A Better Way to Think About Learning – David Blake, Co-Founder of Degreed and BookClub

Shiv Gaglani: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani. I'm really looking forward to hearing from our guest today, David Blake, because he's been a driving force in shaking up traditional models of education, and as he puts it, "jailbreaking the college degree." 

Through the company he co-founded, Degreed, and other work, he's brought many innovations to education and lifelong learning, with the aim of enabling everyone to fulfill their personal missions. He's also co-author of the book, The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete and Succeed.

Before we get started, I'd like to give a shout-out to Deborah Quazzo, who we've had on the podcast from GSV Ventures as well as some mutual friends we have with David, including Shadee Barkan, who joined David on his latest company BookClub. David, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today.

David Blake: Good to be with you.

Shiv Gaglani: Our audience likes to hear first in the guest's own words, what got you interested in a career in education and then obviously becoming an entrepreneur?

David Blake: Yeah, framed that way, it's funny because I never aspired really to either. The education bug bit by surprise. I still to this day tell people I'm an education reformer by choice but an entrepreneur out of necessity. But to tell you the story about how the education bug bit, it was when I sat for the ACT when I was 17. 

I was a very dedicated, high-achieving student. I was at the top of my class. I sat for the ACT. I had studied hard, and all the same, I just wasn't prepared for that experience. When I sat down--it was a Saturday morning, three and a half hours in American Fork High School's gymnasium--I just looked to my left and to my right and it just floored me that this is... I mean we just can't be serious. This isn't how we actually sort everyone in and out of their future. 

It just blew me away. That was this catalyst, and I was shook enough from that experience. I went to my high school guidance counselor and asked, "Where did the test come from and why do we do it this way?" They knew its importance in the college admissions process, but they actually didn't know the history of the test.

Then I went to the library. This is all pre-Google, which I'm an elder millennial, just old enough to go to the library and set it to Google when I was in high school. I was looking for books on high-stakes testing to answer these questions. My local rural library didn't have anything on it, but it did have some books on the history of education, and I started studying those. Then I had the epiphany that would change the course of my life, which was this: Those books were the first thing I had ever studied that a teacher hadn't assigned to me, which led me to see that I had managed to become a truly exceptional student and at the same time, a terrible learner.

Once I saw that, felt that and I realized that, I began to see education--it is a system. I'm a product of a system. That system as I had gone through it was optimized for test-taking, for memorization, for soaking up and spitting out information but not for learning. I really was a terrible learner. I had learned very little relative to what the opportunity could have been. Learning was never the point. Getting grades was the point. I committed to myself that I was going to be a great lifelong learner even if it came at the expense of being a great student. That's how it got me into education.

Shiv Gaglani: That's a great origin story and very relatable, actually. When you're a high-achieving student--as many of our listeners are because they're clearly in health professional programs or they graduated so they've maintained pretty solid GPAs--there comes a time when you realize that life is not a test and the skills you need not only to succeed and work in the workplace but to be a happy--a happy balanced human--are not often the skills that our colleges and high schools are teaching. You make an important distinction between being a student and being a learner. Do you want to describe that a bit further?

David Blake: Yeah. As a student, you're participating in some system, and typically the system has very clear markers of measurement and progress. It tends to be grades, GPA, and test scores. Through most of the system, there's the next big gate which is, "Will I get into university? Will I get into grad school?" I mean, that's what it means to be a good student. Versus a learner, which is the ability to... I would really define it as change yourself.

As we actually learn—which is the accumulation of knowledge and contextualization of it—and then the application of it to actually develop and change ourselves—we actually change. And I think, most often, for the better. If you're really being transformed, that's when you're learning. If you're jumping through hoops, that's the game of being a student. Now, those Venn diagrams can overlap. There's no reason why we can't be good students and good learners, but I think a lot of the system has lost its way. It forgets that the point is to see lives changed instead of just seeing people advance through to the next hoop or step in the journey.

Shiv Gaglani: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely important, that whole concept you have of jailbreaking the college degree or degrees, in general, is what led to you founding Degreed. 

