This Week in Startups - E1104 The Next Unicorns E16: Degreed’s David Blake on reimagining lifelong education, ending credentialism, benefits of early apprenticeship & more

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Check out Degreed: https://degreed.com FOLLOW David: https://twitter.com/davidblake FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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And Trends by the Hustle. Track and capitalize on emerging industries and trends before they explode. Start your two-week trial for just $1 at trends.co slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. It's 2020, the year of the pandemic. And it's September. It's been six months under some form of shelter in place, lockdown.

And the predominant issue people are dealing with right now at this moment in September is not the pandemic itself. We seem to have learned to live with the pandemic. It is the second order impact of the pandemic that is causing great concern, anxiety, stress, and frustration for Americans specifically. And the tip of that spear is going back to school, education. colleges are charging the same price for classes over webcams as they were in person. And this is against the backdrop of people questioning if higher education was even worth it to begin with. People going into student debt at a level we've never seen coming out of it in their 40s, never being able to buy a home, and feeling the system is rigged and that capitalism is broken.

I don't blame them in some ways. If you told me my $200,000 in debt was going to return some amazing life, well, and it didn't, I might be pretty cynical too. And I might think that socialism and free education and free college was the solution. It turns out that that's probably not the case. It's probably that we need to innovate. And we probably need to rethink education from the bottom up. Teachers unions have caused massive problems within the K through 12 space.

Higher education is generally considered a rip-off and not worth it when I went to college. It was 10, 12K a year for Fordham University. My first job coming out, I think I made 50. So my first year equaled the cost of the education. Very few people are graduating and having that same equation work. But there is hope. And it turns out that most of the great companies now in Silicon Valley, don't look at your credentials. They look at your skills. They no longer care that you came from

Stanford or Harvard or MIT. Sure, that's not a minus to them, but it's not required. And it used to be venture capitalists used to just simply back Stanford graduates. That's why Sandville Road runs directly into Stanford's campus. It is literally across the street and down the road. You can walk from MIT, walk from Stanford to Sequoia Capital. That's all changed. Not only the funding of companies, but how we learn. Masterclass, which I passed on investing like an idiot. Costs me $20 million that missed investment.

But I did invest in Brilliant.org and Lambda. And there's a ton of other interesting companies teaching everything like Steezy for dance, to math, to science. Lifelong learning is becoming a thing. And today we continue our next Unicorn series, which has been absolutely on fire. This is episode six. We had some really great guests so far. And we got an incredible, incredible response to our last guest, episode five, Cody freezing from zero mass water.

They're literally putting hydro panels. Think of them like solar panels on your roof that suck water out of the air. And then they let you use that water in your house. Pretty amazing, right? I could solve water forever, very easily, in fact. education is one of those problems that we can solve right now. And our guest today is trying to do just that. Welcome to the program, David Blake, from degreed.com,

D-E-G-R-E-D dot com, correct? Correct. DeG-R-E-D. You heard my introduction there. Education, higher education specifically, is a complete rip-off and totally unnecessary in today's workforce. Yes or no? For more people than not.

Okay. So for the majority of people, I just did that as a test to see how candid you would be on the podcast. And you pass the test. It's a hard thing to say, but it is the absolute reality that you or I, do you have kids, may I ask? I do. I've got three. Okay, I have three as well. And my oldest is 10.

Your oldest is 12. Okay. So we will be dealing with this issue in your case in just three or four years and I'll be dealing with it six or seven. And we are people of means. But even we would question the value of going 250K into debt or spending 250K on a college degree, correct? Correct. How did it all go so wrong? So the heart of the issue is the credential.

I mean, if you want to take a broad brushstroke and sort of understand what's actually going on, it's the credential. We've seen education be democratized. I mean, right now available to every listener on this program, today for free is an Ivy League education. between edX and the MOOC platforms and OER resources, if you are dedicated and hardworking, you can go get yourself an Ivy League education today for free. And yet that hasn't brought down the price that these institutions are charging. And it's interesting, as we come to COVID, it's a good revelation of what is going on. But you have to ask, where is the value held?

and a majority of the value is held in the actual credential. And there is value held in other parts. And I think that's what people are seeing with COVID, which is you start to pull apart the pieces and is a big bundle. People are willing to pay $200,000 for it. But you start pulling the pieces apart and saying, is this piece worth, you know, what to me? and one of the biggest revelations is that what you pay for in education is not the learning.

The learning is available today for free online. What you are paying for are other things primarily the credential, but people are just waking up to that because all of a sudden they're on a Zoom call with a professor and 30 other people and being charged $16,000 for the pleasure. So when one looks at that, the other thing that's causing this revelation, is that the experience of college, people frequently say, hey, the experience is part of what you're paying for

and the network. So this unbundling, the pandemic has forced people to recognize the components and it has, in fact, unbundled the component. So the experience is gone. The networking is gone.

And what's left is the MOOC, the massively open online course, which we actually had Daphne Kolar, who co-founded Coursera on the program talking about in CITRO as the first of the next unicorn guest, that's what's actually happened here. And what you're saying is that the component of the course at an Ivy League school is freely available already. So what people were paying for is not that. And when people do pay $16,000 for something that is available for free, they get pretty irate and their eyes open up and they say there has to be a better way, correct?

