The Achieve Podcast - Anthony Koltenuk Pledged Inc.

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Anthony Kultimek. I think I said that okay.

Yeah, you got it.

Uh, founder of Pledged Inc., and you can find them at pledged to. So Anthony, I appreciate you coming on and joining us today.

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

And so you and I were talking the other day and I really loved what you were pointing out, but for those getting to know you and your company, give us the backstory a little bit. That what brought you to this space and who you're currently serving, because it's quite fascinating.

Yeah, happy to kind of dive deep, I guess. So Originally, I was a student and I was really frustrated with the poor data quality of the systems we were using to manage our student organization. We thought, "We can build a better platform than this," and as we were doing research, we found out it's not necessarily the platform's fault, although it did have shortcomings. I, I realized that the bigger issue was that there was no data backbone for universities so that they could just plug everything into this and have the data be shoveled. And so that's when we realized this is something we can build that needs to be built, and it's going to alleviate a lot of pain. Eventually, we got to the point where we were deciding how do we get our foot in the door with this? Because this is, this is a system that would touch everything that universities do. They're not going to look at a startup as a viable solution provider. So we have to find a niche within that space that we can kind of attack. And we ended up building a three-pronged test, which was who has the autonomy to actually make software decisions for themselves, who has the pain to require new software, and who has the budget. And the budget and the autonomy were the two big ones because everyone has pain. We ended up starting— we started with registrar, and while they have the pain and the budget, in theory, they don't have any sort of autonomy. And those decisions for registrar typically multi-year to decade-plus decisions at a higher ed institution. And as we did more research, we talked to different people across university systems. We were looking at advancement initially. So these are the guys who were calling you up saying, hey, you're an alum, don't you want to give your school some money? And we realized they're, they're revenue centers. So we thought this might be a good way in. Um, they have some solutions, but not really great solutions. And as we were looking down this route, we met up with a group called Unite. Out of The Ohio State University, and they told us, well, we go around training schools on managing these corporate relationships. And when we go to a school, they will talk to a couple dozen different departments and they'll have them compile these lists of, of company interactions, and then they'll put this all together into one big data sheet. But the problem with that is by the time the data is in that sheet, it's already dead.. It doesn't have any connection to live systems. There's no real ongoing interaction data. And if a school wants to maintain this, they're running this report, which is fairly time-consuming, every quarter at, at a minimum. Um, so they said, we need a place for this data to live. We need a system of record. And we thought, that's perfect. That's exactly what we can do. And we can do even better than just being the system of record. We can connect into the systems that already exist because anyone who does any kind of data management or, um, data integration for industry knows the hardest thing to do is get people to enter data, uh, reliably. So if they have systems that they use, we say, keep using it. We'll just connect in and we'll aggregate that data. We'll let the university know this is what your corporate relationships look like, um, from a 20,000-foot view. So you can actually see what's going on. What you need to improve, where you're missing money, because a lot of universities are missing a ton of money in this. And so, yeah, we just bring that all together for them. Wow.

And so how big is the team in the organization now that you're running?

It's not huge. Um, it's a 5-person team, but we've found a lot of efficiencies from using AI tools. We've been able to build out a fairly well-scoped system. And since my co-founder is so— he's got a very strong background on this. He's built enterprise-level systems before single-handedly. He built the academic advising system that ended up being used by the state of Hawaii and was later acquired. So he's built massive-scale systems before and he's just got an amazing eye for detail. So while we're using AI to assist us in building this, he's treating this as the junior developer throwing code together, and then he's doing all the final review on everything, making sure everything is secure, which I know is a huge issue right now.

Yeah. And, and again, you— the amount of data you guys are processing is unreal with these colleges and connecting people, like you mentioned, making sure it's live and accurate and pertinent versus, yeah, this is old, dead information. So right now, what would you say Looking back, what turning points have molded the way you think about running this organization?

Um, I think I was pretty naive about the sales cycle for higher ed. It's, it's very political. It's, um, they're not necessarily reluctant to have new technology, but they are reluctant to be blamed for something changing badly. And There's this weird kind of snowball effect that happens within universities. What I've heard from a lot of different schools is no one wants to be the first, but absolutely no one wants to be the last to adopt new technologies. And so if you're selling into higher ed, you really have to rely on that and you have to put in a lot of time before you're going to have any money coming in. But if you can find the universities that like working with startups that have their own startup programs, And that's, that's the way to go.

Okay. Yeah. And right now, what would you say is driving growth for you guys?

Um, direct interaction. Uh, schools are highly referential. They don't like being sold at, and they are really used to kind of these from-the-top directives where you might have an admin or even the president's office saying, this is what you're going to use going forward, and it'll be some, some new technology that this person saw at a trade show, and they have never done the actual work of the department that they're expecting to just start using this new technology. So you get, you get real fatigue that sets in for these groups. So if you can actually say like, this is what we're doing to prevent fatigue, we're designing it specifically for you, we're talking to you first, Help us get in touch with the C-suite. Help us get in touch with the decision makers so that we can make your life easier. I think that resonates a lot better. It also helps that our advisors are really well integrated into the space, including one of our board of directors who was— is running this organization called NACRO, the Network of Academic Corporate Relations Officers. And that whole organization is just about this. It's just about managing the corporate relationship at a university level.