Let's actually turn to that because that's the company I think you're most well known for. One quick small-world connection, I believe there's a great backstory you have about Mark Cuban becoming a key investor. He was actually on the podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about his...

David Blake: Oh, yeah?

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. Talking about Cost Plus Drugs and his new company. Do you mind telling us about how that came about --bringing Mark Cuban on board--and then also just go into Degreed and what you're most proud of it having achieved?

David Blake: Yeah. I tell you, I'm an entrepreneur by necessity and there's so much about the life of an entrepreneur that I really don't aspire to. The early degree journey was very hard. I started the company in 2012. 2011 is what has been deemed the year of the MOOC. That's when Coursera, edX, and Udacity all launched with great fanfare. It was an exciting time in EdTech but everyone's attention was on this democratization of content. When I showed up talking about credentials, that just wasn't in the zeitgeist yet. That wasn't something people were thinking about or were focused on. I could get venture capitalists curious about what I was doing but I couldn't get any of them to see potential in what I was doing.

We ended up sustaining the business early on credit cards. I signed up for every credit card I could and would roll one credit card over to the next. I was paying early salaries on credit cards, accumulating in the process tens of thousands of dollars in debt. After being rejected by some of the best VCs in the world, I had to turn my sights to Angel investors to sustain it. I had never raised any kind of financing before, but I'd never raised from VCs, and I hadn't raised from Angels either. I was young, I was relatively under networked, and had not graduated from a top university or one of Silicon Valley's feeder schools.

I slowly was networking my way through angels and I did start to get a couple of checks, but it was just enough to keep the lights on and keep things going and we were essentially just always running out of money. After four or five months of just surviving on a few small angel investments, we did run out of money and had to skip payroll, and it was just in this window leading up to that that I was scrambling to try and network my way into yet another angel to keep this all alive. In that window, I read a blog post by Mark Cuban—he actually wrote two at the time which were calling out how higher education was failing the American student. It was a topic I knew he cared and I knew he was thinking about.

I got on a shady website on the internet, and I purchased Mark Cuban's email address and I sent him a cold email and said we're jailbreaking the college degree. I read your blog post. I know you care about this. Here's my vision for the future. He wrote back quite quickly. I mean, it's really been impressive how fast he is in his communication. He said, "I'm interested. I'm curious, tell me more." I sent him a two paragraph email with our deck attached, and he responded to that saying, "I'm in. What do you need?" Mark Cuban became our first substantial investor in the company, and he kept us alive to fight another day and here we are.

Shiv Gaglani: I love that. I agree. He's remarkably efficient at his email and Alex Oshmyansky who's the CEO of Cost Plus Drugs, had a similar story. Also, when I was booking him on our podcast, I was really impressed with how quickly he got back and how interested he is in healthcare and education and obviously in blockchain and DeFi nowadays.

David Blake: Mm-hmm.

Shiv Gaglani: For our audience that doesn't know, Degreed is a major name in workforce development and was the basis of your book, The Expertise Economy. Obviously, a lot of our listeners are people who are going to be working for health systems, for large clinics like Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart Health. Can you tell them a bit about the Degreed and then also any specific health care applications of Degreed as well.

In general, I found that many of these great education companies like Degreed tend to thrive in workforce development when it comes to the data science, software engineering, and marketing product, and those kinds of fields. But in terms of health care, it's a bit different. It's much more fragmented and much more bureaucratic it seems. Can you give us a bit of context in Degreed and then any healthcare applications?

David Blake: Yeah. I found no better way of framing up Degreed than this question, which is I started asking people to tell me about their education. "Tell me about your education. Tell me about your education." And in time I came to ask literally hundreds of people that question and inevitably everyone answers one way, which is relative to a college degree. "Oh, I graduated from SMU. Oh, I'm an Econ major," or "I have an MBA. I went to Wharton." Or even those who didn't go will tend to answer relative to a college degree. "Oh, I didn't go to college."

All of it is an absurdity. It's all, all of it an absurdity. If I were to ask you to draw out the absurdity of it which is, if I were to ask you, "Hey, tell me about your health." And you say, "Yeah, Dave. Hey, I actually ran a marathon 17 years ago.” That is absolutely an absurd way to answer that question and we all know it.

