The Exchanges

Q we spoke to Eileen at Cowboy before our She said, when it came to your location, at the time of your move, it was a big risk moving from SF to Denver. You personally described it as leaving Rome in the middle of the Renaissance. I love that description. So with both of these in mind, why did you make the move from SF to Denver? Let's start with that.

A Sure. So when we were starting Guild, it was a handful of us. We were working on Stanford's campus and had a small office in San Francisco, but we knew we needed to make two big sets of hires in our coming year. One was the product and edge team, and two was our first group of Coaches who work directly with our students. And you can think of them as half of a inside support team and half a retention team. And so the starting advice was keep your leadership and your tech team in San Francisco and have everybody else go somewhere else more affordable. But I thought that was bananas because I needed our product team to be constantly working with our coaches to build the right product that they would use and that our students would use in interaction with one another. And so I had a strong conviction that leaving San Francisco was the right move. I'm from Denver, so it candidly had a running head start, but we did look at a handful of other cities. And what I ultimately decided to do, because our investors were pretty nervous about this in 2015, was I posted the job description in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Denver. And lo and behold, the far and away best candidate was out of Denver. It happened to be also a female director of ENG, Jess Rousin, who today is our SVP of engineering. And when I put the resumes in front of the investors, it was so clear to them that if we could find…

AI assessment note: “I'm from Denver, so it candidly had a running head start”

Q on the show a long time again now, but it was a great episode. I do want to talk about the wider team though, because when I chatted to Byron, another of your investors, He said that you've been among the best across the whole portfolio of recruiting star execs. Tell me, what have been some of your biggest learnings on what it takes to hire the very best candidates?

A That is very nice of Byron to say, and he's been a big partner to me in helping me recruit really talented leaders. You know, I think it all starts with building relationships, and often those relationships happen well before it's time to hire the person. I could talk about any of the leaders on my team, but I'm going to highlight two specific folks Who are great examples of the relationship building. Josh Scott is on our team, and Josh was originally an advisor who I was introduced to through Michael Deering. And Josh and I got to know each other as both founders. He had founded Craftsy here in Denver, which is a wildly successful company that went on to sell to NBC. And he became an advisor of guilds, but I secretly harbored ambitions for two years to get Josh on my executive team. And I slowly told more and more people that ambition and told Josh, but he... Was doing some nonprofit work and taking time off after, you know, a seven-year sprint with Craftsy. And then we convinced him to join the board as our independent, and then he joined Guild part-time, and then slowly he joined Guild full-time. And at all points of that relationship, I was just trying to spend as much time with him as I could, and get him as passionate and as excited about Guild as I was, and it really paid off. And the same thing happened with Bijal Shah, who is our Chief Product Officer. She and I became…

AI assessment note: “it all starts with building relationships, and often those relationships happen well before”

Q business now, because there was another quote that you said to me before the show that I loved, but I wanted to dig in on it. And you said the best businesses directly intertwine mission and margin. So what makes you believe that mission and margin are so tightly integrated? And there's a common suggestion that to optimize margin, you have to impact mission. How do you think about that?

A Yeah. So I think this is a bit of a false truism that gets Spread around. And I think there are too many companies and there was an era there for a long time in startup lore where companies were encouraged to just get going and get eyeballs or get users and figure out how to get paid later. And I actually think that's the crux of the problem because I believe that if you start with how do you get paid, you can make sure that your mission and margin are aligned. And for us at Guild, that meant making some risky choices. So we already talked about customer acquisition cost. And as you know, and others probably know in most models, When you do something that's tied to lead generation, you get paid up front, but in our business, we said, Hey, look, we're going to be helping deliver great high quality students to these universities, and we're going to be helping employers. And we, instead of getting paid by either of those entities up front, we want to get paid term over term as the students succeed. And so we've actually put all of our revenue at risk and said, we only want to get paid when the student is succeeding in school. And they're retaining, and when they're retaining at work. And all of our dollars start with the employer. The employers are paying for the tuition of their employees to go back to school, but we don't receive those dollars until they go to the university, an…

AI assessment note: “if you start with how do you get paid, you can make sure that your mission and margin are aligned.”

Q say about the benefits of hiring there in Denver, because whenever I talk to people outside of the core tech hubs, They always say, ah, we have to hire people from them or talk about the challenges of it. Why do you think there is this misconception then that you have to be in the tech hubs to hire the best talent? And how do you push back against that?

A So you just have to think about it as a different funnel. So I think in San Francisco, the funnel is very, very wide, but your chance at winning at the bottom of the funnel when you're an early stage company is incredibly hard when you're competing with Google and Facebook salary packages, right? In Denver, it's a narrower funnel, but we win at the bottom of the funnel. Always, or nearly always, and so just a different equation. I also think in Denver, it's worth noting, you can also recruit a lot of people to move here, and a number of our leaders have moved specifically here, and now more and more of our employees in general are actually moving to Denver to join the company.

AI assessment note: “you just have to think about it as a different funnel”

Q Not at all, but I would love to kick off with a little bit about you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of startups and come to Found Guild today?

A My journey to startups actually began with Political campaigns. And I'll, I'll connect why I think those are so similar in a bit, but I, I grew up in, in democratic politics. I worked on six or seven campaigns, uh, through high school and college, and I had the amazing fortune. And I think it was the luckiest chance of my life to work on the Obama, 2008 campaign. And that turned into the transition team. And then ultimately I was able to follow the team into the white house. Uh, it was the dream job. I was 21. I had basically dropped out of Stanford at that point for a period of time. And it was really the dream. But I told my boss, who's this amazing leader, Don Gipps, who at the time was the head of presidential personnel, which is sort of like the chief human resources officer of the White House to fill the cabinet and ambassadorships. He went on to become the ambassador of South Africa. But I told him in a vulnerable moment, Don, I really miss the campaign. And I don't know why, because we made it, right? And he said, oh, Rachel, that's because you're a startup person. You need to go work in startups. This is the bureaucracy. And so he counseled me about why the massive high growth mode of the campaign had been so energizing for me. You know, we went from tens to hundreds to thousands of employees on that campaign in matters of months. It's so mission oriented. Everyone sho…

AI assessment note: “My journey to startups actually began with Political campaigns.”

Q on the show a long time again now, but it was a great episode. I do want to talk about the wider team though, because when I chatted to Byron, another of your investors, He said that you've been among the best across the whole portfolio of recruiting star execs. Tell me, what have been some of your biggest learnings on what it takes to hire the very best candidates?

A That is very nice of Byron to say, and he's been a big partner to me in helping me recruit really talented leaders. You know, I think it all starts with building relationships, and often those relationships happen well before it's time to hire the person. I could talk about any of the leaders on my team, but I'm going to highlight two specific folks Who are great examples of the relationship building. Josh Scott is on our team, and Josh was originally an advisor who I was introduced to through Michael Deering. And Josh and I got to know each other as both founders. He had founded Craftsy here in Denver, which is a wildly successful company that went on to sell to NBC. And he became an advisor of guilds, but I secretly harbored ambitions for two years to get Josh on my executive team. And I slowly told more and more people that ambition and told Josh, but he... Was doing some nonprofit work and taking time off after, you know, a seven-year sprint with Craftsy. And then we convinced him to join the board as our independent, and then he joined Guild part-time, and then slowly he joined Guild full-time. And at all points of that relationship, I was just trying to spend as much time with him as I could, and get him as passionate and as excited about Guild as I was, and it really paid off. And the same thing happened with Bijal Shah, who is our Chief Product Officer. She and I became…

AI assessment note: “it all starts with building relationships, and often those relationships happen well before”

Q we spoke to Eileen at Cowboy before our She said, when it came to your location, at the time of your move, it was a big risk moving from SF to Denver. You personally described it as leaving Rome in the middle of the Renaissance. I love that description. So with both of these in mind, why did you make the move from SF to Denver? Let's start with that.

