As part of the RedefiningCapitalism podcast, I had the opportunity to interview Matt Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO at New York-based startup ParagonOne, a startup that designs virtual internships for students looking to get real work experience in different industries — from VC to finance and social media marketing — at that was part of the Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley. We discuss his journey and key drivers as an entrepreneur, and how tech companies are stepping up to bridge the existing skills gap, and also, how we can build a better education system that helps everybody develop their talents and capacities.
Q: Welcome, Matt, and thank you for being here. I want to start talking about the ongoing changes in the current environment, and how they impact the school-to-work transition. There is now a lot more acceptance of the idea of remote work. How can remote internships be a way to bridge this gap between school and work?
Thank you for having me. So, as you mentioned, we saw the need to leverage the Internet and the web to make internship-like experiences more accessible for students. We’ve always felt that the real world is the best education for students, and when it comes to picking a career, or preparing for your first job — a lot of students find out that when they graduate, they got very little of the skill set that companies and startups, and the industry are looking for. So they end up having to get retrained. We feel that if you can integrate things like co-ops, internships, externships into that higher education process, students will have much more understanding of themselves, of the direction they want to take, of what is expected of them when they leave the bubble — the higher education bubble. And that was just what needed to happen in higher education. Others believed the same, but it was slow, it was not something that was widely adopted. Now, with what’s happening with COVID, it is just shedding light on this situation, and the really forward-looking schools are waking up and doing something about it.
Q: Talking about reimagining higher education, how can schools improve in giving students the skills they need to thrive once they graduate? How does something like ParagonOne come into place here?
Well, I think the first wave of progress here has been with the programming and coding boot camps. Trilogy Education is an excellent example of this. They came into universities, with this real practical skillset around coding, that even a lot of computer science majors weren’t offering. I mean, I majored in Computer Science Engineering at MIT, and when I was there, I didn’t even learn a practical programming language, until I was a junior — in college. This was at MIT. Now, I think they’ve changed that, but at the time they had a language that no one used anymore called Scheme — the people that use it I think now they’re using Java or C++, but that’s just one practical example of schools waking up to building real skillsets. So, there’s been a lot of attention on STEM, but not around non-technical areas. So with ParagonOne, we’ve been focused on categories like social media, product management, marketing, business development, data analysis, and the other thing that’s important to remember is that students will often graduate college without having what I call life skills, day to day skills, professionalism. I know it sounds obvious, but things like: showing up to meetings on time, knowing how to dress, knowing how to communicate when it comes to interacting with your peers. These are things you typically learn once you get into the workplace, and you leave that college social bubble. But a lot of colleges have not invested in ways to introduce students to experiences that will teach them this. And you can’t simulate some of this; you have to send students into the real world, right. Jump right in, experience something with a company, experience working on a real project that has ambiguity, that doesn’t have a clear answer — a lot of students will look at the first job like a test — did I get the right answer, or what is the clear next step I’m supposed to take? And that, as we know, that’s not the case. The working world, and the real world is messy, it is ambiguous — when you’re solving real problems you don’t have all the data, and those are the type of experiences we want to introduce students to.
Q: How can remote externships be valuable for high-school students?
Well, I think the sooner you introduce a student to get real-world experiences, the sooner they are going to develop a sense of themselves, a sense of what they are going to be interested in. And it is as much about knowing what you don’t want to do, as it is to knowing what you want to do, and that can help a student make college productive. I mean, how many times have you heard, or maybe you are one of these people who thinks: if I had only known this, that, or the other I could have done something differently in college. I could have maybe done a different major, or tried new things, or not taken certain courses, and I think that’s incredibly valuable. Because the university is expensive, and it flies by. I mean, the four years that most students take, it isn’t that long. I remember myself, I got into my senior year when I felt I started to understand what I might want to do, and by then it was so late, that I added a second degree. I had to stay an extra year, which obviously had a real cost, and that was mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet.
Q: If you are able to help high-school students to find what they want to do and there are so many tools available to learn many skills for free, or for a very affordable rate, of course, the ROI of colleges and universities comes under question — it was already under question, but it is a lot more under question now, and this leads us to think that universities, to say the least, will need to redefine their pricing model together with their teaching model. So, what are your perspectives on this, would you see a future where colleges or universities are skipped altogether for this alternative road you can take for a successful career?
