Interview with Josh Wiseman

Engineering Director, AltSchool

Before getting into education, Josh spent six years at Facebook as an engineer. His first major project was building Chat, and he managed engineering teams on other core Facebook features including Photos, Video and Profile.

Josh spent a year researching education ideas, first at Social+Capital and then independently. In 2013 he joined Remind to head up product and more recently, he moved to AltSchool.

AltSchool currently runs six K-8 schools in the Bay Area and New York and has plans to expand quickly. The classroom focus is on personalized learning so that each student can find the pace and method that works best for them. To make this approach work, AltSchool is building a technology platform with new tools for learning and student management.

AltSchool was designed to avoid some of the friction that other ed tech companies face. Because the teachers and the product team are part of the same organization, the development process is faster and more connected. Teachers and parents also join AltSchool expecting new technology, so they’re calibrated for a toolset that will evolve over time. Nonetheless, the product team is taking a piecemeal approach as they builds out tools.

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Before we talk about AltSchool, tell me about where you grew up and went to school. What kind of learner were you? What things got you most excited in school?

I grew up in suburban Philadelphia and went to — what I now realize was — a pretty good public school. As far as learning style, I got the most out of the project-based work. That’s what stuck.

What’s a good example?

Well, in high school I had two physics teachers who oriented their entire course around projects. They managed to create this culture that got everyone in my class excited about physics. We used resources from around the whole school to test out different mechanics; stuff like shooting marbles and predicting how far they would go. The course was so engaging that almost everyone went on to sign up for Physics Olympics, which was one of these nerdy competitions involving labs and math, and we had at least three times the representation of any other school.

I also remember a programming course created by my high school math teacher. She started this course without actually having been an engineer herself, and didn’t know the cutting edge of the field. Nonetheless, she made the format of the class work around that. She would give us large projects, and we would run with them. They would take weeks or months to complete. If we would go up to her to ask a question, she would ask us a question back or point us to some resource to figure it out ourselves. She rarely answered our questions directly.

I took this course with about 10 friends my freshman year. We liked it so much we convinced her to teach it every year of high school. As a result, I ended up with four years of computer science before heading to college.

After high school, where did you go to college? Did you know you were going to do computer science work?

I went to Penn State after high school. During my freshman year, I realized that I wanted to do computer science, and I made the decision to transfer to Stanford.

Open-ended projects still got me most excited, and there’s one that will probably stick with me forever. Stanford had a computer graphics course, and it was well known in the CS curriculum that the main project was building a 3D video game. At the end of the course, there was a presentation, and video game industry experts judged the winning projects.

Everyone took this project very seriously and put in way more work than necessary to get an ‘A’. There was a website with projects from previous years, and you could download and play those games. None of us knew anything about 3D graphics, and it seemed incredible that our peers could create games this good in three months. It was a fun, super motivating project. You could use any programming language, any 3D graphics framework, and it could be any type of game you wanted. I worked with two guys, and we built an Ultimate Frisbee game that won the competition.

As you’re going through that, did you have any particular sense of what you wanted to explore after school? Were there particular problems you wanted to solve or things you didn’t want to do?

All I really knew for sure was that I loved working on products that normal people would use. I wanted to be able to talk to my friends, or parents, or whoever, and say “see this feature, I worked on that.”

I did internships at Apple and then at Pixar. I applied to a bunch of start-ups and ended up at Facebook. A few of the best engineers I knew at Stanford had gone to Facebook the year before, and I just trusted their judgement.

What were the kinds of things you worked on at Facebook? What were the projects that you remember the most?

When I started, I worked on some improvements to Facebook Photos and then helped Video get off the ground.

My first big project was Facebook Chat. It originally came out of a hackathon. A few engineers had built a prototype and then asked me if I wanted to join them to turn it into a product. It was my first major launch, and it’s where I learned what it meant to lead a project.

After that, I oversaw a bunch of core Facebook products — Profile, Photos, Chat, Video, Groups, News Feed — as an engineering manager.

If you look at those experiences at Facebook, what are the one or two things that really stood out that you learned?

It’s amazing how little direction we were given when we started Facebook Chat. At the time it made things stressful, but in retrospect it was awesome. I was an engineer trying to guide a project, but I ended up playing much more of a PM role. In addition to writing code, I led the team and worked closely with our designer. I learned through that project how much I enjoy a mix of product and design and engineering, and I tried to work in a similar roles ever since.