Correct. Yeah. So when we look at this post-pandemic, one question on that, why if all of this Ivy League education is available for free, and it has been for, I think, getting close to a decade now since EdX and Coursera started putting their stuff online, why have people in America not realize this and absolutely swarmed? on the MIT free education, the Harvard free education, the Stanford free education, done the coursework, printed out their homework, and when they go for a job, hand it to the potential employer. Why has that happened? So let me, let me ask you a question. Tell me about your education. If you ask, if you ask anyone that question, tell me about your education. Ninety-nine percent of the people will tell you where they went to university or what degree they have. And it's an

absurdity, but it's a good reflection of the absurdity of the world we sort of find ourselves in. And it's a reflection of our inability to answer any other way. If I say, tell me about your education and you start saying, well, you know, three years ago I took this course and, you know, I got mentored by so-and-so, and then I had this great project. We just, it's hard to contextualize. There's no universal language as we, you know, have to talk about. the messy process of education. And that's where heuristics and credentials step in. They give us a language with which to convey and to speak about our education. But the world's only universal credential, the only universal language is that of the college degree. And let's be, let's be

sincere here and cynical at the same time. It's also a way to sort of give an indication of your status and your cast in life. I went to Yale. You went to Brown. This person went to Harvard. This person went to Fordham. Somebody else went to CUNY. It is a way to signal status, correct? The credentials, the actual associates are bachelors. Bachelor's of Science and Economics. And yet we usually answer with where we went to universities. The logos. Yeah, because the brand is as much of what conveys the information as the actual credential and the actual degree. And how we get past this is we need that the job to be done, we shouldn't resent it. If I do at times need to know about your skills, I need to know whether or not you're educated and in what and what your capabilities are and what your knowledge is. Like we have that need. If I'm going to hire you, I have that need. If I'm going to staff you on a project, if we're going to team up, I have that need. We shouldn't resent the need.

but we just need a better way of being able to communicate an answer for it if we're going to get past this. So when we get back from this break, you have thought about this a lot. I've teed it up for you. When we get back, I want to hear the solution you came up with at degreed.com when we get back on the speaking startups. I need to give you an important message right now. You need insurance for your startup. I know that you got a lot on your mind. You got a lot to think about hiring product market fit.

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depressing San Francisco. And my guest, David Blake from degree.com, a recent refugee, a recent statistic, if you will, of the people who once believed in San Francisco who have now left because of the pandemic, correct? David, your family made the choice to leave San Francisco at this time. We were neighbors only weeks prior. Our office was on Bryant Street and I lived in San Francisco 10 years, but I am part of the great COVID migration. How does it feel having relocated to such an amazing city, Salt Lake City, great place to be, Utah, amazing state? How does it feel in terms of leaving San Francisco, which was just such a hub of energy, economics, and it felt like a necessity? and now you're in Salt Lake City, is your company running better, the same or worse,

now that you've left? And you also talk about lifestyle. Yeah, lifestyle is definitely arbitraged and I'd say better. You know, you're able to be outdoors. We were having to shelter in place very seriously in San Francisco out here. There's just more trails right behind our house, open space. It's a little bit easier to get out and to still stay safe and keep others safe while doing so. In terms of the business,

We actually, my co-founder and I started the business in San Francisco, me in San Francisco, and he and Salt Lake City. So we grew from the very beginning, co-located like that. It was still early enough that, you know, early on it made our job harder with venture capitalists. They didn't like the fact that we were not together and we weren't in San Francisco. But, you know, probably circa, I don't know, probably circa 2015, 2016, 2016, you know, the tides began to turn. And most people started to say, you know, it was a great strategy. It was a smart move.

And, you know, we started getting phone calls from other VCs and companies asking, you know, what it's like to have be co-located in Salt Lake City and other sort of secondary. Why did it look so smart in the year of 2016, as opposed to 2010 when it might be a reason to not get funded? Yeah, I mean, just the, his cost of San Francisco kept rising and rising and rising, real estate and payroll. And the benefit of San Francisco was you could go down to Sand Hill Road or the San Hill Road VC's all opened offices or little satellites and cafes and workstaces in the city. The ability to visit 100 investors in one month, three a day, every day, and still only tap into maybe one or two percent of the investors here was just an amazing win. But at some point,

the salaries and the cost of living broke people, correct? I mean, I think, look, I'm an advocate for the magic of Silicon Valley. Like when I got out there, it was just amazing how generous people are with their time, how the ideas and sort of bump up against each other and people and opportunity. And that felt magical and I believe it is magical. The part that I think is, you know, hard to endure is the cost, the city, the pressure, the homelessness, the crime, you know, the schools, I have three kids. You know, we were in a great school, but navigating it in those waters is, uh, is really challenging.

Um, you know, so I think it's, it's kind of everything else that's put a lot of pressure, um, into the equation. What do you think happens post-pandemic and then we'll get into DeGreed? What do you think happens post-pandemic? Let's say a vaccine comes out in Q1. Uh, that seems actually likely. Uh, there'll be some number of vaccines available. Let's say, uh, people wear their masks and comply. And we get test and tracing up. And obviously high-speed testing is here. It's just not equally distributed yet.

So when it becomes equally distributed and, you know, walking into the movies might require you to show up 20 minutes early and take a little swab outside the movie there, as stupid as a sound, or going into a hotel, might require you to, if you want to stay at a hotel, to take a test on the way in, getting on a flight, obviously no brain are already happening in some parts of the world. Let's say we crush this and it's gone in Q1.

And then in Q2 we wake up and everybody's back to normal. Which is a, I think, the likely scenario, I'll be honest. I feel like we're on the cusp of doing that. Other places are getting back to to some level of normalcy. What do you think happens post-pandemic to San Francisco in the Bay Area and this whole remote work culture? Yeah, I mean, I think the, I would say people who are heard, you know, the city's always went. They always went. Over the long arc.

