Interview with Parlay Founder & CEO Bobby McDonald

My name is Dustin Betts. I'm the content editor at the Founder Institute, and I'm here this afternoon with Bobby McDonald. He's the founder and CEO of Parley. They're an FI Toronto and Founder Institute Select Portfolio Company that is building the future of classroom discussion for both in-class and online learning. Bobby McDonald, thanks for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Excited to be here. So before we kind of dive into your startup Parley, I always like to kind of kick it off with a question about yourself, your personal story. What were the experiences professional or personal that led you to founding this education technology company?

Yeah, so I think personal experiences, I was, you know, I went through high school like everyone else, second year university when the original sort of idea for Parley came into being. And it was born out of a pretty common and salient frustration, and that was that school felt really divorced and disconnected from the real world, and that I was sitting in a room full of really smart people who had really interesting ideas and were very inquisitive, but we were all sitting there listening to a lecture. So it seemed like there was an opportunity for us to bring the real world in and have dialogue in the classroom, and that seemed to be missing. So that was the sort of genesis of the idea that, hey, more meaningful conversations about the events and ideas shaping our world as they relate to what we're learning need to be had in education. And for me personally, I had always grown up really interested in what was going on in the world and really excited and eager to talk about it. So that was the sort of personal genesis. And then as time went on, I spent a lot of time at school, I studied business, but I was also studying a lot of liberal arts, basically as many liberal arts classes as I could take, but also still squeaking out with a business degree. And I just derived a lot of value from that pursuit. Over time, I started to realize that the free and open and constructive and respectful exchange of ideas is a critical element of our society, and it's withering away. Some might say it's past the point of no return. I wouldn't say that we're that doomsday, but it really has gotten to a bad place. All you have to do is open up Twitter to see that happening in real time. And so as much as we thought that from an educational experience, from a student experience, it was great to have dialogue at a deeper level, teaching this to kids and to young people who are going through their educational experience is absolutely critical for maintaining a healthy and productive and society that's willing to compromise across lines of difference.

Perfect. Yeah, I mean, I love that framing kind of critical discussion. Yeah, we'll definitely dive into that as we go. Now, I know because I'm somewhat familiar with your company as a founder and portfolio company that Parley is discussion-based learning as well as a global community of educators. But let's kind of hear it straight from you, the founder. Please give us your sort of elevator pitch, you know, what is Parley?

Okay, cool. So Parley is a tool, educational tool, that teachers in K-12, specifically more like grades 5 through 12, use to facilitate discussions in the classroom. Specifically, we aim to help them facilitate discussions that are Meaningful, that being that they actually teach the critical thinking communication skills that kids need for the future. They are inclusive. In a typical discussion, you know, a few kids will dominate, and we would like all voices to be heard irrespective of anything that might, you know, cause one kid to dominate a conversation and another kid to stay quiet. And we want to make discussions that are data-driven and accessible. Teachers, you know, what gets measured gets managed, and teachers are under increasing pressure to assess students and track everything discussions are those things that are notoriously difficult to track, and so we give them individual student data as well as sort of class-wide data for the purposes of assessment, feedback, reflection, all those kinds of things. Awesome.

Yeah, that's, that's really, really cool. I can't wait to dive into the details. I kind of want to start with the problem framing just because edtech, probably now more so than ever, is like in the headlines everywhere. It's a discussion that's happening. So I mean, most people probably know, even if they haven't felt it in their personal lives, that COVID is hugely disrupted K-12 education. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing as we move towards these online or hybridized learning models? And yeah, maybe speak to how you're seeing those challenges being addressed.

