Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Kelly Smith, Founder of Prenda | Revolutionizing Education Through Micro-Schools | Empowering Students, Personalized Learning, and The Future of Education
Education is evolving, shifting from traditional classrooms to personalized learning environments through micro-schools, as seen in Kelly Smith's journey with Prenda. This conversation highlights the importance of autonomy, connection, and engagement in the learning process while addressing common concerns about micro-schools.
• Discussion on the shift from traditional to modern learning models
• Kelly Smith's inspiration and vision behind Prenda
• Benefits of micro-schools and personalized education
• Impact of COVID-19 on interest in alternative education methods
• Importance of connection and engagement in student learning
• Strategies for integrating technology in education
• Real stories showcasing the transformation of students' learning experiences
• Future visions for micro-schools and the education landscape
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Recruitment: www.mindhire.ai
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seedtoexitpod
There was a time where information was a scarce resource and so you needed somebody who knew the information so they could stand up and deliver the information to the kids, so that they would learn the information right. That's no longer the world we live in. That's been outdated by just the change in information availability and the information in age. So now it's much more about how do you unlock a human for learning, and our system's just it's not set up with that in age. So now it's much more about how do you unlock a human for learning, and our system's just it's not set up with that in mind. It was designed around different goals and so you know adapting and doing things differently. Now you do see it like there are classroom teachers who have figured these things out.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, thanks for listening Today. I'm excited to welcome Kelly Smith to the show. Kelly is the founder and CEO of Prenda, a company that's redefining education through micro-schools. Micro-schools are small, personalized learning communities that aim to empower both students and facilitators. Kelly launched Prenda in 2016 after knowing the growing interest in coding programs that he was running at a local library. Since then, prenda has raised its Series B with a total of nearly $46 million in funding, and has grown into a platform that supports passionate individuals in creating educational environments that focus on curiosity, empowerment and mastery. In this episode, we're going to talk about Kelly's unique approach to education challenges, how micro schools are disrupting traditional education models and how they're integrating technology to deliver customized learning experiences while addressing common concerns like socialization and screen time. We're going to talk about Kelly's inspiration for starting Prenda, his vision for the future of education and how micro-schools are shaping the broader landscape. So with that, I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Seed to Exit, the podcast where we uncover the stories, strategies and insights that power the startup ecosystem. I'm your host, rhys Keck, founder of MindHire, a talent acquisition firm specializing in helping startups build exceptional teams. Each week, I sit down with founders, investors and industry leaders to explore the journeys behind iconic companies and game-changing ideas. Whether you're building, investing or just curious about what it takes to succeed in the startup world, I want this podcast to be your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring conversations. Now, if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with your network. Your support means the world and really helps bring more incredible conversations to life. Kelly, thanks for coming on, excited to have you.
Speaker 1:Welcome, rhys, good to be here.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, I'm excited for this one. Obviously, I love talking to CEOs of venture-backed companies, but this one is near and dear to my heart because of what you guys do and my own personal background of being homeschooled, which is, of course, a slightly different model than what you're doing over at Prenda, but obviously I have a lot of relatability to it. So I'm excited to dig into this with you.
Speaker 1:Sure, this is going to be fun.
Speaker 2:It is All right so tell me about Prenda. I've, of course, looked at the website and have done my own research.
Speaker 1:But for the listeners who haven't had the chance, take it away. Prenda helps people open and run great micro schools. Micro school, if you haven't heard of this yet, is a small group. It's micro. It's five, ten kids meeting in person. Typically it's in an informal space like a home or a community center or church. So a small group of people, one adult who really knows those kids, cares about them and helps them become what we call empowered learners, helps them really take ownership of learning and get into it in a way that maybe wouldn't happen in a traditional classroom.
Speaker 2:How did you come up with the idea? How did you launch?
