Ask A Mentor Anything With Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures

Ash Kaluarachchi: Hi Jessica, thanks for joining us for our Ask a Mentor Anything series. Can you tell us a little about your background, what Copper Ventures does, and what your mission is?

Jessica Millstone: Sure. I've been working in technology and education for about 25 years. I completed the ITP program at NYU back in the 90’s and I can remember Marc Andreesson visiting and giving a demonstration of his Netscape browser! I've always worked at the intersection of education, educational content and technology, and how they can work together to have better outcomes with a focus on research.

At Copper Ventures our mission is to support women entrepreneurs in the early stage, essentially pre-seed. We’ve been able to do a lot of advisory and strategic advice as well.

Ash: Can you characterize the grants you’ve given, the type of education you are supporting ?

We're thinking very broadly about what education is. Who are the people consuming education? What are their needs? What's the kind of advancement and the experience needed?

We've been funding exclusively in the education space but are also thinking about expanding beyond education to FinTech because we believe financial literacy is so important.

We’ve made about nine investments so far this year. I’m really excited about how many amazing women entrepreneurs we are meeting and being able to help them through the earliest stages of their company.

The fund that we started is an evergreen fund. We don't have a particular out date or how we have to deliver the investments. It's pretty slow, patient money. It's like again, very early, early investment, in early stage companies. We're really just looking for amazing women leaders, amazing women founders.

What we've noticed as we've started to make these investments, is that there's a kind of focus around educational experience: how to change and expand educational experience, like a system for all age learners.

Ash: When we think about edtech, our thoughts go to schools, but schools are among the most challenged education providers right now. Have you noticed any kind of trend toward broadening that definition of providing education, direct to parents or to other ways of providing learning to young people?

I actually believe that basically every company will be an education company and we're always going to be needing to learn new things and be able to sort of teach those back out to people like in a very broadest sense of the term education.

In a post COVID world, there's been this real split between school on one end and education on another, we actually had this opportunity, which we've never had before to actually kind of decouple, the place of school and the product of education.

And I think it's going to create so many amazing opportunities. It's also surfacing so many problems, the big problems that we knew in the back of our heads that we never confronted before. For example, the very idea that a school is a place where people eat it's basic food security, it's social, emotional learning, it's connections, in-person connections that we took for granted.

So there's so many reasons why school exists and now we've been able to kind of isolate those reasons in some interesting ways.

If you look at the higher ed space, I think there's going to be tremendous fallout financially from the ways that the business model of universities were really dependent on it, personally, teaching and learning.

I also think that those universities are doing some tremendous experimentation. We traditionally go to school for nine months and then take three months off. But Columbia and Bernard have officially switched to a three semester year where a student can pick two out of three of those semesters to attend.

Ash: Are you open to collaborating with entrepreneurs from other countries?

We only presently invest in US companies. But we definitely talk to a lot of entrepreneurs outside with us. Post COVID we got to see a number of countries put into place different ways of teaching and keeping school and educational life during COVID.

Depending on the culture of the individual countries, they sort of handled it in different ways, but it's not something that the US is great at looking at other countries and taking the best practices they're doing.

Ash: What are the rising needs of teachers?

I think in terms of what teachers need, I haven't, I haven't really, given this one too much thought. But I think that even during this decoupling time between school and education, I'm going to have to really figure out, what is the role of the teacher?

My great hope is that there will be a moving value around the actual teacher in the classroom. And also the new value of the parent as an educator at home and how those two entities can kind of work together.

In terms of the trends around the classroom versus home, these are things that we haven't seen for a really long time. I think increased investment in family engagement by schools, and that sort of evergreen interest in parents will be a market for ed tech products.

I think that what we really need to do is figure out how to sort out the two roles of educator in the classroom and educator at home, and try to figure out ways in which to build products that bridge those two areas.

There's also a kind of rising need for students to sort of own the landscape a little bit more. So the focus of online teaching already today has really illuminated the way a student learns, there's going to be more around students.

A basic kind of customer experience of education is going to be driven a lot by the learners themselves, which I'm really excited about. And that I think that will start a course around adult education, lifelong learning and then move down towards the K-12 space.

Ash: Can you talk about the role of new parents and parental sentiment and how that’s changed since COVID or because of COVID?

The New School Venture Fund recently surveyed teachers, students and parents about their sort of attitudes and experiences around distant, remote teaching and learning. Both teachers and students like the amount of support at tech companies were giving them during this time period.

But parents were uniformly disappointed with how tech companies handled support. So ed tech companies have a product but they also have responsibility to help you use that product in either the way that they intend or in new and interesting ways that they didn't even know about.

I think that that piece of research just showed to me the parent market really is kind of front and center. The research actually says the parent stakeholder is going to be more front and center for ed tech answers, going forward.

We also recently did a webinar about all the stakeholders for an ed tech product: the student, the teacher, and the third party or the administrator who's the purchaser. And in that presentation, we ignored parents, even though that is a passion of mine, you know, sort of home-based learning outside the classroom is like a passionate mind.

I think that companies could previously ignore the parents in the stakeholder triangle. But now we really have to think about it more like a square, like the parent is as much of an important operator in the use of products than ever before. I think that that will stick around.

Ash: How do you pick your investments, and a founder who doesn't know you yet at this point could do to increase the likelihood of getting investment from you in the future?

I don't want to be too specific about what we do or put barriers on our process because I don't want to make people who might feel like they're not really part of this educational ecosystem in a way that is not traditionally defined.

There's a little bit of serendipity, but I really appreciate the person putting themselves out there in order to keep the meeting. I get introductions all the time from people by emails to different investors.

I'm also not trying to discount what's commonly called the warm introduction. But I also really appreciate people who just take the initiative and reach out.

Ash: What would your essential advice be to an edtech founder in a post COVID world now ?

First, I will say that what I absolutely insist on at this point, when I talk to founders, is this: what's your COVID pivot? What are you doing differently since the world changed? I'm very reluctant to finish out a pitch where it doesn't seem like anybody's paid attention to market forces, potential behavioral changes to new opportunities available.

Second, I really think we have to think much more expansively about school education, everything in between, and audiences for education at this point.

Third, what kind of data are you collecting and how are you treating that data? How are you not only using it from a compliance perspective is that there is some kind of data that is collected and aggregated.

How has that data been used, to improve your product or to improve education in general?

In summary: what's your COVID pivot, what's your COVID response, and, how are you using data?

Ash: Jessica, thank you so much for taking the time today. That was very detailed, candid conversation and it's much appreciated,