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Transcript of our conversation with Martin Basiri, Founder and CEO of Passage:
Immad Akhund:
- Hello everyone. Welcome to the Founders in Arms podcast with me, Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury.
Raj Suri:
- And I'm Raj Suri, Co-founder of several startups. And with us today is Martin Basiri, who is formerly the co-founder, CEO of ApplyBoard and currently the co-founder CEO of Passage. Is that right Martin?
Martin Basiri:
- Correct.
Raj Suri:
- Yes. So really excited to have you on with us here. You know, I think Martin, you're well quite well known in Canada, talking to us today in Toronto, but I don't know if that many people know you in the US but you've built like a really iconic company in Canada, ApplyBoard and now you're kind of doing something in a similar space with passage. Why don't you tell, you know our listeners A, you know, what is ApplyBoard and and B, how you started it?
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah, for sure. So I came, I'm from Iran and I was one of those nerd kids that loved engineering from literally as, as much as I remember, maybe I was the age of six, seven. My dad was an electrical engineer then and that's how I got exposed to it. So I started inventing and creating things at like a very early age. And from 14 to 18 I went to this competition that is like for inventors and stuff. And actually I got like a gold medal for our country in this thing called Kharazmi Festival. And then I entered university as a bachelor degree in electrical engineering. So doing circuit design, doing coding...
Immad Akhund:
- In Iran?
Martin Basiri:
-In Iran, yeah, Shiraz University, that's where I'm from. And then University of Waterloo gave me full scholarship to come to Waterloo to do my master's degree in mechatronics, which is electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software engineering. Kind of all combined. And I worked on electric and hybrid electric vehicle technologies and when I came to Canada I loved it and I was like I gotta bring my family here. Like I love it. And so like you guys all read a lot of news about Iran. It's not the best place in the world unfortunately today, hopefully one day like people gain their freedom and everything's like good in that country, become very prosperous. Anyway, so then I found a way of how to bring my brothers and a lot of my, my brothers were young and they didn't have a scholarship so we kind of had to make money because I'm not coming from money. So we kind of started helping their friends with their application journey and the visa like whatever we could do like to help them like as students helping another students with essay whatever and making money here and there. And like I was an engineer, I, you know, when we finished our school everyone went their ways and a couple of years later I was like okay, I wanna become an entrepreneur again and build like technologies and stuff. And this idea came, it was like what if this process of helping another students that we used to do over phone and Zoom, what if we automate some of the steps? What if we automate immigration processing for a study abroad? And we called that ApplyBoard. 2015, so exactly like nine years ago. And that came, that company, like the first three years, it was a lot of struggle. The business model, the funding, the whole nature of it, the fact that we were in Canada, not in Silicon Valley, it was very, very hard the first three years and finally numbers start working and we were able to raise like almost $500 million over the course of like the first six years of the business, became like one of the unicorns of Canada, over 1000 employees in like 30 countries in the world. And we basically became like one of the most important source for immigration. Not only to Canada but also to US, UK, Australia, basically Ireland, and Germany, and other countries. So we build this platform for people who wanna like do that. So that is ApplyBoard. All the students, more and more every year that pass by governments are reducing the funding for universities and colleges or they, they the funding is constant and inflation is going up. So the percentage of what university get funding from, uni from government used to be 80% for example 30, 40 years ago. Now it's like under 40% in some universities like U of T,
Raj Suri:
- University of Toronto for listeners 'cause UT means something different here.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah it's like 25% only coming from government now. So as a result these universities have less and less budget to give a scholarship. So people like me, to come to Canada to study.
