20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat

Mike Silagadze is the Founder & CEO @ Top Hat, the market leader in student engagement software, and is used by millions of students at three-quarters of the top 1,000 colleges and universities in North America. To date, they have raised over $47m in VC funding from many friends and former guests on the show including Albert Wenger @ USV, Boris Wertz @ Version One, Uncork Capital, Felicis and Emergence just to name a few. As for Mike, prior to TopHat, he was a developer at MioVision Technologies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Mike made his way into the world of startups and came to realise the current method of learning was so broken? 2.) Why does Mike believe that investors have an automatic dislike to edtech? Why does he believe it is the most difficult to market to enter? Why is go to market one of the biggest challenges? How can on innovate on this antiquated go-to-market to enable the rapid scaling required? How did TopHat achieve this? 3.) Why does Mike believe that most companies hire in fundamentally the wrong way? How does Mike balance the complex elements of raw IQ over culture when hiring? If there was one predictive factor Mike uses to hire, what is it? What is the framework and methodology Mike has constructed to ensure the best hires? 4.) What were the biggest mistakes Mike made in scaling out the sales team? Why does Mike think he made them? If he were to advise a younger self, what would be the biggest advice and tips with regards to scaling the sales team, from an engineer's mindset? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Mike’s Fave Book: Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep! Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. You are listening to Founders Friday on the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and you can see more from us behind the scenes on the 20 Minute VC on Instagram, at H Stebbings with two Bs. I'd love to see you there. However, to our episode in a very special Founders Friday today, and I'm thrilled to welcome Mike Silagadze. Mike is the founder and CEO at Top Hat, the market leader in student engagement software, now used by millions of students at three quarters of the top 1,000 colleges and universities in North America. To date, they've raised over $47 million in VC funding from many friends and former guests on the show, including Albert Wenger at USV, Boris Virtz at Version1, Uncork Capital, Felicis and Emergence, just to name a few. As for Mike, prior to Top Hat, he was a developer at MioVision Technologies.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  And I do also want to say a big thank you to someone who's supported both me personally and the 20 Minute VC throughout our journey. So a huge thanks today to Boris at Version1 for the intro to Mike. I really am so grateful for all you've done. But before we dive into the show today, what are we without a great night's sleep? And that's where Lisa comes in. Lisa is the Warby Parker or Tom Shoes of the mattress industry. They've done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating this luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online and shipped for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with three unique foam layers for a universal adaptive feel, including two inches of memory foam and two inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, designed to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made,

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

  and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. So go to leesa.com for your perfect night's sleep. And if you're like me and lose sleep worrying about the quality of conference calls and communicating remotely, then check out Zoom, the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities, including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and persistent chat, all in one easy platform. Plus, it's the easiest solution to manage, scale and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don't take our word for it, though. Zoom is the top-rated conferencing app across various user review sites, including G2 Crowd and TrustRadius. And you can sign up for a free account, not a trial, just visit zoom.us. But enough from me, so without further ado,

• 2:13Harry Stebbings?

  I'm thrilled to hand over to Mike Silagadze, founder and CEO at Top Hat.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:26Harry Stebbings?

  Mike, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. As I said, heard so many great things from Boris at Version One, so thank you so much for joining me today, Mike.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:34Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I want to kick off with you and how you came to be one of the frontrunners in the new world of ed tech with Top Hat.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Well, the motivation for starting the company was it was pretty straightforward. It was just based on my experience in undergrad. I studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. And like many students, even today, I found that the course environment just was out of touch with the way that students wanted to learn. So specifically, students outside of the classroom had access to a myriad of tools that made the learning process adaptive and engaging to their particular learning style. And when they showed up to the classroom, they found that there was chalkboards and paper books and all this stuff that hadn't changed for hundreds of years. And not only that it hadn't changed, but this is, it doesn't work. It's a really terrible way to teach people skills, actually. And I observed that, you know, along with everybody else that went through the same kind of educational

• 3:24Speaker 02

  process. But what did change right around the time that I started Top Hat was that smartphones started to become ubiquitous. Everybody seemed to be getting one. And that presented this opportunity to really transform the educational experience, all the way from the textbook to the homework to the in-class experience, from being passive and more didactic to being much more active and engaging. And, you know, the rest is, as they say, it's history.