Um, now when you look at your guys's process, what do you feel like is working well to attract and retain good clients for this or schools?

Um, it's largely just been attending groups like NACRO. Uh, cold outreach does not work in this space. They get inundated with emails. It's— these are the fundraisers. They know what these outreach emails look like, they're used to avoiding them themselves because they create so many of them. They need a human touch, and that might mean having a relationship develop over the course of several months to a year plus. But once you have the relationship and they know that you're not just going to disappear on them, yeah, it makes a big difference.

Yeah, I can see that trust and that relationship is becoming more and more crucial. With the amount of data that's going. So when you think about your sales and your marketing, your outreach system, where do you still see opportunity or money on the table with this?

Yeah, and so we briefly touched on this in our last conversation, so I, I'm really excited to go over this. We are building a portal for companies to be able to share their availability with schools, and this is something that was requested by an exec at IBM and another at Boeing and another at Samsung, where they said, we have all of these interactions with schools, but we don't have a really effective way to communicate with them at once when we're okay with them calling us for specific things. So if we could have a calendarized view that we can share with them of our job availability, of our sponsored research availability, of our donation availability, this is what the portal is designed to do. It's designed to alleviate that outreach pain But at the same time, we are making this, this limited portal free for schools as well. So we were worried about this becoming a two-sided marketplace. If we only have a limited number of schools on the pledge platform, then it's not going to be enough for the businesses to actually simplify their communications. But if we say, schools, you can use this for free, you're going to get these opportunities delivered to you for free. And if you want to put them into the CRM that you're currently using, You can do that. It's not going to be connected, but you have that data. However, if you want to keep— if you want this data to automatically flow through to the person that it's going to be most effective for, use the pledge platform. And at the same time, we're going to be giving companies the opportunity to sponsor schools for this because their budgets are a little tight right now. If you haven't heard, funding has kind of disappeared for higher ed.

Yeah. Yeah, I love what you're doing, the problem you're solving with that. So with AI and automation, you and I were talking a little bit off screen. So where do you— where have you found ways internally to utilize it, and where are you seeing things with it?

Yeah, I think the most effective uses of AI are in novel tools. So if you're looking at things like Google Search or voice recognition, those are tools that have kind of existed for a while and had already been somewhat well-designed. When you introduce AI to that, it adds— it feels like an extra layer of burden for the user. But when you're talking about novel tools like what we've built, having that data analysis run on top of a corporate profile, for example, so I can tell you, hey, this company's hired a lot of your students, but they haven't donated any money. You should talk to them about having more visibility on campus through donations. Maybe you get naming rights to a building or something. Um, when you see stuff like the, the backend of what we're building, our developer team using AI has massively accelerated what they're able to do. And since we have that experience, the, the developer experience to be able to review that code and not just vibe code, we can also make sure it's FERPA compliant because that's incredibly important to us. That we never expose client data. Um, and I, I'm not saying this is because of vibe coding, but as an example, the Instructure hack that happened a few weeks ago was something that had the potential to be much more devastating than it was, and it's because of the way the data is stored in one place. And when we have our schools on the platform, they have control over their own data. It's in a separate server for each school, so they have or a separate database. I'd have to talk to my co-founder to figure out exactly how that's configured. But no one's data is touching anyone else's data. It's not some centralized hacking point that they can get through to everything. And it's really important that data be secured when you're talking about such sensitive data.

Yeah, yeah. And I love your approach, the way you've gone about this. And even to your point where it's like Hey, this business has gotten so many students from the school. It's like, hey, let's make this a mutual beneficial relationship.

It's like, give back. So any given school probably has about 20 different touch points with different corporations, and none of those companies, or none of those touch points within the university, are able to see what anyone else is doing with the companies they work with, and it can cause serious stress. So it becomes this, we're all fighting against each other internally kind of atmosphere. And there are a few schools that have, um, kind of this radical candor idea where they are very open about everything, and that works extremely well, and that's what a lot of the system is based off of. But we recognize not everyone's going to be comfortable sharing their high net worth individual, uh, contacts that they have on the system, so we've built in protections for that as well. But when, when you look at what schools can do when they're open, when they share this data, when they make sure that people are on the same page, a really good example is Georgia State. They're not one of our clients, but they've spent a lot of money to get to that kind of openness with the Salesforce solution. I would shudder to think how much they spent on it, but they went from about 6% of their um, their, their, uh, sponsored research, which is the national average, by the way, about 6%, um, coming from corporate partners, up to 15%.

Wow, more than double.

Yeah, it's a significant change. Schools that, um, manage the corporate partners really well can get about 30% of their annual revenue from corporate partners. Wow. This is the average, about 10 to 15%. Right now, when schools are dealing with the tuition cliff and grants disappearing, it's more important than ever, especially when you consider the students that are being cut out right now are the ones that have typically been considered to be subsidizing education for people domestically. So when you cut out students from China or India by limiting student visas, that is a huge source of revenue that suddenly disappeared. And it's a, it's a source of revenue that schools have relied on for the last two decades. Um, when was the last time you were on a college campus?

