An Educated Guest

Speaker 1:

You’re listening to An Educated Guest, a podcast that brings together great minds in higher ed to delve deeper into the innovations and trends guiding the future of education and careers hosted by the executive Vice President and GM of Wiley University Services and Talent Development, Todd Zipper.

Todd Zipper:

Hello, I am Todd Zipper, host of An Educated Guest on today’s show I speak with Greg Shove, CEO of Section4, an EdTech startup aiming to make elite business education more accessible, relevant, and affordable to all. Prior to Section4, Greg founded five companies resulting in three exits. Two of these sold for over a hundred million dollars each, and one sold to AOL. He received his bachelor’s in economics from London’s Western University and his masters from Stanford University School of Business. The key takeaways from our discussion today, first, how Section4 brought key features of in-person learning online at scale. Second, how the company aims to disrupt the business school market through its 80/10/1 model. Third, why Section4 flips the script by vetting students on the way out, not the way in. Fourth, the benefit of live learning from today’s top business leaders. And lastly, how Section4 is providing a more affordable, accessible alternative to learners. Welcome, Greg, and thanks so much for joining me today on an educated guest.

Greg Shove:

Thanks, Todd. Glad to be here. Let’s get into it.

Todd Zipper:

All right, so I want to start with your background today. You’re the CEO of Section4, but this isn’t the first company you’ve led. So tell us about your background in business and what’s brought you to where you are today.

Greg Shove:

Background in business is six startups. I don’t like working for other people. Started in Canada, came to California and this is my fifth startup, either as a founder, CEO or as a CEO. In this case, I did not found Section4. I came in early as the CEO and we pivoted the business to an online education company before the pandemic started. So with age and delusion, if you combine them, you get lots of startups and that’s why I’ve had six startups so far, and I don’t think this will be my last either. It might be, but I love early stage companies. I love building new things and bringing them to market, primarily focused on enterprise, but also consumer and enterprise, which is the case with Section4 of course. We sell both to individuals and to companies. So I’m a Canadian, British and American and a delusional entrepreneur.

Todd Zipper:

Love it. So like you mentioned you didn’t find the company. I know that Scott Galloway, who’s now a famous podcaster investor, entrepreneur, professor, founded this back in 2019. So why don’t you tell us about how this idea for Section4 came about, what exactly it is and the purpose behind it?

Greg Shove:

Sure. Scott at the time had a lot of success creating, at his previous company, these great videos, educating people sort of about business and about digital transformation and the impact of the tech giants on existing businesses, I think the series was called Winners and Losers. And so he had a lot of success building those videos and distributing them and getting good audience feedback. He’s a professor at NYU, is a marketing professor at Stern Business School. So the kind of combination of those two things and the core team that he built, and he raised some capital with this idea to really demystify business and to explain what’s happening in the world of business today for people is where this kind of all started. Then I’ve known Scott for 25 years. I’ve known him way back when he wasn’t famous. So we’ve worked together in different ways over the years in terms of helping each other out and co-investing each other’s companies and so on.

And there was an opportunity to come and join him sort of full-time. At the time he had an office in New York and I was going to move to New York, but then the pandemic struck. But I joined him to really take what he was doing in terms of creating these great videos and putting more of an educational structure around them into what we called sprints. We had this idea of intensive online learning experiences that would take some of what is good about offline learning, in-person learning, which is accountability, doing it with others being live, and the excitement of being in a classroom. How could we bring those features, if you will, online and scale it, and not just have 50 or a hundred people in the class, but maybe hundreds or thousands? So we really set out with this idea of how could you build a Mercedes product in terms of an online learning product and deliver it at a Toyota price to make it much more accessible and affordable.

When we thought about the product, we thought about it as they said, a sprint, as being one or two weeks intensive learning with others and a combination of asynchronous learning, so videos in a video library, but complimented with Zoom and Slack sessions with the professor and with TAs. So it had that live real-time feel to it. Then starting and ending on the same date, so everybody going through together. Then really benchmarking ourselves not to online education. We felt our kind of benchmarks were more set by Apple or Peloton services or experiences like that where NPS is of 70 or 80 and completion rates of 75% really are our targets. They were initially three years ago and they still are today. So that really is how we got going. The pandemic gave us a real lift. So our consumer sales grew very quickly in the first two years in part, as you know, we were all inside, or a lot of us were inside and had time on our hands.

