During COVID, Readlee, Drew Madson’s startup, offered teachers a highly effective way to measure and remedy reading deficits among online learners. This led to the company being acquired by Paper, the tutoring platform. An inspiring interview.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Drew Madson
What Readlee is Solving
Behind the Scenes of Readlee
How Readlee Came to Be
"... COVID just highlighted this need that already existed..."
"...I highly recommend checking out The Opportunity Atlas. If listeners haven't looked at this, it's an amazing analysis of how certain interventions can actually improve people's ability to make more money over the course of their lives and have more opportunity and flourishing..."
"... What are large language models going to do to this space?..."
How Drew Developed an Interest in Education
Parting Thoughts
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Young Readers Win Big”
Guest: Drew Madson
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish and Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty for its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out in the street, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics, and has been tremendously helpful. Some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Drew Madson
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston’s most interesting angels. Today, we are really lucky to be talking to a founder who is not in Boston, who is in Minneapolis, but has a Boston connection to this. Welcome Drew Madson.
Drew Madson: Well, thank you so much, Sal. It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Sal Daher: I'm very grateful to Katharine Woodman-Maynard, who is the artistic genius behind the design of the website and everything. Everything that's beautiful about my website, design-wise is Katharine. Everything else is just my bad taste.
Drew Madson: [chuckles]
Sal Daher: She has become a friend of Drew’s because they’re two Harvard grads who are graphic artists or artists, and who work in this field, and they met in Minneapolis. Katharine connected me with Drew because he has a very interesting startup called Reedlee that is doing something really amazing that has exited. We’re going to get the story here of a cool startup that has exited. Anyway, Drew Madson give us an understanding of what the problem Readlee is solving.
Drew Madson: Well, it was a pleasure to be here, Sal. Katharine is amazing. For all the folks who are listening, if you haven't seen her work, I highly recommend checking out her stuff.
Sal Daher: Her graphic novels, starting out with the graphic novel, The Great Gatsby. I know she's working on another one, very diligently working on another one. It's just gorgeous, luscious, just -- the design. I understand you have a graphic novel as well?
Drew Madson: Well, I'm working on a project. Nothing in terms of compared to her.
Sal Daher: Sorry, speaking out of turn.
[laughter]
Drew Madson: I do like to cartoon on the side. That's a small passion of mine.
Sal Daher: We will not suppress that information, otherwise I was going to ask a brilliant sound engineer to suppress that. That didn't finish-
Drew Madson: [laughs]
Sal Daher: -to go off completely. [chuckles] Drew, tell us what problem Readlee is solving.
What Readlee is Solving
Drew Madson: The big problem that really solves is the literacy crisis. If you look at students across the United States, one out of three American students is proficient in reading.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Drew Madson: Just think about that, one out of three American students, and when you break that down by lines of difference, racial lines, one out of five Black students are proficient, one out of five American Indian students. It's just catastrophic.
Sal Daher: It’s scandalous.
Drew Madson: Absolutely scandalous.
Sal Daher: It's a scandal because the ability to read, it is not rocket science. It is difficult. It's extremely difficult, but every child can learn to read.
Drew Madson: Exactly. I think that that core belief, right, every kid can read, deserves to read. When I think about the system, our system has fundamentally failed our students in supporting their ability to read. What Readlee does is really elegantly simple. It's grounded in the science of reading. I built it when I was an urban scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
What it does is it listens to students read any content out loud, and gives them immediate feedback on their oral reading fluency, and teachers get that feedback immediately as well. What that means is, any kid can practice on any content at any time and get that feedback on their oral reading. I can tell you more about it, obviously, over the course of time, but that's the brief story of Readlee.
Sal Daher: No, this is fascinating. I just can't get enough of this because I have been a Sunday school teacher, and I used to have kids read Scripture aloud. I found that some kids really struggled with it, and then after a few weeks, the kids they had improved tremendously. It's they don’t do enough of it. A little bit of practice and very soon, because they are of age where the brains are primed to learn and to develop, they have all this stuff that's available to them, plasticity is really high at that stage.
