Personable
Building a Business with 30 million users: Tutor2U Geoff Riley | Ep 13
Episode 13 of Personable features Geoff Riley, a titan in the field of education with a staggering 38 years of shaping young minds, as we trace his incredible journey from Yorkshire to international educational influence. Geoff isn't just a revered teacher; he's the entrepreneurial force behind Tutor2u, reaching over 30 million learners each year. We share his poignant story, from the personal loss that led to the birth of a groundbreaking educational resource to how he and his brother Jim have crafted an unparalleled learning platform that combines passion with innovation.
Personable is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners become the best they can be by learning from the world’s best in their respective fields. This mission is inspired by my mother, Louise, who encouraged me to become the best version of myself before she passed away from cancer in 2023.
Connect with Harvey:
Harvey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveybracken-smith/
Harvey's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmith/
Personable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmithpodcast_/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7JOTYDER6m2FDrlhop4api
My dad's startup: https://www.thedraft.io/
Donate to the charity we have founded in memory of my mum: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LouLouRacefoiundation?utm_term=PvByaxmdn
Episode 13 of Personable features Geoff Riley, a titan in the field of education with a staggering 38 years of shaping young minds, as we trace his incredible journey from Yorkshire to international educational influence. Geoff isn't just a revered teacher; he's the entrepreneurial force behind Tutor2u, reaching over 30 million learners each year. We share his poignant story, from the personal loss that led to the birth of a groundbreaking educational resource to how he and his brother Jim have crafted an unparalleled learning platform that combines passion with innovation.
Personable is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners become the best they can be by learning from the world’s best in their respective fields. This mission is inspired by my mother, Louise, who encouraged me to become the best version of myself before she passed away from cancer in 2023.
Connect with Harvey:
Harvey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveybracken-smith/
Harvey's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmith/
Personable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmithpodcast_/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7JOTYDER6m2FDrlhop4api
My dad's startup: https://www.thedraft.io/
Donate to the charity we have founded in memory of my mum: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LouLouRacefoiundation?utm_term=PvByaxmdn
Hello and welcome to episode 13 of Personal Today. I'm hugely honoured to be joined by Geoff and Jim Riley. Oh, Jim didn't fancy turning up this morning, so just Geoff Riley. Geoff was actually my economics teacher. He's had a very successful career in the education field, being the head of economics and being a teacher. For how long was it, Geoff? How long were you a teacher for?
Speaker 2:Well, I taught for 38 years although you never stopped, really and then 25 years at your school, that one-man school you attended.
Speaker 1:Wow for a really long time teacher, but actually also founded a company called TutorTube which is used by over 30 million people a year as doing educational courses, textbooks, in-person events, and he's been helping a lot of making a lot of kids very happy, helping them with their A-level, gcse and BTEC exams. He's also generated over 230,000 followers on YouTube with his hugely entertaining YouTube videos, which I and many others have been watching. I feel hugely honoured to be joined by you today, geoff, so thank you very much for coming, mate.
Speaker 2:Meetup and thank you for inviting one of the old entrepreneurs onto your personal podcast. I wasn't a tech entrepreneur when I was 11. That's the years, not months. I haven't raised $20 million for a start-up yet, but I'm really happy to explain how you can grow a business this slow way, and there may be different ways.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I wanted to get started off by asking you what was your childhood like? Why get into education?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, okay, I was born in Yorkshire as the best people are, obviously and raised at a state school, which I actually live a mile or two away from now. My brother went to Cambridge as an Auburn scholar and I hinted that I should apply as well. So my older brother, I eventually went to Cambridge, managed to luckily win a scholarship to read economics at Cambridge. It's a hugely formative time. I had brilliant teachers both at school and also at university. I've kept in touch with my university teachers by the mid-80s, by the way, harvey, that's the 1980s, not the 1880s.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I got confused there.
Speaker 2:By the 80s, I was pretty certain I was going to be a teacher, and so I applied for a PGCE, a university course which gives you qualified status as a teacher. That was a year or so I did that, and then I applied for a job in Newcastle, the great city of Newcastle, pond Tine, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very familiar I'd be like Duke.
Speaker 2:He gets very cold in the winter.
Speaker 1:Big time.
Speaker 2:And I was there for 12 years who was head of economics for 10, in Newcastle. I was during the time of Keegan and Newcastle United's Epic Rise to the First Division, and then, around the millennium, I got the job as head of economics at Eton, which is a well-known boarding school in the UK. So I moved down to the southeast and around that time my brother and I my twin brother Jim we co-founded a business called Shooter 2 you. The genesis of that was really quite interesting. So we lost a family member through illness and we'd been to a rugby game to watch, just chatting as you do. We were two twin brothers.
