00:00.00

Dipesh Jain

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Tech in EdTech, a show where we discuss technology and how it impacts learning and brings digital learning to life for everyone In today's show we have Siya Raj Purohit. I've known Siya for more than six months now, I've met her at conferences, and followed her on Linkedin.

02:21.30

Dipesh Jain

Siya works with and AWS, and without further adieu, Siya, please introduce yourself, would love to know more about you.

02:28.35

Siya Raj Purohit

Yes, absolutely um, so my name is Siya and I lead the education and workforce development verticals at AWS marketplace. I'm also co-founder of Pathway Ventures an early-stage fund focused on the future of work. But overall I've worked in ed tech for about ten years now and very passionate about the entire sector.

02:47.10

Dipesh Jain

Great so see. Siya, why don't you tell us about you know how you got into education give us a little bit of background about you How you got into Edtech and education and what motivates you to keep doing this every day.

03:02.34

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so I first got into the space as an undergrad student I was studying computer engineering and really not resonating with the way classes were being taught. They were very theoretical one-size-fits-all and I saw that a lot of my friends were dropping out of the engineering program because it didn't fit them - What is now called like the pipeline problem. Um, it was 2011 and not enough resources existed online on why someone should study engineering because the tradeoff is not obvious to an 18-year-old in the bubble of the college campus and it was just a difficult problem, then I was thinking about whether I should continue with engineering or try something else. So I wanted to understand why someone should study engineering so I called emails some of the most famous people in Austin. A Nobel laureate, a supreme court attorney, professors, and authors spanning across verticals to ask them why someone should study engineering. Surprisingly, many of those people responded and they told me how important an engineering skill set is for a country's growth and how personally fulfilling engineering careers are but that the way that schools teach it deters smart students from pursuing those majors so I started writing down um these conversations and that became a book about America's job skills gap, that I published in 2012 - talking about how universities just need to do a better job of teaching like these engineering careers and that was the same year that Coursera and Udacity launched and a lot of excitement is being built up in the MOOC space. I got fixated by this idea of like fixing how engineering just to help people feel less locked out of impactful careers and that's become like the core passion of my life. So I've been early at two Silicon Valley Ed Tech startups Udacity and Springboard where I helped build different products and business lines and I've also worked in Venture Capital GSV ventures, investing in the sector. So again, very passionate about all things thinking about like education to employment pathways. But also just like learning for like job skills.

05:07.14

Dipesh Jain

Wow. I didn't know Siya, that you had a book I would love to get a copy of that. Ah, but what you just mentioned out. There was so so important. Um you know again, just a little detour I mean my background I started physical therapy, ventured to Sales. Like how do I use the skills that I learned and apply it to my work? So I'm just you know resonating with everything that you just said. So, so thank you for providing that backdrop. I think that's that's really interesting. I mean you know coming from that ah background, you know and the curiosity that you had and how do you see that manifested today, in terms of let's talk about your role at AWS. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to create? Um, if if you can just throw some light on that.

05:58.96

Siya Raj Purohit

Absolutely so AWS is like a powerhouse. The team does a lot in education everything from supporting early-stage ed tech startups through AWS Ed Start through working with big companies and hosting education conferences such as AWS Imagine. I'm the education and workforce development lead for AWS marketplace um, AWS marketplace is a software marketplace and we're doing for software buying what http://amazon.com did for all consumer products. So the software buying process is complex both for businesses and public sector organizations including school districts or especially school districts and we want to remove that friction from that process. So I'm building up these verticals and working with education companies of all sizes to enable the sales process for them to be easier. My dream is that like in the next five years we can remove a lot of hurdles in the education procurement process because there's so much cool tech coming up that is not making it into the hands of students because of the hurdles and procurement and hopefully, a company like AWS can help fix that just given the resources and reach.

07:07.51

Dipesh Jain

We do track all the RFPs that come from schools and districts right? And when we look at some of those things and you're right,  the processes can feel very overwhelming, especially for a new company who wants to start doing something.

07:24.95

Siya Raj Purohit

Um, yeah.

07:27.70

Dipesh Jain

It can feel complex, it can feel convoluted so and and and I think one of the thing that defines Amazon for me is for you just mentioned how it has changed the buying experience for a consumer. You know there's always information synergy I I know what I need to know. Ah, if the process is very simple I think the need for simplicity is definitely there in in the education buying. So so I think that's a great thing that you're solving for.

08:03.84

Siya Raj Purohit

And what you said is so spot-on like, especially for startups. This is such a struggle because sales cycles to schools can take up to 18 months and that often exceeds the runway that they have from a financial perspective especially when they're just starting out. So it deters a lot of smart entrepreneurship building in the K through 12 space because of how long that process is.