Immad Akhund:
- You know, you know I heard this crazy stat and this kind of ties to this, I won't say who since I think this was like a closed conversation, but it was someone at a university that was a president and they said per undergraduate student it cost them $200,000 like in costs to teach the student but they only make a hundred thousand dollars. So I thought that was insane like I dunno how it cost them that much but I think it's part of this kind of picture that universities are just not making enough money to cover their costs.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah like right now the top universities in Canada, like almost all of them are in deficit. Research is very expensive. For example, when 14 years ago when I came to Canada, one out of five students they were coming for masters or PhD, fully funded by universities, now it is one out of 20. And universities basically have real like revenue issue. And as you guys know, domestic population of 18-year-olds every year is declining as well. So their domestic enrollment also coming down while their campuses and fixed cost and payroll keep increasing. Add on top of it that like any other organization, a lot of them are public universities, our colleges are kind of like running like government. They're not the most efficient organizations as well. There are a lot of union involved in different universities. Sometimes one university you see three, four different unions between the staff, contractors, call it like faculty tenure faculty, you know there are like so many like complexities that this, they have also a lot of this inefficiency cost. But generally speaking the research also is very expensive. Then I noticed like there are so many toughest students that they can come to Canada and the US and change their life and make good money here. And also study fields that people who have money don't wanna study like nursing, like trades, like become an electrician or very, very technical things like computer science, data science. And as universities have less funding to give to international students, I said what if we we coming and like fix this problem And like we didn't have like billions of dollars to give. So we decided to give low interest rate loans. The thing that like right now, any American or Canadian, they have access to government loans from from government. And we said international students don't have access to these things. But what if we provide them? So someone who who has the brain and drive and grit to change their life but they don't have financial means, they also can access to this top life changing opportunity of coming here and in two years then they make 50, 60, 70, $200,000 and change not only their life but also they can like support their families back home.
Raj Suri:
- They're investing in immigrants.
Martin Basiri:
- We’re investing in immigrants. Yeah.
Immad Akhund:
- Was it difficult for you to leave ApplyBoard 'cause you poured like I guess 8 years of your life into it and raised a lot of money and all that?
Martin Basiri:
- It's so hard. It's so hard.
Raj Suri:
- His brothers are still running it, right?
Martin Basiri:
- My brothers are living it. But living the day to day, I think it...
Immad Akhund:
- Became a family business.
Martin Basiri:
- It's, it's so hard. Like it's like a baby, you know? Work for me is so personal.
Immad Akhund:
- I think it is for most founders.
Martin Basiri:
- I know. 'cause otherwise why, why? Why would you do that? Otherwise it's just too much work. It's literally like, like when you have kids, right? You have one kid and now you have two kids, you are constantly thinking about both of them. Your thought doesn't didn't shift, it just became double.
Raj Suri:
- Immad has a post about that, right? You had a pretty good LinkedIn post about how you wake up in the morning.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah. One thing that like, I think it's kind of tricky. This is a bit of a good divergent has that like, you know, how do you find meaning in life? And I guess people used to find it in like religion and other things that like I feel like the western world is sometimes a bit devoid of. But I think like I find a lot of meaning in working in my startup, right? Like it's like you make it, you work really hard, it's like challenging but it's like fulfilling and all that stuff. And I also find it a lot in raising my two kids and I guess my post was about like how it's like actually a lot of the reasons you find meaning in both of them are like basically the same reasons. And it's kind of interesting to try to think of like what are; what else in the world fits these kind of things that give people meaning and there's not that many things, right? Like there's like maybe non-profit work but it's hard to find meaning without like doing these kinds of things I find.
Raj Suri:
- Absolutely. Yeah. And I think working with immigrants as well, you know, I mean like Martin, I mean your companies have like a social mission as well. You're helping people really change their lives, right? And I'm, I'm also doing that nowadays with Lima, which is helping immigrants you know, come to the US and you know, skilled immigrants. I find it very meaningful, you know once you get like an immigrant approved for like a green card or something, it it changes their life. You know, they're eternally grateful and you know, you changed their family's life as well and generations to come.
Immad Akhund:
- Did you get involved in kind of politics and like kind of the regulatory side of this? 'cause I mean it seems like you had like quite a lot of scale.
Martin Basiri:
- Like when you get to that scale you always get questioned, right? Like you are on panels that they're sitting, especially like in the country of Canada we have this; it's a small country, a country of 40 million people and basically access to people in public sector is there for almost all citizens, right? It is very different from US. I, I actually lived in the US for like seven years as well. So I've seen both world of the 14 years that I'm outside of Iran, half of it I spend in the US half of it I spend in Canada and access to people who serves us in the public sector is of course very easier I think in the, in Canada. So you always like exchange ideas. This is home. So I wanted the best for my children and grandchildren and other people's children like, like when you think about like what's the meaning of life, you know one of the thing is like we come into this beautiful world, the other people made these buildings and these homes and this agriculture and everything for us to flourish and then our job is to make it better and leave this world better for other people and and that's like exciting and sometimes it's in your business, sometimes in your part-time, things that you do with philanthropy or other things sometimes in your advisors and sharing your knowledge.
