Zachary Marx-Kuo
Stanford University
Stanford (37.4° N, 122.1° W)

featuring Eric Li, Senior Product Manager, PeopleGrove, San Francisco (37.7° N, 122.4° W)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Li, and I learned about his experiences in and path into the educational technology (“edtech”) industry. Eric currently serves as a senior product manager at PeopleGrove, a company that connects students to professionals in their fields of interests. Prior to this role, Eric worked at Khan Academy, Spire Education in Kenya, and the Boston Consulting Group. Eric graduated from Rice University with a BA in economics.

During our interview, Eric shared his path into edtech beginning from his own high school days, how he balanced his interests with the expectations of his parents, and a pivotal moment when he decided to leave consulting and pursue careers in education full-time. Eric made this career pivot after reflecting on his values and identifying the ones that he held most dear. Dustin Peterson’s book Reset was instrumental in this process, and Eric realized that his professional life as a consultant did not uphold one of his key values, empowerment. While I’ve heard about the influence of mentors or experiences in shaping some of the major decisions that people make in their lives, this is the first time that someone has cited a book as this motivating force.

We then discussed our personal views on the current and future roles of edtech. As a former teacher and counselor who used various edtech products, I appreciated gaining a behind-the-scenes perspective on what the makers of the products believe their role to be (versus how the products may play out in the classroom). Going into this interview, I expected to hear more from Eric about edtech’s merits and its power moving forward. I was surprised, then, to hear that Eric thought that edtech would not be a major driver in students’ educations for at least the next 50-100 years and that the classroom teacher plays a very important role. He pushed against the idea of technology in classrooms as a silver bullet for the issues in the education system that we see today, despite the rise of screen time for students of all ages in classrooms. Eric highlighted the ability of edtech to empower teachers but how it cannot help them solve certain problems that they’re already facing in the classroom, like students coming to class hungry.

Finally, I appreciated the approach that Eric suggested for someone that has an edtech solution in mind that they would like to pursue. He recommended that this hypothetical inventor empathize with the intended user, focus on understanding the problem before jumping to a solution, and to simply “go for it.” I think this advice could apply to people interested in fields even outside of edtech, as could Eric’s priorities as a growing professional, his eventual move to social impact over consulting, and his open-minded perspective on how to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Highlights from the interview

Could you first talk about your educational journey?

I grew up in a pretty stereotypically “tiger parent” household. In high school, very heavy emphasis on grades, academics, SAT, et cetera. Not as much emphasis on exploration, or curiosity, or that sort of thing. That was the K-12 chapter. In college, I would say that shifted. My focus went far less academic and more towards what I could learn from experiences in hands-on opportunities. There are things I gained from the academic things, but one of the bigger takeaways for me was, I think, the experiences through internship. Getting to chat with professors, with internships at different companies, I really had a lot of valuable understanding about my interests, my passions, my strengths and weaknesses, how I wanted to grow, came from those [interactions]. That’s a quick overview of how I viewed some of my learning and growth.

How did your family feel about some of your choices?

In college, I was prepped to focus a little more on what would be a strong job out of college, what to major in that would set me up for success. I became a lot more pragmatic in college. I wanted to make sure I was setting myself up for a career of success. I had interned in real estate, finance, consulting, tech, and ultimately decided to go into consulting in my first role out of college. I think, coming from a more traditional household and being from a first-generation immigrant family, that represented stability, sort of having reached a certain point. I think, as parents and firs-gen immigrants, that was absolutely something my parents were thrilled and ecstatic about.

Fast forward two years later, when I decided to transition out of consulting into first an education fellowship, then to Khan Academy, and now to PeopleGrove, there was less understanding of why I would leave a stable and well-known company with good pay, et cetera, for a completely different mission and making, on paper, some significant tradeoffs. That has taken them some time to come around to, but they now understand some of my motivations and what I’m solving for…it is less on the prestige side and more on the more tradition social impact and making a difference [side]. And I think that comes from, as I’ve gotten older, appreciating more of the privilege that I did grow up with. And, as I’ve seen more inequality, especially in the educational space, knowing that it would be super easy for me to put my head in the ground and not care about any of that. But with what I’ve seen, I want to be a part of the solution for that rather than upholding an inequitable system and a lot of these disparities.