08:25.76

Dipesh Jain

Right? I mean that is another part to the puzzle as well is just you know, um the adoption of products. But again there are you know first is procurement and then adoption of the products. Let's go a little bit more detail into the procurement piece. The process is complex. It is. Can you define some key or highlight some key ah parts of that complexity. What are the key things that you've seen that make that process complex and cumbersome?

08:57.33

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so there are 2 big reasons. But before that, I think at a high level the procurement process. Um for k through 12 has been put in place for the safety of students. The term “safety” has almost become a cover that's preventing useful tech from reaching the right students. So I see it almost as like the own personal battle of why I got into ed-tech that tech in the classroom right now is one-size-fits-all. Because there's no way for teachers and school districts to make like to have procurement be easy enough that they can use different types of tools for different learning styles in the classroom and ed-tech products themselves are not diverse enough that they can cater to all of these different learning styles. Um yet. So I think that is like why it's a problem but very specifically there are 2 things that make procurement difficult in k through 12. The first one is that every state has different rules and how education solutions can be purchased so that's a lot of ambiguity in the process. Obviously for companies looking to sell. So as you mentioned, they have to complete different RFP processes for each state and school district making that whole process very difficult to scale and taking away resources from innovation and outcomes at these companies. Because you need so much staff to just be able to help navigate this as well as like actually make like these RFPs happen and of course you hire consultants and like basically the whole process becomes cumbersome and then the second piece is about who makes the decision and what information they have. Um, I feel like there's that gap in terms of K-12 buyers need to better understand the features quality and reviews of each given software product. But at many schools the school's governing board members determine which software the school should acquire typically based on personal experiences that their teachers, admins, and parents have had so the information is limited in terms of discovering new products or helping them get through the screening process. We often hear stories and people are like oh my parents use Blackboard. So we're using Blackboard now because now parents enter the school board. So I think things like that in terms of information discovery and then ease of policy will help make this easier.

11:13.29

Dipesh Jain

Right? There's a lot to unpack over there. Ah, but you know yes in fact, just man looking at those adoption cycles looking at those ah RFPs itself as I said for a smaller business. You know I'll just give you an example Siya those this one particular tool that I saw what I found was so relevant what it does is you have all these video lectures recorded in your LMS, this uses AI and ML to search for a term that is there in one of those videos. So, because nobody has time to go through hundreds of video lectures. But let's say you want to so search about force or you know Newton's law of motion in one of those videos you can just type it and it will show the videos that have it. It's such a good I mean I found that that was a pretty useful tool. But it's a small startup now for them, the biggest challenge is how do I test it out. How do I sell it? It's just a maze of problems.

12:10.59

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, absolutely and again feature adoption is even trickier like in terms of will they be bundled with something else? Will they try to sell independently? Like very tricky to get this kind of tool plugged into the existing maze in K-12 buying.

12:28.16

Dipesh Jain

Yes, now. So we've we heard the problems, I think I think most of most of the orders if not all will agree with that issue, so tell me a little bit about how what is your goal and how are you and AWS I mean when I say you also means AWS trying to solve some of those challenges? Um, because it requires it's not as it's sort of a simple problem. It will require solutions on the supply side and the demand side. So how are you trying to navigate that?

12:56.52

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so basically um, as I mentioned AWS marketplace is a marketplace for software products. So what we're doing is um, taking out some of the hurdles in the procurement process and using like I guess. Ah, both tech as well as like our sales team to kind of make that process easier. So how it works is basically very similar to the dot com experience for consumer products. You can navigate the different solutions that are available on marketplace, identify and buy off-the-shelf in terms of the types of products that you need. But then you can also have custom private offers which are custom like negotiated terms between the buyer and seller and that transaction can also happen through marketplace. So basically marketplace wants to increase speed, enable easier governance, because AWS builds the customer. And takes and like basically disperses the payments to sellers and um, just makes that experience much easier. Kind of like an app store experience almost but for school districts and large-scale customers. So right now large ed tech companies such as Coursera, Pluralsight, Udacity, Udemy, and Blackboard - two of these kind of companies are already selling on marketplace and the goal is to really help grow that to enable K-12 school districts and enterprise buyers to have a variety of options and then also to be able to go through that purchasing process. Much more quickly in a matter of days instead of the months that it typically takes.

14:27.40

Dipesh Jain

Right? It just does seem like a smooth, smoother process and especially for somebody, as I said, for somebody, it brings in the aspect of Access in place. Um, there is you know one of the things that I because this is ah RFP driven, there are so many holes there. There can also be information asymmetry which is another big problem. So I think having kind of a marketplace helps. Now a question, so so you mentioned about the tool side. What about the buyers right? How do you plan to get the buyers on board in terms of changing some of those ways of procuring tools?

