to date have been in education where big believers in the power of education that transform people's lives and to achieve their full potential. And our footprint is global and across the life long learning spectrum. Maybe keeping you on the spot for a second we can move to our next topic which is how you're defining impact and educational outcomes and how you're measuring that and reporting on it. Yeah, I think that's one of the hard things about education which is that it's not actually just about creating jobs, it's also about looking for outcomes and learning and employability. So for us, throughout our philanthropy on education front we really do focus on taking a learning science based approach which includes starting with an evidence base and it really also includes learning, engineering and iterating your product based on whether there are outcomes. It includes a bias towards measurement and accountability. And we also look to incorporate science in general around for example, what we call comprehensive student development and really acknowledging that it's not just about academic factors but about non-academic factors as well and we have a particular framework where we consider factors like your sense of identity and purpose, social and emotional learning, cognitive skills, your physical health and your mental and behavioral health, all of which we believe are incredibly important for learners to achieve their full potential. So for us, the work that we do has to be grounded in those concepts and improving access and affordability is another big piece of it from an outcome standpoint. We also look for more from an input perspective as well. We look for entrepreneurs who understand how to balance the trade-offs between building a commercially successful business which we think is important if we're going to invest as opposed to giving a grant but also that really are focused on building a transformative solution that is going to move education in the direction that we really would like to see it move towards. And in summary, it really is one where what works wins and where what we believe is a high-quality solution is actually available to more people. So we look at our venture work also from an impact standpoint as a bit of a tip of the spear in terms of really finding innovations, whether it's pedagogy or business model or distribution, that we think is gonna unblock some of the barriers that are currently existing that prevent education from becoming what we believe it can be. So those are some of the factors that we look for. In terms of metrics, we do believe that commercial metrics are actually quite important as proxies for some of the things that our companies are trying to do. I think it's important for companies to be able to raise capital to build great products that users actually enjoy using and love using and continue to use. So engagement metrics, retention metrics, all of those things are actually quite important for us. But at the same time, we also look for, as I said in the beginning, an attitude that really kind of is hungry for actually incorporating evidence and science into the approach and looking to constantly iterate on your product development and your learning engineering such that you are actually improving outcomes when it comes to learning and employability. So I think those are some of the things that we typically are continuing to work with our entrepreneurs on and we try to bring our learning science team and our whole child team to bear, for example, in helping them think through that. I do think that Chan-Zach work is really unique for the number of learning science folks that you have on your team and data scientists that you have on your team. And I should know the answer to this, but is some of their work easily available online? Is publishing any of their views on learning science part of your mission? So it's interesting. I think we have taken the approach that what we'd like to do is actually catalyze the ecosystem. So one of the things that we actually prioritize, for example, is how do we surface what's available already that is not being currently incorporated? And there's actually a lot of that. It's not, so that's one piece of it, which is just really trying to encourage collaborations of learning scientists and behavioral scientists and neuroscientists and cognitive scientists to really kind of collaborate on specific problems, specific challenges, and really trying to make sure those discoveries are available. We do work in a form of challenges. So for example, we just launched a something that's the equivalent of ARPA-ED, so I think DARPA for Education in conjunction with the Gates Foundation, which is really designed to encourage broad-based innovation in a few areas, including executive function, literacy, and math, and the teams themselves are working on a number of grants to support researchers to develop some of the, to push forward some of the science that we think is gonna help. In particular, I think one of the things that is different about our approach is almost everyone on our learning science team actually also has experience working in a company. In a startup, and so the approach is actually not purely academic. It really is trying to figure out how can we incorporate what is true and rigorous from a scientific perspective, but into something that's actually practically applicable for those of you guys who are continuing to iterate and need to continue to iterate in order to respond from a rapid product development standpoint. That's great. Tori, how does ALD define and measure impact and educational outcomes? Yeah, no, thanks for the question. Very simply, frankly. So what we have decided through a lot of iteration is that we are not working to build towards one blended metric that sums up our entire portfolio. Instead, we build, we have a social impact report that we release to our LPs on an annual basis. And in what it's doing is it's answering two questions for every company in our portfolio. The first being, how well does the technology work? So how, you know, for a, you know, let's say an adaptive math learning platform, we'd say how are summative exam scores improving relative to students who are using incumbent products or alternative products? Like how much better is this solution than others defined quantitatively? And