So when did you feel like you had that shift?

It would probably be my time in Kenya. That’s where I went [with a fellowship] after my two years at the Boston Consulting Group [BCG]. That was a fork in the road where I had been in consulting for a little while but was ready to think about something else. When I thought about making more of a meaningful impact with my career, considering all my gifts and advantages growing up, I realized that education was the common thread in a lot of the volunteering work and things that I spent my time on. It was always teaching in some way, mentoring in some way, creating resources for people to use. I had always thought of it as a hobby, as a side gig, but at that point I said, “Why don’t I try it out full-time? Learn more about the field, the industry, the opportunity. See if I can make a difference.” At the end of that time, I had the option of coming back to BCG or going elsewhere, and I chose to continue along the path in education, which led me to Khan Academy for four years and ultimately where I am now.

Did you have anyone that was helpful in terms of helping you to follow that path? Making the switch from consulting to education.

I don’t know if there was one particular person. I think it was taking that risk of leaving consulting, going on that fellowship in that time—in a very different environment, different culture, different company—that honestly got me out of a little bit of a bubble of consulting and allowed me to consider a lot broader set of opportunities and possibilities. I think the environment in taking that risk, trying something else, opened my mind to differences.

The second thing was—towards the end of that fellowship when I was at another crossroads of either going back to the life I led or continuing—there actually was a book that was pivotal in making my decision. It was by Dustin Peterson, who was a former Rice professor, and his book was called Reset. What spoke to me at that point was an exercise in the book that had 10-15 values that you had to weigh against each other, and when I took a values first kind of approach, it was very clear what the decision was going to be, and where I needed to go, and that led me to education. The empowerment was the top value I had at the time and still is probably up there. I think education, and probably a few other things, are among the most empowering things that we can give to people to better their lives and the family, the society.

Could you tell me a little about your current work?

I am currently a senior product manager at PeopleGrove. PeopleGrove’s mission is to ensure every student and alumni has the connections and mentorship that they need to succeed and achieve their goals. I think we all know that having a connection, whether it’s a friend at the right time, a mentor, a recruiter, or someone you know at an institution or company you want to be at, can often make all the difference in whether you are able to enter and step through and get an opportunity. The work I do at PeopleGrove is to build products that support this mission of making these connections far more accessible than they otherwise might be. So, I’m thinking about how do I help students at universities across the country, and across the world, have a tool that can allow someone to easily reach out to alumni at companies, or mentors that might help them both in college and once they graduate, through internship, jobs, advice, et cetera, so it’s working with engineers and designers to build a product that facilitates that.

Let’s talk about some of the skills that you find yourself using in this role.

One is strategic thinking. Two is problem solving. Three would be communication.

I think it starts with strategy, and understanding what is the mission of the organization, what is my role in that, and what data do I know about the problem, about the challenges, et cetera, so that I can create a game plan that will move the needle in achieving the mission, be feasible, reasonable, et cetera.

The second part is problem solving. Every day might bring a different challenge, with a different person, constraint, et cetera, so being able to think about whatever problem and create a plan to resolve it, work with people, et cetera, is something I do everyday.

The third part is communicating. You might have the best plan, the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t know how to communicate effectively to get buy-in from your peers, from superiors, from the rest of the company, you can never just do it on your own. So knowing how to communicate efficiently to show your ways of thinking, get folks on board, and inspire them to work in that direction, is important.

What motivated the recent shift over here?

One definite factor was a desire to increase how much and how fast I was learning. Having been at a place for four years is a good chunk of time, so after four years I started to have some déjà vu of, “Oh, I recognize this problem. I’ve seen this before. I’ve done this before.” Making sure that my learning kept accelerating where I could own a significant part of a product that I believed in was really important to me.

Could you give an example of a project that you felt like, at the beginning of your work, was really exciting?

