ETL Speaker Series: Dave Vasen, brightwheel

Hi everyone, my name is Emily Ma and I welcome you again to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series presented by stvp, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship center and basis, the business association of Stanford entrepreneurial students. Today I am so excited to welcome Dave Vassan to etl. Dave is the founder and CEO of brightwheel, the number one platform in early education and one of the fastest growing private sector SaaS companies. With Brightwheel, teachers save valuable time in the classroom, administrators can oversee the business and parents get a real time view of their child's day. Brightwheel is the top reviewed product in early education. A hundred and seventy five billion US market. Throughout his career Dave has been a passionate leader in education technology at companies including Amazon, Cisco, Teach for America and he was a consultant with Bain & Co. As well. Dave is also a first generation American. He holds a BA from Stanford University, class of 2003. Woohoo. And an MBA from the Wharton School. He lives with his wife and two daughters in the Bay Area. We're going to kick start with a video and huge welcome to you.

Dave. Thank you. Hi.

Sharks. My name is Dave Vastin. I'm the founder and CEO of Brightwheel and I'm here seeking a $400,000 investment for 4% equity stake in my company. Brightwheel is the mobile app for preschools, daycares and families. And we are completely revolutionizing early education. Now I believe all of us are parents here and I want to ask, when you come home after a long day and you ask your kids, what did you learn at school today? Does this sound.

Familia? Everything I did and I wanted to tell you. You don't want to tell me? I don't.

Know. This is the experience for millions.

Of parents across America every single day and especially for younger kids. You've been apart from your little human being for 6, 8, 10 hours a day and that is all you get. You know, you want to be a part of their day, you want to add to their learning. Once you come home and you can't, it's gut wrenching. And on the other side, on.

The school side, it's no.

Better. In addition to actually educating our kids, teachers are managing a ton of paperwork. Let's face it, they're actually managing parents. And on top of that, they're even running a business. The system is broken and brightwheel is the solution. So let's jump in and take.

A look at how brightwheel.

Works. So with brightwheel, teachers can easily.

Check kids in from the mobile.

App. They can log activities and assessments during the day. They can send quick updates and they can even manage their business all in one place. And we're just seeing an amazing amount of photos every single day on brightwheel. And this is the reason. You take it, you tag it, and you are absolutely done. And now we're gonna look at the teacher app. So this is the teacher's room, and we're gonna click on activities at the bottom here. And this is all being done on paper today. And so we've taken it and combined it and made it super fast and super easy. So we're gonna click on nap here and then we're gonna tag three kids that just went down for a nap. The key about brightwheel is that we're saving teachers time. You actually have measurably more time with kids every single day. Now. We're gonna flip over real quick to the parent experience. So let's jump to the mobile.

App. This is actually my little girl.

Ser her day, and as you can see, I get a sense of not only what she's doing, but what she's learning. And so when I come home, I can actually have a conversation with her about it. My connection with my little girl is so much deeper because of Bright Wheel. And by the way, in the middle of a pretty tough day, it doesn't hurt to get a photo like this.

Sharks. This is a unique opportunity to.

Build a massive business that has a massive impact on people's everyday lives. And that's something that we hear every day. So I hope you're joining Serena and our team and bringing Brightville to every preschool, every daycare, and every family across the.

Globe. Wasn't that cool? That was so cool. I watched that so many times. But I'm going to keep them all in suspense and not talk about Shark Tank until the very end. So let's start with actually how this all started. Like the origin story. So, you know, you've been interested in education since your days in Stanford, and then Teach for America and Amazon. And even when you weren't working directly in education, you still sort of carried the through line. And so you have a pretty special story about how this all got started. Would you be open to sharing.

With? No, of course. Yeah. For me, it does go way back. So personal, actually, it has relationships. My time here at Stanford, so both my parents are immigrants. They came to the US Very classic immigrant story. They paid their way through school, were able to get an education, like, literally my dad washing dishes in the cafeteria to make their way through. So growing up, it was always very clear that education was their bedrock, enabled our family in a very real, very tangible way to have the life that we had. So that was always there growing up. And then actually when I. I don't always share this part of it, but when I came here, literally my very first week on campus, I was in Unipro, if anyone, if that speaks to anybody. And so very first week on campus, we have like our first dorm meeting. I'll never forget this. And like we had a guest come in and it was a teacher from Teach for America who was over in East Palo Alto. And she came in and basically just asked for help. And she, she actually got emotional in the moment just saying that she was really struggling with these fourth and fifth graders who were in a tough spot. Now I did myself. But back in like 1999, East Paloto was not what it is today. It was one of the worst zip codes in the US and it was really tough. And so I went out there that week and kind of every Friday over the next four years. What we saw were kids that were really, truly heading in the wrong direction and mainly through the work of their teacher. But this program that we helped create, you saw a complete change in the trajectory of their lives. And so for me, having experienced that in my life, having seen it very real in theirs, the spark was there. Like, how do you scale that? How do you create that experience for ideally, many, many more. Not one to some, but one to many. And so actually in my senior year, I created a piece of software to try to bring that to life. It never launched it. It was horrible. Like it was in the, in the, that was back in the day, like the dot com boom, when software you thought could, could solve everything classic, like software in the world. But the spark was there. And so from my journey from there to Cisco to Amazon and everything in between has always been about whether it's the teacher, the parent, the child, how can tech be an enabler and empower and ideally something that creates scale for.

