311 - How Generative AI is Shaping the Future of Education and Workforce Development with Ziplines Education's Sara Leoni

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Sarah Leone, you are the CEO of a company called Zipline Education, and which can be found at zipline— ziplines.com. Welcome to the show. So let's start off with a basic question. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. I'll just say that I look at your website and look at your team. You've got a big team. There's got to be a story there.

Yeah, I always like to start with, at my core, I'm an athlete, and that has really driven a lot about how I show up as a leader. As a Division I softball player, you go from everything. From figuring out how to build the right team. You spend a ton of time on reflection. It's a pressure cooker, right? So you're always dealing with everything from incredible successes to incredible failures. And I think with that also breeds just a general competitive nature. And when I think about who I am as a leader, a lot of that basis is built from those experiences that I had growing up, up into my early adulthood.

So tell us about all that. Where did you grow up? Where'd you go to school? How did you get into what you're doing today? Yeah, on education.

Yeah, so I grew up in Southern California. My dad was a mechanic. My mom got her degree in her early 30s, so had a later launch in life. And I played sports from a very early age. I— anything basically that I could get my hands on, if it had to do with a ball, I was into it. And for me, a really important aspect of determining where I went from an educational perspective was having the ability to get a full-ride scholarship. And so, I was recruited by a number of institutions but joined University of Nevada, Las Vegas. So, I went to school in Las Vegas, which is always an interesting story for people. I think there's a little bit of a jaw drop, "Oh my gosh, how did that go?" Jerry Tarkanian. Yeah, Tarkanian. I was just past Tarkanian. Alaskanian. That experience was incredible for me, and not only did it pay my way through college but really helped me build a lot of, again, those core skills that I talked about. And post-college, I decided that Las Vegas wasn't where I wanted to hang my hat, and shortly thereafter moved up to Northern California where my mom had moved and where I knew that there was a really vibrant economy and workforce and a lot of opportunity, and I never left. So I'm Here on the peninsula, just south of San Francisco.

Tell us about Ziplines.

Yeah, so Ziplines is a career accelerator that partners with leading universities to deliver industry-focused certificate courses really designed to empower professionals to thrive in a future that's shaped very much by technology and by innovation.

So how did you come about— did you found the company, or were you recruited in as a CEO?

Yeah. So I was recruited in as the CEO of a company called GreenFig. I would say we, over time, as many startups do, as Doug, we went through a number of changes, right? We went through a pretty significant pivot to Zipline's education. And really the idea and the vision behind what we're building today is very much mine. So I will say while I was brought in to run GreenFig, and there's parts of GreenFig that still exist in our DNA, it's really a very new company. And so when I think about it, I very much founded what exists today around ziplines education.

As I look at the website, it, it, you have courses for individuals and then you have corporate training, corporate certifications that people can get. And I also saw that you, you have a association with a lot of universities.

Mm-hmm.

How, how does, how do those partnerships work?

Yeah, look, one of the things that's really important to us is when we think about how do we help individuals today who are entering the workforce or who are just trying to survive in the workforce, there are a couple important components to how we serve that audience. One is obviously we need to bring skills, right? Training that is up to date, that's really industry-focused, that integrates things like generative AI. Like, all that's really important. I would say the other important piece is that as employers, as employers look at these credentials of somebody who may be applying for a job or even somebody who's in a job and looking to take on more responsibilities, that credential's a really important component. And so for us, one of the things that we learned very early on in our journey was when people would look at, hey, I have a credential from Zipline's education, what does that mean exactly? Versus I have a credential from the University of Texas Austin McCombs School of Business. And it carries a very different weight. And the reality is, is those universities are very much reviewing our curriculum, excuse me, validating our curriculum. And so they're a really important component to how we show up to enable those professionals to develop skills.

So I'm trying to understand the model. You have your own, I, I take it you develop your own on your own curriculum and produce it, whatever it is. I, I have online courses, so I know what that's all about.

Yeah.

Um, and then you go out to universities and have them bless what you've done. Yeah. And then how do the students— the universities don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They make money out of this, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Look, we, so in many cases we are partnering with the continuing education division.