Yeah, so this is what Ryan Craig, from University Ventures, calls The Great Unbundling of Higher Education, right. You have this idea, where there are very specific skill sets that the market is looking for, and private market-driven providers are coming into this space, and providing that service or providing that skillset or education where universities are failing. Because universities are sprawling institutions, and there are a lot of competing forces, I mean, if we think: First, the university was not constructed to produce a skilled workforce. That’s not how it was set up. The university system was set up as a funnel and a feeder into research. Like, they’re built around the research institutions, and to do great research, you have to get a PhD. And so, what they did, was they set up this gamification, the tiered system. And if you can make it to getting your PhD, and you’ll get then through your post-doc, then you’re able to do research. You’re able to be a professional researcher and contribute to humanity’s knowledge. But along the way maybe you didn’t make it. Maybe people couldn’t cut it. And so we are going to give them a masters degree. Perhaps you couldn’t make it that far, so we’ll give you a bachelor’s degree. We’re going to give you something, for sticking around for four years, and paying the tuition that you paid. So here’s something that validates this academic pursuit. Still, when you take that degree and put it into the marketplace, it doesn’t satisfy what the market is looking for, because you’re requirements were designed on the road to becoming a PhD, to do research, that’s what they’re training you for, that’s what everyone has been getting trained for. So students are spending a majority of their time training for something that they never intend to go into. Now, that’s not to say that it is not useful to learn biology, or liberal arts, I’m a big proponent of that. I took one writing class at MIT, and my writing improved dramatically from that, and I’m so happy I took that one, right. So there are still certain things that are worthwhile to take, but most of the time, students are preparing for something that they didn’t sign up for. So, the unbundling is going to continue because the universities are not going to catch up fast enough. I mean, there’s so much bureaucracy, there’s so much many competing interests from people who are responsible for research, not responsible for producing people to go out and solve problems in the real world. Now, you’ll talk to people in universities, and they’ll say: of course we’re training them in life skills, and there is certainly some of that there, but they are not designing their courses, in many cases, to take that pragmatism into account. So, I think that’s an important thing to understand, because as long as that exists, there will be market-driven participants. There should be, coming in and being very action-oriented, being very outcome-oriented, measuring themselves on what skills can you demonstrate. Are you employable? Are you able to land a job? So you’re going to see that more.
Q: How do you see the classroom of the future?
Well, the classroom of the future, I believe, is one where you have this connection to the real world, and it is not driven by an artificial measurement. Testing has, for too long, been the great equaliser in education; testing and assessments. And I think assessment is good, but we think about testing and designing out of this bubbles from a purely academic standpoint, which is mostly driven by tests, to make sure that you are understanding concepts that ultimately would be more important for seeing if you can make it through a PhD, right. I think that you are going to see less emphasis on that, and more emphasis on the real world. And we have to loosen this dogma of the only way you’re really judged is through your GPA. When you get that degree, your GPA is somehow the standard-bearer of your future success, because as we know, many people who have outstanding GPAs, get into the real world and they can’t function. I mean PhDs are notorious for this, because they spend too long in the bubble, and the PhDs that get that far and say: well, you know, I don’t want to do research, this isn’t what I want. And then, they go out into the job market, I mean, it is painful. It is so painful, because they lived and died by the test. They lived and died by, at that point, spending countless hours on certain parts of the research, but with no real application to the real world. And I don’t just mean that the work that you did is based on a realistic scenario. I mean, you are interacting with people in the industry. You are interacting with ambiguous problems, and maybe the answer isn’t clear. Maybe in a class, the answer isn’t clear, and the point isn’t to measure everybody, and compare who got the best answer compared to somebody else. That’s not how life works. So when I think about the classroom of the future, I mean, sure, there’s going to be technology involved, there’s going to be hybrid online-offline — I’m thinking less about the tech. I’m thinking more about: what am I spending my time doing? What am I spending my time struggling with? What am I spending my time agonising over, because it is not clear how to solve the problem? Because I cannot go on office hours, and get all the answers. Because I don’t have last year’s test to pass around and study, because we know that the answers get reused, and that we gamify our learning. At the end of the day, there’s always a hack; there’s always a way to game the system of education right now, because it is test-driven. So, I think that’s the way the classroom of the future needs to look like.
Q: Talking more about ParagonOne does, I understand that there are two assessments for students who go through your program. One is automated, and the other one is done through a coach. Am I right or has this evolved?
