Siya Raj Purohit: OpenAI, ChatGPT, Engineering in Education, Investing in EdTech

Hayley Spira-Bauer: We have Siya Raj Purohit, the education go to market leader at OpenAI, and general partner at Pathway Ventures, but also just the brilliant forward, thinking mind who wrote Engineering America Siya welcome to the Podcast. Siya: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited. I am so excited to meet you. I was so honored when we had a little bit of an introduction via our friends at New York EdTech Week. Your work really stands alone in this space, both as a thought leader and as a thinker and as a speaker and all the other pieces that go with it. I can't wait to interview today. Thank you so much for joining me. Siya@openai.com: Thanks, so much. So I'm going to dive in with our 1st question, which is, how did you come to be the personal and professional version of yourself, Siya?

Siya Raj Purohit: That's a great question. No matter where I start telling my life story, it's clear that I was destined to work in education today I'll just kind of talk about a couple of those childhood experiences that steered me towards becoming like this towards building a career, helping people learn and achieve their potential. So my family and I immigrated to the United States. When I was 6, I was put into ESL, and I was spent recess sitting in the hallway with my ESL tutor sounding out words to improve my reading. When I think back to that time and everything that's happened since then, I'm so grateful for the US Public education system and my ESL teachers. It's amazing to think that 11 years later I'd become an author and win awards for writing. Another formative experience was when I was 14, I volunteered to teach basic computer skills in a village in India, and within a few weeks of learning to browse the Internet. These children in the village classroom went from imagining their future in the village to dreaming of becoming scuba divers artists and astronauts. Access to the Internet had awakened their dreams and opened up their world. So all of this came together. When I was 18 in college, I decided to study computer engineering to help bridge the digital divide and bring technology to the masses. But I struggled with a 1-size-fits-all education model of engineering school. I felt our classes were not practical enough, and a lot of my friends were dropping out of the engineering programs to get advice. I cold-emailed 5 national figures, including a Nobel laureate and a Supreme Court attorney and we had these fascinating conversations about how engineering was the surest way to break into new socioeconomic class. But it wasn't taught in a way that's accessible to everyone.I turned my research into a book about America's job skills gap and Engineering America came out right when I was like 18-19 to just kind of start sharing with other young people the value of engineering education while calling on educators to change their approach of teaching these skills. So it's been a decade since college. And I've been focused on solving that problem and making education accessible to everyone. I've worked at high growth startups, venture capital firms, Amazon education. And now at OpenAI, I'm all focused on helping people learn and earn a better living.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Yeah, I appreciate your through line throughout your story, which is equitable access to incredible opportunities and engineering and teaching engineering to students. Thank you so much for your candor and sharing your background and your story and your passion, I have a question for you. So in 2021, the American Society for Engineering Education listed the average graduation rate for engineering schools at about 55%. How do you see since your time writing the book. Engineering America. How do you see that number as positively impacted by some of your thoughts and your work? Or do you think that we still have some ways to go in ensuring that the education is more practical and ex practical and accessible for all.

Siya Raj Purohit: I think they've made tremendous impact in just helping students understand that not all college majors are created equal and to prioritize like technical skills. And you can see that in the number of enrollments. So there's disproportionately high number of students enrolling in the computer science and other related majors, which I think has been huge progress for us as a country, I think the area we're still struggling with is that not all university curriculum is still practical, still leads to industry, outcomes or makes it in a way that is accessible for all students. When I talk about accessibility, I mean that it's designed for very much. Still, a 1 size fits all student. And we need to figure out where to meet students where they're at. And I think online programs. And the online boot camps do a really good like job at that specific problem by making like learning accessible, linked to the topics that students struggle with being able to help navigate student journey. I think the companies are doing better at. And I'm excited that they're getting more into university curriculum. So I'm more optimistic about the future of this just because we know that technology and edtech solutions exist to help solve that problem.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I think your naming here. Some of the trends are absolutely spot on. From my own research I can see that you have underrepresented groups being enroll, enrolling more frequently in the past 10 years. In in engineering programs, I I saw a couple of quotes that had large percentage increases 5% in just a couple of years time. Yeah, I appreciate the forward looking lens that you're applying here and calling out where the opportunity still lies. Let's go back to the book for a second because you wrote this book while still in school yourself. So you had very fresh eyes. What was the reaction of your peers to your publishing Engineering America. Was it what you expected? Did it differ, and how so.

