Epic! Reading with Suren Markosian and Kevin Donahue

Epik is the leading digital reading platform built on a collection of 40,000 popular high quality books from over 250 of the world's best publishers and they are in 90% of US schools and and free to use for many students. We have an Epic club on teach your kids and it allows children to choose unlimited books on topics that interest them. In particular fueling a love and interest in reading and they can brag to friends about how many books they've read. I know kids who are inviting their grandparents to join them on Epic and collect badges for reading their stories. So we just love Epic and are so honored to have the founders here today. So today before co founding Epic, Kevin worked at Google in strategic partnerships and was a member of YouTube's original team serving as Vice President of content. Prior to YouTube, Kevin specialized in business development and content for a variety of technology and media companies. He also designed ABC's first online community for kids, creating award winning games and educational content. Soren has successfully built and scaled several large consumer businesses including crowdstore, which rose to become one of the largest social gaming companies with over 200 million users. And also List AM, which is now the largest e commerce company and online destination in Armenia. Welcome to Teach youh Kids. It's so great to have you here.

Thank you.

Thanks Manisha. Great to be here.

So perhaps I don't know who might like to begin, but you could start by telling us the story of how you came together to build this incredible reading platform that has helped so many students.

I had this idea when I was spending a lot of time with my kids. After I left my previous gaming company. I found myself staying home and basically spending all my days with the kids and learning their daily lives and daily habits and daily needs. And one of the things I really wanted them to do, just like every parent does, is to read books. And the natural thing was to go buy books in a store, in a bookstore. But I quickly realized that this is actually not the most optimal experience for the parent and for the child because books are expensive. Because as a new parent you really don't know what your kids will like and what are the actual right books for the right age of the child. And it's in a world where kids are growing up with tablets in their hands and they're so digital native. You know, reading physical books is great, but there is always a demand for more and more content and just cannot keep up with that. And so I had this idea. I became very passionate about solving the problem of reading for kids and especially Coming from the world of games.

It.

Was very strange to me that kids have access to any games they want to play for free. They can watch as many videos as they want for free, but they can't read as many books as they want, anytime they want. And it was a great experience. It just didn't make sense to me. How come we all talk about the importance of literacy and education, and yet we're building those games and videos and distracting kids with social media instead of providing them something useful and something that's beneficial for them in their future life. So I got very passionate about solving this problem, especially knowing that how to build engaging games. I thought I can apply my experience in building engaging products to reading, and making reading fun, and making reading as fun as playing games and engaging for kids. And so I started talking to people who were also parents about it. Everybody obviously supported the idea. Everybody loved it. And then I started talking to potential investors who all seemed to really connect with this idea. And one of these potential investors was Kevin. And I'm going to pass it over to Kevin to tell the rest of the story.

Yeah. Thanks, Iren. So it's really interesting how it came together. It seemed really fortuitous and magical, kind of for both of us that it all worked out the way it did. I had left Google, and I had been angel investing and advising startups for about a year and a half. And one of the investors that I got to know introduced me to Surena. And I met him in Palo Alto at El Fornayo, at a restaurant. And he had a laptop and a deck and an idea. And this is the idea. It was very rudimentary deck, but the idea was in my mind, just about fully formed. I mean, there was a lot of work we had to do over the years. But he had this great idea. The idea was basically like a Netflix for children's digital books. And over the years, I've worked in children's entertainment quite a bit, starting in animation and then working in digital media. And so it's near and dear to my heart. But in addition to that, My daughter was 5, and she was just starting to read, really, and she wasn't reading as much as I wanted her to read. And I had done what Seren had done. I had looked online to see if there was anything really great to really capture her attention. And I was doing what Sirinh was doing. I was going off and buying my children, my daughter, stacks of books at Barnes and Noble. They're very expensive. And then she'd read them for a while and then go buy another stack of books. And that was very enjoyable for us. But number one, it wasn't enough books. Number two, is very expensive. And I just realized that was a problem for parents that hadn't been solved and it. So when Cyrene presented this, I had a little notebook of keeping ideas about startups I wanted to get involved with or start. And one of them was a children's digital reading idea. But it wasn't exactly what he had. He had it, I think, just very simply figured out strange. Very good at thinking in terms of first principles, solving problems for customer and keeping focused on that, keeping it very simple. And so the way he used to talk about it is getting out of the way, removing the friction between kids and reading. And to me, that's just so powerful. And it's something that parents, all adults, really want for children universally, educators and parents particularly. So we knew there would be a massive community of interest amongst adults that would hopefully be interested in this, drive this forward, and enable us to create a business around this. But we had to figure out how to build a business. Specifically, would people pay for a consumer service that was digital reading? We know that kids are very busy in their free time after school. There are so many things that they could do, from other digital things that are fun, like Minecraft and Roblox, to YouTube to playing sports, to hanging out with their friends, to watching tv, whatever it is, to even watching Netflix. So we knew we'd have a lot of competition as a consumer service. Yet we're consumer people. You know, Sren and I both just. Our entire careers have been really in the consumer space. But interestingly, we didn't realize we were building an education company. So what? Yeah, so what? What happened is, I don't want to jump too quickly in the story, but maybe the most significant thing that happened is teachers started demanding this after we launched it and we began offering it for free to schools, and that that changed everything.

