The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The SPAC Market + EdTech, Apprenticeship, and Entrepreneurship — with Euan Blair

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Euan Blair, the founder and CEO of Multiverse, an ed-tech startup that provides professional apprenticeship programs in partnership with employers around the world, joins Scott to discuss the business model and logistics, how the company doubled its valuation from just eight months ago to reach $1.7 billion, and how different cultures have different relationships with apprenticeships.  Scott opens with why investors are wary to park their money in SPACs.  Algebra of Happiness: express your emotions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 169. In 1969, the Beatles recorded their final album together abbey road people born in 1969 jennifer anderson wes anderson jennifer lopez jason bateman matthew mcconaughey and peter dinklage i watched game of thrones with my in-laws and all the sex made me so uncomfortable so i just turned the volume on the show up, and I couldn't hear them. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 169th episode of The Prop G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Ewan Blair, the founder and CEO of Multiverse,

a net tech startup that provides professional apprenticeship programs in partnership with employers around the world. Disclosure, I am an investor in Multiverse and a big fan of the company and its approach to making education and learning skills more accessible. I'm a big believer that we are going to need to find different on-ramps or more on-ramps to the middle class for the two-thirds of Americans and the 75%, I believe, of Europeans that don't get a traditional undergraduate BA. In America, we've decided you have failed as a parent. And as a kid, if you don't go to MIT and end up at Google, recognizing or not recognizing that two-thirds, again, of kids will not end up with a traditional BA and we have to find more on-ramps. 50% of kids in Germany, or people in Germany, I should say,

have some sort of vocational certification. And in the U.S., it's less than 10. There's sort of this trope or this perception or scarlet letter of failure if you don't get a traditional college degree. And traditional colleges or elite universities have preyed on this stereotype and have taken prices through the roof and incurred a transfer of wealth of about $1.5 trillion in the form of student debt or debt on young people to the faculty administrators and endowments of these universities. Anyways, I think Multiverse's model is fantastic. And we'll talk

about how it has doubled its valuation from just eight months ago to reach $1.7 billion. So in the face of a pretty serious slowdown among growthy stuff and tech unicorns, they're actually bucking the odds and, I don't know, running through the tape, whatever the term is, sailing upstream. And also how different cultures have different relationships with apprenticeship programs. Okay, what's happening? The market for SPACs, as in special purpose acquisition vehicles, is looking shaky. That's looking like shit, I would say. We're not just talking about how we're seeing fewer and fewer SPACs. We're talking about the investors behind these deals. But let's back up. Let's broaden the lens here and let's talk about SPACs more generally. A SPAC is nothing

more than a cash shell when it IPOs. It then goes shopping for a company to acquire or merge with so that the company can become public in lieu of executing its own IPO, sometimes referred to as a blank check IPO. Basically, you're betting on an operating group or a group of executives who will be able to find a company that's private and buy it, and then it'll begin trading overnight as a public company. Now, so what does that mean? A SPAC has no business operations, nor do they need to identify a target company before they close their IPO. As a matter of fact, they're not supposed to. The funds they raise sit in an escrow account.

So it's kind of a means of circumventing the traditional means of going public. And in really frothy markets, SPACs become really popular because there are folks out there hunting, or SPACs hunting to de-SPAC and try and find private companies and say, I can get you public very fast. I'll get you a good valuation and we'll begin trading, as opposed to the traditional IPO, which has more filing disclosures and takes longer. Basically, the paperwork's done and you're kind of ready to go, just flip the switch. The New York Times reported that at least 80% of investors have asked for their money back,

up from 54% historically. Now, why is that? Because of this ambiguity, investors are entitled to reclaim their shares prior to the merger. Think of it as buying something on back order, and when the time comes to ship the product, you can say, never mind, I'd like my money back. So, when you invest in a SPAC before they actually announce the company they're buying and de-SPACing with, you get to, as an investor, decide if you want to redeem, and you're not investing in the new company. So a SPAC goes out called the dog and the dog says, okay, I'm buying Rogue Fitness. Rogue is the company that makes all those weights. I don't know why that popped into my mind. And you might decide, okay, Rogue's a good company, but you're overpaying for it because everyone's trying to de-SPAC right now. And I don't want to be on this losing train or

