# Ben Somers: Friends, Choice, and the Future of Learning *OpenEd Podcast Episode - Ela Richmond* --- ## Full Transcript **Ela Richmond:** Ben, welcome to the podcast. What got you interested in education to begin with? **Ben Somers:** I was truant from grade six to grade nine and dropped out of high school. I really didn't like school as a kid. When I was 11, I had this teacher frustrated that I was a foot tapper and wiggler. We had to see a psychiatrist and I went on 70 milligrams of Concerta when I weighed about a hundred pounds—a really large dose of methamphetamines. As an adult looking back, loading up a hundred-pound 11-year-old with tons of drugs seems really crazy. There has to be a better way. I felt wronged during my school process, but I liked learning and liked a bunch of my teachers. I can imagine a version that's much better. **Ela Richmond:** Did you in the moment know that it was wrong? **Ben Somers:** For sure. Do you know how much 70 milligrams of methamphetamines are? If you're 100 pounds and you take that, you have anger issues, you're crazy constipated—there's a ton of side effects. We went to an endocrinologist years later and it had some effects on my puberty. But for sure, when I was 11, I was aware that when I took this pill in the morning, my day looked way different. **Ela Richmond:** The purpose of the pill was just to keep you paying attention in school? **Ben Somers:** I had tons of great teachers. My fifth grade teacher was not good. I think it was really about the other kids. I was disruptive and probably talked a lot and was running around all the time. It was to make it easier for the teacher to deal with the classroom. What's funny is in my town that year, I think almost a quarter of all the boys in the school were on stimulants. **Ela Richmond:** And then as you got older, you started looking back on your journey. I wonder what I would have become if my education looked different. I'm entirely happy with who I am, but I wonder. **Ben Somers:** I think there are only two or three reasons you work in education if you're specifically working on building something that changes the system. Either you had a bad experience and you can imagine a version of yourself that's better than you are now, and you want to build the education that would have produced that version of yourself. Or maybe the second is that you felt you had a particularly good schooling experience and you want to bring that to more people. But if you're working on net new things, I think it means you can imagine a version of yourself that's better than you are now. And that definitely is true for me. **Ela Richmond:** Did you do any education things before Recess or was Recess your first foray? **Ben Somers:** I did some tutoring in high school and college and some debate coaching. Then three or four years ago, I went to work at a company called Synthesis School, which makes team simulation games for kids and a digital math tutor. I decided to work in education after building a company with my brother and wanted something I could work on for 40 years. I picked education as a problem and then went to go work for the smartest people I could find. I thought Josh Dahn and Crispin Frank were both really good options. Josh had built this school at SpaceX and done really cool work. Crispin had collaborated and made these great stories called the Conundrums and built tutoring companies. So I went to go work there and learn from them. **Ela Richmond:** What would you say that you learned from them there? **Ben Somers:** I wrote a 30 or 40 bullet point doc of all the things I learned and sent it to Crispin afterwards. I learned a lot of things about company building. The company grew really quick—from zero to 20 million in two years, then all the way back down to 3 million after a product pivot, then clawed its way back up to 10 million ARR. Crispin in particular is really comfortable with his back against the wall. He's just very fearless and endlessly optimistic. I saw the power of that and how many problems come up, even if your company is interesting and cool and good. Just how hard it is. I learned something about the need for total perseverance. I learned a lot about education. It was a cool place because I think it was the Mecca for two years for forward-thinking teachers, right as COVID hit. This great company launches with this cool backstory with SpaceX and it's this new way of teaching kids things. Everyone's looking for part-time income as teachers. So I think it was the Mecca for all of these great forward thinking teachers. I learned a ton from them—details about how to make a kid feel seen, how to use after-class time to pull them aside and get them to do things, how to motivate a room of people and tell a story that gets everyone excited. Josh was particularly good at making kids feel like whatever they were doing was really important. He would really get everyone to buy in. There's a whole lot of that stuff that I picked up that was really valuable. I'd say it's a thousand tiny skills. I learned a lot of stuff. It was a really good experience. **Ela Richmond:** How did it evolve your understanding of education? **Ben Somers:** There were two core insights that were very specific. The first was that the number one predictor of retention—and this is a business metric, but also a learning metric—was if the kid had a friend in their class. It wasn't who the teacher was, whether they were Illinois Teacher of the Year, or whether they won a ton of games or lost a ton of games. All these things that you'd expect didn't make