A Sure. So when we were starting Guild, it was a handful of us. We were working on Stanford's campus and had a small office in San Francisco, but we knew we needed to make two big sets of hires in our coming year. One was the product and edge team, and two was our first group of Coaches who work directly with our students. And you can think of them as half of a inside support team and half a retention team. And so the starting advice was keep your leadership and your tech team in San Francisco and have everybody else go somewhere else more affordable. But I thought that was bananas because I needed our product team to be constantly working with our coaches to build the right product that they would use and that our students would use in interaction with one another. And so I had a strong conviction that leaving San Francisco was the right move. I'm from Denver, so it candidly had a running head start, but we did look at a handful of other cities. And what I ultimately decided to do, because our investors were pretty nervous about this in 2015, was I posted the job description in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Denver. And lo and behold, the far and away best candidate was out of Denver. It happened to be also a female director of ENG, Jess Rousin, who today is our SVP of engineering. And when I put the resumes in front of the investors, it was so clear to them that if we could find…

AI assessment note: “the far and away best candidate was out of Denver.”

Q say about the benefits of hiring there in Denver, because whenever I talk to people outside of the core tech hubs, They always say, ah, we have to hire people from them or talk about the challenges of it. Why do you think there is this misconception then that you have to be in the tech hubs to hire the best talent? And how do you push back against that?

A So you just have to think about it as a different funnel. So I think in San Francisco, the funnel is very, very wide, but your chance at winning at the bottom of the funnel when you're an early stage company is incredibly hard when you're competing with Google and Facebook salary packages, right? In Denver, it's a narrower funnel, but we win at the bottom of the funnel. Always, or nearly always, and so just a different equation. I also think in Denver, it's worth noting, you can also recruit a lot of people to move here, and a number of our leaders have moved specifically here, and now more and more of our employees in general are actually moving to Denver to join the company.

AI assessment note: “In Denver, it's a narrower funnel, but we win at the bottom of the funnel.”

Q can I ask, I'm sure you get a lot of early stage founders and first time founders come to you for advice on attaining such great clients. What advice do you have for other founders when contemplating whether to get that payload brand of your Walmart's, et cetera, versus trying to get the smaller, lower hanging fruit that maybe is a little bit easier to get in the early days?

A So I think it's often framed as a go-to-market strategy. And of course I believe in that, but I also believe it's a product And so I think sitting down and really thinking about what will it mean if this is our go to market strategy? Do we have the sales rhythm or the ambition to do that key account go to market motion? Or is our product one that we want to actually have grassroots adoption, or we want to sell in to a manager or director, but then also having a conversation with your product leaders, or if you yourself as the CEO, in most cases are still the product leader thinking about what are the implications of building a product For a handful of big customers to start versus building it for many SMB or self-service customers, and that will really dictate a different approach and strategy, and so I think those are the two conversations you have to have before you decide which way you go.

AI assessment note: “those are the two conversations you have to have before you decide which way you go”

Q Can I ask, did you get pushback from your investors or potential investors? Because one could say that if you did get the payment up You know, obviously the payment is much quicker and you could plow that into growth and potentially growth, maybe faster. Did you get pushback from the investors and how did you think about that?

A Yeah, we did. Obviously. Yeah. The cashflow looks a lot nicer if you get paid up front, but I, this is one of the beauties of working with long-term investors who are thinking about the long-term versus the short-term is we are obviously taking a short-term hit on cashflow, but we are building a more recurring and predictable business. So I think that's quite important because our, you know, our revenues are recurring and come to us on a term-over-term basis. We also proved that we could predict our churn curve, and we have much lower churn than other entities in higher ed. And then lastly, we proved that this was the right long-term game, and that by doing this and taking these risks, we were going to be a sustainable long-term company with the right reputation to do the very important work we do of helping people go back to school in a trustworthy way.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we did. Obviously. Yeah. The cashflow looks a lot nicer”

Q business now, because there was another quote that you said to me before the show that I loved, but I wanted to dig in on it. And you said the best businesses directly intertwine mission and margin. So what makes you believe that mission and margin are so tightly integrated? And there's a common suggestion that to optimize margin, you have to impact mission. How do you think about that?

