Bradley Heilman

Bio

Bradley Heilman has helped design curriculum delivery platforms and K–12 digital curricula for the past 30 years. Bradley is currently the designer, co-founder, and COO of Exploros, an educational platform for device-enabled classrooms. Exploros is a teacher-guided, social platform that helps all students engage and contribute to collaborative learning experiences. Prior to Exploros, Brad was a co-founder and chief designer of Pangea Tools, a cloud-based curriculum authoring system that was purchased by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). Brad was also the chief instructional designer for Science Fusion K–8, HMH’s core, best-selling science curriculum in the 2010s. Brad is married with three children, lives in the Boston area, and has trained and taught martial arts for the past 30 years. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Aspects of Brad’s master's thesis were published in Popular Mechanics, Discover Magazine, Science, and several technical journals.

Summary

The conversation with Brad Heilman elucidates the profound impact of technology in K-12 education, particularly through the lens of student engagement and voice in the classroom. Brad, a co-founder and COO of Exploros, shares his insights on how traditional classrooms often fail to capture every student’s input, a challenge that can be surmounted by leveraging digital platforms. He recounts his entrepreneurial journey, beginning with a resourceful approach to raising pigs, which nurtured his understanding of margins and innovation. Additionally, his extensive experience in both education and martial arts informs his belief in the importance of community and collaboration in the learning process. This dialogue not only highlights the evolution of educational technology but also emphasizes the necessity of adapting pedagogical methods to enhance student ownership and understanding in contemporary learning environments.

Conversation

The podcast features an enlightening discussion between Jothy Rosenberg and Brad Heilman, the COO and co-founder of Exploros, an innovative ed-tech platform. The conversation delves into Brad's unique journey as an entrepreneur, which began in his youth when he discovered ways to improve margins while raising pigs for 4H. This entrepreneurial spirit, rooted in his family's legacy of innovation, has driven him to create impactful solutions in the education sector. With over three decades of experience in K12 education and a keen understanding of the challenges educators face, Brad articulates how Exploros seeks to enhance student engagement and facilitate teacher-guided learning through technology. By enabling real-time interaction and feedback, the platform aims to transform traditional classrooms into dynamic, student-centered environments that foster deeper understanding and ownership of learning.

Brad also shares insights from his extensive background in martial arts, drawing parallels between martial arts training and the resilience required in the startup world. He emphasizes the importance of overcoming self-imposed limitations and finding one's voice in both education and entrepreneurship. The conversation is a rich exploration of how entrepreneurial thinking can drive innovation in education, highlighting how technology can empower students and educators alike. Brad's perspective on the necessity of creating a supportive and collaborative learning environment underscores the importance of community in fostering educational success, making this episode a valuable resource for educators and aspiring entrepreneurs alike.

Takeaways

• The dialogue elucidates the importance of leveraging technology in K12 education to enhance student participation and engagement, fostering a more inclusive and responsive learning environment.
• Brad Heilman's entrepreneurial journey demonstrates how innovative thinking can significantly reduce operational costs and improve resource allocation in various contexts, including education.
• The concept of martial arts training as a metaphor for overcoming psychological barriers is thoroughly explored, highlighting the necessity of mental resilience in both personal and professional pursuits.
• The discussion underscores the critical role of teacher support systems in addressing the challenges faced by educators, particularly in post-pandemic learning environments.
• Exploros, as an ed-tech platform, exemplifies how real-time social interaction can transform traditional classroom dynamics, allowing every student to contribute meaningfully to their learning experience.
• Understanding the intrinsic challenges within the K12 educational framework, such as student motivation and teacher overload, is essential for developing effective educational solutions and interventions.

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Hello. Please meet today's guest, Brad Heilman.

In a typical K12 classroom that doesn't use technology, teachers can call on students a few times. But you can't hear from everybody multiple times. You just don't have the time.

But when students can write their thoughts into a device and share it with the teacher, that can happen a dozen times in a class.

What do Wonder Bread pigs and the inventor of the implantable defibrillator have in common? They're all part of today's guest's entrepreneurial origin story. Brad Heilman discovered margins in 9th grade.

