111: Leveling Up Education - Taylor Shead's, Founder and CEO of Stemuli, Game-Changing Approach to Bridging Skills and Careers

Holly Owens (00:02):

Hello everyone, and welcome to another fantastic episode of Edup Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens and

DaNadia Johnson (00:10):

My name is Nadia Johnson and we're your hosts, and

Holly Owens (00:14):

We're really excited today. We have a wonderful guest with us. We have Taylor Shed, who is the founder and c e o of Stemuli, and we're excited to talk to you. Taylor, welcome on in.

Taylor Shead (00:24):

Thanks so much. I'm excited to chat with you all today.

Holly Owens (00:27):

Yeah, we can't wait to hear your story and about all the things that you're doing at Stemuli and how you're helping education institutions, everything, and I'm so glad we got connected through another connection and that you're here. But before we jump into all things, we want to know more about you. So tell us your story. Tell us your journey to this EdTech space.

Taylor Shead (00:49):

Yeah, well, just a quick little background is I grew up the daughter of two entrepreneurs in Dallas, Texas. And as far as my educational background, I actually have a pretty diverse background. I went to a Jewish school in first grade Christian school, second to eighth grade Catholic school my freshman year and graduated from a public high school. And with that said, I had aspiring goals to become a reconstructive plastic surgeon and also earning a division one scholarship to go to college. And the idea was, as a athlete and a female basketball player, it was never the idea that I was going to make it to the pros and make millions of dollars. And so what I was passionate about is how could I help people improve their lives? And so plastic surgery and Grey's Anatomy had an impact on me wanting to be a plastic surgeon.

(01:44):

But wrapping the story up, I got into college chemistry class. And it wasn't until I was sitting there and I realized I didn't have the math skills I would need to succeed and to continue my degree in pre-medicine. And although it was very disappointing, I ended up losing my scholarship because I really could not keep up with academics and some of the social and emotional stuff happening with me. And so it became this opportunity where all of a sudden I was like, wow, I don't want people to look back on Taylor. She, and remember this failure she had of losing her scholarship. And so from that moment forward, I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to see how I could use technology to transform the education industry, but with a particular focus on how could I avoid the next generation encountering the problem I did, where you set a goal, you have high aspirations, and it is not until you're in a place to realize that goal that you realize you don't have the skills. And so all the work that we do at Stemuli really focused on not only do we want to help you through your educational journey, but ultimately we want to prepare you to be able to get a job if you're dreams.

Holly Owens (02:49):

I love that story. So you're a D one athlete. That's awesome. I love sports. Not even news. I can talk about

DaNadia Johnson (02:58):

Sports, but I won't get into it.

Holly Owens (02:59):

And I know the W N B A playoffs are happening right now.

Taylor Shead (03:03):

Yep, that's right.

DaNadia Johnson (03:06):

But Anyways, that's a great story. And so two entrepreneurs in your family Inspired you.

Holly Owens (03:11):

I too. I was a bio major at bi, and then I got to Organic and I was like, Ooh, this is not going to happen. And

DaNadia Johnson (03:22):

That's why I was like, that happens far too often where you're like, yeah, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go major in this. This is my path. And then you get there and you're like, okay, now what is my backup plan? Because this clearly didn't pan out the way I thought it was.

Taylor Shead (03:39):

Yeah. It's a shared experience that most of us have, which is kind of ironic because in the entrepreneurship world, if there's a problem that's massive that most of us have, then you think that there would already be solutions out in the market that are solving it. But that's what we're working to do.

DaNadia Johnson (03:57):

Yeah, that's awesome. So you told us a little bit about your journey into this space. Who along the way inspired you on this journey into building Stemuli and discovering what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be?

Taylor Shead (04:11):

Yeah. Well, first it starts with my mother. And that might sound super cliche, but it's totally true. And the two things that she did that inspired me is she would tell me oftentimes about her background in education and how she grew up in rural Louisiana and ultimately went through desegregation. And she told me stories as a very young kid about, she's in desegregated schools. There was pages torn out of her textbook when she went to, or excuse me, there were segregated schools. There was pages torn out of her textbook. And when she went into desegregated schools, she was surprised that there was only two names in the textbook as opposed to pages of people that had owned that textbook before her. And so it's ironic, but those stories led me to have this deep awareness of inequities that have existed for a long time in education.