Okay.

Right. Of an institution. Those, those organizations are, a lot of their purpose is really to create revenue generation for an institution and to ensure that they're bringing in alternative forms of learning for adult learners, right? People that they're not currently serving in a 4-year degree or graduate degree. So we partner with those continuing education divisions. And you got it right. We develop the curriculum. We bring in the subject matter experts, the instructors, all the support systems around it. They bless the curriculum. And we do a lot of the marketing in those regions, right? So we will say— I brought up University of Texas earlier. We will go out and build a marketing campaign that really provides awareness in the footprint of that particular institution.

Got it.

And as you might imagine, in some cases we're serving alumni from institution, in other ways we're really allowing or enabling that institution to broaden its reach to serve folks that couldn't otherwise be, be part of that university community.

So that— I, I can see the benefits of the university, and they, they get paid, I presume they get paid a little bit of whatever you charge for tuition.

That's correct.

That's correct. They get a, they get a piece of the action and they bless your curriculum and then the certificate comes from them based on the course material that you offer your students.

That's correct.

That's correct. I mean, I can see why universities would like that. You take away all the work and they get all the benefit. Yeah.

And one of the things that's really challenging right now is that as quickly as technology is moving, we're making constant updates to our curriculum. And you highlighted, we have a number of partners, so we have 30 university partners. When we update that curriculum, we're able to update it across many institutions, a consortium of institutions. Our investment can go a lot further than say every single university trying to build out this curriculum and stay on pace on their own. And so the value add is very much in that also, that relevance of curriculum.

Saves them a lot of money.

Yeah.

Because they don't have to develop, they don't have to update, develop and then update the curriculum.

Develop and update. Yeah, that's correct.

You've got a— is Ziplines remote, hybrid, or all in person?

Hmm. Oh, we've been remote from the very beginning. We were remote before it was cool to be remote.

There you go. Okay. I thought so. But you got a bit, you got a big organization. How many employees do you have?

Yeah, we have, we've got about close to 50 full-time employees and then we've got a really extended audience of folks that are what we would consider our live session instructors, our learner success advocates, and that basically about doubles the size of our team today.

Wow. So what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Yeah, it was funny. I, I just had a— so speaking of listening, had a, a conversation on Friday with a brand new employee of ours, somebody that we brought in to really run QA for our marketing team. And she asked a very similar question. It was like, what motivates you? And for me, it's— that's easy. There's, there's a number of things within here. I think one Being able to create and develop a business that has a true impact on people's lives is incredibly motivating, right? The stories that come back about how we've enabled people to build the confidence, to develop the skills, to parlay that into something new and different, and whether that's a new job or them just feeling like they've got a seat at the table, that is incredibly motivating to me. I think also at my core, you know, flashback to what I talked about being an athlete. I love building. I love the pressure cooker. I love the team, right? I love the team dynamics. And so for me, another motivating piece is just being able to bring in this incredible group of talent that over time we get to see grow. And we really get to challenge in unique ways and see how it comes together to accomplish amazing things. All of that for me is what, what, where I wake up every day really excited about what I get to do.

I, I'm curious about how you, we left a, a blank space here that I'll let you fill in. You, you graduated from UNLV.

Yeah.

And now you're a CEO. Yeah. What hap— what happened in between? Did you go back to school and get an MBA or did you just— nope. Okay. So you just learned all these skills all just on the job? Yeah.