They have nothing but plasticity. They don't have anything pre-programmed. Everything is just ready to be rewired, and so it's amazing. Reading aloud is an art we have lost. Like the Romans, they didn't know how to read silently. That only emerged in the Middle Ages, I guess in the monasteries you couldn't be reading out loud [laughs] The Romans, when they read, they claimed so they were taught to read aloud.
Drew Madson: Oh, totally. I think that's what's so interesting is we are oral creatures. That's just how we are designed and when you talked about whether it's Sunday School, reading sacred texts aloud, some of our most early adopters were whether they’re religious schools, practicing reading the sacred texts to kids who just need to practice reading so that they don't feel uncomfortable in front of their peers. For many of students who are using the product for the first time, is the first time they ever heard themselves read aloud and to hear that aha moment for kids to say, "Oh, I sound like that?"
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Drew Madson: "Oh, wow. I can do a lot better," it was a profound change. Especially think of all of the English language learners or what you might frame as multiple language learners across the United States that have this platform. That's, actually, why the company was called Readlee. L-E-E is read in Spanish, so Readlee.
Sal Daher: Readlee, okay. Yes. Muy bien.
[laughter]
Drew Madson: That was also, I think what's been so profound about building out the product is, it's this skill that everybody needs to practice and they want to practice on the content that they want to do. Not just whatever the curriculum or a specific mandate that a classroom has, but really create content that they're most interested in.
Sal Daher: Drew, that is also a very powerful observation. Having the child decide the content that's to be read because you can have a kid who's a poor reader but who's a phenomenal baseball player, loves baseball. When that kid is reading about baseball, the kid's reading ability is much higher than what would normally be.
Drew Madson: That’s right.
Sal Daher: If you had this kid reading aloud about baseball or about quilting or whatever the kid is into, the kid's going to be at his best or her best. That's a way to connect. It's like the lowest-hanging fruit that you have. You're playing the kid’s strengths-
Drew Madson: I think that’s exactly right.
Sal Daher: -by allowing to read any content instead of just being fixed to the reader, and all that stuff. I love this. I really love it. This is fascinating. Anyway, tell me exactly how Readlee works. What is it that it's doing behind the scenes?
Behind the Scenes of Readlee
Drew Madson: Behind the scenes, it's very simple. Just for the process, let’s say I’m a fifth grader, I sit down, I go on to our app, you can use any type of platform or any type of computer. Most kids are using Chromebooks because that's the most prevalent type.
Sal Daher: That’s what schools got.
Drew Madson: Yes, that’s what schools have, but you can also use your phone or iPad, and so forth. They, essentially, open our product, they can immediately click record and start reading orally. Then what we do is we take what they're saying and we match it to this transcript of their content and do a comparison of the two to say, "Okay, here's the fluency of the student. Here's the vocabulary of the student," and then we'll eventually get to comprehension.
Fluency, vocabulary comprehension are some of the pillars of the science of reading. Then we take that comparison and turn it into meaningful data both for the student as well as to the teacher. What that data looks like it’s a few things. One is fluency as we tell the educators the words correct per minute that students have which is an important benchmark for understanding how the students are growing.
We also keep track of the total amount of words students read and the unique words that they've read. That's really important too because there's all sorts of studies that show exposure to vocabulary over time is a key indicator of you're growing your knowledge base, and then, obviously, growing your reading capacity. It's really that simple. We're making that comparison.
We spent early on a bunch of time building out a lot of language models. We made our own, essentially, in-house speech rec right in the early days. What we found, actually, is that educators and students didn't really care as much about the accuracy of speech rec as much as they cared about just getting the practice time in. We said, "We could go down this route of building a meaningful speech rec." We tested all of the speech rec that was out there--
Sal Daher: Speech recognition?