• 3:46Harry Stebbings?

  The rest is history. And what a journey it's been. But I do want to start today, naturally hanging out with a lot of VCs doing the 20-minute VC. We've interviewed over 1,400. And the commonality when one says ed tech is this kind of wincing or shriveling up at the word. So I want to start on this. And why do you think they have this automatic reaction to the space? And is there any historical or otherwise justification to it?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. They are 100% correct. It is arguably one of the most difficult markets. To succeed in over the last ten years or so, there was a brief period of a resurgence in education technology. Where a lot of investment went into the space, people naively thinking, wow, you know, it's time for the space to be disrupted. Not realizing that the reason that it's been the same for a hundred years is the reason that it's difficult to disrupt. And out of the, you know, thousands and thousands of companies that have been funded over the last decade or so. Only a handful, I'd say probably ten or fifteen have really broken out past the, let's say, tens of millions in revenue. Milestone and, you know, are tracked to potentially become a public company. It's really only a handful have actually been able to achieve that.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Top had been one of those. So the track record is just terrible. It's really, it's a brutal, brutal market. The only thing harder is maybe healthcare or and for other, other very regulated industries. So they're absolutely correct. Most people that have invested in ed tech have lost money in ed tech. And so, yeah, there's, there's good reason to be skeptical. You know, if I was evaluating Top Hat in the early days, I don't know if I would have invested knowing everything that I know now, just knowing how difficult the market is.

• 5:17Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most difficult element? If you were to go, there's one fundamental thing, be it connecting distribution, be it production of different content. What's the one fundamental thing that you think is the most challenging?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  So ultimately it's go to market. That encompasses a lot of different things. But it's very, very difficult to take products to market in education technology. So there are tons of companies that have been started that have had amazing products that would have been very impactful and would have had a great outcomes. But they just couldn't get them to market. They couldn't figure out, you know, who would pay for it, how they would pay for it. If you want to sell something in higher education, generally speaking, you know, you have to go through a committee process that can take years. Sometimes three years for relatively small transaction sizes. And in K twelve, in, you know, high schools, primary schools, it's actually worse. It's even more difficult. You have to go through districts. I mean, it's really a political game there. And so, you know, the kinds of companies that exist there don't focus on products. I mean, products in education technology are generally terrible because the decision makers aren't the users.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  And so like much enterprise software, you end up with a pretty terrible product. And unfortunately with ed tech entrepreneurs, many of them are idealistic. So that's what they focus on. But what they don't focus on is the go to market. How do you actually take your great product vision and translate it into a viable economic business? And I would argue that's where Top Hat, one of the areas that we've been innovative on and it's allowed us to succeed.

• 6:34Harry Stebbings?

  Mike, I'm utterly flummoxed then. I wasn't expecting that. So tell me, where's the opportunity then that you see that maybe the past hasn't produced and the current investor community doesn't see quite yet?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  For sure. And I'll even say this, you know, when I speak to entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of folks come to me for advice on starting companies in the education technology space. One of the first things I ask them is, you know, are you sure you want to go into this market? I mean, this is, you're probably going to fail. This is one of the most difficult markets. In all likelihood, it's going to be brutal and frustrating for you. You should maybe consider something else, you know, just because that's the nature of it. So, you know, yeah, the question is, you know, what is it that Top Hat has done that made it somewhat unique? The way that companies typically sell software in higher education, I'll focus on higher education because that's, you know, a rap. The way they typically focus on selling software is by going top down to the enterprise. You know, you go to the CIO, the provost of the university, you tell them this amazing software that you've developed