then two, who's getting access to the technology? So are there anomalies in the demographics of students who are using the product or geography or other sort of things that we would otherwise want to know and resolve? So how well is it working quantified and who's getting access? So those are the questions we ask across our portfolio. Tori's colleague, Ashley Mitner, in the audience told me last night that you've just published your annual report. Is that available to everybody in the audience online when they go rush out and download it? Thank you for the question. No, it's not. It's like that. But it is the right question. It's something that we hope to make broadly available. We want our methodologies to be adopted by anyone who wants to ask these questions of their company. So other venture funds, other companies, we think it's the right sort of framework to define a certain company's performance on this impact vector relative to others. There's too much competitive information in our report as it stands today. So we are trying to iterate and find ways to sort of desensitize that document to make it broadly available, but... Matt, how about you? How are you defined? It sounds like you want to make a follow-on comment to that, though, for... Oh, yeah, stop me when I've talked too long, okay? We have gone through the same evolution. Cambridge told us that our first impact report was in the top 1% of the impact reports that we had seen, which is slightly terrifying because it really wasn't so great, but what it did was to offer evidence of efficacy of one kind or another and just be very honest about the quality of that evidence. There was also too much information in there about companies that was sensitive, so we couldn't distribute it beyond our limited partners. What we did this time was to push the more sensitive information into a spreadsheet and to build a document of case studies that could be distributed more broadly, which is advantageous to the companies in question. We're also happy to open source our impact framework, which is in turn heavily indebted to a report by Michael Fullen and Caitlin Donnelly called Alive and the Swamp. We had a lot of the same criteria, but they helped us sort of organize it into three categories, and then we added a fourth. The categories are pedagogy. Does this product square with what we know about how people learn? And it's shocking how many venture backed companies get knocked out by that criterion right away. The second is technology. Is it architected in a way that it can be continually improved? Microservices architecture. Does it use APIs? Does it fit into the technology ecosystem of the user? Third is community fit, community or institution. And that, at an early stage, really boils down to are you asking people to change their habits or does this fit into the way they do things and the way they see the world? And more simply, still, does it get used? What is the engagement like? And we see an awful lot of tools that get used a little bit and then not at all because they haven't gotten that right. And then the fourth category, which we added, is what we call enterprise model, which is basically ESG but adopted for startups. So questions like, is the company open to talent from everywhere? Is the company committed to measuring the efficacy of its product or service and using it to drive a process of continuous improvement? We have a core value of focusing on the most vulnerable and on the whole human being and not just the potential future worker. So a lot of the discussions about the workforce basically talk about fashioning a widget that can be slotted into a job that pays a living wage and ignores the question, who is this human being? What, to her mind, would constitute a purposeful and rewarding life? What about civic engagement? And so I have a recurring debate with Ryan Craig of University Ventures on this topic. He thinks getting them the job is all that matters. My personal feeling is that if you don't engage their imaginations and their hopes that they won't succeed in today's educational institutions or even in newfangled vocational pathways programs. Yeah, you raised about 10 different issues, each of which we could go into deeply. I just came from an event at Google this morning where there was a lot of discussion about matching folks with jobs. Probably not enough discussion about getting them the educational content so that they could do those jobs. I'm also giving myself homework. So Alive in the Swamp, that's gonna be one of my reading assignments now on my Kindle. So Amy, Omidyar, how do you all define and measure impact and educational outcomes? Yeah, I've got like 20 plus ones of what each of you said around kind of design, test, and iterate. Certainly, Matt, your comment on just more broadly we look at unlocking human potential. So we invest across the spectrum, as Vivian said, social, emotional learning, cognitive development, physical health, mental health. It's the whole picture of the individual. When we look at our, when we evaluate the impact of our organizations, we have a fairly simple function, similar to Tories. We look at breadth, times depth, times influence. So breadth being the number of lives touched, and that breadth we also then have a qualifying factor on the income level of those individuals and how excluded are they from opportunity. So we then look at depth, the depth to which those lives are touched. And that can look at, it takes different forms based on what the intervention is or what the product is. So that can look at the efficacy, sort of the hardcore efficacy as Tori talked about. It can also look at, did it three X their wages? So we look at that. And then we also look at influence. So we look at the extent to which this entrepreneur or this enterprise is really sort of blazing the field and is creating a new space. The extent to which they are engaging with policy makers. The extent to which they're changing the dialogue versus are they sort of a me too of something that's done before. And we try to, given that we are a philanthropic investment firm unabashedly impact oriented, that we do, we invest in those kinds of entrepreneurs. And the other thing that I would say is having been in this space for a long time, I think it's really important when we talk about impact metrics that we are holding