95% of e-learning becomes skip factories (zick learn)
Matteo Penzo - Co-founder & CEO zick learn
Matteo is a serial entrepreneur and a former executive at frog, a global design and strategy firm. Today Matteo leads the team at zick learn, which is a startup making enterprise learning fast, efficient and fun through text based micro-learning delivered to any chat client on the market.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. Matteo Penzo is interviewed by Frank Albert Coates.
How come you ended up moving into EdTech and startup your company?
Well, these days I was thinking that it's been years I'm in the education field. I co-founded a conference organization, a conference startup back in 2005. And what is a conference if not a huge amount of content of know-how delivered from stage to the audience.
But then I have to say that I believe that the strongest force in the universe is serendipity. And what I was focusing on after I left Frog, I was focusing on my conference company. I was researching micro learning. Because we were launching a product on micro conferences. So jamming the content of an entire conference into bits of 40 to 50 minutes.
So I read, I spent the summer reading basically every scientific paper about micro learning. And then I was called by a guy. He was the creative director of a design company that I hired to design the website at a real estate giant I was working for back then. I'm speaking about 2006, 2007.
So this guy called me in the summer of 2021 because he wanted to speak with me. And, you know, after leaving Frog, I joined some boards as an advisor or as a board member. So I was thinking since he was an entrepreneur, he knew, he moved from consultancy to entrepreneurship, I thought he was offering me a seat in his board.
What he told me is, look, I have this idea of an application that does text-based microlearning, and we're looking for our third co-founder who could really put legs into this idea, and I would like to work with you. And again, this was right after I spent the entire summer studying micro-learning. And so the very moment I recognize in my life serendipity at play, I always jump in.
And so I said yes and the rest is recent history.
Could you tell us a bit more in depth about what the company does and what stage you are in? I know that recently there's been a pre-seed funding round that was successful.
During my tenure at Frog, I became famous in the organization for being the one employee who skipped basically all the mandatory trainings that the organization was pushing to me. And I did that mainly because of two reasons.
Number one, I did not have time. Number two, they were extremely boring and I didn't think they were useful to me, and I had better things to focus upon, namely the work for my teams and for my clients. And this is the problem we're trying to solve with zick learn. If you look at standard e-learning, corporate learning, obviously we're focusing on B2B on large to very large scale organizations.
95% of e-learning fails because it's employees not finishing the trainings, abandoning them or transforming them into what we call skip factories. When you just press next, next, next to reach the end of your mandatory training, and then you can go back and focus on your work. What we do with zick is that we leverage the learning science theories of microlearning and spaced learning. Simplifying complexity; I would say that these two theories are the best ways for our brains to learn and to memorize for the longest period of time possible.
And we leverage these two aspects of learning science to deliver bite-sized text-based training to any chat client on the market, so that employees do not have, number one, to sit at their desk in front of their computer, connected to a powerful wifi to learn.
And number two, they don't need to create the availability of time they need to be trained. But since that, every lesson lasts a maximum of a couple of minutes, the lesson and the learning basically happens in the flow of work. So we leverage the small moments of free time that every employee has in their day.
One question around that. In the organizations you work with, I'm sure that there's many other systems around learning and development. So how do you integrate with that? How do you position yourself around or in that flow of learning?
For the moment we don't. We're still focusing on the core of the product. For the future, we're planning and we have a pretty fat feature pipeline from today all the way to June when we're calendarizing our next funding round. And the plan is to integrate with enterprise API similar to Workato. So we basically wanna open to the outer world through readymade or easily customizable recipes that you can build on Workato to integrate with us.
What we discovered is, although from the very beginning, we were not positioning ourselves to compete with the largest scale LMSs of this world. First of all, because they are too big. You don't enter a race, you cannot win. That's at least my philosophy. And number two, because I don't think we are on the same thing. And zick learn seen from the perspective of a LMS builder; it's just one powerful additional channel they could integrate in their training workflow to deliver trainings.
