"Chasing Interesting, Disruptive Movements" - Fred Singer, CEO of Echo360

SHIV GAGLANI:
Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani, and today on Raise the Line, I'm happy to be joined by Fred Singer. Fred is the CEO of Echo360, which is the first video platform designed to foster active, engaged and personalized video-based learning. He's an internet pioneer and entrepreneur whose career and philanthropic activities have spanned a broad range of interests from education, media, arts, science and veteran affairs. So Fred, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today.
 

FRED SINGER:
Thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be on the show.
 

SHIV GAGLANI:
So you have a pretty storied career at the intersection of internet innovation and education. We'd love to hear more about your career journey in your own words.
 

FRED SINGER:
Sure. I'm originally Canadian, so I grew up there, was on my way to being a lawyer and got recruited to the U.S. with Bain Capital. And along the way, went to Harvard Business School. In the middle of school, I was writing a paper on the third industrial revolution, which was all about technology. Keep in mind, this is before the internet actually existed. A light bulb hit me that there was going to be this big change. And so I ended up going to The Washington Post in the very early days and was one of the founders of washingtonpost.com. So, I really caught the internet early and what will be relevant maybe for your listeners is that a lot of what's going on in the newspaper industry actually translates very well to what's going on in education today.

But I started that up. Then I was fortunate because at that time, there was a little company down the road called America Online, and they were bringing the internet and transforming how media was taking place. I managed to catch that wave as well so was there during the big boom years before the merger with Time Warner took place, and so really got to see multiple industries transformed and be in the middle of it. As I kept chasing interesting disruptive movements, I came across a fellow named Masayoshi Son, who's the CEO and Founder of SoftBank and he brought me to Asia in the early 2000s long before the Chinese market had opened up, but when the internet broadband was taking off. And so I was his personal advisor for about five or six years. I was traveling in Asia, but really got to see this huge impact of, again, another set of continents and another set of industries being disrupted.
 

So I really had a chance to see these cycles over and over again, which led me to my last chapter, which is education. During that time, I had a son with learning difficulties and I began to see the juxtaposition of this fancy technology being used for advertising and dating and for media, and then I would go to my son's school and it looked like the 1950s. So like a lot of internet entrepreneurs, just began to scratch my head why on earth education was so far behind. And I know you have a large healthcare audience as well and I would say along the way, most of my comments that apply to education actually apply in great measure to the healthcare industry.

SHIV GAGLANI:
Yes. So there's a lot to click on there. And before we go into Echo360 and do a deep dive into your experience with them, I did want to pause and say your time at AOL is pretty interesting to me. One of our large investors is Greycroft, and specifically a partner there named Alan Patricof who invested in AOL early on. I met Steve Case last year at the Greycroft Summit and Alan also brought in a guy named Greg Coleman, who's an advisor and investor in Osmosis, who also has a media background like you. He co-founded the Huffington Post and then sold that to AOL, probably after you'd already left there. But I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on what you alluded -- the similarities between media and education.

FRED SINGER:
Sure. And as your listeners may not be aware, Steve Case and Ted Leonsis are big investors in our company, again because I think they saw the same set of transitions going on. But I think what's really maybe the most direct comparison is when I was in the newspaper industry, online was just coming on board. Newspapers were the center of the media world back in the early '90s and so when online came about -- and it was really Steve Case leading the charge -- the first thing they thought of doing was to go, "Okay, well we know this online thing's coming, why don't we just take the newspaper and put it on this computer and people can read it and we're online?" And that's what they did. 

The analogy if you're listening is that's what schools are doing today in education. That's what Zoom is. Zoom is taking the lecture that was in a traditional classroom and vomiting it back into online. And so you're communicating the lecture, but all you've done is do a one-for-one comparison. The lesson I would tell people to take from that -- and why I think we're so early in the chapter for education -- is that the big winners in media weren't the newspapers, the big winners in media are... what are we listening to? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram because people like to communicate. So, going back to the early '90s, the first signal of a change was when AOL popped up because the chat rooms were going crazy. So while the newspapers were struggling with “should we allow readers to comment, it's not already vetted” the online guys we're actually already down that road where they were letting people communicate.
 

It's the same thing in education, which is people learn when they interact with the content, with the students, with the teachers. The interaction is the learning. Just like in media, the interaction is the actual media experience now. So again, one of the big lessons is that interactivity is at the core of it, but that simply repurposing a classroom doesn't make any more sense going forward than it did for the newspapers to dump online content and magazines to dump online content and assume the world's going to change. It didn't work that way.

