YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexander Cummings

lines on the record: 80
first: 2018-03-05
most recent: 2018-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sounds great, Peter. You can find Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Today, I'm in New York City with a terrible voice, and I'm here with Alexander St. Ahmed, the CEO and president of GLG. It's a learning platform. We've just been talking about how GLG got created in the bust, essentially right before the bus. Let's talk about the idea that Silicon Valley thinks they can do this through AI and everything, knowledge. So let's talk about where it's going from a technological point of view, because what you're doing is pretty traditionally you're linking people with other, like, you know, not unlike LinkedIn or any of the other, like people are looking for something or Tinder or anything. You're linking people.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People love teaching good students. So the key to GLG is making sure that all of our, the reason why it's not a consumer idea yet is because you have to qualify the student. The problem with Yahoo Answers is just all sorts of people are asking random questions and are they worth teaching and also it.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people don't know who they want to learn exactly. They don't know exactly who they want to talk to. They come in with a question, I think there's more to learn about school security. Where do I go?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, so every reporter always asks us that question, and everyone in Silicon Valley asks that question. Most people don't really know how to find the expertise they're looking for, and they're not used to the process you would go through to find, I was a reporter also just for a year, but I found it really easy. I covered news for Bloomberg. I covered the Bundesbank for much of the year for Bloomberg. Oh, man, that's enough to get to get.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we invite a lot of people to do the project. Everyone can opt in or opt out. They fill out a questionnaire of what they do or don't know. They go through some legal and compliance and contracting type things. They're then available. Then we pass along their information, their biographical background. And the answers to those questions to a customer, the customer then gets to make a decision about who they want to talk to. And then there's a scheduling system in our sites and stuff that helps them.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be valuable or that they're the best at teaching. And most people, we always say that everyone loves to teach. They just don't know quite what they want to teach and where they want to teach it. Not everyone wants to go move to Boston and teach a course, but everyone does love sharing their expertise with the right people.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have expertise in podcasts, I guess. Someone wanted to launch one. Not pretty much. That's actually an important point because people don't really know what they have to teach either. So we will recruit a former Fortune 500 CEO and they'll ask us, what do you think I have to teach? And they have a lot to teach about being a Fortune 500 CEO or in a sector or pharma or whatever it is or interacting with the White House or managing corporate culture or whatever the subject is. But they don't really know what their real thing is.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we recruit because we think you're an expert in something. So, yes, we have a lot of inbound people applying, but in general, we're recruiting you because we heard your care swisher and we think you know something about something.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you work with someone at the LG, you can go to our site, but in general, you're covered by someone. We have a few thousand employees, someone covers you. And you call them and you say, I want to learn about school security. And here's what I'm thinking about. And they will go through our database. They'll invite new people. We'll ask people in the membership to invite other people at fairly high scale. So we want to invite a lot of people to this idea and hopefully have you connected with someone on the phone within a few hours. So it's quite on demand 15 minute on demand, but it's on demand as insane day or next day”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great. The digital component is just how do you scale, look, the digital side of GLG is fairly straightforward, but it's not that different from Uber. There's a car around the corner and you now know where it is because of GPS. GLG is just, how would you know who the best people are on the subject? And so we do everything, we use a lot of different technology to find the best people and what they want to teach or what they have to teach. And then we spend just as much time figuring out if you're a customer of ours what you want to learn. And to do that at scale requires a lot of systems, but not super fancy systems. Of course, we use AI for it. Of course, we have what you might expect, but it's a combination of the idea combined with simple systems.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it took off. So does it have? I mean, there is a digital element to it because you link people find you or not, or how do you look at it that way? Digital pieces. I want to get later to talking about where learning is going.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, our founding story is a little different. So the company's called GLG, it was originally Gerson Lehrman Group. It was started in 98 by a fellow named Gerson, a fellow named Lehrman. So it's Gerson Lehman Group. And the original idea that they had come up with was to start a publishing company and to raise some money for the publishing company. It's a long story, and I'll tell to you because it relates to the heart of the matter. But I joined them and we came up with this other idea to do this. And went out to raise money for it, but we didn't. Guru did and other people did. But the publishing company didn't work either. So we repurposed the capital from the publishing company and put it to this idea. But this idea worked. I mean, even as Guru was fairly immediately struggling, we developed a first group of customers who loved the idea and started working with us. And so it took off.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a one-on-one phone. Right. So to go back again to the nine, so you started this guru, got all this money, and there were three or four others that were like this. Talk about how did you manage, what happened? Your original premise was the same thing that you're doing now?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Differentiate. So Bain, McKinsey, et cetera, they deliver you what you should do. Their idea is you say, should we open in Australia and they deliver you a report? What should we do with our business? They deliver your report. I would say that we're not that. We don't tell you what to do. We don't tell you the answer per se. We teach you about things. You want to learn about markets. Most of the top strategy consultants do use us in most of the biggest companies in the world use us, or many of them do. But they don't use us for the same thing that they use at consultant for. You could call we do consulting, but it isn't really. The average interaction between, we've done millions of projects. Our members have answered, I believe, almost 100 million questions on our various sites. But the primary experience is a phone call.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how does that differ than other ways of people learning? Like how do they, or consultants really? Because that's what Bain does. That's what all the other consultants. So how did you differentiate?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can pull together a report, and those things are important. You should do those things. But then when it really comes time to start figuring out what you want to do, you need perspective from people in the space about how would your idea work in that market? And what if you did this? What if you did that? And it's the development of perspective, the development of, I guess you could call it wisdom on the subject that really only takes place just like this conversation. You could learn a lot about GLG, but you're going to ask me questions and learn more about GLG.