increasingly losing train called the SPAC shit train or shit show. And so they redeem and say, just give me my money back. And what we've seen is that the percentage of investors or shares that have redeemed once hearing about the company they're planning to acquire with that escrowed cash that is going to de-SPAC is now at 80%. Think about that. So if you raise $300 in a SPAC IPO, only about $60 million has decided to stay in, meaning you got to go find more money in the form of a SPAC. It was up at about 54%, which seems striking to me. The logic here is pretty straightforward. Just as there are 80% fewer traditional IPOs this year compared to last year, it's clear that investors are wary of what high interest rates might mean for their capital. In some, that the companies that typically go out or get de-SPAC'd or purchased by a blank check or SPAC

are usually the kind of companies that are making money and the cost of capital to fund their growth has gone up and plus the cash flows they're supposed to produce in the future when reverse engineered back at a higher rate or discounted back at a higher rate because of higher interest rates are worth less. So basically, it's costing more to produce cash flows that are worth less, meaning the underlying company is worth a lot less. And the SPAC market no longer looks like a viable option for their

money. On top of that, or a good option, I would say it's viable. That's just a shitty option. On top of that, regulatory scrutiny of SPACs is increasing, making it less enticing for the parties involved, namely the sponsors that promised to complete a deal and the companies they're trying to acquire. Since the start of 2020, the SEC has opened 24 cases involving SPACs and a quarter of them involve, wait for it, EV companies, right? It's hot electric vehicles, it's climate change, yada, yada, yada. The Times also reported that roughly 600 SPACs at IPO during the past couple of years are still trying to complete deals. Think about this. Around 600 SPACs that IPO during the past couple of years are still trying to complete deals. Think about this. Around 73 SPACs that were waiting to IPO have canceled their plans

to do so. So there's 600 operating groups with money in hand, combing the earth, trying to find a company to acquire and de-SPAC. That means you're getting knocks on the door from these SPACs saying, hey, would you like to go public? We'd like to de-SPAC you. I, no joke, was lined up ready to go at the starting gate for a SPAC with two colleagues, very credible guys, Goldman, Jeffrey signed up, ready to go. And then we did one final call, and that is the three of us. And one of my colleagues said, how many calls from SPACs have you received? And I had received two the previous week. I'm on the board of a couple of unicorns and had received two calls directly

because they didn't call the CEO because the CEO wasn't returning their calls because he'd been receiving so many calls from SPACs looking to de-SPAC. And I said, well, I've received two. And he said, I've received seven in the last 48 hours. And we all thought, do we want to be those people making those calls?

It was just clear there's too much capital, too many SPACs looking to de-SPAC, naturally leading to elevated prices or bad deals. In other words, it's a great time to be a little company or a small private company or a big private company trying to get public because you have all of this capital chasing you. You're going to be able to negotiate a really good deal for you, but a really bad deal for the folks who decide to stay in and buy your company for that price.

And the market has just soured on these things. They have a bad brand now. Anything that says SPAC on it says, oh, it's a shitty company that couldn't go public the traditional means. The market is just pretty much slammed shut for IPOs. And all of a sudden, boom, the SPAC market is as cold as it was white hot. What does this mean? SPACs actually aren't a new vehicle, but what they are is just as retail investors entering the market kind of signal a top, SPACs kind of signal a top. And the top went longer than people thought, and there were a lot of people out there claiming to be operators. They weren't. They were just promoters going on CNBC and saying, hey, space tourism is going to be great, and electric vehicles and golf carts is going to be great, and hey, this cute company that ships treats for dogs shareholders. Yeah, but the SEC is meant to be paternal and meant to ensure that there's a

certain level of credibility, a certain level of quality for companies that can sell their shares to the retail public. And I think the retail public has come to expect that there's a cop on watch that says, well, this is just purely shit. We're not going to let it trade publicly, or we're going to put people on the hook here. Now, what happens? The operating group or the operators who take the company public to begin with or originate a SPAC or a blank check company, they get in exchange for putting up $3, $5, $10 million, the cost of underwriting, the initial SPAC, the cost of the legal fees. They're going to get somewhere between 5% and 20% of the company, of the outstanding shares of the company once it begins trading. What does that mean? It means they have huge incentive just to find a deal and to get it trading. And then once their lockup expires to sell their shares. So even if the shares decline 30%, 50%, 70%, they're likely

still going to make money because they got a big swath of the equity of the company once it is de-SPAC, which means that even if the deal is bad, even if they're overpaying, they have incentive just to get the deal done. The investment banks have an incentive just to take a company, blank check company, public, even though they don't know the target, even if they don't know it's going to be a good company over the long term, even if they don't know they're going to overpay for a company to de-SPAC because they get their fees. And by the way, investment banks have supposedly raked in over $5 billion in fees from taking blank check companies public. So what do we have here? SPACs have become a dirty name, a bad brand. And who gets left holding the bag? The people who

wanted in on this growthy disco party that didn't end, the champagne and the cocaine were flowing. And then boom, once the lights went on, oh my God, is he ugly. And oh shit, you should feel this headache. Just wait. It's probably going to get worse. Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Ewan Blair. have shifted their career trajectories. And how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway.

