Amir Nathoo on Outschool: Learning for the Future

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You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Banderak, and today we’re with Amir Nathu, the CEO of OutSchool, a great education platform. Launched about five years ago. They offered online classes to K-12 learners. Amir earned a Master’s in Electrical and Information Science at Cambridge about 20 years ago, and he’s been a business builder ever since. Amir, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Tom. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Amir, you’ve had an interesting career of starting companies and then building businesses inside larger companies and then starting companies and you develop software at IBM. You helped Square build their payroll processing, and in the meantime, it looks like you started a couple companies. I’m curious in that sort of 20-year tech journey, what you learned about your own learning and how you took that degree from 20 years ago and stayed so current both on business and tech. That’s a great question. You know, reflecting over 20 years, there’s just so much I’ve learned. I think one of the key learnings that underpins it all is just how fast things are changing.

A lot of that change is being driven by technology, and it’s amazing to think what our work and life was like even five years ago, let alone 10 or 20. For me, that has had implications on how I approach my work and my life in that it’s no longer possible to lean so much on your previous experience when there’s so much that’s new. All that said, I’ve been very lucky in that I started engaging with computers when I was five and started teaching myself how to program. Obviously, over the past 20, 30 years, that trend in the growth of computers inhabiting and transforming all parts of our life and the ability to create software businesses has been an incredible advantage. But coming back to that learning of how rapidly things are changing, I think ultimately what this means for business people, what it means for learners and kids today is it’s really important to think about, you know,

skate to where the puck’s at is the phrase. You know, not be looking backwards in order to ascertain the trends of the future, but looking at the now, you know, what’s happening right now. And linking that back to outskill, you know, this is why we encourage parents to support their kids in interest-based learning. Kids are so observant about the present, they’re not burdened by assumptions or the, you know, all the baggage we have as adults about assumptions about how the world works. It’s an incredibly exervent. So, and they’re just instinctively geared to be curious about really powerful trends and tools of society. So that’s why kids are so excited about, you know, stealing daddy’s phone in the case of my three-year-old.

They correctly identify that this is a incredibly powerful tool of this world they’re brought into and they want to study it. And so, you know, that’s what, you know, that learning about how fast the world is changing and the implications of that, you know, influenced me and influenced how I think about the value that outskill offers. Amir, you may be the very best example in history of hitting a window of opportunity. I wonder over the last 20 years if you learned anything about that of windows of opportunity. You may have had periods in your career where you missed a window of opportunity, but, you know, it’s not only about having a great product, but it’s a great product at the right time.

And do you think you observed that before outskill or was this a new chapter, a new observation for you? You know, I’ll first say there’s a lot of luck involved in this, right? You know, as you pointed out, I was lucky to be at the start really of the trends and software and to develop the right skills at the right time. And without all, you know, we’ve benefited from trends, but most obviously the recent pandemic where the growth in online learning was incredible and it would be a lie to say that all of that is intentional. You know, that said, I think there are ways in which you can position yourself in order to be more likely to be in the right place at the right time.

And a lot of that is about looking coming back to looking at trends and being in the now not being overly wedded to the past. I think there’s some there’s some failure modes and they’re a little bit counterintuitive like focus and discipline. You know, those things that we often teach are the route to success. Stop you from seeing the opportunities that might be right in front of you. A desire to pursue status or seemingly important things can also hinder you because usually, you know, if you look at the large markets today, or the high status professions today, or the opportunities that everyone else seems to be going for,

you’re probably not seeing the future. So actually, you can start to train yourself as to ignore those things, but it’s hard. You know, it’s hard when you watch your friends, you know, acquire qualifications acquire higher paying jobs. And but you think the future is going that way, it can sometimes take years to play out and you might be wrong and you have to accept the possibility that you might invest years of time in a particular area. And so it’s important to mitigate those risks.

