Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the students of these 10K students on your platform are performing at high levels?

Josh Jones: Let me, tell you our latest number. I think it is 581 in the last semester.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very good. And they all have internships?

Josh Jones: No, I’d love to get there. No, in our pilot program, we did 25 last year. We’re going scale that at least 35 this next year. But we didn’t wanna over commit our first year because again, we had to go wrangle to 25 corporations say, yes, we’ll hire a 17-year-old as an intern. So there’s a lot of work getting the program off the ground, but props to our team. They’ve done a fantastic job.

I just got a note from one of my teammates that one of our 25 interns just met the governor of Alabama as part of her internship. So that was really cool seeing that. So yeah, it’s early stages, but excited about the growth.

Sramana Mitra: Great. So now in terms of your coming back to the business, is the primary revenue of the business still the assessment business?

Josh Jones: At this point, upskilling is a much bigger revenue source.

Sramana Mitra: Upscaling is a bigger revenue source. So the education business is bigger.

Interesting. Okay, great. How do you go to market with that upscaling business? Do the teachers find you? You find the teachers? How do you go to market on that business?

Josh Jones: We do a lot of content marketing. We’re fairly well placed from an SEO standpoint. We write thought leadership pieces. I do a lot of public speaking. I speak on artificial intelligence and how it’s changing industry. So I’ve testified before legislatures, I speak at conferences as a keynote speaker, I’m part of Tiger 21, YPO, Rotary, and Kiwani clubs. A lot of that creates a lot of awareness.

We do teacher training and attend a lot of EdTech conferences. We’ve recently built a sales team that’s scaling that business up. It’s a complex market to sell into. EdTech is not new.

Sramana Mitra: EdTech is complex. It’s not easy to sell to.

Josh Jones: No, I agree.

Sramana Mitra: You have consciously decided to become an EdTech company now, even though you were doing more of a SaaS business earlier. It sounds like your passion and your primary business is an EdTech business now.

Josh Jones: It is. One of the biggest factors is the impact of generative AI. We’ve been a beta customer of open AI for a couple of years now. We were in it early. The acceleration that we’ve seen has far exceeded our expectations. It’s that exponential curve and moving up the rise over run.

Now that you have the ability to use these natural language models to do things, there’s a lot of hype there. It’s not just a magic pill. There’s a lot of work to be done. But workforce multiplier that it’s enabled. Industry estimates that 40% or 50% of jobs are going to be impacted – Goldman Sachs is estimating trillions of dollars in GDP impact. I believe that.

Probably one of the most interesting statistics I can share is that McKinsey a couple of years ago estimated that about every ten years, you have about 10% attrition in jobs. We no longer have people delivering ice or blacksmiths or things like that. So about 10% over ten years. I think everyone generally is comfortable with that. That’s been a slow pace. We no longer have video store clerks at Blockbuster etc.

The World Economic Forum put out a report this last year that estimates skill churn over the next five years is gonna be about 23%. So if you think of going 10% over 10 years to 23% over 5 years; that is a dramatic number. It’s like going from getting a home mortgage at 3% to 12%. That’s life impact, right?

This skill inflation is real and it’s accelerating. Now more than ever, we have to rethink the way that we’ve been doing education. We have to have visibility into where this is going. We can’t forecast by looking behind us. You’ve got to look at the tools and the trends and the tech. It’s just a totally different game. We believe that there’s just a tremendous need to be in that space. That’s really where we’re navigating the ship.

Sramana Mitra: I think, not maybe not immediately, but if you look out a little bit further into the future, the level of automation is going to be very, very serious. If all the coding is going to be done by AI or a significant amount of the coding is going to be done by AI, then what do you educate people for? What does a computer science program look like? What does a data science program look like?

My instinct is, you have to teach the students to understand how to program, what is the power of algorithms, what you can achieve with data, and what you can achieve with data science; but ultimately, it is problem solving. Ultimately, the maximum monetization opportunity is going to be in building a problem solving solution.

Probably the best monetization model of that is going to be in an entrepreneurship context.

Josh Jones: If you think about like a big picture to go beyond wealth creation at an hourly rate or an hourly wage to really scale your ability to earn, you have to have capital equipment. A 100 years ago, that was a cotton gin or a tractor. You acquired this capital equipment, now you can multiply your output.

In the 1990s and 2000s, in the early part of my career, despite coming from a background with absolutely nothing, I was able to create far outsized wealth gains by creating capital equipment called software than what I would have gotten in a normal job. I was able to write that software and then resell that and multiply that.

That was even far before the subscription era. Now, what you have is an even more multiplier on your ability because you don’t have to handwrite the software, you can use generative AI to write that software. If software is a 10X, what it would have been trying to buy a tractor a 100 years ago, I believe you’re going to see a 10X on the 10X on software. So it will be huge.

That really creates a democratization – where I might’ve hired ten developers to do some project a couple of years ago, now I might hire six or four and use them to leverage generative AI to do those things. So it really is a much more rapid change and democratization effect for entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: OK, Josh, it was a fabulous interview. Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones
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