Todd Zipper:

Yes, I might debate a little bit that online education isn’t all created equal. So in terms of the experience, the efficacy, I think my instinct is that you’re probably referring to the MOOC or the large open online course platforms that have really low completion rate., but let’s come back to that one in a second. I want to-

Greg Shove:

That’s fair. That’s fair. And I would agree whether it’s free like MOOCs or I’d say the asynchronous video libraries like Coursera and Udemy also have low engagement rates, LinkedIn Learning and so on. But I would agree that it’s not the whole category of online learning.

Todd Zipper:

So I definitely want to get back to this, but just taking a step back, I’d love to know the origin of the name Section4. It’s a kind of unique name for an education company. We can sort of imply maybe there’s somebody taught a Section4 or something like that, but I don’t know.

Greg Shove:

I think the origin we probably need Scott for this. The origin is a combination of, I think, a business school class is typically organized into sections. And so that’s one reason. At the time when Scott started the company, I think he was thinking about it as teaching others on how to compete with Silicon Valley. At the time Silicon Valley was kind of dominated by the four major tech companies. The origins of this was how do we help others learn the techniques, strategies and playbooks of the tech giants so they can compete more effectively with the tech giants? If you will. I’d say that still inspires us in terms of the curriculum, meaning that we want to take the most relevant and applicable business strategies, playbooks, frameworks, models, and get them in people’s hands, teach them to them so they can use them for their own business, whether they be in a large company or their own startup.

Todd Zipper:

So I know you guys less than two years ago raised a nice chunk of money from blue chip investors, so this model clearly is attractive to the investor community right now. So I want to get into really what differentiates you from the market, what we think the business model is and can be in the future. And one of the things that really stood out for me and in reading about your business was this idea of the 80/10/1 model. So maybe you can for our audience kind of unpack that because I think that starts to explain the model. And you sort of alluded to it with the Mercedes and Toyota analogy, but I think this’ll make it come to life a little bit more.

Greg Shove:

Sure. Yeah. We thought about it as if you think about the ultimate career accelerant in business, it’s been the MBA, right? That degree is a stamp or a signal and particularly if it’s from a top school. If you look at leadership roles in industries, whether it be Fortune 500 or private equity or venture capital, a lot of MBAs populate the kind of senior ranks in those industries, including in government and so on. So it’s a career accelerant. And how do we provide that career accelerant to others? We thought about it as 80/10/1, meaning 80% of the value of what you might get from a business school at 10% of the price, at 1% of the friction. So let’s break that down.

We don’t mean 80% of a degree because we don’t provide a degree. But what we do mean is what we’re teaching is going to be of the same quality of a top school. Our faculty, the quality of what we’re teaching, the experience of that learning experience is going to be great. And there’s enough in our curriculum that if you took advantage of our curriculum, you’d learn 80% of what you might learn at a business school. You’re not going to leave with that badge, but you’re going to learn a lot. You can learn a lot.

10% of the price. In our case, we decided to price at $995 a year. So a subscription model which will speak to why investors are interested in this category and in us, which is the business model. So we’ve priced it at $995 a year for unlimited consumption. So you can take all the courses you want in a given year. And then 1% of friction meaning no application process. My point of view on this is we should be vetting people not on the way in, but on the way out. I think schools have obviously decided to vet primarily on the way in, create exclusivity in their brands, restrict supply and use the application process to essentially manage to a small number of actual students from applicants.

So I think that’s not the right way to think about it. I think the way to think about it is let anybody in who has the ambition and see if they’ll do the work and vet them on the way out, meaning vet their completion, vet their assignment that they actually have done the work, so to speak. And so when we certify people and provide the badge, it’s because people have completed the course. So we just fundamentally have a different point of view on it, which is this should be more accessible and affordable. We also, by the way, Todd, we scholarship 10% of every class because there are people that obviously want access to these kinds of experiences and can’t afford it. So we do as much scholarships as we can as well.

Todd Zipper:

Well, depending on what business school you’re referencing as a 10% of a thousand dollars a year, you’re probably closer to about 2 or 3% of the cost at least to top call it 30 business schools and what they are at.

Greg Shove:

No, that’s right. I think we thought about initially as a single class on Section4 used to cost $750, and a single in-person class at a MBA or business school is around $7,000. So that’s kind of how that 10% number came around. If you look at online business school classes, they’re typically priced between 3 and 10,000 for a single class from a school that either in partnership with a Coursera or edX or on their own as in terms of their online offering. We’re a thousand bucks for all classes. So I think we’ve still created a significant price advantage for our customers versus either the offline or online alternatives.