entrepreneurs accountable at the appropriate stage. And it sort of, it goes without saying, but I think it needs to be said. There's a, Nesta developed a great framework which I think is a start of a great framework. And it has four levels. I think we need probably more like six to eight. But talks about, at the first level, do they have a clear theory of change? Next level, can they demonstrate that there is some impact? And then there's comparative, getting all the way up to sort of the full gold standard of RCT. But I think when we look at really what do we measure? One of the things that we're really, we try to be very critical about as well is what is the level of evidence of impact here? And just being honest about that. For those who might not know, do you wanna tell folks who Nesta is? By the way, I don't remember what it stands for, but I will tell you that they actually sponsored together with new schools that report I mentioned alive in the swamp. So they're doing a lot of real serious thought leadership on ed tech out in the world. Okay, extra credit after class for anybody for anybody who can come up with the definition of Nesta during the Q&A session. Could I offer just a, not a challenge, but a question. You were talking about income levels, and we use the phrase vulnerable. And that includes people who experience persecution or discrimination of some kinds. There's a very interesting entrepreneur in the audience named Emersal Hadayat, who is an Afghan refugee, and has started a business that connects refugees with students who want to learn about their language and culture. We are also thinking about physical and cognitive differences. That's very important in the history of my firm. For both my partner and me, what got us into this was through a series of accidents, in my case, becoming involved with the special ed, realizing that there were certain problems that were not getting solved there. So there are a lot of different kinds of vulnerability. Actually, I was on the working group at B Labs that was trying to produce next generation education standards, and we had an extended debate about whether we could include LGBTQ status as one of the populations which you would get a score boost for addressing. And the provost of some school said, we don't track that, which is a problem with the B Labs standards right there. Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth. There are things that are important that are harder to measure. It's harder to measure things for smaller companies. But it's very obvious that there's tremendous human suffering around all kinds of vulnerabilities of the affluent. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, I followed that up quickly with, and those who are excluded from opportunity fully agree. It's simplistic, but in the U.S., it's very easy to, you know, schools have measurements of those who are free and reduced lunch. So there's some easy ways to get at that and some more difficult ways. Income and accessibility is a whole topic we could dive into on its own. We do try to look at that with the Rise Fund and I don't think we have our kind of policies worked out yet, but we are thinking about that in the U.S. and we have different levels of income and inclusivity that we're focused on in emerging markets. And in an attempt to be slightly provocative or at least to provide a compare and contrast in my response to the question about how we do it at Rise, we actually are trying to reduce ultimately all of the different metrics down to, we're at least trying to come up with and include one metric that would be comparable across all of our portfolio and that's been one of the big debates or questions in the impact sector, are all the metrics bespoke or can you compare across investments? So Rise uses what we call our IMM methodology or impact multiple of money. We do, as you heard other panelists say as well, really start with the third party evidence in the case of a company like Everfi. They had participated in randomized control trials for some of their products so we could readily see the effect sizes of those studies on students and we build a model. So in a parallel way to the building of the financial models that look at financial return, we are also with every investment opportunity building model that seeks to value the social impact. The way we do that is to start with inputs that are the outputs of the base case of the financial model, which I think has a lot of benefit because as you may know, if you're investors out there or folks who've received venture capital private equity money, the investors spend a lot of time thinking about the base case of the model and what the outputs are likely to be, whether it's number of students trained, whether it's numbers of teachers trained. So that's kind of a healthy conservatism as the starting place. We look at the third party evidence to say what the likely effect sizes of the intervention and then in the attempt to both drive towards an impact and to have something that's comparable, we do try to value that impact in dollars. In the education sector, what that often means is we're looking at the ways in which improvements in academic achievement, educational attainment and linkages to employment improve the wage and labor market prospects for individual students. And you can see, because there's a lot of good literature out there that's been repeated over time, that improvements in achievement and improvements in educational attainment do lead to higher labor market outcomes. And then we try to come up with a ratio that says for every dollar we're investing, are we generating several dollars of measurable social impact and try to hold ourselves to a standard that just as we would in the financial modeling that we're achieving several dollars of social impact. And then we are also seeking to hold ourselves accountable. So as we're reporting every quarter and every year on the financial performance of our portfolio companies, so too we're reporting on a set of key performance indicators about what drives their impact and what that likely means in the value of the social impact that's been created. And then I have to sit across the table from KPMG, who is pressing us not just on our financial performance, but also on whether or not we were really producing the kinds of outputs we said