Yeah, so I think, you know, general challenges. So there's a few. Number one is when it came to educational technology adoption, with the exception of a few sort of core tools, you didn't have the critical mass of teachers comfortable with the process of signing up for a new tool, figuring out how it works, troubleshooting it, experimenting with kids, going through that process in real time, and really being outside of their comfort zone. A lot of teachers just, they kind of stayed away from that. Obviously they haven't had a choice in the last little while, but to figure out all these different tools, try some, figure out what works for them, what doesn't, and really experiment. So I think that's been extremely stressful for a lot of teachers who are not used to, you know, to that process. I think long term that has some really great benefits where, you know, people are just generally more comfortable trying and implementing solutions in their classrooms. So that's one thing that I think we've seen, and in general, just the shift to online learning has been very, very, very difficult. For many teachers, the uncertainty from one day to the next about what their classroom will look like. Obviously the safety and security questions are very real for teachers and just so much additional work for them. So the degree to which you can take some things off their plate and you can, you know, whether it's, you know, we have a content library. So, you know, in the case of Parley, teachers can easily find topics and add them to their class and invite students and students are driving the learning. And then much of the data is automatically calculated and aggregated for them. So saving them time on the front end of the lesson and on the back end of the lesson, I think that really helps. And then I think probably the biggest one that we've seen as it relates to our tool, obviously that tends to be the context in which we have conversations about online learning, is keeping classroom community really strong and keeping kids engaged in general and with one another. There was a broad shift away It's been happening for a long time away from teacher-driven instruction where the teacher is lecturing content to the students, kind of like what I was talking about earlier, towards more student-driven learning where they go from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. It's kind of a corny line, but it sticks and it makes sense. And that transition was impeded in a lot of ways by, by this shift to online learning. And Parley is a really great way for teachers to navigate conversations and build classroom community and have that student collaboration, whether they're in the class fully, at home fully, or some hybrid approach.

Yeah, perfect. I really love that, and I love kind of how you talked about on the front end and the back end of kind of taking it off. And I want to dive further— or taking things off their plates, excuse me. I want to kind of dive further into your mission and vision, because— and this kind of goes to what you were saying at the top— I think those who are maybe not in the education space or have been out of school for a while, it might not be like immediately apparent what it means to be like an active learner, is a term that I used to hear. But Parley is all about like engagement and critical thinking and discussion. So yeah, do you want to kind of tell us a bit more about your educational philosophy behind the product, or, you know, why it's so important for learners to really engage actively with the subject matter and, you know, facilitating that on the educator side?

Yeah, no doubt. I'll try to keep it as brief as I can. So our core focus is discussion, as you know, and to this day, we still call, among other things, but we still call student-driven discussion a Socratic seminar. So for 2,500 years, we've understood the value of this kind of educational experience. Rather than giving kids the information, asking them to memorize it and then regurgitate it, you have them ask the questions and build on each other's ideas, challenge each other's ideas, question each other's ideas, and seek truth where there are lots of shades of gray. And there's quite a bit of research that shows that not only does that teach skills, obviously, like communication and critical thinking skills and collaboration skills that would not otherwise be acquired in a traditional sort of rote learning environment, it actually increases knowledge retention as well in a lot of ways. Some research done at Stanford that shows this, and there was a really— another really great piece of research that was done called Visible Learning by an Australian professor named John Hattie. And in that research, they showed that, you know, classroom discussions have roughly— I'm not doing the statistics justice here— but roughly a 2x increase on students' learning outcomes. So it teaches them the skills of the future. It teaches them how to engage meaningfully with one another. So a lot of those social and emotional skills as well, right? Like how to disagree with someone respectfully. That's pretty critically important thing. And it moves the needle more than traditional learning on student outcomes and knowledge acquisition. So it's just a better way of learning. And not in every context, not all the time, but it really does move the needle. And if you look at some of the sort of best institutions in the world, quote unquote, at least at the K-12 or high school level, you see someone like St. Philip's Academy Exeter, Andover, a lot of those sort of really, really expensive prep schools. Those schools have unlimited resources in effect, and they could do any kind of teaching and learning they wanted to. And there's a reason why they settled on discussions and what they call Harkness tables or Socratic seminars as their core instructional method. And so what we're trying to do is say, okay, what are these schools doing in classrooms of 12 with really super well-trained teachers and unlimited resources? How do we take that wisdom and take it down from the ivory tower and make it accessible to everyone? So that's kind of our mission and how we think about our role in education above and beyond the sort of citizenship element that I mentioned earlier.