Speaker 1:So I have kids of my own four of them and you know, as every parent does, we get out these conversations. You know what do you do, what's the right choice for your kids and how can we support them. I had seen my kids gradually get to a place where they were really doing fine in school as far as all the metrics go. But engagement was dying out gradually. I mean really saw the light go out in their eyes. They weren't excited to be there, they weren't curious like they were when they started life. You know they wanted to learn everything and understand everything, and traditional school for them was kind of gradually beating it out of them, so to speak. And I think that happens for a lot of kids and for a lot of different reasons.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile I had been volunteering at the public library teaching kids computer programming, and as I watched these kids in an after school environment really catch fire and just be excited about learning and capable of doing all kinds of cool things, I thought what's the disconnect? Why do these same kids do so well in this environment and not very well in that traditional classroom environment? And that's when I started to ask some of those bigger, more dangerous questions what if we did the structure differently. What I found is interesting. The ideas for changing education have actually existed for a really long time, and you'll find great educators doing really everything we're doing in our micro schools. Many of the educators that we meet today say you know, I wish I was allowed to do this as a public school educator.
Speaker 2:So it's just really giving permission to innovation and doing education in a different way, and how old were your kids when you realized that they were starting to lose interest in more traditional schooling?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an interesting question. A lot of the research shows I didn't have this research at the time, but it shows fifth grade is kind of one of those spots where it starts to die out, and my son was a fifth grader when I pulled him out to do our micro school.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you came up with the idea, but then how did we get from maybe we can do things differently to actually launching Prenda and then grow into where it's at today?
Speaker 1:Well, it put me in a funny spot right when I thought, okay, we could do this differently. I ran a micro school in my house. I was the learning guide, so that the primary educator for these kids with no expertise, teaching degree, any sort of background that anybody should, you know, acknowledge as qualifying me to do this. So it's like if I can do this and really did put together a learning model that had kids working at their own pace through online curriculum, but doing a lot of creative projects and small groups and then meeting together once a day to do things in a Socratic way, hands-on science experiments, things like that.
Speaker 1:My role was different than a teacher. I wasn't writing lesson plans and grading papers. I was definitely facilitating, coaching, mentoring, supporting these kids, and it worked. And so I got to see these kids go from disengaged to engaged you know, hate school to love school and seeing that change happen for them. Their parents noticed it too and I recognized like, yes, you know it happened to be me, but I actually believe there's people, lots of people out there that would do a much better job than what I did as a facilitator for a micro school, and that was kind of the magic moment where we started offering this up and allowing other people to do it personal friends at first and then that expanded and grew and we've since helped over a thousand people start micro schools.
Speaker 2:How did you convince those original few people to take the leap into becoming the, not only enrolling their own kids, but also becoming the guides, as you call them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you study startups. I mean, early adopters don't actually need a ton of convincing. These are people who are very aware of the problems. In some cases that came from a parent perspective. Right, you've seen your own child struggle. Right, if your child is I'm thinking of some of these early folks if their child is advanced academically and they're just bored out of their mind, every day is just a chore.
Speaker 1:It's like forcing that kid to go sit in a class that you know is not engaging his or her brain and they don't want to go. You feel that as a parent, right, and you're saying what can I do for this kid? Differently, a lot of the folks that we worked with in the beginning were really on the verge of homeschool. They're thinking about taking it to that next level and saying, all right, could I be responsible for the entirety of my child's education? And that feels like a pretty big lift.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have concerns what if I do it wrong? I want my kid to be around other kids. It's a lot of work. Am I going to be able to have a life or sanity in homeschoolinging? Right, and so if homeschooling is out there as this is possible solution, I think a lot of people say, well, if I could get the benefits of that but still have it, have some normalcy, some structure, some you know standards, aligned curriculum, a group of kids that's meeting together, an adult in the room that's trained and paid and you know, understands what to do.
Speaker 1:That's a nice compromise, right. You get the good parts about homeschool and the good parts about traditional school. You're still able to do education in a way that's very student-led, that opens up kids' minds and really captures their imagination, but you don't have to, you know, do it all alone with your own kids. So that's that, that trade-off, and we found those people. In fact, I would say they found us. We grew very quickly before covid and then, of course, covid came along and shut down all the schools and by that point, uh, it was. The only option really was to try to get a micro school going.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people did it in 2020, 2021 right, yeah, what was covid like for you in that couple years?
Speaker 1:insanity. I can imagine, yeah, you get these feelings like people are just beating down your door like, please, let us start a micro school. The organization wasn't equipped, wasn't set up, we didn't have the you know, our software wasn't built to the maturity level that it is today, we didn't have things sorted um, but we wanted to help and accommodate. So we did a lot of work to just try to be there for folks, probably in retrospect, like said yes too much, like we could have said no more often. Of course, a lot of those folks when school reopened they went back to traditional school and so it left us in an awkward spot as an organization too.
Speaker 1:We had to adapt to that. Us in an awkward spot as an organization too, we had to adapt to that. But putting that all together, I mean it definitely changed the way I would say changed forever the way parents think about their kids' education, and it made all of us recognize like, hey, you know, we need to wake up on this and be involved and really be an agent and a chooser in how education works, as opposed to just passively, you know, shipping your kid off and hoping that everything turns out okay.
Speaker 2:Are you thinking about yourself more as an alternative to homeschooling or more as an alternative to public school?
Speaker 1:These days the number's slightly more towards public school. I mean, people are coming to us from a more traditional whether that's a district school, a charter school, a private school. You know every kid's different right and so the right solution, you know, is going to depend on the kid. What we see is, you know, probably something like 60, 70% of the kids that come in today to Prenda are coming from something more traditional. And then there's still a good contingent 30, 30, 40% that are homeschool.
Speaker 1:We get a lot of we call homeschool-ish families, right, People who have maybe done it for one year and then went back, have thought about doing it but haven't yet pulled the trigger. They're doing all the research, they're thinking about all the things and for one reason or another, it's not their core identity or their way of life. Like you, you definitely meet the all-in homeschoolers who are just like this is what we're doing k through 12, like you're gonna be homeschooled, and oftentimes that's motivated by something really deep. And and sometimes those people don't even like micro schools. Right, they say we've got this covered, thank you very much. But there are a lot of other people that are like I see the benefits of that, but I don't know if I want to go all in on it. And for those people, micro schools are a great solution.
Speaker 2:Why do kids to go back briefly to the one we talked about you know the kind of delight going out in your little guy's eyes when he was in fifth grade. Why does that happen, in your opinion, in public schools?
Speaker 1:Well, you could ask psychologists. There's this thing called self-determination theory. It's the same three kinds of things that Dan Pink has written about. There's a book called Drive about what motivates humans. There's basically three things you need, and one of them is connection with other people. Specifically for a child, it's connection with an adult who cares about you and sees you and knows you.
Speaker 1:The structures that we have in place today in public education, they're definitely not designed around connection. In some ways they thwart it or undermine the ability to actually connect. I mean, imagine a junior high teacher with literally 120 kids that they're trying to know by name and to know their names at all is one thing, and then to know anything about them or to feel any sort of genuine connection, it's mathematically impossible, right and so to get 10 kids and an adult that really cares about them. We really try to solve for connection in these micro schools. So make an explicit focus on this, both in who the guide is, in why the parents choose the guide, and then also how the guide operates. Connection is just one piece of it, another one's mastery. So people, humans of all ages, want to win right. We want to take on a challenge, learn it, get good at it, feel competent in it.
Speaker 1:Some of the researchers will call this competency or competence, and that's important to people, right, and I think there's this sense in schools where we've got this kind of cheap counterfeit to that grades and test scores and some of these structures. But I think if you're an unaware, I'd maybe call it a cynical kid, like I was. You see through it. It's like I know how to get an A, I know how to get the test score. It's not really competence for me, it's not really mastery. I not learning, in fact, my whole goal, unfortunately, I've seen this over and over again kids that are, you know, taking a test on the red badge of courage and the whole game is to read the you know summary notes online, as you know, as quick as possible, get the information into their head and keep it just long enough to do well on the quiz and then forget it all like it never happened and it's like it's not learning.
Speaker 1:All of us know that that's not learning right, so, um, so that's another reason. I mean it's disengaging to feel like you're playing some sort of sham game. Uh, and then the last one is maybe the most important one. It's hard to choose between these. They're all three very important, but it's it's about autonomy, choices for yourself.
