Bruce Umpstead: IMS Global Learning Consortium | The Business Blast Podcast #498

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Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Bruce Umstead with us. He recently joined IMS Global Learning Consortium. The leading international data standards organization in education. His task is helping bring the education industry into the API economy. So welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Of course, man. Grateful to have you here. We'll dive right into the first one. The first question I have for you, Bruce, is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

Well, I've got a series of stories. I can tell you my origin story is that I was raised by a career military noncommissioned officer. My dad had an amazing career. He flew on Air Force crews that picked up Apollo 13 astronauts, Iranian hostages. He traveled all over the world. It was really a great career. And I really found that kind of like became who I was, right? And I've been fortunate, right? Because not only did I move 20 times, but I got to live all over the world. And it started in Southern California. Then I moved to Washington, D.C., where I got to experience busing. And then I came of age in West Germany when it was West Germany and we were fighting the Cold War Russians. It just really became kind of seminal in who I was to live life on adventure. And most of the time when we were in Europe, we were driving around in an orange Volkswagen camper van, driving all over. Experiencing life. So I found out that I'm really never satisfied unless I'm on adventure. So that's what I'm looking for. I'm always looking for what, what the next adventure is and who wants to join me on that adventure.

Yeah, I love that, man. Um, and what's the most valuable piece of information we should know that is within your expertise or industry?

Okay, so I focus on K-12 education, and it is an exceptional industry, and I can explain why. But basically, I focus on scaling technology solutions in education And that's why I joined IMS Global Learning Consortium because they're pushing education data standards that make all the backend systems work interoperably or basically as one system. So you don't have to have a single system. You just have to have them share data standards. And unfortunately in K-12, it's small lot size that is the biggest problem. It's like in Michigan, we have 1.5 million students. There are 900 different education boards that decide how the funding is going to be spent and how you're going to provision education. And so we celebrate that local control, it's called, but in reality, it can drive up your cost of customer acquisition to about 35% of what you want, what you want to charge. And so it becomes very, very difficult to try to scale innovation in education because of that small lot size. So you have to be looking for those incentives to drive adoption. If you want to get to scale. So that's unique to my industry in K-12 education and working on data standards.

And what's your best piece of overall business advice, so not necessarily industry-specific?

Focus on generating positive network effect. Network effect is really what drives a lot of the platform companies. So when we think about Uber, Airbnb, OpenTable, of course, is the big guys, and they're buying up network companies all the time. And that is Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Those are all big platform companies. And a lot of times, the smaller platform companies are really kind of creating markets, connecting one side to the other. You can think about it like a matchmaker. So Match.com or Cupid and some of these other dating sites are perfect examples of what network effect is in terms of the value of the company goes up the more people transact across that platform. What we found, I've had to study this for the last 4 years, an odyssey on my own, is that in 2016, Deloitte said the stock market is valuing network orchestration, so people who generate network effect at 8x revenue versus technology companies, which are only valued at 4x. You get twice the value if you are actually focusing on driving network effect. That's why somebody like Airbnb has launched at least 3 times, if not 4, in terms of trying to drive the community that's on their platform. Yes, they're sharing bedrooms and they're sharing apartments and you name it, creating experiences. But the value really comes from one side changing value, exchanging value across their platform with someone else.

And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Write it down. Write it down. That's pretty critical. It's pretty easy for me to think about what I'd tell my younger self because I have two teenage daughters and one's in college. The older one is funny. She is so funny. I have to work at being funny, but she just like lives life of funny. And I'm like, you did write that down, right? I don't think writing it down on her spam Instagram account counts, but she is starting to take my advice. I said, write it down.

Yes. And in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?

Living gratefully, because happiness can be fleeting, right? It can be based on emotions, and emotions change faster than the weather, even in Michigan. And joy is different. Joy comes from the inside, and really you can generate joy by being grateful. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts, and I know that you do a gratefulness journal in the morning. Yeah. And that's really a source of joy for me. And that's my hashtag, living gratefully, both in my email and also on Facebook. It's kept me out of some political debates and helped me keep focused on what I'm really thankful for, what I'm really grateful for. And that's really, to me, the key of being happy.

Yeah, man, the morning gratitude journal is a game changer in my opinion. And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

Well, what if I said Conference Crushing by Tyler Wagner?

