Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl Ventures, on the VatorNews innovation podcast

Owl Ventures is the largest edtech VC firm with over $2.25B in assets under management

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Ian Chiu, Managing Director at Owl Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in the world focused on the education technology market with over $2.25 billion in assets under management.

The firm has a global portfolio with companies in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its companies are serving over 591 million learners across 241 countries, ~41,000 Higher Ed institutions and 930,000 employers, and have created over 46,000 jobs.

Highlights from the conversation:

0:34 - Chiu’s background: He grew up in Houston as the son of immigrants, and went to public school; even at an early age, he recognized the importance of education, finance, and was thinking about education as a pathway. He also wrote a book, along with his brothers, on scholarships that was endorsed by Stanford. Coming out of Stanford, Chiu helped to launch a startup, he worked at a consulting firm at Bain, did a little stint in news media and banking, and spent some time at the NBA as well. He started his investing career about 20 years ago in tech, and about 15 years ago he started to see more and more happening in education services and education tech, and that's when he started to invest in in the space, because it really represented an opportunity to not only help learners, individuals, and institutions, but also had an enormous market opportunity as well.

4:51 - The team at Owl: Owl is purpose built as a team and as an organization to invest and support edtech companies. There are people at Owl that have been in the classroom, that do have Master's in education, have experience working in policy, and have also run companies, including Jessie Woolley Wilson, who used to be the CEO of DreamBox Learning, which was one of the largest math technology providers to public schools across the US. Chiu’s experience comes from the last 15 years investing i education services and technologies, meaning the operational elements of it, the impact side of it, working with schools and technologies that work with schools. So, it's not simply about only working with teachers, but educational technology as a category that touches all aspects, including students, learners, adults, enterprises, teachers, school, public school and private schools, and governments. 

9:22 - The evolution of edtech: Up until about the mid 2010s, edtech was not really a bona fide investment category and it didn't attract a ton of capital or attention. A lot of the businesses in education were education services: 20 plus years ago, if you talked about education as a sector you were talking about publishers, meaning education publishers, school book publishers, along with some of school operators and training organizations. There was a huge limitation at the time, and for many years education lagged from an infrastructure standpoint, so there was a chicken and egg problem that existed in the industry where less than 5% of public schools had access to broadband internet even in the early to mid 2000s. In the 2010s, there was a government funding initiative called E-rate that started to allow schools to come online and that really unlocked a lot of that constraint and the infrastructure so entrepreneurs could build a company that would be able to be delivered into the classroom via broadband, and also start to get opportunities where teachers could access it more seamlessly. 

21:03 - The role of parents in edtech: Success often begins with the environment that you create at home and schools are part of the equation but there are more hours being spent outside of the school. Having parental involvement is huge: engagement at the student level, engagement at the parent level, it’s a group effort to educate the next generation and you'd be hard pressed to find any educator or administrator who doesn't want parents to be on the same page in terms of learning programs, who doesn't want parents to be encouraging of their students at home. Technology is a helpful tool because it allows for teachers to communicate more regularly with parents. Going back 20 or 30 years ago, the only time parents and teachers communicated was a couple of parent teacher conferences and then when they saw a paper report card. Now, there's more personalized, detailed assessments that happen more frequently, allowing teachers to communicate with parents and have parents and teachers together help students where they need it the most. 

30:03 - The effect of COVID on education: COVID set us back pretty meaningfully because of the discontinuity that took place. Coming out of COVID there's been quite a few studies that talk about the declines: fourth graders had the largest score decline in reading since 1990 and eighth graders posted their largest decline ever in math. It's not that we were without issues in terms of math and reading, but COVID, in particular, also then added an even more challenging element to what was something that we were already working to help address. There's no silver bullet and no one-stop-shop in terms of how to address these problems, it's always very multifaceted and it involves institutions, teachers, parents, and the right curriculum. 

49:17 - Helping teachers learn new technologies: You don't just drop new things into a classroom and they magically flourish; there has to be an understanding of where to use these solutions, how to use them, and that's something that requires investment and time. School districts need to set aside time and to invest in providers that help with that education. Owl has a portfolio company called BetterLesson that educates teachers on a variety of topics, including AI. This technology is very new in the mainstream that everybody really needs to understand not only how to use it, but also how best to deploy it and, going a step further, there needs to be more and more curriculum that teaches AI and teaches technology and teaches computer science as well as foundational elements of what education is today, because that is the world that learners are entering into or are already in.