Yeah. I like to say I got the MBA, the best MBA on the job and I, I am somebody who learns by doing very much. So for me, there— do I take courses and do I read a lot of books? Absolutely. At the end of the day though, all of my best learnings have come from real life experiences, which means mistakes. Yeah, absolutely. Which, which absolutely makes mistakes. And that's again where athletes' success, failures, you have to learn how to deal with both, right? And I never— people say, what was the Did you design a path to CEO? And the reality is I didn't. I didn't have— I didn't— there was never a goal in my mind of I want to accomplish X. I think what I knew in my DNA was that I was incredibly hard worker, that I was ambitious, right? But ambitious from the perspective of loving to do good and be part of a team and contribute to that team more than ambitious of I want to climb the corporate ladder. And but I think that my DNA, right, and just being that driven and engaged and team-oriented, over time, I just kept moving up and I would take on new teams and new opportunities. And it gave me— and most of my background, by the way, was in marketing, right? It was very much in performance marketing. So, more spreadsheets than thinking about more brand orientation. And so, I was able to parlay that very easily from Hey, when you think about performance marketing, you're thinking about top-line growth, you're thinking about bottom-line profitability of, of a marketing spend. And I was doing this for $100 million, $150 million businesses. So not, not small budgets, right? And over time you recognize the components of, oh, how does that fit into how you operate a business? And again, didn't get my MBA. I was a communications major. I learned finance through managing a business. And hiring great people, right? I think that's the other thing is how do you hire great people and learn from those people over time so you yourself can get better?

That's— you're not the first person I've had a conversation with. I'm— I think that almost every successful CEO I've talked to said that the number one function of a CEO is hiring smart, good people. Yeah. And if you're gonna scale, hire people that know how to scale, hire people that know how to hire.

Absolutely.

And that seems to be a major theme running through the success that I've learned in the 300+ interviews I've done.

Yeah.

So you've talked about your background as a Division I softball player in college and competitive nature and all that. If you look really deep inside yourself, what do you think is unique about you that you bring to the table that makes all of this work?

I would say I lead with a ton of authenticity and empathy. I think that is one of the things that, you know, outside of being very driven, you know, my flip side is I care very deeply about people. And both from the perspective of, yeah, at our core, a company's only as good as the people that you hire, but I truly I care deeply about everybody as not just an employee, but a human being. And I think the combination of those two things can be really powerful.

I agree. You mentioned the word empathy. I'm writing my fifth book right now on leadership empathy, what it is and how to do it and how not to do it.

Yeah.

And why you have to do it.

Yeah.

And that, of course, flows right into what I love to talk about, which is listening. How did you learn how to listen?

Oh, goodness. I think, one, you can't be part of a great team without listening and understanding where other people are, what space they are occupying. That's a really core part of being a team. And so I think from a very early age, really listening and feeling, right? I talked about the empathy piece was just a core of, I would say, a capability that that I didn't recognize was something important to build or to create. But over time, I think that's part of where it really started. And the reality is you can't be a great leader without being a great listener. You just can't. I don't think you can. Or at least I value what you gain in listening to people and hearing their feedback and the challenges they face. And how that impacts both positively and negatively a business. And I spend a lot of time with my ear to the ground, both. I think there's, as I was preparing a little bit for this podcast and thinking about what are the ways I listen, I think there's one being very present as part of a conversation that you're having, whether it's an individual or a small team or a big team, and just really trying to recognize what's happening in that space. But then too, another way that we listen very deeply at Ziplines is through surveys and feedback. And when we do, for example, we had an all-company retreat in North Carolina about 3 or 4 months ago, and I followed back up with the team with a survey. And the idea of that was, hey, what did you like? What did you not like? How do we make this better? And we listened, right? We listened. And then what I do is I take all of that, and as we go into the next one, we identify the things that we are going to make sure that we implement as part of that process. And so people very much feel heard. And I think that's a big part of closing the loop on listening is not just listening, but making sure people feel heard.

Yeah, it's what I call Type 2 listening, where the agenda of the listener is to make sure the speaker feels heard from the speaker's frame of reference. And one thing I've observed over the years in the work that I do is that most people never have the experience of being deeply heard. And when you can fulfill that, things change radically. Yeah. And that's why I devote a lot of time to teaching people how to listen in this way, because I've seen some amazing transformations, like watching 10 women on a prison yard in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world change a yard of 1,000 women from violence to peace in a year by listening.

Yeah.

It's amazing. It's amazing.

It's incredible. That's an incredible, incredible story.