Humanity has always gathered. Density has always created opportunity. Density has created higher degrees of creativity. innovation, like density over the long arc always wins. And so I think what happened is probably healthy. Because of those collisions you mentioned earlier, that randomness and that density of talent and the collisions that occur, those two factors are just amazing. Yeah. But like, there's no reason that San Francisco has to be the only place where ideas can collide. And I think other cities will have greatly benefited by this sort of migration and will give them a new normal. And, you know, I would hope I think it's good

for all of us. I think it was really good for San Francisco to take some of that pressure out. You know, it was getting very high pressure to just be able to live and sort of maintain in the city. And it's taken some pressure off. I think San Francisco is still going to be an incredible place next year in five years and 10 years and 20 years. But I also hope and believe that we will be better by having other cities that are able to specialize and to, you know, have density in different themes and areas and topics. And I think that's good for everyone. I literally tweeted, hey, I think we're going to get to this great Renaissance where

San Francisco turns into the San Francisco I encountered in 1999 in 2002 when I first started coming here in my late 20s, early 30s, and was just a lot. fascinated by the crazy fun of it and the artistic nature of it. And if all this collapses, well, we could have $2,000 a month single one bedrooms. And then somebody said, by the way, that's what Austin is now, $2,000 for one bedroom. And I had this great laugh because that's an incredible insight of yours. I think that the pressure being taken off of San Francisco allows new people to come in. And it also sends a signal to the incompetent governance, the dysfunctional governance that allows, you know, a homeless, and I'm using air quotes here, a problem,

which is clearly a mental illness, primarily a mental, according to statistics and all the experts we've had on the program and everybody was talking about it. This is not an issue of homelessness in that there is no home. This is a matter of mental illness and drug addiction in the majority of cases. And I think this is going to make California then have to compete with Austin, Texas, Salt Lake City, and Utah for these same founders, correct? Like Salt Lake City is stoked that you're there. Yeah, and, you know, by many accounts, I'm not the only one. I mean, it's a great tech hub.

The community has done phenomenal things over the last start, 10, 12, 15 years, Silicon Slopes as an actual organization and community. Yes. You know, it's healthy and it's vibrant out here. Ryan from Qualtricks, he's trying to get me out there for Silicon Slopes. I'm coming out. I'm going to be the keynote. I'm going to do a fireset chat with them, I think.

So tell me, what is degree.com? Who are your customers? how do you make money, how do you charge for the product? What's the outcome you're selling with this software platform? Yeah, the genesis and the vision was tell me about your education. And when people go skip 10, 15, 20 years of their lives to answer with the university, it's a reflection of this need and opportunity in the market. And our vision was to create a model of lifelong learning where people could answer for

all of their real-time education and skills, all of their academics, all of their personal and formal learning, all of their professional training. And that's what we built. We started in circa 2012 sort of, you know, Fitbit and quantified self was was a big theme. So that that sort of theme of tracking and reflecting was a big one. You know, and, you know, where it's taken us is this currency, as we look in the rearview mirror, the currency that we transacted on was the college degree. But as we look forward, the needs of the workplace, the demand for half-life of skills is coming down. That means we have to learn more and more. The skills gap is growing. The war for skilled talent remains even amongst COVID unemployment. We're in an environment where there's a high

level of need for particular skills. And that's created a pressure and an opportunity. And the future of work, the currency will be skills. It increasingly is. We've seen it with Google. We've seen it from the- Google just made an announcement, right? They just made this announcement. Google announces 100,000 scholarships for online certificates in data analytics project management and U.X. Google basically is saying, hey, you know, what colleges are offering, we're just going to do ourselves, correct? They're looking to just find talented people and teach them what they need and, you know, college degree credential be damned. We're now the credentialer.

If you pass one of those certificates, they waive sort of any degree requirement. Okay. So essentially, your vision for degree has been embraced by Google, which is a pretty good sign that you're on to something. How does your product manifest itself? I saw Atlassian was a customer on your website. Atlassian pays you $5 per employee per month, $50 a year to have them take a course in U.X design or management, how does it work?

Because I saw there was some sort of dashboard for the HR department to sort of see people's skills going up and you're marketing on the website and everything's phenomenal, but it all kind of funnels you into a demo, which is how SaaS is supposed to work, right? You're supposed to get every, the goal is to get to a demo. I wanted you to unpack here for us on the show. How do you charge for it? And then what are they looking for as an outcome? Explain the actual detail of what you do and how people pay and how it's a business when we get

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for supporting independent media like this week and startups. Speaking of which, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, David Blake is here from DeGreed. And you can visit DeGreed.com. He's raised a ton of money and he, I'm not sure you're, I think you did, you're at a $580 million valuation according to my notes. You raised $32 million in your C3. I've never even heard of a C-3 from Al Ventures. They took the entire round. You've raised over 185 million. Congratulations.

My man Mark Cuban got in there. That's nice. How do you know Mark? Yeah, those numbers are getting a little bit dated, but Mark, yeah, Mark was a cold email. I told him we were jailbreaking the degree and that I knew he cared because he had been blogging about the future of education. On blog, Maverick.

He wrote back and said, tell me more. And so after a brief exchange, he was one of our earliest. Just shipped 100,000. investors. C-Ced his lawyer. It shipped 100K. That's what did with me. Check. Check. Yep. Yep. It's like literally he's like, okay, I'm in. And he just C-Cs his attorney. And it's just like, here, ship a Hyundai. And then the attorney was like, can we ship two-hundy? Then it was like, can we ship 300 into weblogs ink? famously. We sold the company and he made, I think, five. That's not far from my experience. Yep. Oh, did he up it? And he upped it after he got more conviction. He usually starts with that. It was 300. It was literally what it did with us. And then it came back and said, could we put 500 and I was like,

We don't know what to do with that much money. Sorry, just I pump the brakes. Let me spend the $300. But, well, yeah, he's a great investor. And then you get those late night emails of 600 words from him with, like, actual details about every aspect of your business. And you're like, he's up at 2 in the morning thinking about my business. Everything I've ever asked, he's responded on, he's delivered on every email he's

respond. That's how I learned to be. It's incredible how responsive he's always proven. That's how I, that was one of the things I stole from him. when I started becoming an angel investor was response time. And so what I do is I start at my, most people start their email like, okay, where's the last email? Because you want to be courteous.

Like, oh, it's been a day since I got back to me. I always start at the top, the person who came in one minute because I'm going to be late for the other person. So I must just start at the top. And I just respond to people so fast. And somebody was like, somebody told the story. I think it was Arlen Hamilton told the story. Shout out Arlen, your first million.