And, you know, be prepared personally to be wrong. And that’s a key part of also being ready to take take advantage of opportunities, because it makes no sense to burn yourself out of, you know, resources or personal enthusiasm only for the perfect opportunity suddenly arise. So it’s really hard, but a lot of a lot of it is counterintuitive and a lot of what we’ve been taught in terms of focus and discipline and staying to the single path can actually get in the way of seeing where where the world is going. So, what’s the backstory on on out school whose idea was it? How’d you get started? Who supported the idea? So, you know, the founding of our school is a long time in the making. In terms of my own personal motivations, you know, both my parents were teachers.

And, you know, as I shared they supported me in pursuing my interests and particularly this interest in computers. And so I’ve been thinking about education for a long time and how I can apply, you know, my skills in business building in software to education. And especially, you know, five years ago when I was thinking about having my own family and reflecting on what kind of education I want for my son, who’s now just about coming up to age where he can take out school classes. So, a lot of my personal motivation and the inspiration for the idea came from that reflection that so much of my own learning that has been valuable to me happened outside of school and was because of my parents and the combination of having, you know, the great credentials that I have, very fortunate to have, you know, that helps open doors, but the things that have been really impactful beyond that are things that I acquired outside of normal school.

So, you know, that’s where the name out school comes from, you know, all these learning experiences that are possible outside of normal school that can be super important and that comes out of my own personal experience. And then, you know, I was riffing on, you know, ideas like that with my co founder Nick, who at the time was a product manager at Clever and previously been first engineer Airbnb. And after starting his career as a high school teacher, so he was passionate about education and worked in EdTech. And we realized there was an opportunity to apply a marketplace based model in education with seeing how that marketplace based model had transformed other industries like transportation with Lyft and Uber and, you know, accommodation and travel with Airbnb. And we thought that instead of focusing on putting new technology tools in the usual classroom, there was much greater leverage and transformation possible if we try to apply technology in how education was actually consumed, specifically focused on out of school learning experiences.

So starting from outside the system. And then I guess the final piece of inspiration which really catalyzed the founding of out school was the realization there was already an early adopter community of parents who are customizing their own education or their own kids education outside of the normal system. And that was this group of secular homeschoolers who are really under recognized and a fast growing niche market and the strategy for well, hey, we have a thesis about why this kind of learning is important. We think it’s going to be more important in the future, not less with the past changes in the world. We know a marketplace based model can transform an industry, and there’s this perfectly positioned early adopter audience who we think will want this to date, we can grow from that. And, you know, those set of ideas all contributed to the founding of out school.

And I want to link your last two comments because the observation of focusing on how to school five years ago was not apparent to everyone. As you said earlier, sometimes it’s about seeing what other people are not seeing. I’ll remind folks that five and 10 years ago, the general investor sentiment was American parents won’t pay for experiences outside of school. That only happens in Asia and in China. It’s not going to be a successful model here. I think you correctly saw the need for more agile, interest driven out of school learning. And so a great example of what you said a few minutes ago of seeing what other people may miss. Let’s dive into the learning model. What kind of experiences could a parent or a learner find on out school? So we have more than 100,000 class topics. So the few examples I can give you today will not do justice to the full array. But to give some examples, you know, you can learn about cat anatomy from a vet.

You can have your child learn math through art by studying the geometry of art. You can have your kid study architecture through Minecraft. And so a lot of the classes on out school are incredibly creative and link core learning back to just really interesting topics and a taught in an innovative way. We do also have, you know, standard subjects in core, good core topics such as your algebra and core math classes. But our approach is to always be looking to meet the child where they’re at. If they’re already excited about math, then great, you know, great, we have the advanced courses, they can push themselves to take classes that might not be available yet to them in grade level in school, or they can catch up on certain areas they’re struggling with. But that’s not more often than not the problem that the parents are going to parents are saying, you know, my kids not excited about math and the way to being taught in school, but I believe they could be. And then they’re coming to out school and finding, oh, if this subject is taught in just a different way, then we can really inspire our kids. And so, you know, another benefit of the marketplace based model is we unleash the creativity of teachers. We don’t provide a curriculum, we say they must follow. Instead, we have a content policy. So we say that classes have got to be, you know, objective secular age appropriate and we and when we assess for quality, but we don’t insist on a particular way of teaching a class. And so, you know, that’s what drives the variety in the in the marketplace and the value for families. You mentioned your teachers, Amir, how do you how do you vet who can teach on the platform.

