Lisa Calhoun
Welcome to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m Lisa Calhoun, General Partner at Valor Ventures. I’m really excited about our special guests here today, one of Valor’s latest investments, but doing the honors on that introduction is one of my partners who helped extensively in diligence, Austin Meacham. Austin, say hi.
Austin Meacham
Hi, everyone. As Lisa said, my name is Austin Meacham. I’m an Associate for Valor. Basically, I assist in sourcing due diligence portfolio company work, and I’m really, really excited to introduce you to the founders of ecoText, Joel, and Nelson.
Joel Nkounkou
Awesome, thank you for that Austin. Like mentioned, my name is Joel Nkounkou, CEO and Co-founder of ecoText. I’m a builder. I’m an innovator, I love to take things and bring them to life. I’m originally from New England and excited to go deeper into ecoText, our journey, and the impact that we want to make.
Nelson Thomas
My name is Nelson Thomas, Co-founder, and Chief Marketing Officer of ecoText. And, to Joel’s point, that’s why we’re building this adventure together, we both are built on that common cause and that same cloth of looking forward to building things, getting and going in there, and solving problems that affect not only ourselves but our everyday community. I’m excited to share our story with you don’t,
Lisa Calhoun
I’m gonna jump right in and ask you what you’re doing. What are you building?
Joel Nkounkou
ecoText is a collaborative digital learning platform that brings academic resources to life. We can all kind of think back to our collegiate times, especially myself not too long ago, where we get our syllabus, we go to the bookstore, and we’re having this internal debate about how we’re going to purchase these out of pocket textbooks. Certainly, we don’t want to end up like that student at the end of the semester, who is begging a random guy in the truck to pay for a textbook for $15 and they bought it for $400. The thesis of ecoText was how we can make textbooks and deliver them to students more affordable, but also increase accessibility. There’s an equity factor there, that’s really important. And so with ecoText, we’re building a platform, that not only as a student, you can get your academic resources on day one in a digital fashion, in a modern way. But ultimately, you can collaborate dynamically, right within the margins. And as a professor, you can add, facilitate, into that conversation, understand how students are engaging, capture those insights. And of course, in the long term, it’s really an investment for the student and for the institution. If you can meet them halfway, and help them eliminate the kind of that barrier, that friction of academic resources, that financial struggle you’re more likely to have more succeeding students and capture a higher audience and a higher enrollment dynamic of different students.
Nelson Thomas
To add to that, Lisa, ecoText is born out of the struggle that most students face. I know Joel and me, and our team can speak and touch on this very emotionally, going into the first day of school where you’re an ambitious student looking forward to getting started and hitting the ground running. I know this is my story, looking to the left seeing that textbook and knowing there’s no way I could possibly afford to pay for that at that time in my life. At that period, most of us can’t, and most of us still can’t to that degree, at least for you know, $300 textbook costs. To that note, we wanted to really build it and venture out to really lower the barrier to entry as Joel said, and make excuses. They all have equal access to opportunities to excel and reach their respective full potentials or exceed their potential in the classroom or wherever the classroom may be. ecoText really fills that gap and allows students all to have day-one access to the materials, collaboration and those kinds of soft skills that are needed in this transforming world are things that can be taken advantage of on our platform.
Lisa Calhoun
Let’s talk a little bit more about that because I think that’s one of the things that really excited Valor first. We heard this pitch even over a year ago, back on the Startup Runway, before you even had customers. Was your insight that the professor’s syllabus is changing? And the syllabus that people like me, 48 years old, that we used was a dry thing that might have said go to the library and check out this book. But today’s syllabi are very digital, and how are you using ecoText to support the professor’s needs and actually teaching today?
Joel Nkounkou
Yeah, you hit it right on the hammer, Lisa, and it’s not just the syllabus, but so many things about education are changing, right? The classroom demographics are evolving, the journey of a student is more dynamic. When you look at these resources that are pillars in academia; syllabus, textbooks, these resources, they can no longer fulfill kind of their maximum strength by being static. They need to be dynamic. We need to be able to adapt to these changes in education. We understood that, and we saw that “Okay, it’s not gonna stop. The right technology is going to continue to drag us forward. But let’s not be dragging education, right?” Let’s get ahead of it. Let’s build solutions that are dynamic, and that invite professors to optimize their curriculum in real-time, then invite them to actually see those insights, invite them to develop and foster environments where robust discussions can be had. And so just like anything in life, when circumstances change, we evolve, and we definitely saw as a team that this is definitely an opportunity where we can provide some impact knowing all the different changes that are happening in parallel with education.