Wow, that is just fascinating to me that you didn't envision it as an education company when you started. I'm curious. I mean, I don't know what the first iteration of Epic looked like. I've used it a lot with students. But I'm. I'm wondering, you know, if, you know, the Kindle Unlimited for kids was around at that time or if they copied you and how you. How you can, first of all, how you competed with videos on Netflix and how you differentiated yourself from the Kindle. Kindle Kids.

Yeah, Kindle Free Time Unlimited. The Kids version of the Kindle reading product for kids was available. So the investors we would speak to would say, how are you going to compete with Amazon, you know, the 800 pound gorilla and you know, reading and content and kids are really like almost. Those are the three main things that Silicon Valley investors like to stay away from.

So why is that, by the way, if we might take a little detour?

Yeah, yeah. So raising money at the beginning, I'd say the Series A was the challenging part. The seed money came fairly quickly because of Seren's background as a serial entrepreneur and my background perhaps, and the team of us together. Seed money is not too tough to raise in most markets. When you have some experience, the Series A is the next level of funding that you raise. And you have to prove the business more, you have to prove there's a product market fit and that there's a business here. But the reason to answer your question is there weren't a lot of examples of, you know, pure like content reading, you know, books, digital books related companies other than Amazon that were massively successful. And same with kids companies, very few that you could count that silicon that were Silicon Valley funded. And when investors In Silicon Valley VCs are investing, they're looking for many multiples of return on their investment and a billion dollar company at minimum as an outcome. And so those are the challenges you're facing when you're raising money for something like this.

How funny because I mean it would seem to me that, I mean the public school is, you know, trillion dollar industry and there's so much money flooding. And why, why doesn't the investors make that connection?

Some do, but we were really focused on being a consumer company around digital reading for kids. Yeah, perhaps if we would have gone out and said we tech company, here's the size of that market and here's, you know, here are the examples of education technology companies that have exited over a billion or close to it. Yeah, that might have been better. But we ended up, you know, playing this interesting role with one foot and clearly in the education world and one foot clearly in the consumer world and then connecting those two communities, which to me and this ran over time, that made perfect sense because for a child to read more, they need the support of the family, the parent as well as the teacher. And the reading should occur in the home after school as well as in the school. And so in my mind we really kind of created the perfect solution that combined both, they could access EPIC in the school. We offered it for free to teachers still do during school hours. We're in about 95% of the US elementary schools used by a couple million teachers. And then we also offer it for consumers if they want 24, 7 access.

It's just such a wonderful resource. I mean, I have an online homeschooling community and we have formed a school on Epic and our children just really connect around how many books they've read and what books they're reading. And it's just such a lovely way to build a community around reading. Do you find? One more question for you, Kevin. I mean, since you launched Epic and you started fundraising and now there are more companies such as Prodigy, Remind, that have used a school by school approach, do you see more interest in Silicon Valley in funding education companies or is it still a little bit reticent to do so?

Yeah, I think specific investors in particular, like Reach Capital, which was one of our greatest supporters, they're very focused on education. And I think yes, the answer is yes. I think that there's sort of been a new, a new wave of ed tech companies of which we were a part that sort of represented the consumerization of education technology, meaning the type of experience that we delivered. I think what was so unique about it was that it was very consumer level in terms of engagement and quality for the child. And I think that's really what made the key difference. Besides the library and the support we got from publishers, the content we have was the really great consumer experience, meaning a high quality, engaging, entertainment like experience for children in the classroom that didn't exist before around reading. So there are a lot of companies that are moving in that direction that have been along with us at the same time that we were doing that.