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but the learning methodology is the same. I mean, I watch a lecture at IMIT. I watch the lecture on my phone. Now, you know, Coursera and others have made their focus more on skills training and skills development, which I'm fascinated by. The question is, what's the delivery mechanism of that learning? And the conceit of all those companies is that if you just take one to many and make it one to many, many, many, it's going to change the way everyone learns. idea is not that it's that customization is the key to the learning and that people don't really understand what the dynamics are that need to take place if you want to scale one-to-one but if you do accept those constraints that one-to-one is the most powerful method of learning so take the example i used you at a company you want to work on school security right what do you what do you read about that that teaches you how it really works”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are online courses Yeah, and I think our core idea is that, and just like I can make analogies, but our core idea is that one-to-one or customized learning is the new learning thing. In other words, making one-to-many one-to-many, many is one idea. That's what a lot of amazing companies are doing.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How can we get it out? How can you get it out? Right. Right, right. And there also were a bunch of companies that were slightly in your area, not so much the Udacities or the MOOCs, but the ones where you'd want to learn to play the guitar or you'd want to learn to do a lot of things and they would link you. LinkedIn, and that was sort of computer learning”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question and answer is, but the idea has a sort of a long intellectual history in the valley of what about all that knowledge that's in people's heads. How can we get it out? How can you get it out? And everyone, and then you apply Uber to that idea and you think, well, let's just connect everyone. But learning doesn't work like that. I always tell people for learning or Uber for learning, but learning is not selling a camera on eBay and it's not finding a car. The bar is much higher. You asked, why do the Duke faculty members, did they want to teach a group of investors because they learn through teaching?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which we could use today. I mean, you remember, you know, you saw a few years ago that some of the folks behind Twitter launched, I think it was called Ask Jelly. Oftentimes there was Korra. There's been Yahoo answers, LinkedIn answers.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right before everything went down, booming of biotech, and our first customers were investors who were looking to learn about all these new things that were happening in biotech. And so we went to the universities and said, it'd be good for you to share your actual expertise. In other words, investors are making decisions based on equity research reports, based on whatever other written materials they can find, and shouldn't they talk straight to the source? And by the way, you'll learn from talking to them too. It was a little bit based on some jealousy between Duke and Stanford at the time. I could get into the politics of it. I remember Stanford has always been connected with a venture community. Duke wasn't the dean of Duke, wanted to Duke to be a center of thought leadership. And so he invited a bunch of his faculty to teach with us.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the problem is that no matter how much money you pay the head of neurology at Stanford, he's not interested in that question. I mean, he might be if you have a real problem, but he thinks it's beneath his pay grade, not interesting. He doesn't learn through teaching that. So he drops off and it devolves adverse selection, which is the big problem I mentioned, Uber meets Harvard. There's a Harvard part, which is you have to qualify the student and the teacher. So we went a different way. We recruited the faculty at Duke and Stanford and Harvard Medical Schools, and we invited them to teach us.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can find them through the digital platform, idea, I think, on Guru was that you talked to them over the phone or you meet them in person. And as you know, they raised a lot of money. I think that was 98, 99, somewhere in there. When we were raising money. In fact, they announced there around a week after we went to see the same venture firms. Sure. And so we were kind of stuck because they raised a few hundred million. And what they did was they opened up the thing to anyone. And so you go to guru and if they have the head of neurology at Stanford on there, you can come and say, hey, you know, I have a headache. Can you help?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a lot of them. There were a lot of them. And we're actually one of them, although you don't know that, but we like to say when we went to raise money for this idea, we talked to all the same people that talked to Guru and Elance and Expert Ned, and you remember some of those. Yeah, what was the other one?”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surprise you Las Vegas Just for the record, but it was someone else looking at the So, this is all done online. They're clients of yours? Talk a little bit about your backgrounds. How did you get to doing this first? And then we can talk about how it works.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just because I was preparing for this, I looked through some of our projects this morning to name a few that are in the news. We're doing work on school security today that might surprise you. Right. So we had everyone from a really big tech company that you probably know down to a startup looking at how schools do security. And not in a political way like what guns should or shouldn't be there, but just how does the security work in the school. And we've done work today also actually comparably on hotel security after Las Vegas. And you keep going down this kind of political line. We took a client to see the wall. The wall, the border wall with Mexico, and had a group of people understand border security lay out how it actually works in real life. The client was not Donald Trump just for the record, but it was someone else looking at the subject. But a lot of stuff can be really boring. We did the first project this morning when I looked at the list this morning at 6.30. The first project was on how reservoirs are designed.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and love to compare us to some of those platforms too, but GLG is a one-to-one learning business for professionals. You can think of it. I hate these analogies, but the easiest way to think about it is like Uber meets Harvard So it is a one to one learning business. Like I said, so we have on the one hand, we have a group of companies, a few thousand companies that want to talk to various experts on various subjects, learn from experts on lots of different things. And so we have this membership on the other side of about 750,000 professionals who are available to teach. And like calling an Uber, you tell us what you want to learn.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's talk a little bit about your business because I don't think people know what you do. It's when you're talking a learning platform, people usually think of Udacity or one of the other Saul Khan platforms and things like that. So let's give me sort of an outline of how you got to where you got.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, I'm in New York City with a very bad voice, and I'm here with Alexander St. Amand. What a name. The CEO and president of GLG, a learning platform that connects businesses and investors with experts on a range of subjects. He's been with the company for 20 years and has been CEO since 2006. Alexander, welcome to Reco.”
2018-03-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Is 'Uber meets Harvard' the future of learning? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT