The Future Unicorns of Edtech, piece 1: Learning from the best — Masterclass meets Big Brother
INTRODUCTION
There is a lot of enthusiasm for the future of education and work, but we need more bold, crazy and exciting ideas that challenge the status quo and inspire the future. At Emerge, we see the world as founders do and keep seeing opportunities for companies that don’t exist and we think really have to be built.
This new series, ‘The Future Unicorns of Edtech’, is full of short, sharp and unpolished future of learning and work ideas that have come from the thousands of conversations we have each year with our community. As a first check VC we believe in being there from the start, and would love to see the best of these ideas getting built.
Would we invest in all of them? Maybe. Have we done a lot of research on them? Sometimes. Is anyone already doing or thinking about this? The world is a big place, so most likely yes, in which case we would love to talk to you!
THE TL;DR IDEA
Learning from the best: Masterclass meets Big Brother
Deep, intimate learnings from a community of the world’s best business operators who reveal the raw ‘behind the stage’ insights and day-to-day details behind how they operate and what makes them great, while helping learners improve their day-to-day skills.
THE PROBLEM
Every week we speak to so many people who feel they are not learning enough in their jobs, coupled with a nagging guilt for not getting better faster. Unhappy with the support and attention they get from their senior colleagues, they’re consuming various learning resources from MOOCs to books to articles but still finding large, lingering gaps in their knowledge and self-esteem.
The luckiest employees have a strong, involved manager a few years above them, who is able to guide and support them in becoming better, bit by bit on a daily basis, through an informal apprenticeship style model. Unfortunately, most individuals don’t have that dream manager. They resort to the abundance of corporate learning materials which are often too academic, too polished and too high level. You can learn a lot about an industry and a role but you never get quite the right level of detail you need for your day-to-day work.
THE IDEA
Gradually, we are seeing an influx of successful, knowledgeable individuals investing their time in being educators and sharing their wisdom. No longer is the academic the sole channel for education. And, while it is great that more and more successful business operators are sharing what they’ve learnt, we think most of this wisdom is still shared on an arm’s-length basis. Its main impact is through helping others understand the high-level industries these individuals operate in and the frameworks they use. The best example of this is Masterclass — you’re going to hear some super cool things, pick up some strategic frameworks from your idols and leave inspired, but you probably won’t really have the day-to-day tools you need to become a better employee.
What excites us about learning from successful individuals is being offered an opportunity to go behind the scenes and dig into the details of their day to day work — what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Imagine being able to follow your idol for a week. Seeing how they respond to emails — which ones they respond to, which ones they ignore and what tools they use to be productive. Seeing a live recording of how they run their meetings — what questions they ask and how they ask them. Reading through the documents they are writing — understanding how they draft, how they iterate ideas and respond to feedback from colleagues. Finally, imagine all of this behind the scenes footage comes with commentary from these role models explaining and analysing every move and decision they make during the day.
Think old-school ‘work shadowing’ but rather than needing a 1:1 physical presence it can be massively scaled-up and democratised through technology. Why do we think of this as ‘Masterclass meets Big Brother’? It’s because it takes the best from Masterclass — being able to learn from your role model, and the best from Celebrity Big Brother — seeing the raw, transparent and day to day side of your idols.
Bringing this analogy to our VC world, with no disrespect to legendary investor Ben Horowitz, we don’t think his new book covering interesting facts about VC will help any investor to truly become a better investor. But what I am sure of is that many VC investors would pay a lot of money to be able to be close witnesses to a day in the life of a legendary investor like Ben. Learning about how he runs his due diligence process, what questions he asks during calls and how he negotiates terms, how he manages difficult situations and supports his founders, would be invaluable learnings for the whole VC industry.
WHY IS THIS EXCITING?
Willingness to share knowledge and give back: there’s a growing wave of successful individuals who are looking to give back to the world. Some will do this through 1:1 mentoring and coaching, some through writing a book, some through teaching formal courses and some might find this specific approach as the most transparent and impactful way of giving back.
Pull for brands: the creator economy is flourishing and people are willing to pay anyone who can share the insights they need. Unlike the average Joe who needs to work hard to build and monetise their audience, successful operators already enjoy big followings and can carry big brands.
Access to unique insights: there are so many industries, careers and roles with extremely limited information on what good looks like. We believe there is a strong pent- up demand for employees to learn the small details of their work from their role models, rather than through generic corporate training videos and academics.
Looking behind the scenes: there is something incredibly exciting about being able to peek behind the scenes, seeing the raw, unpolished human details of how top operators work. You realise they are human after all, that no one is perfect and that you, too, can achieve greatness despite not being perfect.
WHY THIS MIGHT (OR MIGHT NOT) FAIL
How on earth do you get this level of detailed insight from executives? Well, if we can get celebrities to go on shows like Big Brother and show the whole world what they are like in their personal lives, why wouldn’t it be possible to get celebrity business operators to show the whole world what they are like in their work lives?
But what’s in it for the executives? Just as Masterclass isn’t for everyone, neither will this be. But I strongly believe there is a large enough pool of highly impressive individuals who are happy to share their day-to-day work and secrets. In the same way Elon Musk decided to open source all of his research with Tesla, we feel there is a layer of individuals willing to open source their diaries and business skills for the broader benefit of humanity. If we were targeting a big name in this space we’d start with one of the world’s most successful fund managers, Ray Dalio, who is famous for his radical transparency culture at Bridgewater.
And what’s in it for the companies? Footage like this risks breaching business secrets or showing third parties who do not want to be part of the educational content. This is probably the biggest challenge. One solution would be to allow the companies and lead educators to have the final say on editing and what gets to be shown. Bear in mind that much of the recorded content doesn’t have to be sensitive in nature — it can show how great meetings are run and be used to improve the brand of the company the executive works for and even attract future talent.
Of course, learning like this isn’t immersive and active. While 95% of the time we strongly advocate that learning needs to be active to be impactful, in this case we feel that it doesn’t have to be. We believe the fact of getting behind the scenes of these role models and hearing specific commentary on why they do what they do is gripping enough to keep many highly engaged. Down the line this could definitely become more practical too, but we would probably think of this as a separate business.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this idea and format.
Do you agree with this opportunity? Do you think there are other opportunities and risks we haven’t thought about? Do you know someone passionate about this or building a company in this space? We would love to hear from you.
Everyone that likes, comments or shares this post will be first in line to get an invite to the extension of this session when we connect with a group of founders, thought leaders, executives and potential customers to take the thinking to the next level.
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