Yeah, I love that. That's so interesting. I mean, I kind of maybe thought about the retention aspect of it, but all the things you emphasize about the soft skills, I mean, these are the things that as like the economy moves towards like more automation and things that are also like these soft skills are more important now than ever before. And so I love kind of how you're speaking to critical thinking, communication, like All of those pieces are much more part of that philosophy. Yeah, thanks for that. I'm gonna kind of dive into the product features. Parley, so it's a global community for educators and for learners, like they're all on the platform. You've got prompts and discussions and topics that can be engaged with that, you know, like you were saying, taking some work off the plate on the front end for the educator as well as on the back end for like the data analytics. Is there anything you want to kind of share with us about details of key features on Parley or sort of, you know, how how it works on the educator side?

Yeah, happy to share sort of high-level stuff. I will also caveat that with the real values in the nuance and the very specific details of feature by feature. So it may not all come across, obviously experiencing the product and/or seeing a demo is, you know, there's nothing that replaces that, but there's 3 core components. The first part is the Parley Universe. So this is a library of discussion topics. There are thousands of them in there. We have a framework that we've developed to structure the discussion topic in a way that focuses on learning goals, introduces the right content to multimedia, sort of like a flipped classroom idea where kids might, you know, watch the video or read the article on their own time. And then we have discussion questions, and we use sort of increasing orders of Bloom's Taxonomy, for anyone who's, you know, a pedagogy nerd and knows what that means. Yeah. So to really get them thinking about, you know, the events and ideas shaping their world and how that integrates with what they're learning in the sort of curriculum context. And so the topics are structured in a certain way. Teachers can browse the universe and bookmark topics or use them directly into their classroom. If they do publish a discussion topic into their classroom, they can edit it, so they have full creative liberty, which is really important to us. And then on the flip side, teachers can actually publish topics that they create into the universe and build their own portfolio, and other teachers can search and discover those, follow each other, get recommendations, all that kind of stuff. And then on our end, we have a curation, a team that basically curates the content and says, okay, this was a really great topic from teacher XYZ, maybe we'll polish a few things up to make it more broadly accessible, and then we certify them and organize them into collections. So it's this hybrid model of a curated content library and something more user-generated. So we're trying to get the best of both worlds in terms of quality and also volume. So that's the sort of Parley universe. And then when it comes to the online roundtable, this is a written discussion activity that can be used asynchronously, so, you know, over a long period of time, or synchronously, so in real time, or it can be— and it can be used inside the classroom, outside the classroom, or some blend of both. So it's super flexible. And basically what it is, is each kid submits a unique response to the discussion prompt after having watched the videos, read the articles, whatever, and then they all get secret identities, so they're all anonymous to one another. So you might be Sojourner Truth and I might be Isaac Newton and we might be having a dialogue back and forth. So the idea is that you really want to take the existing social structure out of the conversation and make sure that it's just the conversation of ideas. Doesn't matter if I'm the coolest kid in the class or the least cool kid in the class or whatever that means. And, you know, so all that kind of gets taken out of the discussion and you can focus on the ideas. Teachers can obviously see who's who. And then I would go in and I would read your response and then I might build on, challenge, or question your idea by answering guided feedback questions. Whole process unfolds and you teach kids to think critically, you encourage them to put their own ideas out there, obviously they improve their writing skills, their thinking and their analytics or analysis skills, excuse me. And then at the end of that, the teacher has all this data on each individual student at the class-wide level. It's great summary where they can reflect as a group and they can give feedback and assess each individual kid. So that's the online roundtable. And then the final one is the live roundtable, which is a face-to-face discussion activity. So again, can be done in the classroom or in a hybrid environment in conjunction with something like Zoom or Google Meets or whatever. And the idea is that it's a structured environment where when kids want to participate, rather than just interjecting into a conversation, they tap in. They tap in with a new idea to build an idea, to ask a question, to challenge an idea. And then everyone can see that, you know, 4 or 5 kids have tapped in. And so you create this collective awareness who's contributed Who wants to contribute? What's the nature of their contribution? How many times have they contributed already? Kids can vote for each other, applaud each other when they like what each other says. And then you have a much more structured dialogue that has intentional contributions. And again, the teacher, as this unfolds, very student-driven, they're tapping in, tapping out, driving the conversation. Teacher can sit back, assess, take notes, and really sort of facilitate the dialogue instead of, you know, be the one to lecture. And so that happens in real time, 'cause obviously they're speaking and listening in real time. So really just run the gamut. And then if you think about all of that in the continuum, it loosely models what you'd expect to see in a liberal arts college or in a sort of seminar-style learning that you might get in a literature course or a philosophy course or something like that.

