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00:00

Hi guys, welcome back to the debt to business show and this is Ted, your host speaking. Today we have Eric fancy who show us how we can make a global impact vo business. Herrick Bansi is an ex investment banker was formerly the Chief Investment Officer of sustainable investing at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. Today is best known for founding the roomie initiative, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate children in underserved communities using affordable technology. Over the years as a nonprofit organization, Rumi has helped re educate former child soldiers as well as children who do not have access to schools such as children affected by the Ebola crisis and the Syrian refugees. In today’s episode, Carrick shares how he attributes Rumi’s evolution over the years to be a result of always listening to the needs of his customers. Why quality does not always equate impact and his approach to finding the right local partners where he grew room internationally. Now before we begin, if you actually enjoy today’s episode, and you want to show your support for the show, then please feel free to leave a review on Apple iTunes or any other podcast directory out there. Now as a way to say thank you and to show my appreciation to you guys, if you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple iTunes by the end of September, then you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. All the show notes, tips and resources can be found on tatio.com. That’s t Ed Teo calm. Now let’s dive right in. Hey, Derek, thank you for joining us today.

 

01:26

Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

 

01:28

So Tarik, let’s dive a little icebreakers for the listeners can get to know you better, could you share who was terrick fancy when he isn’t working?

 

01:36

When I’m not doing Rumi or anything work related? I think I try to sort of do things that are just completely different rights and creative things. And while those things I’ve loved trying out in the last few years is trying my hand at stand up comedy. I just taught some beginners classes. And yeah, I ended up putting a few of the clips on my on my Instagram of social media stuff. And just you know, it’s it’s a nice break. And it’s very different than this stuff I do in the daytime.

 

02:03

Wow, does really cool. I know stand up comedy is not easy. So hats off to you for trying.

 

02:08

Thank you. Yeah, it is definitely very difficult. I used to do a lot of public speaking and you get away with the fact that like people are nodding and this and that. And you don’t really know if you did well or not until the end. But stand up comedy you if there’s no laughs in 20 seconds. It’s a very lonely place up there.

 

02:22

Yes, for sure. No terror. Let’s dive right in. I know you started your career in finance. But what led you to leave and actually started me,

 

02:30

I had kind of landed in finance, almost a bit by accident, which I think to be honest, reflected, most of the people around me also, you know, I didn’t exactly go to school and study and dream of being a banker are working in finance, I really had a lot of passion around changing the world and doing doing things that could create the kind of social change that I I wanted to see. And largely in recognition of the fact that having been born and raised and Canada I was lucky, right? In life, I was lucky and had a lot of privilege. And you know, I wanted to recognize that in some form and give back. But then I wanted to finance and you know, you get caught up in it, you get really into the day to day you start to climb the ladder, you’re learning a lot. And so from that perspective, it was enjoyable. And, you know, I climbed the ladder and started to find success at it. But it was one of those things where, you know, I went from investment banking to investing. And that was at a sort of firm in New York private equity firm, and we had great returns. And then, you know, eventually went back to a firm in Canada was building strategies of stuff. And all the while it was interesting, intellectually challenging, but it wasn’t sort of, I’d say, spiritually satisfying, in the sense of like, this is what I want my life’s work to be.

 

03:47

So could you share a little bit more about the idea behind Rumi and how it was conceived?

 

03:52

Here, the idea behind Rumi was that you know that it’s so easy to create and disseminate free learning information online. That that represents a massive step change for humanity, if we can do it correctly, right? In the sense that like, you know, 25 years ago, and encyclopedia used to cost $1,000, right. But now it’s free. And there’s all these things that are free online. But the actual early data showed that it was increasing inequalities and learning and education. And the reason all the spread of great free stuff online was increasing inequality was because only rich students had devices and connections, and we’re using it all. So the idea behind me was this potential, why don’t we bridge the gap to you know, bring free learning to the communities that are least likely to

 

04:38

access it, but have the most to gain well, and it’s a real blast from the past. Eric Nanda, you mentioned I do remember these encyclopedias, which are huge tombs of knowledge that I remember seeing when I was growing up.

 

04:47

Yeah, I mean, they used to have you used to have door to door salespeople in like the 90s. Yes, they did. And they’d sell them for $1,000. And it’s crazy. If you would tell someone today who’s young enough not to remember that they would say like,

 

04:58

why would anyone pay for that? We’re clearly showing our age. So Derek, I know Rumi is now an online learning platform with tons of short and accessible lessons termed as bytes. But before we delve deeper into Rumi’s, current incarnation, can you share if this was your original vision of Rumi, when he first started? Or did it take some pivoting to get here,

 

05:16

it took what I would call an evolution as the kind of evolution that is probably what you’d expect when you’re doing anything in technology in a brand new space, right? I mean, the you know, the the Lean Startup model modeled, you know, that you have a minimal viable product, and you go out there, and you have a view and a vision, but you have to learn the pieces, you know, Pete the details by actually trying it, and getting getting into the weeds. And so for us, the original version was we said, well, this ought to work most for the communities that have never received access to anything. And so we were thinking offline communities, you know, in Rwanda, and in remote parts of Afghanistan, and, you know, refugee camps, all of these are places that we ended up doing work in. And a challenge we had to solve in those places, that is that they didn’t have an internet connection, it’s very difficult and expensive to build an internet connection where one doesn’t exist. And it’s actually cheaper to just have a device that has extra storage space on it, so that things work offline, you know, for most of the time. And so we built a model that, you know, you could store all of your content offline on a just a low cost device, low cost tablet. And you could find already that that was driving enormous impact, because we were putting it into places where they had access to nothing, the alternative they’re trying to set up was like these sort of large international NGOs that are shipping paper textbooks to the corner of Africa. And if you could just take a low cost device, and you could put the Library of Alexandria on it, because storage space is so cheap, you know, then you suddenly could send someone what we call the library for the cost of a book. And so that grew, and it grew. And we did it in a bunch of countries. And something interesting happened is that when we we of course, knew that we didn’t want to require people have devices. So you know, we want to we are our view was that listen, doesn’t matter what device you have, you should be able to use this. So as we got better at it, we started to adapt it. So it could work on any anyone device, any smartphone and tablet anywhere. And that was really interesting to us. Because when we went from a solution that you’re locked into only using the pre approved educational content, because this is like a roomie device to your own device, where Rumi is just an app among other apps on it, you find that the usage of learning content drops off a bit. And the reason it drops off is because generally speaking, you have a lot more competition, when you’re getting to someone’s own device, no distractions. Yeah, as lot of distractions, and distraction is the right word. Because it’s really the social media companies in particular, who have built business models around trying to addict us to, to, frankly, their distractions, right. And so you’re on your phone, and it’ll know exactly what time of day, you know, what kind of notification, and it’s trying to pull you back to the platform. And once you get back onto the platform, I would say it’s Instagram, you refresh, and you get a dopamine rush, right. So you kind of feel feel good. Because you know, you see this update, and you know, and the thing refreshes? And the challenge, of course, is that, number one, they’re extraordinarily good at it because they have everyone’s data. And so and their entire business model is to sell ads, right. So they, they need to get you back to that platform. And I think why that’s so interesting is that we realized very early, that when you’re trying to have someone learn on their own device, it’s not about quality equals impact. Right? Right. It’s actually about engagement. You need engagement, because you get the best quality programming. But if no one again, people are have an option. If they don’t open it, then they’re not going to use it, there’s going to be no impact. And and contrast it this way. Imagine, because I think every school system learned exactly what we had learned last March, we had learned Luckily, earlier. Yeah. But what what they were learning, I think was that if you have, let’s say a classroom, and there’s an AR stuff is not even k 12. It’s like broadly about job skills, whatever. But let’s just imagine you have a traditional learning program. And everyone’s locked into a classroom and as a one hour lecture, if you’re 10 minutes into that lecture, and people are really bored, they can’t just leave, right like they’re physically there, you know, they can’t crawl out the window or just escape me the people take attendance, you know, your captive audience. And so if you’re a captive audience, people don’t think about engagement. They just think about what’s the best pedagogical quality of what we’re doing. Have a programming perspective. The flip side is when you go to someone’s device imagine you tell that kid hey, here’s that one hour lecture but because of COVID you have to sit at home and you know, consume it. And now here it is on your phone. Yeah, and it can mean I learned so much from it

 