Well, we’ve definitely evolved quite a bit, but both of the concepts, yes, we embrace. So, let me tell you what ParagonOne is. ParagonOne is a platform that helps to automate and scale something we call remote externships. Now externships have a meaning, usually, when a school partners with companies to provide an internship-like experience for credit. But we’ve adapted the term a little bit. For us, a remote externship is like an internship, but it is online, it is more accessible, more flexible, and it comes with structured training and mentorship. And we’ve developed this because we saw that the traditional internship was failing in a lot of ways: failing students and failing companies. It is failing students because this is not enough for them. There are not enough good internships out there, either the good ones are constrained because they go to, you know, the best students from the best schools, or the students that already have resume experience, or they are just not well-run and not well-managed — the students show up, and people are like oh-oh, the interns are here, we’ve got to give them something to do. And in a lot of ways, companies view internships as having a negative ROI, because they inherently involve someone who’s not trained — someone who doesn’t have a skillset. So the time and resource it takes for them to train that student, in many cases, isn’t worth it. And, you know, you get people who really care about mentorship, who look out after the programs, and that’s great — but there’s not enough of them. The students are graduating looking for these programs, and by the way, their college doesn’t have the resources to help them, right, most career centres don’t have enough resource to help students land internships, you know, prove their interview skill set right, I didn’t know how to interview coming out of college — no one teaches you that. So where do you find the internships? How do you network? So that’s the problem that we’re solving. And the way that we’ve built our remote externships, is that we’ve developed software that takes common projects, that takes entry-level work that a student might do, in let’s say, marketing, or business development, or data analysis, and we create templates using this software. We create templates for the training, we create templates for the workflow, and we can take these templates, and we can reuse them in a lot of different industries, with a lot of different companies. And the software enables us to handle larger numbers of students, I mean, twenty, thirty, forty students on one project at scale, without it being an additional burden on the company. And we provide other things for students. We develop training for them, so that they really understand the industry, and the work, we provide mentorship, and coaching, and small group check-ins, where students can comment and ask questions that maybe they didn’t feel comfortable asking. But we also facilitate webinars on behalf of the company, so that they can have a structured way to interact with students. And it is meant to lower the burden on the company. They only have to spend a few hours a month to organise this and participate in the high-value activities. And then under the hood, we have ways that we can score work, that we can provide student peer reviews, and present the work back to the companies in an efficient manner. So it is this all-in-one platform that’s turnkey for schools, turnkey for students, turnkey for companies, and it provides a lot of value. It is creating an entirely new category that is an alternative to internships that provides a wholly new type of experiential learning for students.
Q: So, throughout your experience coaching and mentoring, do you find that the most significant pain point in students managing this college to work transition, has to do more with skills like writing a resume, interviewing, pitching? Or is it more around more soft, life skills or abilities like confidence and self-awareness?
So, when we started ParagonOne, I would have told you it was the former. Because we started ParagonOne as an on-demand career coaching platform, where we have 800 industry professionals getting matched for students in 3-to-6 months virtual programs, and coaching them on interview skills, and resume preparedness, and how to speak the language so they can land a job. And all of those are still important skills. But what we realised is getting students into these real experiences faster and earlier; that was the game-changer. That’s how you build confidence. That’s how you build the knowledge, and the awareness, and that’s how you actually build your resume, right. So we can sit and coach someone on how to create a great resume all day long, or how to interview well, but if they’ve never tested out working in the industry, or they don’t have something they can put on their resume, it’s all sort of theoretical to them.
Q: In order to achieve this, to help people become more confident and become more self-aware, and build their career path, and to get this experience you require a lot of human touch, you require a lot of interaction from mentors, from coaches, so how do you achieve this in a company, a tech company like ParagonOne, where a lot of processes are automated?
We look at automation as a way to streamline the processes and tasks that would normally require a human, but don’t necessarily lead to a great student experience, right, so for example, there are certain things in regards to grading, assessing work, verifying work, organising the time when certain things happen, creating the curriculum, where we can reuse a lot of templates, and content, and software, and focus, instead, focus the human interaction on the really-high impact stuff. So, that’s being able to provide the right person to answer questions that the students have about their work. Most of our human interaction is built around not only a support system, but helping them do the work, guiding them so that when the work goes to the company, it’s gone through a test, it’s gone through some system where it is not just raw for the very first time.
Q: Yeah, I think it is very important to strike that balance, when used right automation can be a tool to enhance the human touch, not to eliminate it. So, moving on to your trajectory as an entrepreneur, you first graduated from MIT, then you went into investment banking. Why?
