This Week in Startups - E1119: Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett is creating a marketplace for early childhood education & microschools, giving teachers greater access to entrepreneurship & iterating in education

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

Check out Wonderschool: https://wonderschool.com FOLLOW Chris: https://twitter.com/8ennett FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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to a lot of interest, excitement, and hand-wringing over education and school. And people having to suddenly educate their children over Zoom, which doesn't work. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think it works. And when I said, listen, I think the pandemic's going to go on for a year or two. I am going to take my children's education into my own hands, and I'm going to hire a teacher. And I just tweeted because I thought, hey, you know, 20, 20, 21, I don't buy that people are going back to school. I know some people have started.

I know some people are doing testing. I think it's only a matter of time before a teacher, tragically, just law of big numbers, not only contracts coronavirus while the school year is going on, whether they contract that school or not, but some number of teachers statistically will die from COVID because it's impacting a certain number of Americans. Maybe it will wind up being, you know, a tenth of all. a tenth of one percent, ten basis points of all Americans will die from COVID. Perhaps that's the eventual number, 300, 400, 500,000 Americans. But there has to be a teacher in that group,

statistically, and then all teachers are going, and all teachers unions will say, schools off. That's what I believe will happen. I hope I'm wrong. But anyway, I tweeted, somewhat, you know, simply, I'm looking for the best fifth grade teacher I can find. If you help me find that teacher, I'll give you a $2,000 Uber Eats card. You know, kind of stuff does work when you do that. And I wound up on TMZ. Oh, wow. Daily Mail and San Francisco Chronicle as a rich guy who was stealing a teacher from the public school system, even though we were committed to hiring a teacher who was not currently employed, which was in the tweet storm, but people don't want to read that. But one thing that happened that was interesting is about 100 people said,

do you know, Chris Bennett from WonderSchool.com? Because he is doing that exact thing. And I said, Yeah, I've heard of Wonderschool.com. Let's get Chris Bennett on the podcast. So here he is, Chris Bennett, the CEO and co-founder of Wonderschool.com. Welcome to the pod. Thank you, Jason. Super excited to be here. So starting out, what is Wonderschool.com?

And then what do you think is the outcome of the 2020-21 school year in terms of kids going back to school or people forming pods? So in its simplest form, wonder school is a network of child care programs. When we started out, we started primarily in-home. So we worked with folks who were operating in-home programs. And the idea came to me because I went to an in-home program as a kid for after-school care. And my sister went to an in-home program for preschool. And I've lived in the Bay Area for going on 11 years now. And I keep hearing from friends,

wealthy, not wealthy, everyone has issues finding childcare. And I thought, how strange, this doesn't make any sense where I'm from. Child care really isn't an issue in Miami. I'm from the suburbs of Miami. And I'm like, why aren't there more of these in-home programs? And so I started touring some of the programs and visiting some of them in the Bay Area and a lot of them from a quality standpoint just weren't really great. And I kept meeting all these incredible educators who didn't really have the

business acumen to be able to manage a child care business. And so we're like, hey, why don't we take some of the ideas that are floating around Silicon Valley at the time, Airbnb ideas, Uber ideas, sharing economy ideas, and apply it to childcare. And we came up with this idea for Wonder School. And, you know, fast forward, we have programs all over the country where we know we've raised venture funding. and this pandemic hits and where, you know,

people are like, well, you know, are you only operating for children between the ages of zero and five? And which is where we've always like sort of played. Zero and five, which would be nursery school? It's a daycare and preschool. Daycare and preschool, got it. So before like the K to 12 system

that we're all familiar with kindergarten, we all go through. And this is a super important time because if you get exposed to learning and a passion for learning, whether it's Montessori or Reggio during this period of time, that can set you up on all the statistics show for greater success in life, especially when you get to kindergarten, the people who've been to pre-k or done two or three years before that, they do better, correct? They're 100%.

Yeah. Like massively better. Like, I'm one of 31 first cousins. My family, all of my parents, my parents are immigrants from Honduras. I grew up in this really large Honduran community in Miami. I went to one of the best preschools in Miami. So how many siblings do your, did your mom or dad have? My mom has three.

My dad has six. Okay. And then, and those are first cousins. If we goes like second and third cousins, it's like a high school. Well, we had six growing up. So my mom had two sisters and three brothers. So it's six. And I think on average they all had a couple of kids each or five of them had a couple

of kids each. So I think we wound up in the 18 or 19. But yeah, you guys really went for it. Yeah, totally, totally. It's just very common in our culture. So nine siblings across your two parents. Yeah. So that means on average, three kids each, which was normal at that time.

Totally. Now it's not the case. Totally. Well, a lot of, well, it also depends on where you're, where you have your children in Honduras, it's very common to have more children than it is in the United States. So all of my aunts who started having children, aunts and uncles, that started having children in the U.S., they're on the one to two range. But my aunts and uncles in Honduras, you know, six and seven. Still getting it done. Six and seven, wow. Can you imagine?

It's fun. It's super fun. Do you have kids? No, I don't. No kids yet. Okay. So what is the difference? And let's just get some definitions out of the way here. And And we'll get to that second question of what's happening this year in the pandemic. What is the difference between homeschooling and a micro school? Because I said I'm starting a micro school. I had my own idea. And there's homeschooling. There are, I guess, nursery schools.

I think we all know what nursery schools are. But what's the difference between a micro school pod nursery school and, you know, private school, homeschooling? Okay. So we set the table here. For each name, I'll tell you, um, the definition we use at Wonder School. So, okay, microschool is K and up.

So kindergarten and up. Typically, the age is five and six and up. And it's a, it can be a replacement for your traditional, you know, school system. Got it. And traditional private or public school, 20 and 30 people in the classroom. We all went to. Everyone went here. How is that different than homeschooling?

So, and so the other thing about a micro-center, a micro-school is you can think of a micro-school as a homeschool resource center. That's actually the best way, you know, someone explained it to me. So it can be a place where multiple homeschool children come together and they get access to, you know, a facilitator, a guide, a teacher. So it's the combination of what would normally be a three or four homeschool kids. Exactly. Exactly. And a homeschool child is someone who is not going through the traditional K to 12 system and is learning from home. And they can be doing that by themselves or they can do that within a micro school environment. Is that helpful, Jason?

I think so. I think that totally makes sense. And then homeschooling was considered kind of a fringe weird thing. Yeah, now the whole world is doing it. standard, but now micro school, the whole world has to homeschool. Exactly. But micro schools are a somewhat new phenomenon. When we get back from this break, I want to get an idea to that first question, the second question I had, which we didn't get to, but we'll get to after the break, which is, what is the footprint now of microschools during this pandemic?

How many people are getting together in pods? And then do you anticipate the pandemic, the post-pandemic world resulting in microschools and pods becoming a sustainable trend? here in the United States when we get back on this week in startups. Hey, everybody, you know Dell has been sponsoring this week in startups, and they've been a tremendous supporter of me for many years. And I have been a tremendous supporter of Dell's. And we're very lucky today to have Mobile Aji.

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everybody, that's correct. We are talking about micro-schools, homeschooling, and education with Chris Bennett, who does WonderSchool.com, which started as a marketplace where you can do a search right now. You can go to WonderSchool right now and search and find a nursery school for kids age two to five to join. And they do the back end and the infrastructure for an educator who maybe doesn't have the business acumen, but does have the ability to educate and, uh, take care of children, and you provide all that infrastructure for them, right? That's right. Got it.

Now, when we talk about microschools and these pods, do you have any idea how many microschools are out there right now? And what do you think the longevity of them is? Yeah, so it's really hard to get any data around microschools and pods. The number I was operating with pre-COVID was in the tens of thousands across the United States. And the way we think of a microschool, the difference between a micro school and a pod is I think of a pod is, I call it parent-led, where parents come together and they recruit a teacher, and then a micro-school tends to be teacher-led, where a teacher decides to start their

own organization, and they go and recruit the parents. And the rise of pods is, you know, it's been, it's not even exponential, it's astronomical, astronomical. There's got to be millions of Pots. Yeah, yeah. Because there's, I think we typically have the 320 million Americans, like 75 million are under the age of 18. So we have a pool of something in the range of 70 million people for pods. And everybody is educating from home. So if 10% or 5% were in pods, that would be 3 million pods. If you had four people per pod, that would be something in the neighborhood of a million pods. Pods, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they, they've popped up overnight. And,

And it really happened when you sent out your tweet essentially, when all of the parents realized that, hey, this COVID thing's going to stick around for a while, we need to come up with a plan to make sure our children are getting access to education because time is of the essence for them. And it's been pretty phenomenal to see the rise of them. When you saw my tweet, I'm assuming you saw it and you saw the reaction to it or some of the negative class kind of reaction to it, what did I get wrong in my tweet, if anything? and why are people so triggered by the concept of a micro-school? Because it does seem people are freaked out, and education is a charged subject. Let's be honest here. And previously it was with private versus public school or vouchers or charter schools.