SHIV GAGLANI:
That's a really great analogy. And one thing I'll add to that is while the newspapers were seeing their demise, because content was becoming commoditized and obviously the rise of Google and Facebook taking all the advertising revenue, Warren Buffett was investing in local newspapers, largely because they were still profitable endeavors because people cared about their local news. That was harder to replicate for large publications like The Washington Post or New York Times. And obviously, Facebook and these social media networks had done an even better job of making things hyper-local. They're so hyper-local that you're seeing exactly what your brother or your uncle are doing online at any given point.

So Echo360 has done a pretty tremendous job. I know this from firsthand experience having used it, but also at Osmosis, we have over a hundred institutional clients like NYU and Kaiser Permanente and more often than not, when I asked them what they use for asynchronous or synchronous video communications, a lot of them will say Echo360. So to our audience, most of whom are probably already familiar with the company, do you mind giving us a bit more background on the company and what makes it different than other companies in the space?

FRED SINGER:
Sure. So the reason that I got into it was from a technology sense, what I realized is when a teacher and a student interact, that is the learning process and the technology available at the time didn't help that process. So what every school has is called an LMS, or a Learning Management System, like Blackboard and Instructure, and they're actually perfect. They're the platform of record, but they're administrative tools. And in my language, they would have been what I used to call the Yahoo portal from the 1990s. They're a place where you navigate, but you don't go deep. So what we began to think through was “well, when a teacher and a student interact, what do you need to do?” So the first thing is it has to be video based, which LMSs are. The second thing is you’ve got to start focusing on the data and understanding what are those interactions? Do you understand them?

And the third thing is you've got to get engagement up. So back to my analogy around Twitter and Facebook is that ultimately, you have to find a way when a student and a teacher are either in class or out of class for them to interact more and it turns out technology does that. So that's the basis of it. What makes us different is that we amalgamated all the core tools of learning into one place. So most schools have five, six, seven, eight tools out there, technologies to try to help them. They might have a clicker. They might have a transcript thing. They might have a place to store video. They might have something to record lectures. And we came to the conclusion about four or five years ago that you needed this platform that did it all-in-one, because it's too hard to train the professors, and students don't want to bounce between technologies. If you think about big data, you can't capture interesting data if they're from different sources, because it never normalizes.

So again, all the core principles, but we're the only ones to really put it together and then think not as a technology company, but think as a learning company. How does this actually make students learn better and teachers teach more easily? So that's what made it special, and the results particularly during COVID have been outstanding just in terms of how the student learnings occurred.

SHIV GAGLANI:
We'll get into COVID in just a minute. But I'm curious, before COVID up until 2020, can you give us a sense of the size and scope of the company? How many institutions, how many students have you guys reached? And then also, you mentioned data a lot. I think that's one of the things that's most interesting about online education in general is how do you use the data to personalize learning and then recommend other content, for example, based on what people are learning? So we'd love to hear more about how you measure success in terms of…is it hours of video watched? What are some of the KPIs or key performance indicators you all track?

FRED SINGER:
We reach between two and three million students depending on how the metrics are defined. We're in 20 plus countries, we're particularly large in Asia and Australia and the UK, and then Europe, UK and mainland Europe, also U.S. and Canada, Middle East. So we're global out of the gate. Probably have over a thousand schools and several hundred institutions of all types. There's not any one type of institution. We go from Ivy Leagues to community colleges, to health and science schools. It really works across any venue. Some high schools as well. So it's pretty broad based. How we measure success is whether we improve learning. Pretty much across the board, when you put us in there, the engagement -- which means the interaction between the teacher and the student -- will go up anywhere between 500% to 3,000%, which is just a crazy number.

And the reason is we make it easier for students to take notes. We make it easier for them to ask a question. We make it easier for them to push a button and say, "I don't understand," if you want to have polling. But by making everything available on your phone and computer, what we've learned and we know is students interact more. The more important thing is we also see a huge improvement in grade point average. So on an average, we get about an 18 to 19% boost in grade point average and the boost comes at the bottom. So what you learn as a general theory is that A students get As because it really doesn't matter how you set it up, they know the system and they figure it out. The kids that don't do the work don't do the work. But everything in the middle usually goes up about a grade because it makes it easier for them to ask questions.

So to be specific, you may have a hard time listening in class or you may not have paid attention. You can simply go over what you just saw in class, go over at your own speed. English may or may not be your first language. We have automated transcripts so that if you don't like taking notes, instead of having to call somebody up, the system takes the notes for you and you can simply highlight them and go through them. Teachers have the ability to ask questions just like in class so that they can tell whether the students understand the concept. So all of that just allows for what is called blended or active learning. It is the one proven methodology that works and all we've done is enable that in a really clean technical platform.