A Yeah. So I think this is a bit of a false truism that gets Spread around. And I think there are too many companies and there was an era there for a long time in startup lore where companies were encouraged to just get going and get eyeballs or get users and figure out how to get paid later. And I actually think that's the crux of the problem because I believe that if you start with how do you get paid, you can make sure that your mission and margin are aligned. And for us at Guild, that meant making some risky choices. So we already talked about customer acquisition cost. And as you know, and others probably know in most models, When you do something that's tied to lead generation, you get paid up front, but in our business, we said, Hey, look, we're going to be helping deliver great high quality students to these universities, and we're going to be helping employers. And we, instead of getting paid by either of those entities up front, we want to get paid term over term as the students succeed. And so we've actually put all of our revenue at risk and said, we only want to get paid when the student is succeeding in school. And they're retaining, and when they're retaining at work. And all of our dollars start with the employer. The employers are paying for the tuition of their employees to go back to school, but we don't receive those dollars until they go to the university, an…

AI assessment note: “if you start with how do you get paid, you can make sure that your mission and margin are aligned”

Q I have to. One of my nerdy passion topics is customer acquisition costs for educational facilities. Can I ask, with the rise of alternative educational facilities in the lights of Lambda School, coding boot camps, do you think that we're going to see a rising tax for these traditional educational facilities? How do you predict the next few years in terms of customer acquisition costs for the traditional educational institutions?

A I'm so excited to talk to you about this. I didn't know that you shared this nerdy passion I talk about customer acquisition cost of higher ed everywhere I go, so I'm glad you and I can now be the two people passionate about this topic in the US. Yes, we know it's going up. Our data shows that schools that are trying to acquire students in a B to C format today are struggling across the board, and I actually think while Lambda's newer to the game, you look at some of the older coding boot camps, they are also struggling as they're watching their B to C acquisition cost Because they're all having to manage it within a monopoly system, effectively, between Google and Facebook, or duopoly, I guess we should call it. And so I believe we need to not only be having more competition, and I'm a big fan of what many of the innovative boot camps like Kenzie and Lambda and others are doing, but I also think we need to be talking about distribution channels. And I think there are many other ways that both our regulatory environment as well as our private sector can encourage different ways for students to hear about the ways they should go back to school. We've got this Huge problem, which is college knowledge is concentrated in the people who need it least, right? Like the New York Times and its readership know a lot about college. Well, it turns out they all already went. And so the sixt…

AI assessment note: “Yes, we know it's going up. Our data shows that schools”

Q Can I ask, did you get pushback from your investors or potential investors? Because one could say that if you did get the payment up You know, obviously the payment is much quicker and you could plow that into growth and potentially growth, maybe faster. Did you get pushback from the investors and how did you think about that?

A Yeah, we did. Obviously. Yeah. The cashflow looks a lot nicer if you get paid up front, but I, this is one of the beauties of working with long-term investors who are thinking about the long-term versus the short-term is we are obviously taking a short-term hit on cashflow, but we are building a more recurring and predictable business. So I think that's quite important because our, you know, our revenues are recurring and come to us on a term-over-term basis. We also proved that we could predict our churn curve, and we have much lower churn than other entities in higher ed. And then lastly, we proved that this was the right long-term game, and that by doing this and taking these risks, we were going to be a sustainable long-term company with the right reputation to do the very important work we do of helping people go back to school in a trustworthy way.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we did. Obviously. Yeah. The cashflow looks a lot nicer”

Q can I ask, I'm sure you get a lot of early stage founders and first time founders come to you for advice on attaining such great clients. What advice do you have for other founders when contemplating whether to get that payload brand of your Walmart's, et cetera, versus trying to get the smaller, lower hanging fruit that maybe is a little bit easier to get in the early days?

A So I think it's often framed as a go-to-market strategy. And of course I believe in that, but I also believe it's a product And so I think sitting down and really thinking about what will it mean if this is our go to market strategy? Do we have the sales rhythm or the ambition to do that key account go to market motion? Or is our product one that we want to actually have grassroots adoption, or we want to sell in to a manager or director, but then also having a conversation with your product leaders, or if you yourself as the CEO, in most cases are still the product leader thinking about what are the implications of building a product For a handful of big customers to start versus building it for many SMB or self-service customers, and that will really dictate a different approach and strategy, and so I think those are the two conversations you have to have before you decide which way you go.