Speaker 1:I mean, there were so many times in my experience through school where you know it would have been very easy to just say, write about something that's interesting to you, and instead it's no, here's the assignment you have to write about. You know what I want you to write about? And it becomes this formula in this game of like just meeting the rubric and kind of playing by the compliance, just jumping through compliance hoops. Kids, I mean, they're humans, they just they are. So to treat a kid like a human and to honor agency, to honor autonomy, to give them opportunities for mastery and to do it in an environment that's connected, I mean those are the kinds of things that are the problems, but they also, thankfully, stand out as solutions and it's allowed us to have just great success, great experiences doing micro schools.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think it's not really any secret that the public school system, although there certainly are exceptions, isn't generally a great one. What's your opinion on just why it is the way it is?
Speaker 1:I don't think it's anybody's fault. I think so much of this you know was well-meaning and it came about in the you know you really trace some of this back to Horace Mann visiting Prussia in 1843. I know it goes back a while. There was a time where information was a scarce resource and so you needed somebody who knew the information so they could stand up and deliver the information to the kids so that they would learn the information right. That's no longer the world we live in. That's been outdated by just the change in information availability and the information age. So now it's much more about how do you unlock a human for learning and our systems just it's not set up with that in mind. It was designed around different goals and so you know adapting and doing things differently. Now you do see it like there are classroom teachers who have figured these things out.
Speaker 1:I remember doing a Socratic discussion in seventh grade. I was in a honors social studies class or something and my teacher went to some sort of convention and we did a Socratic discussion. It really like stood out to me as one of the great educational moments of my life. Part of why it did was was literally the only one that I can remember doing right the whole time I was in school. So it's like we had that one beautiful day. So you do see people that are trying inside of the system. But often you know you talk to teachers, they're busy, they've got a whole list of things that they have to deliver, the standards they need to push, push onto kids and it kind of gets in the way of, you know, engaging with those ideas of connection and autonomy and mastery.
Speaker 2:OK, so we've. We've built a system off of a hierarchy or paradigm that's really no longer you know as relevant in today's society. So if you were to wave a magic wand and fix things whether that be making adjustments to the current system or tearing it all down and building something new in its place yeah, that be what everybody be doing. Micro schools Is there something you'd change within the way things are currently done?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what I would do is make a micro school available to everyone. I mean, basically what we see, even among micro schools, there are different specialties, different focuses, different approaches. Some of the guides are soft and nurturing. Some of the guides are a little cold, prickly, but like push you to be your best. You know there's there's different ways to do all these things, and more options to meet the needs of a very diverse group of kids is really what it's all about.
Speaker 1:And, frankly, you know I have a lot of friends that still work really hard to make public school districts work well and to improve them. I feel proud of the work they're doing. I feel like we're all in it together. So it's not like I would blow anything up.
Speaker 1:I think what I would do is just say, hey, here are options, and I think more options is generally better, because kids are different and families have different priorities, and I do talk to parents that are like you know what? Yeah, I hear you about engagement and autonomy, but like I want my kid to be like in the normal thing that everybody else is doing and I don't want to do a micro school right now. To me that's adoption curve and it's perspectives and you have to honor that as well. So yeah, with agency is such an important piece. I would never force everyone to do micro schools, but I think the existence of micro schools and as people hear about them and find you know, find the benefits of it, what you're seeing is it kind of pushes the whole system to think harder about just innovating and providing more options for kids.
Speaker 2:So what does a day in the life actually look like for apprentice student? We understand the format small group guided by an adult but what do they do all day?
Speaker 1:So apprentice micro school. I'll go quickly through this, cause I know we're short on time, but there's four. There are four learning modes in the day. So the first one's called connect picture, a 20 minute kind of mini activity that's focused explicitly on the, the mindsets and the kind of purpose driven thinking. It's really about who you're becoming as a learner. That's a short, you know, group activity.