Todd Zipper:

So MBA student gets an MBA, right? A master’s of business administration, they put it on their resume, they put it on their LinkedIn profile. What does a Section4 student get that sort of signals that they’ve got these knowledge and skills that will stand out to an employer?

Greg Shove:

What they get, Todd, mostly is the next time they’re in a meeting about marketing strategy or product strategy or presenting a business case, they’re going to be able to participate more effectively, prepare a better business case and present it more persuasively, learn how to story tell more effectively. So when they’re talking at their all hands meeting, they’re going to be a better communicator. We don’t signal through credential. And over time, I believe we will, meaning I believe the badge, the Section4 badge that is on your LinkedIn profile, over time will signal your ambition, signal your willingness to self-improve, right? And your willingness to contribute, if you will.

But that takes time. People don’t know our brand like they know a university brand, but what you’re really getting is not that. What you’re getting is we’re actually teaching you how to do it. You’re getting the skill. You’re getting the ability, and you get the ability to go and use it pretty much the next day.

So I think about it differently. We think about it as over time, the brand will stand for ambitious people who are trying to advance themselves and their companies and they are improving themselves to do that, right? They’re investing in themselves, but they’re getting that over time. But what they’re really getting is we’re going to teach you stuff. The former head of product at Netflix is building his third course with us this week, and he’s teaching our students how to build their product roadmaps with a framework that they can use when they go back into their company next week to work on their product roadmaps. So I think that’s what we’re all about.

Todd Zipper:

So I’ve read that you have about 15,000 alumni over a few years, which depending on how you compare that number, these are largely paying students, which is significant and certainly would dwarf any other traditional business school out there. How do you think about this student? Who is this student? I know you talked about being both direct to consumer and direct to consumer through obviously the enterprise deals. Can you kind of talk about what this student looks like in terms of their career, their makeup, et cetera?

Greg Shove:

Historically they’ve been mid-career. So we don’t think about ourselves as competing with business schools in part because today most of our students are probably mid 30 and have been in the workforce 10 years. Some of them have MBAs, not many, because not many people in the world have MBAs. But some have been to good schools, got their MBAs and stuff like that, but they’re 10 years out of business school or 10 years out of college and they want to sharpen one or two skills. They are either moving their career into a specific function like product management or marketing, and/or they’re moving into management and getting more management responsibilities. It’s probably one of those two kind of use cases, if you will, and they want to sharpen up.

So that’s been our primary student. We’re seeing now more younger students take our classes and I think it’s just people who are ambitious and see that they can’t either afford to go to business school or don’t want to. Don’t want to take the time or don’t have access to a top 20 school. And if they don’t, they see us as an alternative as a way to add those kinds of skills, those kind of strategy or thinking skills to their own portfolio. So we’re seeing our younger student population grow. We’ll teach about 12,000 students this year. We did about 10,000 last year in that range. So it’s a lot. You’re right. We’re happy with the numbers.

Todd Zipper:

So when you think about traditional students, whether it’s undergrad or grad, they ultimately, most of them pay so much money. It’s unlikely any of them are doing real return on investment calculations for that cost. And so they just make a calculation in their mind that you got to get a degree to get a job and eventually I get a good job and it’ll all work itself out. I’ll pay back my loans. That has limiting success given the $1.5 trillion of debt. But I’ll push that issue to the side here. How are you thinking about ROI? Because even if a thousand bucks is in a lot compared to let’s say a traditional program is a lot compared to free or something along those lines, and so are you working with your learners to really understand the ROI of the investment they’re making in your product?

Greg Shove:

Yeah. First of all, I’d say you’re right. It is a lot for a consumer if they’re not getting reimbursed by their employer or using an educational benefit or being able to expense it, you’re right. It’s a lot of money. So how we think about it is applicability. So we survey our students at 90 days and then at 12 months around were they able to apply what we taught them at work. Currently, 88% of our students are reporting at 90 days that they have used what they learned in a Section4 course, which I think is fantastic and I think probably justifies the investment. It’s hard to measure the ROI of learning as you know. How do you isolate just that? When someone gets promoted or someone changes jobs, how can you isolate what contributed to that promotion or that better job? We hear it all the time anecdotally.

What we hear from students is, “Hey, I got promoted.” Or, “I was more effective in this meeting,” or, “I got that assignment.” I think about a lot of what we’re doing, Todd, is besides teaching skills and specific ways to think and ways to execute a playbook, we’re also injecting confidence in our students. And I think we forget a lot of people are working now, of course remotely or in a hybrid environment, but in a way are more isolated than ever before. And when you think about these experiences, it’s not just the learning, it’s the learning with others and the alumni community that you graduate into and access to those alumni as a thought partner in a kind of online chat on Slack or something like that.

I think it’s a lot of what we’re doing is we’re bringing you confidence and giving you some feedback and giving you some support afterwards and a network, a community, from which to draw some support from. And I think it’s really valuable to people because I think we increasingly are feeling isolated and we’re working alone often without a lot of good feedback. A lot of people working, and on their own businesses as well, who our students are both from corporate America and from smaller companies and/or startups. So I think the community is really valuable.

Todd Zipper:

So before, I want to touch on the market overall and competitor set. But before we do that, a key part of why people choose an education is who they’re going to get taught from, especially since this has a robust synchronous component to it. You’ve already alluded to the former head of product at Netflix working on his third course with you all. How do you think about that aspect of bringing in? Cause I know you formally had some relationships with universities, maybe not so much anymore. It sounds like more geared towards bringing in subject-matter experts that are actually working in the field. So can you talk about who’s actually driving the content right now?

Greg Shove:

Yeah, we think about it as curriculum first. So we design a curriculum which is inside what we call stacks. So product marketing, leadership management domains or, as I said, we call them stacks. So we design the curriculum first. We think about the high value courses in that stacker curriculum. And then we just frankly look at industry practitioners first. I think people want to learn from others who have done it. And so if you’re going to learn product management, I think you want to learn it from someone who’s run product, and either a single product or a product roadmap for a large organization and probably both. If it’s in marketing, you’re going to want to learn from the latest demand gen marketers or the latest B2B marketers and so on. We think about it as curriculum first, then faculty. Faculty come from industry.

We look at people that have been in these roles and maybe have exited into, they’ve written a book, they’re teaching themselves on another platform, they’re running their own workshops. So they’ve got experience as essentially teachers themselves, or we’re looking at people that are still in those roles. And we provide a full-on kind of turnkey instructional design solution, if you will, or team to them. We build robust courses and we partner with the talent and they don’t need to be instructional designers office and they don’t need to build courses before. We do that for them.

So we’re able to take someone who’s got a full-time job. Eric Kim is one of our instructors. He runs Good Water Capital. It’s a $4 billion fund. Eric’s a busy guy, but he teaches a course for us called Think Like an Investor. He’s able to do that because we bring that team to him and say, “Let’s create this course together based on his framework.”

We are looking for people, Todd, that have been able to distill their knowledge into a framework or playbook. We’re not teaching anecdotes. I think a lot of industry practitioners, particularly when you think about business, if you think about the guest lecturer at a business school class, it’s someone who’s telling stories about their career, the highs and lows kind of thing. We obviously don’t do that. That’s not, in our minds, robust enough. We need to be teaching a framework that can be used by the student.

And our students come from everywhere. You asked earlier about our student. Consumers and from enterprise, 60% US, 40 non US, as I said, mid-career, more in that kind of mid 30 to 50-year-old range would be our typical student. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re bringing those kinds of students in and exposing them to great practitioners who have a framework that student can take back to their company and apply it.

Todd Zipper:

So you mentioned Stacks, I think that best understands what people are ultimately getting educated in. Can you just double-click there and talk about what are the stacks that you have, what are the most popular, and what do you see growing over time? Is this going to be strictly a kind of business education school of college of business concept? Or could it potentially go beyond that into all sorts of job categories?

Greg Shove:

Yeah, we’ve got five certificates currently. So by the way, once we think about curriculum and build out the courses, we then package those into certificates. So we’ve got five certificates currently that we’re offering, and the most popular leadership and management. So the horizontal sort of broad skills. And then the next two are product and marketing, which what I would consider sort of high value domains, challenging jobs that are changing a lot and where sharpening your skills is needed I think more frequently than in other domains.