He was raising pigs for 4H and instead of paying $55 in feed per pig, he figured out how he could drive to the Wonder Bread factory, pick up 400 loaves of bread seconds for four bucks grinded into feed, and cut his cost to $5 a pig. That 10 to 1 improvement in margins, that's the entrepreneurial mindset that's driven his entire career.

Brad's uncle sits in the inventor's hall of fame next to Thomas Edison for inventing the implantable defibrillator. Innovation was just part of the family culture.

And he'll explain how defending yourself against the invisible stress, self doubt, the ceilings you put on yourself is the real training that prepares you for the startup battlefield. So let's get into it. Hello, Brad, and welcome to the podcast.

Hello, Jothi, and thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Especially since we're neighbors and it's like I've been doing this for two years and I'm, you know, it's like, wait, I should have.

I should have done neighbors first. Hey, so where are you originally from? And I know where you live, but tell, tell all of us, where are you originally from? Where you live now.

So I'm originally from western Pennsylvania in the sort of country area north of Pittsburgh. About 35 miles north of Pittsburgh in a very rural area is where I grew up.

And then I, I went to high school in eastern Pennsylvania, and then I came up to the Boston area for college and have lived in many sort of areas around Boston, both in the city and in the suburbs. And we settled here in Wayland, Massachusetts about a decade ago.

And, you know, across the, across the bridge, through the woods, you know, to get to each other's houses, which is fun. You are, right now you're in the education space. You didn't just immediately go there.

So what other startups, what other companies have you been involved with and sort of that led you to this point?

So I've been in the education space broadly for probably a little over 30 years at this point, specifically in the K12 ed tech education space for about that amount of time and also in martial arts for about that amount of time in various forms where I've opened up my own schools or I've consulted with other schools. But going back before that, I think I've always just had a real interest in education in general. It hasn't always been an education component.

When it's come to sort of being entrepreneurial, I think I, I grew up with it.

I had, my dad's, my dad is a doctor, but he had two brothers, one of which was an inventor of a certain kind of asphalt, which is kind of a remarkable material that doesn't break down. It actually if we used it everywhere, there'd be a lot less potholes in the world. But he, he was always tinkering with that.

And you know, I would, I would visit and he would be coming up with different mixtures and he was just very much of a, of a, of an inventor. And then his younger brother, my dad's next older brother, invented the implantable defibrillator.

And so he's sitting in the inventors hall of fame next to Edison. But it was always sort of part of the family culture to be innovative, I think in some capacity.

So I would say my first entrepreneurial experience was I was a 4H er. You know, I raised pigs and steers and showed them at the county fair.

And my brother and I started off with just one pig each and showed it at the fair. But we realized that there was an opportunity there and we, we found this kind of a funny thing about margins.

So a pig eats about 550 pounds of food to get to market weight, which is 220 pounds. And when you go to the feed store, it's $10 a bag for 100 pounds. This was, you know, I'm dating myself for how cheap feed was at the time.

But it would be $55 to buy the amount of food that it would cost to get your pig to market. But we discovered that you could go to the Wonder Bread factory and buy Wonder Bread seconds for, for 400 loaves for $4.

And we would take a pickup truck down to the Wonder Bread factory, pick up an entire pickup truckload of bread for four bucks and bring it back and grind it into our own feed. You had to supplement it with some various things, but we were able to basically feed on a per pig basis.

Instead of paying $55, we paid about $5, which made for kind of a little bit of a cash cow when it came to raising pigs and so.

Or a cash pig.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We did that for a little while and we, we also transitioned into bigger, bigger markets by raising, raising steers and that, that's what sort of started the bank account initially in terms of trying to fund some hobbies and things like that. But I have to ask a question

about Wonder Bread before you move on. So Wonder Bread doesn't strike me as being, I know you said you added things to it, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly healthy food.

Right? Well, it's a good question.

That all being said, you know, we, we had to lay it all out, have it dry into essentially like a crouton and then grind it into a powder such that it matched with pig feed.

And then we would augment that with some, a little bit of corn, a little bit of supplements and things like that seemed to work on that Jati, but, but it worked out well.

