Ryan Delk of Primer joins Nick to discuss Fixing Education with a Startup Mentality: The Innovative Micro Schools-Model Backed by Founders Fund, Khosla, and Sam Altman. In this episode we cover:
- Challenges in the American Education System
- Comparative Analysis of American Education
- Measuring Success in Education
- Broken Incentive Structures in Education
- Primer’s Educational Model
- Teacher Selection and Empowerment
- Future of Education and Policy Changes
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0:19
Ryan Delk joins us today from San Francisco. He’s the CEO and Co-Founder of Primer, a company on a mission to build an education system that truly empowers kids. Before founding Primer, he was the COO at Omni, which was later acquired by Coinbase, and helped scale Gumroad’s GMV from $10,000 to $50 million. Ryan, welcome to the show!
0:39
Thanks for having me.
0:41
So tell us a bit about your background and your path to primer.
0:44
The very quick version is 28 years ago, my mom founded one of the first micro schools in Florida. We were zoned for a F rated elementary school, and we didn’t have the resources to either move to a better school district or to go to a private school. And so we didn’t really have a lot of options. And so she started this micro school, homeschool Co Op thing that was kind of, it was a little bit of the Wild West days of alternative education. It was really the only option we had. And it was incredible. She totally, totally changed. Changed my life, my siblings life, bunch of other families that were involved live. And so I spent, I spent the last decade building tech companies. But a few years ago, after we sold my last company, decided to go all in on trying to take the education model that I experienced growing up and figure out how we can scale it to millions of kids across the US. That’s what I wanted for my own kids. I think it’s superior, more efficient, better outcomes. We can talk more about that. And so that’s where we’re doing, a primer, awesome.
1:38
And before that, you worked for some tech companies. What was your specialty there? I worked
1:42
across product and growth, mostly some operations. I was kind of one of those classic I had no pedigree coming into startups. I you know, I didn’t go to Stanford. I didn’t know anybody in tech. I just kind of hustled my way in and took whatever roles I could get at good companies, and tried to find ways to work really hard and hopefully turn those hours into value for the company. So I did that a few times, and and it was, it was really fun. And then primer was kind of my first jump into founding them myself. So
2:10
what would you say are the biggest problems with the education system in America today? My
2:15
maybe a little bit contrarian take for people in the space that we’re in is that the main problem like, it’s actually, if you had to, if you told me to design a system where I had to educate, you know, 60,000,000k through 12 students in the US and every school had to be exactly the same. There’s some tweaks on the margins that you could make, but that level of standardization is just very hard. I’m not sure that you could do something way better, because standardizing something across 50 states with different state standards the way the money has flown historically, the incentive structure is just very hard to work with. And so our view is that what needs to happen is you need a much more heterogeneous offering of different education models, different schooling structures, pedagogies, ideally, many of them that put students in the driver’s seat and increase student agency, and that is the primary vector by which you can improve education outcomes, because every kid is different, every family is different, the circumstances of every community is different. But right now we have this sort of one size fits all industrialized education system, and it’s just really hard at that scale when everything has to be 100% standardized. You can go in almost any high school in America and it looks almost exactly the same with very small variations. It’s very hard to deliver great outcomes when you have to standardize at that
3:21
level. How are schools typically funded? I know there’s federal funding, there’s state funding, there’s a local jurisdiction funding, like, what’s the breakdown there?
3:28
It varies by district and the type of school, but at a very basic level, you have some amount of state funding that flows from the state budget into school districts. Different states do it differently, but it’s typically tied to students, the per pupil in some way. Some states, it’s a day, it’s based on the days that they attend that school. Sometimes it’s based on just enrollment for the year. So there’s different formulas, and this is a very hotly debated topic among state legislatures and state, you know, school boards and superintendents and things and so that front funding formula dictates how much any given school gets. It’s usually a combination of property taxes, other local and state taxes, depending on the state. And then there’s federal funds that are a much smaller portion, and sometimes local funds as well, federal funds that are a much smaller portion that flow for specific schools. So there’s different types of schools that qualify for different buckets of federal funds. And then you have schools like charters that often raise private funding in addition to state or district funding that they use, typically for more capex style investments, for launching a school or something like that. It depends. It depends on the school, depends on the district. I spent on the state, but it’s generally mostly state funding that comes down on a per student basis to the schools
4:29
in in overall, how is America doing versus its other large, globalized counterparts? What are the statistics for America, American education here, and how does that compare with other other leading countries.
4:42
Well, then the NAEP scores. There’s a bunch of different national report cards and different things that come out, and people argue about which one’s the best measure. But no matter how you slice it, it’s not good. The latest numbers that just came out, less than 40% fourth graders are on grade level for or proficient is the language they use for reading and math and. Then that jumps down to about 34% by eighth grade. So not only are those numbers objectively quite bad, but the really strong indictment is that the longer you spend in the system, the more the higher probability of being behind you have. So what we’re doing right now is is is not working if you can. There’s a bunch of different ways to slice the data, but we’re spending more than ever, particularly on non teaching expenses, so things like administrators, consultants, third party service providers in schools. So most of the budget increase is actually not going to teachers. It’s going to all these other auxiliary services. It’s similar story to many industries in the US, where you have this huge amount of bureaucratic bloat that’s happened over the last 2030, years, and then in turn, a very small percentage of that increase is actually flowing down into infecting student outcomes. And so our a lot of what we do at primer, and our sort of thesis is that you can remove all the middlemen and a lot of that kind of administrative layer, and you just focus on having really great teachers that are empowered to make an impact on students lives, then that is where a lot of the magic happens. And so we try to strip away a lot of that and focus on empowering teachers.