we were gonna produce and whether that's likely to be leading to the outcomes that we were hoping it would lead to. Can we go to the panel's pushback on that? Go off, go off. So first of all, if you're looking at different kinds of impact, how many, say, dead children equals one endangered species being wiped out? Or sick children, let us say, or children who are deprived of all economic opportunity. It's just very hard to reduce things. I mean, I guess you can attribute a dollar value to a fully potentialized human life, maybe. I'll answer that question by answering a totally different question than when you actually asked, which is a common trick in interviews. So we're all appear to be agreeing with him, even though I'm not actually agreeing with him. So where I do think I wanna be transparent that where the methodology is right now versus where it isn't. So what I have found tremendously constructive about the methodology is a couple of things. One is we are really forced to grapple with the third-party evidence and the research in every investment. And having spent the better part of a couple of decades investing in the education sector and caring about quality, I can tell you I do it a lot more now than I did in my conventional private equity roles in the past. So that has been constructive for me in the way I think about outcomes of the investments that we're making. And then, while there's right now absolutely false precision, and I should make it more clear, maybe in a direct response, we're not trying to say that a healthcare outcome is better or worse than an educational outcome. So it's not really for the purpose of comparing this is a better outcome than another. It's more saying we need to get over a bar for all of our investments. And that is where it's been useful in my experience. So there's absolute false precision right now in our methodology between $3 of social value and $4 of social value. But I can tell you that a company like Dreambox Learning, which Tori Patterson invested in or Everfi, which Tammy was helping to lead, the difference between the $15 of social impact that we expect Dreambox to produce for every dollar of investment or the 14 or so dollars from Everfi, that is very different than the opportunities that I've looked at where the methodology said we were only gonna produce $2 or $0 of social impact. And so that I find very constructive is being forced to think about, okay, what are the effect sizes here? And do we have scale? In some ways it gets a little bit at what Amy's very powerful algorithm around depth and breadth. If you're getting to scale and you're doing it in an impactful way, that is going to help lots of students. So that's where I think it's constructive, but it could of course be used in the wrong way too. And if I can just push a little bit further. Go for it. Because you said you wanted to... This is the first time I've ever seen that be provocative. Just kidding. So when I was on that BLAB's working group, it became clear that if you were trying to maximize the score, you were going to focus on things that were easily measured, but not necessarily more important. And so within my portfolio, K-12 outcomes are super hard to measure, whereas workforce outcomes are really easy to measure. What was the salary coming into the program? What was the salary upon exit? What's the salary three years down the road? What was the retention? You can measure those. You can reduce it to dollars. We did an impact calculation for General Assembly and even at a much earlier stage in their evolution, the dollar number was eye-popping. And it's very hard to arrive at it. Even after you subtract out the tuition? Oh, so a lender called Climb Credit calculated the ROI on a General Assembly program at 49.5%. I don't know about you, but anytime I see an opportunity to get a 49.5% return on investment, I'm generally pretty pleased with that. Absolutely. Okay, I would love to dive more into that, but I'm gonna move on to another question, and please, audience should feel free to come back and ask questions about any of these topics. I do want folks to have a sense of which subsectors we're investing in, where we think there's either a convergence or a co-linearity or a lockstep relationship between impact and commercial opportunity. So for the RISE Fund, our three main areas to focus right now are digital curriculum, but more importantly, the personalized and adaptive learning that digital tools are enabling. Career education, which is really everything from shorter, career-relevant content through longer degrees, but ideally delivered to working adults where they need it most, which is in the workforce. And third is international private education, both K-12 and tertiary ed in emerging markets. How about a mid-year? We've got a lot of overlap. So we, too, invest in workforce readiness in the skilling space, similar to how John described. We also look at private education, so for those of you who haven't spent a lot of time in Lagos recently, 80% of kids in Lagos are going to private schools. 80%, 70% of kids in the Indian urban centers, because the government schools just are not delivering, parents are voting with their feet. So it's a pretty interesting space. It's a tough space. It's a space that does require impact patient capital. We also invest in ed tech, particularly in markets where we see a significant opening right now in Brazil. They're moving to a common core, and that was a big turbo boost here in the United States. And then in the US, we're spending our time looking at early childhood. So massive implications for impact. It's a place where the practice has not caught up to the science and the data and the evidence, and so we're really spending a lot of our philanthropic capital trying to kind of encourage entrepreneurial activity there, and trying to encourage innovation and seeing some really, really interesting entrepreneurs pop on the scene. I've been talking a lot, so I'm going to be very brief. We also do workforce investing, two basic categories, career pathways programs with a high ROI, and software platforms that provide crucial infrastructure for workforce training, like DeGreed and Pluralsight. In higher ed, our big theme is retention. We have four retention oriented startups that between them help retain over half of all US college students. In