Just by accident. When I went to MIT, originally I wanted to work in the computer graphics and special effects industry, in film. I was a big film nerd in high school, and, you know, I was also a computer nerd, and math nerd, so I said: well, if I go to MIT I can learn technical skills to do special effects. So, think Pixar or Industrial Light & Magic. But as I got through my time there, I realised — maybe this wasn’t what I wanted to do, for various reasons — I was kind of lost. And I just sort of randomly decided: well, maybe I’ll do consulting. And I wanted to do consulting because consulting seemed like something to do when you’re ambitious, and you just don’t know with what. So, let’s kick the can out of the field, and I started to interview for consulting firms, and I remember I got some offers, but I didn’t get the offers at McKinsey or BCG, so I started randomly interviewing for investment banks. And initially, the feedback was: oh, you don’t have internship experience in finance — which I didn’t at that time. So, I was not making it past the first rounds of any of the big banks; they just didn’t take me seriously. Finally, I got an interview, and it was with Morgan Stanley, and I think I didn’t really care whether I got it or not. I was sort of: I’ve done enough of this. I was, ahh, whatever, I’m just going to show up. And I think my comfort with not trying so hard, plus my familiarity with the process, plus the fact that the people interviewing me had actually gone to MIT, and were engineers as well, and they didn’t have any internship experience in finance — they actually related to me. I don’t know, somehow, that all clicked, and I kept going through the process, and I got an offer. And I remember telling some friends who had internship experience and wanted to work in finance, and I remember them saying to me, well you obviously are going to take it right, you didn’t even want to work in banking, so you, basically, you need to take it to validate the rest of us. So I thought about it. And, you know, Morgan Stanley is a great name. I had studied and looked into doing investment banking, and it kind of scared me. It didn’t sound like something I wanted to do, the gruelling hours, etc. I was kind of interested in finance, but I was more interested in the challenge. And that was the bottom line. I decided to do banking because it kind of intimidated me a little bit, and I was curious, could I do it? Could I survive? And that personal challenge is what drove me. And I would say that is what has driven me with most of my decisions. Even being an entrepreneur — it is very personal. It is to see if I can do something: can I build that? Obviously, there’s a goal, and something that I’m passionate about, but that was the goal with banking, to prove myself.
Q: In hindsight, do you believe your decision would have been different if you had access to a tool like ParagonOne?
Totally. I mean, that was a big inspiration for why we started it. Actually, when I was in banking, I got tendinitis in my hands from typing so much. For the first year I was, you know, you’re basically working 80–100 hour weeks, you’re not exercising, you’re chained to your desk — everything is urgent all the time, everything is a fire drill. So, you are just constantly in a state of stress. I didn’t know how to say no to things, I overworked, and I got tendinitis in my hands, all the way up into my shoulders and my back. It was bad, and I couldn’t type for a year because it was painful when I would type, so I thought my career was over. So I said, okay, I guess I didn’t survive investment banking. But what I did, instead, was, one of our VPs in our group had the idea that I could sit behind the interns and coach them, teach them for them to do their jobs better. So by the end of the summer, the interns, all of them were so good at what they did because they had me teaching them, coaching them, and they were as good as the analysts that they all got offers to come into the group. So I remember that experience. And that inspired me later on. If we can harness the resources of companies to basically teach and educate students — that’s powerful right there. That kind of guidance, and direction, and education is incredibly powerful. And so that is what we are trying to do with ParagonOne. We’re trying to bridge that gap, and bring the real world, bring the industry into students lives.
Q: Throughout your journey, what has been the most challenging moment? What has been the toughest challenge that you’ve overcome?
There are so many. I mean, at the end of the day, I believe being an entrepreneur is waking up, and not wondering or hoping that there’s not going to be problems. It is just waking up, and knowing that there will be problems. Every day is about problems, constantly facing problems. Some are small, some are big. There have been times where we’ve thought we were going to run out of money, right, there have been times when we’ve been technically insolvent. There have been times where we ended up going through really rough patches, and pivoting, this direction, and that direction, so many little things under the hood. But they actually got us to where we are today, with the remote externship platform. It is hard for me to pick one, because it just becomes an amalgamation. Eventually, you just sort of wake up every day, and you just keep pushing forward, and it is only because you have to truly believe that what you are building must exist in the world, and will exist in the world, eventually. It is really the only way that you keep doing this. I wouldn’t say that I’ve become any massive success or anything. This is my second startup. The first one that I cofounded ended up having a small listing, but it is not, I haven’t got to the point where, you know, I’m set for life. And that is because I don’t do this for the money. If I was going to do something for the money I would have stayed in finance, I would have done a hundred other things by now. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. I just can’t I think, during the times where we thought: oh, is this not going to work? Are we going to have to close up shop? The thing that kept me going was the idea of having to go work somewhere, like, the idea that I’m having to go work for someone else, I was, like, you know what, I think I’m going to keep doing this. I’m going to figure this out. Although I think that deep down it wasn’t driven by that kind of fear, it was driven by the desire of doing this, and that, actually, even during the hardest times, the most brutal times, I would ask myself: would I rather be doing something else? And I came back to the answer. I would say, I’d rather be trying to build this company and struggling, that making a lot of money sitting at a corporate office, doing something that I’d be pulling my hair over. And I’m not saying people who work at these companies work on things that they’re not passionate about; there’s plenty of that. But for me, I know what drove me every morning. And that’s what we have to have. Because the knockings will come, if you let them. The punches are hard, and you have chains that you’re just pulling every day. You get to the top of the hill, and you cannot say: Look how steep that hill is,because once you get to the top of the hill, there’s just another one, there’s another mountain. So you just live it, you breathe it, you absorb it.