Well, what? Sorry, this is just, I know this is weird, but why did the Wonder Bread factory have so many discards?

So this is a little known thing and I don't think they do it anymore. I had a cousin who was getting Clark bars, so when you may, when you make cattle feed, you put molasses in it.

But he, he figured out that he could do the same with Clark bars and grind those up and use it as a minor sweetener for the feed.

And essentially these factories will have a fair amount of product that gets marred or somehow dented or somehow just unpackageable in the process of being produced. At least it did then.

And they would take those things and set them off to the side and you had to sign a waiver that said you weren't going to eat it like it wasn't for human consumption, but they would basically just offload it.

And I mean, I, I, it's sort of like I can barely believe we did this, but we would drive a pickup truck, you know, 30 miles with four of loaves of bed bread in the back and it would be mounded up over. It wasn't like hidden. It was, it was right there. So that's why they do it.

They just have, they have loaves that get dented or maybe they get over baked or you know, something happens where they don't feel like they can sell it. A little pocket of opportunity. Right.

So, you know, anyhow, sometimes you come across these, these anomalous things that, that make certain things possible. And that was one of them.

Well, that's the entrepreneurial kind of mindset anyway.

Right, right. Just, just look, looking for something that fits in with what you're, what you like to do or are doing and you know, sort of a way to do it better.

So, so, you know, that, that was, that was in sort of 9th and 10th grade of high school and I didn't have any other businesses per se until later on, but it was, it's always sort of. I think I went into college thinking I was going to start a business at some point.

It just wasn't, you know, I was focused on, on academics after that until I finished up my graduate degree, I guess, to, to get to where I am today. I went to school for an engineering degree in mechanical engineering. And I went to a specific university where there was a lot of opportunity I had.

It was here in Boston.

I went to Tufts University and at the time I had an advisor who was a presidential young investigator, which meant that he could get whatever grant money we got matched by the National Science foundation predominantly. And it meant that we had a lot of funding to play with.

And one of the things that we did was we built some labs and we started to have an opportunity to redo the undergraduate curriculum in the engineering program.

And there was a real bent towards trying to figure out how to teach engineering in a different way where it was a little bit less so to give you an example, the engineering school at Tufts at the time started to gather more female engineers than any other school in the nation and ended up almost balancing out to 50, 50, which is kind of remarkable.

Usually engineering at that time was sort of a male dominated kind of a field, but the way that it was structured and we were putting it together was just more overall palatable for a broader range of, of individuals. And we just had a lot of opportunity to work with course development and cross pollinated with the education department.

And I became more and more interested in education, specifically in, in STEM education at the time and at Tufts. We partnered with Boston public schools and started to teach engineering principles. It was sort of the Beginning of the whole STEM thing, STEAM stem.

And so we went into Boston public schools and started teaching kindergarteners and teaching elementary school students about engineering concepts. And it was just really interesting and I found it, I found it meaningful.

So when I graduated, I specifically tracked down some K12, one K12 educational company that I really wanted to work for that had developed some math and science models that were used in, in secondary school. And I kind of worked my way into a job there and that's how the K12 component of my career got started.

At the same time, during graduate school, I started training in martial arts and have just continued to do that ever since. And so if you my career, as a broad strokes, I've been sort of, I've created several different companies in the edtech space and in parallel.

And at various times I switched gears and opened up Marshall martial arts schools and taught as an instructor and have pursued that, that line of teaching as well.

Which, which form of martial arts?

I teach a lineage called Umyongdo. It's predominantly from China, but it's eight complete martial arts taught at one, taught as one.

So it's aikido, hapkido, Yudo, kung fu, chapalge, which is 18 weapons, samurai sword, taichi, bagua. So it's a, it's a, it's not components of those arts. It's actually eight complete martial arts.

People have the perception that martial arts is, you know, martial arts historically has been mind and body development.

And one way to think of the self defense component of martial arts, in traditional martial arts, all movements have a self defense aspect, but the predominant goal is self defense against the invisible. So self defending yourself against something that's visible is, you know, you learn how to block and attack and those kinds of things.

