Scenes From Salt Lake

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah -- If the many technology entrepreneurs, investors and start-up owners attending the annual ASU + GSV Summit here had to name a higher education technology company they might seek to emulate, many of them might cite Blackboard. Over two decades, the learning management company has served more than 16,000 colleges and schools and has a value with nine zeroes in it. It hasn't always been adored, and its stranglehold on the market has eased, but it's a success story like few others.

But any would-be imitators hoping for easy or obvious shortcuts would have been disappointed by a session here in which Blackboard's founders told that story.

It's not that Michael Chasen and Matt Pittinsky weren't forthcoming or encouraging -- they were -- or that there aren't lessons to be learned from the company's founding and path. But as Chasen and Pittinsky tell it, Blackboard got where it did not through some "secret sauce" or even being first into the market, but because of the usual entrepreneurial mix of some good ideas, hard work, a good bit of luck.

And, importantly in an era where fast growth is valued above all, its success was not the lightning fast variety that so many Silicon Valley investors want.

"We were a 10-year overnight success story," Pittinsky said, "though it only looks that way because we're looking backwards."

Dream to Adoption

Much of the discussion was consumed by the details of Blackboard's genesis story, many of which have been told before. How Chasen and Pittinsky dreamed up the idea of developing software for the academic side of higher education while they worked together at the consulting firm KPMG out of college. How they "borrowed" computers and "stole" chairs from KPMG to furnish their first office in Washington, and tracked an initial investor to a suburban mall. ("Okay, so maybe we stalked him a little," Chasen said.)

Titillating as some of that was, much more relevant for many in the audience were the pair's insights into the role of digital learning in higher education and the role of companies in spreading it.

Pittinsky noted that amid the talk about "blitzscaling" (drawn from the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman's course at Stanford University), focusing on the speed at which technologies spread and companies grow, the "adoption curve" in higher education "has its own logic" -- code, to those who track it, for cautious if not slow. 

"Blackboard was one of the fastest and most widely adopted, with at one point 70 percent of universities using it, but that happened at year 10," Pittinsky said. "I can't imagine an adoption curve much faster than that" in higher education.

That wasn't for lack of trying by Chasen, who engaged in friendly banter with Pittinsky about their creative differences in how much to emphasize within Blackboard a culture of selling versus a culture of understanding the higher education market into which it was selling.

Pittinsky said he gave all new employees a copy of Henry Rosovsky's The University: An Owner's Manual, designed to help Blackboard's staff understand the culture of higher education. (Actually Chasen noted that "we handed it out, I don't know if anyone read it," to which the moderator, Jessie Woolley-Wilson, a former Blackboard employee who is now president of Dreambox Learning, said: "Well, clearly Michael didn't read it.") 

While Pittinsky was focused on making sure the product better served professors and administrators, Chasen always wanted more salespeople. And it was their sometimes conflicting perspectives, but their trust in each other's instincts and values, that allowed Blackboard to succeed. "Building a company is definitely a team sport," Pittinsky said. "I would gnaw off my arm to not do the things he was doing, and he was pretty much the same."

Asked whether they believed companies should give away their products so universities can test them, the two agreed: Not really. Although Blackboard let faculty members build courses in its software early on, to "try to socialize them" to the idea of using technology in their courses, ultimately customers of all types, including colleges, "value what they pay for."

"If they didn't pay for it," Pittinsky said, "they don’t commit to it."

A Conference Swells

The annual ASU + GSV conference continues to be a place for educational technology company leaders, investors and others in the space to be seen and to schmooze. The meeting's content improves each year, and the number of educators in attendance continues to grow, reflecting the reality that more and more colleges recognize that digital learning is, in one way or another, part of their future.

The conference remains, though, first and foremost, a place for matchmaking between companies at various stages of development and those who might help them grow (or in some cases start).

The meeting has grown in size in recent years, and about 3,500 attended this year, comparable to 2016. Attendees wondered whether the dynamics might change next year. That's no comment on the quality of the conference, but rather about what's happening in the ed-tech market, in which investors who have been pouring money into education-related technology companies are increasingly questioning the return they are getting. (See Pittinsky's earlier comments about the comparatively slow pace of adoption in higher education, which doesn't necessarily align with the demands of investors.)

It's not all about money; many investors are willing to support companies for a time if they see customers buying into the products. But even successful companies in the space are more openly acknowledging that proving their efficacy is a challenge in a realm that hasn't historically known how to measure what works and what doesn't.

Rick Levin, the former Yale University president who is now CEO of Coursera, said during a panel Tuesday that the company surveys its course takers six months after they complete to find out if the skills and knowledge they gained helped them advance in their careers. The results are "gratifiying," he said, but they really don't tell the ultimate story about whether the five-year-old online education provider is delivering on its promises.

"The honest truth," Levin said with refreshing candor, "is that we really want to measure this over a much longer time period."

The Secretary Speaks

A last-minute addition to the conference agenda was a big draw. Betsy DeVos, the U.S. education secretary, spoke to a ballroom filled with educators, entrepreneurs and investors Tuesday afternoon.

Her talk was similar to what she has said in public appearances elsewhere -- heavily focused on elementary and secondary education, and promising to "get the federal government out of your way so you can do your jobs."

The secretary's prepared comments said little about higher education, apart from exhorting colleges to "update their models to best serve students." (In a brief Q&A afterwards, when asked about the pending renewal of the Higher Education Act, she did question "why would we reauthorize an act that is 50 or 60 years old?... Why wouldn't we start fresh ... with a focus on what we need in this century and beyond." She did not specify what might be in such a new approach.)

DeVos also offered a nod to one of the meeting's co-hosts, Arizona State University, as one institution that has shown a commitment to try new approaches to educating students. Arizona State is undoubtedly one of the more experimental colleges and universities in the country, having moved aggressively and creatively online and building a unique partnership with Starbucks to educate its employees, among other innovations.

But the example DeVos cited in celebrating ASU -- a program that gives entrepreneurial students awards for creative approaches to solving community problems -- is a not-particularly innovative approach that dozens if not scores of colleges have been doing for a decade or more, leaving many attendees questioning her understanding of the landscape.