Use your network to hire an A-team
Guest: Miguel Molina-Cosculluela, founder and CEO of Analytikus, a company based out of Italy and LATAM that personalizes education through analytics and AI.
Frank Albert Coates
Do you want to start by explaining our listeners briefly about your company and what stage you're at right now?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
We're in the business of personalizing education, through analytics and AI in order to improve teaching, learning and student success. To give you a little bit of history, the company was founded about seven years ago. We did not start out as an EdTech company, we started as an advanced analytics consulting company. And we were lucky enough, about six years ago, we started working with a very large network of universities. We started working with one university in a consulting approach, second University, third University, fourth University. And about six years ago, that's how we ended up being an EdTech company. One of the milestones for us was when we decided; let's just forget about everything else and focus on education. This was in 2017, the year we won the global EdTech startup awards. And so for the last four or five years, we've been very much focused on education technology. And that's where we've seen most of our growth. We're still a startup, I would say we are somewhere between seed and series A. We are kind of a teenager feeling the growing pains of moving from seed to series A but, I'm extremely excited about the prospects and how the market is looking. And we know how COVID propelled our industry.
We are kind of a teenager feeling the growing pains of moving from seed to series A.
Frank Albert Coates
So, you would say that you ended up in EdTech, more because business was just there, or was it a decision you made at some point or a passion of you to go further in that direction?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
I think it's a little bit of all of them. Of course, we were very lucky with this particular customer, this particular network of universities, and that accelerated everything. But, also my co-founder, and me, we wanted to move a little bit away from the traditional, retail, CPG, financial services type of businesses and try to put together a solutions base where we could make a difference. And I remember a conversation maybe about six years ago, we were thinking climate, education. And his background is very much close to education. The wife of my co- founder is a learning therapist meaning we had a little bit of insights into this industry. So that's how we started leaning towards it was just perfect timing to say, let's do it. Let's just pivot and be an EdTech.
Frank Albert Coates
So you did want to go towards the EdTech track and you have a co-founder with a network in that field. That must have helped a lot. How would you describe having a co-founder with those skills?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
…you need to build trust…in particular with educational institutions.
I think it's not only relevant for EdTech; I think for every startup, the universe doesn't necessarily conspire in your favor when you're starting. Because you need to build trust. And in particular with educational institutions. They love to know what you have done; which institutions have you worked with, what have you done. And of course, the biggest challenge when you're starting is answering that question. Who have you done it with? How many references can decide? Could you introduce me to those universities to understand what they have been doing? And in particular, this industry or this sector loves that you understand the sector, that you have the lingo of talking about education. So, I'm answering your question, I think it helped tons on building credibility on understanding the different functional areas, understanding pedagogy and challenges when you're trying to learn and teaching.
Frank Albert Coates
And that brings us to the next question around the challenges with obviously running a startup, but also, particularly in the higher education segment. What's been your biggest challenge until now? And how have you solved it?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
The challenge that we have now is the same challenge that every startup has, and the keyword is scaling. How do you scale? And in particular, I think it's a double challenge when you are at an analytics company. And why do I say that? We started very much with; there's a huge appetite for predicting whether a student will dropout, or whether a prospect might convert into a student, and everybody wants to move into the space of advanced analytics and AI. And, of course it has tons of impact. But, these are pure machine learning solutions. And the problem with that is that it is not scalable. If you want to do it you need to go through the pain of giving me your historical data. And I'll train a model based on your data. And even though you may sell it as a product or a solution, there's a consulting approach. And that is not scalable.
And even though you may sell it as a product or a solution, there's a consulting approach. And that is not scalable.
So the number one challenge has been how do you scale. Over the last five years, we've been moving towards a more cognitive approach, instead of pure machine learning. Our flagship product today tries to understand how a student is learning based on the different signals that he's leaving behind on the LMS. And based on that, it sends personal messages through different bots in order to support you with reinforcing certain areas where you have very good achievement and employment, but also trying to indirectly modify some areas where you have opportunities to change. And this is based on nudges and behavioral economics. So why we're pushing towards that solution, or why we're putting our heart on that solution is because it's scalable, it's already pre trained. So you connect into the LMS and you can already gather the data. This will go through the process of getting your historical data so I can train it to get more skilled. That's the challenge that we've been having and trying to solve.
Frank Albert Coates
How do you mix and decide how much you want to have customized solutions and consulting versus having pre trained models etc? How do you manage that balance?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
We know where we want to go; we want to scale. So, we're trying to move towards scaling and trying to have an as ready out of the box product as possible. But, we still need to solve particular pains that institutions have. So, our marketing efforts are going towards the scaling. The appetite is very much on building for me, because I'm very particular about needs for unique institution. Today most of our revenues are still coming from these customized solutions. But, 2022 is going to be the year where we're going to explore the cognitive market. The beauty about these cognitive solutions is that now we can rely on marketplaces of different LMS and that is going to help us scale.
Frank Albert Coates
And if you look forwards 6 to 12 months, what keeps you up at night?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
Scaling is the is the keyword that keeps me up at night, but that dissects into people. For every startup, if your series A, seed or somewhere in between, you still rely tons on the team, on the brains behind it, on the execution. So, having the right people in the right places, and creating this sense of ownership for them is key.
Having the right people in the right places, and creating this sense of ownership for them is key.
In the case where you are moving away from consulting and into products, there's also funding. And I think that's the second second thing that keeps me up at night today. We're actually going to prepare for the second half of this year or early 2023, to do a fundraising. And that is really where we're moving. Those are the two things that keep me up at night.
Frank Albert Coates
Any advice you want to share on the team part, as you said, to have the team ready for these challenges? Anything that you can share with other startups that you thought about and solved?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
For a founder, for a CEO, for a co-founder, for somebody that started at the very beginning, you want to be on top of everything. And it's key if you want to truly scale, you need to delegate. So, it's key to surround yourself with A-people. And I'm going to describe what we mean by A-people. I had a mentor a few years back, and we were trying to grow the team. He always told me; always think about hiring A-people because if you start hiring B-people, soon enough, they're gonna hire C-people.
Always think about hiring A-people because if you start hiring B-people, soon enough, they're gonna hire C-people.
So it's key to get leaders, people that can execute, that you feel very comfortable with just saying; hey, you take care of this, I'm gonna put my energy on this. Otherwise, it's impossible to scale. You're gonna drive yourself crazy. And after a year or two years, you're gonna be completely exhausted.
Frank Albert Coates
Then the question is; how do you hire A-people? What do you do? What do you look for?
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela
In our case, for entrepreneurs, it's a different story, depending on when they are starting. I'm in my 40s. And so, I been in this space for 20 years already. The first team that we brought on, it was people that I knew for many years already. So they did not need to prove it was a safe hire. Because, frankly, if there is a challenge, it is to hire the right people. We have struggled with strategies over the last couple of years on expansion in different countries; it is hard to hire the right people if you don't know them. Because a CV, an interview, it can tell many stories, but it does not really tell you about the performance. One of the lessons that we learnt is don't minimize the effort of using your network to hire. And I think the second one is, if you don't have anyone in your network with the skills that you need, do a very thorough interview.
If you don't have anyone in your network with the skills that you need, do a very thorough interview.
Sometimes we hear about these large companies were you have 10 interviews. And you say, wow, that's crazy. But, it really is not. Because they need to go through all these pains. And when you're talking about technical skills, it's hard to know out of an interview, out of a CV, if they truly know, if they have the spirit, if there is the chemistry.