But defending against the invisible, things like stress, you know, just, just negativity, that, that requires kind of balancing out your mind and body. I mean that's the, that's the holistic nature of the human being. And that's what traditional martial arts is predominantly about.

You know, the origin story of the Shaolin monks, for example, was that what they really wanted to do is Meditate and reach a higher level of spiritual understanding.

But they realized that if that's all they could do, and there were invaders that came in and you know, they were spending all their time trying to, trying to improve, but then they couldn't defend themselves on a, on a physical front, then what's the point? Right. They're going to struggle with, with, with that aspect.

So that's the traditional martial arts has always been predominantly self defense against the invisible. That doesn't mean that there, there are plenty of martial arts schools that are focused more on the, you know, the physical side of it.

And it is, traditional martial arts is also very physical, but the traditional aspect is really about mind body development.

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Well, has that helped you in this sort of other aspect of your life, namely startups?

Absolutely. For, for multiple reasons.

For one, in, in the K12 education space, Ed tech side of things, I think teaching and learning is not only about what is taught, but how it's taught. Right.

The how is is is a big component of the what meaning, you know, how you're taught determines what you gain from it as much as what you're taught. And one of the things in traditional martial arts that I've seen over the years is that the lessons are typically group lessons.

It's not to say that there isn't private coaching and you know, that kind of thing, but most of the improvement that I've seen over the years comes from a group of people who level each other up in the process of going through a lesson.

In other words, when you're going through something super challenging and you can look to your left and look to your right and somebody else is going through with you, they might be a little bit ahead or they might be a little bit behind, but regardless, the fact that you're within that group of people trying to accomplish something means that, that I think you push your boundaries in a different way. And so in traditional martial arts that's part of the how it's taught.

It's, it's, it's taught in that capacity such that people push their boundaries. In K12 education, which I've designed several platforms for, the thing that I focus on is the nature of the classroom.

So there are a lot of K12 solutions out there today where it's a student logging into a computer and sort of learning curriculum pathway from a computer and there's, there's certainly a use for that and I think it's good for skills building.

But what I've personally focused on is looking at the nature of the teacher guided classroom and say that most classrooms, if you walked into a eighth grade classroom today, you would see a teacher guiding students and those students would be participating in some form of social experience. Right.

It would be, hopefully it would be a teacher kind of getting kids involved and engaged in dialoguing with one another and guiding that conversation such that the participants get a sort of expanded view of the topic at hand.

So, so I would, I would say not only, not only sort of the, the in the martial arts component of my life has influenced the, the EdTech side of my life. Although EdTech I really try to take a look at what's happening in the classroom and make sure it's focused towards that arena.

But I, I, I definitely see parallels that cross back and forth.

So what is the, so, so what's the name of the edtech startup that you're the COO of right now?

So that's Exploros. And historically I guess my career has always been in the designing of platforms. I sort of mentioned it before.

So I, I designed Exploros, I founded it, I was a co founder and a designer of it.

I, I finished up my engineering degree, I went and became, I sort of worked my way into an organization that didn't have a job for me, which I think is a lesson for anybody that has a goal Right. Is don't be intimidated by the fact that there's not an opening. Go create an opening. In this case, I.

They wanted to hire a cfo, and I was a. I was the furthest thing from a cfo, but I just wrote a letter and sort of wiggled my way into an interview. And at the end they were kind of puzzled and were like, why did you, why did you interview for. For a position that we don't have?

And I just, I just said, oh, I think you should create a position. So they did. Actually, they couldn't, guys, a little bit crazy, so let's, let's try them out. And they started me on a halftime position.

And you know, within a couple of weeks it became full time. And I was a teacher trainer.

So I started off just flying around the United States, going to classroom after classroom and working with teachers using this particular educational software and getting a sense of the challenges and training teachers on how to implement in the classroom. And I did that for a few years.

And then because of having sort of all that on the ground experience, I was able to participate in a revision of the whole platform and kind of an upgrade sort of a platform 2.0. That platform actually was pretty interesting. It was the first textbook adoption for a digital product in the United States.

The K12 education space runs on these things called textbook adoptions, which one might think would have timed out by now, but it still occurs where states say, hey, we want to, we want a new version of our science. Here are our standards. This is what we want to teach. And then a handful of companies will jump into that process and build a solution.

