What triggered your interest in education innovation and entrepreneurship? How did your education at Stanford help you in your journey?
I’ve loved games of all kinds my whole life, and although I didn’t struggle in school, I did often fantasize about how we could make learning more fun. At Stanford, the Symbolic Systems program exposed me to wild new perspectives on thinking (including learning), and the proud lineage of startups that began on campus made entrepreneurship feel possible.
What inspired you to start Kidaptive? What challenge were you trying to solve?
In 2010 the iPad came out and instantly became a hit with very young kids. I was in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design doctoral program, designing games to help people learn all sorts of things. I also had a toddler at home. Kidaptive came from the idea that by creating beautiful interactive stories with adaptive games woven into them, we could personalize learning for preschoolers during the screen time that they were getting anyway and simultaneously help their parents learn about how to support that learning in the real world with personalized tips and recommendations.
How did learning science influence the founding and scaling of Kidaptive?
Learning science was central to every aspect of Kidaptive. A doctoral classmate introduced me to my cofounder, and my dissertation literature review convinced him to work with me. Two of our first hires were fellow learning scientists. Learning science provided the foundation for our game designs, measurement approaches, and story arcs. Learning science suffused our companion app for parents. Our company and products won awards—and we secured partnerships after our pivot to SaaS—on the strength of our learning science. And our company was acquired by McGraw Hill after a conversation with their leadership convinced them that we were serious scientists.
What surprised you the most about the founder’s journey?
Two things: First, I was shocked at how much less rigor there is in industry than in academia when it comes to basically any sort of claim. People get away with a ludicrous amount of outright lying about efficacy, traction, deals, etc. And second, company culture isn’t something that you eventually get around to establishing; it’s the accumulated residue of every choice you make from day one.
Now, you are SVP and Chief Data Scientist at McGraw Hill, which acquired Kidaptive. What was the acquisition experience like? What inspires you about your new role?
Our acquisition was a natural continuation of a conversation I had with Sean Ryan, President of McGraw Hill’s School business unit, about our shared vision for personalization through richer, more holistic understanding of individual learners. It was also a bit of a covert operation, though, because a competitor of McGraw Hill’s was in a position to disrupt the acquisition and almost certainly would have done so had they known. We Kidaptive alumni are inspired by the scale of positive contributions to learning we can make at McGraw Hill, which serves tens of millions of learners and educators globally.
How do you see the future of education evolving?
Very incrementally. As science and technology advance, people continue to predict that education will be “disrupted” by this or that. This timeworn trend dates back at least as far as Socrates, who feared that the new technology of writing would make men “cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.” We all have painful recent memories of education actually being disrupted (by COVID-19), and many people vainly hoped to leverage that disruption for lasting positive change. Instead, cultural inertia drew systems back to “normal” within a few years.
What was your favorite education class or experience at Stanford and why?
My favorite class was Rich Shavelson’s course on Human Cognitive Abilities (the anchor text for which was Education As the Cultivation of Intelligence by Michael Martinez). I continue to be fascinated by the history of attempts to understand and characterize cognitive abilities like intelligence, and I thought Professor Shavelson did a great job of interrogating strongly conflicting lines of research that reflect fundamentally different conceptions of the field.
What advice would you give to Stanford students interested in education entrepreneurship?
- Find and learn from great resources like Reach Capital’s edtech playbooks.
- Ask for help, and consider everyone in the field as potential collaborators rather than competitors.
- As soon as it makes sense, turn around and help folks who are coming in behind you.
- Don’t do it to make a fortune! Do it to make a difference.