Drew Madson: Exactly. Yes. There's tons of amazing companies that do this really, really well, and what we found was two big aha moments. One is, educators and students, they use Siri, they use Alexa. They know it's not perfect and so they didn't expect our product to be perfect. Then the second thing is, to build trust, we always show them and say, "Hey, this is what we think you did, but you can correct it and change it if you think it's different." Because accentedness and dialects are so diverse across the United States, we always wanted to give the space for educators and students the opportunity to, essentially, say, "No, this is the right way. This is how I say this word."
Sal Daher: Insurance versus insurance. [laughs]
Drew Madson: Exactly. Root versus route. [laughs] Yes. Sal Daher: It listens to local dialects, local variations, and it's amenable to that. You can correct for that. Great. Okay. Tell me the founding story of the company. How did the company come about?
How Readlee Came to Be
Drew Madson: Something that you should know about me is, I am an educator at heart and by training. I spent nine years in the classroom. I cut my teeth teaching on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in rural South Dakota. One of the most impoverished parts of the country. Then, I worked in education policy and I've helped build the public charter school with a bunch of amazing educators. We saw 100% of our kids--
Sal Daher: Oh, you've been to the frontlines? Okay.
Drew Madson: Exactly. I've been on the frontlines and I think the reason why I share that is because I thought I would be a teacher forever until I had this moment happen to me one day. I was teaching 150 students and it's March in high school history. I never heard this student read. His name is Oscar. His mom kept texting me wondering how Oscar was doing in class.
One day I pulled him to my side and I said, "Look, Oscar, what I want you to do is just take your cellphone out, record yourself reading aloud, a voice memo, and then send it to me as a text message, include your mom on the text chain. That's all I want you to do. When you come to class, I will know how you did. You don't need to take a quiz. You don't need to read aloud in class. I just want to know how you're doing."
He sent it to me and it was just this crazy moment, and I was like, "Wait a second. There's all of this rich information about how Oscar's doing." You have this 16-year-old kid, English is his second language. He doesn't want to speak out loud in class, he feels uncomfortable about it. Then it's like, "Oh, there's a lot of vocabulary words he doesn't even know how to pronounce. No wonder he's struggling in class. Here's how much time he actually practiced."
I realized then and there, I was like, "Every kid should be able to have, essentially, someone listen to them every single day and give them feedback on the content." Then, I had this belief that I was a hypocrite. I've been teaching for nine years and telling all these students to follow their wildest dreams. I was like, "You know, I'm going to follow mine. I want to see if this could be a company." I applied to all of the fancy schools. Got into Penn, Stanford, and Harvard. Went to Harvard to have, essentially, all of the smartest people on literacy and education tell me that it was a bad idea. That was my goal.
Sal Daher: Oh, [laughs] that's difficult. That's difficult.
Drew Madson: Well, that was the goal. Essentially, halfway through the year, they said, "No, you could build this. This is, actually, a great idea." I built the company when I was a student there. I'm happy to share more, but that's the origin story.
Sal Daher: There meaning at the Harvard School of Education? Is that where you were?
Drew Madson: That's right. Yes. I was studying Technology and Education and spent the first half of the year really just making sure all the research was right. Because I believe education is like medicine. If you don't have grounding research behind it, what you're doing is quackery. That's just not okay. Then, the second half of the year was, essentially, testing the product in classrooms. Then, we founded the company in real-- Things got real in early March of 2020, and then COVID hit.
Sal Daher: Oh, gosh. Yes.
Drew Madson: Yes. When COVID hit, that just opened up a realm of opportunity for us because every school in the country said, "Wait a second. How are we going to know if kids are reading and where are they struggling?" Then, it just opened up a realm of opportunity in terms of building up the investment in our first round because a lot of folks were interested in education because nobody knew what was going to happen.
Sal Daher: Oh, I could just imagine. The idea of having the kids interact with software and help improve their reading, it's just amazing to do it remotely. You don't have to be in a classroom. It extends the power. I love this idea of technology giving teachers superpowers, like a force multiplier for teachers.
"... COVID just highlighted this need that already existed..."