09:46

if that kid well that’s the thing is like the kid I mean, maybe they’ll learn from it, but I guarantee you if a 10 minutes ended that they’re bored, they’re going to close it and switch to tick tock because they can write because you’re sitting there alone and and that is much more fun, not your competition, your confidence. isn’t really Tick Tock in the classroom unless the teacher lets you know, kids pull up phones and stare at him in the middle of class, which is unlikely. And so what what everyone found out in the pandemic was that like, usage dropped off, because, you know, you had stuff that people needed, but it’s not what they wanted, and they had an option. And all of that led us to micro learning, because our evolution of micro learning was driven by the idea that we can merge what people need, which is, you know, figuring out that content areas where they need to build skills. And for us, the clearest area was jobs, job life and career skills are sometimes we say, it’s the things that you wish you learned in school, but you didn’t, because school curriculums tend to move so slowly. And so it’s all Yeah, so topics like mental health were covered as well. Yeah, well, you know, it’s very much it’s our model, we’re nonprofit, but we’re don’t we’re demand driven, not donor driven. And so we was listened to the community and more and more, and they would say, listen, hey, if you observe what youth are doing, when they’re on the platform, you notice that like, you can make it more engaging, the more you can make it fun, the more they spend time doing it right, and the more you have impact on it. And so, you know, it’s really through talking to users, and we understood also the content area that they wanted. And I’m glad you brought up mental health because that we launched it right after the pandemic, the micro learning right after the pandemic fell. And mental health has been an extremely popular category. It there’s a lot of demand for it. And it’s, you know, one that has, you imagine, yeah, it’s really meeting a need for people,

 

11:28

guys, there’s so much value in what Eric just shared. Of course, we’re quality is very important. Quality does not always equate to impact as Tarik is shared, one of the factors that you must also pay attention to is your ability to retain your users like Eric has done, you really need to listen to your users. So listen to your users and give them what they want. As you do so you may be discovering the you’re actually pivoting away from the original business model. But this may help you discover new creative and innovative areas of business that you may not have thought of before. So back to you, Tarik. No, he’s very funny that he or she mentioned the social media platforms such as tik tok and Instagram. So I’ve used Rumi personally a few times. And I’m very impressed by how I very quickly drawn into the lessons as well. Within a few minutes, I was able to cover topics like blockchain technology, and even how to help a friend who may be suffering from depression, I realized that the content or lessons were very fast paced, quick and punchy, and also avoided points at the end. So I can really tell that the Rumi system right now as we get towards retaining the user’s attention, I hope so yeah. Yeah. So my next question for you, Tarik, is how does Rumi curate his content at the moment?

 

12:32

So the way we we create the content now is by number one, we have a learner community that’s growing on discord and through other channels, we will stay close to learners and try to understand what they like what they don’t like, so that we can continue improving the experience, and what are the content areas that they want? Right, so then we have a sense of where the demand is, then the content itself is created by a growing volunteer community we have. And so in that sense, the Wikipedia analogy is very apt. We have a community of people that’s growing. And they’re passionate about being part of a vision of where they can take the skills that they have, that they’ve built over their lives, or that they you know, everyone has areas of expertise, and distill that into effective micro courses, that then can be spread and used by people globally. And so the average microkorg new course that we put up, I think it gets completed close to 10,000 times now. And so it’s, it’s a great way to be able to share, yeah, and it’s and it’s all growing super fast, we’ll be launching the pandemic, but it’s a great way to be able to share the knowledge that you have, even if you’re at home, right, and you’re socially distant, and you can’t go you know, do a program, you can distill it in through a digital platform into something that really has has value for people. And that that becomes really important. Because, you know, if you think about the numbers we launched, in the, you know, right after pandemic hit, and then about a year ago, we had 15 micro courses on the platform, we a few weeks ago, cross 1000. And I think we create close to 50 a week now. And that’s because the movement of volunteers and people behind is grown so significantly, that you know, you could sort of start to see that you can, we’re growing learners on one side, right, so it’s gone from zero to well over 100,000 and, and now is accelerating all the all this all from zero during the pandemic. But then the courses are increasing also because actually on the other end are also people right there are people on both sides as givers of knowledge and as receivers of knowledge. And the givers of knowledge are also joining the movement and contributing, you know, volunteering their time. And and that’s actually a similar Wikipedia that you can sort of see how this can scale and become a global resource for humanity.

 

14:46

Notice really cool Tarik, but could you share with us any particular challenges that you faced when it came to managing volunteers?

 

14:53

I think it’s not I mean, honestly, the the process has been great for us because you know, we do vet the volunteers before they join So it’s not like Wikipedia, where some, someone anonymously can start doing stuff online. We do they, they apply, we vet them, the quality is fantastic. We’re always looking for great people to join in. And we have now a great community of just really, really passionate contributors who really care and, and actually, we even have data that we look through some of the creators themselves, and we serve it. And it’s like, there’s all these benefits to them. It’s, it’s a real Win win. Because the giver of the knowledge also feels very, you know, it boosts your morale and you know it, there’s a real feeling satisfaction, especially because you start to get information back on how your micro courses are going. Because we obviously did data can have a sense of like, it’s popular in these countries, people, you know, how people use it, this data, the other in the future will also map it against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And so people really understand how they’re contributing. But that that is the model, right? It’s really, in that sense, very, you know, Wikipedia, as I see

 

15:55

this, a very good system. So Tarik, you shared that you were able to hit about 100,000 users during the pandemic alone? How do you get to these numbers?

 

16:03

I think it was a few different things. I mean, word of mouth seems to have been the biggest, right. And that’s why it’s really important. That’s why it’s important that I’m here now, right? That I can, because our stuff is all open and free, right? It’s really meant to be a gift or a resource for humanity driven by a movement of people who care and believe in, in doing this. And so, you know, the more people that know about it, the better because it’s just build something more and more for humanity. And so one thing is word of mouth, right? Because people, the more they hear about it, like even right now, the more they’ll go and check out romee.org. And they may even end up being like that, you know, close to 90% of people with surveyed who use it actually say that it competes with social media. So you’re not competing with Coursera, or Khan Academy. If you’re doing five minutes on your mobile phone mobile first, you know, while you’re on the go this day, you have a snippet of time, that’s a direct competition with a six minute you know, loading of Instagram. And the goal being that you know, you get a dopamine rush from learning something also, right. But it has to be something discrete, it can’t be like, you know, you open the textbook, and then you read a few pages, you close it, and it’s all in the middle. It has to be you learn something from start to finish. And so the idea is that you get dopamine rationally good for your mental health over time, rather than something that is increasingly detracting of you and, and that I think crafters, our ethos, right? We really, you know, we look at social media companies, and we think, well, they’re using a bunch of text techniques and engagement tools to basically sell your data, even an education player, they’re going to take your data, and they’re gonna try to sell that either there’s going to be to advertisers are going to take and try to sell you more content or another course, because their bottom line is obviously profit, whether it’s selling courses or ads. For us, we look at and we say, look, our only bottom line of social impact. So we’re not going to sell your data, right, we’re not going to do anything with it beyond try to use the aggregate data overall to continually improve the experience. so more people can benefit from it,

 

17:52

guys, Tony just had a very important point. Again, he identified the his competitors, when not the other educational platforms is that his competitors are actually the other social media platforms. And how did he find this out? He actually asked his users So always be curious to ask for input from users and customers, this is how we can best find out the pain points that are affecting them, and how we can deliver them a better service and which will in turn, grow your business. So Tarik Olivia challenge you a little bit more than disappointed, you believe is always beneficial for children who are still developing to be exposed to such short term learning lessons, will this have any impact on your ability to focus or pay attention on longer task in the long run?

 

18:30

It’s a good question. I mean, the way I would look at it is there’s definitely a viewpoint that says, you know, attention spans are getting shorter, driven by technology things. And so you know, we shouldn’t contribute to that, right. Like we shouldn’t, you know, we shouldn’t adhere to that we should try to get people to have a longer attention span. I think there’s other well with that approach. I mean, that that makes sense. It’s a perfectly valid viewpoint, I think the way we look at it is that I really want to live in and work in the world that exists around us whether it’s the ideal that we really want it to be or not. And as realists we look, and we say, for the younger generations, there’s no question that data is black and white, it’s not so social media is one of the causes. But the overall data is black and waited, attention spans have dropped. They’re particularly short on mobile phones, you know, you know, that this is the way sort of people consume technology, especially on mobile. But here’s the interesting thing. There’s also an opportunity there, because micro learning is a very new approach. It’s only you know, last few years, and there is now increasing studies that show that it’s more effective than traditional learning. So there’s one study came out a couple years ago and said that learner retention, yeah, it’s really interesting. It’s it learner retention is actually 22% higher. Now, you know, there’s a whole bunch of debates people have Is it better because it’s made the data is clear that it seems to be when they’re objectively measuring it has higher learning, retention. It could be because it’s just objectively better, right? It’s more effective for the human brain. Also, there’s probably some element of it’s particularly good for younger people. Because whether we like it or not, if they spend hours on Tick tock, and Instagram, and they’re being, you know, the stuff they use, it’s training them to have stories, shorter attention spans, whether we like it or not, that is the reality of youth today, right. And we need to provide them with the tools for the future in a way that’s practical, rather than sort of idealistic, but doesn’t that misses the mark kind of thing.