The best example I would give is this project that I led twice over two years called LearnStorm. LearnStorm was this big back-to-school marketing campaign with a great end-product experience that really supercharged it. LearnStorm was designed to one, be a really exciting, motivating thing for teachers to use to get their students excited about [going] back to school. Two, to help teachers build strong learning mindsets at the start of a school year, so to set the tone so that students aren’t saying things like, “I’m just not a math person. I wasn’t born that way.” So that they have more of a growth mindset. And three, it was designed to help teachers to bring their students back up after a summer of probably not learning a lot and forgetting a lot. This campaign was something that, as a marketer, I redesigned from the ground up, to make it simpler, much more helpful for a teacher. And then, as a product manager, made the end-product experience much more engaging, intuitive, seamless. And at the end of the day, after two years of this, we had grown the program from about a quarter million, at its inception, to over a million students. We quadrupled the number of teachers using it and delivered a lot more learning to students, and so Khan Academy’s company-wide metric that we care most about is, “How many students are using Khan Academy at least two hours a month or about 30 minutes a week?” This program was one of the biggest contributors in driving a huge increase in the number of students who used us extensively every month.

The reason we care about that deep usage is that we have efficacy studies that show if you use this for at least two hours, you get higher than expected academic gains, and this project drove about half the increase in classroom….really engaged classroom usage during my time there. So that was one where I cared a lot about what it meant for Khan Academy, what it meant for students. And a lot of the stories and videos we saw were great as well; you had students asking their teachers to assign them work on Khan Academy during recess, you had students with really inspiring stories about how they learned differently going from a fixed mindset to “You haven’t learned this yet. You can do this. It just takes some support, a different strategy, et cetera,” so that would absolutely one of my proudest achievements and projects at Khan Academy.

Let’s imagine that I called you in a month, saying, “I graduated. I have this idea. I am working with some friends, and we have this product, and we’re going to get the ball rolling.” What do you think would be the top three things that you would say? Like, “Zach, this looks great, but I want you to be thinking about X, Y, and Z.”

Three things I would say would be…One, know your consumer. Know your user forward, backwards, sideways; know them extremely well. Number two, fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And number three, go for it.

So, number one, know your user very well. Before you start with any idea or pitch or concept, you need to have that consumer or user in mind. You need to know what they care about, what their challenges are, what they currently do about those challenges, and what motivates or frustrates them. Because at the end of the day, you’re doing this for, presumably, a human, and you’re not building a bot to serve other AI bots or something. That would be step number one.

Advice number two would be fall in love with the problem, not the solution. I think, often in startups, you might think, “Aw, this is the killer idea. This very first idea I came up with, no one else has ever come up with it.” Ninety-nine percent chance you’re wrong, but if you flip it and fixate less on the solution and more on “This is the problem, or [this is the] impact I hope to make for this user or for society,” then you’ll start to be a little more data driven and customer driven, and understanding “Hey, this is my first idea, but here’s my second hypothesis, here’s my third hypothesis,” and you really want to be more scientific with it. To test what idea and solution really does solve the problem that you care about for the person that you care about.

The third part is go for it. If you are fortunate to have some of that support…I think responsibilities and things only grow with time, and, as a new graduate, this is a great point in time—an opportunity to learn with an idea that you care about. Few things feel as motivating and inspiring as working on something you truly believe in.

For edtech companies, do you think a for-profit model is better than a nonprofit model for increasing access?

I would say that the number of students, the size and scale of problems in education in the US and around the world…there’s plenty of room for both kinds of models. I don’t think success is driven or dependent on what model you pick. I think it’s a lot more dependent on the strategy. Are you focused on your execution over the course of years and years? Because education isn’t as fast as ad optimization on Instagram. You can’t run a one-week experiment on a kid and say, “He’s going to Harvard now. Great, we solved it.” And so I think what it more depends on is are you focused on the user—teachers, students, districts? Are you able to partner with some of the largest institutions and players with governments, with states, with common-core curricular, et cetera? And do you have a model that has a way to sustain yourself? I’ve seen for-profits fail; I’ve seen nonprofits fail. I’ve seen organizations in both categories succeed. I think it comes down much more to strategy, user focus, and your execution over a very, very long time, rather than simplifying it to for-profit or non-profit. I would also say, for access, it again depends. Khan Academy had 15 million students on it a month, and that was all around the world. It is completely free, so I would say yeah, you probably have some prep school kids on it, but you also have people in the Middle East or in refugee camps, so I wouldn’t say it limited the access in any way, especially internationally. It absolutely increased access there but not because it was nonprofit, per se.