And on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robison, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Ewan Blair, the founder and CEO of Multiverse.

Ewan, where does this podcast find you? It finds me in London. Nice. So let's bust right into it. Multiverse, your edtech startup. Give us the headline news. Describe it for us. Oh, by the way, I should say right up front disclosure, I am an investor in Multiverse through a venture capital firm that I advise, General Catalyst. So I am an investor. So with that, tell us about Multiverse, Ewan. We are very proud to have both you and General Catalyst on board, Scott. What a thrill. What a thrill for you. So exciting. Indeed. You didn't even prompt me there. We've built an outstanding alternative to college and to corporate training through

professional apprenticeships. And it's focused on tech, digital, and professional services careers. And an apprenticeship is work and training combined. You don't pay. The costs are fully borne by the employer. You're paid a salary. The programs generally last 12 to 18 months. You get one-on-one coaching to support you.

In a multiverse, you join a really active community with meetups, socials, sports teams, and societies. And walk us through the business model. So give us a client, what you deliver to them, and how Multiverse makes money. So our customers are people like Google, Meta, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Verizon. And we do two things for them. We both find them talent who do not have degrees, who are people who either can't afford or are choosing not to go to college, to go and join their workforces. And we also deliver the apprenticeship training over that 12 to 18-month period, typically in things like data analysis,

software engineering, and project management. And so the employers pay us a fee both for finding those individuals and for delivering the training. And in return, they get access to exceptional talent, they get those training programs. Crucially, they take these people on as full-time employees, so they are all paid the salary. And so you're basically, you're sort of outsourced recruiting, if you will. Would that be a decent way to describe it? Not really, only because the recruitment piece is only a part of it because so much of the value comes from actually delivering that training program. So we really are an alternative to

college in the sense of this is education, but it's just education directly linked to the workforce and in fact, education combined with work. Yeah, and I think the thing that initially drew me to the company was, you have corporate profits at an all-time high, student debt at an all-time high. And I think what you're effectively doing is transitioning or reallocating the cost from the student to the organization. Would that be fair? Exactly right.

And actually, that's a really important point. Because if you look across the world, there's been this assumption that once you turn 18, the costs for what comes next, and particularly the education, are either borne by the individual or they're deferred through some sort of loan system or they're borne by the general taxpayer. And we're saying, actually, employers should pay. Employers will happily pay if they can get the right talent and the right skills. And that way, you remove one of the biggest financial barriers to people being able to access opportunities. And in the process, hopefully create a much more equitable workforce, particularly in tech and professional services.

So tech companies get to build an on-ramp for communities that otherwise didn't have access to these organizations. They get talented people that show up sort of just out of water, are trained. That's the demand side. What about on the supply side? How do you find people? How do you screen them? What's the process? How many people actually make it through the application and then the actual training? Talk about the supply side.

So we meet students both at their schools, through their communities, through charity groups, through outreach, through marketing, through social media. We have a lot of success actually on TikTok. And we've had somewhere in the region of 100,000 people apply to be Multiverse apprentices over the last 12 months. The bar is very high. Actually, only about 3% of people currently get placed onto programs. It's high by design because we're placing people at some of the world's best companies. They have to be really great. But what's so important is, unlike college, if you look at the diversity of our apprentices, over half of people of color, 54% are women, including in tech roles, and about 35% come from the most economically

marginalized communities. And who would you describe as your competition? So when we look at the US, we really look at college as being our very obvious competitors, right? Because we're deliberately positioning this as an alternative. You do have some ed techs doing things that will help people access degrees online or access them cheaper or faster, or try and link what they're learning more closely to the workplace. One of the things we talk about a lot is actually in ed tech, there's not been