But I think frankly maybe all domains now, or all functions in the enterprise, are under this kind of rate of change. Supply chain, for example, in operations, finance and so on. So you’ll see us build out across those stacks, if you will, or job functions. Focused on business for now, absolutely. Our format works I think for almost any topic.

So our ultimate ambition is to build Section4 as a place where a lot of careers can be either started or accelerated through our experience or through our courses outside of what we consider traditional business for sure. So I see no reason why we would not add technology and engineering courses over time, as an example, design and so on, sales. Sales is a function not taught at business schools typically, but is also a function that is changing rapidly impacted by technology, new techniques and so on. And so I think that over time you could see us build out that curriculum as well. So I don’t think there’s a lot of limitations there for us except really our ambition and access to capital and so on.

Todd Zipper:

Great. So let’s switch gears to competition in the market. So how would you define your competition, right? You’ve got traditional competitors. We talked a bit about that. You’ve got alternative providers. You’ve got do it yourself. It’s a pretty wild, wild west out there right now for folks continuing education. So how are you thinking about that?

Greg Shove:

Yeah, on the consumer side, I think competition is motivation, honestly. I think lots of choices and so there’s no way to point to one or two competitors. I think you’re right. There’s just so much choice out there from great YouTube channels to individuals running their own cohort classes like Seth Goden and his Alt MBA, to free stuff on Coursera or edX or Udemy. So I think it’s really mostly related to motivation, and in our case, finding the right consumer, which is someone that is probably more discerning around quality and in that more mid-career phase, and is willing to invest.

Because you’re right, it’s a thousand bucks. It’s real money. For enterprise, and we’re selling primarily to HR and L&D leaders, I think the competition has really been offline or in-person training. If you look at L&D more broadly or more simply, it’s been in-person training primarily for forever, last 10 years, video libraries primarily, whether it be Skillshare or Pluralsight or LinkedIn Learning and so on. We’re a new category. We are the leader in what is a new category of learning, which is we call live learning, some call it cohort-based learning. But I think we’ll coalesce.

My guess is the category will around the name that we’ve chosen, which is live learning platforms. So we’re a live learning platform. It’s a new category, and it is about taking anywhere from five to a hundred employees and putting them together and moving them through this learning experience. In our case, it’s with others. So our enterprise customers, we’ll do a class for a single customer if they want to send hundreds of students through a single chorus. But mostly what’s going on is enterprises are buying access to our platform and then groups of their employees are joining a cohort, joining a class that will have hundreds of other people in the same class.

And that’s, I think, the magic of this. One of the benefits for companies is that you’re learning with others, could be your own team because your team can go through together, but you’re going to be in a cohort with 2, 3, 400, a thousand other students from around the world, other industries and so on, and getting exposed to them as well. So I think it’s one of the reasons I think that companies should invest in live learning platforms is that besides the up-skilling, it’s the access to the network for your employees. And so this idea of getting exposed to other ideas and other people.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, and you’ve hit on a couple of themes for me. I mean, you’ve obviously talked a lot about the affordability and the accessibility of this. But the third one, and I call these the iron triangle of education, is the job outcomes, and this movement over the last decade for these massive libraries of content with some version of a step through a course, and maybe you get a credential, but most of it is do it yourself. And even grading automatically and stuff like that is not necessarily leading to the outcomes that employers want or those learners.

So we’re hearing a lot more about, we call it facilitated learning, you’re calling it live learning. I think that’s very similar. Around this idea, and I think Josh Burson has sort of coined the term, the capability academies, which is really interesting taking the employer lens. They’re trying to build these capabilities of digital marketing, of product management, like you’re talking about. And you probably just can’t go to somebody and say, “Hey, watch these videos. Here’s a LinkedIn Learning subscription and good luck.” It’s probably not leading to the outcomes. It’s affordable, right? Because it’s probably pretty cheap that anybody can do it. So I’m right there with you on this one.

Greg Shove:

Yeah, Todd, the way I think about it, and if you think about it from the enterprise perspective is they’ve had versions of executive ed or hypo type programs where 50 or a hundred people are chosen and they get a high quality experience and a high cost per head. They’ve done obviously in-person training for certain parts of the organization, like sales. Everybody goes to a bad airport Hilton for a day and does sales training. Then they’ve bought, because it is affordable and the catalog is deep, they’ve bought one or two or more of these asynchronous video library platforms like LinkedIn Learning.