Drew Madson: That's exactly it. I think it's really the-- We had teachers always tell us, "This has saved me 4 hours a week, 5 hours a week, 10 hours a week. I no longer have to do reading logs. I no longer have to sit next to every kid in class and listen to them read for two minutes. It's just I immediately know who's struggling, who has actually read, and how they're doing, and we don't even have to be in the same building. I can assign this for homework and everyone comes to class and I know who has read and who hasn't, and who needs help."
That's why I think it was so profound and I think COVID just highlighted this need that already existed. We were able to double down on that and then grow pretty quickly. We closed our first round, our pre-seed round that Summer of 2020. Then, I'm going to tell you more, but--
Sal Daher: Oh, no, no, no. Please do. I mean, this is a happy story for COVID era. This is a wonderful thing.
Drew Madson: Yes.
Sal Daher: Because so many companies just floundered during COVID. Plans were all turned upside down and they weren't able to pivot fast enough to deal with conditions in time and some interesting companies just went out of business, but I'm so glad to hear the story of your company that, actually, was helped by this. It's the kind of stuff that should have happening before, but the lockdowns prompted people to explore this really valuable resource. Please tell me more. You got your Series A.
Drew Madson: We did a pre-seed.
Sal Daher: Pre-seed? Okay.
Drew Madson: Yes. We closed that in the summer of 2020, and then my belief early on was we had this big question. It was like, "Okay. Do we go top-down or do we go bottoms-up? Are we going to start selling this hard to districts or are we going to start selling this to individual teachers?" I made it for the long game. I love Simon Sinek's framework of the infinite game. You're trying to solve massive problems that seem beyond your life.
I knew immediately that what we would need to see is real stickiness and adoption by educators in our first year. That's what matters because I've seen so many instances where districts buy something, and nobody uses it. Our first year was really getting that thesis right, and it was profound. We said, "Okay. We're going to focus on teacher adoption, bottoms-up approach." Then what we're also going to focus on is research out in the wild." Because there's one thing to say that we have academic backing around all the products-
Sal Daher: Sure.
Drew Madson: -It's far and other to say it's, actually, working. We did that in that first year and we found that students who are using the product were outperforming their peers on standardized exams, particularly English language learners and particularly in education, you often have what are called performance bands. You break it in four categories, and the lowest performance bands are seeing the most growth. For me, I said, "Okay. Wow. This is exactly why we build the product."
Sal Daher: Exactly. This is the promise of technology, leveling the disparities in society, just making it easier for every kid to thrive, to grow. This is really promising that it has this effect.
Drew Madson: Yes. We proved out those things. I think that having a clear North Star of what we were trying to improve with students' outcomes then led us, I think, to the two next major successful events. One was we closed our seed round.
Sal Daher: If you can just stay on this, as I understand it, before trying to expand the scale and so forth, you really doubled down, did your homework on making sure that you are adding value to the teachers-
Drew Madson: Yes.
Sal Daher: -and to the students in the classroom. How did you select a sample for that? Because you can end up having a sample that's highly idiosyncratic, highly particular, and doesn't really translate to a large population of kids.
Drew Madson: That's a great question around difference between early adopters versus later adopters. It also, I think, was an important question when I was thinking about how I tell my story to the investment community. Because if you tell a lot of investors, "Hey, I'm selling individually to the teachers," they're going to say, "Well, you're going to make no money at this," and it's a terrible idea.
Sal Daher: You're catching the few early adopters and this thing has no-- You're not going to cross the chasm as a point of view.
Drew Madson: Exactly. My framing is, "Well, if we can't capture these early adopters and we can't see the stickiness with them, then if we go either the acquisition route or continue to go through our rounds of fundraising, then we haven't solved the fundamental problem." That's going to contest in the long-term. We really had to prove that stickiness. In order to find all of these educator groups-- [chuckles] I feel lucky. I was an educator for nine years and-
Sal Daher: Oh, okay.
Drew Madson: -there were so many networks. The first thing that we did was we said, "Where do educators go to find all the best information about the latest products?" We knew, okay, we have a lot of communities. Some of the communities are on Facebook groups where you have 40,000 members who are talking about these are the products I'm using and why. We simply had our first early adopters make simple videos of them explaining in 30 seconds why they found the product to be useful. A lot of them used-
Sal Daher: Wow.