So, from the start, it’s never been an open marketplace completely because families expect and it’s right for us to provide a level of safety and quality so we’ve always had an application process for teachers, where those applications are manually reviewed to our team, and also a background check process. And then we do assess every single class that’s listed in the marketplace against our class content policy. Then of course we also have all the usual marketplace based signals around reviews ability to flag. And so the combination allows us to assess the quality of a class, even though we don’t have a standardized curriculum. And that’s a that’s an area where, you know, we have significant investments and ongoing investments because, you know, I think the only way a marketplace in education can really work is if there are you know certain boundaries and certain quality controls. So we’re very very focused on that. Your courses you and the learners that you serve range from age three to 18 how how does the content and learning model shift between little kids and and young adults.

As you can imagine for you know very young kids age three. There’s a lot of parental involvement needed as the class. So, you know, these are often kind of you know story time. Early kind of counting and reading classes, and the parents have got to be really involved. Surprisingly, though, it’s surprisingly fast how quick the kids get up to speed with both the technology and the class interaction, and the parents can take more of a backseat. And then, you know, especially in the middle school ages, you start to get into a huge variety of interest based classes, you know, marine mammals is a is a hot class topic on out school kids yoga. You know the Minecraft classes we have a fortnight discussion group. We have critical thinking skills through Dungeons and Dragons. So you start to see that huge variety.

And, you know, as with the older kids they get even more self directed where it’s really them driving the journey rather than the parents who are purchasing. But with the older kids we see we see the interest get a little bit more narrow as kids start to focus in on and have learned about what they’re actually interested. Are there specific things you do on the platform the way you surface content or recommendation engine that you help learners identify things they might be interested in, or other ways in which you help develop learner agency. Yeah, we have a variety of search and recommendation tools. Up until recently though those were only available to parents so was your the parents driving maybe sat side by side with a child.

Over the past six months we have launched learner spaces on out school and learner search and discovery were actually it’s now the kids driving. And they’re the ones choosing the classes and it’s a combination of both, you know, search the ability for the kids to search book by keyword like Lego Minecraft or math and recommendations. One thing that’s a little bit unique about our recommendations is that we try and not only show you things that we know you’re like based on your past behavior. But we try to also show you new things that you might not have yet considered. And that’s really important for learning. It’s not like, you know, Netflix where you might always want to watch action movies or rom-coms and that’s just how you are and the preference you have when it comes to learning opening new horizons is really really important. So we’re quite careful to not only show you the things that you’ve you’ve enjoyed before.

Have I this a question about skill building and credentialing. Have you thought about moving into the credentialing space to help learners sort of capture and communicate some of their new knowledge and skills. Are you going to remain firmly in the out of school category. We have thoughts about ways in which we could help learners showcase their skills and what they learn in class. So far we’ve resisted how doing that through traditional credentialing mechanisms. We really see that credentialing in a traditional sense is something that people should look to schools for or other institutions.

And we want to be careful to make sure that we’re focused on the learning itself. Because too often the focus on credentials drives people to focus on the ends and not the means. And you know the challenge and the problem with with that is it can just be about getting the grades or getting the certification and not really about learning and kids going through the motions and then, you know, forgetting everything right after they finish the test. And you know these are problems with with the way the school system is currently designed and how it measures. So we want to stay focused on love of learning as I call metric are we increasing a lot of learning but if we’re doing that it’s more likely that the materials are actually sticking.

So I won’t say we’ll never go in that direction. You know I hope that you know one day it’ll be possible to you get whatever credential you want throughout school. But we want to make sure that it’s really coming from the learner’s interest and that it’s coming from the place of the icing on the cake rather than being the cake itself. Amir you just finished a third price round of funding congratulations on that you, you really have some blue chip investors really the best in class and both venture investing but also ed tech investing with folks like reach capital I notice and Carol on is is on your board. Congrats on being able to attract really the best investors from both sectors I think that says a lot about you and your initial traction. When did you finish that round and what was it like putting that together.