Impact. Amazing, Amazing. So you talk a little bit about fourth and fifth graders. So clearly you had already begun the discovery process even while you were an undergrad. But you didn't start brightwheel until you had Serena in.

Tower.

Right. She was an infant. A lot of people think, oh, it'd be impossible to get a startup going like an.

Infant. I don't recommend it.

Definitely. But yes, yeah, but you did. And so, like, what inspired you to take that on with Serena, you know, as, I don't know, an 18 month old in your.

Arms. Yeah, so at that point I had like. So at Cisco I worked on online learning, one of the first kind of main online learning courses. At Amazon, I helped build an education team for Kindle, kind of taking that device to market. I even at one point worked on physical schools, creating them. So I had attacked and looked at education a bunch of different ways, mainly in the K12 space. And so I think a lot of interest, investments and just entrepreneurship ends up in that K12 space, maybe in higher ed. And so I was at that moment in my career where then Serena shows up, our first child. And I never thought about what happens before the K of K through 12. And so you know, that traditionally starts at age 5 or 6. In retrospect, it's very obvious that kids don't just show up ready to go at age 5 or 6. But like I had been zoned into that segment and never thought about what happens before. And when she showed up, I was the parent in charge of child care and I started going very, very deep in our space. And I can tell you more about it, but for me what was profound was just the impact that was there and the opportunity that was there. And so that was the pull and it wasn't. Again, I actually don't recommend starting a company with like a three, four or five month old at the time. It's not the easiest thing. But it was really inspired by her coming into our lives.

Wow. Wow. Well, if somebody did have a 3 month old, any tips for them if they were to start a startup with us in that sort of.

Circumstance? I mean, I think going eyes wide open, like, you know, I think both are going to pull you at different moments in different ways. And it's the early journey in particular. Entrepreneurship is really tough. So I don't think there's anything you can do to blunt that. I think it's just be ready for it.

Probably. Okay, well, be ready for it. You can do it with the Fremont though. Uh, so let's dive a little deeper in the discovery process. So as you were exploring, I understand that you were in the process of looking for childcare for Serena because both you and your wife at that point were also working. Um, what was that like? Like what were the steps that you took to really understand the pre case.

Space? So for me the first thing that was really compelling was just understanding how important it was. And again, I literally had just had, you know, blinders on or whatever it was to this part of the market and realizing that when you look at the child, the first five years of Development are arguably the most important five years of development in the development of a human being. It's just so critical in every way for certainly cognitive, but physical, emotional, every type of development. Then you look at the family, as you mentioned, families need and I felt this very viscerally, they need childcare to go to work every day. It's the number one determinant in women's workforce participation. It's usually the biggest check the families are writing. It's either rent or childcare. And depending on your zip code or number of kids, it's usually often childcare. So it felt profound in terms of how important it was. And for me it was just that pull of like, okay, I've been looking for impact, it's here and what can I do? And the natural orientation for me was I'm a parent, I'm going to go out and solve a parent problem. And so that was my first orientation. And back then, this is in 2014, I got really great advice. Just go and try something. I think a lot of people toil, design, iterate, think for a long time, you know, in, in the, on their own. And I was on my own at that point. I got really great advice. Just go out there and so actually early on in this journey I was actually on parental leave. You know, for Serena I started going out and it started just trying to get her into actually a childcare space. And feeling the pain of that, I started drilling, developing some parent related products. I quickly realized that I was off course and I think being able to really quickly early talk to users and in particular who were going to be the determinants, the buyers? In this case it was the small business owners and the administrators and the teachers. They were interested in the parent problems, but that wasn't the biggest thing on their minds. Like making parents happy actually wasn't the biggest thing that they needed to solve day to day. And so it was a quick pivot into okay, what are your biggest challenges? And doing a lot of observing and listening and just asking, like not, not going in there with any predispositions of I know, technology, I can solve your problems. Just asking, hey, what is most challenging for you? What's most time consuming? If you could take one thing out of your day, what would it be? And having those conversations? As well as just observing the workflows that they had, which honestly were pretty tough to observe. They're really painful. These folks are even in the hub of Silicon Valley, even in the tech capital of the world, running on paper, more or less paper. Checks, maybe really old spreadsheets, Horrible software and kind of band aiding together these different systems. We benchmark, like, 15 different tools that they're using to run their small business. And it's no different than a restaurant or a yoga studio or pick your small business. But this was one market that really had never had adequate tools. And really, no one took a modern SaaS approach to saying, like, how do we solve those problems? And it was at a time when there was a trend towards just building more dedicated software for dedicated verticals. And it just happened to be that this was a very big one without, frankly, any real.