Drew Madson: -the word life-changing. We posted those videos on those groups and found tons of early adopters across, essentially, at what was really powerful, across every segment of K-12. We, actually, had a handful of university professors who were also using the product. Then that gave us the initial market penetration meant to figure out, "Okay, where do we really focus and double down on?" Where we found the sweet spot was grades 4 through 8, ELA teachers. It was, essentially, upper elementary, middle school teachers, they wanted the product.
Sal Daher: English language, arts.
Drew Madson: That's right.
Sal Daher: Basically, you're prospecting for where you're going to look for the low-hanging fruit was informed by your work as a teacher. Then you ended up finding early adopters, but across different verticals, so to speak, different disciplines.
Drew Madson: That's right. Sal Daher: That makes a lot of sense because I'm thinking about another education company that I invested in and it was a very successful investment. It was also started by an educator. Started out as Academic Merit, became Finetune Learning. It's been acquired. Steve Shapiro is the CEO who took it and really helped build the basis of the original founding vision of it. Really, the idea was how to leverage the ability of teachers to design evaluation tests and so forth in text. Being able to have kids write and then evaluate that writing efficiently.
I think there's just tremendous potential for this application of software and machine learning. Those were the time when the large language models are all the rage. Everybody's talking about their effect on the world. They're going to eat the world. I just love seeing the effect of this in these really practical areas. In your case, reading, in the case of Finetune Learning, evaluation of written text, it's just a potential so massive here. It's just so massive.
Anyway, I want to ask you about the exit, how it came about. Just finish your narrative and your funding, and so forth, and then tell me about your narrative. Then I want to ask you, what do you make? What are the large language models going to imply for what you're doing, for the area you're working in? Anyway, so first, please continue the story. Finish the narrative arc.
Drew Madson: Sure. The narrative arc is, in addition to that first year, we got the stickiness with teachers, we got efficacy study completed, and then we won a bunch of different fancy awards. We won the Penn Graduate School of Education, Business Plan, Grand Prize. We were awarded an award from the New School Adventure Fund and Literacy, and then we became a finalist for South by Southwest, EDU. We pitched there.
Right when I was about to pitch about maybe two months prior, I just closed my seed round, led by Equal Opportunity Ventures, out of here in the Cambridge area. What's really amazing about that fund and why I respect so much about them, is that they invest in companies that demonstrate that their users and customers will improve in economic mobility. This is why I'm so passionate about the work, is, I believe education should give students a lifetime of possibility and power. What that means at the end of the day is that they should be able to, at some level, make more money. In literacy, what's so powerful, and I'll spare all the research, unless you really want to get into it because there's a lot of--
Sal Daher: No, no, no. That's a general purpose. I'll take your word for it that you've read it. [chuckles]
Drew Madson: Essentially, for every 10 books that a student reads every year over the course of their academic career, say about 100 books in their academic career, their lifetime earning potential increases by 12%. We can track how much kids are, actually, reading. Part of my work, even right now, with the company that acquired us, is to track the quantity of student reading and then connect it to, essentially, economic mobility measures to say, like, are kids, actually, building a life of more possibility?
Sal Daher: I just question about the data a little bit. Have they disaggregated the effect of just the fact that if kids have more successful and wealthy parents, they tend to read more? How is it that the causal connection was established?
Drew Madson: It's connected to some work that came out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Professor Kim, who did a study on the quantity of reading by low-income students over the course of summer programs.
Sal Daher: Oh, by low-income students.
"...I highly recommend checking out The Opportunity Atlas. If listeners haven't looked at this, it's an amazing analysis of how certain interventions can actually improve people's ability to make more money over the course of their lives and have more opportunity and flourishing..."