Siya Raj Purohit: Yes, so I was 18 writing for other 18 year olds. And now, when I look back at the book, I see, like the CIA 18 language so different. But at that time I started speaking about this topic. 1st to classmates. So where I started was I was meeting. The famous people I'd mentioned, who are sharing these insights about America's job skills gap before it had become mainstream conversation. And I started sharing those notes with my classmates to be like this is why we should consider staying in this program instead of switching to a different major that may have fewer job outcomes at the end of it. And so started sharing. And it became popular enough that I'm like, okay, maybe more people can resonate with this. If it became a book. And then, after the book came out, I started speaking about it at different education conferences. And that's when I had met the teams that were coming out of Stanford at Udacity and Coursera, and they were trying to solve the same problem. So I think it was just a really good time like 2012 was the year of the MOOCs, a lot of momentum around that space on making education accessible. And like, I think my personal win, is that a lot of my friends, like a whole handful, or like about a dozen of them, actually stayed in the program and graduated with me because of all this work that was happening. So I feel really good about that.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: That is so exciting, and you could see very tangential, like something you can carry in your hand and impact to your efforts. It's interesting when you speak about the culture surrounding engineering. At the time that you published, I don't think I realized all the different confluence of events. You like the environment in which you published in. When you look at the future of work evolving, what skills do you believe will be most critical in the landscape ahead of us?

Siya Raj Purohit: So over the years I've championed the importance of technical skills, especially through my work at Udacity and springboard, because they empower people to build those solutions and like open up new opportunities for technology. But I think what's really interesting is that my opinion on this is changing slightly, because with innovations like ChatGPT. There's a new frontier emerging. The future of work isn't just about coding. It's about storytelling, strategic thinking and understanding the human impact of technology. I love the idea thatthe hottest new programming language is English.I saw that I loved it. So I think that in a world of AI the ability to communicate clearly and work across disciplines will be key. So I believe that the leaders of tomorrow will be those who can seamlessly blend that technical know-how, which I still think is important to get, and a deep sense of humanity. So like the people who will be like the storytellers, the innovators, and the ones who bring us together and drive us forward. So technology can serve people and not the other way around.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I actually had this fear, and not a fear that you would judge me for it. But I've been prepping with ChatGPT before all of my interviews since it was released to the public. And it has really leveled up my background research. It has leveled up my ability to find out nuanced information about my guests and even the landscape at large. I can ask better questions, give better prompts, get myself really prepared in a way that I couldn't, prior and I was wondering. And Siya, the research I'm doing before this. And how will she feel about that?

Siya Raj Purohit: I think ChatGPT is a great thought, partner, and it meets you where you're at with the goals that you have, which I think is really valuable for any kind of like work that we do.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I totally agree. It has made me wildly more effective at doing tasks which typically have required a ton of time. My efficiency levels significantly improved, both at doing my podcast but also my general work. And when I talk to teachers about this, when I talk to the tools that are available them today available to them today that weren't available to them 2 years ago, I get a sense that the shift you're speaking about has already significantly impacted the classrooms that K-12 students sit in every day.

Siya Raj Purohit: It has. And then I feel like educators can just kind of continue using this for different types of back and forth exercises just to make themselves more productive, and then allow them to also spend more time in the classroom with with the students, which is, I think, the most impactful work of being a teacher.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: If we could backward think a little bit. You know, Engineering America specifically wrote, written about the set, the space beyond K, 12. So we think back to a little bit to K-12, what skills are necessary? Or do you wish we're taught in K-12. Or that may be taught. Or maybe you've seen taught, or you know, about being taught, that might elicit more career interest in engineering.

Siya Raj Purohit: And these skills specifically for K through 12 students, right?