Software. You know, you also pointed out, I think, in some of your other sort of talks that this space is also pretty regulated, which I wasn't aware about. It's mostly private business owners, if not all, and it's all regulated. Could you speak to that a little.

Bit? Yeah. It's funny, because I got to talk to other founders who are in healthcare or they're in transportation, and they're, like, butting up against, you know, like, if you think about the Airbnb or Ubers, like, fighting regulation all the time. We love regulation. Like, we're like, you know, regulation. So child care is highly regulated, and it's because the age of the kids, like, there are certain safety things you have to take into account. And it's very different, actually, than K12. And so it's a small business and a child care licensing component, and they have to deal with that. And so every day, they have to know physically where kids are. They have to know the ratios of teachers to students. If a kid scrapes their knee, they have to look at that in a certain way. And the nice thing is, like, all of that was being done on paper, super laborious, like being saved in a file drawer for a year. Software can solve that in a really easy way and can actually, like, make things a lot easier and more accessible. And so the fact that, like, we don't fight regulation, we don't mind it, even, like, when Covid brought all these new regulations, we were able to quickly pivot and solve those. And so there's different relationships, I guess, to regulation. For us, it was honestly an opportunity to solve a.

Problem. That's awesome. That's awesome. And, you know, I also thought it was really interesting that, you know, for you, you were able to go in just to kind of highlight what you said and round it out. Like, you were able to go in and do research for inspiration. You actually went in with no sort of, like, agenda, right? And that was a big deal going to these folks because you had discovered that a lot of folks, I guess, or even maybe yourself, you went into, you know, in some of your earlier conversations, like you're like, what if we solved it in this way? And they'd be like, no, no, no, that would make sense. But if you like asked an open ended question, they were like, oh yeah, this is what I would do. And so especially with like cash and.

Checks.

Right. And so I, I, I really love your approach in doing the research to really suss out the problem before trying to build a product and sort of selling.

It. I appreciate that I did the wrong way first, to be clear. So like I went in there and I said, like, you don't have a mobile app. Would you use a mobile app? You know, you're, you're literally going to the bank every Friday. Would you use all I'm banking? And the answer consistently was no. And that was almost enough to deter me. And I had plenty of people also just saying, stay away from this market. So it was actually going about the wrong way and then stepping back and saying, but there has to be a way, like there has to be something here. And so then it was reverting and just saying, going down to like the first principles, fundamentals of what are the biggest pain points for these folks and how can we solve that and not having a perspective on it other than just being really, really curious and letting them guide.

Me. Yeah. So for all of these, those of you out there who want to start a business, right, it might actually benefit just to open up the question a little bit and reframe it a little bit to start with first principles and pain points. All right, well, you started a company, it was just you, and then you started to add people to your team and then you establish a mission of really connecting educators and parents and administrators so that, you know, the pre K space could, you know, thrive and, you know, you're addressing all these pain points. You had that mission some seven, eight years ago. Has that evolved? Is that still true today or how has that developed over.

Time? It's pretty consistent and I think it's nice for us. There are companies that will pivot in a completely different direction and become something else. For us. I saw there was a big important market and an opportunity to solve problems for those folks. And for us, it was, our mission is now, which has evolved, wording wise a little bit, is high quality early education for every child. And we focus on the high quality piece of it and the every Child because we want to be everywhere and serve everyone and to serve every constituent in the market. That piece hasn't changed. I think what we have evolved on step by step is what are the right tactics to get there. And it's, you know, it's a huge thing that we may never fully achieve. But you know, how can we learn and iterate along the way and figure out strategy wise tactics, execution, like what is the right step to take towards that and you know, increasingly improve what we offer and increasingly bring that to more and more folks in our.

Space. You know, the other part of it is the question that might come up is why not just use a generalizable platform, right? Like why not, you know, use, you know, like, like Microsoft Office to run the business or just, you know, TurboTax to run the business? And you have a perspective on this with respect to going super deep in a vertical. Mind sharing.

That? Yeah, well, it's great because like for anyone out there, like exploring things. There were so many people that tried to talk me out of this early on and that was one of the things they said like why would they, either why would they adopt technology in your space or why wouldn't they just use other tools like QuickBooks or Microsoft or whatever it is. And you know, in some cases maybe the market is too small where it doesn't matter to solve that problem. But if the market is big enough, solving a problem that is, albeit maybe small but meaty, can be really meaningful. And the reality is trying to take QuickBooks or Square or anything else and adapt it to our market or even, you know, tools built for K through 12, it's really, really different. The way that they run their business, the way that they manage their staff, the way that they are regulated, as we talked about, all that's really, really unique. And so I, you know, there's some things along the way that have been very serendipitous. One was timing where there was this trend of the verticalization of SaaS which is like every major market now has actually one or two multibillion dollar companies that are just dedicated to offering really, really great SaaS for that space. And yes, you could maybe apply different tools, but the people in that space recognize that if I'm a restaurant, I want to buy something that's going to help me run my restaurant. Right? And yoga studios I mentioned, or if you're a contractor or plumber, all of that. And so we actually are, we share investors with all the leaders of every major vertical and it is actually just a Strategy now, which is like, go out and be the winning software for that.

Space.

Amazing. And I just think you can actually fundamentally solve their problems. If they can't build parents the way I want to build parents, if they can't manage their staff or track immunizations the way that they're meant to, you're not going to actually get very far with them. And our ability to speak to them and understand them is what enabled us to get to the.

Scale. It's amazing that you really spent time understanding the business model behind it right before actually trying to apply a set of tools. Let's talk about parents, since you brought that up. So parents and children, I mean, that's a really tricky space because it requires a deep sense of trust. You're working with data about their beloved children. Could you talk a little bit about what you had to do to develop that sense of trust with your stakeholders, whether the parents or administrators or educators or whatnot. What was that process.

Like? Part of it is, I mentioned earlier I came in as a parent originally, I'm a parent of a newborn, and that's the perspective I took. It was really important to change that early and figure out who we're solving the problem for. And I do think a lot of startups get stuck trying to solve everything for everybody. And so early in our space, like, there's 860,000 preschools and daycares in the U.S. so there's more preschools in the U.S. than our restaurants, to give an idea. It's a. It's a massive market. So part of it is like, we can't go after the whole market. Where are we going to focus? And so let's focus on a certain segment and then within that, let's figure out who are we building for and whose problems are we going to solve. And if we tried to solve the problem of the owner, administrator, teacher and parent all at once, we truly wouldn't build anything of value for any of them. And so we actually have been, for the most part, really just focused on within the school, the owner, the administrator, and now the teachers. How do we solve their problems? I was joking actually with somebody backstage who used the bright wheel, and I basically apologize because they're a parent and we haven't touched the parent app in like five years and we just been really, really focused. Yeah, no, it's embarrassing. Like, I'd notice. Very proud of that app, but it's been like hyper, hyper focused. And I think a lot of people, again, get stuck trying to solve everything for us. It was like, even now, as a larger company, we still have very limited resources. Let's know what we're solving, let's focus on that, let's figure out how we're going to measure it. And I'm very excited about addressing parent needs over time. Thankfully, they've been happy with the experience that we give them. And we're hyper, hyper focused on the folks who are going to buy and use the software every.

Day. Raise your hands if you are using brightwheel as a parent in the audience. See you got some.

Fans. Couple. Yeah, users. Hopefully they're fans. I don't know. Yeah, at least.

Users. I'm pretty sure they're fans. So during the pandemic, conditions change, it was kind of interesting. Everybody was at home. You know, parents were with their children. Like, what was that period like for brightwheel and your users and your stakeholders for.

Us? So as a company, I'd say first of all, like, we had already had three offices, so we Bay Area, Denver and Austin already. And so we had already figured out in some ways how to work across time zones and asynchronously. So in some ways that transition was maybe less hard than companies who were all on a headquarters every single day. Still challenges in being fully remote and really scaling a company and doing all that and things we have to be really intentional about on the customer side. It's really interesting because everything got really bad for a while and our entire space shut down. And there was a lot of fear there. And our belief was that childcare ultimately is a fundamental need. It was classified early on as one of the core services that would need to be protected and reopened. As we talked about, people can't literally go to work if there is no childcare. And so our space was one of the first to reopen. And there were regulations made to allow for that. And then there were a bunch of new things that they had to do. And for us, the ability to kind of quickly change our roadmap and say, we're going to solve these problems. So we launched a learning at home product for them. We launched COVID protocols, we launched a bunch of things to solve those specific problems. It ended up being an accelerant for us. It was, you know, at a weird time when things were really hard. Our team took a lot of motivation being able to solve these really, really tangible problems because businesses at left and right were going, you know, going out of business. So our ability to really solve the fundamentals for these folks, help them reopen, help them run sustainably, help them like with these new regulations, it was really an inspirational moment for our team and, you know, a moment of growth because we really could step up to that.

Moment. Oh, that's amazing. Now that we're all going back to the office, in the last year or so, parents who have been with their children, some, you know, their children don't know any other existence than them working from home, what has that been like now that parents and children are not sort of spending all their time together at.

Home? From the company side, we've been always very open about it. If a kid runs across the zoom screen, like, we're going to be very welcoming of that for our demographic and our type of work. And then what we saw is basically our space returned to full enrollment pretty quickly. There's some staffing shortages and some challenges there, but I think there's always more need than supply in our space. And so the ability to go find a spot, get in and go through that process is frankly like what it was before. And so in that way, there have been challenges and ups and downs through Covid for our space, but it's actually brought the attention to early education in a lot of ways. Like in many, like even in political spheres, early education is now talked about more than higher ed and k12 and really shine the light because I think, as you said, parents are feeling the pain and I think there's a lot of empathy there. Like they're dealing with their kid all day long. They feel a lot more for, you know, the teacher, the preschool teacher, the childcare worker who is like literally doing that work across many, many kids every.

Day. Yeah, I've, I've had colleagues who are like, oh, my kids don't want to eat when I cook them anymore. Like, I understand now what, you know, pre K was doing for my day to day, so thank you for that. Let's talk about a little bit more about people. So we touched upon your staff during the pandemic and I think you have a very strong philosophy of how to build a team and who, how to hire, how to find great candidates that, you know, fit with bright wheel strategy and culture. Mind sharing a little bit about.

That? No, of course. I'd say like for me, some big learnings are one, the biggest wins and misses for me have largely come back to people. And then two is you can have the most amazing idea, the biggest market, the best product, whatever it is. But if you can't bring the right people around you to go solve that, you're going to be, you know, on your own and never get to that point every time. So for me, like, the importance of people was something I didn't fully appreciate when I got into this journey and figuring out really who we were going to be as a company and both, you know, through our wins and the things that we're doing well, as well as the times that we brought on folks who weren't a match, really taking those moments to be introspective and say, like, who do we want to be? And I think I didn't fully appreciate until this experience that, you know, you'll have someone who really is excited and thrives at company A, like Amazon, and then they go to Google and they hate it and they bounce back or vice versa or whatever. And each company, rightly so, is going to develop its own DNA that makes it successful. Understanding that actually defining it, reinforcing it, making sure it lives throughout the organization, particularly now, being remote is one of the most important things that I have to do day to day. And again, I didn't fully appreciate that. So, you know, whether it's values or we call them leadership principles, the things that make you super unique as a company that are going to allow you to achieve that huge vision, that huge mission, you have to be fakely kind of uncompromising in those things and help people understand that. And one of the best things that we can do is in the interview process, be very open because some people are going to come in and they're going to be super excited about that, and some people are not. And we'd rather be very open about that and then help people understand what we value in terms of their growth at.

Brightwell. How do you test for that in.

Interviews? It's tough because at this point now, like, the standard thing is, oh, like, let's look at your resume, let's look at your LinkedIn, whatever it is, it's a match. Let's go. We put way less emphasis on that now. And so we really try to dig in and say, okay, like, we have a leadership principle called think critically, move fast. And so we're going to really probe and go deep on an example or give you a hypothetical and really figure out, are you a critical thinker and at the same time, are you going to just sit and think or can you take action and do you have a bias for action? We have one that is focused on customers, and so we're going to understand how you value customers and bring that into your process. So we have, literally, we have these eight leadership principles. We divvy them up amongst the interview group, we put scores against those, we debate them. If we don't get enough data, we go back and get more. And so it's being really, really direct. This is something I learned at Amazon, Frankly. Amazon has 14 leadership principles. Everybody splits them up. You figure it out and you really, again, are uncompromising. And like the bar is so high and you feel really great that by the time you get to hire somebody, they're really the right person for the right role. And so in a more nimble, maybe startup way, have brought that into Bright.

Wheel. That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, now we've made them wait for a very long time. Let's talk about Shartay. That was kind of an unconventional decision upon your part as a startup to decide to pitch SaaS, SaaS company on Shark 10. Like maybe a little bit more about the experience. Like, what was it like meeting Mark Cuban? What was it like talking to Chris Sacca? Like, what.

Happened? Yeah, first of all, I never thought I told you I got into this path very organically. Like I was getting pulled into this industry and I wanted to solve problems. I never thought I would end up being on reality tv. So it was not like a path that I sought out or ever thought about at any point. It still feels honestly foreign to me to like look at that screen and see like myself up there. So was very like serendipitous how it all unfolded, like, but I was intentional about it. And the reason I went and went to a live tryout with like my daughter Serena in my arm, which I think helped a lot. She was like a year plus at that point. And so like, you know, I won some hearts and minds in that moment and did a live tryout and took the time, at a time when we were like four people in the company really struggling, we just launched. It was the worst time to go, like invest a lot of time in trying to get onto Shark Tank. But when you think about our core audience of small business owners, preschool teachers, parents, there's few places to go reach them in the way that you can through that medium. And so it was intentional and it was about brightwheel. It wasn't about trying to get on reality tv. But for me it was a really eye opening experience. They take it very seriously. So when you say what was it like meeting Mark Cuban or Chris Sacca? When I walked out on that carpet, they had no idea who I was. They knew nothing about me. They weren't allowed to. And I've heard that people even Got kicked off the show if they tried to create contact before. So, like, it's completely cold. It's a long pitch. Like, that was the whole thing was 12 minutes of screen time. I was out there for about an hour and a half under, like, very, very hot lights, answering questions down to like, what payment processor do you use on your back end? So it was very real in a number of ways. They went into diligence afterwards. So I was really impressed with the realness of it. And then certainly it's been really great for us to tell our story over time to our customers who are schools, to employees who would want to look at brightwheel. They did a really nice job of packaging it in a way where we got to show who we are on Friday night. ABC.