 

20:20

I fully agree. In fact, the value proposition is very clear for children who are from maybe less privileged backgrounds who do not have any access to good education. Now, Eric, I know you were able to grow your business really quickly, and you have a presence in over 140 countries right now, what advice would you have to share with an entrepreneur who’s ready to take a journey similar to yours? was really to bring your business global?

 

20:39

It’s a good question. I mean, I’d say that we first went global by working with local partners in these countries. So because it’s actually quite difficult to, to just kind of go from zero, I mean, you can depending on what your product is, and obviously, if your digital online, like you know, anyone can find it. But we found for what we were doing, and obviously learning and education oriented is a bit more involved in and you have to be a bit more careful, on some level. So we found that working with local partners in a lot of countries actually was a an interesting stepping stone. Because Yeah, just dive in all the way you kind of had a halfway step and you had a local partner who was incentivizing, you connected with you to sort of try to make sure that like, you know, you can, it’s kind of like dipping your toe in before diving headfirst. So I think that was very useful. I think the second thing was just a model that is very much built on listening to learners, right, like, we’re not top down a lot of stuff in education and development, social stuff tends to be very, very top down. Because it can be right, because if I’m selling a product, you know, I have, you know, if I’m selling you an iPhone, you’re buying the iPhone, you’re using the iPhone, so if you don’t like it, as a user, you’re not going to buy it. And so I’m going to Apple, I’m gonna be very responsive to what you think, for education and social programs, the people who receive it are often not the ones who are paying for it, because it’s paid through the tax system or through this or that. And so as a result, sometimes those models are not as responsive to the needs of the users, they’re more responsive to the needs of the donor, right. So donor driven, that our view is always has to be demand driven, right. Like, if you really want to get people to use your product and grow it, you have to listen to them, wherever they are. And you have to start to adapt based on the feedback that given

 

22:18

your listeners, there just brought us to a very interesting point of analysis within the edtech space, the person or entity actually paying for the service may not actually be the one using it at the end of the day. So it’s very important to be able to identify the right group of people who are the users of the platform to get their feedback in order to improve the service in the end of the day. Now, you may be in another space or industry, but maybe take some time today to conduct a similar analysis to see where it is applicable to you and how you can benefit from the same non tariff, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the point and choosing local partners. How did you find the right local partners in the first place?

 

22:51

Well, so in the early days, now, it’s a bit easier, because you know, we have a lot of existing relationships, and we have a brand and other things. In the early days. You’re right, it was difficult figuring out who who was right. The way we got around it actually was we decided to let the partners find us rather than us finding them. So what we did was actually in the early days, I spoke at a UNICEF conference at the UNICEF headquarters in New York, we were quite early, we only run a pilot, but I had the feeling that if we presented the results to a group of people who want to care, then you’re you know, you’re gonna find some of them say, hey, we’ll be looking for this. So he presented and that’s exactly what happened. Like after, you know, I’d spoken and we would do this all the time, we would go on spread the message, you’d get people approaching us saying, hey, we’ve been looking for something like that. And that was crawling through pull rather than push, they pulled us in. And it was it was really important, because that’s how we found early adopters. It’s early adopters may be a few percent of the market, it’s very difficult to find them if you’re knocking on all the doors. But so sometimes it can be easier to go where they hang out, you know, raise a flag, and then the few there who are ready for it, like they’re really the early adopters, they’re going to they’re going to be the front of the curve. They find you and then you know, that’s how you know that it’s the best fit you’re going to find for now.

 

24:04

So Derek, I know it’s a nonprofit organization, you’ve led Rumi to help in many humanitarian projects over the years. You’ve helped up in the Ebola crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis. Could you share a bit more about your experiences and some of the challenges that you faced

 

24:18

so the we ended up in doing work in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic by accident, to be honest, because we were working with a partner there is one of our newer partners, and they were working to rehabilitate former child soldiers. Great, great organization, great programs. Suddenly the Ebola outbreak happened and in what was a test run for what the rest of the world would learn a few years later, they closed all the schools in the country to prevent transmission. That meant that you had a, you know, generation of kids who were at a school, you know, for a long time. So they actually repurposed the technology that we had already been implementing with them to be used at a community level outside of school because again, you have technology you have a low cost device, you know, they figured All out, we worked with them. And they came up with a program that was really impactful. Like it wasn’t like it wasn’t just better than the local learning that they had the local learning disappeared. So it was like a lifeline. That was the only thing that was around. And so we grew the program, we did a big crowdfunding campaign we grew the program did really well, that led to us doing work in state with Syrian refugees some years later, because the idea was the same you have, you know, people who like the last generation of kids who were at a school, and the Syrian refugee case, we actually had, we had at that point, gone through something called Y Combinator. It’s the incubator in Silicon Valley. And so we as part of that started to open up using crowdsourcing effectively. And the way that I mentioned we do now, we started testing that for the first time. And so we actually got people around the world to help us find the content that we could use for seeing refugees, because, again, that would that had to be in Arabic. And, you know, there was a lot of specifics around, you know, the language and other things. And my favorite story is we had people at Arctic College in way up in northern Canada, like and none of it that, you know, in the Arctic, who were using their computers to contribute to Yeah, the Syrian refugee program, the turkey Syria border sounds like five years ago. And that was an incredible story of how we grew it. And I think if you fast forward to today, you know, a given example, we’re doing programs in Afghanistan, we’ve been doing those since 2017. And they’re all around girls and women’s education, every step of the way, we’ve learned partly because just being there, you know, you kind of have to learn and adapt. And the Afghanistan ones are really important today, because the US is pulling out of Afghanistan, slowly and surely it looks unfortunately, like the Taliban is retaking territory. Yeah. And so we’re actually hearing this directly from our partners. The good news in that program is that we that there’s not a lot of good news there. But I guess the one good thing about the program is that we are working with the mobile operator to the largest telco in Madison. And the program is based on a deal they did with Wikipedia A few years ago, where they’re making access to roomie learn free of any data charges. Yeah, it’s super cool. So over the last year, we’ve rapidly built all that micro learning engine is entirely built, if you go to DARS x COMM And you’ll see the version that anyone who logs in from Afghanistan sees Drs. Doc’s DRS x.org. It’s exactly roomy learns exactly micro learning. But it’s all in dari or which is far seats and we’re adding pestos as all local language, and that will be able to freely reach is able to reach any, anyone with a mobile phone. And I think for girls and women in particular, when the Italians are retaking territory, mobile learning on a phone from home, maybe the only option they have left.

 

27:39

Thank you. So nice to hear that Rumi stepping in to help address this problem. It is very unfortunate to hear about this. What advice would you give an entrepreneur who still is looking to conduct some humanitarian work as well.

 

27:50

I would say the most difficult part about it is if your nonprofit is funding, because you know, the reality is that there is lots of funding in the nonprofit space. But there’s not a lot of funding that is looking for risky things. Right? It there’s a lot of risk capital in for profit, because everybody wants to back the next Google or whatever, and you can make a lot of money doing it. There’s not that same thing in nonprofit because it no one has an incentive to take wild risk on something that may or may not work. So I do think it’s it’s a very big challenge around that there’s probably something that someone needs to figure out first. And I’d say the second thing is, you know, when it comes to entrepreneurship in business in general, I think, I think an entrepreneur in entrepreneurship generally is very, very difficult. It usually doesn’t succeed, right? The data shows it doesn’t seed. For those who do you almost have to have this fanatical belief that it’s going to work. Like there’s something that some stat that like 10% of businesses, start new businesses succeed and like, but 80% of the entrepreneurs believe that they will, which makes sense to me, because there’s no way you’re going to be in that 10% unless you’re part of the 80% of believes in it. Right. So. So I think that I think they’re, you know, there’s something in there that I always tell people, you really have to believe in what you’re doing, and then the model of what you’re doing. Because if you’re sort of half believe the idea, but you’re not totally convinced, it’s gonna get really difficult. And when those difficult moments happen, you’ll have a hard time persevering through it, unless you really, really, really, you know, are passionate and stubbornly, you know, believer in the idea,

 

29:14

I fully agree. So with such an enormous undertaking, on your part, could you share how you grew and retain the right talent to bring your team to where it is today.