Joel Nkounkou
One of the things that excite me most about our platform, what Joel and the company call the big dreamers on the team, right? Having done such a great job in doing is allowing professors to get more insights into the classroom and get more granular into their student behaviors. I know as an undergraduate student myself, one of the biggest things I was always frustrated with was studying very hard at night before taking all these diligent notes, and then I will go in and have one of those assessment quizzes. Everything I thought was important, the professor didn’t quite think was important. Those are some of the things that we’re able to connect the dots is the ability for professors to go in there and see how the students are engaging with the readings, see who’s engaged with reading, who may be not might be engraved with the reading, so they can make real composition and curricular changes, and not wait semesters over and wonder why this student didn’t necessarily do their best on the quiz or the test, or exam time for that matter. One of the things that really excited me about the platform is the ability for professors to really get into the weeds. See how students are engaging in the curriculum. They can make those real-time decisions during the course of the semester during the course of the week, day by day, to really help students reach their full or exceed their full potential.
Austin Meacham
I completely agree with that point of collaboration in the classroom. Just being a few years out of school, it’s super important, at least in my undergraduate experience, to understand why the students were studying and understand the real pain points associated with trying to do well on the test. I guess in terms of that, in that vein, where do you see collaboration in the classroom going as education is concerned?
Joel Nkounkou
I think there are going to be more and more incentives and opportunities that offers of textbooks are going to be collaborating with students. I think we’re going to position ourselves in the future where you’re going to see more of kind of an enterprise workforce alignment, and this idea that “Okay, part of my job as a student, not only is to do the reading and to have that discussion but try to link it to real-life things, right?” Try to link it to actual modern research and try to link these ideas to what’s happening in the world. Nelson and I have these discovery calls almost every week and where we’re hearing the same words. They’re all trying to make sure they’re cultivating, connecting, and creating a pipeline for students to work for. I think, inevitably, we’re going to end up in a collaboration where, if I am a prestigious biology professor and I write my own textbook, it’s actually in my interest. I’m actually motivated to do more than just write the book, but also engage with the users that are navigating the route and see if I can spark conversations.
Nelson Thomas
It’s just about empowering students and it’s about moving towards a classroom environment. You asked us where collaboration is going in the future, I think it’s just going to be, again, connecting those dots to Joel’s point earlier, and having a discovery call where the professor asked me how do I connect the scarlet letter and early American literature title with happening in today’s world, and drawing those connections are going to be vitally important to bring relevancy in context to why we still care about these things that have in our past. Why did you still pay very close attention to History, or English Literature or Mathematics, or Physics, and how that connect to our coming age? That’s where collaboration is going not only in the ability, which is becoming a growing demand among our job market is really accelerated here with COVID-19, a growing remote world that we’re growing into, but also the ability to kind of connect those dots for students in and outside of the classroom with relevance today, with the happenings of yesterday, or the things that are coming tomorrow.
Lisa Calhoun
What are students telling you about it when they’re using a platform?
Joel Nkounkou
I’ll pass that to Nelson. He has been working diligently at that level with users.
Nelson Thomas
To answer that question, the users are excited about it. They’re excited by the opportunity of being able to really get and have these types of dynamic conversations over text, and also some features that help them stay organized throughout the semester. Instead of working throughout a notebook and having to go above and beyond to remember those notes from the September class that now you’re having exams for next year, for your finals, you can do those kinds of work with ecoText and you could make them be able to really save all those annotations and highlight those important pieces of information and conversations right there within the margins. Those are some of the things that really excite our user base is the ability to really excel as a student and really add those increased enhancements that not only make your life easier to understand whether you’re researching or studying, again, for those long term midterm, for those long term papers, you’re able to easily store that information right there in the margins of our platform, and easily organize yourself and easily be able to speak with your peers when you’re having different blockers and the night’s homework, and also be able to dynamically learn from one another are all things that our users are really excited about. I have been utilizing our platform in a great way. We’re excited to increase that engagement and capture even more great customer stories.
Joel Nkounkou
I’ll just mention one thing, something that stuck out to me. I have a close friend who gave me some feedback not too long ago. He mentioned that just the layout of the platform itself, he described that he just got a little bit curious. He found himself scrolling through, jumping in between books, just to see if there was a conversation. That’s something that we’re trying to strive for is that, “Hey, can we increase academic curiosity? Can a student on your own navigate the book? Maybe it’s required, maybe it’s not?” Who knows what discussion could come?