All of this was very triggering or people are very emotional about it. But this micro-school thing seemed to hit a note that was very raw for people. What do you perceive that to be about? And I'm still learning a lot about this myself on a daily basis, but I think at the core, it's fear-induced. There's fear that wealthy individuals, white individuals are going to, you know, monopolize the best teachers in America and set our education system back. I think that that's that's my understanding. Interesting. Talking to parents, talking to individuals.

Yeah, that seems to be what I'm seeing. Interesting. You know, as I anticipated that, just in terms of hiring, my goal was not to steal a public school teacher and, you know, whatever. But I did want to get the best teacher I could find. Of course. And I said, I'll just, there's so many teachers available. So this premise that your rich people are going to steal the best teachers would be valid if there was a finite number of teachers available. But the truth is, there are, correct me if I'm wrong, tons of teachers looking for work, tons of retired teachers who might want to come out of retirement.

And tons of people who could be teachers who aren't traditionally teachers, correct? That's the premise of Wonder School, substitute teachers as well. Yeah. We believe, and the way we thought about it with early childhood education, there's all of these individuals who may not have the credentials. You know, the average preschool teacher makes $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year. Some organizations, some governments want these teachers to have master's degrees. It doesn't make any...

For a $30,000 a year job, you need a master's degree. It doesn't make any sense to go. get a master's degree to be a priest. I mean, a master's degree would put you 50, 100 in the hole. Yeah, exactly. And so there's all these individuals who love early childhood education, who recognize that if they went through the traditional

system, it wouldn't serve them. And that was the premise of wonder school. Hey, there's all of these individuals who would be great teachers who can earn a substantial substantially more than your average preschool teacher with parents paying the market rate in the

communities they live in. And that's sort of was the premise behind the idea. And let's walk through the economics here because this is a thing that I found absolutely inspiring about the idea of microschools, which is, I obviously did a quick survey of salaries. And it turns out elementary school teachers, as you well know, get paid 40 to 60K a year in the United States. Am I correct in that number? Yeah.

depending on the city. Yep, exactly right. And there might be outliers of incredible teachers in public school systems with five or ten years of experience that might be in the 70 or 80K. Is that right? Yep, that's right. And private schools pay less than public schools. That's correct as well. That's in line with what I've learned as well, yes.

Yeah, so this was all fascinating to me. And then I found out that public school spend $10,000 to $25,000 a year based on the region. Obviously, different regions have different costs of living and different pay scales. But call it 15, 20K a year is what public school spent to educate a kid. And they're spending 50 or 60 on the salary. So basically, four kids in the class are paying for the teacher. Yeah. The other 16 to 26 kids are paying for something else.

What are those, where is that other money going? Well, in child care, it's typically real estate and administration. Okay. And so, again, the benefit of pods, the benefit of microschools, the benefit of in-home childcare is the real estate piece is covered, right? It's someone's home. And the administrator is the teacher. And so you can, you essentially are giving the administrative overhead directly to the

teacher. Right. And the teacher is capable of. administering and looking up online in today's world curriculum. So this idea that you needed to have all these layers and layers of management and administration in a school is outdated, isn't it? Well, this is going to be really triggering. I'm going to get the school unions are going to come down.

I mean, like a bunch of bricks here, but they're definitely overstaffed when it comes to administration, I would think. That's where I sort of, you know, raise my hands and say, hey, I've been in child care for my career the past four years focusing on this. The K to 12 system seems very complex. The more and more I learn about it. So I definitely don't want to get into making any statements or I'm still learning about it. But I do believe, I do believe, because we're seeing this on our platform,

that microschools can be very, very beneficial for the provider, for the community, for the children that are enrolled in the program. And it's not something we should sort of turn a blind eye to. I think that this is an opportunity for us to invest in not only with our own private dollars, but with our public dollars as well. And so I think this is, interesting. So I think this is something that, this is something that I, you know, a belief that I have is this is something our school districts should be thinking about. You know, how do we learn more about these micro-schools to figure out ways to make this an alternative or an option for parents. The back channel I got after my tweet was that the school unions, I'm sorry,

teachers' unions, were very upset at what I had said, that they had coordinated perhaps some of the response to my tweet, since I am an influencer on Twitter with a couple hundred a thousand followers. So people would say, maybe he's going to inspire people to do the same. But what you're saying is you believe that this is something that maybe even the public

school system and government should embrace. I'm curious when we get back from this quick break, what role that teachers unions have in all of this? And are they opposed to or in favor of this potential change when we get back on this weekend startups? Ah, yes, Clavio, if growing an e-commerce business is your focus, you need a platform focused on growth,