Drew Madson: Then it's also connected to Raj Chetty's work on looking at The Opportunity Atlas, where they track how reading is connected to improvement in SAT scores, which is also connected into economic mobility. I highly recommend checking out The Opportunity Atlas. If listeners haven't looked at this, it's an amazing analysis of how certain interventions can actually improve people's ability to make more money over the course of their lives and have more opportunity and flourishing.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. Pardon my digressions, my idle curiosity. [laughs]
Drew Madson: I love it. Essentially then, what happened is we pitched at South by Southwest EDU. The parent company saw us pitch there. The company is called Paper Education, and they're extraordinary for a lot of reasons. Essentially, we had two options as founders. We have an amazing co-founder, his name is Steve Ascar, and was, "Okay. We had money set aside for our next round, for our Series A." Then we had this opportunity around M&A.
It came back to this question of, "We're in it for the long game, we're in it to improve mobility for students, what really matters here? We had the research, we knew that the product worked, we had the stickiness, and we said, "Okay, Let's scale this, because if our goal is to improve outcomes for millions of students, here's an opportunity we're going to scale it." I think part of it really early on in the acquisition process is we told the parent company, we said, "Hey, we're not interested in a merger if we can't continue to build this thing in X, Y, Z ways." Their answer, essentially, was, "We'd love to. We'd love to have you join the team to help build those things." You hear a lot of horror stories around M&A, but I think because we are so values-driven, I can say today that we're still going to build a thing that we care about and we're, actually, getting to do even more around impact, which is why I'm in the business.
Sal Daher: That's the thing about strategic players. The old saying about, "If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go in a group," African saying. You can lose the mission if by going in a group is going to get-- because these large strategic players are massive, and so forth. In the life sciences, because I'm a life science investor right now, focusing on that, if you develop a technology, a life science technology, a new biotech has a lot of road to travel to get that to patients. Whereas the strategics are practicing that.
They can reach scale very because they already have established markets, they're dealing in large markets they're way up the learning curve and that's what they're really good at. They're not good at coming up with new ideas, but if they're able to find new ideas that have been de-risked and they're really, really working well, they're tremendous at taking it to scale. If they continue faithful to the mission, no better way to scale. Excellent idea. What's the name of the acquirer?
Drew Madson: The company that acquired us is called Paper Education. They're an Educational Support System and what I love about them is that they, essentially, think about supporting students holistically through their academic journey. We see this in a few ways. One is what they're known for is 24/7 tutoring support on any content at any time. A kid who, say, is in maybe rural Minnesota and needs help on algebra at eleven o'clock at night because they have a big test the next day, they can go on Paper and they can get a real person who's trained in the specific content to give them help.
Then they have all these other components, which I think is really important when it comes to education, which is, essentially, being the connective tissue around how a student is going through their academic journey. What that means in many ways is for us, is like, how are you practicing reading? How are you practicing math? How are you practicing writing? How are you getting ready for college and career?
Paper fits into each of these components and they think they realized in the last few years that they really needed a meaningful literacy product that wasn't necessarily attached to any content or curriculum, but could be flexible for all of the communities that they were serving. That is, I think one of the reasons why that they purchased us because they knew that they would be able to continue their mission of ensuring that students are confident and successful for life.
Sal Daher: That's cool. Paper.co-
Drew Madson: That's right.
Sal Daher: -is the website? Very cool. I just wonder, are they a public company?
Drew Madson: They're not a public company. They just completed their Series D last spring.
Sal Daher: Okay. Very promising. Really interesting. Drew, the other question is large language models. What do you think they're going to do to this space?
"... What are large language models going to do to this space?..."
Drew Madson: What are large language models going to do to this space? The number one thing that I see, and I might be wrong on this because we focus so much on practice, but we built up a huge data mode of students' oral reading. When you think about accentedness, there's a lot of both regionality to it as well as dialectS. Then it's not just how you pronounce words, but it's how you pronounce phonemes, parts of words is really important, and a lot of the language models that are out there do not account for the phoning level of dialects and really specific regional accent in this.
