Powering Our Future Workforce with EdTech and Vertical SaaS with Luke Sophinos

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party, startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am joined by Luke Safinos, Founder and CEO of Corski. Hey Luke, thanks for being on the pod.

Thanks so much for having me, Neil. Looking forward to it.

Man, I almost feel bad we haven't had you on yet, but it's a great time to have you on and talk about everything you've been building and man, all the great growth you have going on right now too. But do you want to quickly tell us an overview of what Corski is?

Yeah, no, absolutely. So Corski is an education management software that's exclusively focused on blue collar training. So we work with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of businesses and schools that do credentialing in fields like welding, you know, auto mechanics, cosmetologists, aviation mechanics, phlebotomists, dental assistants, healthcare aides, et cetera. So we're really focused on a little bit of an alternative pathway than the traditional college or higher education route. And basically when I say education management software, what that entails is building products that are focused on the student journey and everything that happens throughout blue collar credentialing process. So everything from supporting enrollment to the academic process, being very experiential, driven all the way up into career placement and helping those students earn a career, earn a job.

Oh, that is awesome. We're going to dive deep into this because I know it wasn't always about alternative pathways, but I love that it is. I think you have a great story on the pivot, but let's get to know a little about your background. Where are you from originally and how did you even get into the startup and tech world?

Yeah, so born and raised in Denver, Colorado. Moved out here about 10 years ago. I think I'm about to hit my 10 year mark, so it's been a little bit, but came out initially for school, so was very much attracted to the warm weather and the beaches. It's a pretty standard, typical San Diego story. But that's what took me out here. How I got into the technology world has really just been a lifelong entrepreneur. So I started my first business at 16. It was an events focused application that would enable really anybody in high school to find things to do early kind of app stays, so to speak. So we, we help people my age identify fun things to do with their friends where that wasn't really happening. And so that was my first foray. Got, got into actually managing like tens of thousands of person events at one point, which was pretty cool. I remember coming home with some serious cash and my mom thought I was a drug dealer, but I, I wasn't. So just, just loved it. Just learned real quickly that entrepreneurship was for me and went off to college and kind of let that thing fade into the background. And then in college I actually got a job at a venture capital firm and so it really opened my eyes to seeing this incredible world of entrepreneurship that an impact that can be achieved at scale when you have venture capital type backing and resources and the incredible people and network that come along with that. So from there I decided to start CourseKey.

Okay, but hold on, we got to back Up a second. Because you got to start in high school. You were already working on a startup, already running a business, still decided to go to college, which was. Was that San Diego State? Sdsu.

Yeah. Harvard of the West.

Harvard of the West, Exactly. And undefeated currently. Hopefully when this comes out, they're still undefeated in football, obviously. I'm guessing, like everyone, the path was school, college, higher ed. But I've got to imagine it's a little boring after you just run a startup. So take us through that mentality a little bit. Like, you just run it. You're running a company while you're a high schooler, and then you kind of go. I don't want to say backwards, but you go into college and you know that itch is there. What was that like?

Yeah. So this is, you know, I'm excited to go deep on this because I did what everybody is told to do, and that's the key to success and a career and a job is, you know, you enroll at a traditional college and you, you know exactly what you want to do and you find a career and you're successful. And it's this incredible, like, myth and really propaganda that's been created. And so I just did what I was told to do, and I left behind my, you know, first company to do that, and, you know, I followed the herd. And what I've come to realize, especially in building CourseKey, is that going to college should not be the de facto path for everybody. It is absolutely not the de facto path to success. And as a result, we've created a really terrible situation for a lot of people that end up spending years, if not decades to pay off these loans without really having a specific career that they're passionate about. So we can get really philosophical on this question.

If you want to, let's do it. Because we're both Ed Tech founders, right? And I think we actually. Did we actually meet both at the same time at Evo Nexus. Were you in Evo the Incubator at one point?

I was. 2014 ish. 2016 ish. Timeframe.