Primetime. It's amazing. It's amazing. Any tips for folks out here who might want to go the shark tank.

Route? First of all, no. Like, it's a serious investment if you're actually thinking about it. Like, I didn't appreciate, I was like, oh, I'll go to this tryout with my daughter and then we'll, you know, go to Hollywood if I get there. There were like 20 rounds of like, got through the first one. Fill out a 70 page handwritten essay. You can't, you know, they really trying to weed people out. And then like 15 different video tryouts. Finally you get there and then they still tell you that they're going to cut 30% of the people who actually get who film. So no, it's a huge. The entire time my team is like, our founder is off doing this stuff. Like, why aren't you with us? They were questioning me a lot, obviously, during that time because it was a very expensive time to be investing in that. So just know that if they take it seriously, it's a huge investment. If it works out, it can be great. And I've helped folks since then who've gotten that opportunity to go.

On. Wow, thank you for that backstage glimpse. That was pretty.

Fun.

Yeah. Okay, final question. And we're going to open up for questions on Zoom as well as the audience here in person. So at one point, many moons ago, you were sitting in these seats and if you could go back to that sort of first week freshman orientation at Stanford in 1999, and you could channel a piece of advice or some wisdom to young Dave, what would that little bit of advice.

Be? I won't take that as a knock against young Dave versus now, but. Well, part of it is for me, it was being there's some Serendipity, I told you, literally allowing myself to go explore that first Friday and go over these Palo Alto. So part of it is just take opportunities. And I think that would be the main thing, is seek out opportunities and take risks. I think the moments along the way that I challenged myself, that I put myself outside of my comfort zone, whether it was on campus or off campus or traveling or taking a job, whatever it might be, those are the moments when I most figured out what was possible, what I was capable of and where I wanted to go. And so seeking out risk in some manner in a thoughtful way, depending on your risk tolerance, and seeking an opportunity and fully kind of wrapping your arms around it, I think that's a big one. And then I guess for me, I know this is an entrepreneurship course. My perspective coming into it is that there's a lot of spotlight on it that makes it seem very. It's all like rainbows and unicorns and it's all very sexy and it's all really great. I think there isn't a lot of attention given to just the grind of it. And I think a lot of people get into it and they read the Tech Hunter articles of all the funding, that's obviously the narrative is changing a bit now, but there's a lot of emphasis on the big milestones, the big funding coming through, the big wins. The reality is like it, you know, it really is tough. I think if you get into it for the wrong reasons, if your heart isn't in it, or if you're not ready to sign up for a long journey, it's going to be really tough. And so I think folks need to go in eyes wide open that you're signing up. You know, if you make it for 7, 10 plus years, through a lot of ups and downs, a lot of sacrifices along the way, like whatever might be family, friends, like pick your sacrifice. But I think the glorification sometimes of founders or startups can sometimes then surprise people when they actually get into it. And I would admit I was.

Surprised and you were already prepared. You had thought through some of these.

Things. Yeah, but I think just like how it's unnatural, I think what startups do, it's unnatural. The ability to create something in the time in which they create it and often at the scale which they create it is abnormal. It's not, you know, and I often, I tell the team, like we're creating, you know, in what we do in one year is what companies used to do in 15. Right. And so I think to get through Those hurdles, it has to be hard, otherwise everyone literally would do it and there would be a ton of bright wheels. And so I think knowing going in that there are going to be challenges, there are going to be hurdles, you have to be willing to stick with it, yet also know when to learn and change course and kind of be headstrong all the way that like you're doing it for the right reasons. All that is. Yeah, it's just, it's hard, it's a grind. And so I think I would at least coach myself a little bit to know going in and then also maybe say don't do it when you have like a three month old that isn't fully sleep trained yet. Because that, yeah, those first couple.

Months were tough, but worth.

It. Oh no. Yeah, I wake up every day super grateful to get to do this. Like we are at a size and scale now, which is like incredibly rewarding. And like I tell the team literally when we grow and earn money, so when we add a new school, we make the world a better place. Every, every school we add, we have a profound impact on all the constituents, even the community around that school. And so every time we put a dot on the map, we know, you know, the value of the work that we're doing. So rewarding without question. Definitely.

Tough. Well, let's open it up to the audience for some questions over.

There.

Yes. Oh, wait, wait. We're going to bring you a.

Microphone. Hi, thank you for the interesting talk. I'm Ethan, I got a PhD.

In W from here, from.

Stanford. And in one of these talks I met Elon Musk 20 years.

