Interview with Meenal Balar

VP Marketing & Partnerships, Remind

Meenal spent six years at Facebook where she led growth marketing projects in India, Brazil and other countries. It was the beginning of Facebook’s international expansion, and she covered everything from closing distribution deals with mobile carriers to finding the first hires in these countries. Meenal left Facebook to explore roles in education and joined Remind in 2014.

Remind is a simple messaging service that helps teachers communicate with students and parents, primarily though their mobile devices. Teachers can send announcements to a whole class or message an individual parent or student. Remind delivers messages to mobile devices while keeping contact information private. It has grown quickly and is now used in more than one third of U.S. K-12 schools.

More efficient, reliable communication takes an administrative burden off of teachers, but it also gets parents more engaged in their children’s schools. When teachers can easily reach parents, participation goes up at parent-teacher conferences and other critical school activities. Teachers also use it to tell parents about specific topics or ideas that are being covered in class. When parents are more engaged, students are more likely to be engaged.

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Tell me about your education. What was school like growing up? What got you most excited and what kind of learner where you?

I was born and raised in Rhode Island, first generation Indian-American. I loved the public school system for giving me a diverse group of friends. It was a community of folks I felt I belonged in at a time when I was constantly trying to figure out if I was Indian or American.

Did you like school?

I loved school. I was the studious, academic, do-gooder type. I have a twin brother and he was the opposite of me in so many ways. I don’t know if having that constant force in my life made me think about my identity as, “I am going to be the good one. I’m actually going to make this easy on my parents.” I was immersed in school. I loved learning. I loved studying. I loved every part of it. I was also active in sports. For 12 years, sports and school were my entire life and I was totally happy with that.

In terms of what drove my learning style, it wasn’t a particular teacher, per se, or educational experience. For me, it was visiting India during my childhood. Every other summer, I would spend my entire vacation in my dad’s village. It was a small modest village in Gujarat — with mud-thatched houses and surrounded by wheat farms. It was a very different experience than Rhode Island.

These trips were pretty formative for me. Every time I came back from India, I was like, “What separates me from a cousin or a neighbor, or anyone in that village I had just left after three months?” And the answer was school. It was what brought my dad to the States. He came here to provide us with a great education, and there was always a seriousness to why we were here when the rest of our family was in India. I saw education providing me with a unique opportunity that wasn’t necessarily afforded to the community I left every summer. These trips during my childhood were the most influential part of my learning experience — seeing school in the context of what other kids just like me didn’t have.

The question I always ended up asking myself was “How do I take advantage of what’s in front of me?” I’d seen girls and cousins getting married at 16 or 17 — a starkly different life compared to what I had. These experiences drove how I thought about learning and education overall. From a young age, I approached it with a sense of responsibility and seriousness.

That’s pretty powerful. As you started to head into high school, did your thinking change?

It evolved to be less “education is really important” and more “now what do I do with it?” I was heavily influenced by culture and family, which pushed me towards being a doctor and/or getting into the sciences. I loved science. I loved math. But I also had a bend towards creative things. My teachers, for example, always supported my writing and drawing, nudging me into poetry and art classes. So I went along with the whole doctor thing, plus a bunch of different hobbies.

Then in college I realized that, “Whoa, I don’t think medicine is actually what I want to do.” I had this conversation with my dad where I said, “I want to hedge here. Medicine could be it, but what might give me more flexibility with what I do post college?” My dad suggested, “Why don’t you try marketing? Why don’t you try business?” So I did that.

I ended up with a dual degree in biology and marketing, and I took a job with some pharmaceutical companies after graduation. Later, I moved to New York City, took a job at L’Oreal, and lived a very different post-graduate life than my parents had envisioned.

How did you end up working at Facebook? Were you particularly interested in technology or joining a technology company?

I was never a techie kid. I didn’t grow up tinkering with things or taking things apart. The job at Facebook truly fell into my lap.

After getting an MBA, I accepted an offer from American Express (AMEX) to join its strategy group. I decided to go to India before my start date to do a short project in micro-finance. The area I worked in was very poor, a much lower socioeconomic tier than the village I visited growing up. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

The experience brought up a lot of childhood memories. I remember the trip home, landing on the tarmac at Newark Airport thinking about the job at AMEX and how it suddenly felt like the last thing I wanted to do. Moving to New York City and working for a company that had thousands of employees didn’t make sense anymore. I felt drawn to something that felt more meaningful after that experience.