Speaker 2:We don't have a lot of content with each other, but so we decided we wanted a joint project. So we said well, let's literally write a web page. My brother was involved in the interweb at the time at quite a senior level, so we just literally wrote a web page, called it Shooter 4 you, f-o-u-r or something. Jim said no, just make it a 2. So we just literally created a web page and just started writing blogs and content and whatever you put on a web page, he says. And eventually it morphed into a sustainable business which Jim has managed to see over the past 20 years I carried on teaching, working with the business part time, and when I retired from teaching last summer, I've moved to the business now working, as you can see, in the Shooter 2 studio doing a lot of things.
Speaker 1:Why did you and Jim pursue those different paths in the first place? Why did you go to teach Ching and I saw he moved around quite a lot, going to PWC and a few other roles why was that and why did you think he then both thought education was the root?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess he's always been a teacher at heart, it's part of his DNA. So even when he was at PWC, once he qualified he then took charge of the training program for training grads, something that PWC is always had teaching in the blood. I older brother, malcolm, is a music teacher of some distinction for nearly 40 years, so I mean I was almost guaranteed to become a teacher. That's where I wanted to be and I still do, by the way, and I think many people who choose teaching as a vacation have that essential dynamic, the quality that runs through them. They want to teach, you know, they want to support students through the journeys they have.
Speaker 2:Jim was much more entrepreneurial, trained as an accountant, was really into startups. This was in the first internet wave, which you're too young to remember, harvey, but sort of mid to late thanks for agreeing to the mid to late 1990s. There was this first interweb wave people throwing money, a website that never loaded stupid money really, but it's always the case in the kind of speculative bubble. But Jim was in that domain during that period, came out of it around the turn of the millennium, one of the change of scene, and I think he just saw the potential in tutor junior, saw a few orders coming in, saw the take up of the website and thought, well, let's, let's give this a go and the rest is history.
Speaker 1:What did you see? What? So what did you see as the opportunity? You're speaking and, tommy, you got the name and you built the website, but what was the actual gap in the market or what were you trying to achieve by build the business back then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we had two. We had two words we just decided on at the start. One was content. So we felt there was a need for good quality written as well as published content video content came later, really. And the other was community.
Speaker 2:So what you'll find in many subjects now that I take history or geography or psychology, whatever it is there's often a community of teachers who are huge. Then when they love their subjects, they are subject specialists. They don't necessarily always have the support mechanism around them. So, for example, you might have an economist who's teaching in local schools is on it his or her own, or you might have a single politics teacher. We might have a group of teachers who just don't feel necessarily supported. So our aim is really to create a platform for supporting teachers and students, and the mechanism for doing that the kind of the pathway was just to was literally to create content.
Speaker 2:So I've been watching some of your personal videos and they're incredible, amazing and inspiring in many ways. Oftentimes you get your entrepreneurship wants to scale really quickly and it's like frustration if you don't scale at pace, particularly in the digital sector. Ours is a digital business, but it's also a face-to-face business. So every day we blog every single day. We blog every single day, we'll create a new quiz or we'll record a pod, we'll record a YouTube video or something. It's just an embryonic, iterative process of creating new content in dynamic subjects. The subjects you're studying, for example, change every day and therefore having a resource which keeps pace with that, which tries to make sense of the messy world we live in, is hugely interesting and hopefully supportive to teachers. So, to go back to your original question, what was your question, harvey?
Speaker 1:I think my original question was about the Gap in the Market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I don't think there was necessarily a gap in the market, but we felt there was an opportunity to build content. We felt like we had to build content and build community. And when I talk to young entrepreneurs and some of many of my students have gone on to be entrepreneurs some started hugely successful business like Hello Fresh and I'm one of two others Personally Personally indeed Well, if we talk in a year's time, where will you be? Who next?
Speaker 2:I would say I have 10 subscribers. Well, that could double in the space of a year if you really go for it. But the gap in the market is that you build a community the old Kevin Costner line, isn't it? If you build it, they will come. People will come towards you, they're drawn towards you, but then you've got to sustain that relationship, and so we operated the. I don't know if you're familiar with the freemium model. Do they teach you that at Duke?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you talked to me about that actually.
Speaker 2:I might well have done that. As a teacher, I might ask you to explain the freemium model. So what is it?
Speaker 1:I've probably got this wrong, but it's basically where you give people content and stuff for free and then you can charge them for, like, higher versions of it. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You followed. Chris Anderson famously wrote a book with a long tail and pioneered the freemium idea and it became hugely popular a decade or so ago that your core proposition, part of the value proposition, is just free content, well-written, clean, accurate, supportive stuff. And then you add on your premium services and as a business, we've grown slowly at times, more quickly at other times that we've grown based on that principle. The other phrase now is always there, so you're always there for teachers, always there for students. I mean including we might talk about this later including during the pandemic, for example.
Speaker 1:Sure, but this idea of community, did you always have that? You say that that was your second guiding principle, but did you always have that in mind and how did that compare back then to what the community looks like now, especially as you're such a large business?