Yeah. So we overlap there. I was there from 13 to 15. And we both were trying to solve a similar thing at the time. Well, we both, I believe. I don't want to speak for you, but believe that college is a tool, but not the goal. And the thing that Portfolium was trying to solve was how do you size up that? Someone actually learns something that's employable. And it turns out that schools don't even track that, nor do they care. Did they do their job of helping you get a job. And I think that's what you feel as well too, I've got to imagine, right?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So like, my belief is that today's college is incredibly theoretical. It's sitting in a classroom and hearing a lecture and having zero idea if the person who is educating you or teaching you has the credential or understanding or know how in relevant experience to be doing that. So yeah, we started working on that space and solving that problem of, you know, how can we make the traditional college experience better? And what we found is there's zero incentive from a traditional institution to around student success. Less than 1% of their annual budgets every year are spent on getting students jobs, which is the entire point of a university system.

Yeah, it was very apparent for us as well when we were trying to sell a career product and that Career Services wasn't even the buyer. We thought something's wrong here and totally agree. I've got to imagine, I want to hear later, kind of where you pivoted with CourseKey, that you're probably seeing that very differently at the alternative and trade schools. But during your college career you had an epiphany that maybe this wasn't right for me. Right now take us through. What was the Thiel Fellow program like and what did that do for you during your college career?

You know, I was going through my college journey and really question, you know, I was seeing my family savings being depleted for what felt like was a. Was just not providing a lot of value. You know, it was fun socially and I got to meet people. But you know, how, how much was this really helping me in terms of career preparation, career readiness? Not much. In that whole time I was having this epiphany. The notion that CourseKey was really built on is like, how do we build technology that can make this better? Right. And so we started building technology for that, for your space. And I got an opportunity and it was a little bit counterintuitive at the time, but I got an opportunity to join what's called the Thiel Fellowship. And this is a program for, you know, folks that want to basically drop out of school and focus on building their company full time. And so Peter Thiel, you know, I'm sure most people are familiar with him, but founder of PayPal, first investor in Facebook, co founder Palantir, many just iconic companies. He picks 20 or so students a year that kind of stumble into what I was stumbling into and build a business as a result of that. And so it Enabled me to really build this incredible network of Silicon Valley folks. And what it really taught me was to learn how to think big and to think differently. And that actually spearheaded a lot of why we stopped working with traditional education institutions.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so take us through what's it like to do a company pivot like that, because it's a pretty massive one.

What we basically found, and it goes back to the prior point I made, is there is no regulatory financial incentive or requirement for a traditional institution to get more students across the graduation finish line to get them into, into, into jobs. So you know, all this technology that we were trying to build and gain adoption with from institutions and from professors and instructors, they're just, they just didn't really care. It was a sad truth that we had to face, you know, but we were fortunate because we, we basically found really through my co founder, Fadi, this whole world of alternative education. And so a quarter of the US workforce is a blue collar worker. Right. So I mentioned briefly, but welders, mechanics, dental assistants, phlebotomists, you know, cosmetologists, the list goes on. And the businesses have basically sprouted up because most traditional education institutions don't, don't train in these occupations or these fields. And so as the businesses have sprouted up to do these types of credentialing and training, they have incentive to place students because they're actually regulated and required by the Department of Education to ensure that when students start their program, they have a percentage of those students that actually go out into the real world and get a job in their field of study. When we came with all this software that said, hey, we can help boost your student retention and get more students across the finish line with all this technology and software tools, it stuck. And people got really excited about it because it was, they had, they shared the same incentive structure as a student, which is I'm here to learn a skill and to get a job. And so we, we switched and began working with those schools. And you know, since then I've grown to be the biggest provider of software for the space, of education management software for the space.

Well, that's awesome. Well, congrats on seeing that the opportunity and navigating towards it. I mean, that's big because often founders have some blinders on and solely focus, but if you listen to your customer, you find a bigger opportunity. So where is that taking you today? And I'm curious what the pandemic has done to this space, especially as we hear about jobs and lack of bodies for a Lot of these jobs as well.