6:00
Do you feel like we’re measuring success in the wrong way? I mean, we
6:04
there’s the there’s direct academic success that is fairly easy to measure through NWA MAP scores or various other tests. And you could argue, I think, on the margins, how there’s probably things people would tweak on that, but I think it’s pretty good. There is a lot of debate about how standards have shifted downwards over the years, and so eighth grade considered on grade level for eighth grade today is not the same thing as eighth grade in 1960 for example. But I’m actually probably a little bit more interested in it’s very hard to quantify. In the non academic side, there’s a lot of things you can do to prep kids for tests to try to get very specific outcomes when they take those tests. And I think about the on the non academic side, just thinking about it in terms of human flourishing, the goal of education should be to do two things, in my opinion. One is to maximize the probability that any student is able to reach their potential. Every student has different potential, different ceiling, based on all sorts of factors that are, in many cases, out of their control, and then they also have this, this aperture, or distribution of opportunities. And the goal of education should be to keep that aperture as wide as possible, with the distribution pried open as wide as possible for as long as possible. And what happens so often in education is that by the time a kid gets to high school, because of the system that they’re in, or the incentive structure, or whatever, they have a whole host of those opportunities that are totally closed off to them forever, or basically closed off to them forever. And that could be colleges that they want to go to, professions they want to have to things. And so I think about education as, yes, we’re very rigorous on academics. We do MAP testing three times a year. We track this stuff relentlessly. But there’s this whole other side of it where that you can’t really gain, you can’t really fake human flourishing. And so it’s either happening or it’s not. And so we want primer to be a place not only where kids are getting top decile academic outcomes, but also where their kids come and it feels like there’s a sense of real human flourishing there. For these kids, they feel safe, they feel loved, they feel like they’re able to chase things that they’re excited about, to take risks, to fail, all these things that are very important, that don’t necessarily show up on a map. Test,
7:59
yeah, and I’d love to talk more primer before we we get to that. You know, it just seems like everyone I talk to has got complaints about the education system. It’s it’s industrialized, it’s mass market focused, and it’s like you said, it’s not catered, and it’s not customized, you know, to individuals. And just down my block, I know many people, you know, a very good school district that are considering other options, whether they be, you know, driving 60 minutes to a private school, or many people are considering, you know, forming like groups to do, you know, smaller group learning. I know a bunch of people doing homeschooling. You and I chatted once and we did an experimental, you know, few months of homeschooling with our son, who’s a couple grade levels ahead. You know, how did we get here? How did we get to this place where, you know, so many people are experiencing this kind of broken system and something that’s just not serving the needs of the public? There’s
8:56
been a lot of a lot of rigorous debate about that might I don’t know that I have a great hot take or diagnosis of how we got here, other than I would say one the incentive structures are broken on a very fundamental level. And so anytime, I big believer that anytime you have any industry where the incentives are broken, it’s very, very difficult to see any sort of improvement. The second is that I think it’s one of those very interesting problems, and be similar to the national debt and other things, where it’s always in the if you have a two by two of important, you know, how important a problem is and how urgent it is, it always feels like it’s in the important, but not urgent quadrant. And it always feels like, well, it’s, you know, it’s not quite acute. It’s not quite bad enough that we have to, you know, go fix it right now. Or it’s not quite a five alarm fire. And it feels a little bit like we’re boiling the frog, and we don’t really know. The thing that scares me in particular is that there’s this compounding effect, I think that happens, where the education system fails a generation, and then they have their probabilities of hitting their potential fulfillment in life, having a stable income and family and all these things starts to drop, and then they have kids, and. Then the probability starts to compound, and we’re, we’re getting into that cycle now. And that’s, that’s the thing that scares me, is, I think that the sense that we all have, that the education system is failing in each generation, I think, is probably hasn’t fully caught up to the extent with which it is. And we’re boiling the frog. We’re sort of always hoping that either it’s going to slowly get better or turn around, or maybe it’s not that bad, but eventually that hope, I think, is going to lead to catastrophic consequences. And so my view is that we need to treat it like the five alarm fire that it is, you know, maybe, maybe there is five more years, or 10 more years, or, you know, some amount of time that we could keep going at the current trajectory. But I’d rather not take that gamble. And in the meantime, we need to find alternatives that work for families, that work for students that deliver great outcomes, that do it in an efficient way, because it’s not a gamble that we should be willing to take as a country. Ryan,
10:48
have you come across any studies that attempt to measure maybe, correlation between professional fulfillment or happiness in life and satisfaction with education experience for people when they were young. Do you know if anything like that exists? It’s
11:04
the type of thing that I’m sure someone has studied, but I haven’t, I haven’t seen, I mean, intuitively, you could guess what the correlation would be, yes, but I haven’t seen anything explicit. Yeah.