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Yeah, I'm curious about the little ones. How do we get more little ones like, I wanna, I want my kids to be engineered. That's a great profession. What do I need to do, or what are their teachers need to do to to have them be prepared for that college of study?

Siya Raj Purohit: So I mean, there are 2 pieces to this. One is the actual tools and the other ways the thinking about it. I think that there are like phenomenal tools out there that have gamified education, that have brought like technology into classrooms. I think all of that is really great, but I think for educators, it's more so about thinking about the different types of like, almost life prompts that students will get and how to help them think and articulate in the way that will lead them to becoming like to be able to gain those skills in the future. Which is, how do we get like 1st Level thinking down for students. How do we get them to ask, like the right types of questions, how to be comprehensive in their thought process. And like, I think that piece and that articulation that we're talking about is the 1st step. And if we can get that right, then I think the strategic pieces like once those are in place. Then you can add the technologies on top of that, because the technologies are going to change so much that there's no way that we can actually prepare. Like, I mean starting to teach python early. And those kind of skills may not actually be that valuable. By the time the students get to college and beyond just given again, how technology is changing. So their ability to have like 1st level thinking is like super important.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: It's such a good point. I talk about all the time how the careers our students today and K-12 are going to have may not even exist, yet.

Siya Raj Purohit: Exactly.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: He's so excited.

Siya Raj Purohit: Exciting. It's a little nerve wracking when you're trying to be an educator. But I think there's just so much potential as long as the students can articulate clearly and think strategically.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Absolutely. You know, Siya, I'm kind of jumping around a lot here as based on our conversation and all the thoughtful answers you're giving to some of these questions, I want to jump to a topic that's related a little bit outside the scope of the K-12 walls, though you know you have experience investing in edtech and workforce sectors. And I'm curious what criteria you have used and would use to evaluate potential investments. And in this sector.

Siya Raj Purohit: At Pathway Ventures our investment thesis centers around the future of learning and work. So we are especially focused on innovative models that enable earning learning and community building. My co-founder, Taylor Stockton and I met through grad school professor many years ago, and we both are like deeply committed to the sector. So we're looking at potential investments. We prioritize solutions that resonate with that mission and also founders who have a deep connection to the problems they're solving. I think that the best careers are guided by like a purpose, a passion statement, or an intense feeling, and I love meeting people who are driven by those we do the earliest stages precede and seed. So it's mostly just the founder, the idea, and some early traction by then, and that's kind of what we assess.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I love that passion plays a part here in this space, you know, there's a whole bunch of reasons you can get involved. But feeling deeply, caring deeply. You can. You can smell it, you can feel it. You could taste it on people when they're really passionate and excited. Can you talk a little bit about some of the success stories from your time in this portion of the industry.

Siya Raj Purohit: One of our portfolio companies is Modal, founded by the former CEO of Udemy and the former president of Udemy for business. So they started building model to address a key issue they observed at Udemy, which is that there's a disconnect between like learning courses and tangible business outcomes as in like courses are not tied to promotions. Businesses don't really know how to evaluate what an individual learns and how it impacts like their outcomes and their work. So model has and like adopted an impact 1st approach to workforce development. They only charge customers when learners successfully complete training and demonstrate new skills. And I think that this is just very powerful, because suddenly now, businesses can have an ROI on the courses, and then hopefully encourage more people to complete them and move up in their careers.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: That is really interesting and unique. I I had no idea the origin story there, and so I appreciate you sharing it here. How do you think? How do you think the investment space is going to weather the current fiscal cliff storm that's hitting K-12, are you? Is that something that you experience that or that you're you're looking at the horizon on.

Siya Raj Purohit: So I think when you look at like a quarter or 2 quarters, or maybe a year or 2, there could be up and down activity for venture funding in the sector. But when you take a longer horizon, when you look at it 10 or 15 years later, you know, it's inevitable that more funding will go into the sector. More solutions will grow and help solve the pain points we're seeing in K-12 and in higher Ed. So I think. Yes, there was a hype cycle around 2021 2022 and 23 funding did fall, and we are at a place of uncertainty right now, given the technology. But there's no doubt in my mind that it's gonna be like positive in the long term in terms of investments in the sector and the solutions that will come out of it.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I appreciate that. It's hard to think long term when you're when you're looking straight outside the the front window of your car. But it's a it's a very, very important piece to remember. Siya. I appreciate that you said you invest in early stage startups either precede or early stage, and you recently published a piece on Medium called, Why you should start your career at an edtech Startup, and I won't have you regurgitate that piece. But for those folks who haven't read that yet. And, by the way, we'll link that article along with Siya's book in the show notes here of this episode. But why? Why do you think it's so important for folks to have that that edtech startup experience.