Fantastic. And I guess, Sirinh, as the product guy, you have a unique challenge in education which is that the end user is different than the person who's purchasing the product. And I'm curious, what steps did you take to make sure that children were enjoying and engaged in the product? How did you collect user feedback? What was that, what were your goals and what was that whole process like or continues to be like? I imagine you continue to observe how children use it and make it better for them.

Yes. So it was very important for us to provide children an experience where they just get in front of the book they want to read. As Kevin mentioned, removing any obstacles between a child and a book is important. Meaning that specifically what we did in the product is we made books immediately appear on screen while it was very common to download the books and wait for Them to download, where you go to buy a book, individual ebook, or you want to read a free ebook, you have to download it first. And that was just absolutely unacceptable because kids don't like to wait. They want instant gratification. What we did is we developed our own format for streaming books so that when a child picks a book, they tap on it within a second they are reading. That was a very important thing for us to do so that kids are not afraid to click on as many books as they want. And another thing we did was that the experience of discovering the books and typing of the book should be very non committal. They should feel like they can go in a book, explore it. If they don't like it, the closer book or the next book, and they don't have to commit to reading it. They can explore as much as they want until they find the book they like. And they will, because every kid has their own interest at any given time and they need just to find the right books. And then you got them to read, then they're engaged and they can be there for many, many minutes or even longer than that. And so those two things made a lot of difference in terms of getting kids to love, to browse, to love, to discover and to read. The other very important things we did a little bit later was to build a very complex and sophisticated recommendation system which is taking into account a child's reading level, reading ability, their interests and their age to recommend them the books that they would like to read. It's a much more complex system than recommending content for adults, because most adults are already formed and they don't change year over year or they don't even change months after months. With kids, their interests change weekly. And as they grow and mature and develop, you know, you got to keep up with their demands for content. And so we've developed a system that would actually would change the books and present them the right books week after week based on what they're reading and what the reading abilities are and so on. And so that also made sure that we put the right child in front of the right book as soon as they enter the app or enter our service.

That's so phenomenal. And I just want to highlight that you choose both age and reading level as criteria because I think that's so important, because especially with gifted children, we often see they develop asynchronously where they might love cute, fuzzy bab animals, but they're reading at high school level. So I think that's probably part of your Power that you're able to do that. And unfortunately, quite rare in educational products. Did you ever find, you know, and I'm. I'm not sure what processes you used. If you watched children using Epic or, you know, you got feedback. Did you ever feel like there were times where what you thought children wanted conflicted with what parents or teachers wanted? How did you navigate those different interests in your product?

You know, we ran to.

You want to dig into that one, Kevin?

I just thought of something funny but certain. Yeah, we used to have a book called Richard is a Picker, about a nose picker. Kids loved it and it was really gross and, you know, illustrated in a really funny way. But I think parents weren't so excited about that book. But kids would read more when they would read that book, that's for sure.

Oh, man. So what did you do? Did you keep it on or did you have to.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That's good.

Parents can block any book they don't like, so there are tools to block it. Just like teachers, they can block books.

I love that parents can ban their own books instead of having the state band. What were you gonna say, sir?

Yeah, the good thing about having this, like. Like Karen mentioned the Richard was a picker book. It was a funny book. Kids loved it. But then it served as a entry way into the world of books for some kids who would start with that book, read it, have fun, and then they would go on and discover some other books.

Fantastic. I mean, this actually makes me think about what's going on in Florida right now. And I mean, America in many feel, and I agree, that there's a kind of heightened sensitivity about what kind of content should be included and not included in books. And I mean, some of my friends who are teachers in Florida have found that books are suddenly disappearing from their library. Books about black history. And I'm wondering if you have had any pushback from people about the content of your books and how you handle that in terms of, you know, having diverse content in this very. This world where people are so highly sensitive.