I try to do as much of it as I can and also it is a good learning path. Like for me and this is kudos to both US and Canada, land of opportunity. I came from a country with a lot of controversy, right? Iran, like especially this week, it's all over the news and I always were, when I came here I couldn't speak English. I literally went to Waterloo and I had to like go to English class as well. I was, I was speaking very little English and I was always like how like where can I get in this society as a foreigner, you know as a foreigner. And what I noticed that is so beautiful in Canada and US is the limit is limit in your, your brain. They will just encourage you to work harder and go achieve any dreams. You know, of course there are a lot of, a lot of problems in the society is still for race, gender, religion and a lot of things. But the piece that a human being in these two countries already overcome is magnificent compared to the piece that is not done yet. There is still a lot of work to do. There are like, we have a lot of like problems in our societies that have to be solved but it's incredible how great countries they are.
Raj Suri:
- How did you lift yourself up? You know when you first got to the country getting to a place where you became a very successful founder? I mean you kind of, you came in with a lot of disadvantages and, and you did something very impressive.
Martin Basiri:
- I think like, more support I get from like people who are born here than like my community but also I got tremendous support from the Persian community. But when I started the business I was living in Cleveland even though the company was in Canada and my first investors, they were all local Ohio people that they put together and believed in our mission and believed in, believed in me and my brothers that we started the company together. Yeah. A lot of people over years they, they came and you know they pat our shoulder and they gave us a word of encouragement and you know in entrepreneurship there are a lot of hard days, a lot of days that like you sit down and say not why am I doing this? Like I never asked that, but like, oh damn this is hard. And I normally like get a lot of encouragement from other people to like don't give up. You know, you make a lot of mistakes you know, and you see when you are constantly trying to get better, the word is forgiving you for the mistakes that even you do. You know, they encourage you to go forward and that's a beauty of human beings as well.
Raj Suri:
- How many students has ApplyBoard helped?
Martin Basiri:
- Over 1 million students, with their application journey. Of course not all of them chose to go to the university that we selected, like we helped them with or they got visa, over 200,000 people came to Canada alone throughout ApplyBoard. Yeah. Which is 0.5% population. I did a calculation upon graduating of our students and plus three years of work when they get to like their first base of their salary almost 0.6% GDP of Canada is with the students who grow through to our country.
Immad Akhund:
- That's a great stat. In the US, I find this very annoying that like you know, immigration is kind of bundled into one and like people walking across the southern border are in the same box as a high skilled immigrant kind of getting an engineering degree and yeah, one of the most annoying things that like Trump did was he at least for a year banned H1-B visas and actually it was the reason why Mercury started hiring in Canada and built up a Canadian subsidiary and now we have like 80 people in Canada. But I find it so frustrating because it seems so obvious that these things are like not even the same category, like they have the word immigration on them but they're completely different category of like topic. Does Canada do a better job of like separating these, these two ideas or is it kind of a similar mess?
Martin Basiri:
- So in the US if you look at the numbers like let's say last year, like roughly around a million people came through normal path of immigration and about three to 4 million people some stat says up to 5 million people came illegally from southern border. We don't have that border like our border land borders on the US.
Immad Akhund:
- It's just America.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah it's America. And we used to have a lot of people during covid time come to Canada and now it's actually the other way. We have some people from Canada going to the US. So no, in Canada its different, a bigger percentage. Like for example I heard almost 50% of population of Toronto area is immigrants. So it's very different dialogues. The country is a different stage than like US has.
Immad Akhund:
- I thought there was like an up-surgence, insurgence whatever in anti-immigration sentiment in Canada as well as the US. Is that not the case?