11:12
I’m curious, because it’s like, how do you define the outcomes? Right? What is the right outcome? You get a high paying job, or you’re gainfully employed, or you get into a good school, a good university, right? Like, there’s a variety of different ways that we can, we can define success, I think, in education. But ultimately, hopefully, people are actualizing in some way and finding, like, their true purpose, hopefully life and professional purpose. You know, through the course of the 12 or so years that they go through the educational experience such formative years. And I think about this with my son all the time, like, gosh, I would really hate to put him into an environment that’s stifling him for that many years. And he comes home frustrated repeatedly, which has happened, he comes home and he I’m like, how’s school? He’s like, I wasn’t good. And I’m like, You love math, you know, how is math? And he goes, Dad, what we do at school is not math.
12:06
Like, what is it if it’s not math? I just think
12:09
it’s basic numbers, right? Like, he’s a second grader, but he can do long division, and so I just think it’s a little too rudimentary, maybe, yep, yeah. So, you know, do you feel like these are fixable problems with countermeasures? You know, can we apply countermeasures to the existing system, or do we need some sort of full scale reset?
12:29
I think there’s interesting experiments that you could run in the existing system. One of the things that that I think a lot about on the incentive side is that teachers are teachers are incentivized to spend almost all their effort on, like on downside minimization, or like raising the floor, and we effectively rely on, we rely on the fact that most of them are just very altruistically motivated human beings who actually care about kids to do anything beyond that. And so I thought about, if you I think the compensation structure for teachers would be an interesting thing to experiment with. And what would it look like if the upside for, like, a really great teacher in a K through 12 setting is, like, very tiny bonus by any objective standard, or, like, an award at the end of the year or something, it’s like there’s no real upside for, like, going way above and beyond. And so I thought about if you, if you took a school or a school district, and you allocated some relatively small amount of maybe it’s like a 10, 10% of salary, or 20% of salary bonus pool, and you tied it to different outcomes, or you’d have to experiment a bunch of different things, and you debate how tractable they should be and whether or not you could gain them, etc, etc. But I do think shifting the going from a downside minimization framework to an upside maximization framework, from the incentive, the actual employment incentives of the teachers would be an interesting experiment. I think there’s plenty of interesting things that you can do. The issue is not, are, do people have interesting ideas for how to improve outcomes at scale? The issue is, can those ideas? Is there any operational willpower or capacity to actually scale those ideas across 10s of millions of kids in the US within the traditional system. It’s not for lack of ideas or interesting experiments that you could run. It’s just that one, once those experiments come out and they work, then what? And that’s, that’s sort of the story of the last 50 years. Is the then what? After you, after you find out that something works, interesting,
14:13
like you talk about the teacher, it makes me think, like, what is the true driver of success for a school? Have you thought about like Pareto ing out the drivers of success, thinking about things like the teacher themselves, the curriculum, the funding, you know, the district leader, you know what? What are those major levers that if you get those pieces right, they’re they’re gonna deliver the most outcome? Yeah, we’ve, we’ve looked
14:39
at it more in isolating of the in classroom variables at primer, so testing different curriculum, different academic structures, different accountability structures, different goal structures. One thing that I do think is interesting that we have been spending a lot of time on is every parent has the desire to help their child make more. Academic Progress, and so there’s this potential energy that you could convert into kinetic energy for every parent, and some very small percentage of parents proactively go do that. They sign their kid up for Kumon or tutoring, or sit with them and do Khan Academy on the weekends or synthesis tutor or whatever. But I have this theory that it that there’s a lot of upside to be found in giving parents the precise dosage or precise action to take to help further their kids academic progress and getting smart enough to recommend things that you know that that particular parent is likely to act on based on either their resources or their time. And so you could imagine a system where it knows, okay, this is a single working mother like she’s very little time. She’s probably always tired, always stretched thin, but, you know, on the weekend, she has time, and so there’s free resources that she could spend 30 minutes with her daughter and work on fourth grade, fourth grade subtraction or something, or fourth grade math. That would be probably a very accretive use of that 30 minutes or 15 minutes weekend. And so if you could get but that would be totally different than what you might recommend to a different family who is already spending a bunch of money on tutoring, but doing it really ineffectively. And if you could reroute those funds and give them a very effective framework for how to deploy that capital, you get 2x or 3x the outcome that’s coming or the effect size from tutoring. And so we’re spending a lot of time thinking about this for primer parents and in the traditional setting. And we already give parents a lot they have a dashboard where they can see very, very granular data on their students academic progress, and specific things they can do to push that forward. And so we’re thinking about how we take that to the next level. But if you think about the traditional system, you have basically parent teacher conferences every couple months, report cards every couple months. Maybe you have some sort of online login system where you can sort of see what’s going on, but then you basically rely on ad hoc communication from the teacher through Class Dojo or remind text messages or email or whatever. And it’s very difficult to know how to for most parents, to know how to lean in and engage, and so that’s probably, that’s one of the areas that we’re thinking a lot about, that we that I think is pretty underrated. There’s obviously a ton of energy that goes into curriculum and teaching styles and pedagogy and all these things. And I think activating the family and the parents is almost certainly very underrated relative to how hard it is, which I don’t think it’s that hard, how much upside you could deliver for students.
17:01
Amazing. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of Jeffrey Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone. I don’t know if you come across that, but many years ago, he read this book, and he talked about a holistic education model where the parents are very included, and home life is a part of the analysis. And when you include that in the total package, these children in Harlem made, like, huge strides in education. I mean, I don’t have the data to support it in front of me, but, you know, he’s famous for work turning, you know, certain areas around. So give us a primer on primer, right? We’ve been talking around it for a bit, but what is, what does v1 of the system look like? And what are you building?