Speaker 1:We typically have a couple hours of conquer mode. Conquer is where kids set their own goals. They are working on math and English and you know anything else you want to work on. You'll see kids with you know art goals or coding goals or writing. You know different pieces of their academic mastery and they're really just tackling it one lesson at a time, taking little assessments, learning from their results, consuming tutorials and things like that.
Speaker 1:That piece of the day is followed by collaborate mode, and collaborate is all about get the whole group together, engage in a Socratic way. Um, it's really trying to drive inquiry is what the you know experts will call this. So just getting kids curious, getting them thinking um, and you picture, you know, researching together um, aspects of an ancient society. Or, you know, producing a play or some other sort of work of literature, doing science experiments together. So that's the collaborate mode. And then create mode is typically two or three kids working together on a project, so you'll have a room of a lot of engagement. Kids are working on different pieces of different projects, or maybe the same project, but they're doing it in different ways, so a lot of choices in there as well, and the idea is just to have kids as engaged as we possibly can so that they're, you know, actively making the choice and becoming learners.
Speaker 2:The different learning modalities sound great. How many subjects do they study on a given day?
Speaker 1:It's the same subjects, we just don't organize the day so there'll be. You know, typically you'll have a math goal, for example, but then there may be math as part of your collaborative activity and if you're, you know, create project later in the day is about, you know, one of them is is making a little water bottle business, right? There's like spreadsheet math that kids are doing, even young kids. Where they're um, they're calculating profit margins and figuring out how many will they have to sell to break even on their inventory costs. And so you know, you'll see math in all of the modalities reading, writing, obviously really important to so so many facets of learning. So it's not really like, okay, everybody, now we're reading. It's like we're doing this activity and using literacy and numeracy as part of that is kind of the flow.
Speaker 2:So a lot of this sounds service-based. Where does the technology come into it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the business really exists to help people start their own micro schools. I would say there's two problems that somebody has if they're trying to start a micro school. One of them is business related. It's just like how do you actually start your own little school and we help people market themselves, put up a website for them. That's a you know, a whole software product that we provide. We also help them with the payments system. So we're, you know, invoicing parents on their behalf, collecting the funding, often from state entities.
Speaker 1:There's kind of a regulatory component to this. When there's funding available for school choice, there's also I'm trying to think of the other kind of business services. There's a huge contingent around learning and development, which is typically done more in a service-based way. Those other pieces are, you know, hard software. The other big problem that people have is running the learning model.
Speaker 1:So, you know, we've put this learning model together, but there's also a web app that the kids log into and the guide has an you know admin view that the kids log into and the guide has an uh, you know admin view and they, uh really are able to operate a fully, you know, a complete curriculum, a complete learning model that uh, will help kids. You know, hit all the the main points and we've built in um, you know, kind of measurement and communication back to parents as part of that so the parents can see like, okay, I know my kid loves school, but what are they doing all day? Right now it's important to be able to show like here's your goal in english, here's where you're at today, um, and we're tracking progress, you know, over time.
Speaker 2:So those types of things are all built into our, you know, software platform and then are the are the guides creating their own curriculum or is there a standard bre curriculum?
Speaker 1:We provide a curriculum out of the box. Now what you find is, because kids are different and guides are different, everybody kind of wants to tailor it and tinker with it, so we we give them a lot of flexibility. It's like here's, here's something that will work. Uh, you start there and then you adapt it over time. I was visiting a guide this week. That's in her fifth year. You know she does things, she uses print of pieces and really holds the same structure that we've provided, but she's filled in a lot of the pieces with. You know other things. Either she's created them herself or she's pulled from other places. Gotcha.