I would say that's awesome, man. I appreciate it.

Actually, your book has inspired me. I mean, I ordered the digital copy. The audiobook, which thank you, by the way, a lot of people don't go to that trouble. You hired professional talent for that.

Yeah.

Thumbs up on that. And then also I've got the paper copy in front of me. And one of my side hustle jobs is I am the curator for the IT track at the Future of Education Technology Conference every January. It's gonna be in Orlando this next year. And I realized I generate a lot of content editing people's titles, editing their bios, editing the content that actually describes what they're going to do. I've got as much content in the work that I just did on 60 different sessions than in Conference Crushing. I could turn that into first a blog series and then hopefully a book. I talked to your guy, Jay, yesterday, and I'm really thinking about turning into a, what I call a book, right before the conference. A book. A book guide. Right? A specific guide for the conference, because I'm hired to make it easier for IT professionals to find their way to a teacher conference. Totally. Right? There's 10,000 people there and there's hundreds of sessions. Which one should they go to? So my guide could be really an expert reference for what they should be looking out for. That's my plan anyway.

Definitely, man. Yeah, it is interesting to me, because yeah, I'm sure, you know, if you have Conference Crushing in front of you, it's a pretty short book. And yeah, a lot of people don't realize like how much content they actually already have that they can turn into a book. So I look forward to your book coming out, man.

That's sick. Well, on the fiction side, I love Ready Player One. I just watched the movie. I waited for it to come out on DVD, right? Or at least on iTunes. That very Gen Xer, and I'm a Gen Xer, but the movie was more millennial. I love the book. And then in terms of nonfiction, I read Platform Scale and Matchmakers. Those are two books that were very insightful and accessible. As it relates to that platform business strategy we talked about a few minutes ago. Yeah. The real book that kind of like opened everybody's eyes to the power of platform is called Platform Revolution. But in reality, I had to go back and read their previous book, which is Platform Scale. And I think Matchmakers was written by the folks associated with OpenTable. So it was really insightful to get their firsthand view of how to drive network effect.

And just out of curiosity, I don't really read fiction, but in comparison of movie and book for Ready Player One, which one was better?

Better? Both. Both. I love the book because it was written by somebody who's probably my age, and it just was an anthology of all the video games I grew up playing. I understand why Spielberg cast it the way he did. He took somebody who really— it's even Generation Z, it's kids my age, right, that were playing the game. But in reality, you know, there's a lot of things he had to do. To really bring out the environment, the online environment, you know, into the theaters. And I thought he did a fairly good job at that, but I love the book more.

And what is your favorite quote and why?

Well, I have several favorite quotes, but I'm going to read you one that kind of talks about the way I look at life. It's from the opening lines of The Odyssey by Homer. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he was wrecked on the holy hills of Troy, and where he went and who he met, and the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his own life and bring his men back home safely. And yet he failed to keep them safe. Poor fools, everyone. Hmm.

Dude, so, and why is that your favorite quote?

Well, I'm working on a podcast myself. And it's called The Great American Epic, and really kind of celebrating the journeys that everyday Americans make to do heroic acts of, you name it. I mean, I interviewed somebody who walked out of depression without medication. I interviewed somebody who became a naturalized citizen from Ireland. I've got a lineup. I'm doing Seth Godin's podcasting fellowship right now, and it's great. It's like 50 days of, you know, little increment steps of improving your craft and podcasting, podcasting, podcasting. So you're already getting that experience with this one. I really do appreciate being on the Business Blast. And so I'm kind of walking up that path too, little by little. And so this quote really kind of speaks to me of the types of stories that I want to tell in the Great American Epic.

Yeah, congrats, that's awesome. And Seth Godin, I'm a huge fan, so that's really cool as well. And yeah, man, thanks again for coming on. The last question I have for you before we let you go is where is the best place for people to find you online?

The best place is LinkedIn, so it's en/humpstead. I kind of own the web property there. You can also look, look me up at imsglobal.org. imsglobal.org is my new organization. I'm happy to be an entrepreneur there and kind of driving adoption of very important data standards to make education catch up with the rest of Italian.

Perfect, man.

Yeah.

Thank you again for coming on. We appreciate it.

Thanks.

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