 

29:23

So you’re right, the team is incredible. And they’re the ones behind, you know, the majority of the magic that you’ll see anything that we do, you know, all the little features and tweaks and everything that we keep evolving is really a team. I think that that the way we build a team was sort of, in a sense, I went out and made a sacrifice, I’d worked in finance, and I said, You know, I really believe in this and I want to do it and I don’t want to do it as like, you know, as your average charity, that sort of fundraisers and redistributes like, Hey, we need to build a school in Kenya, like whatever it was, my parents are from Canada, but you know, we need to build a school in Kenya, like let’s raise money and then we’ll send it there and Find a school. That’s wonderful. That’s charitable work. But that’s what I call fundraising and redistribution, charity. We’re an innovation organization, right? We’re trying to say, how do we take $1 and make it 100 times more powerful, right, by using innovation by using digital means, by going from I call from books to bytes. And I think that if you have an idea like that, that’s really alluring. And it’s a real vision that people you know that a lot of sharpen Ojai, people believe in, and, you know, you lead by yourself doing it, and you say, Well, I’m willing to go and do this for charity, then you tend to attract other people who are similar, because they want to follow a leader kind of like that. And so I think, over time, have built a team of people who are, you know, a culture that is really, you know, it’s better than you’d find at any other activity, all nonprofits on tech side, and is nimble and fast and is really you know, it. It’s based around our passion for the mission.

 

30:54

Dear listeners, this is exactly why a strong leader and a strong mission is needed for a company to grow. When you have both working in tandem, you can not only attract or retain the right employees as well, Derek, I know you’re passionate about the issue of greenwashing by large corporations for the benefit of the rest of us. Could you explain what green washing means and why this is an issue that we should all care about?

 

31:14

Yeah, that’s a good question. So so because I don’t spend time in finance have come close to and witnessed greenwashing upfront, and it’s effectively, it happens not just in finance, it happens anywhere. And in any capacity, where people have an incentive to market themselves as being more green, or more environmentally, or socially, you know, conscious or good than they actually are. Right. And the idea is that they’re sort of whitewashing or in this way, greenwashing the public by taking something that’s dirty coal plants, and this and that, and then trying to spin it to you as being something better than it is. And as we all know, there is a dire need to act quickly on climate change today, where you know, this decade is make or break for the world. And every young person in particular is sweating about it, because they know that you know, this is only gonna get worse. And that as long as we kick the can down the road, you know, that they’re gonna end up bearing the consequences in 30 years and plus or less. And so greenwashing, I think, you know, it’s what you’ve found, it isn’t a situation like that, where everybody feels like we need to do something. But it’s expensive to do, right? climate change is not a blessing that we like would have wanted, right, we have a $55 trillion global energy industry that will need to be redone. Morgan Stanley estimates it will cost 50 trillion to decarbonize the world economy. I mean, no matter what estimate you take its climate changes in the blessing that we, you know, would have loved to have happened to us it was a curse. And unfortunately, one we have to take seriously. Yeah, we have to, you know, is like a tough one, we have to take serious and deal and deal with the problem is in there. There’s an incentive. Right. It’s expensive and hard to do. Right? We know that. And everybody wants something to be done. And all the policy experts are saying the only way you’re going to get that done is by government action, right that the government’s implement the carbon tax vehicle emissions limits, so on. And what has been happening in the private sector, and certainly in I’ve seen this in the US are that a lot of the large voices in business are saying, Don’t worry, we don’t need government action. Like why would we need that like, Hey, we have this solution, we’re going to sell you this green product, right. And it’s an ETF that’s green, or it’s, you know, financial or even other product that claims to be green, even though it’s not, it’s literally the exact same thing. And they’re doing it because truly creating stuff that’s green is going to cost everyone money. And no one really wants to do that. But what they do want to do is that as social x grows, because nothing’s getting done, and everyone is saying we need more great stuff on green and gratitude, virg is out there leading marches, they see an opportunity to exploit that by basically taking a bunch of existing stuff, and then marketing it as being more green than it is. So they can sell more stuff at higher prices. And we’re seeing that across the board. And that’s exactly what I saw in finance. And it’s extremely dangerous because none of it has any real world impact. But worse, it actually creates a placebo effect so that it delays society actually acting aggressively to combat the threat.

 

34:11

So I guess the issue is when regular investors or customers support a specific company, often they think they’re actually supporting a green cause but they’re actually being misled.

 

34:19

Exactly. That’s exactly it. I mean, it’s it’s it’s it’s really exploitative, to be honest, it’s exploitative at the individual level, because you believe you’re doing something that you’re not and you’re almost always paying more in fees for like this effectively the same thing to do it. And that I didn’t like but the reason I went public and started arguing about this more effectively in the last few equilibria and last this year, was because it started to become clear that this is actually delaying government action. Like it’s not just individually dishonest because you know, you think you’re getting something you’re not you pay more in fees, in the aggregate is at the level of all of society. It’s actually misleading people and delaying what the policy experts are telling us. We need to come back Climate change. Because if you have all these companies and they’re all like out there saying, oh, we’re doing all this green stuff, look at this green thing and go buy this green thing off shelf, what ends up happening is they’re doing it because they can, there’s no regulation, right? They can just go and say whatever they want, and then sell it for more money. The problem is for society, all of us go. And once we pay more money to do that, not only did we just get ripped off, but then we’re much less likely to support like a carbon tax or aggressive things, because you kind of feel like you’ve already done your part.

 

35:26

Yes, I agree. It actually creates this system where people think that you’ve really done your part for the environment, when actually this is not really true. So do you have any tips for individual who wants to be more savvy and to help Hoda green causes? Where can he put his dollar?

 

35:39

Honestly, I think the most important way for us to reform the economic system is to understand exactly how it works, and then what levers you can pull. So to give you an example, there’s a lot of young people are very passionate, and they’re focused on things like fossil fuel divestment, right. That’s the idea that you just like, get to a university or whatever it is to stop burning fossil fuels. Having worked inside the industry, and in the middle of the machine, I can tell you that there’s absolutely zero impact out of that. Because just because you make just because you sell, like Think of it this way, imagine you’re an investor in the Middle East, right? Or in Malaysia, and you are Sharia compliant, you don’t want to own alcohol companies. That’s fine. What happens is they just divested them, right. They said, We don’t own diazo, and so on, because we don’t want to partake, but none of them actually think that they’re, you know, eradicating alcohol off the planet, right? They’re, they’re saying, look, we know people are drinking in France, but you know, we’re just not gonna invest in it and back it. Pretty much. It’s the same thing with fossil fuels like you, if you don’t own it, then that’s great. You’re not partaking, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, someone else bought it, like it still exists and is doing what it’s doing. And so divestment and a whole bunch of other ideas have been thrown out as ways to fight climate change, it’s very dangerous, because they don’t help at all right, and so they’re wasting energy on something that creates no impact. And that, to be honest, the fossil fuel players don’t really mind as much as they claim because they know it’s actually not changing their behavior. And I think it’s stuff like that, where, you know, people don’t understand how the system works more. One of the things that we’re now doing at Rumi is starting to increasingly create micro courses aligned to you know, how the system works, you know, to crowd topics to climate change sustainability, right? Because we have an engine that makes it easy for people to quickly learn and quick snippets, like as learning is as easy and fun as social media, right? as few barriers to just make it you know, ubiquitous and, and create value. And so we thought when we said, well, we should just create micro courses that help people understand how the system works. So we can, you know, help combat climate change and sustainability by better informing and empowering people with the tools they need.

 

37:43

You know, Derek, I’m very happy to share that, from what I’m hearing it sounds that you found a really nice way to merge the two causes they’re really passionate about, and to be able to make impacts on both sides. It sounds like you’ve been able to connect the dots in your life very well.

 

37:55

It does seem like it weaves together really nicely. And that’s great because roomies education play and if it can help us educate ourselves on how to make society better than that’s, you know, as powerful as it can be.

 

38:06

Okay, Derek, I know that Rumi has to go to help 1 billion children around the world get access to quality education, how can the listeners get in touch with Rumi to help out with this course,

 

38:15

I look, we’re always looking for people to join and get involved. Because what we’re building is not an organization, it’s really a movement. It’s a vision of people who believe in it and are, it’s clear, it’s growing on all sides, you know, we along that lines, that vision for people to feel likewise. And so we’re always loved to get more people involved. The easiest ways to go to our site. I mean, ruby.org will show you what micro learning is in the first place, which is always a great place to start. If you click through to our website at about roomie.org there’s a lot more information on how to get involved. And then I think people can also would follow us on social media and can reach out to us on social media. We’re always under roomy, learn, and I’m under so so fancy. And you know, we really want to you know, get more people to join the movement, and so we can all do something, something great together.

 

39:00

Derek, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure. My pleasure. Great chatting with you guys. So thank you so much for joining us today.

 

39:06

I certainly learned a lot from Derek and I’m sure you have actionable advice that you’ve taken away from him as well. Now if you want to stay up to date for all latest episodes, then make sure you’re subscribed to the show. We’re currently on Apple, iTunes, Google podcasts and Spotify. You can also support the show by sharing it with another fellow entrepreneur who may find it useful as well. Don’t forget that all the latest show notes, tips and resources are available on tattoo.com dt.com calm and don’t forget about the Amazon gift voucher giveaway. If you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple iTunes by the end of September, then you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. That’s all for me today. I’ll see you next time.

 

[This transcript has been automatically generated by a digital software and will therefore  contain errors and typos. Please kindly take note of this and only rely on the digital transcript for reference.]

00:00

Hi guys, welcome back to the debt to business show and this is Ted, your host speaking. Today we have Eric fancy who show us how we can make a global impact vo business. Herrick Bansi is an ex investment banker was formerly the Chief Investment Officer of sustainable investing at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. Today is best known for founding the roomie initiative, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate children in underserved communities using affordable technology. Over the years as a nonprofit organization, Rumi has helped re educate former child soldiers as well as children who do not have access to schools such as children affected by the Ebola crisis and the Syrian refugees. In today’s episode, Carrick shares how he attributes Rumi’s evolution over the years to be a result of always listening to the needs of his customers. Why quality does not always equate impact and his approach to finding the right local partners where he grew room internationally. Now before we begin, if you actually enjoy today’s episode, and you want to show your support for the show, then please feel free to leave a review on Apple iTunes or any other podcast directory out there. Now as a way to say thank you and to show my appreciation to you guys, if you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple iTunes by the end of September, then you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. All the show notes, tips and resources can be found on tatio.com. That’s t Ed Teo calm. Now let’s dive right in. Hey, Derek, thank you for joining us today.

 

01:26

Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

 

01:28

So Tarik, let’s dive a little icebreakers for the listeners can get to know you better, could you share who was terrick fancy when he isn’t working?

 

01:36

When I’m not doing Rumi or anything work related? I think I try to sort of do things that are just completely different rights and creative things. And while those things I’ve loved trying out in the last few years is trying my hand at stand up comedy. I just taught some beginners classes. And yeah, I ended up putting a few of the clips on my on my Instagram of social media stuff. And just you know, it’s it’s a nice break. And it’s very different than this stuff I do in the daytime.

 

02:03

Wow, does really cool. I know stand up comedy is not easy. So hats off to you for trying.

 

02:08

Thank you. Yeah, it is definitely very difficult. I used to do a lot of public speaking and you get away with the fact that like people are nodding and this and that. And you don’t really know if you did well or not until the end. But stand up comedy you if there’s no laughs in 20 seconds. It’s a very lonely place up there.

 

02:22

Yes, for sure. No terror. Let’s dive right in. I know you started your career in finance. But what led you to leave and actually started me,

 

02:30

I had kind of landed in finance, almost a bit by accident, which I think to be honest, reflected, most of the people around me also, you know, I didn’t exactly go to school and study and dream of being a banker are working in finance, I really had a lot of passion around changing the world and doing doing things that could create the kind of social change that I I wanted to see. And largely in recognition of the fact that having been born and raised and Canada I was lucky, right? In life, I was lucky and had a lot of privilege. And you know, I wanted to recognize that in some form and give back. But then I wanted to finance and you know, you get caught up in it, you get really into the day to day you start to climb the ladder, you’re learning a lot. And so from that perspective, it was enjoyable. And, you know, I climbed the ladder and started to find success at it. But it was one of those things where, you know, I went from investment banking to investing. And that was at a sort of firm in New York private equity firm, and we had great returns. And then, you know, eventually went back to a firm in Canada was building strategies of stuff. And all the while it was interesting, intellectually challenging, but it wasn’t sort of, I’d say, spiritually satisfying, in the sense of like, this is what I want my life’s work to be.

 

03:47

So could you share a little bit more about the idea behind Rumi and how it was conceived?

 

03:52

Here, the idea behind Rumi was that you know that it’s so easy to create and disseminate free learning information online. That that represents a massive step change for humanity, if we can do it correctly, right? In the sense that like, you know, 25 years ago, and encyclopedia used to cost $1,000, right. But now it’s free. And there’s all these things that are free online. But the actual early data showed that it was increasing inequalities and learning and education. And the reason all the spread of great free stuff online was increasing inequality was because only rich students had devices and connections, and we’re using it all. So the idea behind me was this potential, why don’t we bridge the gap to you know, bring free learning to the communities that are least likely to

 

04:38

access it, but have the most to gain well, and it’s a real blast from the past. Eric Nanda, you mentioned I do remember these encyclopedias, which are huge tombs of knowledge that I remember seeing when I was growing up.

 

04:47

Yeah, I mean, they used to have you used to have door to door salespeople in like the 90s. Yes, they did. And they’d sell them for $1,000. And it’s crazy. If you would tell someone today who’s young enough not to remember that they would say like,

 

04:58

why would anyone pay for that? We’re clearly showing our age. So Derek, I know Rumi is now an online learning platform with tons of short and accessible lessons termed as bytes. But before we delve deeper into Rumi’s, current incarnation, can you share if this was your original vision of Rumi, when he first started? Or did it take some pivoting to get here,

 

05:16

it took what I would call an evolution as the kind of evolution that is probably what you’d expect when you’re doing anything in technology in a brand new space, right? I mean, the you know, the the Lean Startup model modeled, you know, that you have a minimal viable product, and you go out there, and you have a view and a vision, but you have to learn the pieces, you know, Pete the details by actually trying it, and getting getting into the weeds. And so for us, the original version was we said, well, this ought to work most for the communities that have never received access to anything. And so we were thinking offline communities, you know, in Rwanda, and in remote parts of Afghanistan, and, you know, refugee camps, all of these are places that we ended up doing work in. And a challenge we had to solve in those places, that is that they didn’t have an internet connection, it’s very difficult and expensive to build an internet connection where one doesn’t exist. And it’s actually cheaper to just have a device that has extra storage space on it, so that things work offline, you know, for most of the time. And so we built a model that, you know, you could store all of your content offline on a just a low cost device, low cost tablet. And you could find already that that was driving enormous impact, because we were putting it into places where they had access to nothing, the alternative they’re trying to set up was like these sort of large international NGOs that are shipping paper textbooks to the corner of Africa. And if you could just take a low cost device, and you could put the Library of Alexandria on it, because storage space is so cheap, you know, then you suddenly could send someone what we call the library for the cost of a book. And so that grew, and it grew. And we did it in a bunch of countries. And something interesting happened is that when we we of course, knew that we didn’t want to require people have devices. So you know, we want to we are our view was that listen, doesn’t matter what device you have, you should be able to use this. So as we got better at it, we started to adapt it. So it could work on any anyone device, any smartphone and tablet anywhere. And that was really interesting to us. Because when we went from a solution that you’re locked into only using the pre approved educational content, because this is like a roomie device to your own device, where Rumi is just an app among other apps on it, you find that the usage of learning content drops off a bit. And the reason it drops off is because generally speaking, you have a lot more competition, when you’re getting to someone’s own device, no distractions. Yeah, as lot of distractions, and distraction is the right word. Because it’s really the social media companies in particular, who have built business models around trying to addict us to, to, frankly, their distractions, right. And so you’re on your phone, and it’ll know exactly what time of day, you know, what kind of notification, and it’s trying to pull you back to the platform. And once you get back onto the platform, I would say it’s Instagram, you refresh, and you get a dopamine rush, right. So you kind of feel feel good. Because you know, you see this update, and you know, and the thing refreshes? And the challenge, of course, is that, number one, they’re extraordinarily good at it because they have everyone’s data. And so and their entire business model is to sell ads, right. So they, they need to get you back to that platform. And I think why that’s so interesting is that we realized very early, that when you’re trying to have someone learn on their own device, it’s not about quality equals impact. Right? Right. It’s actually about engagement. You need engagement, because you get the best quality programming. But if no one again, people are have an option. If they don’t open it, then they’re not going to use it, there’s going to be no impact. And and contrast it this way. Imagine, because I think every school system learned exactly what we had learned last March, we had learned Luckily, earlier. Yeah. But what what they were learning, I think was that if you have, let’s say a classroom, and there’s an AR stuff is not even k 12. It’s like broadly about job skills, whatever. But let’s just imagine you have a traditional learning program. And everyone’s locked into a classroom and as a one hour lecture, if you’re 10 minutes into that lecture, and people are really bored, they can’t just leave, right like they’re physically there, you know, they can’t crawl out the window or just escape me the people take attendance, you know, your captive audience. And so if you’re a captive audience, people don’t think about engagement. They just think about what’s the best pedagogical quality of what we’re doing. Have a programming perspective. The flip side is when you go to someone’s device imagine you tell that kid hey, here’s that one hour lecture but because of COVID you have to sit at home and you know, consume it. And now here it is on your phone. Yeah, and it can mean I learned so much from it

 

