Celebrating 500 Episodes with Reed Hastings of Netflix

Alex Sarlin (0:00)

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Reed Hastings (0:24)

Right now, I would say state of the art is building apps that are the front end. That's that within two or three years, just as we three are having a conversation, there'll be an AI avatar on this podcast.

Alex Sarlin (0:43)

Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed and work, you'll find it all here at Edtech Insiders.

Ben Kornell (0:59)

Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out Edtech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

Alex Sarlin (1:23)

Welcome to a very, very special, truly special episode of Edtech Insiders. This is a milestone episode for us. This is Edtech Insiders 500th podcast episode.

And we wanted to express our enormous gratitude to the Edtech Insiders community. We've been up five years at the Edtech Insiders helm, and it has been the most amazing journey. Ben, tell us about the origin of Edtech Insiders.

Ben Kornell (1:54)

Yeah, well, first, I just want to say thank you to you, Alex. It's been awesome co-hosting this with you, whether it's Week in Edtech, whether it's been our interviews, whether it's been our newsletter, and it's been so mind-blowing to see it grow from just a few listeners, maybe our mom, and like a few friends, to now a community of hundreds of thousands of people, about 100,000 each week.

Their origin story was actually just water cooler talk. You and I met through OnDeck, which was like an online community, and I don't know, was I guest number three? Yeah. I was guest number three, and kudos to you. You had an idea around a podcast, around the storytelling, around capturing what was going on at the time, which was in the middle of COVID, and it really has since that moment, just been an incredibly turbulent time in Edtech, with so many great upsides and great stories to tell, but also some real tragic stories over our time. I don't know, as you look back over our five years, what sticks with you from the themes to the people, to the topics? What resonates with you most?

Alex Sarlin (3:10)

I mean so much. And we should mention that I was going to do only interviews. My original idea for the Edtech Insider podcast was going to be interviews with people in the space, giving sight lines so that everybody could make sense of this incredibly fast changing space. And it was your idea, and I think it was an amazing one, to do current events, to actually do it as, hey, let's follow this space. And as we both mentioned, it feels like we've had this incredible time capsule over the last five years, which are very eventful five years. I mean, obviously, the big trends probably go without saying. Is it pandemic, learning loss, changes in private schooling, the rise of online tutoring, and then the sort of quick fall of online tutoring. We've seen, obviously, AI come in, the Frontier Labs, everybody introduce AI to their pitch decks, introduce AI features into their products, something now a tech lash. But within that, so many sub-themes, we've seen incredible things happen in the special ed field. We've seen incredible things happening overseas where you have ed tech companies popping up all over the world and doing amazing work.

I'm always really inspired when we talk to entrepreneurs who are doing work because they were teachers in the past or because they are students or are currently students or were just students. We've talked to a 14-year-old founder. We've talked to college age founders. I've learned more from these interviews and from talking to you in the last five years than I think I have in all the years before that about this field. I mean, no question.

I hope we hope that everybody listening at home has that same experience of getting a lot of meaning out of these podcasts that you can use in your actual life.

Ben Kornell (4:45)

Yeah, we've approached this with a learning mindset and boy have we learned so much. But I think the main theme I'll take away is just coming back to the why we all do this work, which is really unlocking the potential of learners.