Two weeks before my start date at AMEX, I called a friend to congratulate her husband on taking an executive job at Facebook. I remember this conversation vividly — he was actually at Nordstrom’s buying ‘cool people’ jeans to prepare for his start the following Monday. He randomly threw out, “Hey, I think I’m supposed to build a marketing team. If you’re interested, you should shoot me your resume.” I laughed because I had just put down the security deposit on an NYC apartment and was all set on this path to join AMEX. But something stuck, and I ended up sending him my resume. After a quick phone screen, I flew out to the Bay Area for a series of in-person interviews, got the job offer when I landed back on the East Coast, accepted, rescinded my offer from AMEX, lost my deposit on the apartment, and moved out to California — all in a two-week period.

For me, Facebook was an opportunity to build something. Along with the vision of company, I was excited about all the unknowns. In contrast to the predictability of AMEX, Facebook was about carving a different path.

That’s a great story. As you got started at Facebook, how did your feelings evolve?

I went through this up-and-down period when I joined. I didn’t have a job description, and there was no real marketing team. My second day at Facebook, I met with an engineering director who found out I was there to work on marketing, and his advice was to either move back to the East Coast or join HR. He said, every employee at Facebook should be in service of the product; marketing was something superficial and unnecessary. That was my second day. I decided to treat this conversation as an opportunity.

Marketing at that early stage was really an inside-out job. It was about articulating what the product stood for and why, and then communicating that to other internal teams. It was about explaining why Facebook was important, and the role it was to going play in the world.

After a year and a half I moved to the growth team. Growth was a deep-dive into the operational parts of marketing and it was huge for me. I worked on a range of big problems including how to generate awareness, how to drive virality, and how to think about retention as a quality measure of your product. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I was getting exposed to an emerging science of marketing technology products at scale. I worked on Growth for more than six years and got an invaluable education.

We began to focus on international expansion, and I got to work on problems that meant something to me. My experiences in India, for example, had made such a huge impact on my life: who I was, the choices I had made; and I wanted to find a way to give something back.

Facebook hadn’t gained immediate traction in places like India, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, so we made those areas our focus. The expectations around scale were huge, with annual targets in the tens of millions of users per country. The goals forced us to look at important product levers as well as big awareness drivers to accelerate growth — television and news media as well as large advertising and platform partners. We focused on scrappier, business development-focused tactics versus traditional marketing.

The landscape changed quickly — our team began to see the transition from web to mobile happening much faster than the rest of the company. More users were starting to register through mobile web, or use Facebook over SMS. In emerging markets, the device manufacturers and operators became the critical partners when it came to reaching and acquiring users, and our team started thinking about how Facebook could work with the mobile ecosystem. That was the beginning of initiatives like Facebook Zero and pre-loads.

How much time did you spend in the markets themselves?

I spent a lot of time initially, mostly to figure out what were the primary sources of product friction and who we could partner with. I also loved being able to do the work myself. Eventually, we hired local leads in these markets.

Many of these countries had very male-dominated business cultures. Early on at Facebook, it was totally normal to be the youngest person in the room when meeting with other companies. But in these markets, I was not only young, but often the only female in the room. Certain companies would try to use intimidation tactics when negotiating with us. They would invite me to a conference room where it was just me and 20 older Indian dudes. To counter this, I started asking partner contacts to meet me in the hotel lobby — it turned out to be an effective way of making sure only the relevant reps attended so we could have a productive conversation.

As you look back on what you learned, what are the one or two most valuable things you got out of the experience at Facebook?

Growing up on the East Coast, there’s so much inertia that’s been established in how people are supposed to build careers. You’re pushed to think you need X years of experience to get Y opportunity. You’re required to earn certain badges to progress or achieve things.

The culture of Facebook proved the complete opposite was possible. It was a company consisting of smart, hugely ambitious young people that just wanted to solve big problems. By applying ourselves and working together, we could figure out ways to accomplish near impossible things without the system.

The biggest lesson for me was internalizing that mindset. You have a choice in determining how to build your career. You didn’t need to climb ladders or earn badges to work on something you were truly passionate about.

Working on the growth team also gave me a framework for how to tackle problems — any problem. Back in school, I felt like I needed to be a subject matter expert in order to do anything. But Facebook taught me that domain expertise is far less important than knowing how to break down a problem — you understand the full context, you identify potential levers that could impact the problem, and you test and execute your way to solution. It’s a scientific method applied to a business context.

This framework has made me much more versatile. At Remind, I was hired to do marketing, but I’ve worked on everything from defining our terms and policies to building and implementing a performance feedback process.

When you left Facebook did you have a picture of what you wanted to work on next? Was there a particular pull towards education?

After my work in emerging markets, I knew I wanted to work on something mission-oriented and ideally, something related to education. I started reading a ton to understand what types of problems people were focused on in the space. It was depressing because I felt like most of the conversations involved finger-pointing. Everyone agreed that the system was broken — but politicians blamed teachers, teachers pointed at parents, and parents thought it was school administrators or local officials. Meanwhile, there were new and established companies capitalizing on the mess.