• 7:30Speaker 02

  and how it's going to help them. And then very quickly you get bogged down into, you know, if they even give you the time of day, into a multi-year committee style decision-making process where a million people can say no, but a handful of people can say yes. Where the incentives and things that are motivating people are oftentimes not what you think they are. You know, teaching, as surprising as it may be, is really very low in the total poll on priorities in higher education, in fact. That's just, it's not how universities get funded. You know, universities are not known generally because of the quality of their teaching. It's generally about research and grants and that kind of stuff. So that's what we started, actually. I mean, we started trying to do enterprise sales in universities and very quickly, within a matter of months, realized that it was a dead end. I mean, the business just could not exist. We had a great product, a great idea.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  People, you know, acknowledged to us that it was a great product, a great idea, but we couldn't make any traction on actually generating revenue, driving adoption. So we had this crazy idea, what if we sell software, our software product, the same way the textbooks have been sold, the way they used to sell, you know, paper books? Specifically, we go to a professor, individual professor. Professors at university, get them to adopt the product and the content in their course. And then there would be no cost to the professor or to the university. And instead, students each individually pay a small subscription fee to access the activities and content. It was kind of a crazy idea, you know, software had not been sold that way before. And many people told us that it wasn't going to work and they were reasonable to to believe that. Because we we weren't sure it was going to work, we just didn't have any other choice. But we tried that and it did work.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And we were able to effectively turn what is traditionally an enterprise long sales cycle, very painful process into a much more transactional, high-velocity type sale. And that also allowed us to innovate and build the product and make it really incredible, because we were getting lots of feedback very quickly from users and and ultimately scale the business. And so that's what we do is we we go to the individual professors, we get them to adopt the product. And then, once we get traction at a university, once there's enough users, professors and students on the platform, then we go to the institution, say, look, twenty percent of your students are already using this. When we talk about an institutional agreement. And that might still take two years, but the beauty is that we're still generating revenue through that two-year evaluation process.

• 9:39Harry Stebbings?

  I love that and I I share the optimism then, following that and the kind of innovation on on the sales model. I I do want to kind of drill one layer deeper into the operations, though, for you and for any business really being hiring. You've said before to me, virtually all companies do it wrong, but there is a science to it. So if we take that in turn, why do you think that virtually all companies do it wrong? And what are the big mistakes that they make?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  So, yeah, switching gears to hiring, most companies use their intuition when it comes to hiring. In other words, they do what seems to make sense, rather than what the research and the science shows makes sense. There's actually been a huge amount of research that's been done on what in fact predicts success in the workplace. And virtually all companies out there completely ignore this research and instead implement the same kind of hiring processes that have been shown repeatedly not to work, that have been shown to have tons of bias and be in favor of hiring basically extroverts that are charismatic, rather than people who are actually going to be good at their job. And the science out there is is quite clear, there's a handful of things that actually predict success in the workplace. So one of those things is a work sample.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I mean, that's one of the most predictive things. So you actually have people do a sample of the work that they are going to do, whether it's programming, if it's developer or doing a presentation of their sales rep. That's critical and highly predictive of success in the workplace. Intelligence, you know, cognitive assessments actually are very predictive of success in the in the workplace. Yet, most companies don't bother doing it. Or they do it, but they do it in kind of a a backhanded kind of way. Where they'll do maybe programming assessment, problem solving, which effectively measures the same type of thing. Structured interviews, there's a very specific structured process that has the ability to actually predict success in the workplace. And it's essential to have these these types of structured interviews to ensure there's consistency and the ability to compare from one person to another and so on and so forth.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  There's there's a handful of these types of things that are quite effective, and those are the things that we ultimately have implemented. And that, you know, of course, there's been a lot of development and evolution and some innovation on our part in terms of how to run these these types of things. But in the end, it really comes down to looking at the research of what actually is proven to work.

• 11:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is there an innovation on the assessment side of it? So if I applied to Top Hat today for a position, what does that process look like? And how do you measure those scientific elements that suggest success?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it depends on the role. You know, the the interview process is slightly different depending on the role. You know, if you're a sales rep, you'll go through one process. If you're an engineer, you'll go through a different process. But as a general rule, you do a a basic screen to assess for high level competencies to just to ensure that the person is is worth, you know, having a conversation with. There will be, you know, a cognitive assessment and a work sample. So for an engineer, that's an assessment. And we we would ask them to code something, usually they're in a pair programming experience or a, you know, just an algorithmic type of assessment that they they do. Followed by a structured interview. We use something called top grading. There's lots of structured interviews that could potentially work, but the top grading format actually works pretty well. And so we use we use that. And finally, then we do competency focused interviews.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  And those focused interviews, so for example, if you want somebody who is a team player, you would have an interview that assesses their track record and your past performance that indicates whether or not they are in fact a team player. I mean, that's a contrived example, but things like that. So that's the general process for sales. of a programming test, you do a presentation for account management or tech support. Maybe you'd have them do a written communication type assessment. But generally speaking, that's the structure.

