The Power of Always Learning: What it takes to scale a company in the ed-tech space

This week, Sumeru Co-founder and Managing Director Sanjeet Mitra, guest-hosts a conversation with two prominent ed-tech leaders: Advait Shinde, CEO and Founder of GoGuardian, and Nick Hernandez, CEO and Founder of 360Learning.

Intro to Sumeru Scaling X Podcast

Mark: (00:00:30)
Hello and welcome to Sumeru Scaling X, the podcast that’s all about growth. Here on Scaling X, we dig deep into life’s most essential questions, particularly this one. How do you scale a growth stage company without losing its soul? We have a very special format today, a guest host, in fact, Sumeru co-founder in Managing Director, Sanjeet Mitra.

Sanjeet leads Sumeru’s EdTech investment team, which has done five platform and add on investments in the past few years.

One more thing about Sanjeet, when he was in college, Sanjeet coached debate (00:01:00) teams at two different high schools in the Bay Area. So given that experience, we know he’ll be an excellent host. Are you up for the task today, Sanjeet?

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:01:30)

Thanks Mark. I’ve been told I was more articulate in high school than I am now, but I will definitely try my best. Today we have a really special format where we’ve got two of great EdTech leaders to talk more about how you scale learning and for us at Sumeru, learning is a very important paradigm. And it’s actually in fact, something that we think is inextricably linked to growth. You can’t grow if you don’t learn.

But I think that one of the really fascinating things in being in growth and the types of companies we talk to is the ability to learn, collaborate, and bring together creative techniques to scale companies.

With that, we’re actually going to spend a good chunk of time talking about learning itself and how learning applies to companies. I’ll ask Advait and Nick to introduce themselves. So maybe first, without further ado, Advait Shinde, co-founder and CEO of GoGuardian.

Meet Advait from GoGuardian

Advait Shinde: (00:02:00)

Hey, great to be here. Thanks so much for having us on the show. My name is Advait, I’m the founder CEO of GoGuardian. We’ve been working on GoGuardian for about eight years now. For those of you who are unfamiliar, GoGuardian is a K-12 technology company where we focus on building tools that help enable teachers and educators to really leverage the power of technology to drive incredible engagement and ultimately outcomes in the classroom.

We’re serving about half of all K-12 (00:02:30) learners in the country today, in the US today. And we’ve certainly seen some phenomenal growth over the last several years.

I’ve always been passionate about learning and education and consider myself to be a lifelong learner. Before this, I was a software engineer at Google and before that I grew up in the LA area, went to UCLA to study computer science. Thrilled to be here.

Sanjeet Mitra:

Thanks so much for joining us today, Advait. Over to Nick.

Meet Nick from 360Learning

Nick: (00:03:00)

Hey, thanks for having me here, it’s awesome to be with you. So I’m Nick, I’m the CEO of 360Learning. We’ve been doing this for eight years now. We’re offering companies a learning platform, an LMS. And our angle is that we promote collaborative learning. The insight was most of the platforms in the corporate space are extremely top down and the learning experience feels very lonely.

We thought (00:03:30) changing that would make, it was not just a nice to have to change that, it would completely change the whole experience. And the outcome of that experience was to be doing it with peers and to be learning from and with peers.

I’m from Paris and before that from South America, my parents immigrated in Paris and we’re expanding the business in the US right now, most of all, that’s (00:04:00) where we’re growing the most. Well, and I’m thrilled to be with you too.

How did you get immersed in education?

Sanjeet Mitra:

Thanks Nick and thanks Advait, two of the very best in EdTech and two of the best in SaaS, in my opinion. Maybe we can just start with personal history with education. Maybe I’ll start with mine for a second. I was fortunate enough to go to some of the best public schools in the country, growing up in the Bay Area.

And as I went through that system, I had really, really high quality teachers. And this was well before a time (00:04:30) when digital education was a thing, I think we had a set of not laptops, actually in fact, desktops in a laboratory where we played games like Spellevator and Oregon Trail.

But coming back to how it’s kind of impacted me and how I’ve thought about education technology is today we have a really interesting opportunity in front of us to use digital tools to promote education, to promote learning and that learning and development, in my opinion, is critical to scaling companies, to scaling society. (00:05:00)

Maybe from each of your vantage points, how did you get immersed in education? How did you think about what needed to be changed and what prompted you to be sitting here today?