09:46

if that kid well that’s the thing is like the kid I mean, maybe they’ll learn from it, but I guarantee you if a 10 minutes ended that they’re bored, they’re going to close it and switch to tick tock because they can write because you’re sitting there alone and and that is much more fun, not your competition, your confidence. isn’t really Tick Tock in the classroom unless the teacher lets you know, kids pull up phones and stare at him in the middle of class, which is unlikely. And so what what everyone found out in the pandemic was that like, usage dropped off, because, you know, you had stuff that people needed, but it’s not what they wanted, and they had an option. And all of that led us to micro learning, because our evolution of micro learning was driven by the idea that we can merge what people need, which is, you know, figuring out that content areas where they need to build skills. And for us, the clearest area was jobs, job life and career skills are sometimes we say, it’s the things that you wish you learned in school, but you didn’t, because school curriculums tend to move so slowly. And so it’s all Yeah, so topics like mental health were covered as well. Yeah, well, you know, it’s very much it’s our model, we’re nonprofit, but we’re don’t we’re demand driven, not donor driven. And so we was listened to the community and more and more, and they would say, listen, hey, if you observe what youth are doing, when they’re on the platform, you notice that like, you can make it more engaging, the more you can make it fun, the more they spend time doing it right, and the more you have impact on it. And so, you know, it’s really through talking to users, and we understood also the content area that they wanted. And I’m glad you brought up mental health because that we launched it right after the pandemic, the micro learning right after the pandemic fell. And mental health has been an extremely popular category. It there’s a lot of demand for it. And it’s, you know, one that has, you imagine, yeah, it’s really meeting a need for people,

 

11:28

guys, there’s so much value in what Eric just shared. Of course, we’re quality is very important. Quality does not always equate to impact as Tarik is shared, one of the factors that you must also pay attention to is your ability to retain your users like Eric has done, you really need to listen to your users. So listen to your users and give them what they want. As you do so you may be discovering the you’re actually pivoting away from the original business model. But this may help you discover new creative and innovative areas of business that you may not have thought of before. So back to you, Tarik. No, he’s very funny that he or she mentioned the social media platforms such as tik tok and Instagram. So I’ve used Rumi personally a few times. And I’m very impressed by how I very quickly drawn into the lessons as well. Within a few minutes, I was able to cover topics like blockchain technology, and even how to help a friend who may be suffering from depression, I realized that the content or lessons were very fast paced, quick and punchy, and also avoided points at the end. So I can really tell that the Rumi system right now as we get towards retaining the user’s attention, I hope so yeah. Yeah. So my next question for you, Tarik, is how does Rumi curate his content at the moment?

 

12:32

So the way we we create the content now is by number one, we have a learner community that’s growing on discord and through other channels, we will stay close to learners and try to understand what they like what they don’t like, so that we can continue improving the experience, and what are the content areas that they want? Right, so then we have a sense of where the demand is, then the content itself is created by a growing volunteer community we have. And so in that sense, the Wikipedia analogy is very apt. We have a community of people that’s growing. And they’re passionate about being part of a vision of where they can take the skills that they have, that they’ve built over their lives, or that they you know, everyone has areas of expertise, and distill that into effective micro courses, that then can be spread and used by people globally. And so the average microkorg new course that we put up, I think it gets completed close to 10,000 times now. And so it’s, it’s a great way to be able to share, yeah, and it’s and it’s all growing super fast, we’ll be launching the pandemic, but it’s a great way to be able to share the knowledge that you have, even if you’re at home, right, and you’re socially distant, and you can’t go you know, do a program, you can distill it in through a digital platform into something that really has has value for people. And that that becomes really important. Because, you know, if you think about the numbers we launched, in the, you know, right after pandemic hit, and then about a year ago, we had 15 micro courses on the platform, we a few weeks ago, cross 1000. And I think we create close to 50 a week now. And that’s because the movement of volunteers and people behind is grown so significantly, that you know, you could sort of start to see that you can, we’re growing learners on one side, right, so it’s gone from zero to well over 100,000 and, and now is accelerating all the all this all from zero during the pandemic. But then the courses are increasing also because actually on the other end are also people right there are people on both sides as givers of knowledge and as receivers of knowledge. And the givers of knowledge are also joining the movement and contributing, you know, volunteering their time. And and that’s actually a similar Wikipedia that you can sort of see how this can scale and become a global resource for humanity.

 

14:46

Notice really cool Tarik, but could you share with us any particular challenges that you faced when it came to managing volunteers?

 

14:53

I think it’s not I mean, honestly, the the process has been great for us because you know, we do vet the volunteers before they join So it’s not like Wikipedia, where some, someone anonymously can start doing stuff online. We do they, they apply, we vet them, the quality is fantastic. We’re always looking for great people to join in. And we have now a great community of just really, really passionate contributors who really care and, and actually, we even have data that we look through some of the creators themselves, and we serve it. And it’s like, there’s all these benefits to them. It’s, it’s a real Win win. Because the giver of the knowledge also feels very, you know, it boosts your morale and you know it, there’s a real feeling satisfaction, especially because you start to get information back on how your micro courses are going. Because we obviously did data can have a sense of like, it’s popular in these countries, people, you know, how people use it, this data, the other in the future will also map it against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And so people really understand how they’re contributing. But that that is the model, right? It’s really, in that sense, very, you know, Wikipedia, as I see

 

15:55

this, a very good system. So Tarik, you shared that you were able to hit about 100,000 users during the pandemic alone? How do you get to these numbers?

 

16:03

I think it was a few different things. I mean, word of mouth seems to have been the biggest, right. And that’s why it’s really important. That’s why it’s important that I’m here now, right? That I can, because our stuff is all open and free, right? It’s really meant to be a gift or a resource for humanity driven by a movement of people who care and believe in, in doing this. And so, you know, the more people that know about it, the better because it’s just build something more and more for humanity. And so one thing is word of mouth, right? Because people, the more they hear about it, like even right now, the more they’ll go and check out romee.org. And they may even end up being like that, you know, close to 90% of people with surveyed who use it actually say that it competes with social media. So you’re not competing with Coursera, or Khan Academy. If you’re doing five minutes on your mobile phone mobile first, you know, while you’re on the go this day, you have a snippet of time, that’s a direct competition with a six minute you know, loading of Instagram. And the goal being that you know, you get a dopamine rush from learning something also, right. But it has to be something discrete, it can’t be like, you know, you open the textbook, and then you read a few pages, you close it, and it’s all in the middle. It has to be you learn something from start to finish. And so the idea is that you get dopamine rationally good for your mental health over time, rather than something that is increasingly detracting of you and, and that I think crafters, our ethos, right? We really, you know, we look at social media companies, and we think, well, they’re using a bunch of text techniques and engagement tools to basically sell your data, even an education player, they’re going to take your data, and they’re gonna try to sell that either there’s going to be to advertisers are going to take and try to sell you more content or another course, because their bottom line is obviously profit, whether it’s selling courses or ads. For us, we look at and we say, look, our only bottom line of social impact. So we’re not going to sell your data, right, we’re not going to do anything with it beyond try to use the aggregate data overall to continually improve the experience. so more people can benefit from it,

 

17:52

guys, Tony just had a very important point. Again, he identified the his competitors, when not the other educational platforms is that his competitors are actually the other social media platforms. And how did he find this out? He actually asked his users So always be curious to ask for input from users and customers, this is how we can best find out the pain points that are affecting them, and how we can deliver them a better service and which will in turn, grow your business. So Tarik Olivia challenge you a little bit more than disappointed, you believe is always beneficial for children who are still developing to be exposed to such short term learning lessons, will this have any impact on your ability to focus or pay attention on longer task in the long run?

 

18:30

It’s a good question. I mean, the way I would look at it is there’s definitely a viewpoint that says, you know, attention spans are getting shorter, driven by technology things. And so you know, we shouldn’t contribute to that, right. Like we shouldn’t, you know, we shouldn’t adhere to that we should try to get people to have a longer attention span. I think there’s other well with that approach. I mean, that that makes sense. It’s a perfectly valid viewpoint, I think the way we look at it is that I really want to live in and work in the world that exists around us whether it’s the ideal that we really want it to be or not. And as realists we look, and we say, for the younger generations, there’s no question that data is black and white, it’s not so social media is one of the causes. But the overall data is black and waited, attention spans have dropped. They’re particularly short on mobile phones, you know, you know, that this is the way sort of people consume technology, especially on mobile. But here’s the interesting thing. There’s also an opportunity there, because micro learning is a very new approach. It’s only you know, last few years, and there is now increasing studies that show that it’s more effective than traditional learning. So there’s one study came out a couple years ago and said that learner retention, yeah, it’s really interesting. It’s it learner retention is actually 22% higher. Now, you know, there’s a whole bunch of debates people have Is it better because it’s made the data is clear that it seems to be when they’re objectively measuring it has higher learning, retention. It could be because it’s just objectively better, right? It’s more effective for the human brain. Also, there’s probably some element of it’s particularly good for younger people. Because whether we like it or not, if they spend hours on Tick tock, and Instagram, and they’re being, you know, the stuff they use, it’s training them to have stories, shorter attention spans, whether we like it or not, that is the reality of youth today, right. And we need to provide them with the tools for the future in a way that’s practical, rather than sort of idealistic, but doesn’t that misses the mark kind of thing.