We also became just shortly after that, the first software as a. Software as a service curriculum in the United States, which was insanely early because there was no Internet.

I mean, there was a, there was a rudimentary Internet, but this was largely, I think, a statement by the state that said, hey, we want to start looking ahead and start to become a little bit more digitally savvy. And so we, we sort of began that process. That company Apple was an investor in, actually went public on nasdaq.

The founder of that company became a partner of mine in the founding of Exploros, which I'll, I'll get to in a little bit. But so that that company was taken public on NASDAQ. Apple was an investor. We reached about 20% of the high schools in the United States.

And it was all built on mathematical models of various things that you would study in school.

So there was in, in the physics space in high school, obviously there's wave motion and one body motion and things like that, which are common when it comes to modeling. But we also had models for the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system. So different courses in biology would use us.

We had models for chemistry where you could do virtual labs and mix, you know, mix chemicals and see the output and see the temperature of the result and things that would be a way to augment the physical lab and for, have to have students be able to dig in a little bit deeper and do things that might be, you know, sort of dangerous in the real world. They could simulate and learn a lot of lessons from using these particular models. So that was that company I paused after.

I actually went into another startup after that that used web based data on the Internet to produce. We were, we were sort of trying to figure out what to produce. We ended up producing gamecasts.

So we did the first, you know, if you've ever seen the ESPN gamecast or that kind of thing. We, we invented that where we would take, we started with baseball and there's a company called Stats Inc.

Which at the time, I don't know how they do it today, but at the time they would put a person in the stands at every baseball game who would record what happened in relative real time. And so they would record what the pitch was, they would record what the hit was.

There was a certain coding that they used that you could tell whether it was a grounder or a fly ball and where it went and those kinds of things. And it was all coded in real time.

And we took that coding and we, in the very early part ofthe.com boom, we created 3D models that could render out of market games. So at that time you couldn't watch a game that wasn't in your city because there was no such thing. There were no subscriptions to anything like that.

And so if you wanted to watch, you know, the Red Sox and you lived in California, you didn't have a way to do it, but with this you could tune into the Red Sox game, watch a 3D rendering of that game, get color stats live. Like we could tell you what this, what this player's hitting percentage was against the left handed pitcher in this situation.

And so we built dynamic player cards and all that kind of stuff. And it was really pretty cool. We built that for baseball and then we built the Patriots. New England Patriots hired us to build a fantasy game.

We built something for USA Today as a, as a game renderer. We, we began doing football, we began doing soccer, basketball. I think baseball was the cleanest. You know, football's hard to render.

But we did do something kind of interesting with football. It was the ability to take your fantasy player and splice together all their highlights in a single reel.

That, that somebody could just at the end of the day, you know, Sunday night pull up and watch their fantasy team and see what their players did. We had a chance to present that to the commissioner of the NFL at the time and he said no way.

Which I think was because they license out their film to all the stations and there was no way it was going to get merged together and worked with in that capacity. So that, that, that idea didn't fly. But, but that was an interesting time.

It actually used the engine of the, of the K12 company, that was a mathematical modeling company and it used the engine in a different way just to do something in the sports space after that. That. So that company was actually doing quite well.

And I had a bunch of stock and you know, this is a lesson I think, and don't get too, too attached to the financial side because the dot com bust hit and we were, we had paying customers. It was a solid company with, with solid clients. But the whole market got, you know, swallowed up for the most part.

I mean obviously there were some big companies that made it, but, but we went down with the, with the bust and all my, all my stock went to zero. I paused a little bit and decided I was going to open up some martial arts schools and did that for several years.

And then I came back to the Edtech space a little bit later.

So I guess just to get up to exploros, I started again with this co founder of this original company and we were asked to build a science curriculum for Saudi Arabia. And so I had a chance to meet with a Saudi royal family and help to build platform for a science program.

They basically felt like oil was going to last for a while, but they wanted to kind of increase the educational density within the country. And so they had a big interest in fueling the science side of things. And we got chosen as a company, a company or a group to do that.

