S5 E19: Joshua Wohle, Mindstone

So the future would look like a world where you can decide whatever you want to learn and Mindstone will put together a learning pathway based on your current skill level, your life context, and then helps you through it in a way to accelerate, to go as fast as you possibly can, and making sure that you're able to apply this to your end goal. So that would be the future that I'd love to build. I'm Joshua Vohle, the co founder and CEO of Mindstone.

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change an industry and build and lead a team that has your back. I'm your host Noah Lavart and today How Joshua Vola built the platform to automatically create learning pathways from online content. All this and more on Code Story. Joshua Vola was born in the Netherlands. Before he was 13 he actually went to five different schools. Afterwards he moved to Switzerland and went into the public school system which was all in French, which he didn't speak. In his younger years he started building websites and ultimately started a company with 35 other high school students building these websites. Eventually he moved to London initially to shape up his computer science background given he was a self taught developer. He attended a multi year computer science program at King's College and during the last year of university he attempted to try to start another business. He and his co founders declined an investment and never got another offer so the business was out. After university he started a company called super awesome, providing tools for safe digital engagement to almost half a billion kids every month while also ensuring that parental consent was baked in. Seven years after starting the company he sold it to Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite. At the time of the acquisition the company was 170 people with offices all over the world for fun. He's a whiskey lover and he's been collecting them for over 10 years now and in fact once a week he does a fully remote whiskey tasting with a friend of his. His favorite is the I Leech, his backup being a 10 year Laphroaig. After many self learning adventures in his life, Joshua set out to create a product that would allow people to go through self directed learning online, but in specific learning pathways and would allow them to learn faster in the process. Self taught developer? No problem. Be able to prove you went through the appropriate material and acquired the skills necessary. The creation story of Mindstone.

Mindstone is basically a platform that allows you to both create and consume learning pathways that are made of out of any content you can find online. So imagine being able to take the 50 best podcasts, videos and articles in Microeconomics, you put them in an order and you're able to showcase that on the pathway. Sorry, on Mindstone, that forms a pathway that somebody else can go through. So if I put together Microeconomics 101 based off of these resources that I think are great, somebody else can go through that pathway. We would record the learning that is happening and when they get to the end of it, they will have completed Microeconomics 101. It's not too dissimilar from say a Udemy or a Coursera or Udacity, with the difference being that those platforms have very siloed content coming just from a particular university, a particular lecture. What we're trying to do here is more think about how on YouTube you have a bunch of creators that create content and other people that consume the content. Here it would be similar where you have people creating pathways based off of all this content that's available and then other people that can go through that content to learn from. I've had a weird kind of checkered past with education and learning. So I did like four, four or five different schools before I was 13, moved to Switzerland. I didn't French. But then having to go through public schooling still meant having to learn in French without understanding. Learning math in French without knowing French was a hard, hard one to go through. Then I moved to London. I did my computer science course, but I did it part time. I then did my MBA remotely with Open University which was entirely remote. And then I've been a big consumer of different massive online course platforms like MOOCs, sorry, like Coursera and Udemy and others. So I've had this personal experience of those different learning platforms and different ways of learning and at the same time I'm self taught developer. So I taught myself to code to a point that it was commercially valuable, where I built the business on it and people were willing to pay quite a bit of money for it. And in the developer space it's fairly, it's actually very acknowledged and very commonplace to be a self taught coder. And you can go out to the best companies in the world and say, nope, I do not have a degree but I really know how to build my stuff. Here's the evidence, you should hire me anyways. And I always found it interesting that this is not true for any other domain. Even though the content required to learn is available. If I want to learn how to build a rocket, I Can do so based off of purely the materials I can find online. But if I then want to try and get a job that allows me to build a rocket, good luck trying to demonstrate you have those skills. Good luck trying to actually make your way through. Same for if you wanted to be an economics analyst and you then and you self teach and then try to get a job at a bank. Just doesn't really happen. So that was kind of the base feeling and what I then did. I started investing in the, in the education space about three years ago as an excuse to sit down with other founders and sit down with other investors and just have conversations around wait, what are the macro problems that people are investing in at the moment and what are the micro problems that founders are trying to solve on a day to day and why and try and both be helpful because obviously I built super awesome to a certain level already at the time, which led to interesting conversations, but also for myself to try and understand with a view on building something one day, where could we be helpful? And then yeah, I actually read a book called how we Learn by Benedict Carey, which I cannot recommend highly enough if you're interested in the space. It's basically it's a New York Times journalist who compiled a bunch of research about how people learn in a way that nicely consumable. It's not you could, it reads like a novel rather than a science report, but it brings to light a lot of discrepancies between how we know we learn how the brain works and how little people actually know about it. And so it became very interesting because in my head it was many of those processes actually seemed fairly easy to apply and some of them even automatable as my computer science mindset kind of kicked in there. And so that was actually the starting point of Mindstone, which is that there are, there are a bunch of techniques that you can apply which would allow people to learn faster. And then combined with that initial thought around the self learning idea of using all the content that's available online, we thought well what if you built a platform that allowed you to take all the content that's available online, learn from that in a way that is recorded so that you can bring those proof points to your current employer or future employer and say yes, here is a proof that I actually have acquired these skills by learning myself going through and then underneath that platform, what if you built in these different techniques of the science of learning that would actually accelerate the learning journey so that you actually learn faster than you would if you were to try and do it on your own and you would actually remember more of what you were going through than if you would just watch the video independently or read an article independently.