Speaker 2:Oh, great question. I mean for sure it's been absolutely pivotal. If you think about the central as a business, you won't repeat the amount. Some again bow to the better judgment of the Duke management professors, but I think it's true that the marketing cost of selling to an existing customer is about one-fifth Marketing cost, marketing spend of selling to a new customer. So once you have an established customer base of teachers as a department, as of a year, for example, who always combats you each year, you've got that underlying community which become customers and sometimes there's a blur between the two. So many of our customers are friends, We've known them for a huge number of years. You might have a teacher in the school who's been head of economics or head of business for 20 years brilliant teachers and you just build and hopefully sustain and grow that relationship. That's usually important. So from a business point of view, your base layer sales come from those regular repeat customers. Students come and go.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:But a lot of teachers don't. A lot of teachers stay in the school for 10, 15 years. If you can build a strong relationship with them, you get the promotion dividend.
Speaker 1:So with I'm curious you mentioned about how you grew it at the time. I'm curious about that community aspect and the content aspect. How were you generating the content, sort of like the pre-Youtube era, and how were you getting people to both also trust the products and actually get it to new people and get it out there?
Speaker 2:So lots of moving pieces there in that particular juxtaposition. One is to create a nice clean content management system, and we've been through several iterations over the last 20 years. Eventually we settled on a content management system called Kraft. Don't feel familiar with that, all the businesses use Kraft and it's just a nice intuitive way for creating blog entries and lead magnets. I'll talk to you a little bit about lead magnets in a second.
Speaker 2:So one is building having a content system that you're happy with and the other users are happy to import into. Then it's about finding what we call champion teachers and sometimes serendipity smiles. So we might organise an event in Newcastle and meet over lunch. An incredible teacher do we think could be a brilliant contributor or somebody. A word of mouth recommendation comes through.
Speaker 2:So at the time you just build your team and the job of the team is just to write regular content, to produce study notes, to produce online quizzes, run the social media accounts. So each team runs a subject and you hope, and those subjects can go in different ways. So the team that run economics might have a different approach to the team that runs criminology and law, for example. And you just build your team of often part-time or freelance contributors and then over time the content emerges. You obviously have quality control of top end make sure it's fine customer support if there are errors and problems. By the way, we like to get things to market fairly quickly. So let's say we're launching a study book for A level law, let's say Could be hugely popular. Most textbook publishers might spend between one and two years getting an idea for a book written, drafted, checked, proofread, etc. Tomorrow might take a year or two. We think in weeks and months, not years.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the differences. You have to move quickly, you have to move quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was curious about. I was curious about because I still have ideas about what makes Choose2You unique. For me, it's more about the reliability, it's about the quality of the content, it's about being relevant to the latest news and things going on. In your opinion, what makes Choose2You unique and why? Are you know there are kids and other younger people that don't know what they're talking about, as I saw in your economics classes watching videos of other people but what do you think makes Choose2You unique and why can't it not just be replicated by other people?
Speaker 2:Well, lots of people are trying and have tried. We might, if we have time, talk about the lives of AI. Is that a threshold challenge of business such as Choose2You? But I think it's just basically the team you put together, and that team has emerged and changed over the years, but we have a wonderful group. So tonight, for example, I'm doing a live, a festive live stream in economics, which should be a lot of fun. Six thirty, if you want to come along, you know, not too busy, are we? But there's three or four of us who are presenting it and we've known each other for years and we've developed, hopefully reasonable skills of presenting live on YouTube.
Speaker 2:We love our subjects and I think the key word I'm searching for is authenticity. So we have subject experts who are passionate about their subjects, deeply passionate, but they're also authentic. They're not trying to be somebody, they're not. You know, you all have had teachers at school. I think we've all had teachers who just it was subject fanatics, deeply, deeply interested in what they were teaching, never, never, happy with what they knew. They always wanted to finish the day knowing a little bit more than at the start, and they try and pass that on to their students when they teach and when they're supporting the students. So I think the key to our business is not explosive growth. It really isn't. We don't have an app. We have a website, so you can build a business without an app. It's just, essentially, each day, creating new content, new ideas. Some things work, some things don't, and you build a business on the back of that.
Speaker 1:How does your business and I don't want to necessarily call your business a tutoring business, but you still have online courses and in-person events as well. What do you think the need is for that? I mean, if you're supposed to go to school and teachers are supposed to teach you everything you need to know to pass a course, why is there even a need for something like tutor to you? Or is the education system inherently flawed in that people need extra study and extra help in order to pass their courses?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, some people are okay. So if you look at the UK at the moment the context of teacher recruitment and retention we will get at least one call, sometimes several calls, a day from schools saying our specialist psychologist teacher is left or is ill, or we don't have a specialist politics teacher or we need now. Our economic students don't have a teacher for next term. There was a huge recruitment and retention crisis in schools across the UK. So what flows from that are the is that probably a significant percentage of students, particularly A level maybe GCSE, but certainly A level are being taught by non-specialists. Now, if you're a parent of a student who's taking a hard A level and you've been taught by non-specialists, there's clearly a potential issue there in terms of the quality of what's being taught. So, in a way, the demand for tutoring is that derived from the supply problems in the teaching industry in the UK? Yeah, that's always been the case. We know that tutoring itself as an industry is growing really quickly. I don't know if it's the case in the States, but at all levels, from schools to GCSE, support, college admissions is it college admissions hobby is an absolute. Well, it's an industry. I think it's a minefield in terms of the itself, I think it should be much simpler and less commercial than that's not the issue. Yeah, we're called tutors but we don't actually do any tutoring, which is a slight misnomer. But in a sense, you're looking at tutoring in a more holistic sense.