(05:01):

And then the second thing is my mom in sixth grade told me I could be a C E O. I had no idea what that meant. And I said, what does that mean, mom? Or what do I have to do to get there? And she said, well, you could graduate from business school. You get your law degree, but you can do that. And although I did not take that traditional path to becoming a C E O, it's not lost on me. The impact that planting small seeds and just that little bit of inspiration that somebody telling you what you can be, how that opened my eyes about what's possible for my life. Oh

Holly Owens (05:34):

My gosh,

DaNadia Johnson (05:35):

You're so proud. That's awesome. Now that you're there,

Holly Owens (05:39):

Yeah, I bet you're super pumped About your success and now being at that, You've come in this journey, You come into space for ed tech. Can you tell us a Little bit more about how you would personally Define educational technology? We love this question here because we get different answers Every time, so we want to know what you think.

Taylor Shead (05:59):

Yeah, I mean, it's the use of technology to educate. I don't know how others In its simplest form. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The use of technology to educate. I mean, that's to me the simplest form. But I think the power of technology and education for us is all centered around access and equity. And so access, equity and scale impact, those are the four words that circulate everything we do at Stemuli. So that would be my sub definition of what the purpose of technology and education is.

DaNadia Johnson (06:42):

Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, it's straight to the point simple. So now this is the part where we want to know a little bit more about Stemuli, what you do, what services you offer, and how you help institutions, organizations, students within the ed tech space. So we want to hear more about what is Stemuli and what does it do?

Taylor Shead (07:06):

Sure. So Stemuli is an educational technology company at the intersection of ai, workforce development and gaming. And ironically, even though we describe ourselves as an ed tech company, the problem we feel like we're actually solving is addressing the US workforce shortage. And if I was to boil that down into its simplest form, what we say and believe is that the workforce shortage is caused because one, two out of three students are disengaged in class on a daily basis across the entire educational spectrum. And then the second thing is only 18% of the credentials that kids are earning in K 12 actually align with what employers needs are for jobs of the future. And so I'm not shocked by that,

Holly Owens (07:53):

I should be, but I'm not,

Taylor Shead (07:56):

Right? It's a sad thing, but it presents an amazing opportunity for the work that we're doing. And so today, Stemuli is the only company in the world that is combining education and career pathways and to a video game. And if you're wondering what that means, our idea of driving student outcomes is we want to help you pass Algebra one by the time you're in eighth grade, but you passing Algebra one in eighth grade, and that's all we're helping you do, doesn't mean much to us. And so it's like we're working with middle schoolers to get them inspired and helping them explore their different career options in this virtual world where millions of them could have access to career exploration opportunities. Whereas right now in schools, only a small percentage of kids have the opportunity to go on these cool field trips and see what's possible for their lives.

(08:47):

The next thing we're doing is making recommendations to students and families on what is the pathway to move from middle school and to high school and the college, and what courses should you be taking? What content should we recommend to you based upon not only what your weaknesses are, but what you're interested in? And then last but not least, again, the most important part of the work that we do is how do we now take this learner who's been on our platform for years in middle school and high school, and they have a decision to make? Do they continue their education to go to college or do they go directly into the workforce? We have a job portal that's available within our platform that says, okay, here's the skills that you've actually mastered through your journey with us, and here's the jobs that are available that are kind of personalized to you, your interests, your favorite brands, and most important, the credentials that you have.

(09:37):

Which if you think about how all of us got our first jobs or our second jobs, it was nothing like that. We went to a website, we searched it, and we said, oh, I think I might be a match for this, and I could talk for hours about the differences in mindset that different genders have on even doing that, right? There's a lot of women that would never apply for a job they thought they were underqualified for, and whereas men would. So there's a lot of power that we expect to see as we roll out these platforms in north Texas and New York and continue to scale it around the nation and ultimately the globe.

Holly Owens (10:11):

I needed this way back when I needed you a long time ago. My first job was teaching job, and I found that through a connection, but oh my goodness, how much personalization is impacting that tech space and how much it's needed. I absolutely love that. So can you tell us a little bit more about the AI component of Stemuli?

Taylor Shead (10:36):

Okay, so everybody Loves AI here, including me, Nadia, the whole audience. We're all AI

Holly Owens (10:42):

Advocates.

Taylor Shead (10:44):

Yeah. So I'll talk about how we were utilizing AI before the world got super interested in AI and what we're doing now. So the long story short is what I described to you on our user journey is essentially navigation. So a good analogy we use is Google Maps. Google Maps identifies where you are in the world, you set a destination and no matter how many times you make the right turn or you make the wrong turn, it's still working to get you to your destination. There's a lot of AI and machine learning that goes into that navigated like experience. And so it's the same thing with our application. That's something that we were doing before Open AI came out. And while the world is around, how do you just navigate, identify where a person is and make the best recommendation on what they should do next based upon their favorite way to learn based upon their weaknesses and their interests. So as far as where we're headed, I'm supposed to be kind of being stealth mode on this, so I'll describe it as much as I can without making our marketing team upset. Great.

