Lessons in building, the state of education, and defining success with the CEO of Primer.
Ryan Delk is the co-founder and CEO of Primer, an early education platform redefining homeschooling. He's on the tech advisory board at Delta airlines and was previously COO at Omni, an equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage company, as well as growth and partnerships at Gumroad, the creator monetization platform.
Alex: [00:00:00] I'm lucky enough to have Ryan Delk on today. He's the co-founder and CEO of Primer an early education platform redefining homeschooling. He's on the tech advisory board at Delta airlines and was previously COO at Omni, an equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage company, as well as growth and partnerships at Gumroad, the creator monetization platform.
We talked lessons in building, the state of education, and defining success.
Ryan: [00:00:28] All right, let's do this thing.
Alex: [00:00:30] Sweet, well, first of all, thanks for making the time. This is awesome to finally get to chat with you.
Ryan: [00:00:35] Yeah, of course. Happy to do it.
Alex: [00:00:37] So it seems like you've had quite the journey to this point. But to kick things off, I think it'd be great to hear a bit about the road that got you to Primer, and why education is the space you sort of decided to devote yourself to this time around.
Ryan: [00:00:53] Yeah, it's a good question. So I, the like three minute version is I was homeschooled from kindergarten through eighth grade.
I didn't realize it at the time, but it was probably the best, the most impactful, like sort of action that any person ever did for me was my parents' decision to homeschool me. So my mom was a public school teacher. We moved to Florida when I was very young, she took me to kindergarten orientation and we were in very bad school district and she was like, I can't, I can't leave you here.
This is going to destroy your love of learning. And so she decided to homeschool me at the time. She thought she'd homeschool me for a year. And my dad worked multiple jobs so that she could stay home and homeschool fast forward. 16 years later, she homeschooled me and my two younger siblings all kindergarten through eighth grade went to traditional high school, college, dropped out and just San Francisco started building tech companies for the last 10 years have been doing that.
And as I was reflecting a few years ago, my wife and I started having kids and just kind of thinking about like, what do I want to spend the next few decades on? And if I wanted to pick like one problem, And that I'm uniquely suited to you know, to, to, to work on and also something that was very sort of, you know, important to me.
And so just exploring a lot different problem spaces and then sort of. Without even thinking about really starting a company in this space, I started researching like homeschooling and education, early, early childhood education, and trying to make, you know, research options for our kids. And it was just kind of stunned at the lack of infrastructure that was built for alternative learning as a sort of broad concept in the us.
And in a lot of other countries, My parents spent a lot of money on like their kid's education outside of school. Since you're hiring tutors, you're hiring online services, all these different things, and that's like suddenly exists in the U S. And so I was fascinated both by like how little infrastructure was built for homeschoolers and to people that were sort of opting out of the education system entirely.
And then also how little all was built for people who wanted to just augment or sort of, you know, on top of a public or private school experience you know, do interesting things for their kids. And then in parallel is sort of like increasingly scared of. The, the sort of you know, the broader, I think, just push back against like you know, anyone who kind of thinks differently or acts differently that's happening right now.
And so I think in some ways the school system. Or the current education system is sort of architect to like push people into a very specific mold. You know, that's like a, you know, someone who could get into college, someone who can get a job and as there's, you know, start to any high school, the success metric, they look at it as like, you know, number of kids got to college and number of kids that, you know, like graduated and,a number of kids get their GED and all these things, which are all like, you know, okay proxies. Um, but I think that there's a lot of, you know, amazing people that don't fit those, you know, don't don't look, look good in those proxies and stuff. Anyways, a long story long. I just kind of got obsessed with, with the space and, and decided this is kind of what I wanted to spend the next 10, 20, 30, hopefully, you know, hopefully it's the last thing I ever work on you know, get to spend the rest of my life, working on it.
Alex: [00:03:40] That's awesome. And it seems like it's been a long time coming, right? You know, before getting involved in the whole education space, you've spent quite a bit of time around early stage startups and building your own. So before we get into like the meat of everything I have to ask, if there's one point of practical advice you could give to someone building a startup for the first time, or getting involved in something like that, maybe something you wish you'd known, what would that be?
Ryan: [00:04:02] Yes. I'll give you one for if you're, if you're considering joining a startup. I think the most important advice that I got that I would pass along is find ways to add value before you ask for value. So something that I think Chris Sacca originally told me who was an investor and one of the first companies that I worked at and You know, his, his sort of, I think what he meant by this or what I interpreted it as is that you know, people that are working on the most ambitious projects and the best you know, the best companies are very busy and they are very focused on what they're doing.