It is so analogous to how we answer for our education, but we just have been conditioned to ignore the absurdity because we all know that marathons are great. It's nothing, particularly about the marathon, but we all know that the fitness you are in 17 years ago has almost no bearing on your health 17 years later. And yet when you ask someone, "Tell me about your education," and they tell you where they went to university? It's an absurdity. It is a flat-out absurdity.

Just like marathons are good. You can hold that universities are good, and a college degree is good. I mean, I have my critiques but that isn't even what this is about. The fact that that is how we answer for education is a flat-out absurdity. The fact that that is how we hire is a flat-out absurdity.

Degreed was born to fix that problem, which was to give people a way to answer for their education, knowledge, and skills now, in real-time, that reflects all of their education: Informal, formal, and professional. That's what Degreed was born to do.

We do that now. Degreed just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. We do that for companies large and small, but in particular, some of the world's largest organizations. We're in about half of the Fortune 200, millions of people globally in every industry. You are right that when it comes to healthcare, you do tend to see a lot of specialized providers of both the education but also of technology.

Degreed really was born to serve all use cases. We have clients in every industry and every vertical, and then within those clients, we serve their entire organization Frontline workers all the way up to the CEO, white-collar, blue-collar, grey-collar, pink-pink collar... Everyone has to learn these days. All of us, to be relevant and sharp in our fields, have to be good lifelong learners.

We do have some of the world's largest hospital systems as clients. What it enables is: Your listeners probably do have a very different mix as to what they're learning. They're probably reading from a lot of journals. They've probably got a lot of clinical research. They probably are taking continuing education courses. The mix is different, but everyone's mix is different.

Degreed was just born to be able to give you a place to curate that, to track it, to have your organization be able to see who is learning what, who has which skills, who is specializing in which domains that gives you transparency to be able to reach out and to see what your other colleagues are learning and when you have a question, to be able to find those with the right expertise. That is I think even especially poignant in healthcare. For anyone who's interested. Feel free to give me a ping.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. Super powerful and very compelling. I love the marathon analogy. One thing I have learned even now getting into my 30s is that people I knew in college who were Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and all these amazing students, things and priorities change, personalities change, and people are no longer interested in some of the same things that they were back then.

Truly, having the skills quotient or this map, that I know you've been espousing of what people are doing in their off-hours, or the growth mindset. Those things are all captured pretty well in your book, The Expertise Economy, which I really enjoyed not only because of the content in there but many of the same people like Bill Jeffries... He was actually the person who brought Osmosis into the University of Vermont and then Geisinger: Very forward-thinking as far as combating content overload, and reducing those 60 minutes of lectures into five-minute bite-sized, micro-learning opportunities that we do.

Can you tell our audience a bit about the book, The Expertise Economy, and some of the big takeaways they should have, whether they're frontline healthcare workers or they're going to be leading health systems?

David Blake: Yeah. I think there are a couple of ways to maybe share why someone would go to the book, but it was really this call to action to the world of corporate learning and those responsible for it. I think we're at this critical juncture which is, historically, you did use to get your formal schooling and then land in a career, and you could stay in the same job, the same career for 30 years. That's just no longer the case. For all of us, the rate at which technology is scaling has outpaced the rate at which humanity can learn. It's creating an even bigger skills gap. 

The pressure to be a lifelong learner is now omnipresent. And in the future--we're at this intersection point--which is in the past, a majority of your formal education was administered to you by a school, a university, and teacher or a professor. But as we move into this future of lifelong learning, we're just crossing over to where a majority of the formal learning in your lifetime will be administered to you by your company and by the H.R or corporate L&D. That's a radical shift.

We're ushering into this era where a majority of our learning is going to be administered not by a professor, not by a teacher, but by H.R. or L&D, by your manager ,by a administrator. It was overdue to have this conversation about what that future will look like. Historically, the world of corporate learning was almost exclusively about compliance.

Now in healthcare that tends to include a lot of continuing education. There are very meaningful things that people are able to learn and pick up in their continuing education credits. But historically almost the entirety of all corporate training was around compliance. Checking the box to meet these regulatory thresholds. It was not about helping your people become their best selves. It was not about helping people to not just clear the minimum threshold but to live up to their highest aptitudes.