Tell me about the mvp. So you got, you got the idea, and I've got an idea of how you know what you've, what you're building. But tell me about that first version of the product, how long it took you to build it, and what sort of tools you used to bring it to life.

We believe very strongly in release fast, release early. I think it was Reid Hoffman who said, like if you're not ashamed of your product when you launch it, you launched it too late. Very big believer in that. And so we launched the product two weeks after we started the company. The very first version of it that we actually put in front of people, the only thing that it allowed you to do was basically take a URL of an article, put it into our platform, it would scrape the article and it would allow you to highlight different elements of it. That's all it did. And we have been iterating on it ever since. And so I'd say the first minimum viable product that we actually, that we actually shipped to kind of open beta that we were still ashamed of, but happy to kind of get, get other people used that. We had no idea who they were. That was a tool that allowed you to take any content you find online. So again, whether it's a video, a podcast, an article, doesn't matter. You could import that in Mindstone and then Mindstone would allow you to annotate it. So highlight it with different categories, comment on it, mention other people. So if you wanted to have a discussion around it, you could do that. Think almost Google annotation and commenting like features, but on any type of content you find online, you could then add notes on the side and you could save these elements for later. So that if you came across an interesting piece of content and you didn't have the time to read it or to go through it right there and then, we would allow you to put it in your queue and to just for you to get back to it later, rather than keeping the tab open, which lots of people will be doing at the moment, you could just send it to Mind Stone and get back to it whenever you had the time. That was the real MVP where you would have the ability to learn from these pieces of content, but it wasn't yet the learning pathway product that we have today.

So staying on that MVP a little bit, tell me about some of the decisions and trade offs you had to make in the short term around, you know, we're only going to build this with, you know, inputting URL and scraping it. You know, how did you make those decisions decisions and how did you cope with them?