Great podcast. I've been on this pod three times. I think. She said she was like emailing with him and then she saw he was at the All-Star game or, you know, the Super Bowl or something on his phone responding to her because they cut to him. Great investor. So walk me through the actual business. I get the I concept. We've been going concept and wide and we're now sort of getting in this discussion in our third segment here. How do you price it? Yeah, price. So it's a SaaS business. 100% of the revenues are SaaS reoccurring.

we're unique for a SaaS business in that individuals own their data. And what that enables is part of our vision for lifelong learning. So even though it's an enterprise SaaS business model, when you leave, you get to take your profile and your data with you to your next employer. And what that's enabled, and we'll come back to the economics on it. But what that enables is we've been very disciplined. and all of our clients, we've kept them using the same standard of language for skills and skill measurement. So what that means is for the first time in the world, if you are at, if you're at HSBC or if

you're at Citibank or if you're at Bank of America and you leave and you go to a visa or a master card or you go to USAA, you go to Prudential or, you know, being a level four in international tax now means the same thing at all of those institutions. And people get to take their data and their profile and essentially their skills record, their skill profile with them. And anywhere that's using DeGreed, it holds universal meaning and universal context. And what's particularly brilliant about that, you gave the perspective of the individual and how amazing that is, hey, I'm going to this new company.

I send them my linked on DeGreed. if they do not have DeGreed, they say, what's DeGreed? And then it is making your product viral. So now they say, oh, maybe we should have DeGreed. And when they take that job there, I'm assuming they add that they now work at this new company. And now your sales department in the SaaS department now knows who to call to infect the new company with DeGreed, correct? Just like Salesforce sort of infected every company as they went along. But this is even more viral.

If you think about, you know, when we need to work with people, You know, where they've worked matters at their experience, you know, who they are, who they know, and what they know or what their skills are. All of those things do matter. And the resume in LinkedIn has historically really been about who do you know and what your experiences are. Yep. And, you know, really degreed by going in and serving enterprise and being the giving an organization transparency into what skills everyone inside their organization has, has now become the system of record. for some of the world's largest organizations. We're being used.

We're coming up on half of the Fortune 200. We're somewhere between a third and half of the world's largest organizations. Used to greed enterprise-wide, top to bottom, top of the organization, all the way down. And so for the first time ever, organizations are able to ask and answer the question, you know, what skills do we have? What skills do we need? And how do we, you know, get to where we need to go? And as simple as that sounds, CEOs couldn't do that, you know, two, three, four years ago.

And it is a real benefit when a young person or even an older person, but particularly young people come to an organization and you say to them, hey, we're going to give you $5,000 towards like night school. I remember that was like a big thing when we were coming up in the 90s. Like, will they pay for my master's or continuing education? They would, you know, different places had different stipends, $1,000, unlimited, whatever. In your case, this is a real benefit because, I mean, a benefit in terms of like health care, dental education, continuing education is a benefit. It should be considered as such by the employee, correct? Yeah. And one of the ways we've really reoriented the conversation is that corporate training was historically all about governance and compliance.

And so it never felt like you were investing in me, the person. It always felt like you were asking me to go learn something to cover. your ass. And, you know, we've, we've switched that paradigm. This is now lifelong. I get to take this record with me and I get to see all of the resources that the company is making available to me. And we've really reoriented it around your development as an employee rather than the company's sort of requisite, sort of compliance and governance and requisite needs. So it's really employee driven. Got it. How do you charge? You charge by course by employees of $5 a month per active user, like sort of like the Slack model where you only charge for active people, because I can see

that being a roadblock. You go into an organization with 10,000 people use the product. People don't want to pay $60 a year for $10,000. I want to pay $60 a year for those 100 people who used it. How do you charge? We charge per employee per year and we charge for everyone in the organization. How much? Yeah, tens of dollars per person per year. Okay. So I guess $60 a person a year. Does that mean if they have to use it? If they don't use it, do you still have to? have to pay, or is it only per active user? It's for all employees. Our clients pay for everyone to use it, whether or not they ever log in. We have very high degrees of activation and engagement. God. And that's, you know, some of our clients were seeing, you know, this whole refocusing on the

employee changes everything. Some of our clients, they were seeing around noncompliance learning. They were seeing less than 10% of the organization engage annually. And now a majority of our clients will see more than half of the organization engage in noncompliance learning monthly. And if you do that math, I mean, that's orders of magnitude. The HR department must be. We've been able to drive in terms of engagement. The HR and the learning, whatever, the development groups must be over the moon with this. what are the most popular courses and who creates the courses?

Yes. So we bring the ecosystem together. Articles, videos, books, podcast courses, MOOCs, e-learning, conferences, events. We are not the training provider and we do not develop the content. We are just bringing it all together so that it is organized in one place. You can search by topic. You can go for JavaScript and see what courses your organization have. that they've developed.

You can see all of the vendors, a plural site, a LinkedIn learning, a Udeme, you can see all of the courses that they've purchased and made available to you, as well as you can just see every course on JavaScript

out there full stop and see if there's one that is outside of your company's vendors that you would prefer to take. And so we just bring it all together in one place. So if the CEO comes in one day and she says, you know what, everybody in this goddamn organization needs to read, you know, good to great

or crossing the chasm, whatever it is, or Creativity Inc. Even better, Creativity, Inc. They could say, listen, there's a masterclass on Creativity Inc. and there's a book for Creativity Inc. I want to see exactly how many team members I can get to read this because I think Creativity Inc is essential. And oh, there's a podcast where Jay Cowell, on this week's two episodes, yeah, I'm talking about myself and the third person. It's a two-partter. she could then just say to the organization, I think this is important that people watch these podcasts, read the book, do the masterclass, and you could then check off, hey, they understand creativity in the organization.

That is true. And I'll tell you further, is just creating that transparency, being able to see inside an organization what your CEO is learning is really powerful. And, you know, they may or may not ever choose to go and tweet. I just finished this book and I really enjoyed it. But with DeGreed, inside the organization, I'm able to follow leaders. I'm able to follow my mentors, my manager. I'm able to see what they're learning.