That is really the conversation around expertise economy. We had to shift how organizations saw learning, the role of learning, the role of the learner, the goal, and the objective that learning should be inside the organization. And then start to give them an: "Okay, so, how do you do it? What does that mean?" I think one just very quick key takeaway is for us as learners, we talk about the learning loop in the book. Which is, there is a difference between the accumulation of knowledge and learning, and learning has to be again contextualized, and applied. You need feedback and then it loops back around on itself.

The final comment: You reference the skills quotient which is, we do need a way... Part of why degrees are so persistent is because it's the only universal language the world has to talk about education. I can tell you that I'm an MD, you can tell me that you're a JD and you don't actually have to know anything about medicine, and I don't actually have to know anything about law to know what that represents, the level of accomplishment. It's global, it's universal. If I tell you that I'm a level 7 or that I'm GGNA certified, you might not have any context to know what that begins to mean.

The skills quotient is to give organizations the framework by which to start thinking about how do we give common, universal language and measurement to people's skills? The book is already now a few years old and we're seeing a lot of progress on this front which is the organization's capacity to measure the skills of their people and to be able to speak the language of what skills are we going to need in the future and to essentially map those against each other. Because that's the map by which organizations should be plotting out their learning, which is "what are the skills we need? What are the skills we have? And how do we close that gap?"

Shiv Gaglani: Absolutely, and hopefully, even feeding that information back to the colleges and high schools that are tasked with pumping out productive and civically engaged people ,which is just not really happening at the rate we need it to. We can obviously talk a lot more about this. 

One other question about Workforce that I'd love to hear more about BookClub is... These past few months have been a really interesting time to be a leader of a company of any size, whether it's a start-up or a large Fortune 200 company. Great resignation, great regret. Do you have any commentary on the trends happening right now? I mean, March was the biggest month for the US workers quitting their jobs. Do you think this trend is here to stay? Do you think we're going toward a four-day workweek? That's a big question, but would just love to get your thoughts on this these trends.

David Blake: I think we've gotten to labor and capital.... labor has been getting the short end of the bargain. I think the fact that leverage is shifting back to the worker, I think it's healthy overall. Degreed was a hybrid remote organization before it was cool. I have been an early practitioner and an advocate of that, but BookClub was born after Covid and is entirely remote. I will say it has been brought into plain view for me all of the challenges of what it is to organize a group of people who have never met each other in person. 

It's silly how much our brains unlock by just being in the same room with someone versus on these screens. Our evolution is just silly. That future doesn't make good on everything. I can see you, I can hear you, and yet our brains are just unlocking a special way when we're in the same room.

In terms of the great resignation, I do think... Organizations didn't use to have to think about employee development beyond their tenure inside their company. I think part of what this has put pressure on: There's a bit of this paradox which is, if you're actually willing to invest in your employees to their long-term benefit beyond the tenure that you expect them to have with your organization, that's actually what gets them to stay longer.

It's just this paradox which is like, "Hey, why should I be giving them the skill? It might help them leave, it might help make them more marketable, and it's going to make them get recruited away." But the employees, we're all feeling it. We're all feeling the pressure of job displacement, of the skills gap, of the need to do all these things. Where employees want to be is at organizations that are willing to truly invest in them. Not invest in the needs of the organization strictly, but to invest in the employee for their betterment, to their long-term advantage.

It's a paradox. If you're willing to skill someone up in a way that actually makes it easier for them to leave, they're actually more likely to stay.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. It's that famous Branson quote, which is "Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to." Certainly, that's been our experience building a remote or distributed organization at Osmosis. And one of the things that makes me proudest is when people have left because it just made sense at their stage of career and development have gone on to do amazing things at companies like Spotify or Google or even start their own companies which have been really gratifying. 

I know we're coming on time. I have two other questions for you. The first is, do you want to give our audience a bit of insight into BookClub? I know many of them are avid readers and I just think what you're doing is such a cool concept. Again, any healthcare event? I don't know if you have any authors like an Atul Gawande or someone who's well-known in healthcare. BookClub in general and or any health care applications?