enough companies saying, what would we design today if college didn't exist as the prevailing model for access to employment opportunities? And how would we start and how would we work in collaboration with employers? training and that is very focused. I mean, college is, and there's wonderful things about college, and one of them is upskilling you to get a job. But a lot of it is, I don't want to call it a waste, but is what I'll call non-essential to actually getting a job. And it feels like, and by the way, a lot of us love that non-essential stuff, but it feels, the term I would use is vocational training. And that is very focused on getting you to economic opportunity or economic security. And Germany has, my understanding is about 50% of the population has some sort of vocational certification. In the U.S., it's less than 10. Have you found that based on that, that Germany and the U.S. are, the opportunity isn't as big in Germany and bigger in the US because in the US, we just don't,

we kind of don't, it feels as if there's a gap between four-year traditional college degree and dropping out of high school. There's just not a lot in between, it doesn't feel like. So, I mean, and I have a number of kind of thoughts on this overall. It's interesting. Look, for starters, there are problems that exist with college in and of itself. So over 40% of those who go to college don't emerge with a degree. They just emerge with debt, right? And at the same time, nearly half of all students at the moment see no income premium 10 years out from leaving college. You've got degree requirements screening out 70% of African-Americans and 80% of Hispanic

Americans from many jobs. And so you've got sort of problems of multiple stages around equity and access and people benefiting of the kind of prevailing college model. And if you look at something like Germany, Germany is an interesting example, but it's also a country that is dominated by its manufacturing sector, unlike the US, which is a tech professional services economy. A lot of people doing those apprenticeships are still going on to fairly traditional jobs and trades jobs. Now, what's really interesting is the UK, whose economy looks a lot more like America's. It is a tech and professional services

economy. And we focused over the last five years really building this alternative so that you're not having to make a difficult decision about, do I do an apprenticeship or do I go to university based on the type of job I might end up in or the kind of salary I might command? But instead you're asking, which of these routes better suit me, the way I learn, my circumstances, and which do I want to pursue? And so I think America can learn a lot from the journey that the UK has been on there. And we've had lots of American politicians and policymakers look at Germany, look at Switzerland, look at Austria. They're interesting models, but actually they're sort of models to solve different economies

than the US one. We need to come up with a situation that's going to work in America. And in particular, ensure that if you think of so many of the best jobs and the growing jobs are in tech and professional services and at companies like some of the ones I mentioned earlier, there is no reason why you need a degree to go and do those jobs well. So why do we allow a small group of academic institutions to be the gatekeepers of access to those top jobs? And why don't we instead say, well, let's look at actually what people can offer and teach them in an applied workplace context. Do you think your biggest customers are going to be the companies themselves or governments that feel a need or think that this is a good investment in human capital, recognizing that at least in the US, two-thirds of young

people aren't going to end up with a traditional degree, but it makes sense to invest such that again, they have on-ramps to a good middle-class life. Are your biggest customers governments or Verizon and Google? So at the moment, they life. Are your biggest customers governments or Verizon and Google? So at the moment, they are employers, right? The likes of Verizon and Google and others. Governments play an active role in this, reasonably active in the UK. I think also in the US. Candidly, we know we cannot rely on federal government to go and take action in an area like this in the US. So we're much better off basically designing something that works for employers, works for individuals,

and hoping that government provides supportive tailwinds. But they're not necessary to make this work. At the moment in the US, there's very little support for apprenticeship programs from governments. Of course, you have things like the Pell Grant and huge amounts of spending on college that are allocated both federally and at state level. You don't have the same thing for apprenticeships.

Though that said, you can write off the cost of apprenticeship programs against your tax bill, which is a useful incentive at the margin for companies. How do you measure outcomes? Is it how these individuals are doing two, three, five years on in the company? What does success look like? Yeah, so there are two big outcomes that we measure. The first is the percentage of people who complete our programs having started them, right? We know often alternative routes have shown pretty poor stickiness and completion rate at colleges is around about 50%, just north of 50%. So 90% of people who start an apprenticeship with us will successfully complete. About 94%

will remain with their employer 12 months after having completed their apprenticeship. So those retention statistics are incredibly important, and they're one of our biggest factors. About half are promoted or receive a pay increase while they're on program. And the average starting salary for a placed apprentice in the US with multiverse is about $60,000. And there's no debt, no income sharing arrangement. It's a really compelling proposition for that individual. And what do you see as your biggest growth markets?