Holly Owens (11:53):

Well, the next question is about what's upcoming for you. So

Taylor Shead (11:56):

Great

Holly Owens (11:56):

Transition and leadway into that. That's

DaNadia Johnson (11:59):

What I was Say.

Taylor Shead (12:00):

Okay, cool. So if you look at former ed tech products and how the entire industry for years has said, Hey, I can personalize learning for your students, or I can drive engagement through our personalized learning opportunities, the industry has kind of failed, right? Because those personalized learning opportunities were all about, did you get this answer right or wrong? And based upon what you got right or wrong, if you got it right, we're going to take you to a problem that's a little bit harder if you got it wrong, we're going to have you just continue to repeat what you've done. What we believe is the biggest opportunity with personalization is how you understand who a user is, what their interests are, and what their aspirations are, and how you begin to personalize the content that they're getting in front of them to who they are.

(12:48):

And so there's a lot of equity that's around that just with the idea of being culturally relevant to the user. And I can again talk for hours about that, but cultural relevance to us, I'm going to say this and it's going to be like hopefully it's not too shocking, but just because I'm black doesn't mean I want to count fried chicken and trying to multiply something. And depending on who is developing our technology, sometimes those generalizations are made. And so we're looking at all of that is like how do we build The model? The unconscious bias that exists and when people are developing things is,

Holly Owens (13:24):

Yeah, 100%. So the diversity of our development team as well, and the diversity of our entire team across the board between age, race, gender, sexuality,

Taylor Shead (13:35):

We have everything and all of the above working to build this product. So as far as personalization, the skinny is one day Stemuli will be able to provide a personalized video game experience that's focused on education, and we hope to impact the entire video game industry with some of the cool gen AI tech that we'll be building and this year and years to come.

Holly Owens (14:02):

Wow,

DaNadia Johnson (14:03):

I love that.

Holly Owens (14:05):

Me too. I'm just soaking it all in. This is so much fun. I love learn. Before the episode, I do very little research. I want to have an authentic reaction, and sometimes it's just it proves my point. Wait until the episode, really cool stuff.

Taylor Shead (14:21):

Yeah, I love that. When I facilitate panels, it's kind of funny because if you don't know too much about what the folks are going to talk about when you ask authentic questions, the audience oftentimes has those same questions.

DaNadia Johnson (14:33):

Yeah,

Holly Owens (14:35):

Absolutely. And oh yeah, sometimes I like to wing things. I think, I don't know. I don't know. Winging things to me is fun. I'm sure people that have invited me to present don't appreciate that, but it seems to go, okay.

DaNadia Johnson (14:50):

Well, you've already talked about what's upcoming, so

Holly Owens (14:55):

We are kind of coming up on the end of the episode. This has been a very fun conversation, and we like to leave it open so that you can come back. We want to do a where are they now? We love doing, where are they now in the six to 12 months? So when that stuff comes out, you can come back and talk about and then what you're doing again. So we continue to have this roadmap of what Stemuli is doing and we're following you around and all that. Then your

DaNadia Johnson (15:17):

Marketing team won't be mad

Holly Owens (15:19):

By then. We can share

DaNadia Johnson (15:21):

Everything

Holly Owens (15:23):

Without

Taylor Shead (15:23):

Getting in trouble. I'll let them know.

Holly Owens (15:28):

So coming up on the final two questions of the episode, we want to know is there anything else that you want to talk about and anything else that we missed that we may have not covered quite yet? And then we want to know about the future. So what does the future of EdTech look like to you? So tell us all about it.

Taylor Shead (15:46):

Yeah. Well, one thing I just want to point out, and this will be the first time I'm actually publicly talking about this, is if you look at the Stemuli logo, most people glance at it and think it's cool and have no idea what it means. Well, first and foremost, it was designed by this super dope artist by the name of Timmy Coker. He is a black artist that grew up in Dallas and is well known. He's done stuff for the Grammys at t Meta, you name it. So two, when you look at the actual logo, what it symbolizes is our commitment to accessibility and the standards of excellence that we have and wanting to work and support all people. And so one, there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different colors in the logo. You barely see that. That can signal diversity for whatever you want, call it. Two, there's geometric shapes and none of them are the exact same shape.

(16:39):

Just like if the audience wants to know who we are as people and what we're deeply committed to, we're deeply committed to providing technology that's inclusive for all learners. And so when we think about all, whether you have hearing disabilities sites, any type of neurodivergence or any type of age and stage that you're in or any type of background and past experiences you have, our goal is to build this metaverse world as we like to call it, in a way that feels inclusive for everybody and not leaving anybody out. And that's a hard task to do because it causes you to, one, you need to invest a lot in research and development. You need to have the right partners. You need to be working with boots on the ground. But that's who we are at Stemuli. We're not scared of the price tag that it takes to focus in the beginning with designing our products to be accessible, but that's what we're committed to. And so you heard it here first, the Stemuli logo actually means something other than some super cool colors. It is all about accessibility and inclusivity.