Advait Shinde: (00:05:30)

So I also had the privilege of learning in a public school that was absolutely incredible by all accounts in the Southern California area, shout out Oak Park Unified School District. And despite the fact that the school was amazing in terms of test scores, graduation rates, and so on, I think my experience in the classroom was very similar to perhaps how many have experienced education, which is to say kind of disengaging. I was pretty frustrated about the whole concept of studying just for the sake of getting good grades or passing a test.

I grew up right around the time when the internet was starting to become a thing, like the very early days of the internet. And I quickly found myself online at home finding amazing (00:06:00) communities, amazing resources, and I learned how to program online.

So this set of learning experiences that I was having online when juxtaposed to my K-12 experience was disengaging, that gap was so large that ultimately I think it resulted in the potential and motivation to want to start GoGuardian several years later.

And the ultimate observation that we had when we started the company was that as co-founders, we had these incredible learning experiences (00:06:30) online, we just wanted to scale those out to allow all learners worldwide to find the same sense of joy and wonder and excitement as it relates to learning, as opposed to the sort of frustration and seeming arbitrariness of typical K-12 experiences.

And so that was the original impetus really in wanting to start the company. And I think we are continuing on that journey and really, it just feels like we are just getting started in terms of truly unleashing (00:07:00) the wondrous potential of learning in K-12.

Sanjeet Mitra:

Maybe same question back to Nick. What gave you the foresight to think about building 360Learning and changing the game and in corporate training?

Nick: (00:07:30)

Well, so as I said, first, my parents, they immigrated in France and they were given a tuition to study in France. So they were paid for everything, they come from modest backgrounds. And they met at a university residence for South American students. Six months later, my mother’s pregnant and there I was born in that room in the university residence. So I was born in that space of education.

They really, I guess, because learning had been a game changer for them in their life, going from where they were to Paris and a master degree and everything that they could achieve then, they really encouraged us or nudged (00:08:00) us, me and my sister, to study. And I got competitive with that. I really enjoyed all that university, school, college, all of it, I loved it. That was my experience. I’m not saying it’s the best, but that’s how I lived through that.

And then what happened is I did computer science at university. And at the same time, I studied another curriculum of philosophy in a university that was offering (00:08:30) a distance learning program.

I studied a French author called Michel Foucault. And the insight from Michel Foucault was probably the insight of my life. That somehow truth is a social construct. And that really, I was studying science, hard science. And at the same time, reading this that, hey, you know what? Scientifics, when they have a new theorem, they vote and they vote to decide (00:09:00) if it’s true or if it’s not.

And very often the vote is not very clear, it’s mostly 70% say A and 30% say B. And what happens next is that the 30% who are saying B are building rockets, while the 70% are not building anything.

And because they could build a rocket that can fuel their theory, they can expand economically and they will expand their theory too, and that becomes the truth. I thought the (00:09:30) top down truth is always to be challenged.

Not that you can create your own truth in any situation, you need to be consistent with the framework, but you can create the framework and that’s going to happen between peers. The breakthrough are going to be bottom up and every revolution, every evolution, every new thing is going to be brought against some form of consensus. And later it’s going to be the new consensus, but that’s only to be disrupted again.

(00:10:00)And I guess that was the insight, obviously then I was in a bank and they gave me this eLearning compliance, eLearning experience that was terrible. And so I quit it to create 360Learning, but I believe the real insight was that history is built on and forever, has been forever built from peers and not from the top.

What 360Learning does and how that helps scale learning?

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:10:30)
So Nick, maybe you can give us a little bit more background and I’ll come back to Advait in the same vein on what 360Learning actually does and how that helps scale learning.

Nick: (00:11:00)

So we are an LMS, we cover the usual use cases like onboarding, sales enablement, compliance. What we’re really excited about is basically we’ve made all that learning experience bottom up and peer based from Quad’s sourcing learning needs. So listening to the workforce, what do people need to perform better?

To them, finding the right experts, because there is someone in the company who knows how to achieve that. So we find the expert, either we crowdsource the expert, either we leverage AI and all the data we have to say, hey, that person might be knowledgeable to then helping the L&D team making sure that expert is going to ship a relevant learning experience.

And then when that experience is delivered, we have developed a lot (00:11:30) of workflows for learners to engage with that experience. And for instance, one major problem with this learning platform is that most of the content is obsolete, but we let learners suggest an update and boom, the crowd is fixing the problem.