Martin Basiri:
- It is happening like when the home prices because our interest rate went up, it was happening at the same time that the labor shortage was tight during Covid. Right. And a lot of anti-immigrant, that it happened and kind of government also rather to say yeah, it's because of the demand of houses is a lot rather than say guys like when the interest rate goes up, cost of building homes goes up, everything become more expensive and that's why developers aren't doing it. So they're trying to like bring down the number of immigrants right now but it is becoming worse and worse in terms of, in terms of like sentiment generally speaking with the compared to the US is much better but in both places, even though for example I lived in Cleveland, which is not very, not a lot of foreigners live there. You see a lot of buzz, but that's like top 10. That's like a 10% of day to day. The 90% is the societies are good educated people that they're like they understand this is land of opportunity. Even like most of Americans, if you ask them, hey where's your ancestors from? They can root to you within the last 100 years how they came from Europe or like from different other places in the world. I think it's in, it is in the blood of us.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah. America and Canada are a land of immigrants. So I think it's hard to like separate that. Growing up in the UK I never had that same sense of belonging. It always felt like England was the land of English people and that we were like foreigners there. Whereas like in America I think you can feel a lot more like you belong as an immigrant.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah this is home like especially Canada. The moment you, you are, your plane land, you feel home. I live in both countries. Both countries I think is amazing for immigrants. But there are a lot of work has to be done in both countries. Like, like listen purely mathematical when you are the number of newborn since 1990, like from 1990 we are having less children right now than 90. 90, right? And our economy is four times bigger, our workforce grown 40%. So people don't get 3D printed. Like either you bring immigrant or you, you basically create people through natural birth, right? So I know it's a very political thing but the economy is growing and need more workforce. That's what is happening. Like maybe the AI and robots change that.
Immad Akhund:
- It's a temporary fix, right? I guess you get an immigrant, I think in one generation they still have a lot of babies and two generations later they're back to like the same fertility rate as like someone from those countries. I wonder what is like a long-term fix to it?
Martin Basiri:
- What do you guys think? A birth rate of US and Canada is,
Immad Akhund:
- The US is 1.64. I can't remember what the Canadian was
Raj Suri:
- Canada's 1.26.
Immad Akhund:
- Wow. Yeah it's lower than Japan now.
Raj Suri:
- But didn't Canada recently slow down foreign students, foreign immigrants? It's a big thing there now, right? Like is that because of the housing crisis or is it because of other things?
Martin Basiri:
- So one of the biggest problem that governments has, right, is the main reason they bring immigrant is for economic purposes is to fill the gap in the current labor shortage. They always look at current labor shortage but the time it takes an immigrant to come and get to the economy is like three to four years. So governments always have to make a decision based on data of today for what's going to happen in four years. So when they made the decision during covid we had a huge talent shortage and basically we basically gave more visas for people to come to Canada. Then interest rate went up and as a result, a lot of layoff and basically the unemployment rate rised. So as a result then, now government is responding to what is happening today. However, at the same time they're decreasing the interest rate means the labor market gonna go back up again. So you'll see in three years we're gonna have another massive labor shortage because government always has this challenge of I need to make a decision today for what is coming like in three to four years. That's one problem. Canada, we count number of people who come in part of our population versus in the US they don't count illegal immigrant at all part of their working, working force. So like even the population of us, if you look at the stat, they say oh we've grown 1.7 million, 700,000 natural births and basically 700,000 net natural growth and 1 million immigrant. But we all then read on the same type that 4 million illegal immigrant come in Canada, anyone come here. Even the, when they over stay, we count them on immigration, we count them on our population. So normally like a stats like GDP per capita population growth and stuff us is kind of understated and Canada is a little overstated. We are in a smaller country so we are tend to be more sensitive to ups and downs of interest rate compared to us, which is a bigger economy.
Raj Suri:
- One other thing I'm, I'm really interested in is, you know the ApplyBoard business model is quite unique, right? You don't charge students, you actually make money from the universities. Maybe you can explain that a little bit like how how the business model works because it's quite unique.
Martin Basiri:
- It's very similar to normal. You know when the recruitment firms works with your companies, right? When they bring an engineer it's very similar. Universities are like for example, like in us, if you go name some of the universities, most of the people know because they're now here. But for example, let's say Ohio State University or University of York in Canada, in China we have 147 cities with a population of over 1 million people. Those people don't know York University. Those people don't know Ohio State University. In fact, I never even heard of Ohio till I came to Canada.