Speaker 2:If you need a video on YouTube, we've got a thousand of them. If you need a quiz on Cude, we're writing them as we speak. If you need some essay plans, yeah, we've got some essay plans. If you want a live stream every Tuesday night on a key topic with a bunch of teacher friends, we'll be there. If you need a study guide, we'll print business. So we're a live, face-to-face business. We have a great relationship with one of the world's biggest cinema trends. We are a publisher. We are a teacher support business.
Speaker 1:We run tutors, cinema chains, I know, but what does that mean? It seems quite weird for an education business to have a partnership with a cinema chain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really is. So what we do is we run a series of live revision days. Let me picture the scene for you, harvey, maybe, so maybe you're struggling a little bit. What are you studying this year?
Speaker 1:This year's no, and I'm studying. It's kind of different out here, so I'm studying economics, maths, I had a writing course and I'm doing Latin again as well.
Speaker 2:Wow, okay. Well, let's take Latin as an example. Okay, there might be a few others struggling with their Latin, who knows? So we book some of the biggest cinema screens in Europe Digital 4K, surround sound, et cetera. The biggest screens you can find are the 500C cinemas and we run live revision days where students get a booklet to fill in. Obviously, they get four sessions. Teachers present and that's quite a challenge. By the way, we're finding teachers are comfortable presenting with the world's biggest cinema screen behind them. They then get access to an online course as well. So we have two courses. One's called Grade Boost Doses as you get closer to the exam. One's called Strong Foundations.
Speaker 2:So we won these big events. I was on them last week. Across the UK, thousands of students turn up and their teachers. Hopefully it's a good day out and it's really interesting. So even a world of digital connectivity on the internet and things, the demarc of face-to-face events continues to grow, and it's partly reflecting the fact that people want live events. People want live comedy, live music, live entertainment, and why not do the same with cinemas? So our experience was that kids would go to a revision day. They'd be sat in a drafty church hall on a wooden seat with a projection that's no bigger than the wall behind you, and that's what the experience was. Our experience was let's book some great cinema screens and let's go for big screen live revision, and it seems to have worked quite well.
Speaker 1:I think that the message of authenticity and being up to date with things makes a lot of sense. But you mentioned AI previously. What are your thoughts on it? Do you see it as a potential to have an impact on your business and what do you think that impact will look like?
Speaker 2:Did you create that question using ChatGPT?
Speaker 1:As you know, I was using Google's new AI tool. Chatgpt was yesterday.
Speaker 2:I can't decide whether it's worth the money.
Speaker 1:No, I made that up. I haven't used it yet.
Speaker 2:In my final year at school the school we both attended it became increasingly obvious that students were using ChatGPT as a default. In behavioral economics terms, Of course, duke University, the home of one of the greatest behavioral economists the world's ever seen they're no really. But people are using ChatGPT as a default and there are all kinds of interesting discussions about how we respond to this. And clearly, education will evolve over time. Schools and colleges will have their own rules and engagement and terms and conditions, but with AI, so in theory, a student could go to ChatGPT this morning armed with the spec and simply ask that or others to create a set of study notes and structured study notes covering the spec in the right order. Within about half an hour they'll download onto an iPad or something. They've got a complete set of study notes.
Speaker 2:So is that a threat to our print business? Conceivably, except our study books are written by experts. They are reprinted every year with amendments and additions. They follow and they change each year as the exam changes. So we respond to the previous exams in terms of content. So may I be able to do that as another issue? So in theory, students and teachers will be able to access so much more information and so much more quickly. You call with quality assuming given level of quality, and that could be a threat to print businesses. It could be.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think at present it can't. I actually don't think for your particular business it will be able to take over it, but that's for a different reason. But I think in terms of generating content, chathtpt, it's based on using a certain and limited number of sources, often based back in like 2021. So it's not relevant to the past two years. So that's a problem in and of itself. There's something like economics you need current examples, so it can't do that. There's also inaccuracies with it. It can take a lot of time Everyone just having the same things. That might not be relevant. There's that problem.
Speaker 1:Let's say we did get to a point where it was using the most up to date data facts. I think there's still a problem with validality validation. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet these days, things that are made up which could have an impact. I think when chathtpt first came out and people were trying to use it for law or something and someone in court accidentally cited chathtpt in it, it'd give it off, completely, made up the case. But even if it did get past that point and it said they'd create this perfect system, I think, as you said, the authenticity, the in-person events, the course, as Ash is speaking face to face. I think there is a lot of value with that and I don't think that's just going to go away like that. So I think it'd be fine, at least for another month and then past that point I'm kidding I think it'd be fine for a lot longer.