Speaker 2:Now you don't require the guides to have teaching credentials, which I can see the argument for, but then also, at the same time, if they're responsible for the education of the kids, I could see a concern around why they don't have one. So what was the reasoning behind that decision and how do you handle it when a kid you know let's says, hey, I'm having a trouble with this eighth grade math problem and one would hope the guide would help them, but maybe they can't. What do we do then?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think, reframe it at the very beginning as, um, this isn't a traditional teacher-led classroom. So I think the picture most of us have in mind I mean maybe not you because you've homeschooled, but most people picture sitting passively while school is sort of done to them, right, and the teacher's job is to quote do school to you like, I will school you. So I will stand up here and tell you stuff and then I will give you homework and assignments to see if you understand it, and then test you ultimately and put a grade in a grade book. That whole model is flipped on its head here. So it's really about providing the kids with a path forward. I can give an example of this. So one thing we have is called the well, there's, there's goal setting, right? So in conquer mode, you'll have a goal for math and a goal for language at least, and you often will choose other goals that you'll add to that. When you set a goal, you basically start the year with an assessment and we say here's where you're at. This is information for your own good. It's not for us to like, measure you or brag about our school or anything. It's just like here's the current reality of where you are today on language and on math, and then from that data point we have what's called the GPS meeting the guide, parent, student and these three sit together. We provide training for how to do this as well as a software interface that guides the conversation. So this meeting is really important because it's both a kind of hard look at where the kid currently is and an ambitious kind of forward look at where they could be, or where they want to be by the end. We give the kid a chance to, you know, identify a long-term goal, like by the end of the school year. Yeah, I'm currently, you know, say I'm a fourth grader and I'm currently testing at like halfway through third grade math. Like, I understand some of third grade but not all, so I'm not completely up to grade level. What we're going to say is we're definitely going to go back and make sure you're full on third grade and you've got time through this year to progress so you could set a goal to be finished with fourth grade math by the end of the year. That would be what we'd call like a one point five grade level goal. Right, but for the whole school year. Well, what we do from there is. Our software will break that up. Given the, you know the academic calendar of the year. We'll break that up for you, and it'll say OK, every day that you're in school, you need to do this many lessons, master this much content, and then track it.
Speaker 1:We have integrations built to these various third-party ed tech tools that we're working with, so we're tracking their progress as they go through the year. So it is a very deeply human experience. Obviously, this is about a kid feeling empowered and able to kind of set a goal and tackle it. This is about a kid feeling empowered and able to kind of set a goal and tackle it. What we do, though, is really try to provide all the tools so that that's it's a very scalable experience. It doesn't require, you know, some sort of special expertise on the kids part, or the parents part, or the guides part.
Speaker 1:We can put this all together, so we see this happening in micro schools all over the country. In fact, the average goal that's set is 1.8 grade levels in a year, so you see kids really shooting for the stars, in the sense that you know if you were sitting in a regular fourth grade class, the goal implied, the goal given to you would be 1.0. You're going to finish fourth grade math regardless of where you started and regardless of how fast you're understanding it and we do. We see these kids set big goals. They don't achieve them all the way. The average final outcome is about 1.3 to 1.5. But that's mastery data and it's more than what kids would have got in a traditional classroom, so we feel excited about it.
Speaker 2:That's great, yeah, because in traditional classrooms I mean you have the no child left behind which got implemented in 2001, which at the time obviously had a very noble goal. But I think it backfired in a lot of ways in the sense that you now move at the pace of the slowest student and so kind of to the detriment to everyone else and so essentially under your model, kids can move at their own pace. So you're calling it one to three, one to five, so currently you have grades K through eight. So does that mean that I could then theoretically finish eighth grade at an age when I might be in like sixth or seventh grade?
Speaker 1:Yeah, see it all the time.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then how do you? And so then are we having? Are we having 11 year olds going into high school, or what happens in that Delta?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is definitely a, an interface, I guess, at the end of Prenda. So when, when you reach you finish Prenda, we don't, we go K through eight. Typically kids will either choose you know there's different paths that you can take, right, so some of them will choose a traditional path. They'll say I want to go to a regular high school kind of participate for that kid, no-transcript, a trade-off, like some of the material academically is review for him, I guess, to say the least. I think there's often times where, um, you know he does find individual teachers within those systems that you know kind of encourage him to like think outside the box and he'll engage in sort of different conversations, just hypotheticals.
