Hayley Brooks - Co-founder & CEO of Whooo's Reading

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast, where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. This podcast episode is proudly brought to you by our friends at Cox Business, a broadband and cloud services provider to the modern tech company. As a longtime supporter of San Diego Startup Week and the San Diego startup community, Cox also puts on top Tech awards. Get started. And most recently, quick pitch with San Diego Venture Group and Techcoast Angels. Thanks again to our friends at Cox Business for their support of the community. All right, welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here with Hayley Brooks, co founder and CEO of who's Reading? Hayley, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us what's who's Reading.

So with who's Reading, we provide a machine learning algorithm that automatically assesses students responses for elementary and middle school teachers. It's a huge need because it makes it a viable replacement for multiple choice and gets the students thinking more critically and creatively about what they've read. Wow.

Really cool. I want to hear how that all started and the impact you're making, but let's dive deeper. Let's get to know you a little bit. Where were you born and raised?

Actually, so I was born up in Orange county and then moved down to San Diego when I was about 6 years old. So basically raised in San Diego.

Oh, wow. It's pretty close to a unicorn, I would say for sure. Most people are here, you know, two to five years.

I feel like transplants. Yeah. One of the rare ones that grew up here.

So what was it like growing up in San Diego?

I mean, I can't complain. I went to school back east and then after four years of the cold and snow, decided to come right back.

So where'd you go to school?

Williams College. It's in northwestern Massachusetts. Really small.

Really cool. What did you study there?

Math.

Interesting. What got you interested in that?

I really liked the problem solving aspect of it. I liked being able to have a process and repeat that, actually. And also I went in thinking I was in new physics or Romance languages. And then the department at Williams was really strong, the math department. I loved all the professors and they kind of scooped me up and then made me want to study math.

Really? That's cool.

Yeah.

So was math a big department? I mean, there were a lot of students there. Or was it pretty Small.

It was a fairly big department for the school. Our graduating class was like 500 kids, so maybe like 80 or 100 math majors, I think.

Okay, and what was the plan for after college to do. What were you going to do with math?

I didn't have a plan. And then my senior year, I actually took a how to write a business plan class with one of my friends, and that's where we wrote the business plan that eventually became who's Reading?

Oh, wow. So you already had this idea in school?

Yeah, yeah. My senior year, we'd done a couple other, like, entrepreneurial things together. We sold these hats that said these bright neon hats that said Amherst sucks on them, which was our Williams rival. Made some money on that, and then kind of were searching around for other ideas and took this class, and we had to have an idea to write the plan about. And we both done Readathons as kids, so we wrote a plan for an online Readathon fundraising company.

Oh, interesting. So you went from Amherst sucks hats to the next natural business, which is.

You know, education technology.

Yeah, education technology. Makes sense.

Yeah, totally.

So what was the genesis really, like, what did the company look like on paper back then in the business plan?

Oh, man, it looked like a very, very former version of. We ended up doing a lot of customer development and market research that spring, tapping into the alumni network and getting a lot of advice from the principals and people involved in education to refine the idea. But it was essentially the initial pilot that we did that first year out of school. And the initial raise that we did was all based on this model of selling to parent teacher organizations, this online software that helped them run Readathons, where students would read as many books as they could and get pledges based on how much they read from their friends and family to raise money for the school.

Got it. Okay. And Readathons were already happening, were they? I mean, were they a big fundraiser for schools at that point?

Somewhat. Yeah. Like, so Rafael and I. My co founder, Rafael and I had both done Readathons as kids, and they were super exciting and fun times for us, got us really motivated to read. So we thought, hey, we'll just bring this online. It'll be so much more efficient. We can leverage social media and help the school raise more money. So that was kind of the thinking. And some schools did Readathons, but a lot of our competition in that space was like, cookie dough, gift wrap, things like that, selling physical products. And then those physical product companies take, like, 40 to 60% of funds raised and so we were offering kind of 15 or 20% of funds raised as an alternative, and the students are actually doing educational activity. So we thought this is, you know, better, more aligned with the mission of the school.

Got it. Okay, so you come up with a business plan during school. Do you actually get build product before you graduate? No.