And so doing that, really our goal is to take people who are learners, who can be passive learners to become (00:12:00) active authors who share what they have to share. And, well, we’re really excited because we believe there is a lot we can do here. There is a lot of space to grow and to bring performance to companies at a moment where they really need while upskilling is becoming the main bottleneck for most of the economy.

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:12:30)

So let’s come back to that in a moment, but basically just replaying what you said and probably less articulate terms. Always be learning at the company level, take it to the bottom up, give it back to the company, the employees and let them set their own learning journey strategically.

What GoGuardian does and how that helps scale learning?

Sanjeet Mitra: What is GoGuardian doing and how does that impact folks’ K-12 journey? And what’s the role of the teacher and now what is the teacher doing with GoGuardian to drive the student to their best version of themselves?

Advait Shinde: (00:13:00)

When we started the company, we were really outsiders, meaning we didn’t have education backgrounds, we didn’t understand the challenges that teachers face in the actual classroom. And instead, we were talking about things like using all of the data that’s emerging from the use of these digital tools to really understand how learning works to be in a position to really optimize it. And so we started to talk to educators about these ideas and they said, look, this data and machine learning stuff you guys are talking about is great and all, but I’m having trouble keeping my kids from watching Netflix (00:13:30) in class.

And that was really striking to us because it showed that there was a real gap in understanding, meaning all outsiders, whether it’s parents or local legislators or us as technologists were sort of viewing technology as this obvious next step in the K-12 world whereas real teachers who are responsible for implementing that technology in the classroom to drive learning outcomes were actually incredibly pessimistic about (00:14:00) that technology.

They felt that they didn’t have control, they didn’t have any visibility in what students were doing, kids were constantly playing games and so on.

And so we had to take a huge step back as a company and say, look, if these technology adoption challenges aren’t addressed, then basically all of the upside potential of what technology can do in a learning environment would basically be lost. And really of all of the stakeholders, teachers first and foremost should be the strongest advocates of technology. (00:14:30) And there was a lot of work that needed to be done to get teachers to that point.

And so we basically focused for the first several years of the business on that problem. And it basically was broken down into two sub problems. So first is how do you make sure students are having safe experiences online? Because if you give the open internet to a second grader, you can imagine that, while there’s a lot of upside potential of the internet, there’s also a lot of harm that can happen to that (00:15:00) student. So safety needs to be solved first and foremost.

And then secondly, how do you give educators more in a real time context, visibility and control over their devices? So how do you see what students are looking at and how do you turn the devices into almost like an extension of the teacher’s intention that feels organic and natural and easy from the perspective of the teacher, as opposed to this sort of foreign object that’s intruding in the classroom that creates a wall between the student and the teacher? Which is (00:15:30) honestly how it was being and perceived on in the early days.

And so our first two products focused on these problems, safety, and let’s call it productivity. And really from day one, we’ve been oriented directly to serve teachers. And I think that while technology certainly has the potential of helping teachers, it takes like a overt focus on making sure that we understand the role of the teacher, understand the (00:16:00) challenges that they face day-to-day and really intentionally designing solutions that help the teacher, that sort of intention is required in order to truly move the needle in helping the teacher day-to-day. And that I think has been a core focus of ours from the beginning.

Student Learning and Teacher Loop

Sanjeet Mitra:

As you fast forward to today, what are you actually doing in terms of the student learning and teacher loop and what does it mean for education in the future in the classroom?

Advait Shinde: (00:16:30)

So I think if we talk about these first two sub problems of safety and productivity, at this point in 2022, we feel that those are basically addressed. You can confidently give technology to teachers and students, young students, and make sure that that experience is positive.

And now you start to get into the much more interesting, exciting problems in K-12 learning, which is to say really understanding, like if you think about the actual student learning journey, (00:17:00) you can imagine that there’s so much information to be gleaned from observing how the student actually learns.

So for example, what videos are they watching? What teaching techniques are being used in the classroom? What is their level of mastery in relation to the set of standards or skills that the teacher is trying to drive? And all of that data can be delivered to the teacher in a way that really makes the teacher’s life (00:17:30) easier, so they can understand where the students are at in terms of mastery and really start to almost like hone in on differentiated experiences for each of the students.

Today, that idea of creating differentiated learning experiences is actually super challenging if you’re limited in doing it in a manual way. And I think tools like GoGuardian can very much drive a lot more (00:18:00) visibility into how things are actually unfolding in terms of learning experiences and create actionable insights for teachers to increase engagement and ultimately drive learning outcomes more effectively. I think that that is almost like the holy grail problem of K-12 education.