K-12, we have two themes. One is just content that is engaging or exciting, and the other is the back office, scheduling, procurement, budgeting, compliance, predictive analytics, truancy case management, very large portfolio there. I think that there's been a general retreat from K-12, and so in terms of additionality, that's obvious a place where I'm needed when I can find things that make financial sense, and I got into this business on the strength of some wins in the K-12 area. Tori is definitely not retreated from K-12. Tori, what are the sub sectors that you're focused on? Primarily K-12, but we look at early learning, K-12, post-secondary, and then what we call career mobility, like really looking at the enterprise life long learning from the perspective of the individual, like how do I stay relevant and employable as the economy changes fast? But the thing that gets us to yes on any deal across those four buckets, we like to see, just to be cliche, Silicon Valley technology kind of infrastructure solving a core problem in a big way, so whether it doesn't matter what market it's in, K-12 is particularly void of amazing solutions like that, so the opportunity's been really great there, but we're eyes wide open all over the place. We just did our first few international investments. We like to say we want to invest in the world's leading education technology companies regardless of stage, geography, or core market, so. Vivian, how about Chan Zuckerberg? What are the sectors you're focused on? So we actually invest across the life long learning spectrum, so we have some investments in early childhood, we have some investments in K-12, both direct to consumer as well as selling into districts because we believe both are necessary, especially for impact, and then we also invest in post-secondary and workforce slash skills development where there is a clear outcomes focused on employability. I would say this year happens to be a year where we've invested in several companies that are more related to pathways, whether it's pathways where we invested in an OWL company called Raise Me, which is really trying to help, especially low income kids, identify the best matches for them from a college perspective but also encouraging behaviors that allow them to really build better applications and build the skill sets and the backgrounds that make them better positioned as candidates for admission, as well as companies in the workforce and employment space that we haven't announced yet. So I would say that's been a bigger theme for this year, but I think in general, as I said earlier, we're really looking for transformative solutions that we think are where the entrepreneurs are taking a different approach than what might have existed that allows something to be unblocked. And I would say the only thing I'd say on K-12 front is that we actually probably lean away from doing traditional back office or infrastructure type investments with a greater bias towards investing in companies that are a little closer to the learning experience itself. Maybe you could talk about one of those companies that's transformative and really reaching scale, one of the dangers at a conference like this is folks can talk a lot about field building. We've been talking about some companies today. It'd be great for you to dive into one of your portfolio companies and use that as a case study. Yeah, so one of the companies that Amy and I are both involved with is a company called Indella, which I think speaks to some extent some of the opportunity with emerging markets but also the opportunity for a very transformative solution. So what Indella does, it actually recruits the top 1% of applicants. They've had 85,000 applicants over the course of the last few years and accepted 1% into a world-class four-year fellowship where there is a very personalized learning experience that focuses on both soft skills and technical skills as well as a lot of the comprehensive student development frameworks that I've talked about. And what they do is instead of having the students pay for this training, which they would not be able to do because half of the incoming fellows are unemployed and the other half make on average 4,000 a year. They actually place these fellows with top startups and companies in the US, in the UK and about 10 other countries around the world where the companies are in search of incredible engineering talent and would not otherwise be able to find this talent and they actually pay for these fellows to be working for them. So from our standpoint, that's a win-win on both sides, both for the employer in search of talent as well as the fellow who is in search for a career opportunity that they would not otherwise have had access to. And I think from our standpoint, the potential for impact there is very much that when we look at it, there's about two thirds of the population in Africa is under the age of 35 and there's anywhere from 40 to 80% under an unemployment amongst that youth. So the opportunity for really transforming the potential for opportunities for that group of students is actually really high. And we also think that long-term, what's incredible about that is the opportunity to actually change the way people think about talent in Africa and more specifically, also the concept of diversity on their engineering teams, which we are very passionate about as an organization ourselves. And so, Andela actually having started in 2014 now has about 1,200 fellows across Kenya and Nigeria, Uganda, and they just launched a public-private partnership with Rwanda where the government of Rwanda is actually working in very close partnership with them to encourage solutions like Andela to come into the country because they see such a great need to train their youth into these great employment outcomes. It's a really neat model. Are you all active in helping them source new corporate partnerships in the U.S. that seemed to me in knowing a little bit about the company to be one of their key needs for success? Yeah, I mean, I think we are very active. So I'm on the board of the company and one thing I'll say, which I just as a totally unrelated to this question, but one of the things I really love about what Andela has done is how conscious it's been about making sure that the representation on the board and its investor base is