Yeah, I think that any. Anytime you have a content platform of any kind of. You're going to have. I saw this at YouTube and to really an extreme degree, because of the amount of content and the user uploaded content, you have a lot of opinions about that content. When you're dealing with children like we are, you have a lot of opinions about content and what's. What's good for them, what's appropriate for them. Parents have a lot of different ideas of what they want their children to read. And we have always worked with professionals, high quality publishers, most of them publish books for schools already. So we work with high quality content. That's been one thing that we are careful to do. The other thing is we have given, as I mentioned a moment ago, the power of control over what their children experience to the parents and to the teacher. And so we think of it like, you know, like a library. And the teacher or the parent, if they were to take a visit with a child to a library, they can direct them to certain books. You know, they can let them roam free. I think the power of Epic is the freedom. And so that's why if a parent really does disagree with a book, doesn't think it's something they want their child to read for any reason, they could remove that book from view for the child and the child still have that sense of freedom and to move around inside the library of 40,000 pieces of content. So that's the way we've dealt with it. We try to be really the Switzerland, you know, totally neutral party, just looking for high quality literature that we're going to provide, make available.

I think that's super smart. You know, just the power of giving the parent the option to choose as opposed to imposing choices on them. I'm very curious about gamification and I'm sure everybody asks you about this, but I, I have come across very few really engaging gamified learning apps. It's still an area that I believe needs a lot of exploration. So I was having a, an interview. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Naval Ravikant. He found an Angel Co and is very popular on Twitter. And, and he was saying that he really wished there was a math app that was as addictive as Fortnite. Do you agree? First of all, I guess maybe. Why aren't there more gamified products? And on the other side of that, can a learning app be too addictive? I don't know. Maybe. Saran, What? Do you think that a learning app can be too addictive? I mean you understand how to build these bells and whistles that games engaging are there ones that you avoid or do you just kind of bring it on if it's educational?

Yeah. First of all, yes, I think a gaming service or platform can be addictive, but not because it's gamified, but because its content is interesting to the learner. And I find that again, just like with finding the right book, if you find the right content that you love to learn about you will be engaged for a long time. We always saw gamification as an enhancement to the core experience, but not as the absolutely must have, because without the great content that we have, there wouldn't be any success or gamification creation wouldn't even work. So what we did is we enhanced the experience by making it fun, nudging kids to earn some badges to level up to read more. Because of that, by the way, we always were aware that we shouldn't cross the line and we shouldn't become a game and we shouldn't distract the kids from reading because if they spend too much time playing or doing some activity that is not related to reading, then we are actually not focused on our core mission, which is getting kids to read more. But if we gamify it enough to bring back the kids every day to read, for example, we have this 20 minute timer every day, which is 20 minutes is a recommended time to read every day for kids. And then if you complete your 20 minutes every day, you get a reward and that's great. But if you come to the app with the mindset of I'm gonna just play some little games in that app instead of reading, this isn't what we want, this isn't what our mission. So we were able to find this great balance between making it slightly gamified and fun, but yet keeping reading and books the central focus of the experience.

Fantastic. And Kevin, what are your thoughts? Is it possible for an educational game to be too addictive? How do you define that line that Suren is describing?

I think if you create a successful educational app, meaning it's really succeeding in terms of its goals for the learning, I think it's almost not possible. I think it's a good thing if a child's learning and he's using something. On the other hand, I'll give you the other side. I guess I'm going to rephrase that. If my child was constantly on an app or a computer doing nothing else in their life, no, I wouldn't be happy with that. So I think one of the things we've done with Epic is to provide opportunities and incentive for kids inspiration for kids to go offline and to do things. So with the videos that we provide, which we call learning videos, very specifically, they're short form videos that many of them are how to. And some of them are how to do things like how to kick a soccer ball or, you know, how to, you know, go bird watching or whatever it might be outdoors and do something. So when I think about my daughter and what I want for her, even now that she's 16, I want her to do a combination of things, you know, to learn, to spend time, sure, of course. On digital devices and then books, physical books, too, but also to be outside and to do physical things.

That's wonderful. I love that you're finding that balance, and it's intriguing to me that you don't think that it can be too addictive. That's kind of a. I guess it's kind of a relief for me to know that that is true. And I guess, I mean, Kevin, you're also an investor in the educational space. And I mean, I've seen a lot of learning apps and a lot of education curriculum, and I just feel like there's not a lot of great educational apps out there that are highly engaging, that are gamified. Is that your impression as well? And. And if not, why aren't more people building in this space?