• 13:03Harry Stebbings?

  We had Mark Mader from Smart Sheet on the show the other day. And he said that people often over index culture and under index raw IQ. Would you agree with that statement?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely, because most companies don't measure IQ at all. And that's wrong. I mean, there's a 0.6 correlation between IQ and job performance. And that is, in fact, if you could base your hiring decision on one factor, you can only base it on one factor. IQ is actually that factor. Like, it's the most predictive element. Now, of course, point six isn't great. I mean, you need a lot more data to get to a higher level of certainty. But it's incredibly predictive. Good things happen. There's a certain kind of magic that happens when you put a lot of smart people in the same building together. And so there's a sort of a hard to quantify element to that as well. So I would strongly agree with that.

• 13:48Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of hiring, we had Maryam Nafissi from Minted on the show last week. And she said that internal upscaling is the most important thing in a company. So I'm intrigued. How do you think about the debate of whether to promote that internal candidate or hire that maybe more experienced external candidate?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I think companies need to develop both of those muscles. Internal hiring is essential to show people career progression, to show them that there's a future with the company. And not only that, but sometimes the very best candidates are people that you hire when they're very young. Because generally speaking, when someone is incredibly talented, as soon as they land somewhere, you know, that company is going to try to hold on to them, you know, for dear life. And so as a result, people who are experienced, paradoxically, as far as the distribution, it's more challenging to find top performers. Because as they said, the good ones are already locked in somewhere. And so when you hire people that are, you know, fresh out of school or quite junior, and then give them the opportunity and empower them to level up, that's one of the most effective ways to get really strong top performers in the business.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  But at the same time, you know, sometimes you don't have the skill set in the organization and you need to level up. And so the ability to hire externally is crucial as well.

• 14:56Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, when is a stretch a stretch too far in expectation of ability, maybe?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it happens a lot. It's super challenging. The way we tend to handle it is you almost give the person the role before you promote them. In other words, you give them the opportunity to show that they're able to do the role before you actually give them the job title. We've certainly made the mistake of promoting people too early and unfortunately that usually doesn't end well because what tends to happen is you can't demote them because that's, you know, politically or whatever, from an optics perspective, you can't really do that. And at the same time, you know, they're not leveling up as fast as the business needs. And so ultimately, that almost always ends up with the person leaving the company. So promoting someone too early is quite disastrous. That's really something to avoid.

• 15:39Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely. Speaking of kind of stretched there in terms of the employees and candidates, it's often something we see in SaaS businesses we evaluate. I'm intrigued. We've spoken before about the scaling of your sales team and you've admitted to some mistakes. I'd love to start on a very tough one and I don't mean to be a therapist on this one, but why do you think you made those mistakes when you reflect?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I would say the reason I made many of the mistakes in sales is lack of experience. You know, my background was engineering and so I had a pretty good intuition about how engineering should work. I had worked on engineering teams, you know, through undergrad. And so I was able to build that up reasonably well without too many mishaps, I should say, although certainly some. In sales, I think all of my intuition about how to run, you know, a sales team based on how engineering is run was wrong. I mean, it's just you have to operate those types of organizations radically differently. And so I just made basically every mistake in the book. You know, we hired enterprise sales reps to do transactional inside sales. We promoted great sales reps into management. We didn't know what our sales cycle and what our methodology was. And we did document things. Pretty much every

• 16:42Speaker 02

  mistake you can imagine, we ended up making. And, you know, we certainly paid for it. Probably we'd be further ahead if I had the experience early on and weren't making those mistakes.