As part of the RedefiningCapitalism podcast, I had the opportunity to interview Matt Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO at New York-based startup ParagonOne, a startup that designs virtual internships for students looking to get real work experience in different industries — from VC to finance and social media marketing — at that was part of the Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley. We discuss his journey and key drivers as an entrepreneur, and how tech companies are stepping up to bridge the existing skills gap, and also, how we can build a better education system that helps everybody develop their talents and capacities.
Q: Welcome, Matt, and thank you for being here. I want to start talking about the ongoing changes in the current environment, and how they impact the school-to-work transition. There is now a lot more acceptance of the idea of remote work. How can remote internships be a way to bridge this gap between school and work?
Thank you for having me. So, as you mentioned, we saw the need to leverage the Internet and the web to make internship-like experiences more accessible for students. We’ve always felt that the real world is the best education for students, and when it comes to picking a career, or preparing for your first job — a lot of students find out that when they graduate, they got very little of the skill set that companies and startups, and the industry are looking for. So they end up having to get retrained. We feel that if you can integrate things like co-ops, internships, externships into that higher education process, students will have much more understanding of themselves, of the direction they want to take, of what is expected of them when they leave the bubble — the higher education bubble. And that was just what needed to happen in higher education. Others believed the same, but it was slow, it was not something that was widely adopted. Now, with what’s happening with COVID, it is just shedding light on this situation, and the really forward-looking schools are waking up and doing something about it.
Q: Talking about reimagining higher education, how can schools improve in giving students the skills they need to thrive once they graduate? How does something like ParagonOne come into place here?
Well, I think the first wave of progress here has been with the programming and coding boot camps. Trilogy Education is an excellent example of this. They came into universities, with this real practical skillset around coding, that even a lot of computer science majors weren’t offering. I mean, I majored in Computer Science Engineering at MIT, and when I was there, I didn’t even learn a practical programming language, until I was a junior — in college. This was at MIT. Now, I think they’ve changed that, but at the time they had a language that no one used anymore called Scheme — the people that use it I think now they’re using Java or C++, but that’s just one practical example of schools waking up to building real skillsets. So, there’s been a lot of attention on STEM, but not around non-technical areas. So with ParagonOne, we’ve been focused on categories like social media, product management, marketing, business development, data analysis, and the other thing that’s important to remember is that students will often graduate college without having what I call life skills, day to day skills, professionalism. I know it sounds obvious, but things like: showing up to meetings on time, knowing how to dress, knowing how to communicate when it comes to interacting with your peers. These are things you typically learn once you get into the workplace, and you leave that college social bubble. But a lot of colleges have not invested in ways to introduce students to experiences that will teach them this. And you can’t simulate some of this; you have to send students into the real world, right. Jump right in, experience something with a company, experience working on a real project that has ambiguity, that doesn’t have a clear answer — a lot of students will look at the first job like a test — did I get the right answer, or what is the clear next step I’m supposed to take? And that, as we know, that’s not the case. The working world, and the real world is messy, it is ambiguous — when you’re solving real problems you don’t have all the data, and those are the type of experiences we want to introduce students to.
Q: How can remote externships be valuable for high-school students?
Well, I think the sooner you introduce a student to get real-world experiences, the sooner they are going to develop a sense of themselves, a sense of what they are going to be interested in. And it is as much about knowing what you don’t want to do, as it is to knowing what you want to do, and that can help a student make college productive. I mean, how many times have you heard, or maybe you are one of these people who thinks: if I had only known this, that, or the other I could have done something differently in college. I could have maybe done a different major, or tried new things, or not taken certain courses, and I think that’s incredibly valuable. Because the university is expensive, and it flies by. I mean, the four years that most students take, it isn’t that long. I remember myself, I got into my senior year when I felt I started to understand what I might want to do, and by then it was so late, that I added a second degree. I had to stay an extra year, which obviously had a real cost, and that was mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet.
Q: If you are able to help high-school students to find what they want to do and there are so many tools available to learn many skills for free, or for a very affordable rate, of course, the ROI of colleges and universities comes under question — it was already under question, but it is a lot more under question now, and this leads us to think that universities, to say the least, will need to redefine their pricing model together with their teaching model. So, what are your perspectives on this, would you see a future where colleges or universities are skipped altogether for this alternative road you can take for a successful career?