What that means, I think, is that we're going to see some extraordinary speech rec come out in the next few years that can, not only understand American Indian kid who's living in Pine Ridge, but they can also understand a fifth grader who's living in the deep south who might speak differently. I think that's critically important in order to serve those students better. That's I think the one component of large language models. The other which I find to be fascinating is, prosody is a measure of your intonation of how you read.
Sal Daher: Would you say that word again?
Drew Madson: Yes, prosody.
Sal Daher: Prosody. How's that spelled?
Drew Madson: P-R-O-S-O-D-Y. It's, essentially, like if you say, I don't know, "The cat is fat," versus, "The cat's fat," it has a different meaning to it, right?
Sal Daher: Right.
Drew Madson: What's interesting is that there are lot of speech rec out there that can pick up the mode of qualities of students' oral reading, which can then also be connected to student interest, which can then also be connected to comprehension. I think there's a lot to be said about, okay, you're getting the accuracy better through having more specific data modes for lots of demographics, which then will allow you to also understand whether or not students are interested and comprehend what they're reading, which then can connect to all sorts of other sectors.
We're talking training people on whether or not they are getting their training materials for, say, a corporation that needs them to read out loud their materials. I think there's so many applications for those elements of large language models. Then I also just say, you can then map that to different types of literature and books to figure out where people find the most interesting parts of books and literature, which is, I think that's a whole crazy thing as well.
Sal Daher: That's so intriguing. I just delight in this. I have friends who've spent all their time speculating about what's going to be happening on this. These chapters, very, very interesting. One thing that I've observed in my lifetime, I learned English as a second language around age 11, and I remember Cambridge. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I came here as an immigrant 57 years ago, people had much more of a Boston accent in those days than they do now.
Television and so forth has smoothed out the accents across the country. The local accents are much reduced. It's rare to hear a real Boston accent. Don't hear it anymore [laughs]. I think similar things have been happening all across the country. I wonder what these large language models are going to do to our access? Maybe it'll allow local accents to endure because it'll be able to understand all of them. I don't know.
Drew Madson: Yes, it's fascinating. I don't know much about how accents develop over time, but what I can tell you, anecdotally-- I've lived in Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Massachusetts, and South Carolina all in the last six years. Then I just moved back to Minnesota.
Sal Daher: Oh, that's another component. That's another thing that, last generation, mobility is also axed to file down the differences between accents. National television and mobility. Please, continue.
Drew Madson: What's funny about having moved all over parts of the country, I initially believed in your theory as well, where it's like, "Okay. Accents are being shaved down or nulled down. Having come back to Minnesota, I was like, "Holy moly, my family is so Minnesotan." It's just how we talk. I think there's something to be said about it and I don't know how the language is developing in each of these regions, but it feels like accents may, at least in my experience, be getting even more robust in certain areas just because language is always changing. It's always developing.
I think that's the other thing about speech rec is that no speech rec model can ever be perfect because language is always changing and developing. It's just always going to be that case. We're chasing, essentially, an impossible task, which is joyful and fun in its own way. That's how I think about language development across the United States because South Dakotans, and Coloradans, and South Carolinians, and Minnesotans, we all speak a little bit different.
Sal Daher: I really appreciate your perspective on the projected direction of where accents are going to go. I love accents. English is second language. Personally, I love accents. Anyway, I thought we would do a little promo for the podcast and then get into your biography a little bit in the end of the podcast here. If you are enjoying this tremendous conversation with Drew Madson, founder of Readlee, and you're like, "Wow. I love this podcast. I wish more people could hear it," you can do that by first following the Angel Invest Boston Podcast, and then leaving a review.
A written review is really powerful. A rating, we love five stars. My mom told me to ask for five stars. Also, if you spend a little time and just write a few sentences. It doesn't have to be a paragraph, just a couple of sentences. It really helps the algorithm, find this excellent content and show it to more people. Follow us, which means subscribe, and then review us, rate us, and help excellent content like this conversation with Drew Madson, founder of Readlee. Anyway, Drew, tell us about how you got into this whole education business. How did you develop an interest in education?
How Drew Developed an Interest in Education
Drew Madson: I'm from Minnesota born and raised in the Twin Cities. Education was always a dinner table conversation.
