Latest / Subplots of Education, Etc / Making Math Beasts, with Prabhu Balasubramanian

Transcript

Making Math Beasts, with Prabhu Balasubramanian · Subplots of Education, Etc

• Jason Major: Okay. This is Subplots of Education. I'm Jason Major. We're gonna jump right into the guest I have, Prabhu Balasubramanian. She is the CEO of Inflection Point Learning. Prabhu. Thank you for having me, Jason. Excited to chat. You wanna just tell me about Beast Academy and what led you there, actually? Yeah, so Beast Academy is a is a curriculum focused on helping as particularly advanced learners at the elementary level get access to Rich, challenging, engaging, problem solving. What's unique about it is it's comic book based instruction. So you you learn math through the lens of these little monsters that are experiencing math class. And it's also really focused on puzzles because puzzles are a great way to practice that's more interesting and and more dynamic than normal, normal math practice. And my journey into it was you know, so I have I have two elementary age kids actually. And my older one, my son, when he was in third grade, we put him in an AOPS Academy, not not far from our house. AOPs is art of problem solving. They're the company that makes East Academy. And he had done other after school math programs and they weren't that exciting. And so we decided to to try this. And he immediately got engaged, got hooked. He was racing ahead and doing doing more work than had been assigned. I was watching, my wife was watching. We were seeing how much he was learning and how much he was growing. And that this he started this in the fall of 2024. And it so happened that I had I had been working at Google for a number of years and I had left that summer to sort of take a break and and decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. And we so I had a little bit more time to pay attention to his learning journey, what he was doing in school, what he was doing outside of school. And then that following spring, and it had been it had been going well in the spring of 2025, they sent an email to all of the parents who had their kids in in these AOPs learning centers and said, Hey, we're launching a new company focused on bringing the core pedagogy behind Beast Academy into classrooms in in schools. And that sounded great because the, you know, this program is great, but wouldn't it be great if more kids could do it during the actual school day? And it sort of felt like a a perfect merge of my interest and enthusiasm as a parent with space I'd always wanted to work in, which is education, and my skill set as someone who knows how to build products and knows how to build businesses from my experience in in other places. And this just felt like a really great opportunity. And I like literally the the email came out, I think it was on a on a Monday or a Tuesday, and that night I like wrote a cover letter, you know, applied to the job. And and fast forwarded a few months and and I was starting it. It's really awesome. So we we use it at my school, as you know, and we've used it for this is our second year with K to five. The kids in some classrooms will literally jump up and down when they're solving the puzzle problems. And it is so cool. Like it just makes math so fun. And I I used AOPS as a teacher 15 years ago. So for me to be using it as a school and have all the kids using it is just Like it is the it is the best math program there is. I don't think it's even close. We certainly feel that way, but but it's always exciting for me to hear that from from a customer, from someone who's using the program and has has known it for a long time. one thing, you know, just to sort of finish the story, the reason that it was important to launch the separate company, Inflection Point Learning, focused on building a product called Beast Classroom, which is our adaptation of that program specifically to schools. Is you know very well, like schools just have different needs than parents and families and out of school learning settings. you need a thing that can work for all of the kids in your class, you need a thing that can work that that can sort of meet the teacher where they are in their own math journey. You need a lot more operational tools, you need a lot more pedagogical tools. You need training and professional development and all of those things, when you're focused on just the parent audience, become much more optional. And so we felt it was important to have a company that was dedicated to doing what schools really need. And that journey is one that we're still pretty early in. Lots of schools like yours are seeing that it's working really well. You know, I have a question about that. Because it is the interface for teachers, it is the easiest curriculum to use that I've ever seen. Because everything is right there that you need. So all the slides are there. Every single like resource that you need for the lessons is there. The way you enter assessments for teachers is there. And it seems so easy, but I've seen many other curriculums that are not easy to use at all. So I wonder how much of that like Google, YouTube, Facebook background that you have helped with like just had the ease of use of this curriculum. I think I guess I would I would hesitate to take any credit for that. I think that spirit of ease of use has been, you know, it it predates me from the work that the team was doing. I think a lot of it is actually a significant chunk of our team, their last job before this company was teaching in a classroom. And when you have that perspective in the building, you know, or or a distributed company, so metaphorically speaking, it forces you to think about the end user and center them in the way that you you design the product. I think another thing which is I expect a pressure we will have to manage as time goes on is as a platform or a curriculum gets more mature, the number of stakeholders who ask for random