So I, I got to design the platform for that and work on the curriculum side. I think one of the things that I've sort of specialized in over the years is merging tech with curriculum. And so I got to build that. That was.

Those platforms were entirely non social. They were just students learning from a device, often using some cool stuff like simulations and models and things like that.

But after, after that company is when one other person and I founded Exploros with this idea of saying, look, now technology is really natively social. This was, you know, a little, little over a decade ago.

And as much as Facebook has been around for a while, it took a little while for people to understand tech as, as natively social. It seems oddly common sense today, but it wasn't at the time. And so technology was social. Classrooms are social, classrooms are teacher guided.

Now it's commonplace. Every student has a device. But that wasn't the case before.

So we looked at it and said, look, there's an opportunity coming where there's going to be a timeframe where every student has a device.

So we can look at what it would be like to use those devices in a different way and have the devices actually help in orchestrating the classroom lessons and let the students use the devices as a mechanism for having a voice. And so that's the purpose of Exploros is to give every student a voice in the live classroom.

You know, in a typical K12 classroom that doesn't use technology, teachers can call on students a few times, but you can't hear from everybody multiple times. You just don't have the time.

But when students can write their thoughts into a device and share it with the teacher, that can happen a dozen times in a class. And a teacher gets a much better insight into what students do and don't understand.

And all students get to actively contribute, which increases the ownership, which in turn increases the learning. And that's the, that's the sort of point of Exploros and kind of a little bit about how we got here.

And, and would you say that, that what you just described is how it's different, it's, that's its differentiation?

I would, I Mean, there are very, it's. I find it a little bit odd, but there are not that many platforms in K12 edtech that are both real time social and teacher guided.

That's not to say that there aren't any, but there are, there are not a lot. And what we specialize in is doing that, as well as the ability to stage pedagogically strong lessons.

And so Explorist is really built to be able to help teachers deliver a lesson plan.

And in that process, because we can do that, we can get input from all students, we can map it to the learning standards, which, you know, if you haven't been a teacher, you probably don't pay too much attention to.

But, but teachers have to teach to a map of, of learning standards and we can assist teachers in the delivery of that lesson, which makes it a stronger. This is going back to the how are things taught? You know, in the worst method of teaching, a teacher can stand up front and talk for 45 minutes.

And that's not a good method of teaching.

In a much more interesting method of teaching, there's lots of small group work, there's collaboration, there's students producing things and sharing it back to the class, there's conversation, there's individual assessment. We orchestrate all of that, make it very simple for the teacher to deliver.

And in the process, we gather lots and lots of data for understanding how it's going.

So Explorist as a company to date is around 300 million student responses in context, meaning we know what learning standards the students were trying to address when they were responding. Not all of those responses are assessments.

A lot of them are student projects, building graphic organizers, submitting drawings, those kinds of things. But the strength of Exploros is really threefold.

One, student engagement, two, simplifying teaching for a teacher, and three, providing visibility into that classroom such that both the teacher and those that are overseeing a district can improve their instruction over time.

What would you say your installed base is like? To measure it by students or by teachers or by school districts or.

Yeah, it's a great question. And it has to do with our sort of guerrilla attack on the market.

I mean, when you design and build an enterprise platform as a startup, it's a little bit of a crazy thing to do. We just decided there was a need and we wanted to try to address it.

So when we built Exploros, we decided we would make it free for teachers and then there would be a tier where, where teachers would pay to have students and it's we don't sell to teachers. We still, we sell to school districts. But, but school districts would pay to add students.

So from a distribution standpoint, we have publishing partners that use us as a platform to distribute their programs and then we distribute programs directly. We actually have teachers because we're free for teachers. We have teachers in about 20% of the districts in the United States.

So we've got a pretty good reach on that front. But when it comes to paying customers, we have about a million paying students that are distributed across the United States.

But we have concentration in certain market areas just based on where we're paying close attention to what's happening in the state.

So given all that, what would you say are still some of the biggest challenges in, you know, K through 12 education today?

Challenges in education or in selling an education? Like in, in a, in, in the broader sense, what's, what's the challenge for a student in K12 today?

Or what's the challenge for somebody trying to have a business in K12 today?