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child because you came from this week in startups. Again, K-L-A-V-I-O-O-com-slash-T-T-S-T-T-E-O. K-L-A-V-I-O dot-com slash twist. Thank you, Clavio for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Chris Bennett is with us. Follow him on Twitter, B-E-N-N-E-T. Is that right?

Or are you eight in it? Eight. Oh, I just saw that. Yeah. So anyway, it's not Bennett. Bennett, if you're a place to be with an eight, like in hacker speak. That's great. So 8E and N-E-T.

Fantastic. Have you run into the teachers' unions? And when you say you think public dollars should go towards this, is that not blasphemy in the teachers, unions and public school system? Well, I haven't run into the teachers' unions. I've primarily spent my time trying to build relationships and understand how superintendents and school boards think. And what I've primarily found was that this is like a novel idea to them. This is, it's just so, it just came out of, you know, left field. It's when I bring it up,

I'm operating under the assumption that this is something they've researched and if they thought about, but that's, it isn't really. That's crazy. Yeah, that's, I think that's a really important thing to note. It's not on their radar. Wow. And then. So they're completely not even thinking about new models of education or potentials. They're so stuck in the concept that has been at work, the factory farming as I think cynical people look at the public school system, the factory farming system, I'm not saying I think that, but there are many critics who call it factory farming for education, 30 kids looking at the sage on the stage, that model, they're not even thinking about alternatives

to it. Well, it's so weird. The interesting thing is they're not thinking about it, from an in-home perspective. But what you're seeing school districts do, which is innovative, but it sort of defeats the purpose, they're creating microschools in commercial spaces almost. So like the Boys and Girls Club, or they're partnering with like an after-school care company to do it.

But that still goes against the idea of why we don't want children in the school. in the first place because of the ease of which COVID could spread in these environments. But the idea of doing it in home is a really new idea. But what I found is something that they're really excited about. And the more they learn about it, the more there's interest. Do you believe that Americans who pay taxes should be able to get a voucher for their contribution or whatever their pro rata is of it or some amount. And instead of the public school system deploying 15K per student, they could get that,

I don't know, 10K of it or something or 15K of it. Maybe it would be a percentage or it could be the whole thing. But let's just call it 7,500. Half of what the public school system is, they could get half of that back and deploy it in a micro school that they were starting. Do you believe that's how the system should work? I definitely think it's something we should explore. and based on

from what I understand that there's there can be pretty big downsides to that again sort of what would the downside be America's public schools

are segregated and there's a lot of there's data that suggests that integration both from a racial standpoint from a socioeconomic standpoint

benefits everybody it benefits our entire It benefits all of society. Yes. But not only does it benefit society, it benefits the children, the individual children, in the classroom as well. They become more tolerant. They get to meet people who are not like them.

Whereas if you were homeschooled or if you were micro-schooled, you would have been with some number of your 31 cousins. Exactly. I mean, you guys would have three microschools going. And, you know, my cousins didn't end up where I ended up. And I do attribute a lot of my success to integration, to the ability to interact with people from different races and different backgrounds. And these are people I'm still friends with today who often tell me that they benefited

from it as well. And so I think that there's things that I don't know about that we need to investigate. But I don't. But you know, I'm a startup founder. Like, test and iterate, right? And then... Yeah, God forbid you say that in anything that has to do with public policy or education or elder. How dare you want to run a test to make school better?

What's also interesting about the government, you know, we're starting to build relationships with different governments. Governments are very open to piloting things to learn where to invest. You know, I understand the government gets a lot of a bad rap. They are willing to pilot. That's interesting. 100%. 100%. And so I think that we need to be piloting what microschools look like in our school districts.

Absolutely. Why not run an experiment where you say, hey, of our, in our school district, we're going to allow up to 10% of parents to run microschools for the next two, for the next 10 years. And we're going to assess how those students do versus the internal ones. If you'd like to apply for this program, go here. And we'll give you your 15K to go do it. And then you can actually track it. And let's check in every year and see if we want to double down or not. You know, and I think that these are these are conversations we should be having.