15:17.50

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so um, as far as like the AWS model itself goes we have different types of account managers covering every type of AWS Customer and those account managers help enable the customer to purchase from AWS. So right now the majority of AWS buyers, ah sorry AWS marketplace buyers are existing AWS customers. We have about 325,000 different organizations purchasing from marketplace but that's growing really quickly. And then as far as bringing K-12 school districts on, what's been interesting, is that we've seen a lot of these school districts almost leapfrog other AWS technology and start using marketplace as their first point of interaction with AWS. And this is huge because I guess these school districts are also fed up of like the process it takes them to buy like different software. And see marketplace is an easier way so we have different sales teams focused entirely on school districts bringing them online helping them identify the best products for them and also helping track those outcomes and see like what makes sense year over year for their student base.

16:28.96

Dipesh Jain

And that's very fascinating. Um, that is amazing to be very honest that being able to do that would just really make that process simpler. That's very helpful Siya and and the scale that AWS has, I think I'm guessing that it can also make that access easier. So you know how can AWS make that access easier. How can it improve affordability, if you want to talk a little bit about that? How do you plan to leverage the scale that you have to be able to make it easier for everyone?

17:13.00

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so I'll share my personal dream right now again like a year into building this up and of course the market will kind of tell us where to go from here but the personal dream is to have like every ed tech company sell through AWS Marketplace and enable schools to have like that kind of optionality and also just like the speed of being able to acquire. We should take less resources in the middle procurement process and make that just much faster. Um, and then also add in things such as like reviews and outcomes. So, I don't understand why we can't do reviews like the app store does for apps for all of these education products enabling us to be able to collect that data from teachers and classrooms, bubble that up more easily to school districts, and then actually use that to impact how ed tech companies build. Right? So I think that is something that we'd love to explore as well like in terms of getting deeper into reviews - making buying easier step 1, um step 2 is just like growth in terms of bringing more school districts on bringing like enabling more of these transactions, and then step 3 is thinking about these like reviews and outcomes and what that means for how education products um are assessed essentially. So and then simultaneously also actually think a lot about education policy and how we can help rewrite some of that to take ah take into account some of these technology advancements that enable education to be like updated so much more frequently than it was like when I was going to school when we had like Blackboard for 12 years or in structure for 4 years or any of those kind of products.

18:48.57

Dipesh Jain

Right? on the review piece and getting teachers, because at the end of the day, you want to understand from the users how were their experiences and whether a particular product eases their burden or adds to their burden. Um, and I think that that review process is again the kind of adds to that information symmetry piece of it. I want to know how others are feeling before I about this product before I go and buy that. So I think getting some sort of scale to that entire review because I know reviews do exist now but getting that scale to that review process will help buyers make a better choice.

19:33.80

Siya Raj Purohit

Absolutely And then also this kind of central platform also opens up like ah like more um, direct feedback. So like it would be amazing like of course companies collect this independently but their customers. But what if we had like that kind of information across the board on how teachers like um use a product or what features they request or like basically a call for startups coming from teachers. Like all of this would be possible once we get more like standardized reviews and data on these products and their performance.

20:06.97

Dipesh Jain

And that's the other piece that I wanted to like double click on the reviews and outcomes. Outcomes is a big thing in learning and Ed Tech because at the end of the day education does have like for some it is career readiness, upskilling, jobs. So, if there's a way we can get outcomes using some of these advancements I think that will be a huge win for everyone. Ah, how do we track those like okay this tool the technology or the Pedagogy - How did it help in getting to that outcome I think those so that was other piece that I wanted to focus on from what you just said? 

20:56.80

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, and honestly the solution might be something like outcomes-based pricing being able to actually measure usage of products and then actually seeing like whatever results based on those pieces and then pricing it accordingly. Something like that could be very unique for education right now, obviously, there's like this almost chicken and egg problem in terms of that um school districts and Ed tech companies almost blame each other for like lack of outcomes or lack of visibility there. Ed tech products say the school districts aren't using the tools sufficiently enough to showcase those outcomes and school districts say that the education products are not enabling those outcomes. So just having more visibility and perhaps changing the pricing structure to enable like that usage-based model could be interesting as Well. Instead of like the like license-based like butts and seats as they call it. Um, format.

21:52.93

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, yeah. No I think I think those are some great ideas Siya from what you do at AWS,  Siya, you've been in at tech for a while very passionate about education. You're also an investor so edtech has changed a lot in the last especially since covid obviously but over the last let's say 5-10 years. If someone is to break into edtech space today, you as an investor or as an operator, what is some of the advice that you would give them?