What we discovered by speaking with clients is, although we were positioning zick in the moment when learning happens, now the market is dividing into three main pillars.
Number one, the people who are using zick before the actual training. And you can think, for example, companies that do a lot of experiential training. For example, orienteering in a forest, right? Bringing manager in a forest to teach how to cope with a larger team or with the challenges of the entire team and how to solve them as individuals, part of a group. And they're using zick before the training happens to create a common ground of understanding among all the participants, but also to inform the trainer of the different skillset that every participant has. Because of the exercises you can do within zick and the interactions between the platform and the user.
And on the other side of the spectrum, you have organizations that are using standard e-learning to create the foundational know-how for their teams, but then deploy the same training on zick a couple of weeks or a month after the training happened. In order to do number one, reinforcement of the knowhow they already got. And number two, verify again with the interactions among the learner and the platform, verify how much of the original content has been retained.
Talking about that; what would you say are the reasons for how you will succeed and what's your secret sauce, if we may say so?
The reasons behind our success. It's very simple. If you look at our life today as learners, the one thing that everybody has huge lack of is time, and we operate in the minutes of free time everybody has. Number two, we have huge focus on user experience and the learner experience, and we created a product who, from one side makes the course creation and management super simple for the learning managers. And from the other side creates an amazing experience for the end users, for the learners. And these are the two main focuses that we keep in mind when prioritizing, planning and applying new features.
And when you look at the rest of the market and especially the corporate education market. How do you see your, let's say, competitors or other actors and who might they be and why?
So the first homework, if you want, that I accomplished after my co-founders brought me on board, was to look for competitors.
It's very easy to fall in love with an idea, especially when this idea is as sexy as the idea behind zick learn is. But when I was at Frog, I worked a lot with startups and I noticed that the main reason of failure is when you are an idea in search of a problem. And in this love relationship with ideas, it's very difficult to say, okay, let's build this. Let's deploy this to market, and then we'll find a problem that we can solve with this idea. But, it never works. And so even before scouting the market in looking for problems that we would be solving with zick learn, I wanted to see whether there was somebody else doing the same thing.
Because again there's one thing that my former CEO at Frog used to say is that; ideas are free, it's execution that matters. So it's not just important to have an idea, even if it's super cool, then it's everything about how you execute upon this idea that will make your success. And luckily enough, otherwise we wouldn't be speaking today, luckily enough for me, I have amazing competitors mainly in the US market. One of them is Arist, it's a spinoff of Stanford University. They do something very similar to us. They deploy micro-learning, text-based lessons to chat clients and SMSs. Then you have Edume which is a super giant.
The one thing that differentiates zick learn from Edume, for example, is that Edume, you have an amazing learner experience, ultra curated. They are similar. They deploy something which is very similar to stories for Instagram. But they operate within their own app, which means for the learner, the need to download a new application, install it, maintain it, potentially create a new user account, and then learning to use a new app that you never used before.
And the one thing that we curate a lot in our product is to be as frictionless as possible when you deploy learning to employees. And that's why I believe that leveraging the chat clients that they already have on board, either because they use them in case of WhatsApp, 98% of the European population is an active user of WhatsApp. Or because their organization had them installing them. And I'm speaking about Slack or teams or I don't know, Google Chat. Then it makes it much, much easier for them to start to be trained and for their employers to deliver the training. Even without or nearly without the employee realizing that a new training channel has been added to the organization.
One question on the type of competitors that you look at; how do you see the market evolving in corporate education with bigger actors around LMS, sort of moving across and deploying all kinds of different types of engagement and channels. Do you see those more traditional actors as potential competitors as well?
This is a very interesting question because it's something that keeps returning even when I speak with investors, and as I was saying, I don't think LMSs are or will be competitors. For two reasons.