Immad Akhund:
- So you help acquire the students.
Martin Basiri:
- Exactly. For these universities, it's extremely expensive for universities if they want to go to different places and have those own people. But if you serve all of them, the cost can come down. It still is very expensive to recruit. And remember they're looking for people who, they're looking for exceptional people who are also willing to pay, for example, in Canada, four times the tuition fee of domestic people or in the US out of a state fees a lot of times don't even get their scholarships.
Raj Suri:
- Pretty cool business model because you don't charge a student and and universities are willing to pay. What do you think of like university's business models and how do you think this is gonna evolve over time? There's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about, you know, how universities are not sustainable. Actually they're, they're gonna become less popular over time.
Martin Basiri:
- I hear those arguments all the time and I think they have a lot of valid points. A lot of valid points about, as we were talking about, a lot of these costs doesn't make sense. A lot of the degrees really if you look at the income after graduation, it doesn't make sense. You spend $200,000 to get a general art degree even though your salary after graduation is $40,000. I agree with that. So there are a lot of truth in what they're saying. At the same time, if you look at it, it's like a universities are divorced system but better than any other alternative at the scale. If you look at the income of people, general public and then if you look at the income of them, people who went to a higher education and people who didn't go to higher education is massively different. So don't look at outlier, look at the society when you're making a decision for the society. I think there are a lot of the things that, for example, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is saying, is saying trying to to make those higher school students to be done become the outliers.
Immad Akhund:
- But the issue I think is that like, you know, this is kind of like consumer surplus, right? Like the, you go to university, used to be you pay $30K and you can get a job where you like pay off your university in like five years or something
Martin Basiri:
- Because universities used to be 80% run by grants from governments.
Immad Akhund:
- Okay, maybe that's why. But I think it's also like there's been a massive kinda, because it's not a competitive market, like universities exist, very few new universities are are chartered or created and like the costs are mostly still covered by student loans which are funded by the government. So there's just like, you keep getting the cost disease to the extent that it like takes up more and more of like the ROI of going to university and at some point people are gonna be paying $500,000 to go to university and it'll be like a hundred percent of like all the salary then.
Martin Basiri:
- And as this university's prices goes up and some of the value which is content goes down because of content become widely accessible, more and more alternative has happened going to happen currently everyone alternative is if you can create yourself a self-discipline to learn something earlier in your life and you learn how to learn, you're gonna do better. Because what is the most important thing that universities teach us? Learn how to learn. It doesn't matter if I'm a good high school student, there's no way I can come to Canada and say, Hey guys, give me an opportunity. Just come to Canada. Like that's, that's why I go to universities again, back into the things. There are a lot of problems in the universities. Currently at mass, There is not a single alternative that's shown that they can bring people at mass out of poverty better than universities and colleges. So it's like we had a system done very well over time became less efficient and as internet and other forms of content became more and more important, the value, the delta of that value came down. But the price kept going up. It's still at a massive level for teaching people discipline. Learn how to learn, create a social network
Immad Akhund
- Acts as a filter, right? Like if you are a company, you are like, okay, you know, I want smart people to work here. And like I think a university's done some level of filtering in some level of education and then vice versa because of that filter. Like an immigrant wants to go at a university because they know what they're gonna get.
Martin Basiri:
- The other thing for, for the society to have great alternatives, you have to have great people and entrepreneurs go to ed-tech and things around education to innovate. You don't see that much of that inflow.
Raj Suri:
- Entrepreneurs see it as hard and it is hard. It's multi-decade. Yeah.
Martin Basiri:
- Hard, and it is not like very lucrative.
Immad Akhund:
- Well the couple people that have tried to innovate in ed-tech, like they've kind of been like a little screwed, right? There's Lambda school that became BloomTech and that was hit by a ton of kind of regulations and there was another company that was trying to do like a, a college degree in two years. It's really hard to actually get, do innovation in education. Like it's a very regulated industry.
Martin Basiri:
- It is extremely hard and compared to; like if like if I wanted to make the best financial decision for company valuation and for myself, I should not have started an ed tech company.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, probably not.