that big of a difference. But really, if you had a friend in your class, you stuck around forever. If you didn't, you churned in three to six months. My anecdotal experience was that the kids performed way better when they had a friend in the class. They could take criticism from the teacher or from their peers way better when they had a friend. They would talk about it sometimes when they weren't in the class. They'd make maps in their free time because they would make it and send it to their friend. There were all these things. I was shocked by how much a good social experience led to a better learning experience and a better business model. We spent, at one point, I wanna say $10 million a year on games—probably $7 million on games out of maybe $10 million total on engineering. The games had less of an impact on retention than "friend in a class," which is close to free. So from a business perspective, we really gotta laser in on this and make this experience really good. And the learning one was true too. The second was the kids had a mandatory Recess session once a week, and then they could choose from a list of events for the rest of the week. The feeling in the mandatory class and the chosen class—I taught both—was really different. The chosen class just felt electric. Every kid wanted to be there. They didn't have to go there. The parents weren't paying for that session. They chose to be there. Their level of commitment, their level of drive, their skill in the game, what you could do in a session was so different. I then had this second thought of, "kid buy-in matters a lot more than we treat it or think about it." Other than homeschooling, I don't really know of any good model that works in kid choice as a very serious part of their curriculum design. At best they pay lip service to it. So the two core insights that led to Recess were—and you'll catch the name—you hang out with your friends a lot at recess and you get to choose what you do. That's what led to Recess: a place where you could choose what you do and you'd meet lots of cool people and you could hang out with them whenever you want. So if you were a kid in Idaho who was really into building circuits and crazy Minecraft contraptions and cool products, you could find other homeschoolers from around the country who did that kind of stuff. Or if you're someone who loved publishing books, you could make other friends who liked doing that and making art. **Ela Richmond:** That's really fascinating, especially because what is the topic that I hear kids bring up all the time today? It's Roblox. And why is it Roblox? It's because they're playing with their friends most of the time, or they're meeting people. **Ben Somers:** Yeah. And it's one of the only game platforms—on iOS, a lot of kids can't download apps without their parents. So you either have to get approval to pay for the app or just to download it. Roblox is actually just a giant app marketplace. It's hidden as if it's a game. If you open it up, it's 10,000 games and the kids get to pick which ones they want. So both a place where you hang out with your friends and a place where you get to choose what you do with total freedom. **Ela Richmond:** How have you taken all of these insights and put them into Recess? Have there been any things that surprised you? **Ben Somers:** Recess started as basically once a day, as close to the word recess as we could get. Once a day at the same time every day, a whole bunch of kids would log on and we would use something like Gather Town and they could run around and talk to each other and hang out and meet each other. I would place games down and they could convene around the games they wanted to play. Now the way the friend thing and the choice thing work really hand in hand. There's a big marketplace of classes and the classes are run by YouTubers and people who are professionals in their field. The interesting thing about Recess is your parents can't sign you up for any classes. The kids pick the classes. But there's a second trigger. The kids look through this marketplace and all the thumbnails are really exciting to them. It's not "learn circuit design and learn the basics of circuit design." It's "how to build a trap door in Minecraft," "how to write a show for your favorite TV show." They're presented in a way that kids are very excited about them, because the only way you sell the class is if the kid wants to click on it. Then the second part is the kid requests it from their parent and then their parent can approve or deny the request. So there's no such thing as a kid being in a class they don't want to be in. So every room you go into, everyone wants to be there. And there's no such thing as a parent paying for a class they don't value. The second part about the friends is when you join a class, you're going to meet everyone who wants to be there and they all like the same stuff as you. So you already are going to have a lot in common with them. After the class is over, we basically suggest friends—all the kids you just met—and you can add them as a friend. Then we give you a Discord-style chat where you can chat with them and call them and hang out with them and play games with them. Then you can see what classes your friends are in, so you can organize and easily schedule joining up with them. So those are the two main parts: kids pick the classes and parents approve them. Then we use the classes to help the kids make friends who like the same stuff as them. What's cool is things kind of trend on Recess. One kid will get really into this engineering thing