And if you want to find a way to get on board or get a job or to go the team, one of the ways to cut through the noise is to just do something that adds a lot of value for them. And then start a conversation about joining the team. So that's one piece, I would say if you're thinking about joining the T joining a team or want to kind of figure it out finding something you can do that will add value for the founder or the team as a way to signal that you're really serious about finding a way to help and want to join the team is, is a good way to do that.
And then I think if you're building a company. It's something that I learned from Keith or boy who I think learned it from coastline. If I remember correctly, I'm probably messing up the attribution, but I believe that's how, how it came about, but it was basically the idea that the team you build as the company you build.
And so I think a lot of people you know, underestimate how important the team is for early stage companies. I think it's, I think it's true probably at all stages, but it's especially true for the first 10 or 15. Employees, and I've experienced this over and over again where you know, three or four years into a company and you can look at the critical failure of the company or the things that are not going well, all of the things that are going really well, and you can trace that back to early team members that either, you know, put really great DNA into certain processes or strategies or whatever, or failure points within their early team that were not properly mitigated either by new hires or by firing them or whatever, that then sort of you know, It creates a sense of decay within the organization, and then you have to ultimately solve those problems.
And it could actually be the reason that the company fails. So those are probably the two that I pick. So for
Alex: [00:05:50] that second one, is that like culture fit? Is it adequate experience or background? Is it a combination
Ryan: [00:05:56] of the two ultra fit? I think is like one of those, I think it's like important and it's also a total BS at the same time.
So it's hard to, I think when you say the culture fair, like everyone thinks of something differently. I would think about it in terms of. What are the critical risks for this specific business? So I think, uh, businesses is having there's three different types of risks that I sort of bucket business in one is technical risks.
So they're trying to do something that technically is very, very difficult and may not work. There's operational risk, which is, Hey, we. No, we don't think this is technically that difficult. We think the market is like ready for it, but we just need to execute. And it's sort of like an execution problem.
And then there's market risks, which is like, Hey, we're trying to build something. We actually don't know if people want yet. It's, you know, operationally, maybe it's not that complex. Technically it's not that complex, but it's some sort of new, you know, mode for communicating or education or whatever.
And we're not sure if people actually want it. And so I think the team, the early team needs to map the rest of the business. And so, yeah. The very obvious one is if you're building a company that has a lot of technical risks, you should, over-index on hiring extremely ambitious, smart, technical people.
Versus if you're building a company that has a lot of operational risks and you do nothing but hire people who are really excited about technical problems, but have no you know, no understanding or, or, or ideas for building these engines to solve operational problems, you're similarly going to struggle.
And so I would think about it in terms of mapping the risks of the business and figuring out, you know, and no businesses like perfectly in one of those three categories is always a mix. And then, you know, making sure that the team stacks up with that accordingly.
Alex: [00:07:13] That makes sense. So, all right-- let's get into Primer, let's get into education. On that topic, sort of timely remote learning and school and the age of COVID and all this stuff has really been at the forefront of a lot of discussion. Was your decision to build Primer swayed in any way by the pandemic or changed in any way?
Ryan: [00:07:32] Um, no, it's kind of a funny story. So we, my co-founder and I, we'd been working on nights and weekends for a while, but we officially went full-time on primer in like, Uh, November, I think of 2019. And then the pandemic in like March of 2020. And so it was kind of funny. We raised a seed round you know, we raised a seed round from some amazing investors in sort of like self funding it for a little while, and then raised a seed round from some amazing investors.
And then the pandemic hit. And at first it was like, Oh, well, I'm so bad at raising money. Like, you know, this is going to be like Armageddon for startups. And then it was like, okay, actually, this is going to be crazy for us. And it was actually quite challenging from a leadership perspective to lead through.
Something that was like devastating for humanity team members, losing family members, my family, losing family members and friends. And then also at being like really quote unquote, good for the business. It's like a very weird sort of leadership challenge, but very quickly it became clear. This is actually going to be, I think, a tailwind for us.
And so Yeah, it was, it was definitely not swayed in any way. You know, if anything, I think it just accelerated a lot of these trends.
Alex: [00:08:33] So I want to dig a little bit deeper into your own philosophy maybe when it comes to education. So lots and lots of students, myself included have been feeling some of the effects of learning remotely.
Um, yeah. How does in-person interaction matter when it comes to education or in your case, educating young kids. Right? Like, I mean, in a practical sense, I'm an only child I'm thinking if you're an only child that could be a bit tough. Right?