17:39
Primer helps great teachers launch micro schools in their community. We believe that teachers are incredible entrepreneurs, and that when you give them the chance to go serve their community and launch a school, amazing things can happen. We believe that technology can handle most of the heavy lifting of that. So the software that we’ve built, it empowers teachers to spend most of the time doing the things they love, which is interacting with students direct instruction. Building relationships, encouraging, uncovering their passions, etc, very little time doing all the things they hate, which is lesson planning, paperwork, this sort of like administrative bloat that has taken over the teaching profession. I had an amazing moment with one of our a man who’s launching a former longtime principal, who’s launching a primer next in August, and he said, the thing I realized is that I love teaching, but I hate being a teacher. And what he meant by that is that being a teacher now means doing a bunch of things, most of which are not teaching. And he hates all this, all the stuff that that comes with it now. And so he’s, you know, excited to get back to that with primer. And then the third thing we do is we we set up from a regulatory perspective, we we take on all that complexity for the teachers. And so there’s obviously school education is a regulated industry, regulated industry, regulated by the state, regulated by local ordinances and zonings and different things. And so we take on all that for them, and we help them be able to launch, you know, a compliant school that’s either accredited or approved by the DOE, depending on the state, that they can launch and start to serve their community. And so we believe that these micro schools, because of how quickly you can launch them, because of the structure for students because of how it puts teachers in the driver’s seat, who can then put students in the driver’s seat of their education. We believe this is a pretty key part of what fixing education in the US can look like. And we believe that this model can scale very, very quickly across the current states we’re in, and new states
19:14
as well. And how large are the schools that are being launched? And, you know, is it multi grade level or give us a bit of the profile of, you know, the mix and the structure. Each
19:23
primer is up to 25 students, and it’ll be K through two, three through five, or six through eight for the grade levels. And the teachers can decide the primer leaders. They can decide which, which grade level they want to launch. They go recruit the students. We also help them recruit students. We spend effort and are quite, quite good at accelerating that for them. And then with their primer gets too large, then they can actually, they can split it off, and they can either go to a smaller grade band or just kind of double up two different K through two primers. We’ve had that happen a bunch, which is kind of awesome. They’ll recruit a friend to take over half the half the primer and start another one, and just sort of grow from there. So we hard cap the number of students both from a. A student experience perspective, but then also from a teacher experience perspective, we have stories of teachers that come to primer, and they say last year I had 45/4 graders that I was teaching. One teacher told me that she taught all of last year wearing a Brittany microphone because she had 56 students in her class that she was teaching in second grade was total insanity. And so they’re often coming from these environments where they’re asked to just go above and beyond, and beyond, and we want to set them up for success, and not, you know, not, not put them in situations like that, for example.
20:26
So different grades will be in one classroom. And then what happens, like, if you’ve got the three to five group, what happens when they move to six? Do they need a companion, primer program to hand it off to? Or do they go back into a traditional, most
20:39
of us campuses? You’ll have a group of teachers that will launch primers together. And so those those campuses will have a K through two, three through five, and a six through eight, all co located. And so typically, they’re able to stay at the same location all the way through. And this isn’t actually parents really like and students like is they can stay with the same teacher for three years. And so they build these really deep relationships with these teachers and, you know, they’re getting invited to their birthday parties, like there’s, there’s like a real bond there that’s perhaps, you know, a bit a bit stronger than the traditional system because of the time duration that they’re with
21:09
these teachers. And what does a day look like for a teacher at primer? So the mornings
21:13
are very hardcore academics. So we are not unapologetic. Totally non negotiable. Every student does 100 minutes of math, 100 minutes of reading and writing a primer every day. We are upfront with parents about this students. It’s, it’s very transparent, but students actually come to love it because we visual. We allow them to visualize their progress, so they can see every day the progress they’re making academically. And so rather than it being this black box where they’re sort of, you know, stressed about some report card they’re going to get in three months, it’s, it’s, it’s like anything else in life now, they can see progress real time in their dashboard and see how they’re tracking against that. And the afternoons are for kids to go deep on what we call pursuits, which are independent projects where kids are working on writing books, launching podcasts, starting companies, starting online businesses, all sorts of things that they want to work on that are led by the primary leader, but they’re really almost like independent study experiences for the kids, and they’re all grounded in things that they’re excited about in the real world. And so it’s designed as something that they’re able to sink their teeth into, put to work all the academic skills they’re learning. But it doesn’t feel like contrived, like they’re actually starting a company that they’re actually gonna sell real things on, Shopify. It’s not these sort of, like, contrived, classic school experiences. And something that’s really important to us is that these the pursuits, feel like they’re, they’re real world projects, and they’re giving kids real reps on those sorts of things that they’re going to then encounter, you know, post primary, post high school, post college, etc. I love
22:34
it. I love it. My my son’s obsession of the moment is rocks. He’s all about three rocks. He always wants to go to rock shops, right? And two days ago, he told me he launched his first online website. It’s on Etsy, so he didn’t have to code it all, but he’s got all his rocks on his mom helped him with the photos and stuff, but he sold like, three rocks on that thing. She’s gonna leave it. I’ll buy some rocks. I’ll send it to you. It’s awesome, but it’s kind of like what you’re like what you’re like this project based stuff. Like, you find what they’re interested in, and then, you know, they’re naturally gonna build all these skills. Like, he knows a little geometry now, because he’s had to measure, you know, the different facets of the rocks to figure out the value
23:12