The other thing I learned was the power of a culture. Facebook, for a long time, had very little process but was so successful just because they had a bunch of smart, motivated people with big ideas. Process and tools can help make an organization more efficient, but in the end, what really matters are the ideas and drive that people have. I took this culture for granted while I was there, but have since realized how essential it is. To build a great culture, you have to identify those smart, motivated people and empower them to feel ownership over the direction of the company. That’s far more important than any particular process.

After leaving Facebook, you explored some ideas in education. What was the high level motivation for that? What was the process you went through?

After six years at Facebook, I began to lose a little bit of passion for the mission. Facebook continues to do awesome things for the world, but for me personally, I wasn’t feeling as connected to it. My best sense was that I wanted a narrower mission, something I could point to and say, “this is the problem that I’m solving.” I also wanted to put myself into an unfamiliar environment that would force me to learn new things that I hadn’t been exposed to before.

I considered things like education and health care or maybe something with government. Those were big spaces where I could learn a ton and do good for the world.

I joined a VC firm, Social+Capital, and spent six months there as an engineer in residence. It was a good context for me to learn these areas. I talked to some portfolio companies and a couple dozen other start-ups. I also used that time to read and see if I had any particular leanings towards specific problems in those fields. Over the course of this research, I got more and more interested in education.

Do you remember why? Do you remember the things that were attractive about it?

It met a bunch of criteria for me. Mostly, I thought that there were very interesting consumer-level problems in the space. I could take what I’d learned from Facebook and improve the product experience of education.

What’s an example of one of those problems?

There are so many. Just take the fact that we continue to make students consume information via textbooks. Nobody else in the world does that any more except for kids. What would it mean to design a product that allowed students a choice of methods for learning a piece of material. Also, it’s not a massive technical challenge to build a product experience better than a textbook. I liked the idea of being able to improve that experience without needing a huge engineering team.

During this time I also got inspired by what felt like some tangible progress happening in education. I read Sal Khan’s book, “The One World Schoolhouse,” and found it really compelling. He is systems-oriented in how he writes about school, and that connected with me as an engineer. I also visited some local classrooms, including the Summit Charter Schools. This was a group of people who clearly asked themselves: “What would we do if we could design a school from scratch?” Seeing these things got me really excited.

After doing at least some of your thinking in your exploration, you joined Remind. What attracted you to them in particular, and what did you learn from that?

To me, Remind is a very clear win. It’s a simple tool that helps teachers communicate with parents and students, and frankly, it’s saving teachers a ton of time. They don’t need to spend as much time on the phone or email trying to reach parents. They don’t need to worry about whether students received a piece of information because they know it showed up on their phone. I joined because it was a good opportunity to continue exploring the education space while working on an obvious improvement for teachers.

I also thought a simple communication tool could eventually be a jumping-off point to build a different style of classroom. Facebook had a similar path. It was first a simple communication tool that became a platform for all sorts of other interesting stuff. I could see Remind getting into curriculum management, tracking student’s progress, and keeping parents up to date with that progress. That was the other big reason that I joined.

What things did you learn about education at Remind that you didn’t know before you went there?

I knew this to some degree, but Remind drilled home that basic communication tools are a huge unsolved problem for teachers. If you work in a modern company, you take for granted how easy it is to communicate and share resources. But teachers don’t have access to good tools. Teachers also don’t have hours in a week to research technology, so they often rely on what’s working for their peers.

Remind grew quickly because it took a direct-to-teacher model, and it was free. Our early teachers told other teachers, who then simply downloaded it from the App Store. They could try it and use it without having to go through some complex purchasing process.

There are other tools, like ClassDojo, that are also taking the direct-to-teacher approach and seeing success.

That’s interesting. That’s a pattern that may not have existed five years ago. Teachers have both the autonomy and the inclination to seek these tools out themselves.

Yes. And it’s a lot easier to pitch to a district when half of the teachers are already using your tool. The next question is which of these products are going to be able to make the leap from the direct-to-teacher model into a profitable business.

Were there any other conclusions you came to — either about education or the way that technology might help education — as you were leaving Remind?