22:26.23

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, it's actually been fascinating like it's an incredible time to be in ed-tech um, in 2019, like pre-pandemic, I wrote a blog post about how the time will come when people stop seeing ed-tech as a social impact category. And see that we're actually 1 of the most important and profitable sectors because we help people earn a living which is like crucial, is recession proof, It's like very essential to like how society works and I think that time is here like edtech obviously saw significant growth during the pandemic. And honestly even given or maybe like especially given that uncertainty in the market. These solutions are very much needed. So I think it's a great time to get into ed tech either in the workforce development category to like help people upskill for new jobs, learn employable skills or have the communities around them to support that growth. Or in K-12 like given how savvy like young learners are these days we're going to need to see those solutions on education content student assessments like out-of-school activities and the school admin and communication stuff. So basically across the board edtech companies are hiring. Um, AWS has 40 to 50 open roles in ed tech globally right now. So obviously they check that out as well, for anyone who's looking to break into the sector. Um, but I guess as far as advice goes. Um I guess 2 different pieces of advice one is for teachers transitioning and the others for like operators. Um, so for teachers themselves in the past couple months I've gotten like none of teachers reach out about like wanting to transition to ed tech. Um, and I think that like the best advice for them is to find companies that work closely with teachers and would benefit from that perspective. So K-12 companies like um like Clever, Newsela, Outschool are very teacher-centric and so find a way to share that like classroom experience to influence the operations growth or product at those companies. So like, come at it very much from like this is what I saw in the classroom. These are the types of ways that we can reach other people who are who do the job that I used to do and how we can help either build or grow into that space. And then um for operators, transitioning into edtech, basically, of course, they'll transition like the functional capacity of their role but it's super important to highlight that passion for education I think what makes ed-tech so cool is that the sector is still small enough that that passion for the product really matters. Um, like a decade ago at Udacity I remember seeing my colleagues and they were all like children of teachers or like passionate educators and they've all gone on to build such amazing things in the sector. So I think that mission orientation piece is still like critical to the DNA of Edtech companies. And like showcasing that is super important in order to like break into ed tech now.

25:27.10

Dipesh Jain

Right? And just I mean I work in a company which has ed tech in its name right? So I remember like before Covid um not a lot of people would understand and I'm talking about back home in India a lot of my folks. Okay, you know, but after covid when I said that I work in an ed tech company. Everybody knew not only did they knew they let go this is great. That is you work in this. You know my son or my daughter uses this tool. So I think the awareness has

leapfrogged a lot. The second thing is I read an article, I think a few months back by Reach Capital if I'm not mistaken. It spoke about every company is going to be an ed tech company and really resonated with me because even corporate like you are always upskilling. You know you're always learning so if you go by that context. Um, every company is an ed tech company. So yes I just wanted to highlight that and this is like really an exciting time to be in the space. and you know for your personal information diet like what do you read? How do you get your Ed Tech news? Who were the people you follow?

26:46.74

Siya Raj Purohit

Yeah, so 3 um, awesome sources that I read every week, um one is Matthew Tower who runs a great newsletter and is a close friend. The second is Ryan Craig from Achieve Partners. I really appreciate his thoughts in the sector he has been in the space for like a long time now and his perspective is very valuable and then the third is probably the writer of the post you mentioned about every company being an ed tech company Tony Wan from Reach Capital. So highly recommend those 3.

27:19.00

Dipesh Jain

And yeah, I have subscribed to Reach Capital's blogs, I obviously get Matthew Towers newsletters every Sunday, I think they are amazing. I would definitely look out for the other source that you mentioned.This is very helpful. Last but not the least you.What are you learning these days?

27:48.17

Siya Raj Purohit

Um, yeah, I'm actually trying to get smarter about education policy right now and there's obviously so much to unpack in that space. Um, but trying to understand more about like how the US department of education fits into like the ed-tech sector almost and how like they collaborate with like um, the different um school districts and like how they think through policy as well. So I'm a big fan of what Schmidt Futures is doing and people like Marguriete there who are like thinking about education policy and how it impacts like ed tech. Um, so just trying to get smarter about that space right now.

28:28.87

Dipesh Jain

Great, and you know, um, one of the things about that is education policies and labor policies and all of these areas have become so intermingled. Especially when you look at the Workforce Readiness piece of it. So I think that policy piece is and the way it is changing. It's definitely something very exciting I'm particularly very excited about I read some of those papers that are published ah by the Department of Ed. Siya, thank you so much for joining the show. It was a pleasure having you um, before we wrap up. Is there anything that you'd like to add plug um, feel free to this is your time your space.

00:39.40

Siya Raj Purohit

Um, amazing. Um, yeah, thanks again for having me. Um I'm really like trying to dive deep into education procurement. So if anyone is building cool things in the space or thinking about the policy piece behind that I'd love to get in touch. Um, please reach out over Linkedin and it'd be amazing to connect. Thanks so much.

00:59.90

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, that thank you so much and for audience, I'll have Siya’s Linkedin and we'll have all the links that she's mentioned in the show notes so feel free to check them out and do connect with Siya - She has some amazing content on Linkedin. Thanks Siya, I really appreciate you coming on the show have a good one.