Yeah, so this is what Ryan Craig, from University Ventures, calls The Great Unbundling of Higher Education, right. You have this idea, where there are very specific skill sets that the market is looking for, and private market-driven providers are coming into this space, and providing that service or providing that skillset or education where universities are failing. Because universities are sprawling institutions, and there are a lot of competing forces, I mean, if we think: First, the university was not constructed to produce a skilled workforce. That’s not how it was set up. The university system was set up as a funnel and a feeder into research. Like, they’re built around the research institutions, and to do great research, you have to get a PhD. And so, what they did, was they set up this gamification, the tiered system. And if you can make it to getting your PhD, and you’ll get then through your post-doc, then you’re able to do research. You’re able to be a professional researcher and contribute to humanity’s knowledge. But along the way maybe you didn’t make it. Maybe people couldn’t cut it. And so we are going to give them a masters degree. Perhaps you couldn’t make it that far, so we’ll give you a bachelor’s degree. We’re going to give you something, for sticking around for four years, and paying the tuition that you paid. So here’s something that validates this academic pursuit. Still, when you take that degree and put it into the marketplace, it doesn’t satisfy what the market is looking for, because you’re requirements were designed on the road to becoming a PhD, to do research, that’s what they’re training you for, that’s what everyone has been getting trained for. So students are spending a majority of their time training for something that they never intend to go into. Now, that’s not to say that it is not useful to learn biology, or liberal arts, I’m a big proponent of that. I took one writing class at MIT, and my writing improved dramatically from that, and I’m so happy I took that one, right. So there are still certain things that are worthwhile to take, but most of the time, students are preparing for something that they didn’t sign up for. So, the unbundling is going to continue because the universities are not going to catch up fast enough. I mean, there’s so much bureaucracy, there’s so much many competing interests from people who are responsible for research, not responsible for producing people to go out and solve problems in the real world. Now, you’ll talk to people in universities, and they’ll say: of course we’re training them in life skills, and there is certainly some of that there, but they are not designing their courses, in many cases, to take that pragmatism into account. So, I think that’s an important thing to understand, because as long as that exists, there will be market-driven participants. There should be, coming in and being very action-oriented, being very outcome-oriented, measuring themselves on what skills can you demonstrate. Are you employable? Are you able to land a job? So you’re going to see that more.
Q: How do you see the classroom of the future?
Well, the classroom of the future, I believe, is one where you have this connection to the real world, and it is not driven by an artificial measurement. Testing has, for too long, been the great equaliser in education; testing and assessments. And I think assessment is good, but we think about testing and designing out of this bubbles from a purely academic standpoint, which is mostly driven by tests, to make sure that you are understanding concepts that ultimately would be more important for seeing if you can make it through a PhD, right. I think that you are going to see less emphasis on that, and more emphasis on the real world. And we have to loosen this dogma of the only way you’re really judged is through your GPA. When you get that degree, your GPA is somehow the standard-bearer of your future success, because as we know, many people who have outstanding GPAs, get into the real world and they can’t function. I mean PhDs are notorious for this, because they spend too long in the bubble, and the PhDs that get that far and say: well, you know, I don’t want to do research, this isn’t what I want. And then, they go out into the job market, I mean, it is painful. It is so painful, because they lived and died by the test. They lived and died by, at that point, spending countless hours on certain parts of the research, but with no real application to the real world. And I don’t just mean that the work that you did is based on a realistic scenario. I mean, you are interacting with people in the industry. You are interacting with ambiguous problems, and maybe the answer isn’t clear. Maybe in a class, the answer isn’t clear, and the point isn’t to measure everybody, and compare who got the best answer compared to somebody else. That’s not how life works. So when I think about the classroom of the future, I mean, sure, there’s going to be technology involved, there’s going to be hybrid online-offline — I’m thinking less about the tech. I’m thinking more about: what am I spending my time doing? What am I spending my time struggling with? What am I spending my time agonising over, because it is not clear how to solve the problem? Because I cannot go on office hours, and get all the answers. Because I don’t have last year’s test to pass around and study, because we know that the answers get reused, and that we gamify our learning. At the end of the day, there’s always a hack; there’s always a way to game the system of education right now, because it is test-driven. So, I think that’s the way the classroom of the future needs to look like.
Q: Talking more about ParagonOne does, I understand that there are two assessments for students who go through your program. One is automated, and the other one is done through a coach. Am I right or has this evolved?