Remind is leveraging the obvious trend that everyone now has a phone. That’s the device they check multiple times a day. Meeting them in that medium is going to be a interesting trend for education.

So after some time at Remind, you left to join AltSchool. How did you make that decision? What became particularly compelling?

As I got more exposure to education, I realized my main interest was inside of the classroom. That’s where I saw the most compelling product problems — how teachers organize and share material, how do students do work, how to track students’ progress. That’s what I wanted spend time on.

One big challenge is how to stay away from the constraints of an existing school system. Schools already have a curriculum in place. They have a grading system. Teachers have the methods they prefer. And if it’s a public school, there are additional constraints like testing requirements.

If you’re a classroom-oriented ed tech company, working with established schools will constrain product development. They’ve got to serve existing systems and can’t try new ideas with the frequency of other tech companies.

But what I liked about AltSchool was that an engineering and design team was embedded in the school. It’s part of the same organization. We get to innovate and build tools with the teachers, so everything moves much faster. Part of this is because educators at AltSchool know what they’re signing up for. They want to be part of that process, and they’re comfortable with changing toolsets.

Students and parents have similar expectations. They’re not shocked to see a new tool or redesign that didn’t exist the week before. That eliminates a lot of potential friction, and it’s a unique environment for product development. Within the K-12 classroom space, it’s an advantage and hard to find anywhere else.

Summit School’s Basecamp project with Facebook has some similarities to this. And they’re starting to put out some great tools for public schools to use.

It’s only been a few months, but now that you’re working closer to the classroom what have you learned? Are there any surprises?

It was surprising to me how different every classroom looks and how differently every teacher approaches their job.

AltSchool’s general methodology has been to hire great teachers and, for the first few years not to put many constraints on them. They teach how they want to teach. As a product development organization, our job is mostly to observe and ask questions.

But even with the relatively few teachers we have, there are so many different teaching methods and types of material. That’s revealed an interesting tension between wanting to abstract practices into a system and tools while not constraining these really smart, motivated teachers. So we’re taking a piecemeal and humble approach, as engineers and designers, we know that it will be a few years before we have a sense of what the system should be.

As a simple example, I’ve spent a lot of time watching how teachers set up an activity in their classrooms. They’ll often group kids in seemingly ad hoc ways for different projects, and a lot of that is based on context that’s in the teacher’s head; which students are likely to work together better or need to work on particular things. It would be a losing battle at this point to try to build a system that controls that environment. Our focus needs to be on tools that are often optional for a teacher, but we shouldn’t try and replace all the instinct and context that’s in their head.

That’s really cool. When you think about AltSchool five years from now where do you think it will have the most impact?

If I had to guess, AltSchool’s biggest impact will be as an example for other educators. It will demonstrate what happens when you can rethink large parts of the classroom experience and have the technology to make things more efficient. We’ll be a Petri dish where people can watch how this plays out. We’re still figuring out how we’re going to get AltSchool’s ideas and our tools to a wider audience, as a big part of our mission is to help solve educational inequality.

Now that you’ve worked in two education-related companies, is there anything that seems specific to this industry compared with others?

A regular theme for ed tech is the misalignment between users. There’s a tension between designing the best experience for students or teachers versus what is going to convince an administrative decision-maker to make a purchase. That’s a problem specific to K-12 ed tech.

Another thing that is different that I love is that it’s a collaborative industry. There isn’t a constant fog of competition and secrecy, and people don’t view the product space as a zero-sum game. Even the for-profit education companies tend to be fairly open and collaborative with other companies. Maybe that’s because we’re so early, so there is room for many technology winners. That’s refreshing.

Lastly, there’s a sense of patience. Nobody is going to solve education anytime soon, so there’s less short-term pressure and stress compared to my prior jobs. Everyone also feels they are working on something very important. People are more grounded. It’s a less time-pressured environment with a sharper long-term focus.

Are there other things that you see out there, other companies or trends, that get you excited?

I’m really excited about the trend towards personalized learning. We’ve gone beyond acknowledging that kids learn at their own pace to implementing programs to actively support it. It’s also an area in education where technology will be particularly useful. We’ll need tools to allow students to progress through material in whatever way is best for them and at whatever pace is best for them. I’m confident there will be a handful of really important technology tools to support that, and it will cause a major transformation in education.

That’s awesome, thank you.