Because when these opportunities present themselves, it could be a great thing for our children. It could be a great thing for our communities. But we shouldn't completely turn a blind eye because of fear. That is the weird part is like people get locked into this position that public education needs to be a certain way. Well, if our results are bad, which they are, public education is not doing well in the United States. For some. For some. But I think overall, in a global perspective, we're paying more than most countries per student in getting less results.

So you have to ask yourself, well, if we're spending this much money and getting bad results, it would indicate that you might want to run some experiments and try some different things to increase the performance. and the way we're seemed to be locked in this dialogue is you're either like a classist or a racist if you want to try something different. And that to me is the major problem here. And I did experience the blowback personally when I talked about the microschool, which was you're a racist. And I was like, I have a mixed race family. I mean, my wife is 100% Korean.

My kids are half. They're mixed race. I know that Asians don't count as a minority, even though they are. even though they're treated poorly and people don't like to think of them like that. I am in a mixed-race family. We have faced racism because of how Asians are treated. Maybe not to the extent brown and black people are. But man, it was just very weird, systematic, like, attack on me for it.

And I don't care, but I did find it interesting and wanted to be aware of where those people were coming from. The results of smaller class sizes are undeniable, however. Undeniable. Correct. Yes. Undeniable. So when we look at micro schools, it's an obvious way if you get rid of overhead and you have efficiency, which is how we think as founders. Yes.

Well, this just makes more sense because for the same price, and this is where the math didn't add up to me, seven students. So let's just take a teacher salary of, I don't know. What do you think the average elementary school teacher salary is in the United States? 40, 50K. All right, let's go with 50. Round number. Okay.

50K. And we know the average student is spending 50K. 15K. If you had seven students, seven times seven is 49, put an eighth in there. Let's put it all way up to 10. 10 students, that's what, 10 instead of 25 in the average class size. So now you've cut the class size to less than half. And you could pay the teacher more or the teacher could have more resources,

like an assistant half the time or something. So it's undeniable that we, we could have half the class size or maybe a third of the class size for the same price. The math is the math is the math. And I think there's another big piece here. It's just the internet, right? Like the fact that you forgot about that one. You know, as you mentioned, Zoom classes aren't working, but there are still benefits to, you know, tutoring where children can get access to.

Yes. One-on-one Zoom does work. I agree. Yeah. So exactly. There's a lot of innovation that's occurred in education over the past 10 years. There's even more investment going into education today. And we have the benefit of being able to use a microschool concept, and we also have the benefit of the internet. And so there should be ways to do things in a more efficient way that are also better, that we, again, need to be exploring. and running tests on, in my opinion. When we look at this, there seems to be room for entrepreneurship to emerge here,

where teachers can become entrepreneurs through your platform on Wonder School itself. And then I'm curious what the profit would be for somebody who was a teacher who left and started a microschool. What would their little home business look like, at scale. You must have some examples of this. So I'd love to hear about some people who actually built a business and what that looked like for them as an entrepreneur. We get back on this week in startups with Chris Bennett of Wunderschool.com. Let's get down to brass tax everybody. LinkedIn Jobs is giving you $50 off your first job posting. If you're not familiar with LinkedIn jobs,

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Thank you. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Thank you to our partners who make it possible for us to employ, I don't know, six or seven people on this podcast full time to make three great interviews a week. If you love this podcast, I ask you to do one thing. Go to iTunes and write a review about how much you love it. And then if you do that and you send us that review, you send us that review.

You can just DM it to This Weekend Startups on Twitter at TWI, or you can email Nick at launch.co. He's the producer. We will possibly send you one of these beautiful Yeti cups as a thank you or a mug. We have this beautiful swag. We don't do it one for one because we can't buy reviews, but sometimes we see a review and we send something nice. They say something nice about us.

We send something to them. So anyway, it's not perfect correlation, but you never know. You might get one. Chris, when you look at the entrepreneur, because I look at what you're doing very similar to what Uber did in creating entrepreneurs or Airbnb created entrepreneurs or Etsy created entrepreneurs through an infrastructure in a marketplace that allowed them to do business and find customers. What does a successful micro school teachers business look like?

Do they have 10 students at 10K each or 20K each? Do they make twice as much as they did when they were a teacher, 25% more? Is it the same, but they get more control? what does it look like? So, we have the most data around child care, so between the ages of zero and five. Sure. And, you know, what we've seen from a child care perspective, because we're all over the country, so our averages, you know, can, they're all over the place.