Pre pandemic, how trade schools or career colleges, I use those words a little bit interchangeably. How they were set up is they did all of their instruction entirely in person in a physical location, which makes sense because the nature of these occupations is very hands on. Right. If I'm a welder, like, you know, I'm using my hands. If I'm a mechanic, I'm using my hands. If I'm a cosmetologist, I'm using my hands. So you don't want, you know, at least I don't want, I don't want a phlebotomist drawing my blood who learned entirely online. Right. So you know what was interesting though is we believe that there was a world where a blended learning modality, meaning half of it was done online and half of it was done in person, could reach a significant more amount of students, could support this massive jobs gap that we have in the trades. It's actually the biggest jobs gap in the country. And it made business sense for these folks doing this training because they could grow revenue by, by getting more students in the door. They would have less real estate costs, right. And they would have less instructional costs because they wouldn't have to spend money for every minute of teaching that takes place. And so, you know, when the pandemic hit, that was no longer a kind of a pipe dream or something that forward looking companies believed and adopted, but it was a requirement. Right. And so we saw, you know, incredible growth. The business, our ARR tripled, we went from supporting 20 enterprise customers to over 200. What we've seen as the pandemic has slowly gone away is nobody's going back to that fully in person because even though they're teaching very hands on occupations, there still can be 20%, 30%, even up to 50% of that learning that can be done online. Our technology really blends the two worlds of in person and online learning and eliminates what they were doing before in those in person environments, which was almost entirely done on pen and paper with you know, attendance sheets, with quizzes, tests, exams. It was, you know, they were, they were stuck in the stone ages a little bit prior, prior to coursekeep.

Interesting. That's awesome to hear. I want to kind of get you to talk a little bit more about that job gap that you're talking about. Especially because what we've seen during the pandemic, like white collar, have been able to move around the world, you know, work from wherever, but that, that's not really not the case for a big chunk of society. What are you seeing around, like, localized talent? Are you seeing anything there of, like, how a local economy tapping into and retraining or upskilling their local talent?

Yeah. So no, it's a fantastic question, I think. I mean, pre pandemic trades was the biggest gap in the biggest jobs gap in the US and even post pandemic, that remains the case. And so we have this immense shortage where companies are literally having to bring in, you know, foreigners to fulfill some of these roles. The one of the things, if, you know, on Twitter that I'm super loud and vocal about is one of the. One of the things we're really trying to change at Corski is the whole stigma and narrative that has been created that traditional college is for everybody. Right. And it's not, especially if you don't know what you want to do. Right. So I have a buddy from high school who went to traditional college, floundered around, didn't know what he wanted to do. You know, racked up $100,000 in debt, dropped out, went back to moving to mom and dad's, but then got, you know, pursued his passion in cars and opened his own, you know, got credentialed as a mechanic, opened his own auto body shop and employs like 15 people. And so it created this incredible career for himself. Makes more money than all of his friends. Right.

Awesome.

Yeah. There's such a huge opportunity in blue collar. And so the talent piece of it is we need more people pursuing these careers.

Absolutely. And I think something you obviously can track and what you're able to do with the software is point to results. Well, one, you said that there's legislation that makes that happen. Right. So first the schools are on the hook to do that, but now you're also able to build these dashboards and show that it's actually working, which the accessibility of that data is huge too. Right. It inspires people to say, man, I hit a wall. What's next for me? Friend says, hey, look what happened to me. This school can help you too. So you kind of turn success of the student into kind of the ambassador, saying, hey, maybe this route works for me too. Which is great to see.

Yeah. That's the most exciting part about what we do at Corskey is, is we have a lot of, you know, student success focused software that because we're digitizing kind of the whole learning process, we're able to collect information that we can show to these institutions, these businesses, these schools, and tell them who's Struggling, who's at risk, who's falling off, and they can intervene and support that student, get on track before it's too late. Right. And so if you think of, if you look at the alternative in college, yeah, you know, there's big out learning management systems and everything's digitized, but the school is not spending time looking at like enterprise student success analytics and helping people get back on the right path. There's a counseling center that waits for a student to knock on their door and tell them that they're struggling. Right. So because our space is really incentivized around student success and their business models operate and only succeed when a student succeeds, it's awesome to build software that creates alignment for the student, for the school, and for the federal government regulation that's associated with it.