Yeah, but with the added philosophy of— or the added value of being able to extract, I think, the insights for a larger class in a way where it's— if it's purely a Socratic discussion or something like that, you know, some of that nuance might be lost. But I love how like the tool allows you. Yeah, kind of diving into these features, it really, really helps illustrate, I think, kind of your overall philosophy that we talked about earlier. And yeah, just love that. My favorite question to ask, I'm gonna ask next, which is to ask you to make a prediction. So, you know, what do you envision for the future of edtech, say over the next 5 years? And because it's such a hot topic right now around adapting to COVID, you know, feel free to speak to, you know, what parts you think will stick around post-COVID versus during the pandemic?

Yeah, well, I mean, loaded question for sure, and predictions are hard, but I think, I think as I said earlier, the general familiarity with educational technology tools, how that has risen to the critical majority as opposed to just early adopters, generally speaking.

Yeah.

Will mean that educational technology is adopted and used more regularly in education, whatever the classroom context looks like in the future. So in general, I think this is a good thing for education technology. So that's great. In terms of, you know, going back to class, I think long term, we will have to get back to a place where kids spend a lot of time inside of a school. I think work from home for adults is not going to go anywhere. Some hybrid model will emerge there where parents will spend a lot of time at home. And I think if they're doing that and they're working at home, it's going to be absolutely critical that kids are in school because, like it or not, schools are places for the kids to go so the parents don't have to parent them 100% of the time, all the time. And so they can have their own lives too. So I think long-term, like, we'll have to find a way back to school. With that said, you're seeing a fragmentation of traditional education. You're seeing schools experimenting with different pods models or blended learning models or hybrid models. So I think that that is going to persist, and there's a lot more room for creativity and experimentation as a consequence. Of COVID and obviously just the immense destruction that has cascaded from that. So yeah, I think we'll see more blended and hybrid models. I think you're going to see a lot more homeschooling and you're going to see a lot more parents who are saying, "Okay, the jobs of the future require XYZ. Google and Facebook and Microsoft and a whole number of other companies don't even require that my student, my kid has a 4-year college degree," which is is inordinately expensive and takes a long time. So what can I do as a parent to craft or create a learning journey for my kid that I think is going to better set them up for the future than maybe the public education system could? Obviously, not all parents will have this luxury, but I think this will emerge. And there'll be more supplementary options and more of a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing that will emerge in education. What form that takes, I don't know, whether that's K-12, higher ed, some combination of both, I don't know. But I think that sort of decentralized future seems to be just the way that everything's going with respect to the internet and the efficiencies that can be gained. So I know that's a little bit obtuse, but yeah, that's kind of how I see it.

That's perfect. Yeah, thanks for going out on a limb and kind of speaking to like the higher education stuff too, because yeah, this is obviously like a really very disrupted space right now. And yeah, people are talking about it and yeah, I love that, the series of predictions. I think that's really great. You've obviously worked really hard to build Parley to where it is today. What advice would you offer an early stage or aspiring entrepreneur who's just getting started today? Maybe something you wish somebody had told you years ago before you got started.