Siya Raj Purohit: Thanks so much for reading that and referencing it. I think it's really important, because the kind of ownership that you get at a startup, and the kind of like belief that this is your company. That kind of feeling is something you can't really get in a bigger company. I started my career at Udacity, and everything felt personal like. When people left lights on overnight. It felt like it was coming out of like my own expenses, and same when they took like an Uber XL instead of an uber when they didn't need one. So these kind of like I mean that kind of ownership, and the fact that this is my company feeling is so powerful for young people to have cause. I really think it changes the way they approach work because you're so committed to making your company successful once you are at a startup in that way. And so I think that I mean every person has their own preferences in terms of how they want to grow in their careers. But the ability to build at a startup work with leaders who are, might be far outranking you at a bigger company. But still are that startup and the exposure that you get for getting to interact in all the different parts of a business, I think, are really powerful.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Oh, boy, yes, I totally agree. I totally agree, having Le living that experience right now you get to do things you otherwise would not really have the experience to do in a more established company. You have more interface with key stakeholders, both internal and external. It's fast pace. I I you know, whenever I'm interviewing folks to join the phone, my team, we're not a startup anymore, just by definition of what startup probably means but I always tell. People like you have to want to work fast and be nimble and be adaptive, which is what the startup culture startup. Life is really about.

Siya Raj Purohit: And it's a really great thing to do when you're like young early career, and just like hungry to learn and grow because then that exposure that ownership and the bias to action really helps you build skills that you may take years to do otherwise.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Totally agree. I I really I love that piece and medium that you wrote, and it really resonated for me, and I knew I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it here. It does speak, you know, especially. You've had the experience of doing so many sides of the sector. Are there any sides? You haven't done.

Siya Raj Purohit: I mean. So I really enjoyed the startup, the venture side, and I guess the big tech as well. At some point I want to learn more about policy and work on the policy side of education and figure out how to like, bring more like technology insights into our policy, especially as technology gets more into classrooms and in higher ed institutions.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Oh, my gosh! See, I will be here! I'll cheer you on. I'll even join you. That is something I, too, am very curious about. I appreciate. You have this, I mean palpable, continuous improvement mindset. And it is, I mean, I'm sure it accounts for them. A large part of your success is like, how hungry you are to learn and try new things. It is so rare, and I think it is so special.

Siya Raj Purohit: I mean, we're in the education field. So I don't take any of the things I need to learn personally, because obviously we're all on this path and those like. And we also enable those paths for other people. So I think it's just like a really fun experience to just kind of continue on our own career paths while helping build those for others.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Amazing that that's really amazing. Do you? Have the opportunity now to return to the roots of your book and visit college campuses and get an opportunity to see engineering at work.

Siya Raj Purohit: So given the work that I've done, especially like recently at Amazon. I do get to spend time on university campuses, and it's just like, I love spending time in the universities, just because there's always excitement. There's so much enthusiasm for like just learning and growth. So I think that's a lot of fun. Curriculum pieces. We're still making progress on. I think that professors are much more open now than they've ever been before on incorporating like tech, but also like changing curriculum to be more personalized and customized to student bodies. And I think, like AI can help take that to the next level, because I envision a future where, like a business school, education is no longer like a general piece of education, it's more so cater to your career aspirations. So if you wanna like, get out of your MBA and go work in the food industry or in the sports industry, you see case studies and materials that cater to that like? How did a CEO handle growth in the sports industry, or like, how did a CEO help build like operations and finance departments and the sports industry. And so I think it's gonna get very customized which will help with the outcomes that we see from these kind of programs.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: The customization speaks to one of your main points in the book about ensuring that programs are inclusive and equitable. A large part of inclusivity work is helping students to see themselves in their studies. Are there other elements of equity, the equity of engineering education that you want to call out here.