Martin Basiri:
- The level of scrutiny that is on you for helping people with university or things is massive. Anything like that goes to healthcare and education, especially education. The amount of scrutiny is so much higher. And look at the result, healthcare globally, this a 2019 data is about $6 trillion. Expenditure market capitalization of companies that are in healthcare is about $10 trillion. Education is about $5 trillion expenditure. And it's the same, same taste of it. A lot of private and public expenditure market capitalization of companies is $150 million. It is just hard to build businesses in education. It makes less sense logically and more hard. You gotta be more crazy to do a business in education, to do a startup in education like building a company is not only hard enough now you just added another level of complexity and scrutiny and less funding and everything. But you know, some of us has to do it.
Raj Suri:
- What I'm excited about are these alternatives, right? Alternative models that could disrupt universities. We, we, we all agree that universities are, you know, their business models are upside down. They don't necessarily provide the value that they used to maybe 30 years ago. And I'm excited for these new models. One model I've been thinking about is just like these, you know, like Waterloo co-op, you know, is a really compelling model but it's only exists really in Waterloo and maybe a couple other US universities. Immad, do you know about this?
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, I do know about it and I actually love Waterloo co-op students. Do you wanna just describe it Raj for people that might know?
Raj Suri:
- Yeah. And, and Waterloo if you, you know, for the undergrad program, every engineer has to alternate between four months of study and four months of work and they have to go through a rigorous competitive like interview process to get those jobs. And you know, they have to, when they go on site and they work for four months, they get evaluated by their, their boss and it gets part of their like academic credit. So like, you know, working is like a deeply ingrained part of their, their their degree. And by the time I graduated from Waterloo, I worked at six different companies. I had two years of work experience and I felt like I was fully formed. You know, like I felt like I knew what I wanted to do long term. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I would love to see the Waterloo model exported to like all the universities. Yeah.
Martin Basiri:
- But there, there the, the supply is not there. There are a lot of universities also try to create a similar things, the supply of companies to provide that many jobs for all 20 million. For example, higher education people like Waterloo works because they started 50 years ago and they build that brand, if every single university have like Waterloo means that Waterloo students don't find a job because companies don't hire that many intern.
Immad Akhund
- Well I think you could do it at like the top universities. It is definitely harder if you're like not a top technical university. You know what I was just gonna say, I went to University of Cambridge in the UK and actually like working or doing something practical was seen as a negative thing. 'cause it was all about like, hey we are, we are academics here. We are like researchers. We are like doing, you know, we are building the future of computer science. It was computer science. This is a very practical subject. It's cool that Waterloo doesn't seem like it's like that. I wonder if there's other kind of top universities have that kinda practical side to it. Like I feel like Stanford is pretty practical but maybe like Harvard and something
Raj Suri:
- MIT was surprisingly, I mean even though MIT was, you know, is should be seen as practical. But actually it is not as much as a Waterloo. I mean I felt Waterloo undergrads came out of, you know, their degree program way more ready for the workforce than MIT students. And which is ironic 'cause MIT is probably, you know, the best technical school in the world.
Immad Akhund:
- But to Martin's point, maybe there isn't enough like internships out there to facilitate that many.
Raj Suri:
- I think it would increase though. Like that's the thing. I don't think supply is fixed. And I think if you create an easy program for, you know, it becomes a culture for all employers to hire co-op students.
Martin Basiri:
- One of the best thing about Waterloo is like when the students go out every four months they can see and then when they come back they're better students now. So the work also make them better students. Like a lot of times like we go to the school and we learn something. We're like, why did, why are we learning this? When you go to work and see, oh some of those skills make me better when next semester they come back to school, they also take school more seriously 'cause they see what is working in the real time, right? They take group like a teamwork more seriously because they know at work I struggle with the teamwork. It's kind of a real quick, quick feedback on your soft skills as well. Versus in the block universities where you go to a block, you don't get any feedback on your soft skills. Like remember like we are entering a word that soft skills are becoming more important than harder skills and there is not a real quick more you can fasten the process of feedback better.