Yeah, well, again, I can only speak to my own experience, but I think that for me personally, starting Parley was definitely about more than money. Many entrepreneurs want to start a business because they want to make a bunch of money and they want a good challenge. I have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever. That's awesome. Go for it. Our world was built by people who do that. For me, in my life, I wanted to create something that I knew would advance society in some way, in a way that was also true to me in terms of what I liked and what I was good at. And so that meant I chose education, which is a notoriously difficult market to understand and ultimately to monetize, just the nature of it. So edtech is a really hard, long game, And so for me, I chose something that I was super passionate about, and Parley has become really, for better or worse, an extension of me and who I am and not just a company that I created and want to run with. And so it has required an immense amount of resilience, and every setback has felt— in the early days, certainly, setbacks felt very personal. As opposed to, "Oh, well, they don't like my thing, too bad," and that's been really challenging, especially in a market that is not very forgiving and it's hard to generate meaningful revenue. So I guess my advice to people who are trying to do something both impactful and to self-actualize and hopefully make some money in the process, is to have a ton of resilience, get ready for late nights and a lot of self-doubt, and to study stoicism to the best of your ability, and to damper your highs and pull yourself up in your lows and find some sort of equilibrium that makes those more manageable. I don't know if that's helpful, but that's a little bit about my experience, I guess.

I think it is. I think it's really helpful, especially for any first-time founder who's kind of going into it maybe with the starstruck idea of the Elon Musk entrepreneur or whatever, when really the journey, I think speaking to, yeah, this resilience, you know, choosing something that, you know, you feel very strongly about personally that's gonna like bring you through those ups and downs is, yeah, that's really, really important advice.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, yeah, and actually I guess on the Elon Musk point, you know, read his biography and listen to him. Like that dude suffered a ton as a child. Through his first two companies and ultimately Tesla and SpaceX, he put it all on the line over and over again, worked his butt off, and has sacrificed a ton. Now he's some crazy— He's got the megalomaniac sort of thing going on, and everyone likes criticizing him, but he suffered a lot to get where he is, for sure.

People don't see his entrepreneurial journey. They only know the backside of it. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

Perfect. So final question is kind of like, you know, about where is Parley headed next? Any news or updates you want to share with the Founder Institute community or any asks for anybody who might be listening live or watching this video recording?

Yeah, sure. So we've grown a lot this year. We've grown about 1,400% in our total user base. So there's over 45,000, 46,000 teachers on the platform now.

Amazing.

Our revenue has increased almost 600%. We're tracking by the end of the year. So That started at the beginning of the year with some really great press that we were getting, and obviously COVID really accelerated that. So we've grown a lot and we're raising a round of financing now, and it's a seed round, and we're going to make some amazing investments into the product, build up the content library more, really aim to grow a global community, move to a freemium model so we can get the millions of teachers all over the world. India is one that's sort of top of mind for us right now on the platform and using it. We want to give teachers the ability to sort of connect their classrooms together from anywhere in the world. So, you know, a group of kids from India and a group of kids from Kansas can have a conversation about, you know, let's say the Sustainable Development Goals as an example. So that's something that we're thinking about, building a global community. And then, yeah, we have, you know, bigger plans beyond that, you know, outside of your traditional structures of K-12 education. So There's no real limit to our ambition in terms of where we think we can take discussions as the future of education. If anyone's interested in investing, I guess, reach out, or if you just want to learn more, happy to sit down and talk, of course.

We'll include the URL everywhere that we share this. It's parlayideas.com. This has been really interesting for me, picking your brain and getting some of your insights on these developments that a lot of people are talking about in for the future of hybrid and remote learning. And yeah, we're all really looking forward at the Founder Institute to keeping up with Parley and where you're headed next in your startup journey as you continue to, you know, make meaningful change to engagement in education. So at any rate, Bobby McDonald, thank you so much again for joining us.

Thanks, Dustin. It was great. I appreciate it very much.