actually very broad. So they have the U.S. investors like, I'll put us in that category, but they also have an African tech VC leading their series C round and sitting on the board. They have the former minister in Nigeria by CT. They have a very successful African businessman on the board. So they really have sought to make sure that they're developing a solution that actually is resonating with and useful for the populations that they're serving. So in terms of how we work with them, part of it is actually certainly introducing them to other potential customers. Some of what we're doing is actually, as I said earlier, we've actually had our learning science team work with them as they think about, how do you actually identify this top 1%? So they go through a very rigorous screening process, but some of it also is as you're progressing them along the way, how do you think about the different levels of engineering for them and they have four levels, which is self-paced, but what does the D zero constitute? What does the D one constitute? So really thinking about how do you assess those skills? How do you assess the progression and how do you actually think about developing similar levels when you think about an engineering role across companies, and everyone defines a title so differently? So just thinking about some of those from a rubric and assessment perspective and progression, which we believe really should be based on mastery, not just on seed time, those are some of the ways in which we're working with them. And I spend a lot of time helping with recruiting too. That's great. Thanks also for sharing the commentary about governance. That was pretty interesting. Tori, give us a great case study. Delighted to, and I'm gonna embarrass my amazing partner in the audience here, Ashley Bittner. She just led an investment in a company called Embellis, which is a fun one to highlight. Not massive scale yet, but scaling quickly. And the problem they're solving, which I think relates somewhat to Angela, is you imagine a company like Google or McKenzie in the volume of people who want to work or get an entry-level job at McKenzie, they'll get over 100,000 applicants for a few hundred seats. They can practically interview maybe 1% of those people. So this is a technology company that basically inserts the equivalent of a game-based assessment to allow all those 100,000 people to have their merits identified and potentially surface themselves as candidates to work at a company like McKenzie or Google. So the vision of the business is to find ways to massively level the playing field for access to elite employment. And it's a problem that we don't think is solvable without technology, right? And so this is a company that's, again, very early stages, and if you play out where that can go and what that can be, it changes the importance of going to a brand-name elite university. It eliminates a lot of the just like institutional bias around getting access to these seats. So anyhow, it's a company that we're incredibly proud to be associated with, scaling quickly. Talk to Ashley about it if you need more info after. The comparison I like to make is if you're auditioning to be the principal oboist of the Cleveland Symphony, you audition behind a screen so they cannot see who you are, your gender, your race, and you're not even allowed to wear shoes as you walk out onto the stage because they don't want the judges to hear whether you're wearing high heels or flat shoes, and that approach has changed the composition, or at least moved the composition of elite orchestras. And presumably the quality, right? And the quality. But we have that problem with resumes, right? So you can see so many signals, and there's been lots of research about this, so it's interesting to think about how one can do it differently. Matt, give us a case study. So impact and financial returns are not always precisely correlated, but I'm just gonna offer a brief sketches of three different companies with really massive scale. So we're investors in Brightbytes and Civitas Learning, which are the leaders respectively in K-12 analytics and higher ed predictive analytics for retention. And the footprints are really quite astonishing at this point, and these are not premium products. These are products that people pay for. So the footprint of Civitas is now eight million students creeping up towards half of all U.S. college students, and they have a typical retention lift of around three or four percent. So their moonshot goal is to keep a million students in school who would otherwise have dropped out over the next decade. Brightbytes has a variety of modules addressing different needs of K-12 school districts, including dropout prevention, but also things like how to use technology, student data privacy best practices, and so on. So they have a footprint of over 20% of all U.S. K-12 students. So again, massive scale and also really unprecedented data sets. Are there things that you can do to help them drive greater scale? So with Brightbytes, I helped come up with the idea for two of the modules, found the IP for one of those modules, helped them hire a former state superintendent who sold one of those modules at the state level very early in its history. One of my partners brought in the recent MBA graduate who is now their COO as well as their VP of product. I introduced them to a foundation that is now one of their largest customers uses the software to track the efficacy of the education investments they make on a very large scale. That's a lot of value. I'm gonna remember not to introduce you to any of our portfolio companies. So they're gonna start looking to us to invent modules in their software. Amy, how about you? Can you give us a case study? Yeah, and maybe I'll just focus on how we are helping our companies drive further impact. And I'll talk about two companies. One is a co-investment with Allen. One is a co-investment with Rethink. So, and they're both in the early childhood space. So Tinker Garden is a company that has, when we invested in them a couple of years ago, they had two play groups in Brooklyn. Now they're in all 48 states. Are they up to? I think 50. I was gonna say, I'm like, could be 50, but I wasn't quite sure. I should, now I'll be corrected by these guys on the panel if they're better up on their data. And