Like how do you understand how everything works to optimize it? And I think that while we were certainly eager to focus on this problem (00:18:30) on day one, we realized that there were much more critical problems around safety and productivity that needed to be addressed first before we could truly get to these more open ended ones. And so it really feels like we’re just getting started on this new front. And I guess there’s going to be a lot more to say as we continue to execute here.

Where We Are On the EdTech Journey

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:19:00)

And last question on this topic Advait, then I’ll kick it over to Nick to talk about the corporate side. Where are we on the EdTech journey in terms of using the power of EdTech to scale learning in the classroom on a one to 10?

Advait Shinde: (00:19:30)

It seems like the very, very beginning, let’s say it’s two out of 10, if 10 is the ultimate potential here. It’s almost the equivalent of when electricity first started to become a mainstream thing, people started to obviously kind of imagine what it could represent, but nobody really truly fathomed the degree to which electricity is sort of embedded in society and taken for granted and so on.

Every single technology revolution, whether it’s the internet or the mobile revolution or AI has resulted in these massive structural shifts in terms of just how we see the world societally speaking. And I think EdTech or education in general is very much going through that journey right now. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s like a two out of 10 in terms of just getting started.

Sanjeet Mitra:

Thanks, Advait. And I think I know Nick’s answer, but I have to ask him the question, where are we on a corporate learning basis from one to 10?

Nick: (00:20:00)

We didn’t really start.

Sanjeet Mitra:

So is that a zero?

Nick:

0.5, let’s say.

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:20:30)

Got it. So with that, I mean, with what Advait just described, a lot of the same problems actually exist in a corporate learning environment, then you actually have to compete with the fact that people aren’t there necessary to focus on learning.

They still might be watching Bridgeton on their devices, they may still be focusing on other things, what’s the task and how’s the task been amplified for corporate teachers, HR learning and development leaders at companies?

Like how do we scale learning in corporations and what does that mean for us as a society in the next five to 10 years?

How to Scale Learning in Corporations

Nick: (00:21:00)

Well, so what we’re seeing right now in a lot of companies. I was talking with some folks at BCG and McKinsey. They’re telling me that a lot of their missions right now include this is it’s always kind of the same story. You have an industry, it’s being disrupted. You can think of the car industry for instance.

And what’s happening is well, the CEO just said on stage that by 2025 we’ll only be producing in electric cars and there’ll need to be self-driving cars also. And we’re going to make all the production line green by the way.

And so now you have 20,000 engineers, but they know how to produce a thermic car. And now you need 20,000 engineers that are able to produce an electric car. So you have that massive problem, by the way, you want also that car to be self-driving, (00:21:30) so you need to become a software company and to hire AI engineers, but they’ve all been hired already.

Well, at the same time, you have some jobs that are being automated, right? They’re becoming obsolete and it’s going so fast. We don’t realized that, but like three years ago on that front, people were training, reskilling people into a web developer role. (00:22:00)

And now we’re saying that with no-code, actually the web developer job has become orange, it’s tag as major risk of automation in the short term. So now you’re looking at these people you’re just reskilled and you need to reskill them again into something else. So that’s going to be like that every couple of years.

So for all these companies, we have a CEO who knows what needs to be done, but doesn’t have the right people and needs to be reskilling (00:22:30) these people and reskilling them again. I believe there was an old way of doing that that is kind of the standard way, which is to map the skills we have today. And how do I add to the ones of today, the skills for tomorrow? But that takes two years and after, you’re not even done doing that work, that it’s already outdated. So it’s hardly yielding the results.

I believe what we’re seeing (00:23:00) is another approach, high level kind of build what I would call a collaborative learning culture. Having the right, these people who are passionated, not about thermic car, but about building cars. And they already know about building an electric car because they have learned that by themselves, they’ve kept themselves informed.

And the good news is that the workforce, actually the best people in the workforce, they are not expecting (00:23:30) anymore, the company to offer them a 10 year career plan, they don’t care. They want an adventure, they want learning opportunities and they want marketable achievements. Like what are we building that I can market in the very short term? So I am liquid, I can move. And that’s a different mindset, I believe for companies, but we see a lot of them making that shift.

Is EdTech the true path to success?

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:24:00)

So maybe that’s a good point to focus a little bit on the student. I mean, we’re seeing terms like in the K-12 world, the laptop is now the digital pencil. We’re saying things like education has been the great equalizer. Is that still correct? And is EdTech the true path to success and bonafide equity in terms of education and learning?