Speaker 2:I don't know what we'll see about it. Again, one of your skills as a student was the ability to think counter-intuitively, and so I watched Sunak give evidence the other day at the COVID inquiry and I think pretty much he'd written most of his answers using chathtpt. Just read them out. So it does spread to the top levels of government. We have some competitors who have created online. I won't name them, but they've created an online competition which offers, in inverted commas, a compelling mixture of AI and cognitive science to guarantee students exam results. This, of course, is a little bit of a cobblers, basically because I mean, I was warned Charlie Munger he sadly passed away last week, one Buffett's bridge partner. His insatiable desire for that little extra incremental knowledge and understanding every day, I'm sure, kept him mentally active the whole way through. And the best teachers are insurably optimistic by their students but insatiably frustrated about their lack of knowledge. They want to take their knowledge and understanding and awareness of the subject further, and if that transmits itself face to face or online or one to one in a tutorial or in a classroom setting, that is many times more powerful than the ability of a genitive AI system to give you a set of study notes. And so it's subtle nuance in discussion and argument. So my instinct is that AI will stimulate the demand for live events, face to face teaching. It will take away some of the really hard yards when if you're in the class writing study notes.
Speaker 2:So let's say, for example, I'm teaching about an hour online teaching. So I will ask students to give me five examples of challenger businesses in the UK banking sector. I would know that you might get one. Student can think of two. Well, of course, they can all use their iPads and things and find, hopefully, five really good challenger businesses. That takes all the hassle out of that particular task and then we can discuss which of the challenger businesses Monza, revelle and Metulet will do best and why it's the. It's the hidden wiring of teaching. It's that that sense of fun and enthusiasm and engagement we she don't get from, bizarrely enough, you don't get from looking at text on the screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also think that the the ability to think critically, or at least even think about what you're talking about, is very important. I mean, in my opinion, the whole point of you know questions and exams, particularly in schools, is for a student to think about the answers, that they actually have a deeper understanding of it so that when they go out into the world they can use that. But I think if there's a constant reliance on some external technology to answer every question, you won't understand it. When it's wrong, you have to think about it, and I think it also takes away your skills as an entrepreneur, as an employee, as a worker, because if everyone's relying on the same system, what's your value at all? You know?
Speaker 2:Well, as a younger student, I mean will AI replace exams? Will? What do you think? Traditional hundred and exams will disappear, or exams with keyboards?
Speaker 1:Do I think exams will disappear?
Speaker 2:I have a view about exams. I'd like to know yours first and I'll come to.
Speaker 1:So I think the going through.
Speaker 2:You've been to all of your. Now you'll be taking exams at Duke.
Speaker 1:So I actually have. I have. I'm not a big fan of the UK education system whatsoever. I think it's really stupid. I was more of a person that was much better at working consistently over time and I could do really well in class, really well in science, even while in class tests. But the end of the day, if I wasn't focused for GCSE exam and a level exam, that would impact my entire grade, which I think is ludicrous. That's actually one of the reasons I came to the US in the first place.
Speaker 1:Here I take like all those subjects I mentioned before Latin economics, maths and writing. I've literally finished all those this semester done well, I've got one Latin exam on Monday and then I move on and do another course. So I think that idea is much better. I think people should be assessed consistently over how they're working. There's some kids that able, you know, especially at Eaton where we were, you were really smart and can just cram for an exam.
Speaker 1:But I don't think that's applicable to real world skills either. I mean, the whole point, as I was saying, is the ability, in my opinion, is to think critically, to be able to learn. The people that cram all the stuff forget it a week later as well, and so I think that the system in itself, I think, is inherently flawed in how it's currently run In terms of exams. I can see the benefits of it, but I think more regular testing is needed. But I think that the way that it's currently presented, you know, take studying something for three years, taking one exam on it, I think, is the worst idea I've ever had in my entire life.
Speaker 2:All taking four subjects, dropping one at the end of the year with nothing to show for it other than the cram on the classroom, as many students that are doing the UK, because the default those people watching from outside the UK the default is to take four subjects, as either was, and then, after the first year of study, maybe drop one, a percentage, carry on to four. Yeah, when I see okay, we can agree to disagree. Agreeably, that's okay. I actually like exams. I think exams are important. Having been through them, our business depends.
Speaker 1:Keep them and keep them.