But roughly, you can go from about $30,000 a year to $70,000 a year. Oh, wow, double. A little bit more than double. Yeah. But, you know, we have providers who are made. who can make $150,000 a year running a child care program. I've talked to when we launched our microschool solution, I've started to build relationships with existing microschool providers all over the country

to learn more about sort of their businesses. And I've talked to folks who are making, you know, $200,000 a year running microschools in clearly affluent areas. But there's a lot more. upside that you have you have access to running a a micro school. What I love about what you're doing is you actually have the pricing on the site. So I just did a search on Wonder School for my zip code and looking around the peninsula of the Bay Area. You can see different microschools from, you know, a thousand to two thousand a month.

I'm sure that depends on how many hours your kids are in. And I'm sure there are, you know, eight kids, but they all make a profile, a beautiful profile. You see the program director, and they've been background checked, what days, the ratio one to three providers to children. What a great ratio. So you've really dialed this in and answered all the questions people would have. And then you even have a great section, Chris, on the site, when you're looking at these profiles of the rhythm of the day, 730 to 8.30 drop off, breakfast, cleanup, diaper change, circle time, art, snack, outdoor time, dancing time, dramatic play, free time. you get the idea, nap time, pick up time. And then you even have the calendar there and admissions and how to apply and to take a tour.

You just basically take all that friction out. It really is like looking at an Airbnb. And I'm sure that was part of the inspiration, yes. That's exactly right. And that's the key. As a consumer, right? As a parent, these are things that you expect to see when you're looking for a school. When you're an educator, these are things that are very foreign to you.

You know, it's very common to find that most schools don't list their price. You have to work so hard to get the price. But these are decisions that we all use when we're making decisions. So we try to surface all the things the parent needs to be able to make a decision. And we try to be as transparent as possible so that the parent can make the best choice for them. Because the other interesting thing about childcare and school, it's sort of like buying a home. you, me, and we took a sample size of 10 of your listeners. We all have different ideas on where we want to live.

We have different ideas on the types of homes we want. We have different ideas around the type of schooling that we would put our children in. There's a lot more variables that go into making that decision than the average decision. I think that's a super important point, Chris, because parents, for some reason, seem to have abdicated their childhood education to the public school system without even thinking or considering other possibilities. And this pandemic, I think one of the silver linings to it is that you can sit for a second and pause when your kids are home. Hey, what do I want my kids education to look like? What are the possibilities? Totally.

Because homeschooling, you felt weird, right? Like, it felt like a weird thing to homeschool. Yeah. Then you start thinking about like, I am homeschooling and what else could this look like? What would it look like if I had a tutor come in twice a week or an actual teacher come in half the time or whatever? Yeah. When we started the company, we're like, hey. Let's make them all monosaur schools, right?

Monosaur is the best. And then we started talking to parents, and that's just my idea of what's the best. Every parent has a different idea. But it really is the best. I'll just be honest, because we're a Montessori, and I agree. Regio of Montessori is. No, but why, why, explain what Montessori is? Did you go to a Montessori school when you were a kid?

I didn't. I didn't go to a Montessori school. Why are you enamored with Montessori? Why did you consider that one? I went to a STEM school. Oh, okay. And, uh, I seem to have turned out all right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

You're running a tech company in the marketplace. It worked out. It worked out. I think your parents are pretty happy right now. Yeah, I think it. You're bold and you build the future. I like it. Yeah, I think it, I just, you know, I.

But what is it about Montessori? Talk about that for a second because it does seem once you get on that Montessori train, you really start to appreciate this like child led education. Yeah. It's child led. It's the, again, like the focus on the child being able to, you know, follow their path, follow their interests. The fact that folks who are Montessori teachers, you know, are very well trained and they're esteemed in the craft of Montessori. And it also just has a very strong brand, frankly.

You know, a lot of famous people went to Montessori schools. A lot of successful, creative individuals. I've gone to Montessori schools. And so the belief I had was, hey, like, this is something that we should make available to everyone. But again, what I've learned is that education, both from the teacher standpoint and from the parent's standpoint, it's very, very personal. And providing options is going to be, is very, very important, similar to Airbnb, right?

Yeah. And so that's what inspired us. I like the ratings and reviews. I see a couple of testimonials here, but how do you make sure the ratings and the reviews are well done? Because I notice you can't click on those. You don't see the details. How do you think about that?