I don't think that there's a very clear cut answer because the reality is there was a lot of back and forth. We have a team that has various elements. Some of us have worked together for a long time, others have not. Some come from a product background, others do not at all. And so there was definitely a lot of tension around when does something go out? But most of the decision came from what is the smallest possible thing that we can imagine with any kind of probability might have value to someone. And if you can reason that a smaller version of what you're talking about might have value to someone, most of the time it makes sense to go for the smaller version first. Just get it out there. And it always came back down to the equation of. Or the thing that the thinking that the amount of feedback you get by putting something out there earlier so the extra feedback you're getting because you launched it faster is worth more than the fact the product would be better a bit further down the line. And if you believe in that fundamental concept where basically you're kind of saying that you have some hunches, but really your users will know better what is required than you will yourself, if you agree with that, then the value of getting more of those users telling you quickly what is wrong with it is so high that it is better to get it out there quickly. And so every single time we would have discussions around reducing the scope and for actually we have had since the start of the company, a role where we would always, every week need to have at least a single thing that is going to significantly change the user's experience. And if we didn't have anything that we were shipping that would significantly improve the user's experience in that week, then we would basically discuss as long as it was required until we found that one thing that we could break it down so that we could make that improvement.

That's actually a perfect segue into my next question. So you talked about like shipping something every week that would significantly change the user's experience. Tell me about that process you went through of progressing the product in that way and maturing it. But I'm interested in how you decided on your roadmap and how you decided, okay, this is the next most important thing to build.

The reality is that we talk to a Lot of our users, and I would say this is probably one of the things where the COVID lockdowns and people working from home have actually helped us build a better product. Because before COVID asking somebody to call on, to jump on a zoom call and have a quick chat was not done outside of a pure business context. And that barrier has dropped so significantly that we have been able to just look at the, the users that are using our platform when they came on and we would have like, there's an actual message from me that goes out for any user that falls into a particular pattern of usage where we just ask them, hey, looks like you're either enjoying or really not enjoying the product. And we try and classify those two. Would you be willing to jump on a call for 15 minutes and so jump on a call with the CEO and founder, which tends to. They tend to be happily surprised because okay, wow, this is a company that actually cares, wants to have a chat with, with the users. And many people agree. Many people jump on the call. And we have done more than 400 user interviews in the last year.

That's a lot. That's a lot.

And so to, to kind of round off on your original question, that is how we decide the roadmap and actually to make it maybe more concrete for anyone that's listening as well, we actively do not maintain a roadmap. We have a very active stance against a roadmap because we believe that if you have a roadmap that somehow means that you know better than the feedback that might be coming from your users. Because if you really value the feedback that's coming from your users, then saying you know what you're going to be building in three months doesn't make any sense anymore. Because if you're taking the feedback you're getting today really at its true value, why aren't you acting on it tomorrow? And so we have tried to make really sure. We have very short planning sessions and I'd say, like, we have some overarching goals, strategic goals, but the planning happens on a week to week basis.

Let's switch to team. So tell me about how you built your team and what did you look for in those people to indicate that they were the winning horses to join you?