little things from it just grows and grows and grows. And you end up having to add things that don't really make the teacher's life easier, but impress some other stakeholder in their broader ecosystem. And it's just really hard. The other challenge is because schools are so diverse, if you can keep the feature set very narrow. You can keep it simple and consistent for everyone. As soon as you start expanding the feature set, every school's version of what they need from that feature is different. And you end up with lots of knobs and twiddles. This is a classic thing that happens in sort of enterprise software. And I think our journey will be how do we make sure that we preserve simplicity and usability? One thing that happened, you know, from last year, last academic year to this academic year, we did a significant overhaul of the teacher experience. We added A bunch of new features for teachers. We added more, more curriculum, more other tools, and we still get the same feedback that it's easy to use, which I'm I'm happy to see. It means that we're we're sort of sticking to our guns on that. The teacher's perspective of having people straight from the classroom working on it definitely helps. But we were in the pilot and it was just noticeable that literally our teachers saw if they gave feedback, it would be in the product. So it's Like they it was clear that they were listening and like it's seen drastic improvements in the last year just because you have listened. So just that it's very grassroots because it's essentially teacher to teacher just creating the thing without all the bells and whistles that are unnecessary, like you said. I I think that's right. I I think that's also that is an advantage we have as a startup. One of the a very, very large publisher curriculum company. has massive scale, massive sales team, tons of, you know, operational weight they can put behind a product. We don't have any of that, but we have a closer, deeper relationship with the people actually using the thing. And we are small enough that we can move fast and be nimble. And literally someone can send in feedback and few hours we've changed something to address it. And it's it sort of moves as as fast as the speed of thought in in many cases, which how we have to operate to lean into like what our advantage might be, given that we're not some massive company. And that's what I wanted to ask about too, because you just posted on LinkedIn about how hard it is to find even what math curriculum is used in districts and schools. And then similar to that too, is would these giant companies own have these math curriculum that they can just sell on a massive scale because they already have existing relationships. I've always finded an interesting phenomenon that the best programs I've found educationally Many people don't know about it. It's like underground. So I think a lot of people know art of problem solving. Not many people know Beast Academy. And so how challenging is it to get people to know about it and get districts to implement it? Once you start talking, I could tell you the backstory of getting it in my district, because it was just an unbelievable undertaking to try to get it done. But I'm just curious about that. Like how hard it is to grow when you're not a massive company. So I think there's a kernel of an asset that we have, which is that. If you know, you know. Like that the it does spread through word of mouth among a cohort of teachers and school leaders who really care about engaging authentic, challenging problem solving. I would say we have work to do to get the word out more. And that awareness piece is one of the most important pieces. And there's a lot of things we're working on. Like we need to make our website better. We need to make ourselves more discoverable both on Google and on Chat GPT. We need to sort of Be it the right conferences. you know, one arc, for example, that we're going through is historically sort of awareness channel that worked the best for us was gifted conferences, because the the the product works really well for gifted kids. And as we're trying to expand beyond that, we have to figure out like where do we go for the right decision makers to show up? Where I'm I'm gonna be at NCTM in in in a month or so, and and there's lots of other spaces where we can show up to tell our story. I think. The world is more sort of ripe for this story than it has been in a long time because people are looking for something different in math and and a different experience at school. and so I'm very excited for that. The other thing I would say is we live and die by what our customers think about us. And that's why we have to be make sure that we're responsive to feedback and that we actually because that leaves an impression and people will tell their friends about that. All of that said, school procurement processes are not for the faint of heart. you know, I I'm trying to think what is the non-weapon version of this metaphor, but whatever like bringing a knife to a gun show, like a small company can feel that way trying to enter these really complex processes. And there's a massive industry of consultants who will offer to help you with that for a for a pretty penny. And I think my feeling is I I'm I want to see how far we can get just making the product amazing and making sure we get in front of the decision maker and try to manage the investment that we have to make in all of the stuff around that. and I think that's hard. Like the one of the the challenging situations that companies encounter is they have to build more and more for the procurement process versus the classroom. And I want to resist that as long as we can. And there has to be a way to do it. So like I there was another math program that I used as a teacher years ago. And they got bought out, but I think I think it was Pearson. But the product became drastically different as soon as they were bought by Pearson. It