Yeah, I think there have been some good ones, like Brain Pop and others, and I think that we are going to see probably more companies trying to build greater engagement into their apps, seeing the success of companies like Epic and others. And yeah, I think it's a really good time for edtech companies. I think we're seeing a lot of creativity, and I think that it'll be really exciting over the next few years to see what develops.

That's exciting. Well, the homeschooling community continues to grow, and so hopefully more people will be building for that space. I actually just love the Read to Me feature. For any of you who have used Epic before, there's this really cool feature where on some of the books you can actually push a button and you'll hear a voice read, and then the word that's being read will light up. And I think it's a really fantastic way to help develop literacy in children. Was that a feature there to begin with, or did you have an aha moment where you added that maybe. Sirinha, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, because I just. I really like that feature.

Yeah, this is one of the most popular features on Epic, especially with younger kids who are just learning to read or starting to read. And it really is teaching kids to love reading. And we've heard from a lot of teachers that they had reluctant readers in their class until they've discovered Epic and they tried to read with me books. They followed along a little bit. They discovered the joy of reading and all the stories that they suddenly realized exist out there and they became avid readers in the class. We converted reluctant readers to avid readers thanks to this feature. The read to me. And we added it fairly early on. Not in the first few releases obviously, but fairly early on we've added it and it became super, super popular.

I'm curious to know why you haven't expanded to high school. And part of the reason I asked this is because I've noticed that a lot of these wonderful education technology companies stop at sixth grade or eighth grade. Is there a particular reason that you haven't expanded to older grades?

I'd say there's, there's a lot to be done still in the elementary school area where we are really experts at this point. And there's a lot to be done domestically and internationally there. And one example of that is the fact that we've now begun selling Epic to schools and districts for 24. 7 access. So as I mentioned earlier on this, in this conversation that we do offer it free to schools during school hours 7am to 3pm We've been doing that for several years during COVID during the height of COVID I should say for a couple years, we, we enabled, when kids were home, we enabled families to have 24. 7 access to EPIC. We're a very mission oriented company. We felt that was the right thing to do. It of course had benefits for us because I think we gained a lot of loyal users and teachers really, I think loved us even more when we did that. And you know, our reach became greater because more parents learned about Epic. But yeah, we weren't charging for a pretty lengthy period of time giving away 24. 7 access to Epic. So now then, after Covid began to subside and normalcy was coming back, kids were going to school again. We reverted back to what we originally had done, which is 7am to 3pm Only in the classroom. So teachers would like to have that 24. 7 so they can assign homework to children. So that's now what we've begun, begun doing is also beyond selling it to consumers, also selling it to districts and schools.

And how were you able to offer free service during the pandemic? Was that because of your investors or you were still getting enough through subscriptions or surrendering coven? You just charged up your credit cards. How were you able to offer that during that difficult time for people?

Well, we had great support from our investors and the economics, the business model of our company enables us to do that because we also have supportive publishers who are really partners and invested in the overall success of Epic in the way that we have designed the financial arrangement with them.

Fantastic. And, you know, it's just so beautiful to see this commitment you have to equity in education. And I'm curious, maybe Saran, you can comment. What are some of the challenges of getting epic to 100% of students? I mean, I think about students who don't have Internet access. I mean, you would even have to lay down a cable to get Internet access or might not have a tablet. Is there some ability to use Epic offline? How are you limited and how are you addressing those problems?

Yeah, I think there isn't a single challenge. There are many different challenges that could prevent us from getting to 100% of the kids. But as you mentioned, not everybody yet has Internet access or access to devices. Not even every school has yet devices. And many schools that do their flows or their habits in the classroom aren't to use reading online. They're still using more traditional physical books. So it is a process that is. Thankfully, we're growing and we see more and more kids are using epic. And yes, we do have offline access, but this requires obviously online access for us to download the books. But we do offer that feature to even classrooms that they can download the books and read them offline. But I'm very optimistic about the future. And I know more and more kids come online and start using devices for educational activities, including reading. And so we're going to be seeing more and more adoption over time.

What keeps you committed to working on this project?