There were a few different elements. One, the very first one was that I wanted to make sure, because Mindset is a learning company, at the end of the day, we try to help people learn faster and remember more. So I wanted to make sure we had an education professional as part of the founding team and I was introduced through a former mentor of mine, actually to Patrick. And Patrick was a teacher in philosophy and religion with a specialization in epistemology, basically the theory of knowledge. And it was a really interesting one because he felt that he had come to basically a ceiling in his profession where he was great at what he was doing, but his impact was forever limited to 30, 50 people at a time because of the format in which he was delivering it. And so he was trying to figure out if there wasn't a better way. And we just hit it off pretty directly. I tried to absorb as much of his knowledge as possible at the very start when we, when we met. And yeah, after a few meetings decided, well, actually we should, we should do it together, because it was. We were both trying to figure out and do something similar. So that was the first piece. So I was Chief Product Technology Officer at Super awesome, so obviously I had a technology background and a product background, but I was missing the industry expertise then as I was going to run Mind Stone. And because I at super awesome, even though I was cto, I had not been coding for a while. The team was pretty big. I was mostly focused on building teams at super awesome rather than actually coding. I was lucky, obviously, that I've worked with quite a few different people on the development side. And the one of them very specifically that I had worked with already 15 years in different on and off, not for a 15 year stretch, but kind of all the way when I was 16, hired him for the first time and then kind of continued doing so. And he had also been there at super awesome in the early stages. This was Florian Sisset. Yeah, so he was there for three and a half years or so. It's a gross. And he then went on to Monzo, which was one of the big financial technology companies, a new bank that came up in the uk. So he went through a big scaling phase there, which was interesting because he got to see how all of that happened for about two years. And yeah, just sat down with him, asked him, okay, there's, there's another thing that is about to start. And this was definitely not the first time we'd had this discussion because it's basically the fourth time that we were doing something together and he was in. So it was the right time for him as well. So that were. We were three of us at the time. And then before we started, we got Melody on board as well, who again, brought an entirely different skill set to the table. Melody is a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. She worked with Newton. So she had been in the education space, in the education technology space quite a bit. She was there for three and a half years and then she went on to spend two years investing in early stage education technology companies. So she had both the operational expertise of having seen something big fail and at the same time spent two years building up a network and an expertise on the macro level thesis of what could work in the future from an education technology perspective. And we just really saw eye to eye and that was definitely a skill set that we knew would help us accelerate and make better decisions as we were to to do this. And so just before we actually founded the company, Melody decided to join as a co founder as well. She basically came to the conclusion that she preferred an operating role to an investor role. And so those two kind of dovetailed pretty nicely. And then last but not least, literally on these at the same week that we started the company, there was another developer that both Florian and I worked with at Super Awesome. It was just all around awesome and we knew that we needed somebody else to help us build more because I was just no longer efficient at even though I could have, I would have slowed everyone down instead of helping. And so Stefan decided to join as a founder there as well literally on week one of the company. And so we set out five of us to go and do so. But it was a very deliberate effort over a total of a year and a half of putting the team together basically.

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I would say neither. We have the we have the Advantage One of the things that we decided to do differently at Mindstone than we did at super awesome is that we currently only have senior talent in the business. So people that have been there before have done it before, have seen what happens and have some of the best practices just ingrained into their current practice already. Very different from super awesome where we were on the lowest possible budget with I mean I was CTO and I was very green. That should tell you most of how we how we looked at doing this. So the advantage it gives us now is that because some of these habits have been ingrained in the people that we work with, we don't fall over on the first thing that happens. We don't explicitly build for scale because I think that is a mistake to preempt the scale. Like at the end of the day it's great if your system can scale to millions of people, but if you never get your first hundred, then you die anyways and your energy would have been much better spent acquiring the first hundred. But even though our focus is on the first hundred, the way that we built the tech does allow us to go. Like we wouldn't be scared to suddenly have 10 times the amount of traffic overnight, for example. Example. Some stuff might wobble, but we will stay live.

Well as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built, what are you most proud of?

Currently, that would be super awesome by. By a decent stretch. Like, there's no. No comparison. So super awesome can genuine. I can genuinely say that we made the Internet safer for kids for about half a billion of them all over the world. And yeah, that, that was something very. That I'm very proud of. And there are obviously some personal parts of it, like I'm a big kid at heart. Like, I love LEGO and Disney and so things like the first time that Disney used our technology, it was a big step for me. It actually meant a lot. First time that LEGO used our technology, same thing I was in the early days. I was a big Pokemon Go user. So when Pokemon Go decided to go and use our tech as well, that was a big personal moment. I'm like, I'm using this thing right now, and behind it is our tech. That was pretty cool.

Well, let's flip the script a little bit then. So tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team, either at super awesome or at Mind Stone, responded to it.