Ago.

So he gave the talk about the SpaceX and there was less people than here, so probably you'll do much.

Better. I don't know about that bar, but thank.

You. So the question is, why did you decide to go that route? And know the traditional, I mean a lot of people go the traditional route, like Page Meal Avenue. What was so attractive about that was the experience of it. I don't think it was any easier because 20 rounds was the money.

That you wanted to.

Raise. So what made you go that route versus other.

Routes? So I, I, I should say I did go the pagemill route too. So I had already raised some funding before that. And so for me it was really the value that Shark Tank uniquely brings, which is exposure. And you know, like I would say that the both Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca have been far more helpful than I realized. They treat it as a real venture investment. They're frankly very accessible they check in regularly. They've continued to invest over the years. So they, you know, it basically is, is, is the value is just immense. Like when you think about it, this is ABC primetime television. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 30 second spot on, you know, during that show to show a commercial. I walked away with 600 grand and you know, and got a couple, you know, a good amount of time. So it really was that, that opportunity to tell our story more than anything. And again, I probably undervalued that in some ways as well as undervalued, you know, the contributions that Mark and Chris and their teams would make over.

Time. Yeah, thank.

You. Let's do the ca is willing to run to the far back scar, the red.

Scar. Thank you very much for sharing your story. As a fellow parent, I can definitely relate to doing a lot of things with a little child at home. Just a general experience. My question is, does. So it sounds like the idea was born around the product first because there was a need for this product to do as a parent and support. At what point as you were building the company, at what point did you transition from product focus to more kind of operationalizing it and building really the company and operations and healthy.

Pipeline? Yeah, it's a really great question. So part of it, I would say it started with the pain of it. And so it was actually eye opening. Frankly, I could feel it viscerally the pain that these folks felt day to day of managing a business and a preschool or childcare, being highly regulated, managing staff and families. It was overwhelming. And I think I borrowed a phrase early on that we were going to be a painkiller, not a vitamin. And so figuring out, I say forget to take the vitamin day to day, but when you need the painkiller, you're going to seek it out and use it every day. And so we wanted to solve that pain. So my starting point was just cataloging that and understanding that. And there are different ways to go from there. There are people who build quietly for a long time and then launch something. And I decided that we were going to move really fast. I read a book early on called the Lean Startup that was really influential for me, which is get something out and iterate and learn. So we launched in 2015 with a free product, very basic, doesn't do a fraction of what we do today. And we didn't charge for it. We actually lost money on every transaction. But we learned and we learned all the time. And so when we eventually, you know, over the next two Years, I figured out roughly what the business model was going to be, what people were roughly willing to pay, and how we were going to kind of carve things out. We only launched a paid version of brightwheel, you know, which is the core of the company today, two years later in 2017. And so again, some people might wait and launch that, you know, a year or two in. And for me, it was, no, let's just get out there and earn some respect, earn some love, but learn every day through the product. And so different ways of going about it. But that's been kind of generally how we try to run the company.

Awesome. Let's. In the yellow.

Shirt. I thank you for sharing. In the beginning of your talk, you mentioned that rather than like sitting and designing and kind of thinking about it, that someone told you to just go do it. Can you kind of describe what that step from like, step zero to step one was like and kind of how that propelled you forward? Yeah. So I felt very blocked early on because it was a. It was a lot to go do and think about and solve in our space. Like, you have the business owner, the, the. The. The administrators, the teachers, the parents. And as I said, I actually was focusing on the parents first wrongly, and started thinking, okay, I'm going to go build an app. I got to go figure something out. The best advice, which now I'm offering for free, I guess, is just literally go test something. And so I created a. I don't even know what it was on, but probably some PowerPoint slide or whatever and acted like I had a real product. And I went door to door and showed it and got feedback on it and basically got beaten up through that process because it just. People were like, that's fine, but not the thing. And if I had like toiled away and built that thing for a while, it would have been totally the wrong thing. And so quickly getting that feedback of this is not our biggest problem. Let's talk about what is. Then I went back and built another fake thing. And at the time we called Kid Casa. And that was just a way to get to market quickly. I created that. I created list of seven names, pick one, and then put it on paper and said, okay, now we have this. What do you think of this? It's ready to go. Let's talk about what you need for it. And then through that process was able to convince one, eventually two small childcare providers in San Francisco, just a beta with me. And so then eventually just built with them. And so it was kind of an. Iterative process to, like, figure it out until I had enough to know what I could build. Built a really, you know, not great early version of Kid Casa. But again, just continue to the. Even to the last question. Just continue iterating and.

Learning. Let's take a zoom question. So, Mandy, if you want to read the top.

One.

Yeah. All.

Right. Most upvoted question on zoom. Can you elaborate a little more on the value added for teachers? Do you notice some kind of initial pushback from teachers? It seems to be more work overload for.