was like impossible to keep that grassroots, like user-friendly type thing just because they were bought out. So I really hope you can keep it too. I mean, when we adopted Beast in my school district, which is a massive school district, we first were in a no-cost agreement because we were in the pilot, but the no-cost agreement was. Like literally it was like over a hundred pages long. And Beast was not comfortable signing off on it because there's literally was no lawyer on staff at August problem solving. So we couldn't do it. So it is just so many things can happen to even just get one school in one massive district. We we understand that like people have compliance and we need to be able to engage with their compliance processes and review contracts and like that's that's sort of part of the game. Whereas Art of problem solving is focused on families who don't come with this massive process. They just go on a website and they buy. And so that's another reason why we we need to have a a dedicated company with that dedicated focus on navigating those types of constraints. I've always said it's a slow burn too to get something that because you have to have support from the administrator at the district or the school level. But at the same time, if the administrator or the school leader is just dictating what is done, you lose the teacher buy-in. That's right. Similarly, you can have the teacher buy in, but if you don't have support from above, you have to have this perfect match where it's the teachers like it and you have support from the top. And it's a really hard line to to find there. It's really hard. And that's why it's a slow burn. Like I think if you can keep the product as it is, it's going to spread eventually. It just might take longer than if you had to sell some things out to have some massive company backing it. And I think I guess I think there's a middle ground in the in the two extremes that you just painted where we can accelerate our growth by building our own go-to-market engine. We don't have to sell out necessarily to accomplish that. We just have to do it in a disciplined focused way. And it's work smart versus just throwing money at it, which is often what what you end up doing. Cause I don't I don't wanna have to make trade-offs in the soul of what the product is. But one one way I think about it, like this is too good. It's not okay. That more kids aren't using it. And and if you have that belief in it, then you you gotta find a way to get out there. I totally agree. And it needs to be in the hands of more kids and you can't sell it out. And I think the more people that you have eventually that get it that can advocate, it will spread. Because I even think of this is a natural extension of auto problem solving. Now auto problems have been around for much longer, but now it's kind of trickling down to the general education population, right? So that is massive growth right there as it is. You used to not even exist below sixth grade. And now you have something that goes all the way down to kindergarten. So it that's growth just from that too for sure. That's that's absolutely right. And going, you know, we're we're we're writing our f full year of kindergarten curriculum for the first time that right now. And it's just so fun and exciting to see how it's coming together and how much impact We can have with this way of looking and problem solving, even for the youngest learners. One thing that I love art of problem solving is talks about, because I quote this for years, is Richard Rusick, who founded Art of Problem Solving, he said the best way to teach problem solving is through math. That's the best way to teach problem solving. So what we're really doing is teaching problem solving. If we could teach problem solving by teaching Chinese, we would teach Chinese instead of math. It's just math happens to be the best avenue to teach problem solving skills. So the the skills that you learn in problem solving transcend math. They're applied elsewhere. There was a list of 20 Google interview questions that flowed over on the internet maybe 10 years ago, maybe longer than that now. But some of them are almost like word for word, a problem that you would find from art of problem solving or math counts or one of these contest problems, because they they asked it, they wanted to just hear how the people thought through the answer to the problem, not as much as getting the answer. So Was is there any truth to that at all that Google would ask like problem solving type math questions and they're interviews? I it it depends on how far back you go. There was a time when the company would put would pat put math problems on billboards on the freeway. And you'd sort of like if you figure this out, you know, e I don't know, email it to this address and and that was a way of recruiting candidates because that the the kind of candidate that gets excited about that is is one you want. I will say a lot of That approach to interviewing, first of all, it's it's not robust to everyone sharing all the questions on the internet. Like that's a that's a challenge. It's especially not robust to everyone potentially having AI, you know, in you know, on another tab while they're doing a remote interview or or whatever it might be. So I think some of those methodologies have had to evolve, but I think there's still a core of try to assess in an interview process the extent to which a person can think on their feet and solve something original that they had that they haven't seen before. and not because an interview is a perfect reflection of what happens in real work. It's just a simulation, but it's sort of a proxy for for testing some of those skills. And you know, a a lot of companies will give take home assignments or other projects that they ask you to do. And and Google sometimes does that as well. And it's about a collaboration too. I wanted to say that. Whereas there was a push maybe, I don't know, I