Is it the United States? How many countries are you in right now? And give us a general sense for how the business breaks down. So we're in the UK and the US at the moment. And those two countries are our sole focus, partly because some of the things I said before that are quite similar about them in terms of economic makeup. Also, a lot of the employers we work with in the UK are either American employers or have huge businesses in America. We're in nine different cities in the US at the moment. We will

be expanding that further. As we look beyond the UK and the US, look, there are plenty of countries where this could work really well and really effectively. We're being quite careful about how we expand internationally in terms of direct delivery that we multiverse institution provide. We'll start to open up to more countries

as we build that multiverse to platform where we can increasingly offer services that are done in a fully automated way and provide people access to coaching materials in that manner. So let's talk a little bit about the business itself. You're now the most valuable, I think, private ed tech venture in the United Kingdom. You're closing or closed on $220 million in a Series D funding at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. And the thing that's most impressive about that is, and I have personal exposure to this,

is that the ed tech environment is not like a lot of the growthy parts of the unicorn economy is not a great place to be right now. I mean, it's just the valuations have gone way down. And yet your valuation has doubled since your last round. What is different? What's unique here? Yeah, I think there's a few things in that. I think first, it's clear to investors that this is the start of something that could be much, much bigger. And I think we've obviously, we're backed by many of the world's best VCs. We speak to them regularly. They believe instinctively in the thesis that one-size-fits-all model for what happens when you turn 18 isn't appropriate, isn't fair, and it's not sustainable

in the face of everything else that's happening in the world and the failures of the overall college system. I think another part of it, though, is that we've, I mean, look, our book revenue has grown 9x over the last two years, right? We've made sure that this is an equally compelling proposition for employers as it is for individuals. And that's really important. When you look at a lot of ed tech companies, the role of the employer has probably been understated because in the end, we see this as about access to jobs, right? The type of job you can get access to and the type of salary you can therefore command play a huge role in your social status, in your mobility, in the things you can do, in the choices you get to make.

And so by putting jobs at the center of this, and there are a lot of companies that offer training and that's it. And there's an expectation you can get a job or sometimes a soft guarantee because these have the jobs embedded from day one. I think that's a really important distinction. And what's the friction in the business? Well, it's clearly not capital. Is it clients? Is it finding good people to go into these apprenticeship programs? If you want to continue, what is, as the CEO of the company, what is the friction in the business? Yeah. So look, there are always, you always want to get more customers, right? You always want to create more opportunities with employers, have more employers calling out the fact that you no

longer need a degree to work here. And we're using this as our kind of clear pipeline for talent, particularly in tech, data, and business operations areas. The individual, actually, we tend to continuously be massively oversubscribed because if you think of the proposition for an individual, you get one-on-one coaching, you join a community, by the way, whether it's a meetup, social, sports team, societies, those things that actually people typically associate with college. You get a job from day zero, you're being paid a salary. That bit tends to be quite straightforward. And then finding high quality coaches, because we really, really believe that one of the

things that's led to the success of our programs and also that retention is the primacy of an individual coach. I think there's a big distinction in education between purely self-directed learning and instructor-led learning. And we fall firmlydirected learning and instructor-led learning. And we fall firmly on the side of instructor-led learning. And yes, our apprentices can access learning on demand. They learn remotely in many ways. And there's a large kind of library of materials for them to be able to use and engage with.

But having a coach holding you accountable throughout that program and also helping you as you take some of those early steps in the workplace is really, really important. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make

stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT, presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin?, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to coworkers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo. You were an investment banker before. What convinced you to, I mean, we actually have very

similar backgrounds. We both started at Morgan Stanley and then we started companies. From that point, things have diverged dramatically in terms of our careers. It's remarkable what you've been able to accomplish. What was the most difficult thing about transitioning to be an entrepreneur versus being at a great platform like Morgan Stanley? Well, I didn't take a direct route. And it was interesting because I joined Morgan Stanley in their graduate scheme, right? I armed with a degree in ancient history and a master's in international relations that did not prepare me for the things I was supposed to do in corporate debt and derivatives, but for some reason were deemed a really important prerequisite. And that was immediately one of the things that struck me. I was surrounded by people actually mainly with liberal arts degrees, but nearly

entirely white, major majority men, typically from more affluent backgrounds and we have no divine right to be there but it was a consequence with an obsession with kind of using this degree as a screening credential and i was at morgan stanley for five years i thought finance was interesting it was not what i loved i was much more excited by education employment and so i left to do something really different and i joined an organization that was helping long-term unemployed people find jobs. And I actually wanted to get a sense of what are some of the barriers people face in the labor market on a direct basis. And I joined in business development, basically trying to persuade employers to take on people