or making these kinds of videos, and one of their friends will see and they'll join that class, and then one of their friends will see and they'll join that class. Now you've seen three people just join that class this week and it kind of becomes popular. **Ela Richmond:** What have you been surprised by on this journey? **Ben Somers:** We launched this jobs feature and kids were going to hire each other. We were trying to make a mini economy. So you hire each other and pay each other and get someone to make your book cover. I was surprised at how much kids like to fire each other. I didn't see that coming. So we had to take that feature away. It's a small number of kids who like to fire people, but the same people who wanted to post jobs were the kids who wanted to fire people. I think I'm continuously surprised by how a lot of people would try to label kids as being motivated or diligent or ambitious or curious, and I've been surprised at how often kids you would label as none of those things totally morph into absolutely those things in the right circumstance. When you get them going about their thing—we all know this intuitively. You ask some kid who can't memorize state capitals and they can rattle off all 372 Pokemon and which ones were part of the different leagues and memorize them perfectly and all their moves. It's like, this doesn't make sense. You can't remember 50 things that are pretty easy, but you can remember 372 complicated things. Every time you either help it happen or see it and can do something with it, it's just always surprising. Something about that feels slept on. **Ela Richmond:** What do you think that means? So there's a lot of criticism around homeschool approaches, more unschool approaches, right? Your kid do a lot of what they like. But there's a lot of criticism around an unschooling approach, because it's like, okay, but in life, there are things that you have to do, right? For example, you might not want to memorize the 50 states, but at some point there are some things that you have to do. I'm curious to hear your take on the balance. **Ben Somers:** I have a few thoughts. The first is things have a reason. I think it's useful if you can attempt to figure out what the reason that you do things are. I'm particularly bad at doing things I don't want to do or that I don't think matter. I do think there are things you have to do, but I'm way more willing to pay my taxes when I think about the purpose of taxes and the purpose of a country and what it means to be a citizen. When I start to think about them, even though I don't like doing the paperwork, I think this is where good entrepreneurs come from. You're doing your taxes and you're like, "this is total nonsense. Why do I have to do it this way?" And someone is like, "well, maybe you don't have to, maybe we could make something that would make it simpler to do this." I do think a small amount of discipline training is a useful thing to learn. I think you can train discipline in a bunch of different areas. Sometimes I think there's something to learn about when you can rely on an expert authority and when you can't. When you can rely on an expert authority, you don't always have to ask why if you really trust them. We do a bunch of full school for kids or have a handful of kids that basically is just a full school. For sure they're doing rigorous math practice every day, even if they don't want to. They're occasionally doing reading comprehension tests. So as radical as I am, I still think there's room for that stuff. Then my second answer is kind of the Montessori idea. I actually don't really think kids should play Pokemon. I think it's a pretty bad game from a learning design standpoint. There are other games that are similarly fun and exciting for a kid that have you do a lot more problem solving and logic problems or other types of problems and have more transferable skills. I think this is where Montessori was really smart. She really wanted to give the kid a lot of freedom and have the kid learn independence and learn self-motivation and how to focus themselves. So she would let the kids choose whatever they wanted within a curated environment. You couldn't bring your toys from home in. But anything she had in her space, you could take out and play with. There were these materials that she had custom designed that would help scaffold the kids' knowledge and build upon each other. When they moved to the next one, there were new things for them to learn. When given that curated environment, the kid earns a lot more freedom. I think this is similar to if you grew up in a nice town that's super safe, where your parents spend a lot of time learning, working, doing interesting things, they have good value systems. The kid can have a ton of freedom from the time they're eight years old. I think if you grew up in other environments where there are tons of bad influences around and lots of negativity and potentially even violence, you shouldn't get a lot of freedom as a kid. So the better you can make the environments—and this is where I get super obsessed—is the digital environment. I think there's this idea that screens are bad. Almost every parent I know with a kid under 10 is terrified of screens. They have a lot of anxiety about them. **Ela Richmond:** So speak to that a little bit, because that was one of my questions. I love this idea of curating the environment and then having kids earn a higher level of freedom. But how do you determine when is the right point to expose them to things that are highly addictive? Because that's the