People are able to see what I'm learning. And just creating that transparency is really powerful. Yeah, a CEO reads an article and logs it on DeGreed and all of a sudden, you know, everyone inside the organization will have read it a week later. I have a question that I need a candid answer on, which is who's on the clock for education. In other words, if I'm the boss and I say, you know, I would love to see people read Creativity Inc. But it's, you know, it's a six hour listen and a six hour read on average. Who pays for that continuing education? And what's the state of the law on that? Because when I

ask certain malcontents who were working at organizations I was affiliated with to read a book, I got some dipshit say like, hey, will you pay me over the weekend over time to read this book? I want to answer who's on the clock for education legally, morally, and practically when we get back on this week in startups. Hey, everybody, I want to tell you about a great new online community from our friend Sam, from the hustle, you know the newsletter and the conference. Well, he's got this incredible new service. It's called trends, t-R-E-N-D-S dot CO, trends.com. and it's a great community where they talk about being an entrepreneur and how you can sharpen your blade and be better at what you do. They did an amazing analysis recently about Kickstarter and unbundling it and how startups are

now using pre-sales and crowdfunding to fund their companies more than ever before because obviously, hey, it's not easy to get venture capital. And the pre-sales becomes this great way to incentivize people to invest in your company because you're showing demand for your product ahead of time. great analysis and you get access to a community of industry leaders in virtually every field. They do workshops and they have a network of other founders and investors who you can just like basically lead workshop ideas, you know, and be better at what you do. They have weekly live lectures with experts and they teach you things like growth strategies,

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Trends. com slash twist for your $1.4. two-week trial, you're going to lose there. Okay, thanks for supporting the show, Sam, and he was on a news roundtable recently. Just great entrepreneur. Go ahead and join Trends.com. Slash twist. All right, David Blake from degree.com is here. We got another winning guest. Well done, Nick, producer Nick, crushing it with this season of the next unicorns.

This is our second or third season, Nick, of next unicorns. This is season two, episode six. David Blake, again from degree.com, recently moved to Salt Lake City, doing the Silicon Slopes thing. When I try to get people to read books, I told you this crazy reaction I got from one person, which is not representative. I started a book club to try to get my team and I said it's mandatorially optional. It's kind of my joke.

Like, I really wish you would be there, but I can't force you to be there. And, you know, I would say, like, of my important people in my organizations, it's almost 100% come at 6pm on Mondays, once a month when I do book club at this week's startups. com slash slack. there's a book thing. The next book is, I love capitalism and the hot hand. And previously we did,

never split the difference. But who's on the clock for this? Because there's one person who asked me to pay them overtime, like, oh, it's just mind-blowing. But how does the law work? How do companies look at it?

And then, you know, how do you think it should work? Yeah. You and I should connect on book clubs next time. So I'm actually the founder of bookclub.com as well. I know. I saw that. Whoa,

that's potential. Let's make a startup. Let's make that into a startup. I'll back that. Yeah. All right. You literally own bookclub.com? Yeah, that's me.

Is it a platform or is it like a real business or is it just a hobby, a side hustle? No, it's a venture-back startup. Oh, okay. I missed it. Do you want to write a check on the podcast? I don't know if you've done that yet. I kind of do. What's the business model of bookclub.com?

Yeah. Is it just a SaaS? It's author-led book clubs, and it's a subscription business. Fascinate, because I did a, for Angel the book, I just created Angel University, of course. And the course is free. You used to give you $100 to charity. All proceeds go to charity. But, yeah, I like this idea of authors doing the book clubs because you get paid a certain

amount, but the course actually you can charge more for. And I think that was Masterclass's idea. And then other people are doing like these $500,000, $1,000. which is incredible, but what a great domain name. Well done. So back to the question. Who's on the clock for educational time? Legal answer. Legal answer first. If you are a salaried employee, then you can ask people to learn on their own time. If you're an hourly employee, then yes, the law states that if you require people to learn something that you have to pay them for it, which gets, complicates this in a lot of ways. Okay. So salaried, which is typically over 50 or

60 grand depending, I think, on the state, or is that a federal law? But I think it's, And I'm, yeah, I'll tell you because I think there's a big insight at the back end of this question. And the journey I've been on was, you know, increasingly we're responsible for our careers. If, you know, with lifelong learning becoming the mandate, you've just got to be learning all the time. And if you expect your employer to give that to you or to require it of you, you know, you're going to get left behind. You just, you've got to take ownership of your learning. And you've got to be a great lifelong learner to be competitive in today's market. But now I've spent years with this question and sort of watching the journey.

And here's what I'd say, you know, more recently where I've come out on, which is we've seen companies are giving, J.P. Morgan Chase committed $350 million to upscaling. Amazon committed $700 million to upskilling. PWC has a billion dollar commitment. Boeing has a billion dollar commitment. We've seen gigantic upskilling initiatives from corporations. And yet for all of these big commitments and programs, AT&T, did AT&T Workforce 2020, which was a gigantic initiative. And they gave zero time, which

practically is just silly because time is actually the bigger constraint and barrier in people's lives rather than money in terms of upskilling. Yeah. Money is the second, but time is the first. Yep. So why would you solve your second biggest constraint, be willing to spend hard cash, but not be willing to spend soft dollars in terms of giving people time if upscaling really matters. If it's a positive ROI activity, you should be willing to give, you know, soft dollars in the terms of time if you're willing to give hard dollars in terms of cash. And the other thing I'll say here is that... Wait, so when you say that, it's still not a perfect answer. So let's say my goal as the CEO of a company practically is to get my team to read six books a year.

Just six books. Should I be giving them six days off a year to read those books is what you're saying? Because it's important or should we split the difference or never split the difference, so to speak? I think there's a difference between like continuous learning, which I feel is more appropriate to keep that burden on employees. Got it. And then the difference is then upskilling or reskilling. If we as a company. Upskilling or reskilling.