Uh, a few months ago.

Did you notice all the shiny new buildings? Like, every single college campus pretty much has updated over the last couple of decades, and a lot of that was done on bonds with the expectation that they're going to continue to have this international student presence that will help pay for this.

Okay, okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, okay, very painful situation.

Ouch.

Wow.

So when you look at your own business and the trajectory you guys have been on, If you had to focus on one constraint to solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?

It would, it would definitely be the sales process. And I think we are, we are hoping that the corporate portal where we're giving the schools free access as well will kind of alleviate a lot of that because that's basically a pipeline of schools that already are getting these deals from us and maybe they'll see the value in having this flow automatically to people who can handle that. I think anytime you ask someone that who's working with higher ed, they're going to say the sales cycle.

Yep. Bureaucracies can take time.

Yeah. It's, it's not as bad as government sales, but it's not far off.

What have you found that has helped that the most?

Those existing relationships, having one school say, "Hey, these guys have been helping us with this. You should talk to them." Gotcha.

Effective networking then. So when you look back at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you?

Well, and we— I talked about this before, so I'm AuDHD, but the ADHD part is much more evident in my career history. So I moved to China to learn about China, and I lived there for 3 and a half years. I taught English in Japan. I have done all sorts of different careers, worked as a data analyst, worked as an automation coordinator. And I think the biggest lesson I learned was from my previous startup, which was an English ESL platform. So English as a Second Language platform. For people in China who wanted to be able to find teachers directly, and for teachers who wanted to be able to find reputable schools because there's so much fraud in the industry. And I was very familiar with 2 of the 3 pillars of that model, which were I knew students and I knew teachers. Um, I didn't do enough customer discovery. I didn't talk to enough schools, and if I had, I would have found out that they don't really care because they're going to be able to get teachers anyway. They don't care if the teachers know that they're reputable. They don't care if they're hiring teachers with the degree that they say, because there's so much that they were doing behind the scenes to get the visas anyway that it wasn't a model that appealed to them. And I think that really informed the amount of customer discovery we did with Pledge.

Gotcha.

Hundreds of schools.

Okay, so last question for you. When you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

Um, definitely the corporate portal because we have so much growth that we can do in that field as well. Because I, I mean, I mentioned the calendarization, but we're going to build this as a freemium app, so anything that adds immediate value to the schools is going to be free for the companies. But there are so many interactions that they struggle to maintain as well on the corporate side that we can add in. I think we've got multiple years of work ahead of us just optimizing that.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's, that's fun though. Like if you have, if you have a pattern-seeking brain, solving problems like that is, is super fun.

Yeah. Any final thoughts for those listening, for our guests, those on a similar journey?

Um, don't forget about the human relationship. There are a lot of things that can be accelerated by AI, but in the end, products are designed for people. When you say like, oh, we can make this faster, you have to ask yourself, is faster better, or is it just faster. Um, I see a lot of people who are conflating the two.

Yes, I love that. That is a well-articulated statement there, because the humans, we have to process that. So faster, sometimes you have to slow it down to process it yourself.

Wow. Yeah, AI doesn't know when to stop. It doesn't know, like, okay, this is the amount of information that is necessary to prove this point, or this is the amount of information that is something that can be reliably absorbed. When you talk to people who have been reading AI summaries, you don't know, did they get the correct information from that? Did they get information that is biased by weights of the AI? Are they able to process all the information that AI gave them accurately?

So true, so true. So for those who want to learn more, businesses that want to get involved, want to reach out, obviously go to LinkedIn, but pledged.to. Anywhere else you want to send them?

Um, yeah, if they fill out the form, it'll go to me on pledged.to. We, we are happy to talk with anyone. We're going to be doing more conversations with corporations as well. Getting more of their input on the portal as it's built. I saw our demo yesterday and I'm really excited with where it's going. So yeah, looking forward to that launch.

Is there a certain ideal business to utilize what you guys are doing, the tools you're developing?

Honestly, any size business that wants to work more closely with universities. I think startups, it's a little trickier. Because they don't necessarily have the funds that universities need for a lot of these relationships. But there are still capstone projects, and a lot of schools— so UC Irvine works with startups all the time. They do capstones, and the nice thing about capstones is you get to keep the IP that's generated. So even though you have a student team generating something, it's yours. And a lot of these schools offer discounts or freebies for startups where they will have student teams work on your project for free if it's exciting enough. And it's not like you're taking advantage of them because the students get real-world experience and they can point to, "Hey, I built this and it's in use at this startup and it's novel technology and this shows what I can do." I love that.

That's so good. Thank you, Anthony, for coming on, sharing the insights, the knowledge, and the complexity of those relationships. I like, I love what you guys are doing, what you're building.

Yeah, thanks for having me again.

And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode as well, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the conversation, share it with a friend, with a colleague, with a student, with a business owner, those who are wanting to grow and not sure how to navigate that, reach out to Anthony and the team and they'll help you simplify that process. So reach out and we'll see you all in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.