We spent that spring. That was January. We spent that spring doing some. Doing some market research, talking to a bunch of people, and then built our pilot. After we graduated, we started working out full time. We said, hey, why don't we just go ahead and try this? All of our friends were going off and getting jobs, but we didn't really know what we wanted to do. And we said, hey, now's a better now than never. Just jump in. In retrospect, I don't know if that was the best idea, but it was great. We launched that fall with a pilot program, got some research, did some market research again, like customer development, went around and sort of showed it to people, got feedback, did two pilot programs that sp. And then decided that we needed to bring on a CTO or like a technical co founder because we were kind of weighing like, okay, are we gonna spend $1,500 on this improvement to the tool that we've heard from these pilot events? Like, is that worth it? We were kind of weighing like, the financial burden that would be on us because we were bootstrapping. We were just using our own savings. So it's like, okay, well, do we pay for that or do we not? And that was really hampering our iterative process. So we thought it would be a good idea to recruit someone. So we recruited another one of our friends from school who was a CS major. And so those are my three. The three of us co found.

Okay, and that's. What are their names again?

Rafael Manko was the one that I did the business plan class with. And then Greg Sherrod.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so everyone moved out to San Diego, it sounds like eventually.

Yeah, we were all working in our own. We were all living at home with our parents. I was in San Diego, Rafael was in Philadelphia, Greg was in New York. We were kind of working virtually, and this was before a lot of, you know, slack and tools to make that easier. So we were having some problems with that. A lot of email. And then we ended up meeting someone here that helped get us connected to a variety of investors in the area and raised money that fall that allowed us to all kind of move to one place to be together and really work on it full time. In the same spot.

Do you want to give a shout out to who that was that helped you?

Our lead investor is Keshav Ventures. So, yeah, shout out to that team.

That's awesome. So that was. What is that? Fall 20?

That was fall 2013. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, very cool. And so everyone moves over here that fall. Obviously things start moving a lot faster. How does the company change at that point?

Yeah, so we start working out of a co working spot. We're all, you know, it's more efficient because we're all in person. We do a bunch of pilot events and continue to sell to sell to these PTAs and start scaling our team in 2014. And over the course of that year or two, we really scale up. We grow to be maybe by the spring of 2016, 18 people really scaled our sales team. And yeah, and then classic, classic startup adventure or misadventure, we tried to scale. And it turns out that there are a variety of issues with selling to the PTA space. Their volunteer run, last on the priority list, a lot of turnover. We were seeing really high customer acquisition costs, but we had always justified that in our thinking that we were going to have a lot of lifetime value from that customer. They were going to come back year after year. Turns out that's not really the case. The new PTA president comes in and wants to make his or her mark, mostly her mark on the organization, switch things up. So we had a hard time retaining customers. And so spring 2016, we had to do a pivot to a different space. But fortunately, after that first year, we had a lot of teachers that were like, hey, this is so motivational for my students. They're loving reading. Can we use this year round to motivate reading in our classrooms? And we said, sure. And we thought, like, oh, we'll launch this little teacher ed tech tool and it'll be lead gen for our PTA fundraisers. And it turns out that's actually lead gen for school licenses. So we had all this interest from school administrators at the end of that school year. The first year we had who's Reading? And then when the PTA space started to seem like it was going to be more challenging to scale than we thought. We had this other business that had been kind of growing with teachers and schools. We thought, hey, this is really where our hearts are. Anyway, as, you know, as liberal arts kids, we were so excited about doing something that was related to reading. And so being able to work directly with teachers was going to be so much more rewarding for us anyways too. So. Yeah, spring 2016.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's smart. I mean, to be able to realize that obviously. Well, you also sound like you didn't have a choice of some sort. You had to ramp down something. But what did that look like team wise? I mean, that was a pivot to a whole new business model without many people around to go work on that.

Yeah, yeah. So we pulled our. We had our, you know, top sales gal that we kept. We actually had to scale back our team to eight people from 18 and use what Runway. We had to really hunker down and try and make this other business model a reality. So that was tough.

Yeah, for sure. So did you completely shut off the PTA model or.

We maintained it, and we still maintain it. We still get some revenue from it, from these legacy. So there are some people, some PTAs that stick around for many years. So those ones we still have running fundraisers. And it's kind of like we don't spend very much time on it at all. We don't spend a lot of server costs or anything. Really low. So just help support us.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, take us through a little bit, you know, kind of where's the company now? Now that you've gone through this pivot and this transition? I mean, what do you guys look like today?