I just think that there hasn’t been a choice until now of something that can serve more people in the enterprise, but at a high quality experience. Because the hypo staff or the executive ed type programs are too expensive per head to roll out to hundreds of people or even thousands. You can roll out Section4 to hundreds of thousands of people. And obviously with enterprise, you get some discounts if you buy in volume. So the price per head comes down from that 995 number and becomes actually pretty affordable when you think about an organization wanting to really up-skill that middle management layer, which could be hundreds of thousands of people in a bigger org.

So I think it’s all come together. I think it was a combination of we needed the technology, we needed platforms like Slack. We needed Zoom. We needed the pandemic maybe to kickstart this and show L&D teams that you can create these experiences that are online only, but do have higher completion rates and higher engagement rates and high NPS. We’ve got courses taught that have had NPS of over 80 with hundreds of students in them. That’s a pretty special experience.

That’s a great experience. And you just don’t see that typically, right? That’s not just the professor, that’s the TAs, that’s the community, that’s the content plus everything else that’s kind of working together. I think also it’s the brevity works, the short, but intense works. People are busy. People are burned out on Zoom. People are feeling the pressures of work and this work life combo that we live now online. So we think brevity’s important here to get people through it quickly with a high value kind of learning moment by the end of it.

Todd Zipper:

I want to talk about brand for a second. I was reading a stat that something, call it a million. It’s a little bit less than that of unique secondary and post-secondary credentials in the US. This is a massive number when you think about 4,000 colleges. So of that million number is about 360,000 different traditional degrees, 9,000 MOOC certificates and microcredentials, over 500,000 badges, certificates, licenses, apprenticeships. It’s crazy how much it is. So brand is important.

Signaling, we talked a little about this before, but how are you all thinking about this? Because I’m absolutely bought into this idea of live learning, of your 80/10/1 rule here. You’ve got something that I think employers want, learners want. It’s extremely affordable. It will drive outcomes, like you said. They will be more effective in their jobs and you’ve got, it sounds like a lot of data to prove that out. But if no one hears about you, if it’s unclear, what is Section4 when Wharton has a similar type of program, maybe for two x or three x, the price? And of course these are considered to be non-academic credentials, even from Wharton. They’re non-degree bearing. How do you differentiate right now? How are you guys thinking about that problem?

Greg Shove:

Differentiation I think is different from the first part of the question, which is how do you stand out.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, they’re related, but yes.

Greg Shove:

There’s product and then there’s the noise of the marketplace. So we differentiate on product. So our point of view is to build a great company that stands at test of time. You start with this obsession with product. So every course, every student, we try to deliver the best possible experience. So it’s built brick by brick, one brick at a time kind of thing. I think about it as one student at a time. Get them through one course to have a great experience. They go back into their workforce, into their workplace, and they will tell others. So our referral rates are high as you would expect. We grow a lot organically and through inbound interest. I think the first is we differentiate on product, product and price. Make it affordable and make it great. Then we just need to be patient, Todd.

We need to know that this will take time. It will take 10 years. But there will be people in senior positions in three, four or 5, 6, 7 years who will know that Section4 was one of the reasons they’re in that position. And they will tell others and they will be our buyers or they’ll be the CFO approving the purchase from the L&D officer that wants to buy the Section4 platform for their organization. I think we need to be patient. It takes time because it is a noisy marketplace. So what I know is that this past year, last year, 10,000 students came through our learning platform and went back to work. So I think that’s a good thing. I’d like to make that number a hundred thousand as fast as I can in terms of an annual number. So that to me is the first significant milestone. Can Section4 graduate every year, a hundred thousand students? I think at that point we’re a global business school of real clout.

Todd Zipper:

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So we’re wrapping up here. When you think about the future for Section4, and you just kind of alluded to this right now with a hundred thousand students, is that sort of the marker where you feel like you’re impacting a lot of the key business leaders and companies out there? Is that how you’re thinking about success right now?

Greg Shove:

Yeah. I think about it. That’s one dimension. I think about it also at that very individual level, which is the feedback we’re getting, the stories we get, the students we talk to. Because is it impacting them? Are they really able to use it and get value from it? So those stories matter to us a lot, and we use that as kind of motivation for us to keep pushing ahead. I think it’s also got to do with will employers value it? I think you were really alluding to this. So the real win here is that an employer will say, “I want a Section4 graduate,” right? Section4 means something about their ability, about their ambition, about their ability to have an impact in the organization. They know who that kind of student is, or they know the profile of a Section4 student.