Do you ever see the role of edtech changing classrooms, so the vast majority of classrooms are not directed by a teacher? A more blended-learning style, like Khan Lab?

I think there will always be a role for a teacher, and for the classroom, and for other students. I don’t believe a tech-only solution is viable in the next 50 years or 100 years. And even if it is viable, I would argue it’s not…I wouldn’t recommend it, because technology can be very good at certain things, but the social aspects of learning, the emotional aspects of learning—learning resilience, learning perseverance, all of that—would be missing. I think tech can make some aspects of learning easier, but I think the most holistic, best education would probably be a strong combination where a teacher is equipped with tools so that they can serve their student, wherever their student is. So I think things like a blended classroom, personalized learning, competency-based learning, there’s room for all of these. But at the end of the day, it needs to be in service of empowering the teacher, empowering the student, not just saying, “If 100 percent of people used this, it would magically solve everything,” because MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses] have been around for well over a decade now, and I don’t think we have seen universities disappear or a decrease in importance. You have started to see some impact on the market, where probably there is more resources and things online, but I wouldn’t advise or recommend it. I don’t think it’s feasible that it will be 100 percent purely online learning any time soon.

What are some challenges that edtech, or PeopleGrove, is facing?

I’ll start with these two. I’ll see if there are any others. One is having a sustainable model that balances student needs and teachers’ needs with having something that scales, whether that’s for-profit or non-profit. Improving student outcomes and success and teacher outcomes and success, you cannot pay bills with that, so there’s an inherent push and pull with any company nonprofit that is trying to serve students, so I’d say that is one where it, again, comes down to execution over a long period of time, and the aspiration would be to do so in such a way that doesn’t make you almost a rent-accruing entity within the system. I don’t know what the solution is, actually, so I won’t try to say it, but ideally, you don’t turn into a behemoth that is exacting profits from the millions and millions of students; you are still primarily in the service to student outcomes, achievements, success, et cetera.

Challenge number two in edtech is that we could use a lot more teachers with firsthand education experience. I think right now you still have largely a world of technology people trying to solve education problems, rather than educators using technology to solve educators’ problems. I saw this at Khan Academy; it’s the case here. I am part of this. I had taught in the past but not in a traditional classroom setting, and I don’t have 10 years of university experience. I think that will always be a barrier to understanding who you are serving and doing as good a job as you can, if you don’t have a critical mass of teachers in senior and important roles within a company.

Number three, I would say, is that education…and this is more just a comment on education in general…but it’s the education to employment gap. It’s all fine and good to get a great GPA, have a great major and college experience, but if at the end of the day that isn’t getting you to the career or post-school goal that you want, then you might’ve just graduated with a lot of debt—not the job or means of providing for yourself that you wanted. I think that is a big challenge and what initially drew me to education, because improving academic outcomes for their own sake is good in certain contexts, but at the end of the day, I think education should be in service of the goals the student or individual has. I think today’s schools, universities, are doing a very poor job of adapting to changes in what the market needs, what companies want, preparing students for employment—that whole category of things. One of the biggest challenges that I think…technology is accelerating that. In a world, if automated trucks become a thing, you suddenly have 10 million people you need to reskill. In a world where more jobs are automated, the skills that we are giving students now don’t matter, then, if they’re not prepared for what the market needs.

What advice would you give to a student interested in getting into your field?

Getting into edtech? I would say get good at the ed and/or the tech, ideally both. And get firsthand experience to see if this is really what you want to do. The ed side is the teaching classroom experience, tech being something in engineering design or being a PM. Experience it with internships, or jobs, or opportunities that you have. You can also talk to [people]; do informational interviews and get more insights that way as well.

I would say, maybe, if I’m giving advice to undergrads or students right now, it would be think about the values that matter most to you, the problems in the world that best align with that, and how you want to make a difference. Reach out to your colleagues, professors, et cetera, who can help you on that journey, and don’t get caught up too much in other pressures and expectations and things. But I think if you start there, it’ll help you find what you want to do a little bit faster.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.