Exactly. And and there’s so many like, if you have a teacher, and it sounds like you all are doing this, but if you have a teacher that is thinking through all these projects, through the lens of academic progress, on any of this stuff, you can find math, history, writing, like science, all these different components that you can build into it. And so that the primer leaders are, they’re they’re they’re they’re constantly, you know, sort of this dance where they’re helping the students tackle these projects they’re really excited about, and then injecting as much of the core academics into that that they can. And so from a student perspective, you’re just working on this awesome project, but you don’t realize that you’re actually, you know, improving your writing skills, learning how to do basic math, learning, marketing, learning, all these things that just it feels like you’re just launching a business, but you’re actually learning all these skills that the teacher is sort of making sure that you encounter those problems that might tie into your core academics or state standards or different things they just feel like they need to learn. Love
24:00
it. It sounds like on the surface the rigorous math and reading and writing is, is fairly traditional. Is, is that accurate? But the feedback loop is quicker, and so the the children are more motivated by
24:12
it. It’s traditional in that we follow the basic pedagogy and state standards that you would expect at a high performing school. It is non traditional in the sense that each child’s learning path along that along their academics is personalized to them. So what that means in practice is that when students come to primer, regardless of their age, they take placement test, and then we put them into an academic pathway regardless of how old they are how they’re supposed to be. If they’re two grade levels ahead, they just start right there, where they are based on what they’ve mastered and what they haven’t mastered, and then they progress through that through a combination of direct instruction from their primary leader. Students that are maybe are in the opposite situation, that are behind, might end up in remedial, small group tutoring courses to help get them back on track. They might be doing learning. Apps that help them either with maybe it’s for some students, it’s remedial concepts. For some students that are really far ahead, it lets them keep going faster. And then we’re ingesting all that data, and then we’re giving students real time insight into their progress. And so when a student masters three digit subtraction, they know that in real time, and then we’re, you know, doubling back and making sure that they’re they’re continuing to match master that over time, but they can see that in a dashboard. Their teachers can see it. Their parents can see that. And so there’s total transparency into how they’re progressing, how they’re doing against their goals. And so from a student perspective, it is similar in that students are learning things in the same order as you would expect at most schools, but it’s quite different in terms of the day to day experience and how tailored it is to each student.
25:39
And how long have you been active? You know, when, when did your first school launch? And then, you know, how are you measuring success?
25:47
This will be, we’re in year three, and this will be in August. We’ll, we’ll head into our fourth year for our oldest, oldest primers.
25:54
Okay? And that success in the benchmarking. How do you think about that?
25:58
Yeah, we so we do nationally normed reference testing three times a year, which is sort of the gold standard of academic progress. We use the N, W, E, a MAP test, which anyone who’s had a kid in many public school districts will be familiar with taking that test. So that’s that’s kind of the the nationally norm side that keeps us honest on academic progress. And then internally, we have a metric, which we call learning velocity, and that’s much more granular. And so this gives us, literally, down to the day, very granular data on how a student is progressing through all their core academics. And what’s cool about this, and I don’t know if we’ve talked about this publicly before, is we now we’ve gotten to the point where we can predict what amount of progress we expect from a student in a given day or week, and if the student meaningfully finds themselves off track based on that projection, we then send an alert to their teacher, and we say, hey, it seems like Ryan is getting a little bit off track in math. We think it’s because of this. And we give them a proposed intervention to make with that student. You should go to Ryan, and you should maybe get a scratch pad out and work through these problems, or you should ask them if he’s getting confused on how to carry the one and long did it, whatever the thing is. And we asked them to go do that, and then we asked them to tell us when they did it and if they did anything different than what we proposed, because they noticed in the moment something else was needed. And then we track their progress, and we learn if that recommendation worked or not, if that intervention worked. And this does two really important things. One is, teachers are, you know, really, really, really great teachers can notice where every student is and how they’re tracking, and someone’s confused and they’re falling behind, but that’s that is a that’s like a superpower that teachers develop, and not all teachers have that. And so this gives every teacher, with every student, the ability to know in real time if they’re falling behind and they need help, or conversely, if they’re accelerating quickly, like, well, something really clicked for them. They’ve doubled their velocity. Should check in and see what’s working. And then, two, there’s this accumulating advantage that we have because of the data that we have, we could learn which of these interventions work and which don’t in real time. And so the next time a student has that same note, has a similar fall off and learning velocity at a similar section, we’ll know which intervention worked at that and it suggests maybe a better intervention next time. And so these are the small things that I get really excited about, because the way that the system understands the data of each student’s academic progress allows us to do things that other schools could never do, and then, in turn, allows us to deliver, hopefully, a much better student and teacher experience because of the way the software can push them and resource them. How
28:18
are you leveraging this data in in sharing across sites, right? Are you? Are you pushing down to teachers like you? You have an insight or an epiphany, and you see a trend in the data, like, how do you leverage all these findings and and make sure that the the teachers and the individual primer schools are benefiting from them? So our primer OS,
28:40
the software we’ve built powers every second of the school day for teachers, for parents, for students. So that software layer, the schedule, runs through it. The all the academic progress runs through it. The curriculum runs through it. Everything runs through it. And so that’s the hub where teachers are able to access the data that they need, where students can see their progress, what’s on deck for them for the day, and then where parents can get a transparent view into what their kids are reading, writing, what their academic progress looks like, how they can help,
29:05
etc, and and if there is some big epiphany on one site, you know about a technique that works or something, is that something that you you leverage across other schools? Or is it exactly, we have a
29:17
team? Yes, we have a team that’s watching that learning and when, when there’s some learning or something that’s happening, and there’s actually a way for teachers to formally do this now we then evaluate that and then see if that’s worth deploying across the whole network. And that’s, that’s what is part of what’s so powerful about connecting all the schools through primer OS is you get this compounding, kind of accumulating advantage across the whole network, not just what’s happening in an individual primer.