I'll speak briefly and then let Sirin talk. Basically, I think what we didn't realize when we started the company is how rewarding this would be. We knew it was a great idea, that it was going to be putting some good into the world that would affect our actual children. It was solving a problem that we really felt as parents. But this is such a universal thing to provide tools for teachers and parents to enable their children to have this freedom of reading and learning that really empowers children in so many different ways. And to see the success of the platform in terms of how many lives it's changed, how many children have become readers and have learned things and really learned how to learn independently in many ways by using epic. The adoption by the schools is probably the most humbling thing. It really is a massively used product platform. The schools and teachers truly do love Epic. Whenever we go to conferences, I feel sometimes like we're the Beatles. You know, according to teachers, like, they just swarm us. And it feels so great. We feel so lucky to have that love from the teachers, but we really respect them. And to me, there's nothing that could feel better than what we're doing every day. We get up every morning, and this is what we get excited about doing because of what we're seeing happening in the world. And that's how we've been able to attract such an amazing team. So I've kind of said it all, probably, but I'll pass it to Saran. Saran, what would you add to that?

Yeah, no, this is pretty much the reason we've enjoyed this journey. For me, it's been probably the most rewarding and amazing experience of my professional life. And seeing the impact, seeing that we are potentially changing lives of millions of kids and they will grow up and they will become somebody very successful and we will have played a little part in that. Hopefully we would have inspired them to do something great in life. We may never know that, but we're pretty sure that we are helping an entire new generation discover this amazing world of literature and reading and inspire them to do some amazing things in the future. So this has been. I don't know if can even beat that in the future, but if we can build anything better than that. But this journey has been so amazing. And I would say even the team that we were able to attract and build, they all came with this huge passion for education, for helping teachers, for helping kids. And so working with that amazing team has been also very rewarding for us.

It's so inspiring to see how the meaning you find in your work energizes you. And I think anybody who's thinking about creating in this space, it's just rocket fuel for building. It's a beautiful example of a way to live in the world. So Surin, you are a parent and I think Kevin as well, and you're laser focused on this reading literacy space. Are there any types of educational products you would like to see someone else build for your kids that would support them?

Yes, I think there are a lot of things that can be done with the way we see education is changing. It's becoming a lot more creative and freeform. And so helping kids unleash their creativity using technology would be a very interesting challenge. And I think I always believe that there is something in every child that you just have to unlock and uncover and let them go crazy with their passion. And so creativity has been always a very, like, independent thinking. Creativity has been always a very important, important thing. And I believe there's a big opportunity for someone to help kids unleash that creativity in there.

I love that. I think often a role of a teacher is just unblocking obstacles to the natural passion for learning rather than being the one to create a passion. But I am curious. I mean, maybe they're secret, but as an entrepreneur, I kind of. I have a Google Doc where I listen the ideas for startups that I have because I can't get distracted. Otherwise I'll start building them. Like, oh, I want to build a math app that's like a game. Or I want to build this. Do you have any ideas that you put on a little scratch pad that maybe someone in my community could pick up and create?

We do many. We think a lot about these things.

Are they secret?

I've been noticing a lot of people who enter the edge tech and education space. They stay there, they go on to do something else in the same space because it's so rewarding. And so I hope that we also have a lot of interesting things in front of us and that EPIC also continues to do a lot of interesting, innovative things. And I think the education space is changing very rapidly. The pace of change is accelerating and we all have to start thinking beyond the traditional based education where there are a lot of new subjects, for example, that schools just cannot keep up with because the world is changing much faster today than.

Sure. Data, science, AI. Yeah, for sure.

And so we got to teach our kids a lot of things that they will use when they grow up that will be relevant in this world, you know, 10, 20 years from now.

Wonderful. Okay, well, we'll be excited to see what ideas are lurking in your brain. Kevin, do you have any advice for education entrepreneurs who are thinking of building in this consumer space to parents who are trying to, you know, help support their children's education?

Yeah, I guess for any startup founders, I would say find a complimentary partner. It's good to have two people when you're going through a journey like this. When you're building a company, it's not always easy. It's great to have someone that really complements your skill set. From the standpoint of ed tech and consumer in particular, I'd say it's really got to. The idea has to cut through the noise of all the other things that the kids could be doing in their free time after school. So it has to be something very important, very meaningful, has to be a must have for parents. So reading and literacy is one of those things. Books are seen by parents as always positive. And so for us, that was fairly easy. We chose something that was already in the Forefront of the mind of a parent in terms of what they wanted their children to do.

Wonderful. How did you know that you were a match made in heaven, or did you just get lucky?