so what Tinker Garden does is Tinker Garden has an extremely high quality, efficacious early childhood curriculum and they facilitate play groups in parks. They put the curriculum in the cloud and they identify, they've got a proprietary identification system for getting great leaders to facilitate these play groups. And they're scaling just incredibly quickly and how we're working with them to drive impact is we're connecting them up with the likes of Head Start, which is the national pre-K program for low income students and with other partners like that to figure out how can they further drive their product down into those who are typically very underserved. The other company that I'd like to highlight is Wonder School. So Wonder School is attacking the massive market of in-home and family daycare. So for those of you who have young kids or previously had young kids, you will know that quality childcare in the United States is a massive issue. And they are looking at how can one, you increase the quality of the existing in-home daycare and childcare as well as how can you pull more people into this space by giving them back-end technology infrastructure. So think of them in some ways as like a quick books for these entrepreneurs, for these micro-entrepreneurs. And then also adding on quality curriculum and other elements that enable them to deliver a better quality service while saving a ton of money. And the impact where we're helping them is a bunch of things, but one of the things we support with our philanthropic capital, the Harvard Center for the Developing Child. And so we've been connecting them with experts in the childcare space to help them better build a more efficacious quality product over time. I love the names in education like Tinker and Wonder. I'm gonna provide one more example quickly and then we'll open it up to questions. Another great name, Dreambox. What I love about Dreambox, this is a follow-on that we did after Tori's investment. What I love about Dreambox is that it works. So Dreambox is a K8 math software that adapts to the needs of individual students. And through randomized control trials, they've demonstrated that kids using Dreambox advance faster against grade level in math and the more students use Dreambox, the more they learn. Importantly, this is a great solution but it wasn't reaching enough students. It had started out as a B2C solution. Reed Hastings came along and made an investment. Tori also made an investment and they really transformed the company into a B2B platform selling to school districts and reaching a lot more students. There are a ton of great educational products out there that suffer from a lack of distribution and unfortunately if you don't have good distribution you're not reaching the students. So improving the sales force, improving the ability to sell at the district level. We're continuing to track those metrics. We're also tracking usage because that student engagement is a terrifically co-linear metric. The more students are using it, that's a great commercial proof point that it's gonna be sticky, it's gonna continue to drive renewal rates and also that students are learning. So that's a little bit about Dreambox. The red numbers say that we're gonna run out of time pretty soon so we should turn it over to questions. One over here, the gentleman in the hat. Thank you. I think I heard Vivian touch on this a little bit in terms of social-emotional learning and I was wondering what types of considerations you all have for kind of non-traditional determinants of education and employment. For me with my work I'm specifically thinking of gender and masculinity and how that plays out in all of these young folks impacted with the work that you do. Yeah, I think that is one of the reasons why I don't want a metric that privileges the most measurable things just because SEL is a little harder to measure than some other kinds of progress, but it's crucial. I'll issue an RFP to the room. I'm looking for something that fosters empathy. Plus one, plus one on that. And I would also say that it's very clear if you look at the science of learning some of the stuff which CZI has supported that the environment matter, students need to feel like they're in a trusted, loved environment, right? So there's so many pieces to your point that are not necessarily measurable today certainly under the current K-12 assessment metrics that we as people who really deeply care about impact need to be focused on. More questions from the audience. The gentleman in the lilac sweater. I'm not sure I can figure out what color that is. Oh, sorry. I should be paying attention to the one with the microphone. Thank you very much. I asked this question because I asked in my last panel and no one had the chance to answer it so I want to try to re-edit with this one. So my name is Alex P.A. and I run it on profit and Philly around workforce development and job placement as well as educational placement for young people in local neighborhoods. Me starting this idea there was no resources or access to funding because I'm just trying this idea and me living in a low income neighborhood coming from there and trying to get back you don't get that much adequate resources. And I thought it was not just a problem with me but a lot of people who were actually in the same boat trying to do the same thing. And so I taught myself everything from measuring outcomes and everything else we got to talk about. I'm like, yes, I taught myself that but I shouldn't have taught myself that knowing that there's lack of access to the stuff for people in low income neighborhoods trying to do something great. So how are you guys actually looking to actually not funding projects in low income neighborhoods but actually investing in the entrepreneurs and the startup ideas from those neighborhoods trying to get things done but just don't have access to you guys. And how are we getting foundations to actually do more risk capital for these ideas because they don't have the operational budget that you guys are looking for but also the capacity support that they need to actually help them build out those infrastructure that they don't have in our organizations. Thank you. Who's got the best answer for that? I won't say I have the best answer but I have an answer. I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. So