AI assessment note: “those are the two conversations you have to have before you decide which way you go.”

Q That is one Smart guy. I do love words. I do want to finish it. There's a lot of suggestion around investor value add. Where, from your perspective, have you seen investors really do add the value? And then are there any other elements where through the Twittersphere and through talking to founders, often people feel they do, but actually they maybe don't.

A Good question. I think investors add the most value by being a thought partner to the CEO. And so I think about it in terms of having them on my speed dial, but having them on my speed dial for different reasons, right? So you want different invest You can call about different problems or different areas of expertise. I also think they're talent and recruiting partners, and I think that gets overlooked sometimes. As I said earlier, Byron and others, um, Michael, et cetera, have been amazing partners for me in helping close candidates. I think early on, there's a danger of treating your board like your boss. And the place where I feel really grateful is that Michael was supportive of me hiring an executive coach very early on, you know, right as we were getting the company going. And now Felicis and others are supporting every founder to get an executive coach. And I think they can help avoid some of those pitfalls you hear about, about using the board for the wrong purpose or using your investors for a purpose that isn't the ideal one. And an executive coach can be a great bounce back board to help you sort through those issues.

AI assessment note: “I think investors add the most value by being a thought partner to the CEO.”

Q Not at all, but I would love to kick off with a little bit about you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of startups and come to Found Guild today?

A My journey to startups actually began with Political campaigns. And I'll, I'll connect why I think those are so similar in a bit, but I, I grew up in, in democratic politics. I worked on six or seven campaigns, uh, through high school and college, and I had the amazing fortune. And I think it was the luckiest chance of my life to work on the Obama, 2008 campaign. And that turned into the transition team. And then ultimately I was able to follow the team into the white house. Uh, it was the dream job. I was 21. I had basically dropped out of Stanford at that point for a period of time. And it was really the dream. But I told my boss, who's this amazing leader, Don Gipps, who at the time was the head of presidential personnel, which is sort of like the chief human resources officer of the White House to fill the cabinet and ambassadorships. He went on to become the ambassador of South Africa. But I told him in a vulnerable moment, Don, I really miss the campaign. And I don't know why, because we made it, right? And he said, oh, Rachel, that's because you're a startup person. You need to go work in startups. This is the bureaucracy. And so he counseled me about why the massive high growth mode of the campaign had been so energizing for me. You know, we went from tens to hundreds to thousands of employees on that campaign in matters of months. It's so mission oriented. Everyone sho…

AI assessment note: “He said, oh, Rachel, that's because you're a startup person.”

Q That is one Smart guy. I do love words. I do want to finish it. There's a lot of suggestion around investor value add. Where, from your perspective, have you seen investors really do add the value? And then are there any other elements where through the Twittersphere and through talking to founders, often people feel they do, but actually they maybe don't.

A Good question. I think investors add the most value by being a thought partner to the CEO. And so I think about it in terms of having them on my speed dial, but having them on my speed dial for different reasons, right? So you want different invest You can call about different problems or different areas of expertise. I also think they're talent and recruiting partners, and I think that gets overlooked sometimes. As I said earlier, Byron and others, um, Michael, et cetera, have been amazing partners for me in helping close candidates. I think early on, there's a danger of treating your board like your boss. And the place where I feel really grateful is that Michael was supportive of me hiring an executive coach very early on, you know, right as we were getting the company going. And now Felicis and others are supporting every founder to get an executive coach. And I think they can help avoid some of those pitfalls you hear about, about using the board for the wrong purpose or using your investors for a purpose that isn't the ideal one. And an executive coach can be a great bounce back board to help you sort through those issues.

AI assessment note: “investors add the most value by being a thought partner to the CEO.”