Well, I knew a bit about CERN's background when I met him. So I told him when I first met him, when he thought I was approaching as an investor, that I. Pretty soon after I heard his idea, I said, okay, let's be partners. You know, let's do this. I know we compliment each other. I know, you know, this idea is one I relate to as well. And so we pretty quickly came to that conclusion. But over the years, we've seen how much it works. Our philosophy on product building, on team management, on life. It's pretty similar. Similar values. And so that was it. But later I discovered, this is quite interesting, that years into our working relationship, I found out that previously we lived on the same street in San Mateo, and Saren had lived down the street, like a block and a half from me, but we had never met. And then I found out as well that he has the same birthday as my father. So I was like, whoa, okay, those are some signs. I should be working with this guy.

Extraordinary. That's just amazing. I mean, you guys have all the elements. You have the mission, you have the magic. You have everything. That's incredible.

I have to mention this. We'd be nowhere without the team we were able to pull into epic. So I'd say attract people that are smarter than you around you. That's the other thing. And so we've done that and built an amazing team. And when you have a mission like this, you can attract the best and brightest. So that's the final piece of advice for the young founders.

That is a very good piece of advice. Attract people who are smarter than you and have the humility to recognize who's smarter than you. I did want to ask you, Sirinh, about children who have reading disabilities such as dyslexia. Are there mechanisms that are built into EPIC to support those types of readers?

Yes. So we actually have a lot of kids who have learning reading disabilities, and teachers in general have been champions for using EPIC with these kids. So while we haven't specifically designed epic, we are always trying to cover all the different use cases and Reach, to me, is a great example of the tool that many kids with learning disabilities can use. And obviously, we are always continuing to get feedback with teachers. There's a constant dialogue with our teachers that we get a lot of interesting ideas and feedback from them, and we always Listen and try to incorporate it into the product.

It's so fantastic. And I just appreciate so much the work that you're doing for parents and for children. I have two ideas for Epic if I could share them with you while you're here. So one thing I think would be so great is to have some element of human, human storytelling. Because when I look at YouTube often there'll be someone who's reading a book to children and they're flipping the pages. And I've often thought, like, wow, I could use Epic and go on YouTube and just turn the page. But then I thought that would probably be illegal. So I think that having, you know, actors and actresses or even parents reading the book, because right now the read to me is more automated, I think that could be really amazing. And then as you think about content creation, I feel like it would be really cool to hire parents to create some of the content because a lot of, you know, stay at home parents or, or parents with part time jobs are looking for extra income that they can do at home. And I think that could be a great way to get some extra income for families. So my two cents that I wanted to throw.

Want a job as a product manager. Those are great ideas.

Maybe we'll see how things go with my online homeschooling community on the side.

You can do it.

Yeah.

Anyway, but those are good ideas. Thank you. Those are really good. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. I mostly want to be the actress that reads the story. I think that could be kind of fun. Are there any kind of really key things in how you designed Epic or aspects of Epic that we didn't hit upon today that you want to make sure people listening here?

Yeah. You know, I mentioned things like super important to remove all the barriers between the child and the book, and so getting kids to the book as soon as possible. I think one thing we didn't talk about, which is very important, is that giving kids control over the choices and the freedom to roam around, find books and read them without a librarian or a teacher or parent telling them to read a specific book. So putting kids in the driver's seat, giving them that sense of choice and freedom was super important for us. And I think we were able to deliver on that and build that platform. The way we're kids, they can read books at any level, you know, without having, without thinking about somebody else will, you know, judge them or see them. They're free to live in this world of books the way they want.

That's such a great point. And one Issue we talk a lot about on the podcast is how little agency children have over their own lives. And I'm sure that this is one of the reasons that epic, with over 40,000 books is so appealing is that children do have that freedom to choose what they want to read within a framework that protects them and keeps them safe. And I have experienced children who say, you know, I just don't like to read, I don't want any book. And then I say, well, what about a book about Minecraft? And then their interest picks up and you really do have something for everyone. How about you, Kevin? Is there anything we haven't touched upon that you want to highlight?