and this is one of the places where to be honest it's exciting to have the different tools in our toolkit because on our nonprofit side, for example, we have funded various organizations like Edlock and also Camelback Ventures and Latinas for America all of which are organizations that are specifically dedicated towards really prioritizing opportunities and support and scaffolding and mentoring for some of these folks that are, for example, educators or entrepreneurs in the case of Camelback that come from underrepresented minority backgrounds or from underprivileged backgrounds specifically recognizing that there is a need to really highlight those opportunities. So on the grant side, we have actually taken a very strong approach towards what we consider very important to us which is diversity and inclusion and the fact that these networks are not pre-existent for folks who might oftentimes be actually the best suited to come up with solutions that help their communities. Some of the work that we're doing, for example, in the justice and opportunity side of things actually is around criminal justice reform. That also is another area where, from a grant making perspective, we're very focused on understanding what are the needs of the people who are coming from backgrounds where, again, they're the most suited to come up with solutions but might not have the movement-building capabilities inherently in order to do that. So we actually have work. We have efforts in place where we are trying to explore what some of that movement-building, capacity-building is actually gonna be. Nothing that we're ready to talk about particularly concretely, but those are definitely some of the considerations we are absolutely paying attention to. So the people on this stage are a major force for diversity and inclusiveness among entrepreneurs. There was a study by the Diane Project two years ago, I think, they found 11 African American woman CEOs who had ever raised more than a million dollars of venture capital in the entire history of venture capital. Happily, that number is slightly larger today. It's 34. My firm has backed four African American woman CEOs and Tori and John have backed another. They've given her something like $140 million, which dwarfs the total amount given to African American woman entrepreneurs by every other firm. It's really quite transformative. It's because we, I think, by virtue of our mission are open to talent from every quarter. Inclusion is a terrifically tough problem, but great to focus on it. As we're getting the hook, maybe the last question from the woman with the Apple logo. Hi, thank you so much for the panel. I'm Catherine Moller. I'm a visiting professor at Stanford in the Graduate School of Education. I'm wondering, can everything in education be measured? And so, for example, how are you looking at unintended consequences that may emerge from the companies you're investing in, their products, and the vulnerable communities they claim to be serving? And how, for example, do you look at those kind of power dynamics or consequences when your measurements and the measurements of the companies may not be capturing those? Yeah, and also to think about the ways in which companies and communities are dependent on your capital and so may not provide you with the feedback you really need to understand the impacts. Thank you. I just, thank you for that question. I think the shortest answer is being open-minded and open-hearted and listening, but I will tell you of one tactical way that we try to go against this. So I don't know how many of you went to the, there was a session yesterday on lean data. So it's an organization that's spinning out of Acumen that has a really terrific tool that enables you to, very quickly, through mobile phone surveys, reach into your customer audience, thousands at a time, and get a sense of, is this product improving your life? Just gets to all of these questions, gets you a sense of where they are, where you are from an income bracket perspective. And so we've used that with our portfolio. We've also used it on diligence as well. And we have found it to be incredibly insightful as far as what really are the customers saying as a first step in that sort of efficacy and impact ladder that we discussed. Yeah, I can give you an example of a hard question and I think it was asked of me by a Stanford person, actually. I wrote the business plan. Those Stanford people. Yeah, I wrote the business plan for a company and our portfolio called Rethink Autism originally, now just called Rethink. Not to be confused with my fund. And so the goal there was to democratize access to apply behavioral analysis for behavioral therapy for autistic children and for other children with special needs. And the question she was asking was, is this going to result in people not providing the services of trained professionals? Are they going to devolve behavioral therapy to people who are not certified, who are enabled by this platform? And that's a very general question about EdTech in general. Are we gonna create a two-tier system where some people get educated online in strictly vocational ways and others get access to liberal arts education and in-person seminars? In a format like this, it's difficult to of course entirely understand the depth of your question. At the risk of being a little bit provocative, I guess I do wanna say that I think measurement is tremendously powerful because measurement often drives behavior change. And sometimes I guess my observation in the education sector is that people don't hold themselves accountable enough to measurement. So you of course can't, there's a lot of things that you can't measure and one does need to bear that in mind. Part of what we try to do relative to also the negative consequences piece that you mentioned is, again, you can't always measure them but the more you can be transparent and try to estimate costs and make it explicit, that does drive behavior change and we do seek to put that into our models so that we are looking at a net impact and really trying to think about some of the negative impacts as well. Anybody wanna add to that? I think since we're out of time, go forth into the world, tinker and wonder and build and dream and build scale and quality in the education sector. Thanks very much. Thank you.