Fortune's Path Podcast

[00:00:00] - Introduction

• Tom: Setting up today's discussion points: establishing new standards in software, using tech for effective learning, and the possible conflict between educational system administrators and students.
• Guest: David Ells, Managing Director of Open LMS, an open-source learning management system provider.
• Overview of David's background in online learning with over 15 years of experience, including work with the Department of Defense on the Experience API (XAPI).

[00:01:09] - Early Career and Entry into Learning Tech

• David: Shares his accidental entry into the learning tech field after earning a master's degree from MTSU.
• Initial job at Rustici Software leading to a career in educational technology.
• Discusses the meaningful impact of developing educational tools and the transformative power of education.

[00:03:53] - Importance of Experiential Learning in Hiring

• Tom: Probes the significance of certifications versus experience in hiring.
• David: Emphasizes experience and practical application of knowledge as primary hiring factors over certifications.

[00:05:35] - Introduction to XAPI

• Tom: Attempts to describe XAPI.
• David: Explains XAPI's basics—data format and communication protocol for learning events, allowing detailed tracking of learning activities across various platforms and contexts.

[00:07:37] - XAPI's Vision and Development

• Tom: Shares initial skepticism about XAPI but appreciates its potential.
• David: Discusses the broader vision of XAPI, including data mobility and creating verifiable credentials for lifelong learning records.
• Insights on corporate and academic applications and interoperability with different forms of learning content.

[00:10:52] - Industry Adoption and Impact of Standards

• David: Describes efforts to establish XAPI, parallels with existing industry standards, and the critical role of adoption.
• Historical context of SCORM and the unique challenges and opportunities it presented.

[00:15:00] - Rustici Software’s Contribution to XAPI

• Tom: Questions about Rustici’s role in developing SCORM and transitioning to XAPI.
• David: Details Rustici’s research and industry contributions leading to XAPI’s development and its collaborative approach.

[00:21:00] - Launching and Promoting XAPI

• David: Discusses the practical and marketing challenges in launching a new standard and gaining adoption.
• Realizations and reflections on what might have been done differently for better adoption rates.

[00:28:10] - XAPI’s Broader Applications and Limitations

• Tom: Explores XAPI’s potential beyond learning contexts.
• David: Outlines XAPI’s flexibility, acknowledging both its strengths and weaknesses, and practical applications in data-driven contexts.

[00:38:08] - Managing Data with Watershed

• Tom: Discusses the potential overwhelming amount of data XAPI could collect.
• David: Describes the importance of filtering data to extract meaningful insights and the role of tools like Watershed in this process.

[00:43:42] - Transition to Open LMS

• David: Talks about his move to Open LMS and the shift in focus to higher education.
• Differences between corporate and academic markets and the commonalities in learning management needs.

[00:45:03] - Comparing Corporate and Higher Education LMS Needs

• David: Discusses the evolving needs of universities to prepare students for careers and the corporate focus on skills-based training.

[00:50:14] - Conflict Between Learners and Administrators

• Tom: Expresses views on the inherent conflict between learners and administrators.
• David: Compares this to IT departments versus end-users, discussing the potential synergy with modern SaaS and cloud-based solutions.

[00:58:16] - Future of EdTech and Learning Systems

• David: Envisions a future where learning is skills-based and highly personalized, breaking the traditional degree format.
• Discusses the potential for more granular and modular learning experiences.

[01:00:10] - Collaborations Between Academia and Industry

• Tom: Asks about formalizing partnerships between universities and industries.
• David: Discusses the potential for these partnerships, acknowledging existing informal pipelines and the mutual benefits.

[01:02:17] - Personal Goals and Vision for Open LMS

• David: Shares his aspirations for the growth and success of Open LMS.
• Emphasizes the adaptability of Open LMS and its potential leadership in emerging educational trends.

[01:02:54] - Conclusion

• Tom: Thanks David Ells for the conversation.
• David: Expresses enjoyment and appreciation for the dialogue and Tom's writing.