Well first thank you. Yeah you know we’re delighted with our investors and delighted with the people will be able to bring into the mission and your Jennifer Carolina reach capital of you call that is such a fantastic supporter and is on our board and brings just this wealth of education and also you know a long history of supporting innovation ed tech and you’re earlier you also alluded to this thing that you know historically investors you haven’t seen the opportunity in consumer education in the US. Whereas now there’s been the shift in mentality where people have realized oh you know there’s been an unlock here and there is actually opportunity. Some of that is related to covert and the changing you know the shifts that that has enforced on people. Some of it is also demographic kids today or young kids they have parents who grew up through the Internet and like me have different ideas of how education should be consumed how it should be created. And so I think the future is going to look very different.

And so I for sure that has helped us to you know those trends have helped us to assemble a really incredible group of investors. I think another thing to say is that you know we’re living through remarkable times in the tech ecosystem and the market is incredibly fast and it’s changing rapidly. While recent funding rounds was preemptive we had already raised a series B last summer. But there’s just so much demand and interest in companies at the stage where at and in our sector that it seemed the right timing to to raise a substantially larger amount of money that we had before and bring in some later investors because that enables us to to invest for the future potentially acquire companies expand internationally and really double down on our mission. Yeah what it was like.

You know one thing that’s really surprising to me as an entrepreneur and might be surprising to people at an earlier stage of company is there’s this irony that you know the later stage you get the larger amounts of money that you’re talking about in some ways the process becomes easier and faster. Which speaks to the level of competition at that stage of the market. It also speaks to our majority as a company and that we have our things line up our data you know our dilutions were just a lot more experienced about it. But it’s surprising that it can be harder to raise a seed round or series A round check than it is to raise a series B or C. So it’s it’s highly contextual to the market and the company obviously but like latest raise was completed three weeks from first opening the raise to you know cash in bank which is incredibly fast. Amir was it a crazy scramble a year ago as schools shut down and how did you and your team respond so quickly and effectively to changing conditions.

You know reflecting on that time it was both a scramble and just this slow motion disaster unfolding. Both at the same time you know in late February the CDC came out with this message that maybe schools would need to shut. And that schools may need to consider something that they called internet based tele school. So I read that and I looked at that phrase internet based tele school and what does that mean and it was like oh what they mean is is what I call live online classes which is what we do. And I thought a bit more on thought.

Oh there’s no other organization in the US as more experience offering these kind of classes. Then we do we’ve been focused on this format since 2017 we’ve been growing nicely. And so the realization happened was if this covert thing is going to be bad we need to be ready so we were preparing for a few weeks and we launched initiatives like free education for schools and teachers on how to run online classes completely independent of our product we just wanted to help. And then through those webinars which were very well attended we realized this is the tip of the iceberg these schools you know whatever we can do to help I’m not going to be ready. And then there’s going to be a wave of demand from parents trying to fill in the gaps.

So that point we started working to scale up our teacher base and launching out school the all which is a nonprofit program to offer financial assistance because we realized a lot of families will be left behind. And then on the evening of Friday March 13 2020. You know that was the day when basically mass school closures were announced throughout the US. You know, all of our charts just went like upper cliff in terms of number of sign ups number of enrollments classes filling up use of the free classes program. And so over that weekend that was the core of the struggle.

Whereas like how can we keep the servers up. How can we keep enough funds in the free classes program to meet the demand. And then on Sunday, we realized we’re going to need more teachers next week you know how can we get 5000 more teachers onto the platform in the next two weeks. And so, you know, we succeeded in that we didn’t have major outages and we kept the free classes program going. And we scale it on teachers but those were very, very tough and I’ll have to say exciting days because you know one thing about things like that is you are also having to deal with the personal impacts and fear of the disaster and starting to work from home with that. But in some ways we’re able to kind of ignore that and focus on work because we had this emergency and a unique contribution that we could make through our work at that time so in some ways it’s easier to have that as a distraction whereas you know at that time there was a lot of fear and uncertainty about everything in the world.