Ryan: [00:08:57] Yeah. So I think that, so I think there's like there's a few layers here.
So one is like, there's this kind of, I think common misconception of homeschoolers that they're like extremely socially awkward with jetting is, you know, it might be true sort of. At the fringes of, of any group of kids, but I don't think it's more homeschoolers than any other you know, similar group of kids.
And I think that that socialization comes in a lot of forms and the idea that the ideal socialization framework for any given child is to be randomly you know, grouped with 28 kids of their same age that live in their neighborhood or nearby. And that's like, the ideal of socialization is just silly.
Like no one would say that's true. And so I would say the idea that like public school or private school, it's like the ideal socialization structure is is, is quite silly. And I think implicit in a lot of these conversations is sort of that like, sort of taking that as, as a you know, as true, which I disagree with.
And then the second thing I would say is I think that, that it's actually far, I would argue it's far more important. The modality of the connection, like whether it's like in person or online or hybrid or whatever is actually far less important than the Then then who they're connecting with and how they're connecting in terms of what they're connecting over what those connections, you know, catalyzed for them.
And God's actually far more important. And so but we're focused on and eventually we will get into like physical physical real-world relationships and in communities. But for right now we're focused online. And I think that the key is like, how do you help people find their crew that is really excited about the same things that they're excited about?
Ideally that's as ambitious or more ambitious that them, so they can push them people that are sort of varying skill levels. So you have people that can act as sort of informal mentors, people that you can actually mentor interpretive teaching and help bring along. But most importantly, like get energized by all the same stuff you get injured by.
So you have this sort of like, It baked it in flywheel, where as you get more excited and you want to work on something and you want to stay up late working on this project and you know, you have another kid that's gonna be really excited that you did that. And then there's going to inspire them to work harder on their project.
That's the flywheel that we want to get started. And so I think absolutely like physical in person is extremely important for kids. You know, certainly that's like a, that's a foundation that foundational truth that we should all agree on. But I think that like the, the, I think that as long as they are getting that in some way whether that's at sports or at school or church or you know, music practice or band practice or whatever giving them a space to connect with other kids that shared their interests, who are also really ambitious, really creative is extremely important.
Alex: [00:11:15] Got it now, like outside the scope of maybe early education. Do you see a lot of the problems that you're trying to address with primer and early-stage education? Do you see that as maybe a by-product of some larger issues going on in education as a whole?
Ryan: [00:11:31] Yeah, I think the biggest, the biggest structural issue that I've seen education. And I should caveat this by saying I'm not an expert. People ask me this question all the time, but like, yeah. The one version of who I am is just someone who's built some tech companies who was homeschooled, who thought it was amazing.
And. You know, very passionately wants to figure out how to scale that experience. What are the kids? So I have not, you know, besides lots of reading on nights and weekends, I have not dug deep into the depths of education policy or any of these things. But my sort of like very You know, strong opinions, weakly held view would be that the, the biggest problem in the U S school system in particular is that there's a pretty large incentive mismatch between how we, how we structure incentives for teachers versus what the actual optimal structure is like.
And so what I mean by that is that there's Basically teachers have asymmetric downside if a you know, if a number of their kids, let's say like fall behind by a grade level or fail a year, that's the type of thing that you can lose your job for little, let's say 10% of your class is failing or, you know, assuming that 20% your class is like significantly behind those are the kinds of things that you, you know, it depends on the district obviously, but you could lose your job or you could sort of. Get like, like it's, it's a very negative thing for your career. Conversely, if like 10% of your class is like, way ahead, like I say, two grade levels ahead, or one grade level had, or you know, people are doing really well or whatever, like maybe you win like some award or the end of the year, it's like totally meaningless or you win like a $500 bonus or whatever.
And so what happens is that we basically rely on teachers who by and large, I think are heroes. To effectively basically like use their own time and their own resources to help the kids who want to sort of go faster and Excel and then teach to the lowest common denominator to ensure that they don't lose their jobs.
And that, you know, they're, they're trying to optimize for minimal failure instead of maximum progress. And so I think that the incentive structure there is just like, is really whack and. I think, you know, given that unlimited resources and unlimited time, I would love to run a pilot fund, a pilot with the school district where you know, we offer massive bonuses for you know, kids that, that outperform in different classes and see what that does.