Lisa Calhoun
Well, it’s obvious you’re a lifelong learner, Joel. You draw your passion for education, such matters shine through. But to take it away from the academics and a little bit more into the business case, one of the things I’ve been noticing about some of the early customers is you’re actually using this tool to increase student retention. That’s a bigger deal than I realized at schools that want to grow. Could you share a little bit more about why you see the world that way? Why do a lot of your early customer universities see the world that way?
Joel Nkounkou
There’s kind of two big points there. I think first, with a lot of the customers that we’re engaging with, they’re coming from community colleges or smaller institutions. Every dollar counts, right? You know, in fact, every cent counts, and every opportunity which I can maximize my ROI, I might as well do it. When you are looking at some of these customers, especially from community colleges, students are all coming from different places with different needs and different resources. It all plays a factor in their outcome. I remember being on a call with a school down in Nashville, and the professor basically was telling us that, “Hey I’m sick of doing these quizzes, because now with online learning, I find myself just creating and deploying more quizzes, but they’re not really meaningful. I’m kind of forcefully checking if my students are acknowledging or understanding what’s happening. But now with ecoText, instead of it being an assignment or an assessment that has its own kind of perception to the student, I have a conversation. I can do a check-in like, “Hey, is this making stats? Is this chapter resonating? You know, and if not, tell me why not.” You can essentially have this digital footprint of the cohort, right? When you zoom out, and you magnify that with several sections, several courses in a department, these things matter and especially students that are first-generation minority students, typically are the ones that fall under these buckets of retention, transfer, or dropout. The more we can make sure that they’re prepared on day one, they have the resources and the tools that they can leverage inside the classroom or digitally present, the more we can ensure their success. It’s only in the schools’ incentive to ensure that success, because obviously, on the business side, tuition, but that’s recognition. That’s the brand name. Every alumnus is essentially a potential recruiter. It’s very important in the long term that the institutions are investing in these resources to set our students up for success.
Nelson Thomas
I think the question really is a strong point and that student’s attention. What we found a lot can be a combination of factors. But the common thread that we really found when listening to these different stories and doing due diligence in the marketplaces, comes down to a lot of times, price. Students are making hard decisions around their education because of the price. What we’re able to do in this community of what they call open educational resources, where you’re able to do is lower that barrier to entry, ensure they want to access, that students all have the materials they need. Now price is not a determining factor on the students who may sign up to be an engineer or may come to the university or may come to your university, for instance, being able to deliver that same quality of education at a price that lowers the barrier to entry is going to be really important as schools move forward to maintain those same margins of retention and keep the students there. So to Joel’s point, you quote that feedback loop in the sense that you get the students enrolled, you keep them at the institution, you make their experience one that is very meaningful and memorable. You help them then get career jobs, which then become happy alumni, which then become happy donors. That’s one of the really big important things right now is how do we control and keep prices in a manner that is for students affordable, and the delivery of the quality of education is going to be vitally important as we move forward.
Lisa Calhoun
Do you have a sense of what the fastest-growing student demographics or population is? Is price sensitivity really such a target point these days?
Joel Nkounkou
Certainly, and when we’re talking about demographics, it’s actually African-American females. Additionally, women across the board, whether it’s a Latina or African American, have grown rapidly statistically in terms of pursuing and completing higher education and graduate level as well. And so these are also individuals or typically the demographic that will leverage as many scholarship opportunities as possible. Being able to close that gap or close any financial difference is going to be extremely important and at ecoText, we can help that. We’re going to be there.
Lisa Calhoun
What we have is sort of a confluence of interesting opportunities. Because of the pandemic, education is being decentralized and taken digitally. You’re talking about a faster-growing demographic that is African American or female, but they’re more price-conscious. The professors need to be more digitally native, collaborative and update their syllabi as easily as possible. What gave you all the idea to build something like this?