So the ratings and reviews are only from parents that are enrolled. So you can't just go and leave a, like, you can't go in. Drive by, right? Nope, nope. And then the testimonials we have to be really mindful about because a bad testimonial could ruin someone. But like a parent. Can you provide and vet these testimonials or do they post them?

All the parents vet them. All the parents provide them. We actually choose what we share and what we don't share. Okay. So you take a little editorial direction. Exactly. And then when we see a bad one, we work with the provider on it. So we'll go and spend time with the provider, but we still show the score. So you could leave a one and say, I hate this teacher. We'll show the one. We won't show I hate this teacher. And then we'll go and work. with the teacher, like, why does this parent hate you? And if it's actually something that is warranted, we might remove the provider from the platform or we'll work with the provider to turn it around. So being on the platform is a privilege, not a right. You have to maintain a certain

standard to be on here. That's exactly right. What percentage of people are accepted to the platform and what is your vetting process? How long does that take? What does it cost you to do, etc.? So what percentage are accepted? So we've actually adjusted our model over the, since COVID. And we've found that our reviews are so powerful that we do less vetting up front. And we rely on licensing. So every program to be on our platform has to be licensed by the state that they're in. And to get licensed, you have to get background checked.

someone has to go into your home and inspect your home. Right, that's the licensing so that you can draft off of that. Exactly. So we rely on that. And then once you get licensed and you're listed on the platform, we start to track your performance with reviews from parents. And if we're finding that you're getting bad reviews, you know, we step it. And how do you make money in all of this? So we have two models.

We either have a monthly subscription fee that provides. providers pay us or we take a percentage of tuition. So we have two different models right now. And I'm looking at the most expensive one. And five days a week, eight to five full time is $3,300. It doesn't seem that bad. It all is pretty affordable. And then how do the providers feel about your service and paying you some monthly fee?

Oh, I mean, I'm the founder of the company. I'm going to tell you they love it. But I'm just curious. Like, is it that, do people pay through the platform as well? Is that how like, oh, parents pay. So yeah, when the parent enrolls into the program, they pay through the platform. So just like Airbnb, you pay, do you take a percentage of that? Yes, yes.

So for some, for some programs, you take a percentage. What is that, 5, 10% or something? 10%. 10%. So to be on the platform, any new customers they get, they pay you 10%. But their existing customers, they don't have to pay you on. That's right. When they bring students onto the platform, they don't pay us anything. That's right. So, and the average school is going to be... Every school has about... 10,000 a year?

Yeah, has about 8 to 10 children in the program. And yeah, about $10,000 a year. That's exactly right. Yeah, so it's a no-brainer to acquire one of those students for $1,000 for that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Because they run at a 30% margin or something. So this is how they basically get new customers in the door. Well, I mean, it's amazing. And then you are slowly going into micro schools, and how is that going? So it's going really well. And, you know, we made an announcement that we were expanding into microschools. And, yeah, since we've made that announcement, you know, we've been getting a lot of interest, which has been great.

And we launched it nationally as well. And so that's been really exciting. So we've been getting folks from all over the country who are starting microschools. Another thing we're seeing a big trend of right now is outdoor schools. So folks are starting outdoor programs to deal with COVID. And so that's going to. I think that's, yeah. I mean, if you just look at the chances of getting it outdoors and socially distance and with masks,

it really is much lower, according to all the science today, if you're doing this stuff outdoors. In some places, you can be outdoors for the entire year. or most of it. Yeah, exactly. The Bayer, if you have a sweater and a tent and maybe a heat lamp, you're fine for the entire year. There's probably only a couple of days in the peninsula where it's 50 or 60 degrees, and even then you can wear a sweater and be okay.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, go for it. No, go ahead. The idea of outdoor schools came from Scandinavia. And so, and, you know, they operate with the idea that there's no bad weather. There's just bad clothes. You know, I heard that. I thought there was a German expression. in the Navy one.

And so you can, and so, um, so the Bay Area, you know, you can totally do year round. But in places like New York, we even have forest schools in New York, but they tend to not be open during the coldest winter months. Did you say forest schools? Yeah, we call them forest schools, outdoor schools, nature schools. Yeah, Danish has forest schools. Yeah. And kids in nature, I mean, adults in nature do really well and why not have the entire school

outdoors. Yeah, it's great. And I think one of the great things about these micro schools is, I was talking to who a parent who, you know, their kid is ADHD or, you know, just high energy, what, you know, depending on how you feel about that diagnosis, if it's real or not, or if it's over diagnosed. And they were, I think, you know, faced with this, teachers pressuring them to put their kids on ADHD medicine so they would sit and shut up, basically, and stay focused, as opposed to being vibrant young kids who want to run around.