29:41
You know, last time we talked, you mentioned that your teachers are kind of like entrepreneurs. Can you talk a little bit about the selection process and kind of how you’ve empowered the teachers in a different way than maybe what’s common?
29:54
Yeah, this was a pretty important insight for us. We because this was not how we originally launched our first few. Primers, and what we learned was that the teachers themselves, actually running a classroom in a traditional environment is not that different than running a small organization. You have, you’re doing customer support with parents who have questions all day long. You’re running a pretty tight ship operationally. You typically have a budget you’ve got to follow and stay stay in there’s a lot of hustle and grit involved day to day and and certainly through very specific periods throughout the year. And so once we kind of uncovered that, and we realized that once you take these these great teachers, and you empower them to launch the schools, they actually kind of run with it, and they they make it their own. They take Extreme Ownership of the the experience for students, for parents, they recruit students. They go find locations. That was a real kind of epiphany for us, that we that we were able to figure out. And so that’s now almost our entire expansion motion is great. Teachers come to us and they want to launch a school, and then we, we help them launch a school. And so the the the way that we end up attracting them, mostly through word of mouth, because they hear about primer, and they get, you know, excited about what we’re doing. But then we also have, in some cases, especially when we’re expanding to new states, you know, we will go outbound and try to find great teachers and and, you know, get them on board to be part of the founding team for that new state.
31:14
And is there a profile of the teachers? Are these traditional educators that are teaching in, you know, in public school, or some other profile, it’s
31:23
all over. So we have former teachers, we have current teachers. Actually, the most interesting profile to me is teachers who left the teaching profession because they got sick of all the bureaucracy and administrative crap they had to deal with, and they found out about primer. And then they come back and they say, Hey, I want to start teaching again, be an educator again, but I want to do it through primer and start my own primer. And that’s the part for me that I think is most exciting, because we have a huge teacher shortage across the US, and these are people that are already trained. They’re they’re often excellent at what they do, but they’ve kind of just said, Hey, I can’t take it anymore, like I can’t deal with the all the stuff around I love teaching, but I hate being a teacher. I can’t deal with all that. And we’re sort of like the lifeline for those people. But we have current administrators, principals, you know, very senior people that come to us and say, Hey, I’ve been trying to make an impact. I’ve been trying to make a dent over here. It hasn’t been working. I’m not fulfilled. I don’t feel like I’m making a difference. I want to come, you know, launch a primer and really, really impact my community, and we love it, that’s we’re here
32:24
for. And you do have a unique incentive structure for the teachers. Is that accurate? And, you know, how do you measure success? What are their objectives? Yeah, we,
32:32
I mean, we want the teacher to feel like they’re they have real ownership, and they do have real ownership of of the primers that they launch. And so, you know, they, they, they are in the driver’s seat on a lot of the experience for students, and a lot of the expansion motion. They have economic upside in in the schools that they that they launch and operate. And so we want incentives to be aligned. We want them to be trying to reach as many students as possible, but also deliver a great experience, which oftentimes those two things are in a little bit of tension. And so, yeah, we align the incentives. Teachers make substantially more just on a cash salary basis with primer than they do in the traditional system, because we don’t have all this overhead that we’re spending capital on. It’s just a great teacher and a great location and a bunch of students and typically a studio guide and be a few other supporting roles. But there’s not this you know, huge, you know, sort of bureaucratic machine on top of them. And so they end up making more money, they have a lot more autonomy, and and they end up feeling more time doing what they love, versus having a bunch of their time, you know, being dictated by this sort of administrative class that’s taken over a lot of these school districts. Awesome.