Raj Suri:
- One thing I've noticed for like, you know, people trying to get their first job is like there's very little feedback and there's no, there's no indicator telling you what you need to improve, you know, to, to be a better employee and stuff. And so a lot of young people, even today, right now, the labor market struggling as much as it is, people are really struggling to find their first jobs and they get no feedback from society. And eventually that leads to a lot of problems downstream, you know, leads to people who are bitter and you know, they, it causes political problems, you know, so getting young people their first job getting, helping young people right outta college so important for society.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah. The other thing, like if I say like there's five big disruptions happening in education, right? And the way that I categorize it is through these five. Number one is content. Content is changing online, offline. Now AI came the content, the actual material. Second is personalization. That's the most exciting part of education that is happening. The normal classroom is designed for the middle of the school top as people always get bored. The bottom of the class from that subject, they're always left behind. Personalization makes it, my material would be different from yours because our level of understanding on that subject and level of interest in that subject is different. Third is assessment, right? The assessment we talked a little bit of with one example, but the, the whole test and the way we test different software skills and harder skills is literally hasn't changed for hundreds of years. That has to like change. Fourth is access. That's where like my first company ApplyBoard played and it's access is about providing access now to this top three that I said about it. Making it more accessible, making it lighter. Like for example, just think how exciting it's to have a hundred gigabit SD and put it on an $80 tablet and ship it to the entire poorest people in, in Africa and India and Iran. And they have the, one of the best teachers possible that they can learn languages and maths and different subjects. Right? And the fifth one, that's what I do right now in Passage is called financial access, right? Providing financial access to different level of like education so people for, for financial access don't be left behind. You know, they could have access regardless of their parents are rich or not. You know, and I think these five big disruptions are coming to education and every single one of them affect universities. I can tell you a lot of universities, like the one amount that you are saying in universities, they're not gonna change. And you could see also a lot of universities they, they're going to change because they're competing with the other ones that they don't want to change and they embrace change. And Covid shows that universities are willing to change, you know, when they have to, they all, they came online with a matter of two weeks, but their, their material didn't change for 40 years, right? So if they have to, they change and that's an exciting part of it. But I see a lot of alternative to universities will come up. They're gonna have a very hard time not only from the universities but also from society till the employers accept the alternative till the students can show that they can learn on themselves. And having that discipline.
Immad Akhund:
- I guess like from those five kind of problems you talked about you've innovated in like four and five, right? Financial access and access in general. Is that where most of the kinda opportunity for startups lie in your mind? Or do you think you can innovate in like one, two and three?
Martin Basiri:
- It's a $5 trillion annual expenditure. Actually the content is the biggest opportunity. The content's personalization and assessment right now with the rise of AI is the biggest opportunity. I can tell you the biggest problem for humanity in these five is financial access. Like currently we are living in a world that if you have money, you have access to far better education If you don't have money. And that's not only a university level, same thing for K to 12 and even early childhood education. And there is no tool better than education. And I'm not talking about university, I'm not, I don't care about what type of education. Education is the best thing that you can do for your children. You can do for the society is the best proven way to get people out of poverty. Like Immad if we put you right now, middle of Africa, within two weeks you'll have money because you're educated, you know now how to make money, how to earn money, you'll figure it out. And that's the power that education give to people, right?
Immad Akhund
- If you gimme access to a computer, I can access my bank account, that'll be fine.
Martin Basiri:
- That's a takeaway here. We can all work on making, we can combine forces and work on some alternatives.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah. More entrepreneurs we need.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, yeah. Experienced entrepreneurs can do this, right? We know how to do this type of stuff.
Martin Basiri:
- Yeah. One thing that, like we are talking about the University or Colleges. I know in the US like across every single street there is two colleges or university. When you look at the world, 400 million people right now as we talk should be in the university on college. If the same ratio of people that goes to North America should be in the college that they're not...
Immad Akhund:
- I mean that was a really big driver of China's rise. Like in increasing the number of people that went through higher education in the last 20, 30 years. All right. This is a super interesting conversation. I feel like it could go on for another hour, but we should probably wrap. I really appreciate you kind of diving deep in education with us Martin. We had all these other topics to talk about, but we've just stuck to education, which is kinda your passion.
Martin Basiri:
- Thank you very much for having me.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, thanks everyone for listening. Please follow us on YouTube, Spotify, all the various channels. Join our Tribe group. There's some interesting conversations happening and you know, thank you everyone for listening and next week we'll have a new show.
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