Advait Shinde: (00:24:30)

So there’s like a short term view here and a long term view here. If you look at all the data that’s resulted from the consequences of the shift towards remote learning, it’s clear that inequity has been exacerbated as a consequence of the shift. And I think a lot of people are perhaps pessimistic about digital learning in this context, which I think is perhaps a little bit shortsighted.

At GoGuardian, we say this sort of statement a lot internally, and it’s this idea that education is the single highest point of leverage we have in society to just improve anything really. And if you truly (00:25:00) unleash the educational potential of a whole generation, the rippling impact of those people on society, it is sort of insane truly. And I think in a similar context, education is also the single highest point of leverage we have in moving the needle on inequity.

I think if you can truly understand where all learners are at and really what kinds of learning experiences can help all learners (00:25:30) in all learning contexts at all levels, the kinds of economic and social mobilization that you’re going to be able to drive as a result of unleashing that educational potential are also really off the charts.

And that motive of thinking about education as like a social mobilizer is something that’s really exciting and really empowering to us. And once more in terms of your previous question, in terms of how [00:26:00] far along are we, very similarly, I think it’s like a two out of 10 in terms of the degree to which technology is acting as this mobilizer, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have the potential, and that’s something that we’re squarely aiming towards.

What Does Education Look Like in 2040?

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:26:30)

Maybe with that, we can ask you the question, what does education look like in 2040? So is it NFTs instead of degrees? Is it going to be droids and drones looking over your shoulder for proctoring tests? What does it look like in your mind in 20 years?

Advait Shinde:

I think it’s so hard to answer these questions, obviously, right? It’s such a long time away, but I could probably describe some qualities of what that experience might be like. I think the first thing that comes to mind is this idea that the internet is such a amazing ecosystem of content and experiences.

And today it’s a (00:27:00) really hard problem of figuring how to deliver the internet to students in a way that’s actually productive that’s aligned with the intention of teachers and so on.

And so I hope that by 2040, that that problem will certainly be solved and we’re leveraging the fullest potential of the internet to engage students in the unique ways that each individual student should be engaged based on their individuality.

And I hope that the concept of (00:27:30) assessment doesn’t feel like a foreign thing. And instead, we’re observing learning experiences in a much more transparent way to discern whether they’re working or not, as opposed to artificially injecting these assessments in order to measure.

And I think the combination of these two things, the improvement of measurement by virtue of transparent observation paired with the unleashing of the entire internet is going to naturally result in massively more engagement and ultimately in (00:28:00) improvement in learning outcomes. And so that’s a world that I’m deeply looking forward to. I can’t wait to learn in an ecosystem like this.

Sanjeet Mitra:

A lot more substantive answer than my NFTs question, so thank you Advait for that. Maybe over to you, Nick, how do you think about it in terms of what it all looks like in 2040?

Nick: (00:28:30)

I have to note that you changed the question, because last time you asked, you asked me about 2030, but now we’re in 2040. So we have to acknowledge that and I have to change my answer.

Sanjeet Mitra:

I wanted you to always be learning in the answer. So I was curious to see what you’d say 10 years out.

Nick: (00:29:00)

You’re right. You’re right, always more ambition. Listen, I don’t know. Look, let’s look at, we can look at knowledge. So knowledge, there is that Neuralink project of Elon Musk. If that works, I mean, there is a whole, you can… If you could have some kind of memory plug to Wikipedia, and as Elon Musk says, the problem is the speed of the interface, the computer human interface is too slow.

We’re reading the way we download the data from the computer to our brain is too slow. If you resolve that, I don’t see any technical, practical reason why that wouldn’t be resolved. 2040 probably is more or less the moment. (00:29:30) I guess that’s going to change the way we approach knowledge.

And I’m thinking about that because I see that they’re trying to build an AGI, you know how they train these AI algorithm is by, like I’m going to show the algorithm Wikipedia, or I’m going to show the algorithm two billion hours of driving, and he’s going to learn.

They’re going to learn, it’s going to learn. I don’t think if I show my kids two billion hours of driving he’s going to (00:30:00) become smart or conscious of himself. And so what’s the business model of AI for learning? It’s the question, a very smart AI like a human. And you ask that question to people and the best they can tell you is that it should be a personal advisor, which is kind of it’s puzzling to me that there are actually no better idea.

If I can tell you I build something as smart, as a fast learner as a human, the best (00:30:30) idea people have to employ that person is to make that person a consultant. So maybe I believe by 2040, you’ll have your personal trainer under the form of an AI.