issue with technology. It's not that technology is bad. It's a tool, right? But then if you give your kid access to a tool that has a lot of potential—they could use YouTube for tutorials. They could also use YouTube for a host of other things that you don't want them doing. So from your perspective, where does technology fit in? **Ben Somers:** Totally. If you are a crazy involved parent who spends a lot of time with your kid and is nearby them with the screens all the time, and you use your screens in a really great way so you don't model behavior of watching TikTok on the couch for 45 minutes, but you do model pulling them over and showing them how to build something in CAD or that you wrote a short story or that you did these things, and you're going to talk to them about the pitfalls of where tech can get dangerous—I think you can give them a ton of freedom really young. If you are the 99.8% of parents who have a lot of other stuff going on and you are not going to dedicate probably what is a full-time job to curating their screen time, then I agree with them that I don't really know when. Three doesn't seem like a good time. Seven doesn't seem like a good time. Twelve doesn't seem like a great time. Fifteen doesn't seem like a great time. And then 18, you've gotta stop doing stuff for them anymore. If you're not gonna be—you can't rely on the tech to raise your kids correctly or to teach the kids how to use them safely. They will not do that. That really has to be you. Or you work on the thing I'm working on, which I hope will have this effect. For the YouTube example that you're giving, there's a segue into this thing I'm building now. The super long story short is you download an app on your iPad and it turns your iPad from bad to great. It goes from something you really are nervous about giving your kid to something you are absolutely hyped to give your kid. They're coming to you at the end of the day and teaching you all these things they learned and you're excited about it and it's a very different way of kids interacting with screens. We do that by relying a lot on AI for sure. Using one of the things that AI is really good at is kind of mimicking text, parroting something or translating it. If you want to translate a document, it's really good at that. For us, if we can get a good description of a parent's values, their value system—whether that be that they're really into faith and they want faith to be a big part of their kid's life, or they really want their kid to develop strong technical skills, or they want them to have a strong moral backbone in this area or whatever—if we can get a good picture of what their value system is, I actually think we can have AI kind of help the kid discover the internet within the confines of their parents' values. We're gonna basically try and automate that and then give you as a parent samples and experiences that make you feel connected to your kid's screen time so you understand what they're doing on it so it's not a mystery to you. Then you can just tell if this thing is working and you trust it to help you parent your kid. It's kind of like a digital companion for you on the iPad that makes the iPad good. **Ela Richmond:** That's really fascinating. Yeah, that's really fascinating and it aligns with—so we recently compiled all of the ideas that Matt Bowman, who's the founder of OpenEd, had kind of put together. And it's basically education should be mix and match. Mix and match aligned with your values and your priorities as a family and a child's individual personality, their interests, their strengths and weaknesses. If for you as a parent—this is what always scared me. I never thought I'd be a good homeschool mom because I always thought homeschooling was "I'm gonna sit in front of a whiteboard and I'm going to personally be the one to teach you every single subject forever." **Ben Somers:** Yeah. Totally. **Ela Richmond:** And that never excited me. I'm not a teacher. I don't think I could explain it well. I think I'd get frustrated. Really expanding my idea to, okay, I'm not necessarily having to open myself up to being the teacher in everything. Rather, I'm becoming an education designer. It's like, what could my child's education become? And I'm designing the education that aligns with our values, that aligns with them and that becomes something that can help them to become who they could possibly be. You get into education thinking, oh, if I had these different experiences, who could I possibly be? And as a parent, you now get to look down at your kid and you're like, okay, who could you possibly be? Let's figure it out. And that is infinitely more exciting to me. I think examples like what you were talking about where these things get to be aids to you, right? You get to ask questions and figure it out and you're not alone on this process. It's not like, okay, find one curriculum and let that be it. It's like, okay, I'm gonna pick the very best thing for math for this week. And then maybe next week it'll change and maybe—it is this much more dynamic process, which is kind of scary for a lot of people, but it's to me a lot more exciting. **Ben Somers:** I think you're gonna remove the fear too. I think the removing the fear—there's a product that's missing that would remove the fear, which is—in school they have these things called learning management systems and they're really built for the administrator, not for the kid. So they're built to keep track of a whole class or a whole grade, a whole grade year, and to notice trends. Then there's a little bit there to