Yeah, if we need. Define what those are because I don't know those terms. So reskilling is helping you get a new set of skills that can help you do a new job that is lateral in an organization or outside of the organization. Upskilling is giving you the skills to help you do a new and different job that is higher in the organization. Okay. So reskilling is your same job. You're not getting a pay raise. Lateral.

Lateral. So an example of that would be what? So you are a, you're a revenue operations analyst, and they're going to pay for you to go do Salesforce training so that you can go and be a sales analyst. Got it. There's a training and you went sideways. Got it. So that should occur on the company's clock.

That should. Right. I believe it should. Got it. Because, hey, you're not going to get a raise. You're not getting a raise from it is the way I actually. I read that. But even if you are getting a raise, and the difference is, you know, most of these programs don't. You know, when you think about tuition, you referenced earlier in your career, some some companies, some tuition assistants, you know, a lot of that is, hey, yeah, we'll make five grand available for you to go, and it's often college degrees, but we'll make five grand available for you to go and, you know, upskill or educate yourself, but you have to do it on your own time. Well, the problem with that is right now when, who is able to do. to participate in who isn't. And the people who can participate are those who have good internet at

home who aren't a caretaker or who have a lot of support. The people who can't participate are those who, when they get home, have bad internet, when they get home, have a second job. When they get home, don't have, you know, any help, you know, a single parent with no help in raising the kids or they're a caretaker of their alien parents. And as you look at that, you know, of course, it maps disproportionately to under-resourced populations. And so a lot of what's happening inside of organizations is they're upskilling and it's actually making their diversity and inclusion across their organization worse, not better. Okay, so hold on.

Let me unpack that. I'm trying to get more, I'm trying to help people upskill, which would result in them going to the next level in their career by the definition of upskill. However, if I ask them to do that on their own time, they might come from a population that disproportionately has less time or free time to devote towards that. Yeah. Historically or practically. We've got to be careful. We don't get canceled here.

But that's the reality of this is people who have a lot of support, people who have infrastructure, people who have skills, they're able to successfully take advantage of those opportunities. If you have a nanny, if you've got, yeah, if you got child. care if you got a nanny, if you can afford that, hey, upskilling's easy because somebody's watching your kids. But if you got to watch your kids, how are you going to concentrate on this course? It's not possible. So it works against diversity and inclusion. It works against it.

So my position on this has been now moved slightly. I'll be honest. Because I always, I think I kind of had a jerk approach to it. I'll be honest, which is like, what's wrong with you people? Like, don't you want to learn more? Like, you know, read a book. Let's go. but you're right having had the experience during the pandemic I think it's increased my empathy

of just exactly how hard it is to concentrate when you have three kids running around like you probably do right now you're at home I take it or do you are you allowed to go to the office yeah so you're home and at any point in time somebody could just come barreling in margin barge in and just literally yeah be careful I think it's actually important insight important discussion for us to have which is if we want people if we really want a more just society, more diverse society, and more diverse companies, more just companies. Yeah, we're going to have to meet people where they are, right? And that's just the bottom line. And I love the fact that you're tracking the stuff. And that's why actually I made our book club

one hour. And I told my team explicitly, like, you don't have to have read the book to come to the book club. Because there's 60 people there who are fans of the pod typically. And they'd say what they learn from the book. So sitting there and hearing other people talk about a book and what they learn from it. It's great learning. Yeah, it is. Some of the best. It's some of the best because it's literally like what did you take away from your six hours with, you know, Chris Voss has never split to different shadow.

Chris Voss. Get him on the pod. Nick, what's going on here? It's been on every podcast, but this one. Have you read that one? That's a good book. I haven't not yet. It's pretty good.

What did you read in the last year? Any good books that you, or any business books or autobiographies are particularly inspiring to you in your career and or recent? Yeah, I mean, I just finished Bob Iger. Oh, ride of a lifetime. Fantastic. Just really, chapter after chapter. I mean, it's like every chapter could have made a career. And he just, you know, and he stringed six of them together and to just appreciate sort of, you know, what he accomplished.

And, I mean, with Chad's passing Black Panther, I mean, I remember Bob Iger in the book just talking about as an organization, sort of being presented the case that a black superhero was not. going to perform well and making the decision and the conviction to do it all the same. And, you know, it is the most like tweet, I think, you know, nearly universally admired and respected one of just the great imprints of sort of, you know, in culture and in, you know, the conversation inside the last, you know, five, ten years. And, you know, it's really fun reading, reading sort of that moment and leadership. Was there something you took away from Bob Buggers right of left on? Bob Biger hasn't been on the pod yet, but they were open invite. if anybody knows him, I want to zoom in with him.

Incredible book. We did that in our book club, actually. What was your takeaway from his experience being an entrepreneur who starts things versus Bob Iger, who is entrepreneurial inside of other people's companies? Yeah, I mean, entrepreneurship often feels like, you know, you're cheating somehow. I mean, it's so hard starting these companies and to be surrounded by the, the safety net and infrastructure and resources of big companies. I mean, just to me, it never feels the same. And yet, you know, leading Disney is different than building

something from the ground up. And it was an experience that that equipped him and prepared him for the challenges of leading, you know, a multinational global organization with properties across a lot of, you know, not just media, but I mean, running cruise ships and in entertainment. And, you know, it prepared him well. And I think, you know, all of us is. we look at our careers should be clear in what we're trying to accomplish, you know, because the pathway that will most successfully lead you there is different for every one of us. Yeah, I always had the same thing with you. Like, there's no comparison between starting and working, you know, and then you read Bob

Iger's book and you realize, well, he had to navigate all that politics and all of the strategy that was being pushed on him. I think the big revelation for me was that the bigger the strategy department under Michael Eisner got, the more they were suffocating the units and that the streamlining of that and that what got you here does not get you there. Like Michael Eisner was dead set against the Pixar acquisition. And, you know, Iger just saw clearly that that was just absolutely had to occur. And he had the ability to talk to Steve Jobs and he learned some kind of.