 

20:20

I fully agree. In fact, the value proposition is very clear for children who are from maybe less privileged backgrounds who do not have any access to good education. Now, Eric, I know you were able to grow your business really quickly, and you have a presence in over 140 countries right now, what advice would you have to share with an entrepreneur who’s ready to take a journey similar to yours? was really to bring your business global?

 

20:39

It’s a good question. I mean, I’d say that we first went global by working with local partners in these countries. So because it’s actually quite difficult to, to just kind of go from zero, I mean, you can depending on what your product is, and obviously, if your digital online, like you know, anyone can find it. But we found for what we were doing, and obviously learning and education oriented is a bit more involved in and you have to be a bit more careful, on some level. So we found that working with local partners in a lot of countries actually was a an interesting stepping stone. Because Yeah, just dive in all the way you kind of had a halfway step and you had a local partner who was incentivizing, you connected with you to sort of try to make sure that like, you know, you can, it’s kind of like dipping your toe in before diving headfirst. So I think that was very useful. I think the second thing was just a model that is very much built on listening to learners, right, like, we’re not top down a lot of stuff in education and development, social stuff tends to be very, very top down. Because it can be right, because if I’m selling a product, you know, I have, you know, if I’m selling you an iPhone, you’re buying the iPhone, you’re using the iPhone, so if you don’t like it, as a user, you’re not going to buy it. And so I’m going to Apple, I’m gonna be very responsive to what you think, for education and social programs, the people who receive it are often not the ones who are paying for it, because it’s paid through the tax system or through this or that. And so as a result, sometimes those models are not as responsive to the needs of the users, they’re more responsive to the needs of the donor, right. So donor driven, that our view is always has to be demand driven, right. Like, if you really want to get people to use your product and grow it, you have to listen to them, wherever they are. And you have to start to adapt based on the feedback that given

 

22:18

your listeners, there just brought us to a very interesting point of analysis within the edtech space, the person or entity actually paying for the service may not actually be the one using it at the end of the day. So it’s very important to be able to identify the right group of people who are the users of the platform to get their feedback in order to improve the service in the end of the day. Now, you may be in another space or industry, but maybe take some time today to conduct a similar analysis to see where it is applicable to you and how you can benefit from the same non tariff, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the point and choosing local partners. How did you find the right local partners in the first place?

 

22:51

Well, so in the early days, now, it’s a bit easier, because you know, we have a lot of existing relationships, and we have a brand and other things. In the early days. You’re right, it was difficult figuring out who who was right. The way we got around it actually was we decided to let the partners find us rather than us finding them. So what we did was actually in the early days, I spoke at a UNICEF conference at the UNICEF headquarters in New York, we were quite early, we only run a pilot, but I had the feeling that if we presented the results to a group of people who want to care, then you’re you know, you’re gonna find some of them say, hey, we’ll be looking for this. So he presented and that’s exactly what happened. Like after, you know, I’d spoken and we would do this all the time, we would go on spread the message, you’d get people approaching us saying, hey, we’ve been looking for something like that. And that was crawling through pull rather than push, they pulled us in. And it was it was really important, because that’s how we found early adopters. It’s early adopters may be a few percent of the market, it’s very difficult to find them if you’re knocking on all the doors. But so sometimes it can be easier to go where they hang out, you know, raise a flag, and then the few there who are ready for it, like they’re really the early adopters, they’re going to they’re going to be the front of the curve. They find you and then you know, that’s how you know that it’s the best fit you’re going to find for now.

 

24:04

So Derek, I know it’s a nonprofit organization, you’ve led Rumi to help in many humanitarian projects over the years. You’ve helped up in the Ebola crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis. Could you share a bit more about your experiences and some of the challenges that you faced

 

24:18

so the we ended up in doing work in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic by accident, to be honest, because we were working with a partner there is one of our newer partners, and they were working to rehabilitate former child soldiers. Great, great organization, great programs. Suddenly the Ebola outbreak happened and in what was a test run for what the rest of the world would learn a few years later, they closed all the schools in the country to prevent transmission. That meant that you had a, you know, generation of kids who were at a school, you know, for a long time. So they actually repurposed the technology that we had already been implementing with them to be used at a community level outside of school because again, you have technology you have a low cost device, you know, they figured All out, we worked with them. And they came up with a program that was really impactful. Like it wasn’t like it wasn’t just better than the local learning that they had the local learning disappeared. So it was like a lifeline. That was the only thing that was around. And so we grew the program, we did a big crowdfunding campaign we grew the program did really well, that led to us doing work in state with Syrian refugees some years later, because the idea was the same you have, you know, people who like the last generation of kids who were at a school, and the Syrian refugee case, we actually had, we had at that point, gone through something called Y Combinator. It’s the incubator in Silicon Valley. And so we as part of that started to open up using crowdsourcing effectively. And the way that I mentioned we do now, we started testing that for the first time. And so we actually got people around the world to help us find the content that we could use for seeing refugees, because, again, that would that had to be in Arabic. And, you know, there was a lot of specifics around, you know, the language and other things. And my favorite story is we had people at Arctic College in way up in northern Canada, like and none of it that, you know, in the Arctic, who were using their computers to contribute to Yeah, the Syrian refugee program, the turkey Syria border sounds like five years ago. And that was an incredible story of how we grew it. And I think if you fast forward to today, you know, a given example, we’re doing programs in Afghanistan, we’ve been doing those since 2017. And they’re all around girls and women’s education, every step of the way, we’ve learned partly because just being there, you know, you kind of have to learn and adapt. And the Afghanistan ones are really important today, because the US is pulling out of Afghanistan, slowly and surely it looks unfortunately, like the Taliban is retaking territory. Yeah. And so we’re actually hearing this directly from our partners. The good news in that program is that we that there’s not a lot of good news there. But I guess the one good thing about the program is that we are working with the mobile operator to the largest telco in Madison. And the program is based on a deal they did with Wikipedia A few years ago, where they’re making access to roomie learn free of any data charges. Yeah, it’s super cool. So over the last year, we’ve rapidly built all that micro learning engine is entirely built, if you go to DARS x COMM And you’ll see the version that anyone who logs in from Afghanistan sees Drs. Doc’s DRS x.org. It’s exactly roomy learns exactly micro learning. But it’s all in dari or which is far seats and we’re adding pestos as all local language, and that will be able to freely reach is able to reach any, anyone with a mobile phone. And I think for girls and women in particular, when the Italians are retaking territory, mobile learning on a phone from home, maybe the only option they have left.

 

27:39

Thank you. So nice to hear that Rumi stepping in to help address this problem. It is very unfortunate to hear about this. What advice would you give an entrepreneur who still is looking to conduct some humanitarian work as well.

 

27:50

I would say the most difficult part about it is if your nonprofit is funding, because you know, the reality is that there is lots of funding in the nonprofit space. But there’s not a lot of funding that is looking for risky things. Right? It there’s a lot of risk capital in for profit, because everybody wants to back the next Google or whatever, and you can make a lot of money doing it. There’s not that same thing in nonprofit because it no one has an incentive to take wild risk on something that may or may not work. So I do think it’s it’s a very big challenge around that there’s probably something that someone needs to figure out first. And I’d say the second thing is, you know, when it comes to entrepreneurship in business in general, I think, I think an entrepreneur in entrepreneurship generally is very, very difficult. It usually doesn’t succeed, right? The data shows it doesn’t seed. For those who do you almost have to have this fanatical belief that it’s going to work. Like there’s something that some stat that like 10% of businesses, start new businesses succeed and like, but 80% of the entrepreneurs believe that they will, which makes sense to me, because there’s no way you’re going to be in that 10% unless you’re part of the 80% of believes in it. Right. So. So I think that I think they’re, you know, there’s something in there that I always tell people, you really have to believe in what you’re doing, and then the model of what you’re doing. Because if you’re sort of half believe the idea, but you’re not totally convinced, it’s gonna get really difficult. And when those difficult moments happen, you’ll have a hard time persevering through it, unless you really, really, really, you know, are passionate and stubbornly, you know, believer in the idea,

 

29:14

I fully agree. So with such an enormous undertaking, on your part, could you share how you grew and retain the right talent to bring your team to where it is today.