think it's kind of done, but to individualize everything. You know, some of the online platforms flip classroom, like all of the individualized instruction. And Beast has kind of gone completely away from that too, because it's more about a community of learners who are collaborating around problems too. So can you talk a little bit about the philosophy behind that? Which I totally agree with. I think it's best to learn math in groups because you're collaborating and the problems are so rich that they're open to like collaborating around how to solve the problem rather than just a kid sitting there individually. Yeah. So and I I think especially now, this is like sort of re-emerging as one of the big debates in education, like how to balance between individual growth through hyperpersonalized learning experiences versus collaboration and and learning together. I think the r like trying to choose one or the other all the time is not really the right approach anyway. You need you need a mix of both. But the reason we are betting on shared experiences in the classroom is because I do think that is how people are wired. That is what they want. They don't always want to be together all of the time, but they don't thrive when everything is individual all of the time. And what one example of this from some of the other work that I've done is the trend of the way people watch videos online, TV movies, like it's been more and more individual over time. But some of the most resonant entertainment experiences I'd ever had were experiences that I had with other people. like I can like certain movies, like I can remember when this thing happened and the whole theater screamed out loud or whatever it might be. And you just don't get that when you're alone by yourself watching on your phone, you know, lying in bed. And so I think we see an opportunity to create a culture where the fact that kids are together is not a liability, it's an asset. And there is a responsibility in doing that because the classic way that happens is by Under serving both ends of the achievement spectrum. Like you put everyone together, so everyone's doing the exact same thing, and the kids that are struggling don't get what they need, and the kids that are excelling also don't get what they need. And argument would be a great puzzle or a great family of puzzles where maybe groups of kids are working on different versions of the same puzzle that challenge them in in a way that meets them where they are is just a much more effective way to have a connected experience together. While still challenging the people who are ready for more or giving support to the to the students who who need a little extra extra support. And that's why I've always loved the problems for Martha, problems loving, and beast too, is because they're accessible. There's there's many ways to approach the problem and the puzzle. So you can't engage an entire class. And it's actually related to something else that's a philosophy that I like you to talk about too, which is when the most talented math student in the classroom, if you're talking just a general education classroom, you're still going to have many levels within that. But when that top kid, the top performing math kid, the one who gets everything right in the class, when the other kids see that that kid is challenged, it changes the dynamic and the culture of the classroom. So when the top kid is able to be challenged in a class, there is just a trickle-down effect to the rest of the kids in the class. And I've seen that. And I'm just wondering if if you could comment a little bit about that too. Yeah. And I I think there's a classic way that I certainly experienced as a kid. Of engaging that top kid in the whole classroom's experience, which is to ask that kid to help some of the other kids. And the reality is in that moment, that kid does not feel like they're being fully served. And I always the way I always told those kids to invoice the school for making it exactly. That kid will feel fully served when they experience authentic challenge. And if they feel Fulfilled by that experience, their energy will contribute to the energy of the room. And it also helps normalize failure, by the way, not just for them, but for for everyone else in the room too. I think for high achievers, often a great obstacle is perfectionism and fear of failure. And one of the reasons that happens is because they never experience it for real until they're much older. And then it hits them like a ton of bricks. And You know, one one way I would think about it is like if a kid is always getting a hundred percent on everything, the institution they're in is not serving them. And that is, in my opinion, like a a responsibility of schools and the people who make products that schools use to try to find a way to make sure that every kid finds their learning frontier. And most math curricula out there just won't do that for you. especially the ones made for the general education population, right? That's why the the beast curriculum is just filling a need that wasn't there before. I used to teach at a summer program for gifted kids, fourth, fifth grade. And inevitably every time I would teach it, there would be a kid crying the first day because they had literally never gotten a math problem wrong in their educational career to that point. And when I would teach those classes, it'd be like the goal is to be wrong. You need to be wrong because someday you're going to be wrong and you need to. And the sooner you experience that that the easier it's gonna be for you to you to handle. And the longer the kids would wait to be wrong, the harder it is for them to deal with it. I think the experience of being wrong is one piece. The other thing, especially now with, you know, my kids generation is being able to tolerate going slow because like we just we live in a very high octane world where everything is served to us. ASAP and problem solving requires