David Blake: Sure. The data at Degreed surprised me. Ten years later, millions of people learning on the platform. When I pulled down the data, people are still learning more from books than any other source and it's by a lot. 6X more. That's all online courses. That's all university courses. That's all on podcast and audio, that's all short form. All the certificate programs. People are still learning by, it's like 6.5x more from books than any other source. 

Whether you're plus or minus on that, in aggregate, Degreed has now millions of people, it's representative. I really wanted to start to focus up: If that's the most powerful lever in terms of our lifelong learning, how do we get more from that? How do you go deeper? How do we... I think the power of great literature is the ability to challenge our worldview and to have meaningful conversations inspired by some of the world's best thinking. That's just a great recipe to be playing with. 

We haven't yet made it into any healthcare domain-specific BookClubs, but we launched direct-to-consumer last year. You can think of it as a Master Class-meets-Goodreads. We film these cinematic videos with the authors, taking people deeper into their books and kind of questions behind the scenes, some prompts and thinking, some conversation, and then you're able to do that alongside a community of people on the platform.

We launched to consumers last year. Anyone can go sign up for Book Club, and then we did launch this year with organizations. We are helping organizations to map to what is the conversation you need to have. What is the challenge? What is the struggle inside the organization? What are your strategic objectives? And no matter who you are or where in the world, whatever industry, whatever your answer is to any of those prompts, there's now a book that maps to it.

These books are just great catalysts of the world's best thinking to have a conversation as an organization in a sustained and meaningful way that results in shared storytelling, shared narrative, shared principles, and shared language for your organization. While we haven't been doing medical or healthcare-specific books, it is relevant to any of your listeners who are part of a health care organization and would still be immediately benefited by the way in which we're able to square off to some of these conversations and take your organization through it in just such a meaningful way.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that. At Osmosis we leveraged several books in the exact way you're describing--books like Creativity Inc., as we grew our content production team, or The Hard Thing About Hard Things or Play Bigger. I'm really, really excited about where you guys are taking this and how data-driven you are with the 6.5x stat as you mentioned.

Since we're coming up on time, I'm going to combine the last two questions into one.

David Blake: Mm-hmm

Shiv Gaglani: Which is, we love to hear from our guests any advice they like to provide to our audience about approaching their careers. Then the final thing is anything else that we haven't touched upon that you'd love to be able to get across to them. So, two-in-one here.

David Blake: Here's what it sparked, which isn't quite a career but I find this fascinating. Curiosity is now negatively correlated with good learning cultures inside organizations. On the surface, that just seems to be just mind-boggling. I'll say it again. Curiosity is negatively correlated with great learning cultures. 

The reason for that is we used to exist in a world where information was scarce and so curiosity was this attribute that was this prerequisite of what was required for you to persist long enough to find inaccessible information. But the world is changed. We're now in a world where information is abundant, easily accessible, and fully democratized. Today, curiosity just ends up on a rabbit hole on Reddit, or 86 minutes later on TikTok.

Now, what correlates with great learning cultures is intentionality. You actually have to be good at filtering out the noise of having a clear intention, a clear objective, or a clear goal. Being able to curate your way through all the noise, through great resources that are aligned to a clear objective.

So, I'll leave you with that. It's kind of a backward paradoxical thought but there's new research out of Harvard Business Review to back it up.

Shiv Gaglani: That's fascinating. I got to check that out. It aligns well with your book which... one of the seven core focus areas was to combat content overload.

David Blake: Mm-hmm.

Shiv Gaglani: Hopefully our learners will spend less time on TikTok and Reddit and go down the rabbit hole and more time just being deliberate with their learning and growth. 

David, it's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. I'm really impressed with everything you've done across your career to improve workforce development and education. And now I know you're working with your children to provide them a very unique educational experience. Thanks for joining us. I'm excited to hopefully have you on another day.

David Blake: I would be glad to have it. A lot of fun. Thanks, Shiv.

Shiv Gaglani: With that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show. Remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line. We're all in this together. Take care.