33:39
And then who’s the right fit from a student standpoint. You talked about ages and such, but tell us a bit about geographies, your lot, you’re live in, and what sorts of parents and students this is the best fit for today,
33:51
most of our schools are in Florida. Today, we’ll be announcing a new state that we’re expanding to in August, actually very excited about and then we’ll start turning on a bunch more states over the next 12 to 18 months, on the student side, we have students from every background. We have schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods of some communities, and we have schools in the poorest neighborhoods of some communities. We have students that come from home, school, private school, public school, charter school. All over we find that that primer resonates with families who just want a school that works. They want great academics. They want a high agency environment. They want a great teacher. They want a safe environment for their kids. You know, we we are. We are not in the game of having the fanciest buildings we don’t have, you know, marble staircases and you know, charcuterie boards and caviar and champagne. You know, waiting for you when you show up for your parent teacher conference. We are not the $50,000 a year private school. We’re intentionally not trying to be that we do not want to be that those kids will be fine. Those schools are already great. We’re trying to build the education option that works for the families that just want a school that works. They want a school in their community that’s local, it’s led by a local teacher, it’s affordable to their family if. Accessible to their family, and that’s where we’re building so we have families and students from every walk of life, and primers kind of a bit of a uniting force in these communities when it opens. Do
35:10
you think this is realistic as a mass market solution? Primer? I
35:13
hope to be working on this for the next 30 years, so I would not be working on it if I didn’t think that we could, that we could bring this to millions and millions of kids. So yes, I have, I have very strong conviction. I very strong conviction that some version of what we are doing either either high single digit millions or low 10s of millions of students, we will be in some structure like this in the next 15 years. I and I’m, hell bent on making sure that we’re the ones to do it
35:44
amazing. You know, if public school funding faces significant reductions, how might that capital be redirected? You know, do you anticipate growth and voucher programs, charter schools or privately, privately run alternatives, and how should investors position themselves in this evolving landscape we’re
36:01
so focused on, on the primer side of things. I don’t, I don’t know that I’m the best person to opine on this. I mean, my I think that what will I don’t. I’m not an expert in public school funding or or even even education policy funding in general. I do think that there, there is very low appetite for, I think that you will continue to see a lot of well resourced education options across the spectrum, whether that’s private schools, charter schools, like I know multiple charter projects that are happening right now that are very well capitalized, both on a per pupil basis, and upfront capex funding to help them get off the ground, that are Exciting, that are trying new things. There’s also public school districts that are doing the same. So I’m not sure that the I don’t know exactly how that is going to evolve. I do think, you know, a lot of these states are passing programs where the money now follows the student, instead of being tied to the public school system. And I do think that is, that is a will be a significant shift. You’re already seeing states sort of having to compete. Neighboring states have to compete with each other on it. They’re losing, you know, families move from one state to another based on, you know, getting the State offers it and the state doesn’t. And so you’re seeing states have to compete with each other on it. I hope that what will happen is that the when you introduce that element of competition, that all, all schools will have to up their game, and that the the schools be a public or private, or anyone else that has, you know, sort of rested on their laurels for many years, will realize like they have to deliver, and they have to deliver for students, and there’s now accountability, because, you know, parent, if they’re not delivering like, a parent’s going to find a different school. I think that’s a very healthy dynamic, not specific to education, but specific to anything. I think we just have to make sure that, that the the most important thing to me and to primer is that those alternative options are accessible to every family. If you end up in a state where you know the every every private school in a state is $50,000 a year, or even $30,000 a year, that’s not accessible to 98% of American families, and certainly not accessible to the families that need a quality education option or an alternative to whatever they have currently, of my family growing up, and so that’s the segment that we are really passionate about, making sure that we deliver for. And what happens outside of that? I’m not, I’m not an expert on but I do, I do think this is changing. And there’s there, there. I think it will probably be the, the highest rate of change in terms of education, the on the ground experience of students. I think it will be the highest rate of change decade in America in a very long time,
38:23
amazing. And how do lower income families, you know? How are they able to afford? Primer, we
38:29
partner with some of the state programs that you mentioned and make sure that they can get access to those if they are able to. We also have a private foundation that that can provide scholarship funding as well. And then there’s oftentimes other local programs that will help them get access to but historically, to But historically, we have never, we’ve never turned away a student for their ability or an inability to pay in the history of primer and I hope that that’s true for for a very long time.
38:52
Amazing. You know, are there, are there issues in education that you’re not able to address with the primer model that are important in systemic issues, and if so, you know, what are some of those that you think other entrepreneurs should focus on in ed tech? There
39:09
is, I’m very convinced that the all the technical breakthroughs that have needed to happen in order to make AI tutors actually work. And by actually work, I mean have a sufficiently low hallucination. False positive, false negative rate be structured in some way to where the progress the student is making is legible to some system, be API or dashboard or otherwise, to understand how they’re progressing through some academic concepts. So it’s legible to either state standards or I excel, or, you know, some, some, some sort of schema of academic progress, all the technical breakthroughs that have needed to happen, I think, have happened for that, but no one has put all the pieces together. I am not. I’m not sure how good of a business that is ever going to be, because I suspect the models are going to get so good that they will be able to do most of that out of. Box, and so you’ll end up in a with hundreds of these types of tutors that all work for $5 a month or something, which is amazing for us, because we were the software layer on top of it. And we just spend all of our energy helping helping teachers launch these schools. And then as these new, amazing products come in, we’re able to deploy those quickly. But I do think there’s probably a, I don’t know if it’s a sort of venture backup opportunity, but a really good opportunity for someone to build either a company or a nonprofit that that tackles that, because that has been kind of the holy grail in education for a long time. And it’s always been true that I think the models weren’t quite ready over the last year and a half, and now I think they finally are. But no one’s kind of put together all the pieces. And if you’re building this, I want to hear from you because I because we would love to test it at primer. Let’s
40:40
do it. And let’s, you know, if you’re out there in the audience, then then certainly reach out. You know, one of my personal frustrations with education when I was growing up is tons of emphasis on rote memorization, very little on curiosity, creativity, critical thinking. You know, is, is that a core part of the curriculum? Is it the afternoon project work, where they get a lot of that, where they’re building those skills. How do you think about it? Yeah,
41:04
if you tell a third grader that you want to teach them critical thinking, there’s nothing that will, you know, make them glaze over faster. But if you give them a project that they’re intrinsically motivated about that requires critical thinking or strategy or breaking down problems into sub components, you know, or things like learning how to debate and defend a position, all of a sudden they’re, they’re going to be dialed totally locked in. And so we, we tend to think, I mean, there’s, there are some state standards and different things that we will make sure that we hit that need to be explicitly taught in some format that are sort of in that bucket of skills. But in general, our belief is that all of those things are far better learned through a project where a student is working on something they’re intrinsically motivated by, versus being told that they have to acquire some skill for some external reason, you know, for which they have no intrinsic motivation at all. Ryan,
42:00
I know that primer has secured funding from notable investors, including Founders Fund Sam Altman and others, despite not being like a typical SaaS company, education is a compelling topic, but you know, how were you able to articulate this vision and attract such high quality investors in a category that’s often been maligned and, you know, something that doesn’t maybe have the the super high margins of your pure AI or pure SaaS business.