And I had no idea. I mean, I could be totally wrong. But my sense is that that, that, that incentive structure, the fact that we. We basically have structured the entire system against mitigating failure and then relied on the algebra touristic nature of teachers being great people who are highly motivated by, you know, and thank God they are motivated by kids progress to like spend their own money and their own nights and weekends like helping the kids that want to move faster.
I think it's just Really, really mismatched.
Alex: [00:13:58] Definitely. So looking to the future for a second, a lot of people might argue that COVID is really acted as a catalyst for change in this sense. But what do you think education more broadly might look like in say 20 years, as someone who's really working on that right now?
Ryan: [00:14:17] I'll focus my answer on the U S because that's what I understand the best.
I think like my, my thesis is that the us will look a lot more like the rest of the world, particularly a lot of Asian countries in terms of how parents allocate spend and think about investments in their kids' education. I think that we, I think the public school system in the U S is, you know, either trending flat or negative in a lot of it always particularly relevant to the, the dollars that are going in.
And so I think that there, and that's again, like no fault of teachers. I think this is like the system is broken. And I th so I think that, you know, borrowing some like amazing turnaround, their private schools are going to keep getting more expensive. Most, most major cities are supply constraint in terms of land, you know, building new buildings, like.
So basically like private schools are going, are increasing in tuition costs at three to four times the rate of inflation over the past few decades. And so that's just going to keep that's a runaway train, just going to keep going. And so I think that there's an opportunity for this sort of, you know, homeschooling is this sort of feels a bit fringy, like hard to figure out hard to navigate thing.
I mean, there's an opportunity to take that a bit more mainstream, where instead of, you know, three, four or 5% of families doing it, you get into a situation where 10, 12, 13% of families are doing it. And then I also think that we'll see like, sort of the line between like homeschooling and traditional schooling blur, where you might have send your kids to public school or mostly send your kids to public school, but then you have this sort of stack of things that they're really excited about that they're doing outside of school.
That might be, you know, do a third parties or software or communities that are offline or or you know, any number of things. And I think that that line, hopefully we'll, we'll blur a little bit and you'll, and you'll see, you know, parents investing in a different way and their kids' futures.
Alex: [00:15:53] To get like a little more practical, and this is probably inspired a bit by my own relationship with education, but how much do you guys consider real hands-on work when it comes to education in terms of how much that matters? I guess this changes as you move through schooling, but there always seems to be a balance to sort of be struck between theory and practice, so to speak.
Ryan: [00:16:14] Yeah, I would say we, I mean, primary was a little bit different in that we aren't actually creating a full curriculum, so we're not at least right now. We're not saying, Hey, like this, you know, use primers, math, social studies, uh, you know, science curriculum, like, like. Parents use their own, whatever their current structure is for that, whether it's private school, public school, homeschool curriculum, whatever.
And then primary is, is this way to sort of like level up the experience tickets is to give them this community of kids that are also excited about what they're doing or that they're excited about the same things that your kids are interested in. And then give them structure to explore these things both in live formats, where they're sort of discussing and engaging in debating in real time, as well as like asynchronous kind of clubs did, they can engage in.
And so it's a bit different, like in terms of our like pedagogy and how we think about it. We're not dealing with. Core curriculum subjects. And so it's a bit different, but we have a huge emphasis on doing and making and sharing and those feedback loops. And so there's quite a bit of sort of the way the products are architected, the way the products are architected, the way the experience is architected are definitely, there's definitely a lot of gravity around like doing the thing and creating a space where kids can do the thing in a way that.
Is safe to fail, but also, like they're not insulated from negative feedback. Like we have kids that post and primary, my favorite things is when kids posted promos, Hey, I just worked on this. Actually want everyone to give me a bunch of constructive criticism. It's like 12 year olds that are insanely self-aware now.
And they they're, they're not scared of getting negative careers and actually seek it out because they want to get better. And to me, that is like, You know, one of the most beautiful interactions that we can see because it's it's, it's defaulting to making, to doing the thing that, you know, you might not be perfect at, but you're really excited about it.
And then it's being being willing to engage the community and feeling safe enough in a community where you can say, Hey, I actually want you to like, tear this apart and like, help me get better and give me that feedback is going to push me to the next level. And I think that in a lot of, in a lot of cases, most kids, you know, from age five through 18 get very little.
Pure constructive feedback. They get either bullied or you know, treated terribly by their classmates or by peers at school or whatever. And then most of their feedback, like constructive feedback actually comes from a teacher, which is a totally different relationship. And so that's something I'm really excited about is how do you, how do you sort of merge the, the practical building and doing with getting this like really rich peer feedback experience as a
followup to that?