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:31:00)

Very interesting. And I’ll conclude with one last question, just bringing you back to today and what you see as the next several years, both of you have built really amazing stories and changed the game in education technology.

We know there’s thousands of EdTech companies, it’s hard to get to five million of revenue, it’s hard to get to 10, GoGuardian is over a hundred, Nick is almost at 50 at 360 Learning.

How Do You Keep Learning?

Sanjeet Mitra: How do you keep yourself learning? How do you keep scaling learning for yourself? How do you keep focused on it? And how do you keep your teams and company learning and employ some of the very virtues we talked about in scaling your companies?

Advait Shinde: (00:31:30)

I think personally speaking, I spend at least three, if not four hours a day, just focused on learning, whether it’s like reading or learning from YouTube, that kind of I think just intention and focus, I think is necessary.

I think the cool part here is that it doesn’t feel like a frustrating study for the test kind of experience because of how open-ended and limitless it is on the internet. And in part, that’s a huge (00:32:00) motivation of what we’re trying to do in terms of scaling learning experiences for K-12 students.

In terms of how to optimize for learning culturally speaking, I think when you talk about the inherent joy and wonder associated with learning, I think it’s possible to connect with every single human at this level. Like every single human has had these experiences that are really fascinating, joyful, exciting, (00:32:30) flow oriented.

The degree to which you can pull people into thinking about their own work in that way and creating structures to allow them to focus on learning within the context of their day to day work. As well as talk about learning in a cultural like open context, as well as push managers to drive intentional learning plans for (00:33:00) people, you can just create this like pervasive culture where learning is the most important thing, both in terms of our focus externally, as well as internally.

And I think that that mirror of how we see learning for students, as well as learning for ourselves internally is one in the same in terms of the inherent joy of learning has been critical in terms of how we’ve established our culture at GoGuardian.

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:33:30)

Super interesting. I think I need to cancel three to four hours of Zoom meetings a day to try to pursue something similar, but I will comment that in thinking about learning and innovation and wonder, I’ll quote one of my favorite mantras from Sesame Street, I wonder what if let’s try.

Why Innovation and Growth Starts with Learning

I mean, I think that’s a summary that says, if you want to innovate, if you want to grow, you need to learn and you need to be open and creative in how you approach that. And that’s critical. And maybe Nick in the same vein, why don’t you wrap up with your thoughts in that and give us your thoughts about how you keep the learning going at a learning (00:34:00) company focused on corporate learning?

Nick:

Well, I think curiosity is a habit. And the more you cultivate it. I know my wife keeps telling me sometimes I get this, not obsession, but there is a topic I’m curious about. And then it can be two days, can take one month.

I’m going to keep digging and reading stuff and talking about it a lot and being passionated and allowing yourself to have that kind (00:34:30) of like a kid, looking at things like you were a kid, allowing yourself some time and curiosity to do that and to look at things just because you’re not going to do anything with it, but it’s just passionating.

And I think the other aspect is cultivating that paranoia that people are not giving you the feedback. And (00:35:00) I think I’m hiring a chief of staff right now, and I think that’s the number one mission is get me the feedback, get me what people don’t know how to tell me, the blind spots.

Because when you look at a lot of people, you can see they have blind spots and blind spot by definition is the thing that people have been telling you, suggesting, but you don’t hear it.

Not that you don’t want to, it’s just your brain filters (00:35:30) things out so that you don’t hear them. It’s a protection. And being like paranoid about that, and I need that, I need the feedback, I need to face it, I need people to give it to me saying, thank you for the feedback even when it hurts, it’s really easy to close that door and you’re in a position where no one can actually come and open it if you’ve closed it.

Sanjeet Mitra: (00:36:00)

I mean, it’s really fascinating. And thank you both for taking the time today and also for your continued partnership with Sumeru. I think one of the very fortunate things we have in working with innovators like yourself is the ability to learn.

I think working with founders that tried to solve a problem with innovation have kind of scrapped to think about how to do that, allows us at Sumeru to learn a lot and I think we hopefully can utilize some of those learnings to help other companies do the same.

Really appreciate the opportunity to talk to both of you today. It’s a sincere privilege to partner with you, always be learning (00:36:30) everybody. Thanks Advait, thanks Nick, thanks Mark.

Nick:

Thank you.

Advait Shinde:

Thanks so much, Sanjeet.

 

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