with a history of incarceration, multi-generational unemployment, disability. And I ended up becoming CEO of that organization in the UK. And there was a big moment where we finally got 100,000 long-term unemployed people jobs. And everyone was really excited. The challenge was when you looked at what we were doing, while it was valuable, it wasn't really able to drive serious change because too often we were getting people fairly fleeting jobs in hospitality, in retail, cleaning services. It was enough to earn a wage, but it wasn't enough to change the trajectory of their life. And so the obsession for me became, how do you take something like that and how do

you make sure the best jobs of the next decade don't simply go to all the same people as the best jobs of the last decade? Because if we can't solve that, we're going to end up with a more unequal society. We're going to end up with more friction between different parts of that society. And actually, an increasing number of people say, yes, we see huge growth in tech and in economies. Why am I not benefiting from any of this? Yeah, it really is a bit of a caste system. I've always thought that we always associate a caste system with Europe or India. And I've thought that in the U.S. we have a caste system. And I'm the enforcer of it, specifically the elite universities that take mostly kids from wealthy households, let in a few freakishly remarkable kids to make ourselves feel better.

And that kind of starts it all because the majority of the platforms you're talking about, Google and Morgan Stanley, have fetishized elite university certification. And if you don't get into Harvard when you're 18 or you don't get into one of the 100 elite universities, you're kind of, that entire ecosystem of growth in the economy is pretty much shut off for the rest of your life to you. And it sounds like you guys are trying to create, I don't want to call it back doors, but side doors. I'm curious, you are obviously the helm of the bobsled looking at the intersection between employers and human capital in the UK and America. Compare and contrast this sort of employment situation or the dynamic between employers and growth and human capital in the UK versus America?

So I think they're broadly similar. And it's interesting that we saw, for example, and the pandemic had the effect of accelerating a lot of things that were starting to happen anyway. So in the US, and I speak to chief executives and boards and others who are looking at implementing these programs, there's a big, big focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion now in a really meaningful way. And actually people beginning to try and walk the walk as opposed to simply talk the talk. And that means that instinctively, they understand that if they can't change where

they source their talent from and bring in alternative types of talent, they're going to really struggle. They'll struggle to reflect their customers and they'll struggle to be true stakeholders in society. And then digital transformation is something that is gripped nearly every company out there, particularly traditional companies, where they're having to pivot very quickly towards technology, towards data. And they cannot find those people in the economy and they can't find them on college campuses. I mean, Amazon is an example. And obviously, a tech company and a pretty modern forward thinking one could hire every computer scientist studying at the moment in the US and still need more engineers. So it's just not sufficient. Colleges become actually a bottleneck, both to the kind of diversity piece, but also to skills needed in the labor market.

And we've seen the same things in the UK. It's a very similar landscape. And increasingly, this is something that is being tackled through apprenticeship programs. So in the US, it feels as if we're on the precipice of a lot of layoffs in the tech sector. A lot of companies have grown their SG&A much faster than their revenues and just got out and over their skis. Not that they're not great businesses, but I think you're going to see a lot of layoffs. What happens to a business like yours when the need to find people isn't as great? So this is actually something, and look, we experienced this when the pandemic first hit

and the immediate thing was companies laying off lots of people. There were big fears as to whether we would see mass unemployment. Governments intervened to sort of insulate their economies from some of the worst effects of that. But actually, we spend a lot of time also reskilling people who are already

in the workforce as well. Typically, again, those without college degrees, but in data, tech, business operations. And when companies are hit by recessions, they often try and shed costs, but they pivot towards high leverage areas and focus on kind of high leverage skills within their organizations as opposed to the lower leverage ones and so it actually makes a huge amount of sense if you're a company dealing with some of the the negative impacts of a recession that you say right we're going to have to modernize more quickly we're going to have to pivot large parts of our workforces so if we can either bring in talent at a junior level in these areas you know instead of relying on expensive external consultants we can grow and develop

our own software engineers or data analysts or data scientists. That's absolutely a route they'll take. And also, we will need to rescale large numbers of our workforces into higher impact, higher leverage areas. So I think we're fairly well intuited against a lot of that. And advice to entrepreneurs, what are the two or three biggest surprises or things you wish you'd known

when you'd started a business? I think one of them is that the idea itself doesn't have to be world shattering, right? And you don't have to necessarily be coming up with something completely new. You need to look at something that exists in a different way and have a unique perspective on it and be able to articulate that. And then it all comes down to execution and in particular who you hire and those early hires, because the people you