kind of make sure the kid didn't miss assignments or track attendance or maybe notice that they've fallen behind in something. I think you can—there are examples in a handful of tech tools now that are really good. There's this one called Math Academy. I don't know if you guys have that in your marketplace, but you definitely should. School treats all knowledge like it goes in a line. So it's really scary as a homeschool parent because if you don't want to go in that line, then you are no longer on the same track as school and you can't compare yourself to the school benchmarks anymore. That's really scary because it's like, if we deviate from this line, we're kind of flying blind. I think in reality, knowledge is not ordered in a straight line. It's ordered in a big complex graph of ideas that are connected to each other in different ways. There are prerequisites and post-requisites, but it's much messier. There are many different ways to get to the same idea. Some ideas rely on a bunch of ideas, others you can skip right over. What I think is missing is a really good tool that kind of maps the kid's knowledge in a more open-ended and less linear way and is backed and connected to standardized test scores. I think a lot of parents and homeschoolers don't like them. But I think you can actually build a system that allows for rabbit holes and offshoots and tangents and a totally different way of going about it and still have it feel really clear about all the knowledge that you're supposed to acquire in school and what your kid has acquired thus far and what they're not going to acquire and what they will if you get on this path. If you're missing this knowledge, here's a really clear and easy way to go get it if you do want to kind of go back into the physical school. So I think this product is broadly missing. This is part of the thing that we're making for the browser. Part of what we think is making the right environment for the kid to exist on the screen is for it to have a good experience with their computer. With this tool, it should build a lot of confidence and make it really clear for the parent about how they're using their computer, how it's affecting their learning and where they can go. I think computers are uniquely good at kind of measuring and mapping this kind of stuff compared to even if you had a human sitting next to the kid 24/7. **Ela Richmond:** Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting because this was the very first thing that—I think everybody that saw that first Khan Academy video of Sal Khan sitting with his son, right? On the iPad. That was the very first aha moment that everybody had of like, wow, what could possibly be the future of education? And I think that there's something so important there because there is this shift happening where in the past education was this thing that you entirely outsourced. **Ben Somers:** Yeah, way past there was something you did all yourself and then you outsourced it all. **Ela Richmond:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we've been in this kind of movement of outsourcing education is the way to go. But it's not working for a lot of families. A lot of families are not aligning with the curriculums that they're choosing or more like in your case, some families are seeing their children being mistreated by the system. It's not set up to treat their kid properly. So they're creating this new paradigm where I think parents are becoming education designers. My hope at least is that this opens up a new conversation about kind of what you were saying where parents need different information if they're education designers, right? They need information about what do my kids want? What do my kids like? Where are my kids struggling? They need different kinds of information to fill those gaps. They also need to be connected with the solutions to those things. So if they are this in-between, this person that is diagnosing and also trying to fix—something that I love to bring back is this phrase I heard—they were like, the person most invested in making your child successful is the parent, period. Because they're the one that has to live with them, they're the one that has to experience them all day long, they're the ones that later in life, whenever they are successful, get to look back and be like, all right, we're good, right? They're the closest to wanting this kid to succeed. And so empowering them to be able to make these decisions is really, really fascinating. **Ben Somers:** Yeah. Yeah. While you were talking, I was thinking of some analogies or metaphors. Yeah, the idea that you design your kid's education, not necessarily that you facilitate every part of it. It feels like a big shift. Even if you go—you're on a spectrum from "I dig all my soil and mix it with the cows that I have on my site and make my own manure and find all the seeds from things that are near me and plant them all and I don't buy anything from anybody and then I get the food and then I make"—there's this video where one guy tries to make a chicken sandwich from scratch, but truly from scratch, and it takes him six months and it's a terrible sandwich and he was really bummed that it wasn't a good sandwich. On the other end of the spectrum is not DoorDash. It's someone chooses every single meal for you and sends it to you and you have no choice in the matter about even what meal you have. Most people actually want to definitely pick their meals and sometimes cook and do some other things with them. But if they had to do all that stuff on their own, they'd be