DaNadia Johnson (17:43):

I love that. I'm so happy you shared that because I love that.

Taylor Shead (17:48):

Thank you. And I love it. The audience can't see it, but your background with the

DaNadia Johnson (17:52):

DC

Holly Owens (17:52):

Logo and then the Batman symbol with Stemuli logo in it. Really cool. And as you were explaining it, I was looking at it and visualizing and following along, and I was like, oh, this is, that's awesome.

DaNadia Johnson (18:02):

Very intentional, very love that.

Taylor Shead (18:07):

Yep. I'm obsessed with Batman too. Didn't ask me this,

Holly Owens (18:12):

But

Taylor Shead (18:13):

In an alternative,

Holly Owens (18:14):

We're nerding out here, so tell us all the Things. We're nerd too.

Taylor Shead (18:17):

Yeah, I'm Batman. I'm very wealthy. I'm spending my time and my money to help causes that need help. And I have underlying vengeance and passion that's carrying the work that I do. So there you go. Love

Holly Owens (18:29):

It. Love it. So Taylor, tell us what the future of Ved Tech's going to look like. I can't wait to hear this.

Taylor Shead (18:36):

Yeah. Well, I'll start here by pointing out that there are applications that all of us use throughout our lifetime. You think of Netflix, you think of Prime, you think of Uber, you think of Google Maps. We've engaged with them almost since their inception, and we continue to upgrade and we continue to buy and buy into these platforms. But the world has not had an application that any of us have used for learning throughout our lifetime. And so as far as the future opportunity for EdTech, and really what Stemuli is aiming to do is create the world's first lifelong learning application that can navigate us from the time that we're in K 12 through the rest of our lives. And so with that said, what happens when you put an application like that in the hands of somebody's palm? Then all of a sudden what happens in the school building is entirely different because we're not dependent on the four walls of the classroom and teachers and in school time and seat time to say, this is the only place that you learn.

(19:43):

All of a sudden the walls are blended, and as the walls get blended, there's a blending between how you're having fun and your social life on video games. Instead of it being like video games are fun and school's over there, now all of a sudden you're having just as much fun learning as you're doing, playing video games. The next thing that happens is instead of you learning to work by the time you're hired by a company that's having to train you for the job, now all of a sudden in your math class in eighth grade, if you want to be a Tesla solar technician, you're learning about the Pythagorean Theorem based upon how you would train and how that's involved in your career as a Tesla solar technician. And so with all of that said, I think the biggest thing is you're going to start to see a shift in where people are learning.

(20:27):

It's not going to just be within the classroom. It's going to be an out of school time. It's going to be on the bus, it's going to be on the way to the movies with friends. And so then the role of the school and of the teacher is really going to start to foster community and how we're working together and how we're collaborating and all of those social skills that students need to build. So summing all of that up in a very short way, I would say that I believe the future of educational technology is everybody having a personalized learning companion that's like following them throughout their lifetime. And the same way all these other applications are gathering all this data on who we are. Instead, our data will start to be used to increase our social and our intellectual capital, not just to cause us to spend all of our money. So that's my prediction on the future of educational technology. I

Holly Owens (21:23):

Really like that prediction. Instead of if we all sat here and thought about all the different tools and resources we've used to get where we're sitting now, it's not just one thing, like you're saying,

DaNadia Johnson (21:33):

It's

Holly Owens (21:33):

All piecemeal together. Gosh, I wish this stuff existed when I was young. That's another thing too. I'm envious of future of the future generations, and they get access to these types of experiences. It's wonderful.

DaNadia Johnson (21:49):

That was a good one. I don't think we've heard anything. I love personal learning too, so I'm just like, I always geek out when I see personalized learning.

Taylor Shead (21:58):

Absolutely. Yeah. If you guys didn ask me my strongest skillset, but what my team would say is I can see the future as if it's here today. So I'm excited to see the world catch up with what I see so clearly sitting here today. Yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (22:14):

That's awesome. Well,

Holly Owens (22:16):

Thank you so much, Taylor, for coming on and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate all you're doing in this space and the support and the community and everything that you're developing with Stemuli. So thanks so much. And obviously everything will be in the show notes about how to connect with Taylor, how to go out to Stemuli, how to check everything out, so it will be there for you. Listeners, go check it out now. Thanks

Taylor Shead (22:38):

So much. It was great chatting with you all today.