And so, I’m grateful that we were able to be in that position at that time to have that impact and to have that relevant work. Did you in the last year begin working with with schools in addition to serving parents. Yes, we did. You know, on the back of the webinars we started running for schools to help them prepare for COVID. We started seeing a lot of demand from schools just partner with us find ways to embed classes within their school curriculum. Maybe as electives, maybe as helping individual students catch up in certain areas.

And so, we decided to spin up a arm of our school which is focused on schools. And so now we partner with a number of schools across the country and we’re expanding that side of the business. This was always part of, you know, our long term strategy. You know, we start from the outside of the system, serve families directly but then over time, increasingly partner with the school system to bring interest based learning into into schools, but we hadn’t expected to start that for maybe another couple of years so COVID definitely accelerated that initiative.

Let’s talk about the roadmap. Going forward, what, what are you excited about in terms of your plans for expansion. Well, we have a lot of plans for expansion as you might imagine, you know, given the new funding, as well as continuous improvements on making our current service, even better in terms of your quality and ease of use the website. I think I’d call out three different strands of work that I’m particularly excited about. One is international growth.

Our product is naturally international and given that kids can join class from anywhere. And many parents say that the kids are incredibly excited to be in class with people from around the country and around the world. So that’s an area of focus. Another one is. Right now everything on the platform is in English. So, yeah, that’s here. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, ultimately, we want to have a global community and support every language. Obviously, there’s, you know, we have to go one at a time.

So, you know, that’s it. That’s a key focus area to translate the site have classes in different languages, as well as simply, you know, targeting other countries in terms of marketing. You know, another area of focus for me is making things even more learner driven on the website and put learners in charge. And so we’re working on learner clubs and learner allowances, so that, you know, parents can subscribe to out school and give their kids a budget and maybe some guidance on contents and schedule and the kids can actually purchase the class themselves and enroll themselves. I think that’ll be a huge win both from mission of enabling your interest based child led learning and also a great one for the parents who no longer have the burden of choosing from 100,000 classes and developing the schedule. And then finally, we already alluded to this, you know, relationships with schools and also employers. So as well as schools, these partner with us, employers are looking to offer out school classes as a benefit to help in particular working

moms who have born so much of the burden of childcare and continue to bear the majority of the burden of curating their kids education. And so increasingly education related benefits are in demand by companies looking to support working mothers. Yeah, it’s a real bummer to me but 98% of our customers are our mothers. And I really want to, you know, have more of the fathers on our sites, be involved in curating the learning experience of the kids and you know that’s the father I aspire to be when Cosmo turns three I’ll be getting on out school and bring him into classes myself. Okay, last question. A number of times you’ve talked about interest driven learning, passion driven learning. Why do you think that’s so important.

Firstly, I have a belief based on my own experience what we now observe in our marketplace that if you allow kids and encourage kids to pursue learning through interests that they develop confidence and a love of learning. And if they develop that confidence in their abilities to learn and that love learning that will translate to all aspects of their education including core subjects. And that’s the key reason. A secondary reason which resonates with some families is that if you allow kids to pursue interests. Some of the time it won’t just be about them enjoying the learning. It’ll also turn into incredibly valuable skills that will be so important for their future. An example is my own experience of learning how to code when I was five was I was pursuing interests. And so you’re more likely to be in the right place have your kid be in the right place at the right time and pick up those skills if you allow them to pursue interests.

And for some families looking for a more concrete kind of ROI and love of learning. That’s the appealing part. And I think both exist together in interest based learning. Thanks for turning into the Getting Smart podcast. We appreciate how Amir Nathu and the out school team scrambled to deliver interest driven learning to young people all over the world. What an exciting and timely story Amir. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you. It’s a pleasure talking to you. Until next week. Keep learning. Keep innovating. Another thanks to our podcast sponsors screencastify to learn more about the power of video to engage learners. Check out screencastify.com slash getting smart. There’s a link in the show notes as well.

For the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off. Thank you.