like, please just someone feed me. But when you can make it really easy, they actually want to be involved and they want to do this stuff. So I think there's something similar. Maybe not the perfect metaphor, but the fact that it's way easier to homeschool now and there are lots of good software materials and good online classes and tutors available, I think are a huge contributor to why homeschooling is getting way more popular. **Ela Richmond:** Yeah, I would agree. I would definitely agree. I think it's easier to homeschool now than ever. A lot of the stigma is falling away as to what a homeschooler is, even within the homeschool community. And I know that some people are very particular, like, this is homeschooling, this is not. But I think there's this— **Ben Somers:** Where I am now in San Francisco—it's now high status to homeschool. Like it is the opposite. If you hear someone's a homeschooler from somewhere else, I don't know if it engenders the same thing, but if someone in San Francisco hears another person in San Francisco is homeschooling, they assume that means those parents are really smart. They're doing something really good, different. The stigma is for sure falling away. **Ela Richmond:** That is awesome. Interesting. Isn't that fascinating that the privileged thing to do now is to be able to teach your own kids and take them out and choose how they learn and imbue your culture? **Ben Somers:** I think it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense because it means two things. It means one, you're dissatisfied with the quality of the education. Here, it means that you're dissatisfied with the quality of education, which means you've got high standards. And two, it means you've organized your life in such a way that you can solve childcare and good instruction. I think a lot of people just assume they're going to spend a lot of time on it, that you have figured out how to carve out enough time to be able to do a good job with that and be able to figure out childcare in an expensive city. So it's almost like—yeah, it means that you've got really high standards and you have a lot of control over what your lifestyle looks like. **Ela Richmond:** Interesting. That leads me to my final rapid fire questions. My first question for you is, what do you see, ideal world, the future of education looking like? **Ben Somers:** Flexible campuses with lots of great resources and amenities. So pottery workshops and basketball courts and sports fields and all that kind of stuff. And they're flexible in that you can go at different times. You can come late, you can leave early. Your family can go on vacation for a week when you want to go on vacation. Your parent can come hang out with you for an hour in the middle of the day and get lunch with you if they've got the hour free. In nice places where the kids can have lots of physical freedom and they get to know the same people from the time they're five to 18, so they can have long-standing relationships. Plus, an extremely rigorous interactive dynamic learning experience. I'm really into this guy named Seymour Papert who has this concept of microworlds, which is how kids should learn things. They are immersed in a microworld. So he talks about language learning and how much better language learning is when you're immersed in it. And he's like, I can imagine this for things that aren't just learning foreign languages. I can imagine versions of it that are good for math, versions of it that are—Ms. Frizzle's Magic School Bus, if you ever watched that as a kid. You know, get transported into the inside of a vein. That's how you start learning biology because you're trying to get out and you've got all these problems that you encounter. The white blood cells come to attack you. That's how you learn about the immune system. I think that is the right model. So one half is this wonderful physical place with great culture, great resources, tons of cool people, flexibility for the family and for the kid. And combined with spectacular interactive dynamic experiences that respond to the individual kid and make their learning experience really good and fun and interesting and visceral. So yeah, what it looks like is that campus plus a few hours a day working really hard on a screen. **Ela Richmond:** Very cool. Second question, what are some of the best—give me the top two education books that you'd recommend everybody read? **Ben Somers:** I'm gonna give such lame answers. One is the dialogues—any of the conversations between Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, any of that kind of stuff. That's too hard. I only get two. Then Seymour Papert's *The Children's Machine*. **Ela Richmond:** That's a good one. I haven't read that one yet, actually. I always, I pride myself. I want to have a stellar library one day and I don't have that one yet. **Ben Somers:** I'm obsessed with that guy. If you want to try and figure out what I'm attempting to build, you can basically just read his books and more or less—even the campus I described is somewhat similar to the way he envisioned. He talks about Samba schools and these different places. I really think he really had it mostly down. Just the things he was trying to do were technically infeasible at the time. **Ela Richmond:** Interesting. There's—I gotta give a shout out as you're talking about this. The best way that I've currently seen this done is in Kansas, they have this thing called a Learning Lab. Have you heard of it? **Ben Somers:** I've heard of Learning Labs, but I don't know about the one in Kansas. **Ela