Q&A with Niara Valério, co-founder of Learnabi
Learnabi is a New York City-based ed-tech company that is working to bring the concept of personalized learning to schools all across the country. Learnabi’s approach leverages data and technology in order to develop individualized learning profiles for students and provide them with engaging and tailored learning experiences.
Today, students have more access to information and technology than ever before. Technology plays a big role in personalized learning, but teachers’ roles in the classroom and how they use that technology is crucial as well.
I got a chance to speak to Niara about her experience starting and scaling Learnabi.
You and your co-founder Rahel met when you were both pursuing your Masters program at Columbia and both saw a gap in students’ skills and learning methods. Was there a specific moment or event that gave you the idea for Learnabi or did it gradually develop over time?
I think one of they key factors to us starting Learnabi was that we noticed that many vendors and service providers didn’t know how to connect with this population of students. There is often a disconnect between service providers, schools administrators, and students. So we wanted to develop programs, services and products that were very student centered.
I’d taught SAT classes in the South Bronx for many years and developed partnerships with schools overtime so the decision to start our own company was gradual and it made sense. I approached my co-founder, Rahel, who I met in graduate school and asked her what she thought about the idea and it sort of moved from there.
When you and Rahel were building Learnabi, what were some of the major pain points and challenges you faced throughout the journey from idea to launch?
Our challenges in the beginning were very different from what we have now but ultimately, I think it’s a good problem to have. Initially, funding was a huge challenge for us — the payment cycle of the Department of Education is very lengthy and bureaucratic so you don’t get paid right away. We worked 10+ hour days with no income, while juggling full-time grad school schedules — it was a very mentally and emotionally challenging period. Though we are fortunate to have moved past that, we still think about funding, it’s your job as a founder to make sure you have enough runway to operate. But now we think about funding to scale and grow rather than to survive.
I also think it’s important to have discussions around founder mental health and burn-out, it is the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship but it’s the honest reality of building a business. I’ve spoken with other founders with similar experiences but its often glossed over in the media, blogs, etc. in favor of performative “hustle culture”. It’s great to post photos of beautiful office spaces and networking events but no one is posting the fact that they are sleeping on a friends couch because they can’t afford to pay rent anymore.
Can you talk a little bit about how exactly Learnabi goes about developing individualized learning profiles for students?
Our learning profiles are based on a combination of interviews with former students and data collected throughout the semester. We are very fortunate to have alumni from our programs who are willing to work with us to provide feedback — they’ve been our greatest asset by far! We are intentional about the questions we ask students because we want to gauge for different learning styles and preferences. We also incorporate data given to us by school administrators who know the student well. We want to get a comprehensive understanding of who they are and what motivates them as students and individuals.
You certainly aren’t able to create profiles for every type of student but we want to get pretty close. I think it’s really exciting to work with this demographic of students, the trend we see is that they are a highly motivated, ambitious and socially conscious group. All of our students are considered Gen-Z so we think a lot about Gen-Z user behavior, how do they engage with technology? What do they value? This article came out recently showing that Gen-Z students are on their phones an average of 6 hours a day, most of it on social media. They are a really interesting, diverse and dynamic group of people, so we try think about all these different intersections when we develop learner profiles.
What are some of the challenges you see in the ed-tech space?
One of the biggest challenges in ed-tech is that your end user is rarely the decision maker and I’d like to see that changed in the next 10 years. Ed-tech companies build technology to sell to schools who then turn around and give it to students. The school has a completely different set of incentives than the student — they have metrics, higher-ups to report to, etc. They are under immense pressure to graduate students, it’s very difficult and it influences their purchasing habits.
So if students don’t necessarily like the product, tough luck, they have to use it anyway. In any other situation, you’d just switch providers but the nature of education in the US is such that schools are ultimately responsible for deciding what they want to offer students — it’s very bureaucratic and making a shift isn’t always easy. I think there needs to be more options, the funding mechanisms ought to be more transparent, and schools should have greater agency in choosing partnerships. More importantly, I’d like to see students become advocates for themselves and as learners.
What do you think the education / ed-tech landscape will look like in the next 10 years?
I would like to see technology implemented more seamlessly in schools. I think we are at a pivotal point — although we use a lot of technology in schools, it’s not always utilized at full capacity. Staff, admins are already asked to do so much, it’s a very difficult position to be in. This is especially the case in many of our schools in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.
Currently, Learnabi partners with schools in New York City — do you see it expanding to other cities in the future?
Absolutely! New York City is a hub for ed-tech and it’s a great place to be, but there are similar challenges throughout the United States and we’d like to tackle them. Scaling outside of New York is definitely on our radar.
Along the lines of scaling, have you thought about pursuing any type of venture funding for Learnabi?
This is something we are exploring and thinking about. We’ve had internal discussions about a timeline for fundraising and we are planning on doing so in the near future. We’ve been fortunate to have not needed venture funding up until this point but we are sort of at a cross roads in terms of the kind of impact we want to have and our ability to scale.
Lastly, what advice do you have have for people that are tinkering with an idea or thinking of starting their own company?
Do it, and find yourself a great co-founder. Don’t feed into the pressure of having to build a Twitter or a Facebook from the get-go. Those stories are flashy and attractive but they don’t reflect the majority of companies. The reality is that you need to do a lot of testing to truly understand what customers want, that’s the key to building a solid product. Your ideas will change and evolve overtime but it’s important to stay flexible and open minded. Find a way to get an in with your user, whether it’s offering a free or very limited version. Feedback from users is crucial and can save you a lot of guess work and money in the future. You get a lot closer to getting it right by building something, rather than sitting behind a desk planning away — even if it doesn’t work, you learn so much.
Go check out the Learnabi website to learn more and follow Learnabi on Medium and Twitter!