Yeah. Yeah. So really we're trying to find product market fit for a few years. The main, our main differentiator, like I kind of mentioned, is our machine learning natural language processing algorithm that grades these short responses. And so we've kind of built that up over time with all of the, you know, tens of millions of responses. We have having, you know, had this program for a while, we've been able to use that data to hone this algorithm that is able to help provide like in the moment feedback for students on their written responses as well as information to the teacher on how the students are doing with certain skills that they should be doing in their writing. And the real market need is that in like the SSBAC and the PARC, these are sort of these new age assessments. They've gone in the last few years from like maybe 5 or 10% of the questions where students actually have to write responses to like 30%. So a big part of the students standardized test grade at the end of the year is based on their ability to write, like construct written responses. And so teachers really need a way to help their students do that. And they can't be over every student's shoulder, you know, oh, don't forget to capitalize. Don't forget to cite evidence. So our program kind of helps fill that need. And all of our competition does multiple choice based assessment. So the idea is that after students read a book or whatever for their independent reading, the teacher needs a way to know that that student did the reading. So our competition does these multiple choices. You know, 10 multiple choice questions. Oh, you got an 80%, you passed. Oh, you got a 40%, you failed. There's a whole host of other issues maybe with that model, but one of the issues is that teachers know that's not really the skill set that students need going into the workforce. Like, how many times in your day do you have a question asked you and you're like, oh, it's B or oh, it's C. Not really the way it works. And also promotes like factual recall and lower level thinking that we don't really need with Google. Right. You can just like, oh, what was that thing that I can't remember. Let me just Google it. So kind of promoting those skills that students eventually need in their careers or to be successful in high school and then in college and then in careers, it's like critical thinking. Being able to write about whatever it is that you're reading, being able to support your argument with evidence. Those are kind of the skills that teachers want to be fostering in their students anyways. And we make that scalable with the autograder.

That's really great. I'm curious on the. Is there any kind of hint to the careers that these could lead to when they're using this at all, or is it too early, too young?

It's like elementary and middle school. So we don't really touch on college to career, the college to career side of it. It's more like preparation for high school and preparation for college to be able to be writing about your reading, because that's a skill that kind of. We're in ela, right? But being able to write about what you've read, like, I did that all the time in math and college. Right. I had to write, oh, it's this way or that way or whatever. And really, for any subject area, you need to be a competent writer.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's really great. That's exciting. Where do you guys see this in a few years, you think?

Oh, man. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of. For us to expand to other content areas. So another benefit of our program is that we're text agnostic, meaning that students could read really any text and because we're not asking them specific, you know, what shape were Dumbledore's glasses? We're asking them more like, would you want to be friends with the main character? Why or why not? We're able to apply for fiction, then for nonfiction, to any text, which is something that I think a lot of other programs can't do. So because we're content agnostic, we really fit in with any curriculum, ELA curriculum that teachers are using. So we could see it kind of growing out from there. We've had. We have, like, some science teachers that use it and some history teachers that use it for those subject areas. And so building out more content, that's not just for checking independent reading in ela, but in these other subject areas as well. We feel like that's really, you know, getting students writing about their reading. And any of those subject areas we feel like could be a huge value add.

So really cool. It's exciting. Well, we're happy to have you here. Thanks so much for being a part of the startup community. So along the way, though, you graduate on the east coast, moved to San Diego without really sounds like knowing much about a San Diego tech ecosystem or startup ecosystem. Give us some perspective of that. You know, did it feel lonely? Did you know other founders, like, what was going on? Or were you just so heads down, focused on the company that didn't matter who was around anyway?

Yeah, kind of that for a few years, but it was super isolating. So when I first got out of school, school, we were all three, like, okay, we got to make this work, you know, running sprinting, sprint marathon, and working, you know, closely with our colleagues, the people that we hired, but not really exploring much of the ecosystem. I've actually. I went to Startup Week, like, since I think 2014, and so I'd kind of meet people there, but then it would drop off, and I felt like I wasn't meeting a lot of other founders. And so it's just kind of. I was very isolated, I guess, for the first few years. And just in the last year or two, I've tried to, you know, kind of get more involved and meet more people, and that's been super awesome. Like, there is this amazing ecosystem here. I was just sort of not paying attention to it.

Yeah, but you're supposed to do that. You're supposed to, like, build your company, stay focused, not be distracted, you know, and let the ecosystem kind of support you where you need. So it feels like at least. Yeah, but very recently, really came out of your shell. I Would say as an ecosystem organizer and like, jumped right in. Tell us about what it's been like helping Startup San Diego.