Richmond:** So this is a really cool model and it was built by—there are a couple of really strong donors in Wichita—but what it is is basically a kid coworking space. There are seven different school models inside of it. So it's very similar to this. It is as close to this as you get and they have a ton of amazing resources. So they have a podcast studio, they have a video studio, they have what they call a mess lab, which is a decked out science lab. They have basically a whole print shop. They have basically any sort of resource that you would want as a kid and as a parent. And the way that their facility works is they have rooms that people can rent. So there are microschools that rent them. There are different homeschool co-ops that rent them, and they also have a subscription model. So families can purchase a month of subscription, and then they can just go in whenever. And that is a really great idea. It is—I think we're not there yet. I look at it, and it's working. **Ben Somers:** Wow. Get a desk or something. Wow. Yeah. Is it working? **Ela Richmond:** What's interesting is the people that have the hardest time buying into it are homeschoolers. So people that are open to microschools—yeah, people that are open to microschools, people that want an alternative type of education—they're down. But if they don't explain it as alternative education, if they explain what they're doing as homeschooling, usually that's not the crowd that they hang out with. It's a really, really cool space. I'd recommend going to check it out if you ever have a chance. **Ben Somers:** I will go. I like flying to go look at schools and hang out with them and see what they do right and do wrong. So I actually probably will reach out to them and see what's up. **Ela Richmond:** Yeah, I can introduce you. They're great. But that is—I went there and I was like, I love this place. I can't believe there are not more of them. But I think it will take a cultural movement shift in the definition of what is education? What is homeschooling? How are we doing these things for it to work. **Ben Somers:** True for all—sometimes I'll talk to other people who are working on education and sometimes it'll get competitive between different people or I'll hear other people get fed up with another company. My perspective is none of us are fighting against each other really. We're really attempting to fight the status quo. The amount of dollars in education, the amount of room for expansion of new ideas is ginormous. Yeah, we should figure out as a community, an ed tech, as people who are working on new things, how to help each other make that true. Because if there's anything we do to crack the—put cracks in the system, it'll have a much bigger impact for all of us, even as businesses, than it would be to compete for the relatively small alternative or homeschool market. **Ela Richmond:** And to be quite honest— **Ben Somers:** But yeah, there's going to be big cultural changes. **Ela Richmond:** And to be honest, the thing that I love about OpenEd is it was started with the mindset, we celebrate when a student leaves because they're going on to find something better. And we are creating, hopefully, this robust ecosystem of educational options because if we actually believe that kids need something different—no child is standard, they're going to need different things, right? So to be that prideful to say, yes, my company is going to solve every single homeschool need—you just can't do it. And the more that people see this space as something that they can pick and choose from, the more you have to be okay with that. They're going to choose the best thing for them and that's good. **Ben Somers:** Yeah. And I think it's extremely good for the overall system. When people get locked into contracts or experiences or products for too long—right now, when you're in school, you're kind of stuck there for a long time and you don't really leave the school except if it goes absolutely terribly. And the school makes unilateral decisions. So you just don't get a lot of evolution. There's not a lot of iteration. The good products don't float to the top. They don't become popular. It's very hard to break into the model with new things. If you can move into a pick-a-mix world or a mix-and-match world, I think the products will get a lot better just by nature of the fact that people are making more choices. **Ela Richmond:** Yeah, very interesting. Last question. When parents haven't found out yet what clicks for their kids, what do you recommend? **Ben Somers:** I think about how to answer this one. Find out what video games they play. That's the most actionable piece of advice I can come up with. Your kid could play lots of different video games and they choose to play a small number of them. If they read a lot, what books they read. Video games, it tends to be easier for them to choose because the games are really made to be available to kids and easy to find and stuff like that. And hidden in their video game choices are a bunch of preferences about what kinds of problems they like to solve and what kinds of topics they like to think about. So don't look at them as trivial, look at them as signal. So go hang out with your kids and play video games for an hour. And I think you'll come back thinking they're very passionate. **Ela Richmond:** Very interesting. That was a perfect note to end it on. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was quite interesting. **Ben Somers:** This is really fun. You're great at this. **Ela Richmond:** Thanks. --- *End of Transcript* -