hire into your organization will be the people who deliver on that vision. And the better they are, the more likely you are to succeed. I think it's something that probably isn't talked about enough, just the strength of hiring incredibly well and using people who are better than you in lots and lots of individual areas to deliver on those goals. And what do you see? I mean, you have huge expectations now. The thing I've always thought that a lot of young entrepreneurs don't appreciate is if you can raise money at a $1.7 billion valuation, that's great. But that means those people are expecting your company to be worth 5 billion plus. I mean, you're at the point where your exit

is probably going to be an IPO to meet these types of valuation expectations. I mean, is there a thing that keeps you up at night? Is it finding good people? Is it the economy? Is it, what do you see as the biggest threats to being able to show the kind of returns your current investors are expecting? It's almost always hiring and hiring

velocity and hiring quality and how you continue to maintain a culture of high performance and excellence, but also very values-led as you scale and as you expand across different countries. Because one of the interesting things about what we do, it's actually one of the great things about running a business like this and getting to talk about it all the time is no one ever objects to what it is we're doing. I think pretty much everyone there, I remember early on speaking to the Association of UK Vice-Chancellors of Universities and Colleges in Britain, and I got no pushback. They all absolutely agreed, right?

They know the current model's broken. They know actually they are losing political buy-in and they're losing societal buy-in because they can't fix a lot of these chronic problems and that an alternative is valuable and necessary. Employers, likewise, understand that they can't keep tapping the same small pools of talent and missing out on lots and lots of other people because that's not nearly sufficient for them.

And they have these big skills shortages. And governments are making this a priority. You know, you've had Singapore introduce legislation paying the wages of apprentices because they want to encourage take-up. Australia have done something similar. The UK introduced an apprenticeship levy. Various states in America are looking at doing something similar. So we're in a really good position of doing something that most people support. So the focus is how do we execute on that in the most effective way possible? And at the moment, we're delivering to 8,000 apprentices. There are 3.5 million people who graduate high school in the U.S. every year alone.

We can reach far, far, far more people as we start to grow and have impact way beyond the people we're currently serving. So there's plenty of room and plenty of space for growth. So as we wrap up here, you have spent, your company now operates in the U.K. and the U.S. You actually interned in Congress, United States Congress. So you have a unique feel or insight in as no mercy and no malice way as possible. Compare and contrast the United Kingdom and America.

At a government level? Just someone says the aliens land and say, US, UK, what's the way forward, right? And you see that around everything from gun control to abortion to access to opportunity. And I think the politicization of a whole load of issues that should not sit in the political is going to be incredibly damaging to the American social fabric. And I think both political parties are being pulled in directions away from the center, as the world's preeminent democracy that is a profoundly alarming thing i think in britain while our system is by no means perfect there is a broader consensus around many of these issues take free health care as an example or gun control or in fact abortion or nearly any of these issues that are currently being discussed and debated in America.

I think there is, and has always been in America, a celebration of entrepreneurs, of people who can create business value. And actually, a lot of people tend to celebrate success a lot more. In Britain, we can be fairly cynical. I think sometimes, to our credit, and we make a pretty successful sense of humor out of it, that there is a sort of an optimism that permeates a lot of parts of American life that is really valuable and we can learn from in Britain. Ewan Blair is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, an edtech startup that provides professional

apprenticeship programs in partnership with employers around the world. Prior to founding Multiverse, he served as a Morgan Stanley banker. He joins us from his home in London. Ewan, congratulations on your success and thanks for your time. Thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure. algebra of happiness stupidity i've been thinking a lot about stupidity specifically i love i don't read a lot of books i'm embarrassed to say that people think oh you're you must be so well read property i'm not i'm one of the least well-read people you know at least in terms of books i think i've written more books in the last three years than I've read. I try and read one book a year, and I commit to reading it a couple times to try and learn from it. Why?

Because I read all goddamn day, mostly articles, mostly stuff that's bubbled up on Twitter that I find interesting or that I feel like I have to read or preparing for this show. So the last thing I want to do to relax is to read. The way I relax is that I watch streaming media with my kids or soccer with my kids or I work out, but I just don't want to sit down and read a good book. That has no appeal to me. However, however, occasionally I find a book that really has an impact on me, and I try and really dissect it. And I don't want to say memorize it, but really understand it well. And the most recent one is The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla, who's a professor at my alma mater, Berkeley.