Joel Nkounkou
I’ll speak to my personal experience. I’m an engineer by academia, and I kind of bandage my way through college, meaning that I had a scholarship for athletics, a scholarship for academics, and basically, I was very sensitive to finances. One of the shortcuts that I discovered was that “Hey, maybe I don’t need to actually purchase every textbook I had. Maybe there is a shortcut there.” Now, the problem in that thinking is for a minority of students that might work. For many, that solution, that path, can actually put them in academic jeopardy. If you have an assignment due, and you need to be able to access this resource now, you’re in a completely different mental state, and you have different pressures to achieve that, versus being comfortable and getting that academic resource on day one. I definitely felt that pain and for me, I kind of took a step back and saw, “Okay, how is it that in 2017, at the time we can get millions of songs on your phone for dollars a month for movies and videos, and all this multimedia for dollars a month. but the essential resources, there’s still a lot of friction?” To me, it didn’t make sense. I felt that that pain points through and through and an understanding that the tools that we’re using and that tech need to be more collaborative. We’re moving towards space. Now you can go and achieve a degree completely online, right? That’s a reality that can be achieved. I felt the pain. I’m a tech guy, and I thought about the trajectory of where we’re going from the product standpoint, and I said, “Hey, we need to fuse these things and make sure that we’re not dragging education.” But it’s one that’s going to evolve what we need.
Nelson Thomas
As entrepreneurs and people in the startup space, the ideas change over time, and they take on new life and new shape, but Joel’s point started with that common thread and I think he used the word pain, right? He used the word pain. This is a description here of that pain that we feel, or have felt that we can relate to. I remember going to school and having to pay so much money for my textbooks, and never really got that same reward back especially when I went back to the end of the year and tried to sell them back for $10 from $400. That was really where the idea started. How do we build a better solution, a more democratized solution where everybody can have day-one access? How do we build an avenue for students to have equal opportunity and what and not because they couldn’t afford the books that we didn’t be able to reach their full potential in the classroom, right? And that’s where ecoText started. Joel feeling that pain and me feeling that pain, our team feeling that pain, then we did that research and realized, this is a story that is nationwide, worldwide, really. I just actually spoke to an individual from Poland, who felt that exact same pain point that I thought about the $300 textbook and with that, we set out on the mission to fix that problem. Here we are today scaling this venture, building it up with that mission-driven focus as a company about how we build a better way for students to get all the materials they need on day-one. It’s not because they couldn’t afford it, that they didn’t be able to take advantage and reach their full potential but that everybody has equal access and opportunity to do just that.
Austin Meacham
How did you guys arrive at an open educational resource concept? Could you please explain for anyone listening exactly what it is?
Joel Nkounkou
Open educational resources or OERs are openly licensed academic material that’s out there is a lot of different ways. It can be in the shape of a textbook. Sometimes they are lectures but essentially you can take this material or take these resources, deploy them, modify them under kind of Creative Commons or open license. The reason we came to that particular avenue as a go-to market was we had to identify, “Okay, what is the quickest way we can, we can leverage our platform and get collaboration going and understand it from moving in the right direction. And ultimately, with academia, and a lot of things in these markets, the bigger players move really slow. We saw this as an opportunity to quickly build traction and leverage these resources, but also be kind of a leader in the space. There’s no one really monetizing this, no one really trying to be the standard, if I may say, and so we’re embedding ourselves in the conversations at the conferences and making sure to present and looking to be a leader and a reference point for educators. Of course, it also works in our favor as well that every year, the adoption growth of OER or open educational resources is just growing. More and more professors are coming to the conclusion like, “Hey maybe I don’t need to actually assign a $400 textbook. There are different ways I can achieve this.” And certainly, with professors that are being more dynamic and fusing not just a traditional textbook, but research elements and hovering over materials that lend different conversations, they see OER as a great place to leverage it. We ultimately saw this and said, “Hey, we can pave this road, help professors identify and adopt resources while growing a product, and getting it out there in the marketplace.” We can make an immediate impact.
Nelson Thomas
There was a lot of alignment there as well, right? You know, these individuals, these academic leaders in the space, people who are aligning with, they’re looking to do the same type of work that we’re doing. We’re doing the same type of work they’re doing. Democratizing that access, and enabling day-one utilization. And for us, as we’re looking into this marketplace, and listening to professors say, “I feel terrible assigning sometimes these large and costly textbooks, but you know, I’m not sure about OER. I have my questions and concerns. We knew the great work that was happening in space. But the problem was, that was very scattered.” And they didn’t feel very intimidated or didn’t quite know or unsure about, “Hey, okay, I want to get away from my traditional textbook into this space, but there are so many different avenues or resources. Where is that consistency?” To Joel’s point, where is that standard? What we did on ecoText and realize the opportunity there was if we centralize all this information into one place and enabled it to our technology to be brought to life, this is an area in which we can really excel and enable and bring in professors who are leaning away from those traditional costing textbooks that they’re delivering to their students, and looking for a more cost-effective solution, and want to be more innovative in the classroom. It works out for all the parties involved. And that’s what we did in terms of aggregating the 65,000 titles that we currently have on our platform, and partnering with some of our biggest content producers right now in OER. In Merlot and Openstax, we’re really proud of the work that we’re doing as an open educational resource feature, and we’re excited to be a part of it.