patience. And the idea that like if you grapple with it long enough, you'll get the insight that will get you to to an eventual solution is something that I think kids need now more than ever. because there's so many forces that will serve to strip them of their patience and school is is potentially a a counterbalance against that. I one I'm thinking I've been saying the last couple of years too is it's that schools schools should embrace that they can still do the following things, which is go slow to solve problems, two, force the kids to talk to each other, and three, force them to put the technology away for a bit. It's like the last place where we can still make kids do that and we need to embrace it. and find the the right balance between all of that. That's right. There's one other thing I wanted to ask you about too, which is your I'm a career changer, you're a career changer. So I'm just curious, how does the working and education compare to working for these massive tech companies? Which I always find is just I'm always fascinated by working for tech startups. Like if you say you worked you've said you can say you worked at Google, you worked at YouTube and you worked at Facebook. Like that's pretty three pretty cool companies, right? So how does that compare to what you're doing now? I mean it's funny, like the this the decision to to come into this role. I changed many things all at once, which is not really a best practice for these types of things, right? Like I'd only ever worked in large companies. I joined a very small one. I'd always worked in technology. I jumped into education. I had always worked in product leadership roles. I jumped into a a general management role. I'm a I'm a CEO, which I'd never done before. I had generally I I had spent a little bit of time working on products that were selling to businesses and organizations, but mostly I had been building for consumers, for for end users, and and selling the schools is like building for a particularly challenging type of organization as as we talked about earlier. And so I I changed a lot of things. And and and also by the way, I'd always I'd always worked at companies that were based in the Bay Area, Bay Area, which has its own sort of culture. And out of problem side solving started in San Diego, has has and our much of our team is is still there, and that creates a different vibe as well. I think what I have found is when you're trying to build something that people care about and it's complex and you want it to be excellent, those three things require a lot of the same muscles across many different domains. And so, like you think about the the last thing I worked on at Google, I was working on smart home devices basically, on on the Nest team there and very complex. You're building for multiple people at once, except instead of a classroom, it's a it's a household of people that are all talking to this thing or whatever it might be. you are dealing with the massive operational complexity of manufacturing hardware in the same way that we now have massive operate operational complexity of actually getting a program adopted in in real schools. By the way, we ship books to people. You know, it's not just a it's not just a piece of software. and and you have A very wide range of skill sets who all bring perspectives to your team that you have to build a culture around celebrating and also channel all of that expertise and that energy into making a hook, coherent, cohesive thing for someone who's going to use it at the end of the day. And and finally you have to do a thing that's gonna at some point make some money. and I f I just find that if you can abstract it far enough, a lot of the problems actually look kind of similar. And then what you you have this sort of decision-making infrastructure in your head for how to approach these problems. And then what you can get really curious about and excited about is what does a teacher actually do in a classroom? How do they get onboarded into a new math program? What does it feel like when half your students are getting it and half your students are not? why why are all of these other apps that teachers have to use so complicated? what is the relationship between s you know, tech based learning and and paper-based learning in a classroom? What do all the different communities across the country think about those trade-offs and how do you build something that they're all gonna like? All of those questions are just they satisfy curiosity endlessly. And I find that my curiosity about them has been endl endless. Do you know what comes to mind when you said that too? Is the art to go full circle, the article from Richard Ruzick called What is problem solving? Because he talks about when he got into organic chemistry at Princeton, there were two different groups. Ones who had competition math experience and the ones who didn't. Because the ones who had competition math experience realized that there were only a few concepts that you had to master and from there you could get everything else. So you're saying that working for these two companies is the same thing. You just have to recognize the similar patterns and then how do you address them in your new situation? That's right. And be careful about over extrapolating, because sometimes that can happen because humans are are are pattern matchers. I came to this without any classroom experience and I'm surrounded by people who have many years of classroom experience. And it's a really great symbiosis for us all to learn from each other. Jason: I want to thank Prabhu very much for joining. That was a really good conversation. He also gave me a really good idea for a LinkedIn post about an atrocious math platform that we talked about offline. But he also gave me the feedback that it ended very abruptly. So thanks, Prabhu. This is the end of it. Thanks for listening. Very much appreciate it. We'll have another episode soon. Bye, everyone.