And basically says there's sort of four types of people. And the axes are people who benefit themselves and also the other axes is people who benefit others. And people who benefit others but not themselves he calls artists. People who benefit themselves but not others are bandits. People who benefit themselves and others are intelligent people. And then people who not only don't benefit themselves, hurt themselves and hurt others are stupid people. And it's important to understand stupidity. So if you look at Mark Zuckerberg, he's a bandit. He is hurting the world, but it's benefited him, right? Stupid people or stupid actions are things that not only are bad for you, but bad for others. I think Elon Musk has made some stupid decisions.

I think when he embraces the right, when he is selling cars mostly to granola people in – or granola-esque people in San Francisco and New York. It's not Republicans in Kentucky buying Teslas. It's mostly, I would bet, that 60%, maybe even 70% of the market of people who are buying Teslas are on the left. And just in general, as Michael Jordan said, Republicans buy shoes too. It's kind of dangerous to politicize a product because you're going to turn off between 49% and 51%. So he's not only, in my opinion, hurting society by taking these kind of, I don't know, non-sequitur political views, but I think he's hurting himself. I think that is a stupid decision. I also think he's creating a lot of chaos at Twitter, which is bad for the world and bad for him. He's going to,

I think, lose a lot of reputational value when everyone figures out he's totally full of shit and he's going to walk from this deal. Anyways, this is neither here nor there. You want to ensure that you are not doing stupid things, specifically things that not only hurt others, but hurt yourself. And something I did or I do that's stupid, and I think a lot of people do that is stupid, specifically men. And that is, and I'll use an example. My boys were in town this weekend, took my 11-year-old to the edge, which is the tallest observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, although someone corrected me and said that's actually the Toronto Space Needle. But I'm going

to go with the Edge. It's at Hudson Yards. And you basically spend $38 to go to the 110th floor where you and 3,000 other tourists gaze at the Manhattan skyline. And they have these weird things like the invisible floor where it's just clear glass, and you feel as if you're going to fall down 1,100 feet. And my son, my 11-year-old, ran over there and demanded we lay down and take a selfie. And then he popped up and said, Dad. I mean, he was so excited. And he pointed, and he said, oh, my God, there's a bar here, right? The idea of a bar 110 floors up was very exciting news to him. And he looked at me and said, can we have Cokes? He knows that I will give in and let him have a Coke when his mom's not around.

I said, sure. So he literally sprinted like Ben Johnson out of the gates, practically ran into the bar, and then stood there, talked to the bartender, made a realization, sprinted back to me, asked me for some money, then sprinted back to the bar. And then we're sitting there on these stone benches, staring out over the Manhattan skyline, drinking Atlanta champagne. And he no joke looks at me and goes, isn't this amazing? And he meant it. And just to see the world through an 11-year-old's eyes versus this 14-year-old whose favorite thing, by the way, is to go out with me. And then when we're almost done eating lunch or whatever the activity is, to ask me if he can walk home alone without me, which is fine. He's exploring his own thing and has figured out that I'm not that cool and seems to be angry that I let the charade endure this long. But anyways, in contrast, my 11-year-old just seems fascinated with things

and just seems so excited. That is just, it's just so rewarding as a parent to see that kind of wonder through the eyes of someone you care about so much and someone you love so much. And at that moment, I really, I thought, I want to remember this moment because it just, it feels so rewarding as a dad

and loving someone so much and enjoying and getting so much reward from how much they're enjoying that moment with you. And then later that night, I have a couple of Zacapa and Cokes, which I do quite frequently, and I'm not embarrassed by that. I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. I'm a better version of me, a little bit drunk. Anyways, I start texting some people that are close to me, telling them about the day, telling them about how rewarding I found it hanging out with Nolan, who's my 11-year-old, talking a little bit about fatherhood and what I've gotten right and what I've gotten wrong.

And these folks text back, and we all feel, I think, closer to each other. And then I go to sleep. The next morning, I wake up. I'm sober, and I'm actually a little bit embarrassed. I go through the text. I'm a little bit embarrassed by the text. I'm a little bit emotive, a little bit over the top. And I kind of feel chagrined or embarrassed by the whole thing. And I can feel my emotions coming back in. I'm back to who I am. And that is someone who is not

going to share or in my view, burden other people with my emotions. Or in some, once again, I am stupid. And that is not sharing your emotions with people you care about, about things that happen to you and people you care about, is to be stupid. It makes you less close to your friends. It makes those moments less meaningful, less resonant with you. Don't be stupid. Share your emotions. Burden other people with your feelings. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count.

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