Oh, my gosh, it's been so cool. I really loved, like, meeting all the people that are involved at the organizer level. And convergence was a phenomenal opportunity this year. I had actually volunteered at Startup Week last year and then tried for a while to get involved, but I think there was, you know, the space between last year and then this January, like, not as it wasn't as easy to get in touch with people. I think, you know, Jared Russell joined and things have gotten like, I think a lot more organized since then. But anyway, it was super fun. I got finally involved with all hands and joined the Slack community, which is cool. And then got connected and. Yeah, and then convergence was super fun. I loved working with Nicole on marketing and then I've kind of stepped into a different kind of more operations role in the lead up to Startup Week. But it's been definitely, it's been super, super rewarding to feel like I'm giving back to this community. Now that I've been in entrepreneurship for a while, I've seen a lot of different things and it feels like I can help be supportive with the programming that's going on for Startup Week this year. You know, it's the convention center. So exciting. It's been really awesome working with all the volunteers that make it happen.

Yeah.

Great people.

That's awesome. Well, thanks for all the time you're putting into it. I mean, you're also running a company, you know, so.

Yeah, it's all about balance.

Yeah. For sure. We all have to learn that. That's for sure. Between company, volunteer and, you know, the rest of life too.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, tell us a little about, you know, life in San Diego. What part of town are you in?

I live in University Heights.

Okay, nice.

We work out of you gather in Hillcrest.

Okay, cool. And this is we're here now. Community was the original name, right?

Yeah.

Is this where you guys have been since the beginning or have you moved around?

Oh, so we actually started at Comerge. Oh, right, downtown. We were there too. Yeah. Yeah, Back in the day. We were there for a few months and then we got an office space on the 8th floor of the Jewelry Exchange on 6th and 8th. So it was a bunch of jewelers and then like us and like, some other guy that made petri dishes on the eighth floor. Jewelers apparently don't like being on the eighth floor because, like, not a lot of foot traffic. So they had Trouble renting them out. And they ended up renting them out to like other random businesses like ours.

Interesting. I didn't even know we had a jewelry exchange.

There you go. So definitely a lot of asbestos. Another fun fact is the elevator is like one of the fastest elevators in San Diego. It's been like grandfathered into, you know, the current regulations that don't allow the elevators to go that quickly. So it would like to. I love the efficiency, but sometimes it would like spring too quickly and then get caught between the seventh and eighth floor and then the doors would open and the floors at eye level and.

You kind of like push yourself up.

Cool. All right. So fun things like that we were there until we had downsized in 2016 and then came here to community.

Okay, cool. And I'm guessing here, I mean, there's a bunch of other startups here that you can also mesh with a little bit as well.

I would say that there's mostly independent, like sort of independent contractors or people who are working remotely for larger companies. I think there's been a couple startups since we've been here, but not. Yeah, not as many as I would have thought, I guess.

Okay, well, hopefully you're seeing them elsewhere in the community now.

Yeah, definitely. At the Monday's events.

Yeah, yeah.

Through volunteering at Startup San Diego.

Yeah. Tell us, what else do you love about San Diego? Do you have a favorite coffee spot?

I really like Batter Buzz in Hillcrest. It's walking distance. It's super cool on the inside.

Yeah, yeah.

It's fun to go there.

Yeah, it's a great 1. The two story one over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What about tacos? San Diego's Taco Town, Your favorite taco place or multiple places.

So, yes, I'm a vegetarian, so I don't eat like fish or meat, but tacos, liver. Todd actually right across the street does amazing, like avocado and mushroom tacos.

Okay.

So that's my favorite spot. Yeah.

Very cool. We've got a few of those vegetarian taco places for sure.

Yeah.

What about beer, alcohol? Craft. Craft alcohol here in town. Are you a fan?

Yeah, I'm not a huge drinker anymore because I get terrible migraines even after like one drink. Okay. But my favor is the Coronado Brewing Company, Orange Avenue Wit.

Oh, yeah, It's a good one.

Yes. Nice and refreshing.

They have a tasting room somewhere around here too, I think as well.

I think so. Yeah. I don't know that I've ever been, but yeah.

Very cool. Well, thanks so much. For being on the podcast. Thanks for your dedication to the startup community here. Any way people can find you online? Use Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Facebook.

LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn and Instagram, if you're interested in my personal life, I guess.

Okay, cool. Well, thanks so much. And. And we'll make sure that people know more about who's reading.

Awesome. Thank you, Neil.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neil Blum on Twitter eealbloom and on LinkedIn.