• 16:52Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, if you were then advising or angel investing maybe in a young technical, Mike, as you were, what would your biggest advice be in terms of really scaling that sales team and not making the mistakes that you did?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting. So I'll say there's one mistake that, and this is going to sound paradoxical based on what I've just said, but there's one mistake that almost every young founder makes. Founders in particular, honestly, almost a hundred percent of the time is at some point they decide, you know what, we need to start figuring out sales. And then they correctly assess, well, I don't know anything about sales. So what I'm going to do is bring in someone, you know, with a bit of gray hair and experience under their belt. In order to help them figure out sales and almost one hundred percent of the time that ends up not working. They end up having to fire that person six months or a year or however long. Uh, the reason it doesn't work is there's several reasons, but one is because when you're a very small company without a lot of track record and you can't afford to pay the kind of money that top sales leaders expect to make.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  You end up almost by definition, hiring somebody subpar, somebody who, you know, has had the kind of so-so career and is looking to, you know, get into the startup game relatively late and they almost always aren't able to figure out a model from scratch. Cause they've generally worked in larger companies where they've had a framework, you know, within which to, to work in. So I would say resist the temptation to hire the gray hair, you know, you need to figure out sales. But the way to do it is to go about it methodically, to talk to people who have run successful sales teams, to get mentors and experience. And then figure it out on your own. Uh, I think the founding team needs to have a sales muscle within that core executive team. Or else it's unlikely they'll be able to build a thriving business.

• 18:28Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask Mike, was there an inflection point or a realization moment in your kind of learning curve of the scaling of the sales team for you?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  I don't think that there was any particular moment. I think it was just progressive kind of series of mistakes and learnings that happened over a period of years. But I could certainly talk about, you know, particular lessons, which to probably anybody that knows anything about sales, these will seem, you know, borderline cliche. But you know, you know, when you're hiring sales reps, you need to match the sales cycle and cadence that your business has to the experience of the rep. So if a rep is used to running, you know, twelve month sales cycles and closing two deals a year, you shouldn't hire that person to try and run an inside sales transactional type process and vice versa. They're radically different things. You know, when you've got somebody who's a top rep and, you know, is clamoring for a promotion to management, more often not, that's a bad idea. And you need to figure out how to level them up and give them the opportunity for growth within the, you know, as an individual contributor.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Because usually top reps don't make for good managers and vice versa. Good, great sales managers are not necessarily the best sales reps. You know, we learned a lot about metrics and having to, you know, just obsessively measure everything. Whereas in engineering, that's difficult, if not impossible. I mean, you basically, you almost don't have any metrics when it comes to measuring engineering velocity. Whereas in sales, you know, you need to obsessively measure everything from the phone calls to the emails to the conversions at every stage of the funnel. So all of that kind of stuff, I mean, but this is sales one on one. This is stuff that anybody who knows anything would probably already know.

• 19:51Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with the focus on metrics. But I do want to dive into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, Mike, and then you give me your immediate thoughts in about sixty seconds or less. How does that sound?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Sure, it sounds fun.

• 20:04Harry Stebbings?

  So Flight Coming, what book should I be reading on it and why?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. It's a very profound book that radically changes the way you think about how to structure both your business and your life to benefit from unpredictability. That's about the best way I can summarize it. But it really, in fact, his book Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan, and you know, he's got a new one coming out. I read those when I was pretty young and it really changed my life. I mean, it had a profound impact on the way I think about things.

• 20:34Harry Stebbings?

  What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Okay, I mean, I'll talk about education. Many people believe education is an investment. I actually don't believe that. I think many people believe that education is an investment that makes you more productive in a sense. And I think beyond some of the very basic stuff that you learn in primary school, I don't actually think that's, that's the case. I actually view education as a consumption, as a luxury good. And what I mean by that is causality that people typically ascribe to societies getting wealthier, that, you know, education makes societies more wealthier, is in fact reversed. In fact, what happens is as societies become wealthier, they start to be able to afford to give people four years, five years, eight years to develop and explore and just, you know, enjoy life and learn about different ideas and fields. That's a luxury that people become able to afford after they become sufficiently wealthy.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  And so I think in a lot of ways, the government investment and, you know, pouring trillions of dollars into education is misplaced as a result because the effect they're trying to get is not the effect that they ultimately end up getting.

• 21:33Harry Stebbings?

  I could not agree with you more. I'm very pleased you said that. What keeps you up at night, Mike?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I would say there's a lot of periodic bubbles and market cycles that freak me out. You know, it seems like certainly the crypto mania is concerning. I worried that it's going to get large enough to where it will actually dislocate the global economy, just like the real estate bubble did not too long ago. You know, I worry that there's a bubble in venture financing. It seems like just like many years ago, there are deals being done that really on the face that don't make a lot of sense. So that's that's something I'm concerned about day to day because when it comes time for top head to IPO or go public, that's ultimately going to impact my outcome. So I always prefer the market to stay as rational as as possible.