Them. So it was interesting coming in. I think there are really different approaches. I consider us ultimately a SaaS company, but when you look at education companies, there are a lot of folks that come in and say, look, we know better. We know how to solve your problems. We took a very different approach, which is, what are your pain points? What are the most challenging things, whether you're administrator or teacher, and how do we solve that? And what are the things that we can do to solve that and do it in a way that feels intuitive. And so, like, even to the early iterations, it was figuring out how quickly can we get that job done. There's a framework called work to be done or jobs to be done. How do we get that done as quickly and efficiently and easily as possible to the point where they can pick it up and get the stuff done that they're doing anyway, really, really easily? And so we don't come in and say, Brightwell does an insane amount of things. We don't say, do all these things. We say, take the things you're doing today, and we promise we'll make life easier and save you measurable time, and then earn their respect with that. And then over time, we get to do more and more for them. But we take a very teacher, educator, owner centric view of we want to solve your problem, whatever that problem is, and do it in the best way.

Possible. All right. You've been waiting so.

Patiently. I know you mentioned the importance of hiring, and I was just curious if you'd speak a little bit about your first few hires. Were people that you knew, like engineers, or what was it that you started with for your first or your core founding team? Yeah, I did it the wrong way because I was. I built up a group of folks up at Amazon that I got to know really well and built trust with them and then decided to relocate to the Bay Area to start a company with my wife. So at the time, it was really starting fresh. And really in that time, this is back in 2014, you really only worked with the people that you were physically around day to day. And I didn't have a great group of folks to bring in. And so it was really like putting out job postings at the time on Angellist and saying I had some hope of the mission that would speak to people and then really literally meeting people every single day and trying to convince them of it. And there were a couple early folks who were willing enough to take a gamble. It helped that we had some funding early on, so it wasn't fully risky for them. But in particular, I think it spoke to people who wanted to do something meaningful, do something good. One of the very first engineers that I hired, he knew nothing about our space. He didn't really even care about it that much, but he wanted to do something good for the world, and he wanted to leave where he was to do that. And so we struck up a conversation around that convinced him. He stayed on for five years. But a lot of the early work, to your question, is being the champion and the motivator and the person who can paint that vision enough so that you can get a couple people around the table. And then once you get that core group, it becomes a lot.

Easier. Let's go to the back. Oh, wait, wait. You had your hand up in the black jacket. Yes. Thank.

You. Hi.

Hi. Thank you so much for sharing your story about working with students in East Palo Alto, just as somebody who does the same. So given the long history of inequality in ed tech and. And how it can sometimes be something that really exacerbates existing inequalities, how is brightwheel or how have you made Bright Wheel not something that's just for wealthy.

Preschools? It's a great question. So there was a lot of skepticism I had early on whether it was folks interested in impact or even investors, and they thought, oh, this is going to be a Silicon Valley wealthy preschool product that certain demographics will buy. And I felt confident enough early on that the pain that we were solving was going to be universal. And I had to test that throughout different markets throughout the country, and different demographics throughout the country, and every round of funding that we've taken on. It's been really important to me to bring on an impact investor who actually is going to help us think about this and help hold us accountable. Hopefully you heard. For me, it's been a big part of my life and my work. And so having them around the table is a part of it, and a part of it is just what we care about, what we prioritize and I think the main thing I can say now is right rules and literally if you took a paint can and like threw it against the wall. We're in every type of school across the country, certainly all 50 states and global, but all types of schools, all pedagogies, all price points, all demographics. And some of the biggest impact that we have actually is in schools and disadvantaged areas where you know, for them it's actually less a question of funding. We're not a super expensive product, but the impact is outsized because they don't have access usually to tools like this. And a big part of what we want to do is actually democratize really great tools. And so and then in some cases we have partnered like we serve a lot of nonprofit organizations and head starts where we work with them to discount in the right ways. But the really rewarding thing has been, you know, for us we have kept price low in a number of ways and focused on the value that we add. And I really, you know, what we hear and what we see is that brightwheel really is accessible to everybody and we're able to then measure the impact. And so if you go into a tough area and you're able to save them measurable time, so we save up to an hour per staff member per day and give them time back to spend time with the kids or to even frankly just go home on time. And then if you're helping on the parent side as well, it has a huge impact and frankly an outsized impact in those types of.

Scenarios. I know we have a few more questions, but I do have to bring it to a close. This was an amazing conversation. I learned so much about ed tech today. So couple of comments and then we're going to give them a huge round of applause. So next week we're going to have Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series again at 4:30 here and our speaker will be Nikhil Viswanathan who is the co founder and CEO of Alchemy. So come and learn about web tech web3. If you're curious about these talks, go to the Stanford E Corner, Ecorner, Stanford Edu. You can find more talks going back 20, 30 years. I guess you and I were here, we had upscale back then and there's podcasts, there's articles, there's much more content on entrepreneurship and engineering at Stanford. So let's give Dave a huge round of applause and that.