Well, we’ve definitely evolved quite a bit, but both of the concepts, yes, we embrace. So, let me tell you what ParagonOne is. ParagonOne is a platform that helps to automate and scale something we call remote externships. Now externships have a meaning, usually, when a school partners with companies to provide an internship-like experience for credit. But we’ve adapted the term a little bit. For us, a remote externship is like an internship, but it is online, it is more accessible, more flexible, and it comes with structured training and mentorship. And we’ve developed this because we saw that the traditional internship was failing in a lot of ways: failing students and failing companies. It is failing students because this is not enough for them. There are not enough good internships out there, either the good ones are constrained because they go to, you know, the best students from the best schools, or the students that already have resume experience, or they are just not well-run and not well-managed — the students show up, and people are like oh-oh, the interns are here, we’ve got to give them something to do. And in a lot of ways, companies view internships as having a negative ROI, because they inherently involve someone who’s not trained — someone who doesn’t have a skillset. So the time and resource it takes for them to train that student, in many cases, isn’t worth it. And, you know, you get people who really care about mentorship, who look out after the programs, and that’s great — but there’s not enough of them. The students are graduating looking for these programs, and by the way, their college doesn’t have the resources to help them, right, most career centres don’t have enough resource to help students land internships, you know, prove their interview skill set right, I didn’t know how to interview coming out of college — no one teaches you that. So where do you find the internships? How do you network? So that’s the problem that we’re solving. And the way that we’ve built our remote externships, is that we’ve developed software that takes common projects, that takes entry-level work that a student might do, in let’s say, marketing, or business development, or data analysis, and we create templates using this software. We create templates for the training, we create templates for the workflow, and we can take these templates, and we can reuse them in a lot of different industries, with a lot of different companies. And the software enables us to handle larger numbers of students, I mean, twenty, thirty, forty students on one project at scale, without it being an additional burden on the company. And we provide other things for students. We develop training for them, so that they really understand the industry, and the work, we provide mentorship, and coaching, and small group check-ins, where students can comment and ask questions that maybe they didn’t feel comfortable asking. But we also facilitate webinars on behalf of the company, so that they can have a structured way to interact with students. And it is meant to lower the burden on the company. They only have to spend a few hours a month to organise this and participate in the high-value activities. And then under the hood, we have ways that we can score work, that we can provide student peer reviews, and present the work back to the companies in an efficient manner. So it is this all-in-one platform that’s turnkey for schools, turnkey for students, turnkey for companies, and it provides a lot of value. It is creating an entirely new category that is an alternative to internships that provides a wholly new type of experiential learning for students.
Q: So, throughout your experience coaching and mentoring, do you find that the most significant pain point in students managing this college to work transition, has to do more with skills like writing a resume, interviewing, pitching? Or is it more around more soft, life skills or abilities like confidence and self-awareness?
So, when we started ParagonOne, I would have told you it was the former. Because we started ParagonOne as an on-demand career coaching platform, where we have 800 industry professionals getting matched for students in 3-to-6 months virtual programs, and coaching them on interview skills, and resume preparedness, and how to speak the language so they can land a job. And all of those are still important skills. But what we realised is getting students into these real experiences faster and earlier; that was the game-changer. That’s how you build confidence. That’s how you build the knowledge, and the awareness, and that’s how you actually build your resume, right. So we can sit and coach someone on how to create a great resume all day long, or how to interview well, but if they’ve never tested out working in the industry, or they don’t have something they can put on their resume, it’s all sort of theoretical to them.
Q: In order to achieve this, to help people become more confident and become more self-aware, and build their career path, and to get this experience you require a lot of human touch, you require a lot of interaction from mentors, from coaches, so how do you achieve this in a company, a tech company like ParagonOne, where a lot of processes are automated?
We look at automation as a way to streamline the processes and tasks that would normally require a human, but don’t necessarily lead to a great student experience, right, so for example, there are certain things in regards to grading, assessing work, verifying work, organising the time when certain things happen, creating the curriculum, where we can reuse a lot of templates, and content, and software, and focus, instead, focus the human interaction on the really-high impact stuff. So, that’s being able to provide the right person to answer questions that the students have about their work. Most of our human interaction is built around not only a support system, but helping them do the work, guiding them so that when the work goes to the company, it’s gone through a test, it’s gone through some system where it is not just raw for the very first time.
Q: Yeah, I think it is very important to strike that balance, when used right automation can be a tool to enhance the human touch, not to eliminate it. So, moving on to your trajectory as an entrepreneur, you first graduated from MIT, then you went into investment banking. Why?