Speaker 2:But I think you're like more regular, modular, accessible tests that can be taken when students are ready. Now, obviously, our school system, our school year, is built around the architecture of the exam calendar and you know lots of teachers now in December are in every lesson, are saying, well, yeah, this is in an exam, you should do this, this and this and this links to that and whatever. So teachers are part of their vocabulary. The exam technique is something you should have to teach, yeah, and but equally a professional exam. So people will leave university and take professional exams regularly and there's a case actually I think it was almost the case for saying that we should continue taking these exams. So I taught for 38 years and didn't take an exam between 1988, 1986, or in 19, and 2023 of my driving test. Should there be regular Digital class? I think I did. I only hit two pedestrians. Okay, that's mine, that's mine, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, first, first, first time on the personal podcast.
Speaker 2:We should teachers take a professional top of exam every five, 10 years. Would that? Would that be aware of encouraging them to top up their professional knowledge, who knows? And of course teachers can take master's courses and other other enrichment terms. Interesting that, the teacher of professional development space is a certain we've become pretty big in. We offer lots of good days for teachers and different subjects. I guess we're building community and commercial dividends. Have you got 50 teachers in the room per day and given a really good day, they could be potentially customers.
Speaker 1:I know you might might like or might not like talking about it, but I'd be curious on what your thoughts are on teaching at Eaton College as well. I graduated a year or so ago. What was the experience like? I mean, for a lot of other people there's often a lot of press about the school, often showing it in a negative light or just talking about how much it costs to go a year but actually teaching that for such a while, what are the students like? What is it like to teach there? And, yeah, what was your overall experience like teaching at Eaton?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, great question, and I guess now I've left I might be able to say something about it. So I arrived in 2000, early 2000. Keeping in mind the context, of course, I'm a state school lad from Yorkshire, harvey. Okay, I was born with a plastic spleen in my mouth. I didn't have the necessary of the advantages that other students had. I arrived with three conceptions, came as a head of department and the reality is that after an initial couple of years which was pretty tough, I guess just finding my feet I absolutely had a blast. I had a blast for 23, 24 years.
Speaker 2:Students were immensely teachable, interesting and interested in the subjects they're taking. They are often they don't accept necessarily conventional wisdom, which I think is always good to think counter-intuitive and challenge, to go against the grain with an idea. Amazing times, great. I love my time in the classroom. I hopefully had a decent time with me in the economics classroom. I loved coaching sports, running, student running societies, helping students run societies, running a tutor group. It's an all-in. You will have experience as a student. It's an all-in experience, all-embracing. So your day started, your day probably started. What time was first lesson? 9 o'clock. Chapel was 8.30.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I was probably off. You had to be at breakfast for 7.15 every day and you have societies to what like 10 or 11.
Speaker 2:Your day. If your breakfast was 7.15, you had to be in US by 7.14. But I was always up. I probably because the sweat equity in teaching to you said most days at Eton, most days. Well, okay, every day I would do an hour in the morning and an hour at night working on the business. So blogging, because our blog goes live at 7, anything we write before 7 goes out as an email, but oftentimes we'd be writing at 4 to 7, linking some story in the news. Then something would happen during the day. She'd blog at lunchtime and then obviously society meetings had the evening of things. I would do that. So it's a long day. If you're teaching at a boarding school, you'd probably get up about 6. I probably get to bed at 11.12. So it's a long day, no set hours, but amazing time Wouldn't have given her up for the world. I mean, day schools and boarding schools are very, very different places to be and it takes a certain kind of idiot to want to teach in a boarding school.
Speaker 1:Do you think there was something different about Eton, or do you think it's like any other boarding school?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, we're now looking in from the outside. What are the differences? Fundamentally, most teenage students are the same they want to be taught well, they want to be challenged and questioned, they want to get, they're ambitious, they're competitive, they're very competitive. But fundamentally people are the same and I think and everyone's even thought about fees and uniforms and that sort of context the joy of being at a place like that was the sense again, the sense of community.
Speaker 2:See, when I left in the summer, the people I really wanted to say goodbye to were the non-teaching staff, the librarians, the security guards, the people who work in the laundry and our wonderful cafeteria, because they're the DNA of a great, great school. In the same way, the support staff of the DNA of any business, as you'll find out in the business world the people who are doing the hard yards day in, day out, a solid job or what make a business on every single day. So if you take away, strip away the bells and whistles of a place like Eton, it's a very privileged existence and I felt privileged to be there, but fundamentally it's a school and I suspect always will be, whatever the future holds, and increasingly, of course, the school that's evolving and changing over time. So the work that they're going to be doing and opening some new six forms, becoming more open, I think, more tolerant, more aware of the complex world in which we live. It's a remarkable institution in many ways and I love being there.
Speaker 1:What was some of the I mean something I often reference when I talk about this podcast was actually the society program, and I could pretend that there's always different societies and often quote all the people, all the politicians or musicians and people that come there, but fundamentally, the one I enjoyed the most was the entrepreneurship society, which I was fortunate enough to get involved in. Why did you get involved with entrepreneurship society in the first place? What is it? What were some of the highlights and main things you took away from helping running?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I arrived in 2000. I then ran the Keynes Society, which is the economics society it's called. Keynes was a student, I think. I didn't teach him, I just missed him by a couple of years. And then, 2004, I founded the entrepreneurship society with a bunch of Keynes students, mainly because, if she did you, I was having a ball, having a blast with my own business. I thought there was a kind of momentum and a wave towards entrepreneurship, popularity of dragons Then she probably see many times that I've stopped watching it for variety reasons. So there was that kind of interest in entrepreneurship and so students took up the baton, started organizing meetings.