Yeah, man, huge opportunity here. So think about our listeners who are both either tech entrepreneurs or tech employees that are thinking about the future. Where do you think this space of enabling so many workers, where there is a gap right now besides where you are building. Where else should people be building to build some solutions for this?

Yeah, I mean, I think people need to build in boring, unsexy industries for some reason. You know, we all get caught up in building the new cool thing. And there's so much of the world in these industry, agriculture, construction, you know, vocational training like us, that have just been forgotten about. And you know, we talk about like the Metaverse and all the in virtual reality and all these things that are coming down the pipe. But what we forget about is the everyday American and the everyday person that works in fields like this that still haven't even gone through a digital transformation or have moved from pen and paper to software. Right. And so I'm very bullish on vertical software eating the world. Like, we talk a lot about, you know, software eating the world, but I think there's a coming kind of tsunami, so to speak, where software will be structured in a way that is very vertically integrated and focused on a specific industry or market, as opposed to something that works across, you know, 19 different industries and is trying to be all things to all people, which is the majority of software companies today.

Yeah, that's great, Great points. I don't know if I'm too myopic on how I see San Diego, but I see a lot of the tech we build here for some of those boring industries like education, but also construction and logistics, tech as well.

Right.

Like, who wants to work on trucking software? Well, it turns out it's a pretty huge market. I Wonder if we're onto something in San Diego, maybe in terms of having a good eye on kind of the average American and who to build for. I hope so. What do you think?

No, I think that's right. I think, you know, orenflock Freight just, just today, I think announced they got a billion dollar valuation. So massive kudos to him and the team. That's incredible. So, yeah, another example of a vertically focused software business that's solving a real, real problem that, you know, just so happens to be a massive industry. Yep.

With some big talent gaps as well too coming up currently. And as we lose as retirement age hits for a lot of these, which I think is another piece around the trade skills too, is generationally not backfilling with retiree talent as well. You know, I definitely don't. When I think of welder, I think of, you know, older, older guy doing it for whatever reason and those skills need to be passed on to the next generation too. So super exciting and I'm glad you're shedding a light on this because these are necessities. Things that we're building like SaaS for VCs is not a necessity. But software to help people keep our infrastructure alive and keep Americans doing their job, that's big. So thanks for doing that.

It's our essential workers. Right. It's people that keep the lights on.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Benefit from all the software and technology advancements that a lot of knowledge workers have already, you know, had the privilege of using for years at this point.

Awesome. Well, you've been building San Diego for a while. You've got to know some go to taco spots. Do you have a favorite?

Yeah, I have. I have been here for a little bit. I'd say my go to is Presto. Can't. Can't go wrong with Presto.

You cannot. Pesto is great. They've got pretty good wide range of options even for vegans and vegetarians. So meeting everyone's needs for sure. The upscale taco. We appreciate it. Where can people find more about what you're writing and talking about? We'll put it in the show notes too. But you want to give a shout out to where people can find you.

Yeah. So I'm at Luke Safinos on Twitter. It's Luke and then last name S O P H I N O S There you can actually register for my weekly newsletter. I write a weekly newsletter on vertical SaaS and vertical software and why we're going to see a big shift towards that in the coming years.

Awesome. We will link to them in the show notes too. But Luke, thanks so much for being on the pod and dropping some knowledge with us.

All right, Neil, thanks so much, man. Thanks for everything you do for San Diego.

Absolutely. You too. Cheers.

From Couch Surfing, thanks for joining us.

On the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of this San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at citizenrecording.com you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom and on LinkedIn as well as well as fresh brewed Tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

You want tech and tacos, Tacos in tech. You know we got it.