Siya Raj Purohit: I think that we're going to get the content right very quickly. At this point just given where tech is gotten, I think the equity piece will be more like the bigger concerns will be around. How do we face time, constraints, and the challenges that people may have there? So we know that those from lower income backgrounds struggle a lot with time challenges in terms of being able to learn, because they just may not have enough time to engage with the resources after long work days at Udacity. Actually,we often talked about how our biggest competitor was Netflix.because people often choose like relaxation over studying after like a long day which is absolutely fair. So to bridge this gap, I think we need to develop more flexible learning solutions that fit into those busy lives, whether it's like micro learning modules or easily consumable content, but also make sure that people have the right communities to support that learning and growth. Because, like time is such a key thing to have to get right for equity to exist. And it's something that we all need to collaborate on.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Yes. Time is such an important resource. I I really appreciate that that comment that the biggest competitor was Netflix. I also I want to double click for a second on your response that we have to think of new models. I feel like that can translate really really well, too, into some of the crises K-12 or education are facing right now that our our traditional system is, has provided well for some students and not all students. And so applying some of these principles, you're naming here for college and university may also be really powerful and promoting equity for K-12 students. Has that been something you focus on, or your primary kind of view point has been for college and university.

Siya Raj Purohit: So for K-12 the challenges are different in a sense, like time is in consideration. But also you do have the student in the classroom. The problem with K-12 is that students often bring a lot of what's happening in their home into the classroom, too, and teachers obviously have to smartly navigate that to make sure that they still have, like an equitable chance of being able to like learn in the classroom. So I mean those issues like teachers. Actually, I'm so grateful that they're able to navigate the complexities there, becausea good teacher can make a bad day into a good one by just providing that safe space for them to learnand be unburdened from anything from outside the classroom but those complexities. I think there's a lot more of. I've spent most of my career in higher ed, but the aspiration is how can we like like make the teacher more effective in terms of being able to give the teacher more time to deal with those individual case by case solutions, while we help take care of some of that back end work for the teachers.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Your nuance is so spot on, I mean truly you're you're a treasure trove. I feel like I could ask you any question here, and you are so thoughtful in your reply, and really highlighting what makes each particular stage of education so unique, and how we can approach it. I you know. I don't want to ask our last question, but you've kind of teed up this question so perfectly. Then I'm going to lead us there. Which is what advice would you give a teacher starting their career today and feel free to interpret this as someone in K-12 or someone beyond K-12.

Siya Raj Purohit: So first, st I wanted to just thank you for choosing to become an educator. I think it's a path that, like so profoundly shapes, lives and leads to those kind of moments of discovery, and that place like that making school or the classroom a safe place for students to kind of think about what they want to do and then pursue those dreams. So I'm going to get to that answer in a second, and it's going to be about like leaning in more on tech. But I think one of the things that teachers can actually enable is just creating this kind of community in the classroom. So I think that communities and being able to engage with peers more easily is a skill a lot of people struggle with. And I think that happiness is actually tied very closely to community and social interactions.So I guess my advice would be to prioritize those in classroom and taking like a little bit more engagement in the classroom to just ensure that those are happening in a positive way, especially in the current political climate that we're in, and the amount of stress that all students are under. So being able to just have that like enable those person to person connections, I think, is super key. And then the second is to just be able to lean into the possibilities of AI technology. It's gonna keep getting better. And the tools can hopefully handle some of those backend tasks, allowing you to focus on connecting with the students. And I think back again today. And what I shared about being 6, and in the classroom, and being nervous about immigrating to new country, and not knowing the language perfectly, and having these teachers who provided that kind of support and just that inclusivity of being like, why don't you share the country that you're from, and what that means to you in the classroom? And this is again a Midwestern classroom in the 19 nineties so very different than like classrooms today that are more diverse. But I think that piece is just very powerful, and teachers can get that right which really shapes a child's like career path.