Speaker 2:Over time we've been some years more active than others, but I think in the school it was one of the most most similar, one of the busiest systems. I believe I've had some students set up great, great websites and great businesses on the back of it. Some of you have already exited. I had a leaving do a few months ago and that's. Some students have already exited their businesses and it is. It is insane. Of course they like to scale really quickly. Was I'm a slow burner. Highlights will shoe Speaking the founder of Deliveroo. We had Chris Barton, co-founder of Shazam, which is unbelievable. I think he'd sold his business to Apple for about a hundred million dollars that week and he came, came to speak to us. Karen Billingmore has been a great supporter. The founder of Cobra Beer, I don't know what. What were your favorite meetings, harvey Buett? For me too many to mention.
Speaker 1:Did, did. Am I getting this wrong? I feel like I saw a poster Did Sam Altman? On the talk yeah.
Speaker 2:He did. It's really interesting. So Sam came to speak. He was open AI, so he was at Y Combinator. Oh, so the other guy was Nick Bell. So I taught Nick Bell at the Warground School, newcastle. He then left in the age of 16, left school at 16. Must be in my teaching and he then went off to found his own business called Team Front, which is a kind of end bionic. This was the first way of the internet, and then he ended up at Snapchat, became number three at Snap, so he managed to get back in touch with Nick. Let's be in Australia thinking he bought over. Who's the founder of Snapchat?
Speaker 1:I shouldn't know who that is, there's one called this, three of them. There's one called Evan Spiegel, I think, and there's two more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we packed out the theater at school. You know, literally people sat at the front. Unbelievable event. So that was incredible. So you were to, you were mentioned, you were reminiscing. I interrupted you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I was asking about. I was asking about Sam Altman, because obviously now we're talking about AI and he's become the CEO of one of the biggest, biggest businesses in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, when he left AI open AI last week, we tried to get him come and join us here to build up our artificial intelligence. So I think Microsoft nipped in just fraction.
Speaker 1:I think he's back. I think he's back again now.
Speaker 2:He came to terms with he was brilliant. I mean, it's truly brilliant. Of course, not many students knew him, or often yeah.
Speaker 2:And the techie guys will, but the place was packed, so it was really interesting and it says a lot about, maybe, our school that we were both at. I put on LinkedIn or something that Sam was speaking at. There'll be an open invitation for some old students, old boys, if, like former students, come along and listen if they want to do, and quite if you didn't know, been me 10 or 15 or 20 students came along and terrific event. I then hosted a little drinks party after this, as you do, just to say thank you, and they all came as well and, of course, what they? They were thinking way, if I can just have five, ten minutes for somebody's time, that is gold dust, because they're in the kind of space. It then morphed into them giving our esteemed speaker a lift into London. She's lovely of them is, save me a taxi fare, save me an Uber. But of course, it then gave them an hour in London Sorry now in the car To chat about their projects and their ideas. Wow, what's going forward? That's networking, isn't it?
Speaker 2:There's a brilliant stories from a guy called Steven Steve Johnson, who wrote a book. If I can recommend, load there were two. Go to one of the recommend, by the way, to your, to both your viewers. One is by Steven Johnson, came out about ten years ago. It's called where good ideas come from and it's it's absolutely brilliant in terms of the genesis of ideas in business. Steven Johnson, where good ideas come from, and he has a phrase called which is says chance favors a Connected mind. Chance favors the connected mind, students, and though at Duke as a phenomenal Energy, isn't there an activity in this kind of entrepreneurship space, particularly if you can make entrepreneurship with computer science or languages or whatever it is. Chans favours the connected mind and I think that's hard part of what we've tried to do it to you, always building those little connections. That's eventually, so I'm dippity, might smile on you if you just just happens, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah the other one is always Sutherland. It was at came, I was at Camus. You've always removed me. You had a book two years ago called oh gosh, I come here, come to me, I'm always over. Anyway. The central idea is that the opposite of a good idea could be an even better idea, and Roy Stewart is just absolutely brilliant at the counterintuitive thinking Alchemy alchemy is the name of the book a surprising power of ideas that just don't make Sense. Just give you one very quick example. Let's say you're selling fruit at a fruit store and you're down to your last. What's your favorite fruit? Harvey?
Speaker 1:Pineapple correct.
