Hello, my name is Sergio Monsalve. I'm a founding partner
at Roble Ventures and I'm also a lecturer
at Stanford University. I think the future of education
and education technology is incredibly bright
if we're able to do one thing. ChatGPT came out. It has attracted
more than a million users. ChatGPT impressed
the University of Minnesota Law School C-plus average on its final exam. Is education going to be like
if people don't need to write for their jobs today? New York City School District
announced that prohibit the use of ChatGPT to any student,
which is impossible because they can use it anywhere. But the end of the day,
this exactly what I'm talking about is how do we elevate education
to focus on the things that humans are equipped to do? You know what happened with the calculator
and the word processors? Spelling
and arithmetic became less of an issue and less of a thing you focus on. Of course, you need to know how to do them,
but at the end of the day, you probably will not ask a prompt
that is very basic that ChatGPT can actually answer. You probably will have to go deeper
and use a lot more of your humanism to answer those things
and get credit for your assignment. So I could see education moving in a way
where we elevate humans to be much more abstract,
using more of their human skills, empathy, courage, things like that. The changes are inevitable. I just don't think
you can just fight it. You have to elevate the student. We're no longer luxurious place
where we can actually take a job for the next 20 years,
inch our way up into the ladder and retire. And that's it.
You're going to have multiple careers. There's going to be multiple reductions
of force increase, sense of force. There's going to be a lot of things
that are happening a lot faster. Have to be adaptable
to those changes. This is why you need to focus
on human capabilities faster and more iteratively
than we did before. This is why we cannot afford
having people just go to school from five years old to 25 years old. They have to be going
to school for life. This is why I love education
is if we can re-architect some of the ways we teach,
focus much more on that future, then I think we have a very bright future. So my personal story is
I was born and raised in Mexico City and came when I was 13,
not knowing any English at all. Education for me
became not a nice to have, but a must have. That stuck with me. And so I ended up here at Stanford
where I studied industrial engineering. I've had
to muster a lot of resilience. Later in my years at Stanford,
I really got enamored with mergers and acquisitions
and sort of the financing side of engineering and business. So I ended up working at Wall Street
for two years at Morgan Stanley, where I did a lot of M&A as an analyst. And later on I actually became
a venture capital investor. One of the things
that I really focused on is just to do the things
that I really wanted to do that I was really curious about. One of my really close friends
was from Finland, growing up in a time where we still had
this thing called the Soviet Union. To me, it was very interesting
to have very deep discussions with him about the value of capitalism
versus what other systems had. And he had obviously been a neighbor
to the biggest non capitalist society. So I became very intrigued
about what capitalism can do for people and also the threats of capitalism
if it goes awry, meaning in socioeconomic inequities. And so to me, that was the beginning
of why I'm doing Roble frankly, because I understand that capitalism is not perfect
and we need to kind of approach capitalism with a purpose where I became pretty interested in education and a lot of investors
at the time had said education is like the worst place to invest
because that's how everybody's lost their money and the way they were thinking about it. I would say, okay, I agree because K through 12 and higher ed
had an incumbent that was unmovable, right? Which is the government, basically. But what people don't realize
and I started really thinking about it, we learn formally from 4
or 5 year old kindergarten all the way to 18. If you finish high school 21,
if you finish college, that's it. Then what do you do
from 25 to 100? You're not formally learning. You're actually working,
most likely not going to be formally trained by your employer. And that was okay when the industry
innovation was moving very slowly. But in today's economy,
things are moving exponentially fast. And in that world you have
to have human capabilities be catching up much faster
and you have to upload information, knowledge and skills to humans much faster. So I thought we needed to have
this new industry called adult learning. We started looking at a lot
in different companies and the one that really caught
my attention was Udemy. I really thought that they had a way
to create very quality content at very affordable price. The supply side of the marketplace
was very thriving and very happy. They're making a good income
for them So you're enabling humans
to make more money as teachers on Udemy than outside. And on the flip side, you're actually
making courses that are very affordable for anybody in the world, right? So to me that was a perfect model
and so I invested in it. And it happens that after six and one half,
seven years of being on that board, we ended up taking it public. And it was a very fruitful
investment for us. To me, capitalism without purpose
is not necessarily the way I want to live my life. And there's many ways
and I learned it, frankly, one of my biggest teachers
was being on the board of Udemy and understanding that business. It allowed me to think about one profession
that should be revered as heroes in society. Teachers, they don't get paid
or viewed as heroes in this society
because they are not viewed as in the center of capitalism. It's like odd. We are such a rich country,
yet our most important contributors to society
are not being valued that way. So to me, that's an aberration
of the system that we've created. So there's a way to build it,
and that is through technology. And Udemy showed me that right. Some of the instructors on Udemy
are making over $1 million a year, so that's great. That's human enablement. So that to me is what made me
really enriching. When you see the faces of people
that you've actually helped because of the funding that you've given and the founder
and what the entrepreneur has been able to build and grow. And so you were a little part of it. Think about how big K through 12
and higher ed is in terms of market size. You're talking about trillions. So there's probably a few industries
that are bigger, but not many. Maybe financial services,
maybe energy, the governments. But that's it. Education
is just comes right behind. It's probably one of the top five,
if not the top three industries in the world. And that's only counting K
through 12 through higher ed. I think the future of education
and education technology is incredibly bright. If we're able to do one thing,
which is to really teach how to be better individuals, more emotionally aware,
more have soft skills, are going to enable us to essentially collaborate
with the prowess of computing rather than compete with it
or try to topple it admirably. We have a playbook
on how to assess companies. In fact, one of the things the reason
I started this class at Stanford on entrepreneurship
and education technology is because of what I saw
in the world of investments. And the mistakes were being made
both by the founding teams, but also by the venture investors
in education. You need to bring the educators
and the entrepreneurs engineers together so that the learning science
as well as the technology as well as the business all work together. So it's a very inclusive way
to build a company. In education. It didn't work that way
because a lot of people thought they knew education
because they had been educated themselves. So I started the class with the thesis
around how to properly diligence these companies. Most important thing
to add it out on what we look for, it goes back to people. And this is why I also we
call it human enablement. The theme itself is also
about how we enable our own entrepreneurs, team and market are probably
the most important things. The reality is a lot of the companies pivot,
so it's not about the product, it's about what it says about the team
and about the market. The commonality
in all the greatest companies, the ones that have succeeded the most. It comes back to a great set of people
that work well together. So this is why I focus on their
roadmap for a team, but also as importantly,
how are they going to build their investor base and their board composition You need to be bringing a diverse set
of people from the beginning onto those boards and creating a real independent
and diverse group of people. So that has to happen
both in the board level and the executive level
and at the CEO level. And so I think it's about people,
and that's why I spent a lot of time thinking about this human enablement theme,
because it has a very much a people component in the name itself,
both as what we invest in, but also how we work with our companies.