• JJ: "My my dad was in the music business. He did this thing called mobile recording, where he had this 18 Wheeler truck, in the back of it was a recording studio. And so he would go around the country recording, you know, all kinds of live concerts and albums. And so by the time I got to maybe, I guess, seventh grade, my summers, I was a roadie. So I did that for my summers. And that was really fun for maybe like a week or so. And then I quickly saw that oh, this is pretty hard."
• JJ: "To be like a techie it was all about you had to be real good at math or something. And so you had to be kind of a math nerd. And I just pictured. "Okay, I'm not that.".. But as it turned out a lot of tech is about at least I've found is more about creativity."
• JJ: "We've gotten deep into AI. The attitude internally we had at our company was, okay, this is both a threat and an opportunity kind of thing."
• "Tom: I don't think large language models are going to be with us as, like, a permanent thing. I think eventually they may turn into just like a parlor game. Sort of an amusement. It's just statistically predicting what might come next. That feels like a fatal flaw.  There's a structure problem that is fatal. "
• JJ: "We went years with  no formal marketing. We were working and lucky to be in a field where there's been some demand.  So just trying to do a good job and live off of referrals. Over time, as we  grew, you  want to shift from being reactive to being proactive. That's what I felt would be good to do. That's when we started investing in  marketing internally. "

• "8% of the male population is colorblind, especially to red and green. And so think about the stock market and how that reads, or any kind of financial or big data company and their prevalent uses of green and red.  People see those colors in shades of yellows and beige. ...I think accessibility design is still up and coming.  I think user experience as an industry is still in its infancy... incorporating it into corporate spheres, companies, what does that mean?  I make it a business to help build toolkits on how to define what it is that we do." 
• "Generally people put out surveys at the beginning of a workflow or when someone first drops into their site before login or after login. But where I find that type of survey being really beneficial is after they do something.  So they come there with a certain thing in mind that they want to do.  That is exactly when you should throw up those two questions: a rating scale or an open ended."
• "Nashville is a place of connectors: "Hey, you know what? I know this person, let me email them for you. There is that love here of  meeting, meeting people  organically."
• "Design principles are  value statements that describe the most important goals that a product delivers for its users."
• "With with product led growth, focus on customer acquisition, your expansion and keeping your clients. There's four ways to do that. First: it's with user experience and an intuitive interface. Simplify the user journey. When someone's onboarding, consider how  they quickly understand the value of the product just because of the interaction they're having with the first page or the first few pages, and then make sure that it's a consistent experience across all devices. 
• "The second one is UI. You user interface is really the visual appeal of designing for attention. We touch on this with graphic design. It's bringing clarity and language to guide people through features.  Think of things like feedback, how do you know this is working?"
• "Another one that helps with product led growth is interaction design. Micro-interactions, you know, something that has minimal steps to complete the task or reduce friction and encouraging people to use the product later. A notification  saying, hey, you forgot something! Those are all ways that, you know, kind of brings growth. You don't necessarily think about it."
• "The last one is showcasing  something that you can use for free. But then explaining: 'hey there's these other features that you might like!' And being exploratory with that."

• On the risk of AI programing leading to crummy software: "At the end of the day AI is just a tool, right? And so it's how we choose to use it that could have impacts there. If we allow AI usage to be an excuse to move quickly [when developing software], but sloppily, then yeah, we're going to build more and more software that is is tenuous and has the potential of falling over."
• On the idea of AI being able to help junior developers become senior developers more quickly: "Unless we are intentional as an industry, we run the risk of replacing the natural apprenticeship that's been in place for a few decades."
• On AI taking our jobs: "Humans will always seek to work on the things that they're uniquely able to deliver value on, and I think so we'll just keep doing that in software development. But but I am worried about what the path looks like for people to get to that level of expertise."
• On his new venture Ducky.foo: "Ducky.foo is is the outcome of me wrestling with the disparity that AI assistants are creating in terms of junior developer versus senior developer productivity... Create a human community where more experienced developers can teach and mentor and share their hard won expertise and real world knowledge with junior developers, but do it at scale...it's not novel to think of a community of software developers of different experience levels helping each other out. But I think what is novel is that I think we can hyper scale this type of community by injecting AI into it."
• "Those with the most going into any kind of innovation tend to be the ones who benefit the most." Ducky.foo is hoping to stop this from taking place with AI innovation, and prevent the fruits of AI innovation from resting in the hands of the wealthy.
• On the toxicity of Stack Overflow and general trolling: "here's a place where AI does have a leg up. It's infinitely patient, infinitely pleasant. And so I think That's one thing we can borrow from AI as we're building Ducky.foo.”