I spoke to many people and connected strongly with the Remind founders. They were tackling communication in schools — something that felt like a root problem. Remind’s vision didn’t involve getting an iPad in front of every kid, it was about making the process of education more human. At the end of the day, how can you provide every child a strong support network, multiple people engaged in their learning, so that they can overcome their challenges? Based on my experience at Facebook, this vision of making education about relationships felt right to me.

I had never heard that description of Remind or its mission. Tell me how the product started to take off. What’s been valuable for teachers and students that’s made it successful?

Teachers have struggled to reach students and parents. WhatsApp just hit a billion active users, yet school communication systems are still unbelievably archaic: intercom systems, robocalls, Post-It notes, and paper mail. The Remind founders talked to hundreds of teachers to understand what it would take to move a lot of this communication behavior onto a more relevant medium — mobile devices.

There were three primary areas we had to design for: simplicity, safety, and access. Remind needed to be a product that any teacher could use — it had to be as simple as SMS. It also had to be safe. One of the biggest hurdles to using mobile phones in schools was the need to share personal phone numbers — we needed to build a product that helped keep this information private. Lastly, we had to make sure teachers, students and parents could use the product, regardless of what type of technology or resources they had access to.

The founders worked directly with teachers to build Remind and they’ve been iterating ever since. That partnership, building and optimizing that experience in collaboration with teachers, was hugely important. Those early teachers became our strongest advocates and hundreds of like-minded teachers discovered Remind through them. The product took off from there.

What’s the most useful part of Remind? When it works best, what kinds of effects does it have?

One teacher described Remind as “changing dinner table conversations.” She’ll send a message to a parent saying, “Hey, your child learned about volcanoes today. Ask them the difference between lava and magma.” This opens a huge door. The typical conversation between a parent and their 12 year-old starts with, “How was school today?” and ends with shrug. But when a parent has a specific cue, there’s a better chance of sparking a dialogue.

Engagement at home is powerful. A kid sees their parent taking a concrete interest in what they’re doing in school. And every day, a busy parent can have just enough information to connect with their kid. That simple use case really excites me. I had hyper-involved parents when I was young to constantly nudge my brother and I. Education takes a village, and Remind aims to bring more people into this process. It’s not just teacher and student — kids stay motivated and engaged in their learning if there are multiple levels of reinforcement.

When you look forward 5–10 years what part of Remind do you see that may not be obvious right now? What gets you most excited?

I hope we can see a fundamental shift in how ed tech services are distributed. Right now, most services in education are sold top down. Companies sell to districts or schools, often focusing on the largest or wealthiest districts. While education products and services cater to these specific customers, the smaller, less resourced ones get left behind. More than 60% of K-12 schools in the US are Title I.

Districts spend billions of dollars on ed tech services that come through this enterprise route, only to find that teachers and school communities don’t actually use them. I think this is because the decision making happens so far away from end-users — teachers, students, and parents who need to learn how to use these tools every day.

That’s why starting with the teacher is so important. Products that are really useful to teachers means you can rely on their engagement to drive adoption. It ensures you’re building something that’s better aligned with their needs.

The ideal model is what we’ve seen in places like Newark, New Jersey. We had a bunch of active teachers in an elementary school using Remind, so the principal started to use it to connect school-wide. Then district administrators noticed a bunch of their principals using Remind, and decided to adopt the product for district-wide communications. The bottoms-up model starts with teacher engagement as a core driver.

Once that active communication network is set up, educators can better support students, extend learning at home, or even discover relevant tools and services through interactions with their colleagues. They can decide what works with their method of teaching. Contrast that to the current process where a district like Houston ISD gets pitched by a giant education company, and then has to wait another cycle to get it slowly distributed into the school system. Not only that, but they probably have to invest in training and resources to support their technology purchase. If decision-making around tools is so far away from the teacher, the technology is more likely to be irrelevant when it gets to them.

That’s the biggest shift I hope to see, teachers discovering and adopting tools that better support how they teach.

Compared to your previous work, what feels most different about education? What have you learned about growth or marketing that’s new?

In other sectors, the goal is often to scale the technology as fast as you can. But education is different. You have to figure out the right time to scale. My team’s marketing efforts haven’t started with massive email programs, or paid ad strategies, or big distribution deals. The first set of investments have largely been in building a community. How do we work with educators to help us build a better product? How do we ensure we’re creating real value so they hopefully become a source of advocacy? In education, word of mouth is highly localized. Just because we’re growing like hot cakes in Texas means nothing to a educator in New York City. It’s a hyper-local and relationship-driven environment. Accelerating growth comes later.