Number one, the LMS world is heavily commoditized. LMS was something new 10 years ago. Now if you look at big innovation in the LMS space, it's nowhere to be found. It's just the same old source maybe repurposed into new channels. I am very curious about how audio-based micro-learning or video-based micro-learning are gonna play.
I'm not a believer and hence my curiosity. The reason we focus on text only is because if you think about your relationship with text, text is the only way for you to be truly multitasking. The one example I always make is if you're driving your car and listening to us in podcast, and then the guy in front of you stops the car, then your entire attention is focused on not hitting the guy in front of you.
And I can assure you that everything we're gonna say in those 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds are gonna be completely lost. While on the other side, when you're reading an email or a chat on your smartphone and you are crossing the street. So you stop looking at the phone, you stop reading, you cross the street. And once this task has been accomplished, you go back at reading your email or your chat exactly where you left it.
So using text is much more manageable from the attention point of our users compared to anything else.
I get easily distracted. If my attention is what you're looking for, audio is not really the best media and definitely not video because I start doing something else the very moment I get bored.
And again, if you think about the corporate environment, which is the one we're playing in. Every moment you have something distracting you. It could be a guy knocking on your door, a message popping up on your corporate chat client, an email arriving, a phone call.
And I don't think it's something that can be managed from the outside. You cannot properly plan a product design to manage all of these unknowns. What you can do, which is what we're doing, is that you can plan the product to fit in perfectly between one distraction and the following one.
So let's move over to more of the things you have learned on this journey. Could you say something about your biggest challenge since you started the company and how you solved it?
I think maybe not the biggest, but the first challenge we need to solve is the very moment we started raising money is; okay, how do we move ahead with new hires?
And my original idea was, okay, let's get to the point where we have enough money to hire a full-time team. Let's create corporate culture and then let's start building the product. But, this is a super fast moving market. And pretty soon I realized I did not have the luxury of time. So we initially raised enough money at the beginning of 2022 from some super cool angels in Europe and in Italy, and I decided to, instead of hiring a full-time team, to operate slightly as I would do, as I was doing during Frog.
So I used to augment my existing teams with temporary workforce that I hired with firms in Germany, Italy, UK. I happened to work a lot with Ukraine. This was pre-war, and I got in touch with my former colleagues. They said, no, sorry, we don't have enough people. We have a lot of work, we cannot help you.
But, there is this guy who left our organization and created a smaller organization who basically does the same thing. And then the war started and I focused on countries which were not Ukraine. So started speaking with companies in Italy, companies in Germany, all previous providers of talent that I used during my time at Frog.
And then this guy called and said, hey man, we're still here, we're still on the market, and we're available to work. And the interesting thing that he told me is that although during our first conversations, for example, to hire a senior developer would've taken five to eight weeks because the market in Ukraine was very busy. Post-war all the talents that were working for Russian companies left their job. So in two weeks we have been able to hire a top-notch team with people with huge experience exactly on our product focus. And so I realized I was in the position to make both an ethical choice and an opportunistic choice.
Obviously the opportunistic one is I can get top talent immediately, but the interesting one was the ethical aspect. So I'm going to spend a lot of money paying people that will help us building our product. So I better do this in an area of the world where I'm sure these people truly and badly need my money .
What my teams always tell me is that for them being on the market and making money is a way to support their country. Because they need money not just to live, but also to fund everything that goes on in a country that has been invaded.
So I did three things contractually. I wanted to protect time. We're not in the position to lose time. I wanted to protect the product. We're not in the position to lose any line of code. And I wanted to protect my investment. But, these are easy things to protect in a contract. So once this was done, I was ready to start. And speaking about time, because when I tell this story, people always think that I took a huge risk. Guys, I did not.
We started writing the user stories in March and we deployed to the market our MVP, late in July. So it is possible. To do business with a country at war, it's the right thing to do and it's the good thing to do for your product.
Also, speaking of the support and things that you have used to keep the company going, any specific resources that have helped you along the way as you built the company?