• “Applying to college is a series of tasks where you need information, guidance, and you need support through your own discernment process. It doesn’t have to be terrible. It doesn’t have to be scary.”
• “I use the word discern a lot. And I do that intentionally to discern who they are. Because when you start a college as a freshman, you're not the same person you are when you finish as a senior. And we need to get that right environment where it can be flexible and support that kind of academic, social, and emotional growth.”
• “…what's your philosophy of education? Do you view it as a means to an end, or is higher ed kind of this banquet table, you go and you feast and you try things, and it's just important to know what you don't like as it is to find out what you do like and what you're passionate about. We need to be strategic and intentional with choices for our students.”
• On her pro bono clients: “Helping them realize their potential, but to also broaden…horizons…look at it through this lens.”
• “If someone starts off a conversation, I want my child to go to a really competitive school. There's a lot to unpack in that statement. Once we start teasing out those factors…what I'm really hearing is I just want the best for my child. I don't know what that means. I don't have language around this, so I'm going to say an Ivy, I'm going to say, the best, the most competitive and what the most competitive for I'd say the majority of people isn't always the best decision.”
• If you work with Beth, you’re getting a process, not an outcome. It’s sometimes hard for parents to understand.
• “Children learn what they live. When they're shown another way. They're always receptive. I always said I can work with any student - parents: That's a different story. Kids are not the issue.”
• “Sometimes people just need to be reminded that they can do hard things.”

2:12 - Why she became a self-pay patient after two medical bankruptcies. 

9:22 - How to navigate self-pay by removing fear-based thinking (I must have health insurance) and negotiate with every single healthcare service you pay for. 

11:02 - The freedom that comes with leaving health insurance behind and embracing self pay.

11:58 - How hospital foundations and patient pay advocates have emerged to embrace (somewhat) self-pay.

12:49 - As a high earner, she does not use these foundations, but negotiates to pay her bill. She's also a member of Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM),  a health cost sharing ministry. 

13:20 - How CHM works - you become a member, pay a monthly fee. When a healthcare episode arises, you access CHM to get your healthcare bills paid, or shared. 

15:14 - Sloane details the self-pay patient journey, how self-pay doesn't trickle through to all areas of the healthcare industry, and how to educate each sector about self-pay.

22:50 - How to ask for the self-pay rate as a patient.

25:00 - Where Sloane negotiated for care from one provider that was 75% less than what another provider quoted. 

26:35 - How physicians are fairly  knowledgeable about self pay, but those in their business offices are not. They are trained to work with insurance. She packs her "patience and grace" to ask them to do something that is unusual. 

29:25 - Tom pivots the conversation to how Sloan copes with a diagnosis of a terminal illness (at age 23). She doesn't let it define her, and looks at her condition as a chronic illness. 

30:23 - How Sloane and Tom agree that it is the dying person's responsibility to prepare the living  for their own death. 

34:14 - Why doctors ignore DNRs (hint: it has to do with litigation). 

35:10 - Tom laments that modern Stoics don't talk suicide the way the original Stoics did - it is the last vestige of our wills. 

37:50 - Sloane shares her grandmother's advice about friendship: you really only need 6 friends in life; 3 on one side of the casket, and 3 on the other. 

38:10 - The extreme rarity of having one really close friend. 

40:00 - Shifting to business, how she found herself in Nashville's health tech scene. Pre-pandemic, it was crowded, healthy and vibrant. Backed by Nashville and nationwide private equity and venture capital firms, and also supported by local institutions like the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Nashville Healthcare Council, local family funds, and others, founders were getting a lot of support. 

41:13 - When founder-led companies become responsible for creating shareholder value. The trajectory to create shareholder value is a big change, and she learned how sales and marketing played such a significant role in creating that value. 

42:35 - Creation of her secret sauce: the strategy/methodology/execution of marketing to build to exit, and understanding how to make quick pivots as needed. 

44:02 - What healthcare doesn't talk about post-pandemic: the rise in chronic disease, chronic care. Fortunately, many tech companies have come forward to begin to address this issue, but the exits are not as speedy as they once were.

45:29 - The role of a strategic story in an exit, and how your fly paper is still whether or not you created shareholder value. But healthcare needs to re-think intellectual property.

47:00 - The other way to re-frame and look at shareholder value: the customer relationships you create. If you can own a swim lane in the market, and really own it well, that has enormous value. 

48:16 - How mergers often destroy value by devaluing the brand and the culture. 

51:24 - Who shaped her marketing philosophy, Marty Neumeier, who was Steve Jobs' brand mentor. She believes, as Marty maintains, that a brand isn't what you say it is, it's what your customer says it is. 

54:17 - How she loves founder-led companies, and how she gets so much more out of it than what she put into it. Her emotional paycheck gets cashed every time she sees someone get a check they never thought they would get.  

