A Focus in Education | Michael Staton

So, this is actually, these slides are part of an evolving kind of workshop that I do. And I've been in the process of trying to write a book on the matter. I only have one section done, which is about raising capital. Everything else is just a bunch of notes. But the title is Slow Down to Speed Up. I find that entrepreneurs are always in a dramatic hurry. They're always kind of infused with their own stress hormones and sense of urgency, and they're running around trying to close customers and getting investors, and get investors without actually slowing down to do the real growth that needs to happen first, which is, the first thing that needs to happen is you actually have to grow the mind of the entrepreneur, and grow the skill sets of the team that are starting the company. And if you rush into company building before you do those exercises, the probabilities are already against you, first of all, but they're even more against you if you don't have the right skill sets. So, a little bit on Learn Capital. These are some of the companies that we've invested in. We've invested in now over 70 ed-tech companies. We are apparently second place to Mitch Kapor, Kapor Capital, in the number of companies we've backed in the past 5 years. But Mitch also does very small seed investments, and he also invests his own capital, so he gets to just, if he likes it, he gets to do it. He's a great guy. Yeah. Anyway, there are about 4 ed-tech sector funds. We got started first. We have the best brand. No, we like all the other ed-tech VCs as well, but we have invested in the most companies. We also, in differentiating from other ed-tech VCs, all of us have been founders and operators of companies. At this point, our companies are reaching over 300 million learners. around the world. And part of what we're trying to achieve is to make capital markets work in education, which is a place that it traditionally has not worked, particularly capital for innovation. Private equity has been in education for some time. Venture capital is quite new to the scene. Our firm is a little over 7 years old. So I got my career started as a classroom teacher. Here's some pictures of me and my students. I taught in the worst-performing school in Houston, Texas, and it was actually— it performed so badly that they actually closed it down. So I had to find a new job within the city, and then I ended up at the best-performing school in the city. So I quickly kind of saw the differences there. And the thing that I was struck with was, you know, in high school and college, I had learned to use the internet, And I became a teacher, and there were all these things that were expected of me. I had high expectations for my students and their ability to learn. And I went on the internet and nada. Nothing. There were, like, no tools to help me do a better job. There were very few tools to help my students learn besides just Google search. And I was pretty angry about that. And so I started to imagine a lot of different cool web apps that might help me do my job better, that might help my students learn. And I'm proud to say today I ended up starting none of those companies or ideas, but a lot of them have been started, and we're involved with quite a few of them. What did you teach? What? What did you teach when you were a teacher? Technically, I was teaching, like, social studies. I mainly taught US history. I also taught world geography, economics, government. But I thought of myself, actually, as teaching students how to learn. So one thing that I realized when I was teaching 16-year-olds is nobody had actually slowed down to teach them how to participate in class, how to learn, how to best use their own time, how to manage themselves. And so I actually focused a lot of my curriculum on that. And I found that only when I slowed down to teach my students that, that did we speed up. And so my last year, We actually covered an entire year's worth of curriculum in the first 7 months. And so we got to spend, like, the last 2 months just exploring whatever topics we were interested in, which was a lot of fun. So anyway, as part of me being upset that there weren't really great tools and solutions, and as part of me being upset that no one had slowed down and taught students how to learn, I created a summer camp and an after-school program that were moderately successful. And I maxed out a credit card and tried to start a company around that. And realized that if you're 22 years old and you have no access to, well, 24 years old, have no access to venture capital and your credit card maxes out at about $5,000, you're kind of, you hit it, you hit the dead end pretty quick. And I got a job offer to join a startup out in Palo Alto. I had never heard of Palo Alto. I didn't know where it was on a map. I barely knew what Stanford was, so I kind of showed up blind and moved to downtown Palo Alto and made a lot of friends at a little startup called Facebook, which one of my friends had joined, and that kind of set me off on this journey. This is a picture. I was working at NewSchools Venture Fund. Just as an example, this is the founder of Education Elements. This is the founder of ClassDojo. This is the founder of Reach Capital, founder of Mastery Connect, Goalbook, InGrade. And I don't remember who that person is, but never mind. Anyway, so my journey. Yeah, I joined a startup which burned a lot of cash in Palo Alto and found one way to fail. I started a company that ended up being called Uversity. We got backed by Founders Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. and the founders of Mohr Davidow and Western Technology Investments. I joined NewSchools Venture Fund to help them build out their ed-tech investing practice. It was called NewSchools Seed at the time, and that has become Reach Capital. I left there to be an entrepreneur in residence at Learn Capital, where I helped start Dev BootCamp. And then quickly, within 6 months, got into a very structural disagreement with the founder CEO about how to grow the company. And so we ended up kind of breaking up. Founder breakup is, you know, half of all companies break up, fail because of founder breakup. Dev BootCamp went on to be successful. Kaplan acquired it. I've helped Dale start UnCollege. If you guys know UnCollege, they run gap year programs for students that are not very interested in being students, basically. Yeah. And then now I've been at Learn Capital for almost 4 years now. I've helped us invest in companies like Coursera, Minerva, school DIY. Ed Surge, Brainly. So, in the process, you know, I got to know a lot of folks. This is, obviously, this is Zuck, founder of Facebook. Founder of Cloudera. Founder of Dropbox. The very first Airbnb launch party. So, I've seen a lot of companies that have become household names and have gone on to become unicorns and at least 2 decacorns. And some people ask me, like, what, what makes a great entrepreneur? Is there, like, an entrepreneur gene? Is there any sort of thing that makes a great entrepreneur? The things that I find in common with almost all entrepreneurs is they're attracted to uncertainty. If something's unproven, or people are skeptical, they just get more motivated by that. They're attracted to it. They have a self-created sense of urgency, which I said often comes to, to bite them. They have an unbridled sense of agency, which means that things that ordinary people might think are impossible or at least not worth pursuing, entrepreneurs attack those. And then they also have the ability to kind of integrate thinking and knowledge and come up with kind of leaps of intuition and imagination.