Both myself and partially my co-founders are outsiders when you look at the education market. So the first thing I did is that I wanted to have a hundred percent woman run advisory board, and I wanted to have people in this team that could cover number one, the things where we were the weaker. And the second thing to cover the aspects of our product, which are more important for us. So the first two people that I was fortunate enough to have joining us; one was professor Christina Serrano, who is one of my contacts back from Singularity University. She was in charge of the faculty program there, and she's a faculty at UC Berkeley, which is our learning science partner.
And she and her team created all the foundational aspects, both on how zick learn works from the learning perspective and from the other side, how we built the learning experience for our users. And number two, the thing that I believe is our biggest differentiator on the market is user experience. And so I got my former partner in crime at Frog, Layla Keramat, who's now partner for user experience at Profit, which is another very, very large design firm in Europe and US taking care of everything related to the user experience. The second thing, again, coming as an outsider was to better get in touch with the EdTech community in Europe.
And that's where you guys from the Garage, but also the guys from EdTech Italia, for example, helped us. Well, it's more than helping. You guys literally brought a community around us, which is very, very helpful. Not just in the day to day relationships, but also in the strategic ones. I was in Valencia, right after Christmas to meet one of the Garage members who was building an AI that given the training A and how your learning experience was on the training suggests training B. And they currently operate with universities.
But, it was very interesting for me to understand how and when to integrate these AI onto our products. So even for partnerships it has been very important. But, even if I think about some of our current investors, it's through the work of the communities that we got in touch with them. With the investors, vertical on the EdTech space.
And the third thing. It's something I always say independently from the business you're in; you must nurture your network because especially in pre-seed, people might like your idea, but at the end of the day will invest in you. And it's so much better if they know you very well. Maybe from past experiences, they might be former clients, they could be people you did business with in the past. They could be people in your network, even tangentially appearing in your network. And if I look at our current investor roster, 90% of the people who invested in us knew us personally from before.
When you look forward in the 6 to 12 months, and you mentioned a few of the things coming up for you already, is it anything particular that you have in mind and a big, big priority that you are starting to prepare?
So we're gonna open our seed round. When all the KPIs I want to be in place will be perfectly in place. Which in my mind is something between June and December. That's not something that worries me. I mean, at the end of the day, money is everywhere. It's just your capability of getting that money in that makes the difference.
The one thing that keeps me up at night is what I'm gonna do with that money. I mean, today it's what I'm doing. It's my bread and butter. I'm transforming money into ideas and ideas into products, which is what I've been doing for the past 20 years of my professional career. But, once you have a larger amount of money and you start building an organization with that money, a stable organization that needs to be future proof and scalable. How do you build a culture? How can you be sure that the culture you are building is the right one from the very first moment? Because the one thing with company culture is that once it's wrong, when you realize it, it's too late and since it's too late, it is extremely challenging, if not impossible to change it.
So how can I make it proper from day one and what does proper mean? What is the company culture that I want to design for the zick learn of the future?
One thing I said before is that money is everywhere, but the one thing that is not everywhere is the quality of your investors. And that's the one thing that as an early stage entrepreneur, you need to focus upon. Because the quality of the early stage investors that you're bringing on board will define who you're gonna be next. And so we have been extremely lucky that among our investors, I not just have people being super, super experts of the HR world, but we also have people who shaped the company culture of extremely large scale organizations. And those are my go-to reference point for any suggestion or inspiration around that.
Obviously the funding topic is a key topic for many founders. Is there anything that you would have done differently or other learnings that you have from your first funding round or the pre-seed round?
So, if I look at myself and at my co-founders, this is probably the fourth or fifth company we're launching. So a big part of my answer to your questions is in the past, so I already did so many things wrong that I was in the position to do so many things right from the very early stage for zick learn. Two suggestions here, at least what worked for us; be bold with your term sheet. The term sheet has much, much more value than the amount of money you're raising, because the term sheet will define the way you organize your company, your next rounds and the way you will be raising money for the next rounds for so many years.