We’ve already seen it. But ultimately you’ll see us open up in some way, probably our network for employers to recruit from our alumni. That’s really, when you’re doing that or getting demand for that, and we’ve had demand for that sort of organically along the way, which is employers want to know, how do I talk to other Section4 students, right? Because my employee benefited and it says something about them and I want more like them.

So I think that maybe that is the ultimate place we want to get to, which is not just the scale of it, but also the fact that employers say, “Yeah, I want someone who’s got a Section4 certificate.” One last thing, Todd, I want to leave you with is, I think… And Josh, you had referenced Josh Burson’s work we are starting to have conversations with our enterprise customers about building their own certificates.

So using our course catalog as the clay and then molding that into their own certificate. And I think this is a really powerful idea that I think it’s time is coming, which is employers creating a certificate that says to their own internal employees, this is what we value. These are the skillsets that we want inside this organization for you to progress. Then obviously they can be exposed externally. There’s no reason why a company could create a certificate for themselves because they’re customers of ours.

But frankly, if they’re willing, we want to make that certificate available externally. So those who want to work in that company and get a job in that firm could look and say, “Well, I could take this certificate. They may not guarantee me a job there, but I now know what this company values, the kind of skillsets they value, because it’s sort of an external view of the skillset for that kind of organization.” So I think this idea of academies or company branded programs or certificates is something that we’re really pushing forward in and have created our platform in a way that companies can make their own certificate inside of our platform and then expose it.

Todd Zipper:

Yeah, it’s really interesting because these brands are so powerful, especially some of the larger companies that are out there. And for you to get a logistics certificate from Amazon or something along the UPS, that’s going to look really good in the job market. So it is actually going to help make your employees more marketable externally, not just internally. So really fascinating. When you look out into the future, do you see any major disruption to the traditional model? Is Wharton still going to be able to charge a couple hundred thousand dollars for an MBA? Or do you think this is really additive in creating kind of a whole new market on top of what already exists?

Greg Shove:

Oh no. I think we’re additive. I think that the top schools, the top business schools, I think they’re not going anywhere. They’ve got their brands, they’ve got these great sort of on-campus experiences. If you can afford an MBA, why not, from a top school? Because especially if you want to travel because it feels like every six weeks they’re going somewhere on a trip or something rather than sitting in the classroom. So no, I think the top schools are strong and will see the demand that they need to see to fill their classes.

I think if you are a second or third tier business school at a hundred thousand dollars plus price point, I think that’s a different outcome. I think those schools, I think the road ahead is much, much tougher. And I think programs like Section4 and others are viable alternatives for people that need to add these kinds of skills, especially over time and especially for people… Business school is this idea of friction. You can’t be a single mother and go and get an MBA, or it’s very hard to, you got to move to where the school is primarily, usually so to speak. And then all kinds of other, besides the cost, there’s other logistics and realities around taking that much time out and going to get it. So I think top schools stay in place. We’re additive. We’re for people that want to accelerate their careers once they’ve really entered the workforce.

Todd Zipper:

Wonderful. So is there anything that you want to reiterate or bring forth that you didn’t talk about that you want our listeners to walk away understanding before you wrap the conversation?

Greg Shove:

Yeah, I would encourage every listener to go take one live learning or cohort-based class. I don’t think we appreciate how great the experience can be unless we’ve done it. And I do find that people, when you say online learning, most people’s frame of reference is LinkedIn Learning or Udemy or kind of traditional asynchronous video library learning. This is not that, and it really can be a magical experience. It reminds me when I do it of the magic of being in school because you are with others. There is this excitement of starting on this day and ending on this day with a group of people and learning something, learning something valuable. So I want it to be on Section4, and if not, some other platform, go experience it once. You’ll see why people are giving us NPS of 70 plus.

Todd Zipper:

Oh, thanks for the call to action here. So last question. I asked this of all my guests. Part of what we love about education is that we all have learning champions. Who has been a learning champion for you, and how has that person helped you in your life?

Greg Shove:

I would say it’s been my wife. She is the lifelong learner in our family, and she’s done that to switch careers. She’s now in her fourth career and one of which was a teacher. Living with her and being inspired by her to keep sharpening my skills, she’s been my inspiration.

Todd Zipper:

Well, Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Until next time, this has been An Educated Guest.

Speaker 1:

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