I don't know if it's, I get a great sense of humility from him, which I think works when you're dealing with someone like Steve Jobs. When you come in, you know, and say, you know, like Steve Jobs would, if you're battling with him like Bill Gates did, it's going to be down to, you know, they're going to, those are gladiators, right? Whereas, you know, when he came into Steve Jobs, he was like, I think we should talk, but, you know, I'd love to open that dialogue with you if that's possible. And, you know, he's like on pins and needles waiting to see Steve Jobs' draggers. Yeah, let's talk right now. Like tonight, right now.

And then like in the driveway talking to Steve Jobs about trying to close a deal. Where if it had been Michael Eisner, like that paradigm just would not have worked. Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs equals no deal. But Bob Heiger. He saw it is, you know, he was in it. He was becoming the steward of a legacy. And I think it was that, you know, sort of sensibility that that resonated with. you know, with Marvel, with Pixar, with, you know, with all of it.

Yeah. When he talks about the Marvel deal, too, and getting, who's that guy Kevin? Figey. Kevin Figey getting him on board and then talking with George Lucas and getting him on board. It feels to me like Bob Eiger was the only executive who could have done that. Like, just that ability to talk with that, those, that level of personality. Yeah. And be able to close a deal with them and listen to them.

of empathy. Just something that the other side of the table doesn't have, right? Like, what made Steve Jobs and George Lucas, Steve Jobs and George Lucas is not what made Bob Agar, Bob Iger, right? It's almost like this yin-yang kind of thing. It's amazing. Infinite Games is what I'm reading next? And what is Infinite Game? What is Infinite Game? It's Simon Cynick's latest title. Oh, right. Yeah. What did he do before that? He did start with why. Yes. Yeah, smart. Yeah. And, you know, I heard him give a little recap of it.

I'm excited to read it. But as I understand it, you know, the U.S. Revolutionary War was, we perceived it to be a infinite game. If you can outlast, you win the Vietnam War. It was, you know, they were able to outlast, so they won. If you see it as a net zero-sum game, then it's a finite game. You play differently. if it's an infinite game, if it's an infinite timeline, you play differently to win. Interesting.

That's kind of the premise of the book as I understand it, but I'm just getting started. That is interesting. I was told very early that like not giving up was the way to win. Like if you just stick around, you win. In evidently, like just stay in the game, keep podcasting, keep writing. In an infinite game, you do. In an infinite game, that is true. Right.

If it's not one resource you're going after, if you're not fighting over, a specific island that there's one of that is the name of game. What other books were like super influential for you and your career? I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, we were just as BookClub.com talking about the books that changed our lives. The book that changed my life is not a particularly well-known title or I don't even recall if it's an especially well-written book, but it's called successful intelligence. And to bring this all full circle, I mean, to reveal a little bit of.

about myself, but I came through high school, top of my class, sat for the ACT, found the experience to be just an absurdity, and started diving in to try and understand why do we do things this way. And it was the first time I seriously in my life just sort of asked why, why, why, and came away with the realization, I had made it all the way through high school, a great student, but had failed to become a good learner and didn't like that I was a product of this system. it turned me into, it turned me into a good test taker. It was essentially what it turned me into, but I had no curiosity. I had no passion for learning. And I realized that early enough to commit myself to being a great learner. And one of the first books that I pulled off of the shelf in sort of that

journey was this book, Successful Intelligence. And its premise is simple. It's sort of in the EQ sort of realm, but it essentially just says that academic success does not actually correlate especially well with many successful life outcomes. Happiness being one of them that I've noticed. Contentness. It's almost like, do you think your obsession or just proficiency in being a test taker led to a disappointment that because you were so good at test taking that your life experience didn't match what the test score was?

Oh, yeah, because, I mean, tests are so, I mean, they're structured, they're scaffolded. you know, it's, it's, uh, convergent thinking. And life is like almost always the exact inverse of all those things. So I mean, in so many ways we do ourselves a disservice by by educating and schooling, you know, those, those attributes out of us, um, out of ourselves and out of our, our youth. And, and those were certainly educated out of me. And Sir Ken Robinson, who recently passed his schools kill creativity, you know, was very much my lived experience. But that book was the first book that, you know, as obvious as it sounds now, it was kind of the first thing I ever picked up that that gave me permission to question this narrative and this worldview

that I had to get the A to get into the best college, to get the best job, to have the best career, you know, and that pressure you feel as a young student, you know, trying to, trying to win at that game. It was the first thing that sort of allowed me to question the game at large and to see it for sort of the absurdity that I believe in many ways it to be. It's a road to nowhere. Let's be honest. You get on that track and so many of the kids on that track here in San Francisco and the Bay Area are so unhappy that there's kind of a press block out of this fact that you

can look up on Cora, but because there's a concept of, and I think we can talk about it here since this isn't watched by students, but there's a concept of induced suicide, which is you know, somebody, if you report on a suicide, you might have other people who have suicidal ideation because of it. And there was a rash in one neighborhood in the Bay Area of kids who were under a lot of pressure to kind of be on this track, which was based upon getting into certain schools. I'll just leave it all nameless. And they had an induced suicide problem where they had to do a press blackout and say, listen, we're not going to talk about these students, but I just thought to myself, like, I don't want my kids on this track. And I'm now in the Bay area. We're getting off this track of like the goal is to get into an Ivy League school. to do perfect on SATs or whatever the tests are or to do AP courses, like, forget all that. I just want to have three children who are great human beings who love learning and who are

content, right? Like, and creative and have a joy for life. Like, you can really push these kids to a level. Like, how do you, how do, well, we'll end on this. What, how has your parenting been informed by your experience, both as a, you know, driven test taker and now, you know, running degree.com. How has it informed your parenting? And what's your philosophy of parenting your own kids in terms of education specifically?