SHIV GAGLANI:
That’s a really good description. I was in med school at Hopkins. The students there tend to be very good and overachievers and things don't make that much of a difference to their grades. But then you get more and more students who are in the middle, as you mentioned, the large middle, like 95% or 90%, and that's where you see the improvements. So you mentioned COVID, and I can imagine some major tailwinds. We've had the CEOs of Chegg and Coursera and a number of other education tech companies on Raise the Line talking about the tailwinds, how colleges and universities had to switch to online learning very quickly. But then there's also headwinds. As you know, a lot of these colleges and universities have had to cut their budgets because enrollments are down and all sorts of other things are happening. Could you talk a bit more about specifically how COVID has affected your outlook at Echo360? You've mentioned a couple positive things, but both pro and con.

FRED SINGER:
Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, my view is COVID accelerates trends that already existed. Online was already on its way. What we've seen in phase one is called emergency remote learning. It's back to my newspaper analogy. Schools didn't know what to do. Video conferencing was a way to replicate the class. And so what we know about “Zoom University” is that is a really good communication method, but not necessarily better learning. So that's the number one lesson we've learned. We've also seen with this phase that we've unbundled the university package. So when you really think about why people pay $50,000 to 75,000 in tuition, it's really for four or five things. It's first of all like a camp. You go to campus -- my kids go there -- it's really fun. It's a great experience. That part of the college process really works, but in COVID it's missing. So now everything else is exposed.

You also have clubs, sports, other things that people do. And then you have the research and then you also have the classroom. And what COVID exposed is the relative value of the classroom. That's where higher education's facing a lot of trouble, because the truth is students have been having a hard time getting to class for a long time. We serve a lot of community colleges. A lot of times, people can't get to class because they have work, they have jobs, they get sick, they have sports…everything. So what we're seeing for the first time is schools have to figure out how to deliver a better education when the student or the teacher is not in class. It's not always going to be what it is today where it's remote. What you're going to see is, "Oh, some of the kids are in class, some of the kids aren't in class. Oh, it's a large lecture class with 300 people because that's cost-effective. 300 people on a video conferencing system doesn't really work. How do we think about that? How do we think about learning differently?"

So I think what it did is we're in phase one. I think we've had a number of schools start to completely outfit their entire campus on a scale that we haven't seen. We do online learning, so we do a lot of that as well. We've had a lot of customers that have had budget cuts, so they're really desperate. But I think going forward, we're going to see budget cuts and schools are going to have to deliver better education, they're going to have to get their international students to be able to participate and they're not going to get them all into class. They're going to have to figure out a way to do remote and hybrid learning and this is where we're going to get to phase two -- which to me, back to my newspaper analogy -- where we start to get closer to when the second generation of media outlets came in, and began to really think through the problem in a much more strategic way than what schools were able to do this round.

SHIV GAGLANI:
That's fascinating. It reminds me of some of the stuff I've read and seen from Scott Galloway, who is also an NYU Professor. Greg Coleman introduced us to him. He talks a lot about the unbundling of universities, including his own at NYU, and how if you can't replicate the in-person, the club, the research, all that other aspects, incubator type environment that is a university, what truly is education? There are many examples where education could be delivered even better with better brands. Apple could create a design program and Coursera is leaning on that a lot as you know. Has Echo360 accelerated some initiatives that you all have been planning for a while? I know you've said it has accelerated some macro trends that were already in the works. But I'm curious if at Echo360 specifically, are you doubling down in certain areas that are seeing more of those tailwinds? And then maybe killing off issues that weren’t?

FRED SINGER:
Yes. We're obviously accelerating investment in online and hybrid learning. So when we think about the issues that schools faced, what COVID did was it exposed one type of online learning, which is everybody's out of class because there's a crisis. But what's going to happen is, what happens when a student has a summer class? So let's say you're attending American University. You're attending a class there now, you've gone back home and you want to do a summer course. It's only one course. Currently, there's nothing set up for universities to handle one-off courses using the same platform as the major programs. So what people do right now is they outsource to what's called OPMs, or these full service providers, but they have to give up eight, 10 years of tuition. But 30 or 40% of students today actually take at least one or two online courses.

So what we're focused on is making it completely seamless and cheap for our institutions to either put on a summer course or do a full program themselves. The current model and the price doesn't really work. We think we're uniquely positioned because we're integrated with all the core tools of a university -- like the LMS and their video conferencing system -- to allow schools to do that easily. So that's where our focus is. And we're already doing it. We've just had tremendous success. Our clients are finding it very easy to do this transition with not the same type of complaints that other people have, because it's already set up to do that. So that's what we're focused on. We think our business, which was hybrid and online learning, that's just accelerating and that the whole industry is about to come together.