And, you know, so you have experiences like that and the same experiences that you're talking about where, you know, you're listening for information and to improve and course correct when necessary, but also listening to make people feel validated and heard. And I call it listening other people into existence. And it's just incredible when you can do that. Where do you see Ziplines going into the future? Continue to expand, scale? Is that what the typical—

yeah, yeah. Look, we're, we are on a great trajectory. We're going to continue to— our big goal is Look, we, we want to provide the best possible service to our institutional partners, our university partners, which means really providing the best for our students, right, by those adult learners. And as I look ahead, it's we want to continue to develop really strong relationships and expand our university network, right? Continue to go into new markets and regions. We want to continue to build out the right types of courses, right? The right types of skills that enable people to have that transformational change. So continuing to expand our catalog, and then really deepen things from a relationship perspective. I think we're in a unique position to be able to embrace that university and that regionality and think about how do we develop relationships or connections with employers? How do we really understand the labor market makeup of those regions and ensure that the learners that are coming through our programs are both developing the skills that are most in demand in those particular regions and are able to translate those. And there's a lot on the horizon that we're really—

Oh yeah, technology is— I think we're at the cusp of something that's going to make the Industrial Revolution look like kindergarten.

Yeah. And nobody— we don't know, right?

We don't know. That's right. All right.

Yeah.

So how— you got me curious now because I teach at graduate level and I'm really curious about how you do determine what kind of course offerings that you're going to develop? Is, is that something you do? I'm presuming you must do some market research out there. What's in demand? What's needed? Talk to your university partners, find out what they're seeing. What are students looking for? What are employers looking for? That sort of thing. Is that kind of the—

Yeah, it's, listen, it's a lot of market research. And at the end of the day, there's no report that's going to come back and say, this is a winner or a loser, right? There's there's many dynamics from what does the labor market tell you that is in demand by employers? What are consumers, what are learners, professionals looking for? What are they searching for? Because if the reality is if people aren't looking for it—

Buyers intent, right?

You can build it, but they won't come. And then it's, yeah, as you talked about, having conversations with those universities to say, hey, how do we continue to complement what's in your catalog today? And we don't— in our relationships with institutions, we provide them basically with a menu of options and they can pick and choose. But for us, it's really important to understand where are the areas where they're most interested, where are the gaps that they see in their market. And so that definitely is a big part of the input process. And look, the thing that's really interesting is with, with the introduction of generative AI, right? With the tools and the capacity that's become available in that space, it's become impossible to predict, right? Because people don't know what to search for because it hasn't been created yet. And so we are— that's where it's really important to keep a very tight pulse on what's happening in the market and not just what employers are looking for from a labor market data perspective, but What are people using on the ground, right? What's the reality of the practicality of what's happening in business today? And so that input has to feed in even more than it has traditionally in the past.

And then how do you find your teachers?

Yeah. So, because that's huge. It is huge. It is huge. There is this incredible little network, you might have heard of it, called LinkedIn. And we use LinkedIn as a tool similar to how you might recruit a team. Right. We recruit subject matter experts. And as we've continued to grow, as you might imagine, we get referrals from people. We continue, and, and we're getting— I think in any, in any business, you need to find what's the ideal profile of a subject matter expert, of a learner success advocate, of a live session instructor. And each of those profiles are different, and we're building on them all the time. And then our goal is, great, bring them in, train them, and then, and see if we can coach them through this process or not. And so it's a constant, it's a constant evolution, if you will, because it's, we're serving a lot of students. That's right. And across many institutions.

Interesting.

Yeah.

This conversation's gone fast. One more question. I'll let you go, Sarah. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Ah, yeah. I told you about my background as an athlete. I would say that one thing that I wouldn't know, although you might be able to eye spy it in my background, I am a total car freak. Yeah, my, as I mentioned, my dad was a mechanic. I grew up around cars. My uncle used to restore old Model As, Model Ts. I have another uncle who had a new sports car every year and I have a '64 Ford that I, a Ford Fairlane that I love. I don't drive it as much as I would like to.

I remember those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, like some, some people like purses or shoes. I like cars.

We would never know that. This has been a great conversation, Sarah. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, no, thank you for having me, Doug. This has been really fun.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.