Speaker 1:This is a kid that likes to sit around and debate philosophy and things like that. This is the same kid that was in that first um, first micro school. Now you're in your um. I mean just one of these people, right, that like knows how to hang with adults and kind of take ownership of his own. But he definitely has classes that he's, he's playing the game, right, he's just sort of I'll do whatever I need to to get an A and then move on. So I think, fortunately for him and for all of us.
Speaker 1:You can get to this point where you're an empowered learner and you kind of know how to really take ownership of your learning, and then an empowered learner can function in a variety of situations. We do have other kids that you know have different goals. So if somebody is really about maybe a single topic, I've met some kids that get into, like you know, tech. For example, I want to learn in ins and outs of full stack software development, like those kids might do some sort of online program or homeschool, so they have plenty extra time, uh, to just dive all the way in to their field. Um, but academically it's, it's really not an issue. Eighth grade doesn't quote count, it's not on the high school transcripts, uh, we have kids that will go test into a higher math class or something like that, but uh, they're, you're treated the same as really if you had homeschooled or done anything else kind of coming into into the traditional system as a as a high schooler and is that why you stopped it in grade eight?
Speaker 2:just because of the issues of the official high school transcript or what? What was the? The?
Speaker 1:yeah, kind of three reasons. I mean one is just resources. We wanted to really focus and do well the piece that we we. It is a different world than high school. One of them is regulatory, just these rules and thinking about interfacing now with colleges. It's like a different kind of a full, different game we would have to build out. And the third one is I just kind of alluded to this but the market's different People have different things.
Speaker 2:I think we probably will provide high school at some point but we've just been so focused on getting K through eight Right, so that's that's a couple of times throughout this. So I was homeschooled for a lot of the reasons that you've kind of shared was skepticism around the quality of public education and you know it's funny my parents none, neither of them went to college, and so they were it's not like they were educators that knew everything that they were doing and came in, it was primarily my mom who did it, but it was very much a self-paced self-taught.
Speaker 2:You know, when I was, when I was younger, she would help out with the math problems and what have you. But by the time it got to like sixth grade, in any sort of geometry or algebra, it's like no, you're on your own, read the book, figure it out. Which is what I did. And then I did. I did do the first couple of years, uh, in high school, homeschool, went to public school in my junior year, but then that that is when the issue with the transcripts came up. As I went to, I had a 4.25 GPA my junior year, so clearly something on the homeschooling side went right.
Speaker 2:Uh, but then when I went back to do my, my uh course planning for my senior year, they told me well, you know, your first two years of high school weren't from an accredited institution, so you can come back for your senior year, but you can't walk, you can't graduate, you can't do anything like that. Um, so I ended up, I finished up the year, just test it out, did the not? Not the GED, but I think they called it in California the high school equivalent degree. Um, and I was done. I think they called it in California the high school equivalent degree and I was done. So, yeah, interesting, interesting way of doing things for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's funny, right, Because you think about what that means, like that test, if that test in fact means you have the knowledge that society has deemed important for a high school graduate to have. Yeah, you know my son the same son you know, kind of a smart aleck. He took the ged test just for fun, like two years ago as a, as a sophomore in high school, and he aced it like he, oh yeah, he was like does this mean? I'm done? Like what does this? What does this exactly mean? And of course he's just messing around, but he just knows. You know, it's not really about like getting information transfer as a learner. I think everybody sees that formal structure of An example of this.
Speaker 1:Right, I fix stuff around my house sometimes. I'm not super handy. I didn't grow up doing that. I don't have Some people just magically know what to do and they have the tools. So I'm trying to fix a thing around my house. I'm like what do I do? Well, I go to the internet, google it. I find a youtube video. I watch the youtube video, I pause it. I will like then go to home depot to get the tools that are in the youtube video and then I will like start trying to like follow what the guy's doing in the youtube video.