Well, one thing we didn't talk about is our originals. So we, one of the interesting things that we did at Epic is we took all of this experience. Kids now read a billion books a year on Epic, which is astounding. And we've been in business for over 10 years. And so with all of this information about what kids like by age group, we took that information and we said, okay, how can we create internally a publishing company really to create just for Epic, original books, original book series. And that's what we did. So we've created several hundred books already on Epic that are originals, that take everything we've learned about engagement, like the audio component and the read to me, and everything we've learned about the subject matter that kids like, the formats. Kids like things like graphic novels and action and humor, animal characters, things like that. And we, we really built a, a world class team from the world of children's publishing and brought them in. People who are editors and writers and illustrators and art directors and, and it's a really thriving part of our business. Kids love it. We have series like Cat Ninja and Scaredy Monster and a series called.

Oh yes, I'm very familiar with Cat Ninja.

Kids even dress up as Ken Hinda. It's such a big thing. Yeah. But I think that, that also I.

Don'T know whether to thank you for writing Cat Ninja or to curse you for writing Cat Ninja. But yes, it's very popular.

Yeah, I'll pass a long just because.

I had to read it so many times.

Understood, understood.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm just so thrilled that this resource exists in the world and you know, just even beyond reading, I mean, thinking about, you can learn about history and science and you know, as you say, Sharon, like just take away the block between the children and the book and once you know how to read. And Epic does have very early Pre readers for kids who are just learning how to read, I mean then the whole world is available to them. They can learn any subject and science and history and really follow their curiosity to the limit. So it's such a fantastic resource for self directed education.

Yeah, I think you nailed it right there, Manisha. Self directed education is part of really the core of what makes Epic so great. Sirinh talked about, you know, giving kids through the power to choose what they want to read. It's also choosing what they want to learn and it's also over time teaching them how to be proficient at self learning.

Yes. And one fun fact I think Suren cited is that on another podcast is that I believe a New York times bestseller reaches five, sells 5,000 thousand copies. And how much do the best selling books on Epic, how many reads do they get?

Yeah, something like Cat Ninja gets about a million reads in a few days. When a new episode comes out, a new book, you know, and of course Richard was a picker, gets I think a billion reads a week. No, I'm kidding. But that was possible.

Children are more avid readers than their parents.

Yeah, yeah. So it's great, it's great to see the numbers. You're right, it's very interesting. The world of physical publishing is so limited by the fact that books have to be produced and distributed and sold and digital in the way that we do it. There are no limitations to how many kids can read any individual book, just.

The Internet and access to electricity. So I like to finish up every episode by asking my guests, what's something that you are learning right now? And the best answers are completely unrelated to anything that we've talked about. It could be something interpersonal, it could be about health and diet. One person talked about a 10,000 year old worm that came back to life. Anything you're studying or fact you learned that you would want to share, either of you can start.

You know, I would say one interesting thing is for me is learning to see the world through the eyes of my kids. And as I see them grow up and I interact with them every day, it's amazing that how differently they look at certain things and how different their perceptions are of things that we discovered together. What we like to do is we travel a lot with the kids. We explore new things that are new for us and new for them. And it's very interesting to see how they complement our impressions of new things. And so I'm learning to see the world through their eyes. It's a very, very unique and interesting experience.

For me, I've been studying meditation and practicing it to.

I love that. Is there a certain teacher or app or book now?

Various. Various teachers, various methods, just to, I think, to clarify my mind. And it makes me more, I think. I think, more effective in my work and also more present for anything I'm doing. So it's been very helpful.

How beautiful. I really see the connection there between meditation and connecting with your children. It's so beautiful. Well, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to come here today and talk to our community and for building epic. It's definitely one of my favorite learning apps. I often tell families, you know, if you want to start homeschooling, you really need just good English language arts curriculum and a good math curriculum. And I often just say, you know, if your kids like video games, if they like YouTube, just use Epic for English language arts, and you can use Prodigy Game or Beast Academy for math, and you're set. And after that, they can pursue their own interests and they'll have a very strong foundation for their education. So it's just. It's amazing that you built it. I'm so happy that it exists. And if families are interested in joining our online homeschooling community, we do have an EPIC classroom ourselves. So just go to teachyourkidspod.com and you can join EPIC. You can join book clubs around Catninja if that's what interests you. And you can get more support around your child's education. If they have reading disability, we can help you understand how to help them or get support for them. So that's teach your kidspod.com. so thank you so much, Kevin and Tiren, and we will provide a link for EPIC in the show notes, if you haven't heard of it already. It's just an extraordinary resource and we love you guys so much. So thank you so much for all you do, and thank you for being here today.