And I just think that's another opportunity here is, you know, as a parent, I don't understand why so many people are so quick to drug their kids and put them on this medication to keep them this factory farming schools. And, you know, maybe it would be better to have them, have the ability to be out and about. Totally. Totally. I agree. I agree completely. All right. Well, listen, continued success.

Everybody check out wonder school.com and look for a great school. And if you're an educator, you might want to consider starting your own forest outdoor school and have kids freezing outside with tons of clothes on, tons of jackets or whatever. No, seriously, I think it's a real opportunity for people to start schools and really be part of the solution here and try some things out. I really do appreciate the effort you're doing, Chris, to give people more options. And a lot of these nursery schools and pre-ks and everything, they have exemptions as, you know, to the COVID stuff, right? That's exactly right. Yeah.

And they're keeping it small and testing's around the corner. I think that's going to be the big breakthrough is when kids can get tested twice a week for five or ten bucks. Yeah, they're being really mindful around COVID. You know, they're doing a lot of their tours via Zoom. They're, you know, not allowing parents to spend much time inside of the program. Staggered drop off is a big one. Exactly.

Staggered drop off is the big one, right? Any sign of sickness, you're not, no children are going to the program. So yeah, temperature checks. Exactly. Yeah, I think the thing that's going to be amazing is when you have these rapid testing, which is like we're right on the cusp of having here in the United States. Like I know people have the machines. I'm getting one of the machines.

Oh, cool. You're going to be able to test for 30 bucks and we'll eventually get down to five or 10 bucks in 10 minutes, 15 minutes. So literally the kids could come to school. They could give the parents a test. They could give the kids a test. have them hang out in their cars or hang out on the street and have a cup of hot chocolate. Or they could do it after school and get tested.

And then every week, everybody gets tested. And by the way, that will be the road out of the pandemic because once you have everybody getting tested regularly, you know, this tracing ability is going to become actually viable. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Do you hear about schools doing testing yet? I know that outside of colleges, but.

I think it's carbon health. You know, I think carbon health is looking to do some partnerships with schools. But it doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like as a country, frankly, we've done a really good job in embracing testing. And even when we do, like, I just got tested recently because I traveled abroad. And it was really difficult to figure out where to get the test, how to get the test. Once I got the test, it was really straightforward. Was it a quick test or like next day results? Quick test.

I found out in, I found it in an hour. right which was great you used to then you did the nasal swab for the yeah the nasal swath which was terror terrifying it was like not it did not feel good oh come on fuck up look up Chris it's just like three seconds of but I'm glad we have the option I'm glad we have the second sneeze or gag or something I'm glad we have the option

they have the swap the swab in your mouth thing now so I think for kids that's going to become like the a little bit easier thing but I do think we're going to get out of this in the next six to 12 months, there'll be a vaccine and or testing will be so robust. For sure, for sure. That it's, we're going to get through it. And then, you know, I think we'll see how many people continue doing microschools and pop-up schools. But, man, it would be great if we, one of the great ways to also get out of the economic disaster we have right now with unemployment and everything is why not double the number of teachers?

Right. If we talk about UBI, right, like giving people money to stay at home, maybe we just give. teachers a 10% raise, 20% raise and double the number of teachers and just add whatever, 5, 10 million teacher jobs in the United States. It would pretty great. And then we can afford it. As a country, we can afford it. And we all know the value of education.

So the fact that we create more. Yeah. Why are we not investing in it? Yeah. Well, Jason, one thing that I'm seeing that's interesting. So I keep up of all the Facebook groups. I'm in all of the parent Facebook groups to just keep up with the trends that are happening. and there's a trend of parents who are saying that they're going to continue the pods

when the pandemic ends. 100%. And so it's a better model. Yeah. And so there's a- And those groups are getting pretty popular. And so there is clearly more demand for this, which is really exciting, which is really exciting. Awesome.

All right. Well, listen, continued success. And everybody go to micro-I'm sorry, I'm going to say microschools. Everybody go to go to wonder schools.com. and check out the offering. Great job. Continued success. Thanks, Jason.

We'll see everybody next time on this week and starts. Bye-bye.