In my opinion, there's a bit of a problem with emphasis on rote memorization. And I think this actually ties in really well with that, like super self-aware 12 year olds you're talking about, because I know you've spoken a bit about learning to learn so to speak, but is there any straightforward way to actually teach that.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone has solved how to teach, learning to learn. That's a, that's probably like something that, you know, maybe sometimes someone will feel like they've solved it, but I feel like that's one of those sort of like constant journeys. They're just trying to figure it out the best ways to help kids get that.
But yeah. At least in primer's case, I think we are you're. More focused on how do you, how do you do that loss by Haleigh, sit down and we're gonna teach you how to learn, to learn and more by why don't you teach yourself that by exploring these things that you're excited about. And so what we're interested in is how can we create moments of intrinsic motivation, where a kid is not doing something because someone told them to, but they're doing it because they're excited about it.
And they're excited about doing it with. A community that is also excited about that same thing. And so I think when you put kids in those environments, like if you think about what like learning to learn is it's really about saying, Hey, can you build the ladder on the way up? Like, can you figure out how to, you know, build this?
Can you figure out how to build the machine that helps you learn more things? You know, it helps you learn how to build more machines basically. And I think that's the thing that, that we're excited about is not necessarily, you know, if you told him most kids hate you, I learned how to learn. They they'd roll their eyes and say, I don't know if I can talk right.
But if you said, Hey, you're, you're clearly really excited about video games. You know, do you want to figure out how to build your own video games? And we're going to put you in an environment where a bunch of other kids are also excited about learning, how to code their own video games. And you actually might not even realize that you're hurting a bit of games because you might just feel like you're playing with this really cool block-based programming language called scratch, but by, you know, a few weeks.
All of a sudden, you're going to blink and you've built your first video game. You're going to be asking how you can start learning Java script and, you know, going beyond just visual programming. And so I think those are the kind of moments. Those are kind of, sort of the sort of cycles and the sort of environments that we want to put kids in a and primer.
And so I think hopefully if we do our jobs, the output of that is that they do learn how to learn and they learn how to pursue things that they're excited about in a way that you know, just driven towards excellence and doing great work and giving feedback. Uh, but you know, we're, we're a little over a year end, so we're, we're definitely still figuring a lot of things out.
Alex: [00:20:35] That's awesome. Okay, cool. So. Just last one to wrap up. I thought you'd have some good perspective on what it means to define success or defining success. You've been a part of Gumroad really early on, which has of course gone on to do like really, really well. And you also helped lead this company called Omni, which I was a huge fan of that ended up winding down. What do you take away from two very, very different experiences like those?
Ryan: [00:20:58] That's a good question. So I think for me, a lot of it is about the people. And so you know, Omni was not a, not a successful outcome by any means, from a business perspective.
We took on a very hard problem. You know, we, we ran after it for years and ultimately was not, the business was not successful. But, you know, we were able to through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to take care of the team and you know, most of the team you know, would look back on that and say like, Hey, I'm, you know, I feel like I was taken care of in the end.
We did a small acquisition of a team to a company called Coinbase that has gone on to, to, to grow a lot since then. And so that's worked out very well for that, those portions of the team. And so. I think for me like the, the people that we, the people that we impact as like customers the people that work for us, that's the, that's sort of the ultimate.
Thanks for me. I think you know, I get, I get Mo I get extremely motivated by the idea that you know, what, what I'm working on is not only like when I'm not only building a product that is going to be used by people and loved by people, but I'm actually building a company, right. That is going to be loved by the people that are working at it feared by competitors because hopefully we're more ambitious and tenacious and move faster than, than they could ever imagine.
And, and bill sort of becomes a magnet for really ambitious smart kind aggressive people to come to work. And so that's the and that's something that I think I get the most excited about in terms of the like, You know, success and how I think about it. And, you know, my goal with primer is is to build a company that can both, both build you know, one of the best teams that's, you know, not, not just for an education company, but for any tech company, one of the best teams that's ever been built.
And then also build an incredible business that kind of exists for, you know, many decades to come. And so you know, we've definitely been extremely intentional about the early culture and how we thought about revenue models and the economics of the business and all those things to try to give us the best chance of success.
Alex: [00:22:51] I love that mindset. Um, Ryan man, thank you so much for the time. This was awesome. I know you've got places to be, so we should probably leave it there.
Ryan: [00:22:59] Totally. Thanks so much for having me. Good luck with everything.
Alex: [00:23:01] Thank you, you too.
Ryan: [00:23:03] See ya!