Q In terms of the first customers, one of the first you landed was Walmart, the Fortune One company by Revenue. The question from actually every single one of your investors was how did you do it first? Let's start with that one. How did you get such a great customer so early?

A It's a great question. I think the honest answer is we probably shouldn't have gotten them just on sheer size and dynamics, right? Walmart is the very best supply chain manager in the world, and they're quite good at choosing its vendors and doing a lot of work there to be quite successful. We were small, but the one great thing we had in our favor was that we understood what the average American needed. And that is what Walmart actually does better than anyone else in the world. Walmart understands the needs of the average American better than any company I've ever met. 85% of Americans shop at Walmart, and 10% of American households work at Walmart. And so they understood at such a deep level what we were setting out to do and how different and audacious our mission was. And it made so much sense to them, given their grounding in the educational and skills gap needs related to the American workforce. And so with their 1.5 million employees, they were certainly the biggest opportunity we saw to have an impact on this problem. And we were so grateful that they wanted to take a chance on a smaller company. And as a result, we've learned so much from them.

AI assessment note: “we understood what the average American needed”

Q I have to. One of my nerdy passion topics is customer acquisition costs for educational facilities. Can I ask, with the rise of alternative educational facilities in the lights of Lambda School, coding boot camps, do you think that we're going to see a rising tax for these traditional educational facilities? How do you predict the next few years in terms of customer acquisition costs for the traditional educational institutions?

A I'm so excited to talk to you about this. I didn't know that you shared this nerdy passion I talk about customer acquisition cost of higher ed everywhere I go, so I'm glad you and I can now be the two people passionate about this topic in the US. Yes, we know it's going up. Our data shows that schools that are trying to acquire students in a B to C format today are struggling across the board, and I actually think while Lambda's newer to the game, you look at some of the older coding boot camps, they are also struggling as they're watching their B to C acquisition cost Because they're all having to manage it within a monopoly system, effectively, between Google and Facebook, or duopoly, I guess we should call it. And so I believe we need to not only be having more competition, and I'm a big fan of what many of the innovative boot camps like Kenzie and Lambda and others are doing, but I also think we need to be talking about distribution channels. And I think there are many other ways that both our regulatory environment as well as our private sector can encourage different ways for students to hear about the ways they should go back to school. We've got this Huge problem, which is college knowledge is concentrated in the people who need it least, right? Like the New York Times and its readership know a lot about college. Well, it turns out they all already went. And so the sixt…

AI assessment note: “Yes, we know it's going up. Our data shows that schools”

Q In terms of the first customers, one of the first you landed was Walmart, the Fortune One company by Revenue. The question from actually every single one of your investors was how did you do it first? Let's start with that one. How did you get such a great customer so early?

A It's a great question. I think the honest answer is we probably shouldn't have gotten them just on sheer size and dynamics, right? Walmart is the very best supply chain manager in the world, and they're quite good at choosing its vendors and doing a lot of work there to be quite successful. We were small, but the one great thing we had in our favor was that we understood what the average American needed. And that is what Walmart actually does better than anyone else in the world. Walmart understands the needs of the average American better than any company I've ever met. 85% of Americans shop at Walmart, and 10% of American households work at Walmart. And so they understood at such a deep level what we were setting out to do and how different and audacious our mission was. And it made so much sense to them, given their grounding in the educational and skills gap needs related to the American workforce. And so with their 1.5 million employees, they were certainly the biggest opportunity we saw to have an impact on this problem. And we were so grateful that they wanted to take a chance on a smaller company. And as a result, we've learned so much from them.

AI assessment note: “they understood at such a deep level what we were setting out to do”

Q That's fascinating too, in terms of where the trust lies, but I do want to start on that people element because you said before to me something very interesting when it comes to ambitious mothers and ambitious moms are the best underutilized asset. So walk me through this one, Rachel. Why do you think this? And what do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about ambitious mothers?