Be bold with your evaluation, which doesn't mean create a science fiction based evaluation for your company, but do not make discounts if you believe in what you're doing. And if you believe that your numbers are right, then you don't need to discount. You must not discount anything at any time because at the end of the day, equity is your most valuable asset at any stage of your company growth.
Number three, don't focus on the market. Focus on your users. Markets come and go; it's extremely fashion driven. Also in EdTech, there's something which is cool today, which will not be cool tomorrow. ChatGPT I'm speaking about you. But, the user will always be there. And the very moment you create something that your users will be willing to love, will be improving their life and they will be ready to fall in love with, then market success is guaranteed.
And the fourth is to enjoy life. I always say I'm a recovering consultant. During my time in a consultancy, I was flying around the world like crazy. Over 200, sometimes 250 flights per year, which was crazy. It was extremely fun. It was also extremely exhausting. I ended up realizing that my entire life was focused on my next flight and how to catch it in time.
At the end of the day, your focus will always be on your product, will always be on your organization, but be sure you find ways and time, in order for your company and your product to fit in with your life, not the opposite.
I want to dig into one thing you said about how to build a culture. What's your sort of preliminary learnings, obviously you have lots of experience on it in other organizations, what are the first things you do to build and keep a culture today?
Maybe three things here too. Number one, create an organization which is prone to error. A foolproof organization is a beast. It's something that not just cannot exist, but you will struggle to keep alive. I do errors every time and when I make an error, I raise a hand and I say, oh, sorry guys, that was me. My bad. Let's move ahead in another direction.
Number two, build a company who's a speed bot so that you can turn it very easily. So it's not a cruise ship. To maneuver a cruise ship, you need hours or years in company time. You want something that you can steer super fast or you can slow down and accelerate when you need and want.
Number three, I said your users should be the focus or your attention. Your team should be a point of even more focus. So the better you create the environment for them to work for you, the higher the quality of the resulting product will be. And this is very easy for us. We're small now. Because you can do, you can create something ad personam.
I know that it's not gonna stay there forever, but you can start planning something that can scale. So treat your team as it was your product. When you're thinking about a product, you don't want something that doesn't scale and you don't want features that will lock you in. Same thing is valid for your team.
So today we have a fully Ukrainian team. It's not said that this will last forever. We're based in Ireland, in Dublin, our HQ is there, so maybe sales and marketing will be there and the rest of the team will be in Ukraine. The product team will be in Ukraine or... what if I create poles of attraction around Europe, so offices in Dublin, in Kiev, in Milan, and then I hire independently from the geography or where people is sitting. And I offer them ways either to work from our offices or from their houses, or from coworkings in their town. Or from anywhere in the world. And the complexity behind this is not how you manage them. The complexity behind this is how you build a company infrastructure that can support this. So it's much easier to build properly this company infrastructure from day zero than it is two years in the future.
And so lastly, if you look at, so all your experience specifically within EdTech, is there any advice that you would give based on that to other founders?
I think we already shared a lot of them. Maybe the one thing that it's pretty difficult to manage, at least to me, is that as a founder, you need to be both humble and bold at the same time. Bold because without that, you won't be able to push your company forward. I mean, you need to truly trust 200% what you're doing, and you need to truly trust that everything you're doing will be a huge success.
But, also you need to be humble and ready to listen to others and be in the position to challenge your ideas and your beliefs through the ideas and the beliefs of the people surrounding you. And that's why I was saying it's of the utmost importance to surround yourself with people, and it's not just the co-founders, but also the investors, who are in the position to teach you something.
You know the mantra that A players hire A players, B players hire B players, and so on. It's not very different with investors. You always want to get the money you need from the number one investors, not just for the money they can give you, but for the inspiration and the ideas and the challenges, the challenging thoughts they can provide you with.