• 22:14Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest pro and then the biggest con? So 30 seconds each of being in Canada.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  The pros, so there's a lot of pros. One, it's cheaper. It's just, you know, you basically you're 30% smarter because of the exchange rate being in Canada, and that actually has a significant impact on your ability to build a sustainable business, and that's helped us. And there's a lot of good individual contributor talent, you know, good engineering talent, good sales talent. The cons is there's probably the the number one thing is challenges with financing. There's not as much as robust venture capital community. And biggest challenge, I would say, is lack of executive talent. There are very, very few people in Canada that have scaled businesses past $100 million. And as a result of that, it's challenging to build a business that scales to that degree because nobody else around you has has done it before. And so we've had, as a result, the top had import quite a bit of talent.

• 23:03Harry Stebbings?

  And then what would you most like to change in in the world of VC and startups?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  My mind goes towards just the irrationality. Sometimes you just get these, you know, these either a trend or some sort of hype machine and people will get funded for things that really don't make a lot of sense. But even that, I don't know if that's a bad thing. I don't know if you can have a robust market without that kind of irrationality. You know, to some extent, you need to make crazy bets in order for some of them to to pay off. So I don't even know if that's something that needs to change.

• 23:30Harry Stebbings?

  Are you a believer in Adam Smith's invisible hand?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, of course, I'm a free market guy. The thing that I would say I would change, I mean, there's a bit of an echo chamber, I guess, in the ecosystem where sometimes, you know, an idea pops up and just gains way too much traction in spite of the fact that maybe the the idea is detached from from reality. And there's a bit too much of that. You know, it was Sam Altman actually wrote a blog post not too long ago about how in some ways he actually feels more free to discuss. Certain ideas in China than he feels in the Bay Area because of echo chamber phenomena. And I've noticed that as well. To some extent, I would say less so in Canada, but whenever I go to the Bay Area, that's something that it kind of always doesn't quite seem right to me.

• 24:13Harry Stebbings?

  And then finishing on, the next five years for you and for Top Hat, what's the road ahead?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Ultimately, what Top Hat is trying to do is to bring education, the higher education system into the modern era. What that involves is tearing down the traditional textbook publisher, infrastructure that's been built up. I'm to replace it with a modern peer-to-peer type system that Top Hat is trying to create. To get into every classroom and to make sure that every student has access to the best materials and the best technology for learning that ultimately improves everyone's lives.

• 24:44Harry Stebbings?

  Mike, as I said, I heard so many great things from Boris, so I can't thank you enough for joining me today. And it really has been such a pleasure.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Great. Thank you for having me.

• 24:53Harry Stebbings?

  I so enjoyed that interview with Mike. And if you'd like to see more from Mike, you can find him on Twitter at Mike Silagadze. Likewise, I'd like to say again a big thank you to Boris at Version1 for the intro to Mike's day, without which the episode would not have happened. I do also want to say it'd be great to see you on our Instagram, at H Stebbings 1996, where you can see all things behind the scenes at the 20 minute VC. But before we leave you today, what are we without a great night's sleep? And that's where Lisa comes in. Lisa is the Warby Parker or Tom Shoes of the mattress industry. They've done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating this luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online and shipped for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with three unique foam layers

• 25:34Harry Stebbings?

  for a universal adaptive feel, including two inches of memory foam and two inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, designed to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made. And for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. So go to leesa.com for your perfect night's sleep. And if you're like me and lose sleep worrying about the quality of conference calls and communicating remotely, then check out Zoom, the fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities, including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent

• 26:10Harry Stebbings?

  All-in-one easy platform. Plus, it's the easiest solution to manage, scale and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don't take our word for it though. Zoom is the top-rated conferencing app across various user review sites, including G2 Crowd and TrustRadius. And you can sign up for a free account, not a trial, just visit zoom.us. As always, we so appreciate all your support and cannot wait to bring you our next episode with Lea Buskey, general partner at Fuel Capital.