Just by accident. When I went to MIT, originally I wanted to work in the computer graphics and special effects industry, in film. I was a big film nerd in high school, and, you know, I was also a computer nerd, and math nerd, so I said: well, if I go to MIT I can learn technical skills to do special effects. So, think Pixar or Industrial Light & Magic. But as I got through my time there, I realised — maybe this wasn’t what I wanted to do, for various reasons — I was kind of lost. And I just sort of randomly decided: well, maybe I’ll do consulting. And I wanted to do consulting because consulting seemed like something to do when you’re ambitious, and you just don’t know with what. So, let’s kick the can out of the field, and I started to interview for consulting firms, and I remember I got some offers, but I didn’t get the offers at McKinsey or BCG, so I started randomly interviewing for investment banks. And initially, the feedback was: oh, you don’t have internship experience in finance — which I didn’t at that time. So, I was not making it past the first rounds of any of the big banks; they just didn’t take me seriously. Finally, I got an interview, and it was with Morgan Stanley, and I think I didn’t really care whether I got it or not. I was sort of: I’ve done enough of this. I was, ahh, whatever, I’m just going to show up. And I think my comfort with not trying so hard, plus my familiarity with the process, plus the fact that the people interviewing me had actually gone to MIT, and were engineers as well, and they didn’t have any internship experience in finance — they actually related to me. I don’t know, somehow, that all clicked, and I kept going through the process, and I got an offer. And I remember telling some friends who had internship experience and wanted to work in finance, and I remember them saying to me, well you obviously are going to take it right, you didn’t even want to work in banking, so you, basically, you need to take it to validate the rest of us. So I thought about it. And, you know, Morgan Stanley is a great name. I had studied and looked into doing investment banking, and it kind of scared me. It didn’t sound like something I wanted to do, the gruelling hours, etc. I was kind of interested in finance, but I was more interested in the challenge. And that was the bottom line. I decided to do banking because it kind of intimidated me a little bit, and I was curious, could I do it? Could I survive? And that personal challenge is what drove me. And I would say that is what has driven me with most of my decisions. Even being an entrepreneur — it is very personal. It is to see if I can do something: can I build that? Obviously, there’s a goal, and something that I’m passionate about, but that was the goal with banking, to prove myself.
Q: In hindsight, do you believe your decision would have been different if you had access to a tool like ParagonOne?
Totally. I mean, that was a big inspiration for why we started it. Actually, when I was in banking, I got tendinitis in my hands from typing so much. For the first year I was, you know, you’re basically working 80–100 hour weeks, you’re not exercising, you’re chained to your desk — everything is urgent all the time, everything is a fire drill. So, you are just constantly in a state of stress. I didn’t know how to say no to things, I overworked, and I got tendinitis in my hands, all the way up into my shoulders and my back. It was bad, and I couldn’t type for a year because it was painful when I would type, so I thought my career was over. So I said, okay, I guess I didn’t survive investment banking. But what I did, instead, was, one of our VPs in our group had the idea that I could sit behind the interns and coach them, teach them for them to do their jobs better. So by the end of the summer, the interns, all of them were so good at what they did because they had me teaching them, coaching them, and they were as good as the analysts that they all got offers to come into the group. So I remember that experience. And that inspired me later on. If we can harness the resources of companies to basically teach and educate students — that’s powerful right there. That kind of guidance, and direction, and education is incredibly powerful. And so that is what we are trying to do with ParagonOne. We’re trying to bridge that gap, and bring the real world, bring the industry into students lives.
Q: Throughout your journey, what has been the most challenging moment? What has been the toughest challenge that you’ve overcome?
There are so many. I mean, at the end of the day, I believe being an entrepreneur is waking up, and not wondering or hoping that there’s not going to be problems. It is just waking up, and knowing that there will be problems. Every day is about problems, constantly facing problems. Some are small, some are big. There have been times where we’ve thought we were going to run out of money, right, there have been times when we’ve been technically insolvent. There have been times where we ended up going through really rough patches, and pivoting, this direction, and that direction, so many little things under the hood. But they actually got us to where we are today, with the remote externship platform. It is hard for me to pick one, because it just becomes an amalgamation. Eventually, you just sort of wake up every day, and you just keep pushing forward, and it is only because you have to truly believe that what you are building must exist in the world, and will exist in the world, eventually. It is really the only way that you keep doing this. I wouldn’t say that I’ve become any massive success or anything. This is my second startup. The first one that I cofounded ended up having a small listing, but it is not, I haven’t got to the point where, you know, I’m set for life. And that is because I don’t do this for the money. If I was going to do something for the money I would have stayed in finance, I would have done a hundred other things by now. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. I just can’t I think, during the times where we thought: oh, is this not going to work? Are we going to have to close up shop? The thing that kept me going was the idea of having to go work somewhere, like, the idea that I’m having to go work for someone else, I was, like, you know what, I think I’m going to keep doing this. I’m going to figure this out. Although I think that deep down it wasn’t driven by that kind of fear, it was driven by the desire of doing this, and that, actually, even during the hardest times, the most brutal times, I would ask myself: would I rather be doing something else? And I came back to the answer. I would say, I’d rather be trying to build this company and struggling, that making a lot of money sitting at a corporate office, doing something that I’d be pulling my hair over. And I’m not saying people who work at these companies work on things that they’re not passionate about; there’s plenty of that. But for me, I know what drove me every morning. And that’s what we have to have. Because the knockings will come, if you let them. The punches are hard, and you have chains that you’re just pulling every day. You get to the top of the hill, and you cannot say: Look how steep that hill is,because once you get to the top of the hill, there’s just another one, there’s another mountain. So you just live it, you breathe it, you absorb it.