Takeaways: 

• Selling into healthcare takes a long time - for good reason.
• Having worked in both the education and healthcare market selling software, both are difficult markets. While healthcare has more budget than education, both take forever to make a decision.
• Young entrepreneurs should think about getting some enterprise-level experience before starting a company.
• How entrepreneurship is like parenthood: you don't know it until you try it.
• Early technical decisions can have an outsize downstream impact, and is perhaps more important than go to market activity.
• Moore's most important job as CEO was first to drive revenue, then later to set the company vision and cultivate its culture.
• In his current role as an advisor, he stresses operational discipline over founders habits.
• The number one attribute for entrepreneurial success? Being able to work through ambiguity.
• Managing customers and raising kids both involve cultivating their independence from you.
• Jason's favorite saying? "People gonna people." It's not just negative - people also do amazing things. But just know that folks will disappoint you at some point.
• Advice to his 23 year-old self: Push through the hard times and keep people close; don't lose your focus on them.

Takeaways: 

• Why it's not so much that Eric is a believer in alternative assets, but that he believes in a diversification of investment portfolios. 
• That illiquidity of alternative assets is a feature, not a bug. 
• The legal challenges of getting Alto started took longer than the anticipated technical challenges of simplifying the workflow processes of alternative investments.
• The 'greater fool' theory in investments.
• How public markets are no longer being driven by the fundamentals of investing and operating.
• Alto's three levels of operation: a software business which owns a trust company and also owns a securities company.
• 'Historically good returns' in alternative investments = returns that exceed public market returns.
• Bitcoin, like money, is an invention based on faith.
• What comprises 'luck' in business: hard work, opportunity, and a third vector: remaining open to what's happening in the market.
• The cost - and there is one - to entrepreneurship.

Takeaways

• Understanding the basics of circuits and quantum computing is essential in comprehending the potential of AI.
• Transparency and explainability are crucial in AI decision-making to ensure accountability and mitigate bias.
• Data curation is a critical step in developing AI models to avoid unintended biases and improve accuracy.
• The application of AI in mortgage and loan decisions requires careful consideration of fairness and ethical implications. Higher education is correlated with earnings, but its correlation with credit worthiness is uncertain.
• Being completely blind to factors like race and gender in the hiring process may be challenging, but efforts can be made to represent everyone equally.
• Considering each subpopulation separately and simplifying the hiring process can help ensure fair representation.
• Ethical dilemmas arise when ignoring correlations that have a strong statistical relationship with outcomes.
• The application of AI in the hiring process can be effective when combined with human decision-making and a structured, data-informed approach.

Chapters

00:00Introduction and Recording Confirmation

00:38Background in Physics and Engineering

03:13Research in Material Design and Quantum Physics

04:26Understanding Circuits and Quantum Computing

06:37Transition from Research to Business

11:14Impact of Ideas and Einstein's Equation

13:14Ethics and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

17:15Applications and Limitations of AI

20:39Ethics and Bias in AI Decision-Making

25:24Transparency and Explainability in AI

29:29Data Curation and Bias in AI Models

34:07AI in Mortgage and Loan Decisions

38:15Fairness and Ethics in Lending

38:41Correlation between Higher Education and Earnings

39:21Challenges of Being Blind to Race and Gender

39:49Considerations for Representing Everyone Equally

40:24Ethical Dilemmas of Ignoring Correlations

41:08Product Development and Answering Ethical Questions

41:29Simplifying the Hiring Process

42:02Data-Informed Recruiting and Hiring

43:14Using Data to Find the Right Match

44:24Simplifying the Workflow for Recruiters

45:16Focusing on Skill-Based Factors in Hiring

46:31The Validity of Resumes in Predicting Performance

47:25Factors in Deciding a Good Hire

48:15The Tricky Nature of Job Descriptions

49:05The Importance of Skills and Job Descriptions

50:03The Value of Experience and Starting a Business

51:09The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making

54:02Introducing Scientific Process into Hiring

55:53The Application of AI in the Hiring Process

56:58The Human Element in Decision-Making

58:16Applying the Scientific Method to Business Problems

59:18Learning from Past Research and Being Skeptical

01:00:45Checking Assumptions and Being Discerning

Norbert talks about how Adidas starts its shoe manufacturing process, beginning with a business unit who outlines the market need in a comprehensive brief. Then, a designer group begins experimenting with colors, materials and textures. "There's 250-350 operations that need to happen to put one pair of footwear together, so it's a long process... taking up to 16 months," says Norbert.

Every new material and material supplier is tested, based on internal standards. Once it moves to being manufactured on the production line, further testing and checking take place. 

Some analogies and differences - software vs. manufacturing: 

• multiple suppliers and producers are comparable to software engineers writing code all over a complex system
• the value of eliminating variation
• unlike software, there's no opportunity to "fix it later" in manufacturing, which makes it essential to build a highly functioning quality process
• quality and compliance can't be an afterthought in manufacturing 
• software and manufacturing need to focus on root cause analysis to build the most robust quality management process
• risk analysis is all about error tolerance