Speaker 2:You win a pineapple, so you want to. You know you're selling pineapples in a stall. It's getting towards the end of the day and you've got one pineapple left, okay, and people just aren't buying it. Maybe they think that it's at least good pineapple, maybe it's going off a bit or something whatever. And normally, ordinarily, you'd lower the price, wouldn't you? That's why I taught you to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:I've already. I've probably eat it.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's good, that's counting too, as you're thinking. But there's an even better idea, and that's to give it away. So put it. Instead of having one pineapple in the box, which people can see, there's one left. Just put it away underneath the the counter and if somebody says you're going to pineapples left, you get it out and say look, this is for you. I've held it back. Please take it as a gift.
Speaker 1:That's some that's interesting. You say that because I've heard of Like fashion brands when they run out of stock they actually burn it all. So they don't give it away because they try and keep the scarcity of the products.
Speaker 2:Gasty. Well, there's a story today from enough. So there's a brilliant England goalkeeper in Sarka. Is that what they call it in the states? Sarka, yeah, I know you play a different sport.
Speaker 1:I don't know what that is. I don't know what soccer is.
Speaker 2:It's a more of 22 people running around a field making silly noise, that's football.
Speaker 1:That's football. That's another heart of the earth.
Speaker 2:So there's a brilliant, a truly brilliant goalkeeper called Mary Europs who plays for England and in the football team and before the woke up in the summer, nike decided not to manufacture any England women's goalkeeper shirts. This created a media frenzy, a few worry around on the internet and tens of thousands of you know girls who love, love Mary Europs and wanted to buy the shirt but couldn't. So in the end Nike did produce some shirts ex post after the event, which sold out, sold out, and of course every teenage football fan is a girl, probably wants a news of gold-clicking fan, probably wants a Mary Europs shirt for Christmas. So Nike said they're gonna make some more. Uh, and they put them on sales it yesterday, I think they sold out in five minutes. Sold out in five minutes. Now, is that a deliberate Nike strategy Not to be used enough, which is your thought, I guess.
Speaker 1:I don't think that was that. I don't think, I don't know. That doesn't sound deliberate, that just sounds yeah.
Speaker 2:Commercial mistake not to understand the true demand yeah the pent up demand for these, these shirts.
Speaker 1:I think it's more. I think it's more luxury, but luxury brands that do that. Because I think Nike, like it's, that's more about seeing more people wear the shoes, wear the clothes, wear something like Louis Vuitton, you know. It's about having. You only want people to have the handbag. It's seen as like a prize, so you don't just want the regular person walking with it. So I think there's kind of a difference between the two. But I, unconscious of time, I want to ask what's? Yeah, so I want to ask what's next for you? You've now, you've now finished eating. You know you're now at juice to you. You know you're now at juice to you. Um, what's the plan for juice to you? What's the plan for you personally Over the next few years?
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, the plan is to carry on with the business. I'm having a great time fantastic team here Creating new resources, writing all sets of teaching power points for students and teachers which we offer for free, thousands downloaded. Uh, doing some online teaching. Where schools are a little short of staff, we can step in and do a bit of online teaching, hopefully order traveling next year. Lots of international schools want to uh To have somebody from chubit to giving some revision support. Uh and just uh, enjoying Learning, about writing, about broadcasting, about the subject that I've been teaching for 38 years. Well, the thing is, we don't know where the future is, but we we know it'll be fun along the way. That's the really key bit.
Speaker 1:It's the um, it's the. You know. You say you give the stuff away for free. Is that the red-born model?
Speaker 2:It is and essentially it is. We have something called lead magnet, so I'll put a powerpoint up or quiz up today for free which teachers can download. I mean hundreds to thousands to over the over the period and it's just part of the community. If you're off to a lead magnet, hey, you get there. You get their contact details which is great from a market. Can you explain?
Speaker 1:Can you explain what that is for someone listening quickly and lead magnet?
Speaker 2:Okay, so I put something on the website. This afternoon I write a blog and saying here's a powerpoint on inflation, or the latest unemployment figures have come out. Here's a powerpoint on the uk economy. If you want to use it in your lessons, just download the powerpoint. All you need is a tutor to your account, free account, download it Stores on your website, stores on your server and you can use it and amend as you want. So thousands of teachers do this because that's time-pressure and, as a result, they get a resource for free. Um, she's always updated, we get some great marketing collateral and it's all win-win. It's a positive thing. It's a positive sum game. It's based on the lead magnet and seems to work for us. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much. I feel like I could, um ask you a lot more questions, but I'm conscious that you've got to get to. You know you've got 25 hours worth of live streaming today, um, so thank you very much for coming. It's glad to see you and Jim here today. Um, I feel like I learned a lot from from your journey growing up, to why you actually pursued a career in education. I think it's very admirable, um, to actually stick to something that you you enjoy, even when you've got this successful business on the side. You are a very good teacher. Very kind, talk me a lot, and and lots of generations of atonians and and Millions more people around the country, um, regardless of what people say about the school, you are a very good teacher. So I appreciate you coming on and it's glad to. I'm glad to see you doing so well and I'm excited for everything that comes next.
Speaker 2:So thank you. Thank you again. I hope 2024 is a great year for you at Duke. It sounds it really exciting time to be there.