The biggest mistake I made was about three and a half, four years in to Super Awesome. We had done a pretty good job at building a culture where people in the product team felt they could deploy, build and release stuff without fearing the repercussions. And that was a really core thing thing because it allowed us to do what I was talking about earlier, which is getting stuff out there, figuring out how it responds and then adapt, which allows you to go much faster than if you have to try and preempt all of the possible things that something might go wrong before you ever release it. Now, what had happened is we basically screwed up on one release with a particular client, and rather than absorbing that from the rest of the business, because basically the effects were pretty severe on the rest of the business. Rather than a CTO absorbing that on myself entirely, I ended up allowing some of the rest of the company to take that, not take that out, but to vent their frustration at the rest of the team. Now, the idea at the time was we thought, well, if people don't have accountability to what they're doing, then they can't make good decisions. So there was some rationale to it, but the real effect was that for two entire years after that episode, I was constantly fighting to get people to feel safe to release stuff again. So if you look at how fast we were developing up until that point point, like literally that one day, and then what happened after that, we went. I mean, if we were going at 50% the speed, I would be surprised. It felt that everything grinded to a halt, and it took us two entire years before we caught that back up. So the cost of the reaction to our failure was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the actual failure in the first place, which was just the stupidest thing. It was especially stupid because my gut at the time was telling me we were doing something wrong, but I still didn't get myself to stop it. And it was entirely my remit to stop it.

That's a tough one. It's probably not easy to remember things like that. Obviously, I know it's not when I've had mistakes, but it sounds like over those two years, you got the team back to where you wanted them to be, a place of trust, which is where you can ship fast. So this is always a fun question to ask. So what does the future look like for the product and for your team?

So the future for us would look like a world where you can decide whatever you want to learn. And Mindstone will put together a learning pathway based off of any content that's available to you, whether that's available on the Internet, it's available as proprietary resources from your company, or anything. It puts together a learning pathway based on your current skill level, your life context, and then helps you through it in a way to accelerate, to go as fast as you possibly can for your, basically accelerating your learning and making sure that you're able to apply this in the best possible way to your end goal. And that end goal could be a promotion, a new job, just getting better at what you're currently doing. But it could also be wanting to play guitar, wanting to get better at gardening, whatever it is that you want to get better at in your personal sphere. So that would be the future that I'd love to build in a way, from a team perspective. That's a good question. I wonder. We want to be as small as we possibly can be while still delivering on the vision that we set out to deliver. So we will grow as much as we need to to get to that vision as fast as we possibly can. But we would try and do it with the fewest amount of people that we can as well at the same time.

So let's switch to you, Joshua, who influences the way that you work, a CEO, a cto, really any person. Name a person you look up to and why.

The person that comes to mind instantly is Elon Musk. Even though I've never talked to the, the person of course, but the, the achievements that he's been able to have, the stuff that he's been able to move and more specifically the showcasing that, thinking first principles up word and just sticking to it like understanding something fundamental in an industry and using that to build a business around it is inspiring. And having a person achieve so much allows me to kick myself up the butt when, whenever I need to. It's like, hey, you are nowhere near enough yet because look at how high the bar is. So that is definitely one person that influences me day to day. Now I must also give credit to Dylan Collins, my co founder at Super Awesome. He has definitely had a big impact on how I think, how I operate. He was the first person I worked with that had a better work ethic than I did. He, he showed me what it is possible to do and I just learned so much from him. I would never be able to be where I am today without everything I learned from him in the last seven and a half years.

So, you know, we talked about a mistake, but a little bit different spin. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently or where would you consider taking a different approach?

So I would be more bullish on first principles basically. And I'm already fairly, I'm fairly bullish like the. If I think I understand something fundamental at a first principle level and somebody else is giving me a rationale that clashes with what I think are the first principles involved. I mean theoretically that is just not possible if the first principles either aligned or either they're, they're not true or they should allow you to figure out higher level problems. So that's the whole idea of thinking from first principles. And if I were to do things over again every time we made a trade off where we built something because a client asked for it, even though we knew it was not what they actually either they wanted or more specifically what they should want in some cases simply because their understanding of the same problem wasn't deep enough to understand what, what do you actually measure as we tried to obviously strike the balance between pleasing the customers that we had and making sure the business survived whilst at the same time building long term value. Too often we made a call to please the customer at that particular point in time. And I just want to be really clear. I'm not talking about not building something customers want. I'm talking about really fundamentally understanding why something is being asked for. And if there's a genuine requirement, that's great. But if the requirement comes out of a misunderstanding of how the problem is really shaped, then you can build something that you can get money for, but a few months or a few years later, your product is going to be worse for it because it's not actually addressing the real problem. And that just doesn't scale. Because, yes, everyone will misunderstand things, but they all misunderstand things in different ways. So the only thing that really scales is if you find that fundamental first principle, you address that problem, and then you try and scale that across everybody else. And so too often, we made a decision for the short term over the long term.