Joel Nkounkou
I just want to add one more thing there. Something that gets me really excited is that certainly with our targeted goal of being the leader of OER and being able to centralize these resources, we want to understand, “Is this also going to be an attractive piece for authors who want to come to us and that has been now validated? We’ve had two discovery calls, one done and one on the way, with authors coming to us and saying, “Hey, what are they gonna take for me to put my book on ecoText, and what does that look like?” This idea that we can be that hub and we can be able to engage with different nodes with a publisher, a partner, or maybe an independent offer researcher, and provide value and give you an audience of collegiate students and how they’re navigating your content.
Lisa Calhoun
As we’re recording this, it’s the end of 2020 and you’re looking at a huge Q1 in 2021. What’s next for you all? How can people help you move the needle? How can they try ecoText and if someone likes what they’re hearing, everybody knows a student and most of us went to college, what are the things you’d love to have the audience do to join the mission here?
Joel Nkounkou
First and foremost, definitely go to ecoText.co. On our website, you’ll be able to create an account, search for talents that we have. If you are looking for a particular one, and we happen not to have it, we’re very reachable. You can send a booking request and our team will take care of it. Definitely check our record if you have a student or professor in your network, let them know about ecoText and how we’re creating the opportunity for affordability. When it comes to Q1, with the spring semester upcoming, we’re really just trying to grow and scale. We’ve been able to position ourselves where we have a lot of different pushes going in terms of the student ambassadorship and how we’re engaging with students on a nationwide scale, but then also encompassing a library that has more and more diverse academic disciplines, right? We’re anticipating that at the beginning of this quarter, we’re going to get a whole wave of technical students. And that’s going to be really exciting for us to understand how these engineers navigate ecoText differently than some of the other student profiles on the platform. We’re really excited, I think, kind of taken aback if I may. In my old track days, I used to do all my tracks with just regular running shoes and it wasn’t until the championship, were finally able to get some spikes. I was able to break my records. I kind of have that same feeling where we got the proper gear, we got the proper tools, and super excited to hit that launch and provide an even bigger splash this upcoming Q1.
Nelson Thomas
I’ll quickly add that we’re really excited about Joel’s point of growing, scaling, and enhancing the utilization across the nation. Feel free to visit, please visit ecoText.co. You can fill out a contact form there and we would love to show you our product and what we built, and how we have lived different academic materials by way of our technologies and collaboration organization, and the students’ soft skills that they’re gonna need going into this new world, this new economy.
Lisa Calhoun
Who is the best type of college or university for you? I mean, we’re talking big schools, like UGA locally. We’re talking about smaller schools like the University of Valdosta. What kind of school really seems to be thriving at this point in time?
Joel Nkounkou
It’s not so much about the size, but definitely the strategic plan and the motivations of the school. The schools that we’re having the best success with are ones that have very targeted goals to either really maximize the equity in the classroom, or elevate themselves. They can be just as dynamic in a digital fashion as they are in the physical one. Really being able to optimize their current operations so the experience is seamless for students. For us, we were really focused on the classroom and department level. For professors, chairs, academic technology that are solving problems that understand like, “Hey we need to invest in edtech.”We’re here for you.
Lisa Calhoun
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. I know people are gonna love following up with you getting involved in this open educational platform and how it’s transforming lives for professors, for students, and for schools that really want to serve them. Is there anything else you wanted to say before we just thank you for your time and let you get on with your busy days?
Joel Nkounkou
Once more, I just want to say super excited. It’s always a blessing to be able to wake up and to do what we do and try to impact students and really try to maximize opportunity. I’m thankful to be in this position and we want to be able to look back years in the future and really see the impact that we’ve provided.
Lisa Calhoun
That’s awesome. Thank you both so much, Nelson and Joel. It was a pleasure. Austin, great to hear your voice, too. Y’all, please come back and hear some more great stories on the Atlanta Startup Podcast.
Lisa
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