The 24/7 global primary school - Noam Gerstein (bina School)
Why do we need a systems upgrade to schools? How is it being a solo female founder? Why is entrepreneurship like eating dirt? Get the candid story and advice from the podcast founder in this episode.
The Guest
I think success would be to walk into a village in the middle of nowhere and that there are children there in multiple ages, in a grandma's hut or whatever, that are all recipients of the world's best education. That's the dream, right?
Noam Gerstein is the CEO of the bina School, a fully online primary transnational school for kids aged 4-12. Noam started university at 16 in Tel-Aviv. Worked for physicians for human rights. Founded, bootstrapped and exited a business at 26. Then did more than 7+ years of global K-6 research that culminated in the bina School.
The team at bina School is creating new ways to educate GenA through pioneering what they call “precision education”, which is schooling that strikes a balance between standardization and personalization. Their curriculum is accredited meaning that they adhere to global education standards. Let’s dive further into this story.
bina School profile
Segment: K-6 / primary school
Business model: B2C
Geo: Global
Year started: 2020
Funding: Pre-seed (see more details on Dealroom)
Location: Berlin, Germany
Listen to the story
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👓 Can’t listen? Read the full transcript here or see more below
Episode summary
bina School's unique approach: The school offers a global, tech-based education with small class sizes, focusing on environmental, cultural, and socio-emotional learning, primarily for non-native English speakers. Online schooling can allocate resources more efficiently, focusing more on teaching time rather than infrastructure and enabling small class sizes without geographical constraints.
A school is not built overnight: Noam highlights the complexity and dedication required to establish a school, highlighting the long-term commitment and the necessity of making careful deliberate adjustments.
Challenges as a founder: Navigating funding challenges as a solo female founder in a male-dominated investor landscape, the importance of good hiring and the pain when product issues occur.
Advice for EdTech Founders: Noam advises founders to only pursue entrepreneurship if necessary, solve real problems, work with people they enjoy, and listen closely to customers and stakeholders.
Extracts
The benefits of an online school
When kids go to a local school, they meet their local peers, and the educators that are available to them are the ones that are in their neighborhood, more or less. In bina, children can learn with children from the very north to the very south of their time zone. They are matched according to their needs, not according to their location. Also to their educators by the way. And then we see wonders like two kids from very different sides of the aisle or of the wall or of the war learning together every day and becoming best friends. And that's marvelous.
The aim is to eventually have classes running 24/7 so families can join us whenever, wherever they are and that we actually move with them if they're moving.
High quality learning science
If we consider very high quality at scale, it is absolutely impossible to do it in any other way. And this is before I even start talking about the things that we're starting to be able to do right now, which is creating unfathomable worlds for learning. There are just a lot of things you absolutely can not do in a physical space. For example, when we teach digitally, we can create assessment that is not periodic, but is on a continuum. So every time we play, we understand in a deep manner what people know, what they can do, and to which depth. And that's all the people within the system, both the students, the educators, the families. And then we can craft in real time valuable and quick paced how to help them, how to support them, and what would be the most fitting.
Teachers can focus on educating
And on average [in the school system] an educator spends 32% of their time with students and the rest of their time doing stuff. All kinds of stuff like taking gum out of their hair and marking grades and building unit plans and sitting in meetings and walking in halls and just stuff. My educators spend the vast majority of their time with students, which allows us to keep classes with seven kids or less and still have a very viable business model. That's unique and amazing.
The founder options
So either you have a strong enough network or enough financial resources to put things off the ground on your own with whatever it takes, and then start when you have something to actually sell. That's one option. Or you eat dirt for like four years. And hopefully you have the ability to do both.
Should you start a business?
Your life doesn't need entrepreneurship unless it's absolutely necessary. It's not a pleasant experience. If you have any other option, do the other option. Like maintain your friends, go party, have close family relationships, get a salary - that's real nice. Don't underestimate these things.
The world doesn't need more stuff unless they're absolutely necessary. Build things that the world absolutely needs and that you are the absolute person to build.
What’s new in the Garage?
It was fantastic to see such a big crowd of Garage fans at the EdTech Mixer event hosted by the biggest global EdTech VCs during BETT in London. What an energy and opportunity for connection 🎉
Over the last months we have been in pivot mode for the Garage to find the relevant and viable road ahead. Last fall we tested a beta service for matchmaking between professionals in EdTech from the entire ecosystem which should have been the backbone of our new offering. Although we had lots of positive feedback, the conclusion from this test was that this did not give enough direct value to participants. So, where do we go from here?
Our ambition is to become the network for all professionals in the EdTech industry across Europe with an underlying mission to support innovative startups. To get there, we need to revamp our platforms & tools which means we will pause paid memberships for now.
During this transition phase we will first rebuild our services in these 3 areas:
🙋♀️ Community directory: Open and searchable to find EdTech professionals with relevant skills and experience when you need support.
🌐 Startup resources: Open-source guidance towards the incubators, accelerators, fellowships, events and support organizations in the ecosystem.
🎙️ Founders’ stories: Our monthly founders' podcast will continue and we will use this newsletter on Substack as our main communications channel.
Thanks to everyone who have been with us so far 🙏
⏩️ The next big idea we want to test out is bringing business angels and startups seeking funding closer together. Do you have ideas around how to do this? Please reach out so we can experiment together 🧪
🙋 This newsletter is focused on our podcast guests and stories. Let us know if you have any great EdTech guest suggestions for future episodes
💬 Do you have any feedback, ideas or just kind words? Let us know right away by replying to this email or by leaving a comment.
That was all for now. Take care until next time.
Frank Albert & the EdTech Garage crew