Speaker 1:I mean it the equivalent, like think if instead I was like okay, I'm gonna go sign up for a program in like electrical or, um, you know, home repair or something, and I'm gonna like here's the syllabus and there's these lectures and there's like homework assignments, and I'm gonna do like a whole semester so that I can like fix one thing. I mean, there there are places where there's value to that. But I think all of us have this intuition nowadays. It's's like it really you learn what you need in the moment and the world's changing so fast and anyway. So what we want is kids that are equipped for that and that are less, much less deterred by these systems of gatekeepers and rules and and just limits. I mean, so much of that is holding kids, you know, into structures that are not productive for them.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, it's. It's so funny you mentioned the handy thing, because I'm not particularly handy either, but I'm working on it and so, yeah, I mean you, youtube has always kind of been a go-to. But there was a few months ago I had to change a light fixture and usually anything that like in my past where, like, if it's electrical, I hire it out like I don't want to shock myself. But this time I was like, screw it. And I took a picture of the light box and I put it into a chat gpt and I was just like, here's what I'm doing, walk me through. And it fully walked me through, just based on the pictures I sent it. Um, so yeah, I mean we're, we're in a completely new learning paradigm. It's. It's fascinating to think what you know the kindergartners and you know Prenda, what they're going through and what, what it will be like you know the next several years, any particular story from either students or guides that's really resonated with you as a result of Prenda, that that stands out.
Speaker 1:I mean so many stories, I could tell you them for a very long time. The moral of every story is this was my kid before and it's often some version of you know sitting in the car parked outside the school. The child's in tears Like, don't make me go in there every day, you know, and that can be a variety of reasons Right Boredom, bullying, like discouragement. There's, there's so many things that can happen inside of a system like that, where you have kids that just are deeply unhappy and and then they switch and they switch. My favorite story about the after portion is is the kids crying again? Actually? But they're crying because it's spring break or it's Saturday and there's no school. You know, and you, if you imagine going from crying because you have to go to school to crying because you can't go to school, I mean that's the 180 that we're talking about and it's it's just so powerful. I'll share just quickly.
Speaker 1:I got brave this year and I put up my one political post on social media. You know most of us are like let's not talk about politics and in fact I'm so burned out on it. But there are discussions at the state level around school choice policies and so I put a, you know, an explainer and advocacy like this is school choice. And I kind of said, look, this is, this is making a difference for families.
Speaker 1:And somebody that had had put her son in years ago piped into the thread and it was a really touching moment because she was able to just say, like, look some, for some people this is abstract politics.
Speaker 1:Like, for me, this is personal and here's why. And she talked about her son and just how unhappy and how at risk he was. I mean, there were lots of problems and by creating a new environment for him and giving him opportunity to just see himself differently as a human and as a learner, being part of this micro school group and having a learning guide, that's, you know, fully invested in him and cared about him, and so to put that together, for him it was night and day contrast and things changed and she gave a little update. Now here he is in high school, years later and things are just going so well for him and she really attributes so much of this to what happened to him in that micro school. That was a turning point in his life. I mean, obviously it's her as the parents and there's so many factors that goes into that. But to be even a small part of that kind of change for a human being is humbling for me, and it's it's work that just energizes me every single day.
Speaker 2:I love that. Well, I would have loved to dive a little bit deeper into the business and growth and all that, but we'll probably have to save that maybe for a round two. But you know, looking forward, how do you see Prenda evolving, as well as the broader education landscape, over the course of the next few?
Speaker 1:years, help deliver these services and this value to people like help them start their own micro schools and help them be as successful as as we possibly can with their micro schools. So, like I said, a thousand people starting micro schools, I think 10,000 should start micro schools. I think that should happen in the next couple of years. There are, you know, policy questions around funding, so that this doesn't isn't limited only to people that can afford thousands of dollars out of pocket. Obviously, we want this to be available to everyone, so that's a potential limitation. But, assuming the funding's there, I think lots of people will be interested in this and we want to be ready for them. Our job is to make it as effective and successful as it possibly can be, so we're really focused on that. I've got a great team and we're really grateful to just be able to do this work every single day.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm excited to see how you continue to grow. So, kelly, thank you so much for coming on. Really had a good time.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning into this episode of seat to exit. I hope you found today's conversation insightful and valuable. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network. Your support means the world helps us continue to grow and bring more incredible guests onto the show. Now for more content and updates, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can check out MindHire, where we help startups build exceptional teams. No-transcript.