42:32
I’m not sure I have great advice on this, because I wasn’t tackling primer because I thought it was a, you know, a great venture backable business or not. I was tackling because I believed that this needed to exist, and I wasn’t sure anyone else was going to build it. I to the extent that I have any generalizable advice, I would say I think it is true that tackling a very hard problem, counterintuitively, is is not actually that much more difficult than tackling a moderately hard problem, because when you tackle a very hard problem, you attract very talented people who also want to go tackle a really hard problem. And I can’t remember who I learned this from. This was not a unique idea to me, but I have seen that play out consistently at primer, with the quality of people that we have reaching out to us, wanting to join. And so I think that it primer is a very, very big, hairy, difficult problem, and I think we’ve benefited from that, and that that then crosses over into the ability, I think, to raise capital, especially early on. If you could prove out that you can, you can attract top talent, I would also say that that everyone, there’s these categories like education, where it’s true that historically, there’s been very few generational companies that have been built, but there is. There’s always someone that ends up building the exception, and typically that exception is is an order of magnitude larger than all the than the graveyard before it. And so you saw this with SpaceX as a perfect example. There’s several other industries that that that fit this, this bill, and I suspect that education is on a similar curve, where, for the first time, there, there, there’s the opportunity to build organizations that can really scale. And I don’t, I hope that primer, you know, even, even the outcomes side. I hope that primer can, can be the company to to bring this type of of option and alternative to not just the, you know, the wealthy students that kind of have historically gotten these options, but use the technology that exists today to democratize it, to make it accessible for families across all income levels. And that’s, that’s kind of the the the the the building blocks that have, I think, created some of the breakthroughs that we’ve been able to take advantage of. I think will come together to make that possible in a way that has never been previously.
44:44
Do you think that there’s policy changes required or legislative changes required to kind of realize the extent of your vision? No,
44:52
I mean we, we are the inside baseballs. We are just private schools. So we, we operate under the regulatory framework of 10. Of 1000s of other schools across the US, and there’s nothing new that’s needed for us to to exist or continue to scale.
45:07
Amazing. Ryan, if we could feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about? Robert
45:13
Westbury, our head of engineering at primer. He’s, I think, one of the most underrated technologists and engineering leaders in tech,
45:20
very good. And what would you want to hear him speak about? He’s exceptional
45:23
at engineering, like Team engineering, team building, and thinking through, specifically, I guess, thinking through offline like building software, that is, you interact with it digitally, but then it’s meant to manifest some very specific offline experience. It’s actually a very complicated problem that not that many companies or teams work on. And he’s quite, quite exceptional at that
45:45
interesting. Ryan, what book, article or video would you recommend to listeners? There’s
45:50
a book called The merchant bankers by Joseph, something I forget his last name, which is, like, surprisingly, not, not very well known, but has been scorching through several group chats that I’m in. I think is quite underrated. Do you know what it’s about? Yeah, right. It’s basically chronicling some well chronicled and some under under chronicled financial families that have the titles fairly totally self explanatory, throughout history. And I realized that I didn’t totally so my so my intuition about how money flowed around the world at various points in history was was very flawed, or I just didn’t understand some of the nuances of it. And it’s quite interesting, very
46:26
interesting. Ryan, do you have any habits, tactics or behaviors that are a secret or that are a force multiplier? I
46:33
don’t know. I make breakfast for my kids every morning. I don’t know that’s a secret or a force multiplier, but it’s great, and I love
46:41
it. Okay? And then finally, here, Ryan, what’s best way for listeners connect with you and follow along with primer. If you’re
46:46
interested in launching a primer, that’s the number one thing we’re working on, please get in touch. My email is just the letter r@primer.com We’d love to talk to you, and if you’re building AI tutors or similar things in that space, I’d also love to talk to you. And then we’re primer.com and I’m at Delk on Twitter.
47:03
Awesome. Well, when I retire as a VC, I will be emailing our@primer.com and I’ll be taking out one of your schools. It’s an incredible mission. Thank you so much for the time today, and thanks for sharing so much about the education system and what you’re doing to improve
47:17
it. Awesome. Talk soon. Thank you, sir.
47:22
You all right, that’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.