Well, last question, Joshua. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. They can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person? Having gone down this road a bit.

You cannot fail unless you give up. It's one of my favorite sayings. I mean, it gets accredited to Churchill. I don't know if it actually was him. But the I really try and live my life by this idea of success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And I really believe that it's. If you can cultivate a capacity to get up every time that you're. That you fall down, then eventually you'll be right. If you can stay alive long enough at some point in time with a bunch of different circumstances, your idea is going to be the idea that everybody's thinking about. And so stay alive would be the first piece of advice.

I like it. That's fantastic advice. Well, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Mind Stone.

Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

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That comes to mind instantly is Elon Musk. Even though I've never talked to the the person of course, but the, the achievements that he's been able to have, the stuff that he's been able to move and more specifically the showcasing that thinking first principles upward and just sticking to it like understanding something fundamental in an industry and using that to build a business around it is inspiring. And having a person achieve so much allows me to kick myself up the butt when, whenever I need to. It's like, hey, you are nowhere near enough yet because look at how high the bar is. So that is definitely one person that influences me day to day. Now I must also give credit to Dylan Collins, my co founder at Super Awesome. He has definitely had a big impact on how I think how I operate. He was the first person I worked with that had a better work ethic than I did. He, he showed me what it is possible to do and I just learned so much from him. I would never be able to be where I am today without everything I learned from him in the last seven and a half years.

So you know, we talked about a mistake, but a little bit different spin. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently or where would you consider taking a different approach?

So I would be more bullish on first principles basically. And I'm already fairly, I'm fairly bullish like the. If I think I understand something fundamental at a first principle level and somebody else is giving me a rationale that clashes with what I think are the first principles involved. I mean theoretically that is just not possible if the first principles either align or either they're not true or they should allow you to figure out higher level problems. That's the whole idea of thinking from first principles. And if I were to do things over again every time we made a trade off where we built something because a client asked for it, even though we knew it was not what they actually either they wanted or more specifically what they should want in some cases simply because their understanding of the same problem wasn't deep enough to understand what. What do you actually measure as we try to obviously strike the balance between pleasing the customers that we had and making sure the business survived whilst at the same time, building long term value. Too often we made a call to please the customer at that particular point in time. And I just want to be really clear. I'm not talking about not building something customers want. I'm talking about really fundamentally understanding why something is being asked for. And if there is a genuine requirement, that's great. But if the requirement comes out of a misunderstanding of how the problem is really shaped, then you can build something that you can get money for, but a few months or a few years later, your product is going to be worse for it because it's not actually addressing the real problem. And that just doesn't scale. Because, yes, everyone will misunderstand things, but they all misunderstand things in different ways. So the only thing that really scales is if you find that fundamental first principle, you address that problem and then you try and scale that across everybody else. And so, too often, we made a decision for the short term over the long term.

Well, last question, Joshua. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. They can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person? Having gone down this road a bit.

You cannot fail unless you give up. It's one of my favorite sayings. I mean, it gets accredited to Churchill. I don't know if it actually was him. But the I really try and live my life by this idea of success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And I really believe that it's. If you can cultivate a capacity to get up every time that you're. That you fall down, then eventually you'll be right. If you can stay alive long enough at some point in time with a bunch of different circumstances, your idea is going to be the idea that everybody's thinking about. And so stay alive would be the first piece of advice.

I like it. That's fantastic advice. Well, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Mind Stone.

Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the podcasting app of your choice. Support the show on patreon.com codestory for just five to ten bucks a month. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously.

And.

Thanks again for listening.

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