Well, I was thinking that essentially the kinds of challenges that would motivate you all to try to, you know, expand your solution to meet that challenge.

Sure, sure. The biggest, you know, the number one biggest challenge today is student motivation. And we saw.

So Gallup did a poll before the pandemic that was large. I think it was like 12,000 students.

And they found that about 55% of students were what they called actively disengaged, meaning they didn't have touch points with teachers throughout the day. They were just kind of moving through school that was pre pandemic. And after the pandemic that has not gotten any better.

There was a lot of disassociation with or dis, know, sort of demotivation with school overall as part of the pandemic. And so that's problem number one. That is you sort of universal, but is also part of our main focus of what we're trying to address.

If you can have students feel like they're part of it, feel like they have a voice, then you automatically get a jump in impact. Problem number two in education.

And you could flip flop these because they're highly related, but is teacher overload, which leads to lack of teacher confidence. The pandemic was brutal on this front because teachers were asked to become remote teachers immediately, which is. It's a whole different role.

You can't just switch from being a face to face teacher to going remote and have it work. I mean the idea that everything can take place over zoom, you know, for A classroom is. It just doesn't work. So.

But that hasn't lessened to, obviously, it's a lot better than it was during the pandemic. But there are so many asks of a teacher. They've got lots of emergent bilingual students. You know, English is a second language students.

They've got, they've got, you know, learning standards, they've got state testing, they've got lots of different things that are pulling them in different ways. And, and it's not like. It's not like our teaching pool is lowering, right? There's big turnover.

And so you just have a situation where there's been a challenge for teachers that has ended up being somewhat demoralizing. It's improving now, but it really has been challenging for a while.

And so I think those are the two big things in education that I would call the main difficulties, where a third thing. And I'm sort of talking to you about what the explorer's benefits are at the same time, but this is intentional.

The third thing is that most classrooms are a black box for an educa.

You know, from an educational administrator standpoint, you have teachers in classrooms, teaching, but you don't get to know how it goes until after the fact. And often it's way too far after the fact to do anything about it.

And sure, you can do site visits and try to take a look and see what's happening, but that's a difficult thing to get right. And obviously, if you go and sit in on a class, you're changing the nature of it just by sitting in on it.

So the ability to try to measure, measure outcomes or measure the learning process has been very elusive for education forever. And it's largely because technology is sort of used supplementally. It's not used as a core, it's not used all the time.

And therefore education has been traditionally hard to measure, which makes it hard to improve. And that's, that's kind of a long game, right? That's going to take time.

But that's, that's certainly a difficulty when it comes to assisting those teachers that might be struggling. You don't know they're struggling until. Until they get their results at the end of the year or the end of the quarter.

And at that point, it's often, you know, it's often too late, in a sense.

Hi. The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book, Tech Startup Toolkit how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.

This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years. I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong. You could get it from all the usual booksellers.

I hope you like it. It's a true labor of love. Now back to the show.

Is that like the most important thing on your roadmap to do this measuring and try to get feedback real time? Is that like your next thing?

We've been doing it all along.

I think we work with Amazon and we've worked with big sort of initiatives on the data front because the kinds of data that we have are really interesting.

But this is, it's a long process because you can gather the data, but that doesn't mean that somebody at the school district knows how to look at it or knows how to use it to improve things. So we've been gathering it all along. I think that data is the flip side of student engagement. In our case, right.

When students engage, we have a piece of digital portfolio that they can have as well as can be used for instructional improvement in the district. But the how to use it for improvement is, is a longer process and we've been working on that for years.

And yes, it's in our roadmap to continue to work on it.

You'll find some districts that are highly motivated to dig into that information and see what they can do to improve and some districts that are overwhelmed with higher order problems that are not in a position to dig into that or they don't have the people with the right skill set to dig into it.

So this may be a not very fair question, but if you, because all startups are different and all markets that startups are in are different, but what do you think it takes to succeed with a startup? You know, you've had experience with a few different ones. So, so maybe it is a, you know, somewhat fair question.

I would say. You have to, you have to love what you're doing.