SHIV GAGLANI:
That's really great to hear. We obviously at Osmosis are hyper-focused on healthcare. We've seen a lot of the tailwinds while retailers and finance and transportation sectors are shedding jobs, we can't get enough of people in healthcare. 12 of the fastest 20 growing professions in the U.S. are in healthcare, ranging from nurse practitioner to genetic counselor and so we work with a lot of healthcare students in healthcare institutions. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts. When you go into healthcare institutions -- which I know you have a number of them -- does online hybrid learning have to adjust, or can you basically use the same infrastructure to deliver asynchronous or synchronous online learning?

FRED SINGER:
So I would say the heaviest users of our platform are med schools, nursing schools, veterinary schools, and pharmacy schools. That’s actually one of our core markets. The more intense the content, the better. A lot of students listen to their lectures at twice the speed because sometimes they also can't be there. We haven't had to adjust anything. What we're just finding is bigger demand. What we are doing new is we've partnered with one of our institutions and we're actually creating courses now within partnerships. So we're working in the nursing area.  We're going to be launching something around resiliency in the next quarter or so. We begin to view content as a critical ability in enabling our schools not just to deliver their own content, but now to begin to syndicate it and deliver it in other places. So, you'll be seeing a lot of activity there.

We think nursing was a particularly interesting area because we have so many customers who are in that space. But yeah, healthcare needs it. It has many of the same issues, and the pace at which new drugs come out, the pace at which learnings come out do not fit the long-term evergreen horizon of the way content is taught. All the things we've talked about are applied maybe five-fold in the healthcare field. I think you're going to see huge changes and huge increase both in the type of content, but also in much more flexible delivery. People can learn when they need to learn with the time they have, whether it's on a treadmill, whether it's when they're studying or whether they just want to catch up on something and it's just not being published in the university, but someone's got something that's new.

SHIV GAGLANI:
I couldn't agree more with you. This is definitely the type of thing we see from our university partners in healthcare. I know we're coming up on time, so I have two last questions for you. The first is, what advice would you give to someone right now considering a career in healthcare, or already partially on the way towards that career, about meeting the challenges of the COVID moment and beyond?

FRED SINGER:
One of the things we've been working on is resiliency. Particularly in nursing it applies because we've just been working in this category. But I think that there's so much change going on that the ability to adapt to that change and cope is going to be helpful. What I'd say, just because over my experience you see trends, remember the same trends in your healthcare career are going to affect you that have affected media, that are affecting education. There is going to be time-shifting. 80 or 90% in education of all online content is time shifted. Well, that's the same type of time shifting happening in healthcare when people are able to do things from home, they're able to do them asynchronously, so being flexible around that is really important.

I think location becomes less important just like in healthcare and media. You no longer read your newspaper in the cafe all the time, you read it on your phone. You no longer have to learn in a classroom. You no longer are going to have to treat patients or do work always in one location. So I think that's there. And I think data's going to be really critical. We talked a lot about it here, but obviously with wearables and everything else, you're about to get to a whole new era. So, I think the ability to be flexible is key because the healthcare system needs the leaders to be able to handle this next wave of technology and not block it. I think there will be huge opportunities for people that know how to embrace the change versus stop it.

SHIV GAGLANI:
Totally. My mom always used to tell me change is the only thing constant, and several other Raise the Line guests have also encouraged our audience to think about how they fit in and how they can actually lead the change that we're going to see. Is there anything else you'd like our audience to know about Echo360, about you, about the macro trends that are happening as a result of COVID?

FRED SINGER:
What I like everyone to understand is the gap between where education is today and where it will be. Unlike a lot of industries, all the technology and tools exist to deliver much cheaper education, much more convenient education. It's not like we're trying to discover DNA. Most of the tools can be fixed or done within a year. The classroom online and hybrid teaching can be as good or better than traditional classrooms, because you can do it on your own time. You can teach multiple ways. You can allow people to participate. So what I would say is that we are entering a period where I believe there's going to be this pretty big change. It reminds me of what I saw back in the day when I was in newspapers and people thought that wouldn't change, and it can happen fast. I think this is going to happen, but we should not be content with where we are either in education, or frankly, in how healthcare uses some of these new technologies.

SHIV GAGLANI:
Again, couldn't agree more with that. Fred, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us and obviously for all the work that you're doing to raise the line and improve healthcare capacity through education and Echo360.

FRED SINGER:
Great. Well thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time to share something I'm very passionate about.

SHIV GAGLANI:
Awesome. And with that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show and remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line, since we're all in this together. Take care.