Sal Daher: Were your parents teachers?
Drew Madson: No. What's interesting is they did a lot of work working with Amnesty International, International Campaign for Free Tibet, losing social services, and helping actually refugees resettle in Minneapolis. I grew up, I thought it was a normal thing that Americans just had refugees living in their house.
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Drew Madson: That's just like what we did. When you're talking to what feels like family about where they're going to go to school like so forth, and how you can help kids and young adults who are coming to this country develop a life of economic mobility, I just thought that's just what you do. Then there's a core part about who I am that I think drives my journey, which is I feel a great debt to the extraordinary education I received, and I feel a deep commitment to my community and my country.
The reason why is just because I love so much of our values of believing in the life of liberty and opportunity, and yet I feel this great gap. When I graduated from college, I knew I had to do service. Service for my country and for my community. I applied to a bunch of different service organizations, gotten to Teach for America, and then was placed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation which is right near the Badlands in South Western South Dakota.
When I got into the program, my dad said, "Hey, Drew, do you know anything about the Dakota War?" I go, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "The Dakota War was going on during the Civil War, and the students that you're about to teach you grew up on their ancestral land." It was just this big moment where I said, "Wait a second. Oh, wow. There's a lot of inequality in this country that I have benefited from."
I think that that experience brought me to really start a lifetime of trying to become an amazing educator. That brought me to working in education policy, found a public charter school that was extremely successful. I guess this is the last thing I'll say is early in my career I read a book called The Road to Character by David Brooks. I know a lot of folks might have different opinions about David Brooks.
I think that the thing that struck with me is, he said, "In our current economy, so many of us move from job to job to job to job every two or three years." What we really need to think about is developing a deep and masterful expertise in a certain field, and that will help you over the course of your career. Early on, I said, "You know what? I want to become an extraordinary educator. I want to know this field so deeply." I can't tell you how helpful that was for me as a founder of a company because understanding the education field helped me make product decisions, marketing decisions, sales decisions in a way that I just don't think I would've if I had been teaching just for a few years.
Sal Daher: Well, educators have this ability to make sure that people are following what they're saying. It's like that's the definition of education, you can't educate unless people understand what you're saying. This is a basic for communication, any type of messaging and communication. I've got a nephew who's a tremendous educator and he's going to love this podcast. He's going to love this.
This is really fascinating. It's wonderful that you knew about the Dakota Wars, but you also have the perspective of working with refugees so that you understand where the US is in relation to other countries and how privileged we are. Despite all the imperfection, all the injustices and all the problems we have, that we have a place where we can work on solving these problems and not just focus on the inequalities and the injustices, but, actually, do something effective, which is what you've done. I love this interview. I'm so thankful to Katharine Woodman-Maynard for introducing me to Drew Madson. Excellent. Any other parting thoughts?
Parting Thoughts
Drew Madson: Sal, I just want to say thank you for I think facilitating this conversation and all the work that you do. I think something that I've really in my approach to all of the fundraising that I did with my company and then later, obviously, all my education work is, it's really about building a community. It's about building connections with people for a lifetime of work. That's how I've approached this work. I'm just so grateful to know you and look forward to future conversations because that's what it's about. It's building the relationship so we can, essentially, make the world a better place.
Sal Daher: Oh, human connection is everything. [laughs] That is the soul of-- Don't get me started on that topic. You never get offline.
Drew Madson: [laughs] You know that.
Sal Daher: You never get offline.
Drew Madson: Our next stop, yes.
Sal Daher: You got the hard stop and, yes, next stop.
Drew Madson: [laughs]
Sal Daher: I have a neighbor who's specialty is in that.
Drew Madson: Wow.
Sal Daher: Drew Madson, I'm very grateful for you making time for your very busy schedule at Paper.co, on this wonderful mission that you have, and for being on the Angel Invest Boston Podcast.
Drew Madson: Great. Well, thanks, Sal. Have an extraordinary day.
Sal Daher: Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.