You know, that's a cliche, but it's totally true because it's going to be a lot of hard work unless you get your timing just right and something takes off initially and de risks it right out of the gate. My experience, more commonly, you, you have something that you're good at, you have something that you love and you embark on that.

I would also add that it should be meaningful. This might be implied by the fact that you're good at it and you love at it, but you love it.

But you should find it very meaningful because I've been in a number of Startups and they never go as you plan. I mean, for me, it's never gone as planned.

And so you find yourself in a situation where, um, it's various challenges show up and you have to kind of grit it out and, and endure it. And as long as you love what you're doing and you find meaning in it, then you know that that's a good path.

If it's not that way, then, then, you know, I think fold it up and go find something else. And I would say it's, it's pretty important to be comfortable wearing lots of hats because you're going to wear a lot of hats.

I get a kick out looking at, you know, you, you put your business model, you put your business deck together and you put your financial model together and you know, you, you bank that. You, you look at it a year later, you're like, okay, like it's, it's definitely worth doing, right? You have to have a roadmap.

But just don't get too, don't get too attached to it.

There's, there's a topic I always like to talk about with startup people, which is the, which is grit.

And if you, if you define, you know, grit in terms of words like resilience and stick to itness and drive and risk taking and, and I would also make sure to put in there courage in, in this short conversation that we've had, it's obvious that, that, that you, like every other startup founder I've ever met, has a lot of grit. But that, but no two people have the same story about where their grit comes from. And that's what I would love to know in your case.

That's a good question. I, you know, I think to some degree the work ethic side was something I grew up with.

You know, I just saw a good work ethic and it was around me within my family structure. I had a broad family structure growing up and generally speaking, people were hard workers.

So that, that is something I think I kind of inherited and felt the rewards of. I will say that the martial arts training was very challenging at times.

You know, hours and hours and hours of training going through sort of very difficult things. And the process of doing that lifts your, lifts the ceilings that you put on yourself.

I mean, I think we do this just as human beings all the time is we'll cap what we think we can do. But if you can break that cap, then good things can happen. So that training certainly helped me out.

The other thing I would say is that one of my, the A co founder of Exploros had had that grit too.

And so, you know, sometimes you need to draft off somebody else when you're slowing down a little bit or you have somebody who can serve as an example. And so he had a certain type of courage that I would draft off of and I had a certain kind of courage that he would draft off of.

And I think that's an important piece too. If you can do it. It's, it's nice to have a, a small team and not necessarily try to go it alone entirely.

Yeah, you never know when that opportunity is just going to land on their lap.

Right, right, right, right.

Well, Brad, thank you very much. This is, this is about the right, the right length episode that I, that I aim for and we covered a lot of ground.

I think this is another episode that will be very helpful to a lot of people. So thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. And, and it's, it's good that we got to do it.

You know, this, this started at a, at a breakfast at our house and I discovered what you're doing. It's fascinating. You know, you never quite know exactly who's right around you. So it's, it's been very enjoyable.

This has been excellent. And here are your toolkit takeaways. Three tools for your startup toolkit from today's conversation with Brad Heilman.

Number one, create the opening that doesn't exist. When Brad wanted to work at a specific ed tech company, there was no job for him. They were hiring a CFO and he was a freshly minted engineer.

He interviewed anyway and at the end said, I think you should create a position for me. They did. Don't wait for the perfect job posting. Go convince someone you're worth inventing a role for. Number two, draft off your co founder.

Brad says grit isn't just individual, it's collective. His co founder at Exploros had a certain type of courage Brad would lean on and Brad had a type his co founder would lean on.

When you're slowing down, you need someone who can pull you forward. Choose your co founders whose strengths cover your weak moments. Number three, break the ceilings you put on yourself.

Brad's decades of martial arts training taught him that we constantly cap what we think we can do. The process of pushing through physical and mental challenges lifts those ceilings. Find something hard that forces you past your self imposed limits.

It translates directly to what you can endure in a startup. Now go identify one ceiling you've placed on yourself and do something this week to break through it. And that is our show with Brad.

The show notes contain useful resources and links. Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designingsuccessful startups. Also please share and like us on your social media channels.

This is Jothy Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.