 

29:23

So you’re right, the team is incredible. And they’re the ones behind, you know, the majority of the magic that you’ll see anything that we do, you know, all the little features and tweaks and everything that we keep evolving is really a team. I think that that the way we build a team was sort of, in a sense, I went out and made a sacrifice, I’d worked in finance, and I said, You know, I really believe in this and I want to do it and I don’t want to do it as like, you know, as your average charity, that sort of fundraisers and redistributes like, Hey, we need to build a school in Kenya, like whatever it was, my parents are from Canada, but you know, we need to build a school in Kenya, like let’s raise money and then we’ll send it there and Find a school. That’s wonderful. That’s charitable work. But that’s what I call fundraising and redistribution, charity. We’re an innovation organization, right? We’re trying to say, how do we take $1 and make it 100 times more powerful, right, by using innovation by using digital means, by going from I call from books to bytes. And I think that if you have an idea like that, that’s really alluring. And it’s a real vision that people you know that a lot of sharpen Ojai, people believe in, and, you know, you lead by yourself doing it, and you say, Well, I’m willing to go and do this for charity, then you tend to attract other people who are similar, because they want to follow a leader kind of like that. And so I think, over time, have built a team of people who are, you know, a culture that is really, you know, it’s better than you’d find at any other activity, all nonprofits on tech side, and is nimble and fast and is really you know, it. It’s based around our passion for the mission.

 

30:54

Dear listeners, this is exactly why a strong leader and a strong mission is needed for a company to grow. When you have both working in tandem, you can not only attract or retain the right employees as well, Derek, I know you’re passionate about the issue of greenwashing by large corporations for the benefit of the rest of us. Could you explain what green washing means and why this is an issue that we should all care about?

 

31:14

Yeah, that’s a good question. So so because I don’t spend time in finance have come close to and witnessed greenwashing upfront, and it’s effectively, it happens not just in finance, it happens anywhere. And in any capacity, where people have an incentive to market themselves as being more green, or more environmentally, or socially, you know, conscious or good than they actually are. Right. And the idea is that they’re sort of whitewashing or in this way, greenwashing the public by taking something that’s dirty coal plants, and this and that, and then trying to spin it to you as being something better than it is. And as we all know, there is a dire need to act quickly on climate change today, where you know, this decade is make or break for the world. And every young person in particular is sweating about it, because they know that you know, this is only gonna get worse. And that as long as we kick the can down the road, you know, that they’re gonna end up bearing the consequences in 30 years and plus or less. And so greenwashing, I think, you know, it’s what you’ve found, it isn’t a situation like that, where everybody feels like we need to do something. But it’s expensive to do, right? climate change is not a blessing that we like would have wanted, right, we have a $55 trillion global energy industry that will need to be redone. Morgan Stanley estimates it will cost 50 trillion to decarbonize the world economy. I mean, no matter what estimate you take its climate changes in the blessing that we, you know, would have loved to have happened to us it was a curse. And unfortunately, one we have to take seriously. Yeah, we have to, you know, is like a tough one, we have to take serious and deal and deal with the problem is in there. There’s an incentive. Right. It’s expensive and hard to do. Right? We know that. And everybody wants something to be done. And all the policy experts are saying the only way you’re going to get that done is by government action, right that the government’s implement the carbon tax vehicle emissions limits, so on. And what has been happening in the private sector, and certainly in I’ve seen this in the US are that a lot of the large voices in business are saying, Don’t worry, we don’t need government action. Like why would we need that like, Hey, we have this solution, we’re going to sell you this green product, right. And it’s an ETF that’s green, or it’s, you know, financial or even other product that claims to be green, even though it’s not, it’s literally the exact same thing. And they’re doing it because truly creating stuff that’s green is going to cost everyone money. And no one really wants to do that. But what they do want to do is that as social x grows, because nothing’s getting done, and everyone is saying we need more great stuff on green and gratitude, virg is out there leading marches, they see an opportunity to exploit that by basically taking a bunch of existing stuff, and then marketing it as being more green than it is. So they can sell more stuff at higher prices. And we’re seeing that across the board. And that’s exactly what I saw in finance. And it’s extremely dangerous because none of it has any real world impact. But worse, it actually creates a placebo effect so that it delays society actually acting aggressively to combat the threat.

 

34:11

So I guess the issue is when regular investors or customers support a specific company, often they think they’re actually supporting a green cause but they’re actually being misled.

 

34:19

Exactly. That’s exactly it. I mean, it’s it’s it’s it’s really exploitative, to be honest, it’s exploitative at the individual level, because you believe you’re doing something that you’re not and you’re almost always paying more in fees for like this effectively the same thing to do it. And that I didn’t like but the reason I went public and started arguing about this more effectively in the last few equilibria and last this year, was because it started to become clear that this is actually delaying government action. Like it’s not just individually dishonest because you know, you think you’re getting something you’re not you pay more in fees, in the aggregate is at the level of all of society. It’s actually misleading people and delaying what the policy experts are telling us. We need to come back Climate change. Because if you have all these companies and they’re all like out there saying, oh, we’re doing all this green stuff, look at this green thing and go buy this green thing off shelf, what ends up happening is they’re doing it because they can, there’s no regulation, right? They can just go and say whatever they want, and then sell it for more money. The problem is for society, all of us go. And once we pay more money to do that, not only did we just get ripped off, but then we’re much less likely to support like a carbon tax or aggressive things, because you kind of feel like you’ve already done your part.

 

35:26

Yes, I agree. It actually creates this system where people think that you’ve really done your part for the environment, when actually this is not really true. So do you have any tips for individual who wants to be more savvy and to help Hoda green causes? Where can he put his dollar?

 

35:39

Honestly, I think the most important way for us to reform the economic system is to understand exactly how it works, and then what levers you can pull. So to give you an example, there’s a lot of young people are very passionate, and they’re focused on things like fossil fuel divestment, right. That’s the idea that you just like, get to a university or whatever it is to stop burning fossil fuels. Having worked inside the industry, and in the middle of the machine, I can tell you that there’s absolutely zero impact out of that. Because just because you make just because you sell, like Think of it this way, imagine you’re an investor in the Middle East, right? Or in Malaysia, and you are Sharia compliant, you don’t want to own alcohol companies. That’s fine. What happens is they just divested them, right. They said, We don’t own diazo, and so on, because we don’t want to partake, but none of them actually think that they’re, you know, eradicating alcohol off the planet, right? They’re, they’re saying, look, we know people are drinking in France, but you know, we’re just not gonna invest in it and back it. Pretty much. It’s the same thing with fossil fuels like you, if you don’t own it, then that’s great. You’re not partaking, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, someone else bought it, like it still exists and is doing what it’s doing. And so divestment and a whole bunch of other ideas have been thrown out as ways to fight climate change, it’s very dangerous, because they don’t help at all right, and so they’re wasting energy on something that creates no impact. And that, to be honest, the fossil fuel players don’t really mind as much as they claim because they know it’s actually not changing their behavior. And I think it’s stuff like that, where, you know, people don’t understand how the system works more. One of the things that we’re now doing at Rumi is starting to increasingly create micro courses aligned to you know, how the system works, you know, to crowd topics to climate change sustainability, right? Because we have an engine that makes it easy for people to quickly learn and quick snippets, like as learning is as easy and fun as social media, right? as few barriers to just make it you know, ubiquitous and, and create value. And so we thought when we said, well, we should just create micro courses that help people understand how the system works. So we can, you know, help combat climate change and sustainability by better informing and empowering people with the tools they need.

 

37:43

You know, Derek, I’m very happy to share that, from what I’m hearing it sounds that you found a really nice way to merge the two causes they’re really passionate about, and to be able to make impacts on both sides. It sounds like you’ve been able to connect the dots in your life very well.

 

37:55

It does seem like it weaves together really nicely. And that’s great because roomies education play and if it can help us educate ourselves on how to make society better than that’s, you know, as powerful as it can be.

 

38:06

Okay, Derek, I know that Rumi has to go to help 1 billion children around the world get access to quality education, how can the listeners get in touch with Rumi to help out with this course,

 

38:15

I look, we’re always looking for people to join and get involved. Because what we’re building is not an organization, it’s really a movement. It’s a vision of people who believe in it and are, it’s clear, it’s growing on all sides, you know, we along that lines, that vision for people to feel likewise. And so we’re always loved to get more people involved. The easiest ways to go to our site. I mean, ruby.org will show you what micro learning is in the first place, which is always a great place to start. If you click through to our website at about roomie.org there’s a lot more information on how to get involved. And then I think people can also would follow us on social media and can reach out to us on social media. We’re always under roomy, learn, and I’m under so so fancy. And you know, we really want to you know, get more people to join the movement, and so we can all do something, something great together.

 

39:00

Derek, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure. My pleasure. Great chatting with you guys. So thank you so much for joining us today.

 

39:06

I certainly learned a lot from Derek and I’m sure you have actionable advice that you’ve taken away from him as well. Now if you want to stay up to date for all latest episodes, then make sure you’re subscribed to the show. We’re currently on Apple, iTunes, Google podcasts and Spotify. You can also support the show by sharing it with another fellow entrepreneur who may find it useful as well. Don’t forget that all the latest show notes, tips and resources are available on tattoo.com dt.com calm and don’t forget about the Amazon gift voucher giveaway. If you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple iTunes by the end of September, then you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. That’s all for me today. I’ll see you next time.