New ventures: eLearning & the future

Q5

As an entrepreneur you’re now working on a new company (Mindstone) that’s seeking to tackle the $8.5tn skills gap and the use of technology to improve learning. Why did you decide to move into ed-tech and what transferrable technologies and skills are you bringing to this space?

The main reason for my move was that I had asked myself what I want to do professionally for the next 20 years of my life. Healthcare and EdTech were two spaces that interested me because of their potential for positive impact in the world. The latter, however, was less developed and also happened to be the space I thought I could bring to bear more of my personal experience. Education also seemed to be at a tipping point: put simply, we know much more about how the brain works today than is currently being applied in the classroom. A McKinsey report on automation, employment and productivity in the workplace showed that as much as one-third of the United States workforce could be out of a job by 2030 thanks to automation and that 60% of occupations have at least 30% of constituent work activities that could be automated. What does that mean? It means that there will be upskilling pressure in the space for adult learning. As a result, the make-up of the education space which is now focused on the age group <30 will change tremendously. Going forward, the biggest pressure for learning will come from adults that already have a job and who need to re-skill whilst maintaining their lifestyles and families. At the same time, this is a category of learners which has disposable income (aligning the learner and the payer). Going forward, learning will have to focus more on the individual rather than an institution expecting an individual to come to it. As always, where there is change there is opportunity and that is where my latest venture comes in. The current education system has been built for and from a world where access to information was scarce and a premium. Now we have the opposite problem where we must discern what is relevant from a sea of online information. As with SuperAwesome, we started the process of launching a business from the thought-process up. The pandemic has shaken up the education system because everything had to be moved online. The first wave of companies brought Ed-Tech online since lectures were filmed and broadcast to students at home. What we are now doing is developing the second wave: re-thinking learning from the ground-up in a world where the internet is accessible to everyone.

We are not afraid to question existing "learning" techniques and bring new technology to this space. There is more to come…