Yeah, I mean, I've re-engineered a lot of my life lately around this question. My oldest is now 12. She's sort of, my youngest is seven. My oldest is halfway done with her sort of primary and secondary education. And I didn't want to, my whole career has been spent on the future of education. I travel the world. I've seen the world over some of the most innovative models and I didn't want to blink and have my own kids

grown up and to sort of have been the cobbler's children who have no shoes. And so for my own kids, I had to really seriously start to ask how am I going to approach this with my kids? And I'll tell you there's a lot of things. But the one thing, the biggest thing is we are building an apprenticeship for our kids. And we're doing so through bookclub.com. they are apprentices helping to build and launch Book Club Jr. I think project-based learning gets you, it contextualizes learning in the real world,

but I think an apprenticeship goes even further because projects are essentially made up. You know, if you build a volcano for your science project, you know, that helps the contextualize learning. When the science project is done, you throw away that baking soda volcano. know, it's still sort of a false reality. And the very best thing you can do is to drive and contextualize learning in your children's real interests and real lives and help them begin to develop those in the real world. And that's the biggest takeaway I have for my own kids and our approach to it. So you literally have your kids building Book Club Jr.

and explaining to them how entrepreneurship and organizations and products are developed as an apprenticeship. And it's a cornucopia. It just gives and gives and gives and gives. I mean, it's helping, it gives the context for them to learn interviewing and emailing and communications and outreach and networking and video production and editing and comms and web development and front end AB testing.

And I mean, it just, you know, and that's the beauty of anchoring things. in a real world task is that the building never stops and it gives kind of this breadth. You know, each of my kids have different interests. They have different attributes and skills. Now you're going to have three different startups.

What of one of them likes baking and the other one likes fashion? You're going to have three companies that you're funded inside your house. This could get quite expensive or you might save money when compared to college and you might actually get a return on these investments. They might build a billion dollar startup. You're not far off from what my house looks like. It's startups in school all mashed into one. See, this is, I think, brilliant.

You know, I started a micro school just literally last, we're taping this in week two of the micro school that I've started because we're not going back to school this year. I'm convinced. I don't care what anybody says. I think the teachers unions and there's going to tragically just law big numbers is going to be some teachers who are going to die or students who are going to transfer, you know, coronavirus and it's just going to create this panic again. And I think it's just an opportunity during this year and this year of school to

just try other options. And I'm actually been talking to my 10-year-old. It's interesting about she's really into baking. She's been watching these, like, candy making television, reality television shows, and she's also really into fashion. And then she watches me invest in businesses. I said, I never want to be an angel investor. And I said, yeah, you don't have to be, but, you know, you may want to start a business.

I want to start a candy store. And I was like, okay, that's a business. Yeah, I could be an angel investor in a candy store. Let's talk more about that. And so I've actually been thinking about that as well. And this concept of apprenticeship, like, where is apprenticeship on our edge? It doesn't even exist anywhere in the spectrum. We try to invest in two or three startups in this space, and we haven't seen anybody nail it yet.

There should be an apprenticeship startup where you pay to go work like with an angel investor or a CEO of a company or whatever and just, you know, sit with them. or scholarships or whatever, but man, that would be so much better, wouldn't it? Yeah. What makes it so hard is, you know, no one stakeholder has historically had the right mix of incentives to pull a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 16-year-old seriously into their business. And it's one of the advantages, you know, that was available to me as an entrepreneur was, I mean, I literally built this business so that I could build an apprenticeship

that involved mine and other youth in it. And that's a real privilege and a real skill set. Yeah. But most people just don't have that right mix of incentives because everyone is trying to do it from the outside in, try and go and create a program and then knock on the door of a business and say, hey, will you engage with these students? Take them as an apprentice.

You know, it'll be good for them. It might be good for you. And it's just hard. It's hard to slow your business down or to reorient. Even if you can find an ROI. in there, you know, just no one has has holistically had the incentives. But by creating the business to build, be built to create apprentices, we've been able to do it from the ground up and hope that it provides an incredible experience while building an incredible business. And I firmly

believe, you know, at its best, we do both. Awesome. Hey, listen, David, it's great to know you. Great to have you on the pod. I feel like this season, I'm just getting so many great founders who I got potential friendships I could make. I can't wait to visit you in Salt Lake City. I'm committed to coming to Silicon Slopes and maybe we can get a couple of runs in or share a meal or something when I get there. Congratulations on the success. I know you're hiring right now. If you want to get a job at degree.com, I'm assuming jobs.

Degrade.com or careers, you're hiring. Backslash careers. Hiring like crazy. Remote work okay. Work from remote work. Yes. Yes. Awesome.

All right. Stay safe, David. And thanks for being so candid and interesting on the pod. If you would like to suggest a guest for the pod and you work at a PR firm, don't. We don't accept any pitches. If you're a fan of the pod and there's somebody who you think should be on the pod, you just go on Twitter and you say, hey, at TWA startups would love, or hey, at name a founder, would love to hear you on at TWA startups.

That is the only group of people we listen to is the fans and the super fans of the show. Please, if you're from a PR firm, don't email us a pitch on your client. It reduces your chances of getting your client on the show. The only way to get on the show is that you're doing interesting stuff in the world and then we go find you or the fans tell us about they found a product or service they love. That's it. You cannot get here through a PR firm. Do not hire a PR firm. I know there are some PR firms out there who say they've booked guests on this podcast.

They have not. So if you get contacted by a PR firm and they say, I can get you on. this week in service, I'm assuring you, we literally make a list of all the PR firms. And if they send somebody, we specifically say, that person can't be on the podcast for at least a year. We basically reset it. We don't want PR pitches. We want grassroots, the fans of the show, telling us who they want to have on. So I just, I'm a little perturbed, as you can tell, that PR people are trying to sell people, that they can get somebody on the show. Literally is a ban on PR people. Every time a PR person emails me, I hit shift explanation point, and I ban Edelmanpr.

whatever the name of the PR firm is, from ever being able to email me again on my personal account because I don't want that noise. And if you're out there telling people, you can get people on the show, and I find out about it. Ban for life, period, end of story. All right, that's it.

That's my rant. Thanks, Dave, me on the show. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.