A Sure. So I should name, you know, no conflict, no interest. I'm a mom myself and, and categorize myself as an ambitious one. And I say that word sometimes because it can be a little provocative, but I think We need to have a conversation with our 30 to 45 year old workforce, which is such an important workforce for nearly every high growth company, as well as, you know, the global 2000 about how we're going to support people to have ambitious career paths and their ambitious family choices. And, you know, I recently spent time with the Colorado state demographer, and she was sharing data at a national level, as well as in Colorado, that really supports this problem. I don't think enough people are talking about, which is that tech and other high growth companies are making it Really, really hard for people to have both an ambitious career and an ambitious family life because of biological clocks and timing and the complexity of the always on work culture and a number of things. And so we're really passionate at Guild and it's for moms and dads about helping people figure out how do you not have to choose between taking a step off the career path or letting your foot up off the gas in order to have a family or forgoing your family ambitions because you want to put the foot on the gas on your career and saying you can do both. We're going to create role models for you to do both,…

AI assessment note: “making it Really, really hard for people to have both an ambitious career and an ambitious family life”

Q What do you think would be optimal for the space moving forward in terms of how the distribution channels play out and how we see an equalizing in terms of information across a broader segment of America?

A So our data tells us that our students today trust their CEOs and their companies, and we work primarily with fortune 1000 employee bases. They trust their companies more about the future of work and the skills they need to acquire. Then they trust either the government or the higher ed sector. And that's not a surprise, right? Like the dynamicism of the economy today is such that workers get it, that the CEOs of their companies know what skills are rapidly changing and what they need to know at a more Fine-tuned level than the average university president. That said, I think the power of the U.S. government and the, its power to collect data and to do labor forecasting and predictive analytics is pretty strong. I'm just not sure they're doing a great job at it right now, and so I believe it's a multi-pronged issue that the public, private, and non-profit sector should all be focused on, but for now, we see that our students are looking to their companies to help inform their next learning opportunity.

AI assessment note: “multi-pronged issue that the public, private, and non-profit sector should all be focused on”

Q That's fascinating too, in terms of where the trust lies, but I do want to start on that people element because you said before to me something very interesting when it comes to ambitious mothers and ambitious moms are the best underutilized asset. So walk me through this one, Rachel. Why do you think this? And what do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about ambitious mothers?

A Sure. So I should name, you know, no conflict, no interest. I'm a mom myself and, and categorize myself as an ambitious one. And I say that word sometimes because it can be a little provocative, but I think We need to have a conversation with our 30 to 45 year old workforce, which is such an important workforce for nearly every high growth company, as well as, you know, the global 2000 about how we're going to support people to have ambitious career paths and their ambitious family choices. And, you know, I recently spent time with the Colorado state demographer, and she was sharing data at a national level, as well as in Colorado, that really supports this problem. I don't think enough people are talking about, which is that tech and other high growth companies are making it Really, really hard for people to have both an ambitious career and an ambitious family life because of biological clocks and timing and the complexity of the always on work culture and a number of things. And so we're really passionate at Guild and it's for moms and dads about helping people figure out how do you not have to choose between taking a step off the career path or letting your foot up off the gas in order to have a family or forgoing your family ambitions because you want to put the foot on the gas on your career and saying you can do both. We're going to create role models for you to do both,…

AI assessment note: “when you do, you get such phenomenal talent, and we've seen that here at Guild.”

Q What do you think would be optimal for the space moving forward in terms of how the distribution channels play out and how we see an equalizing in terms of information across a broader segment of America?

A So our data tells us that our students today trust their CEOs and their companies, and we work primarily with fortune 1000 employee bases. They trust their companies more about the future of work and the skills they need to acquire. Then they trust either the government or the higher ed sector. And that's not a surprise, right? Like the dynamicism of the economy today is such that workers get it, that the CEOs of their companies know what skills are rapidly changing and what they need to know at a more Fine-tuned level than the average university president. That said, I think the power of the U.S. government and the, its power to collect data and to do labor forecasting and predictive analytics is pretty strong. I'm just not sure they're doing a great job at it right now, and so I believe it's a multi-pronged issue that the public, private, and non-profit sector should all be focused on, but for now, we see that our students are looking to their companies to help inform their next learning opportunity.

AI assessment note: “our students today trust their CEOs and their companies”