For me, it’s been a lesson in sequencing. You make unscalable, upfront investments, and then figure out when the right time is to amplify them. That’s probably been the biggest difference between Remind and Facebook.

The policy landscape is also fascinating, particularly around student data privacy. All these innovative education services, whether it’s Remind or Khan Academy, depend on developing thoughtful practices around privacy. Everyone believes in the promise of personalized learning, but that’s not the way the legislation is getting built. Ed tech players should come together and develop a shared perspective, but that’s not happening yet. Instead, policy is being shaped by things like civil suits against Google. There is an opportunity for ed tech to learn from what’s happened in other verticals, and develop a coalition-based approach on student data privacy much faster.

You suggested that technology and education are more collaborative than other situations you’ve been involved in. Explain that a little more.

Take something like Uber. There’s one person who has a vision of the future. They personally feel it’s good for the world, and they’re going to mobilize a company to build it. They’re going to push through any obstacle to get it done.

In education, there’s less permission to operate like that. There are too many nuances, too many stakeholders. We’re talking about a kid’s future — there’s just too much at stake. Companies that are successful build authentic relationships with stakeholders in the space. That makes education slower than other technology verticals, but it’s fundamental to creating the right product and identifying the right business model.

When you started at Remind, you probably had a set of assumptions about education. Now that you’ve been in the space for a few years, which ones have turned out to be false? What surprises have you had?

Well, there are two that come to mind.

In the US there’s a lot of finger pointing happening in education, especially towards teachers. They get framed as Luddites, anti-change, and we paint a tough of picture of the profession. But our teachers are viewed very differently in other countries. When I talk to policy makers or educators in Brazil or the UK, they talk about US educators with such admiration.

In what way? Why?

Because there’s autonomy that doesn’t really exist in these other markets yet. US educators are taking change into their own hands. They’re testing and experimenting with new tools. They’re going rogue. They’re working with technology companies like us to build better services. They’re doing what it takes to change the system, even though it’s slow and it’s classroom to classroom. They’re empowering themselves to do what they need for their students.

This has been a consistent observation whether I was talking to a policy maker in Argentina, an administrator of a charter school network in India, or the education council at 10 Downing in London. The theme is how much they admire the US educators for driving change themselves. We have trouble seeing that virtue, and for me, it was a great reminder.

The second surprise was around Title I schools. Many are not connected, and less than 5% of teachers feel their students have the tools they need for a great educational experience. I’ve visited a bunch of them, and spent time with educators in these systems. They lack of infrastructure and resources, tough leadership, and real investments from the community. They reminded me of conditions in emerging markets.

The common perception is that Title I schools will eventually catch up. That’s mostly based on looking at the really big districts — New York or LA or Houston — and the bet that we’ll prove out the flipped classroom or the value of 1:1 iPads and Chromebooks in districts that can afford them. The idea is that one of those programs will become a hallmark example of learning, and then someone will figure out how to subsidize and scale it.

This approach ends up ignoring unique needs in some of the most troubled districts in the country. In many of those places, they’re not dealing with implementing personalized learning software. The urgent issues are getting parents to show up to a parent-teacher conference or getting students to attend class. The focus is not on implementing tools but building an engaged school community. Remind has seen some of fastest growth in Title I districts, and I’d encourage other ed tech companies to invest there, too.

There’s an awesome story from Texas where this young teacher was asked to be an administrator of a small elementary school in one of the state’s poorest districts. They were going to shut down the school if he didn’t want the job. He decided to take it, and invested in community building right away. For the first day of school, he lined up local businesses to sponsor a red carpet experience. The kids walked down the red carpet, flanked by stands from local businesses. Parents and friends were standing alongside the red carpet, high fiving the kids and taking pictures. This principal and his teachers built a sense of community, and the kids got the message — “it’s a big deal that you’re walking into school today.” When I hear how he brought parents, students, and staff together using the product, I think, “Shit. That’s something we should replicate in every district in the country.”

It’s too easy to dismiss the innovation happening in some of the poorest schools, and I find it pretty fascinating to look there first, to see what they’re doing.

That’s awesome. So imagine somebody comes to you who has worked at a technology company like Facebook and says, “I’m very excited to invest the next chapter of my life in education.” What’s the guidance you would give them?

First, so much in ed tech is unproven. These are all very early experiments, and none of us has it totally figured it out. When you look at the space, there’s a meaningful amount of risk. Most of these companies are working off of zero precedent — building entirely new models. But we’re going to try a bunch of stuff and we’re going to figure this out.

To me, if you’re looking for a steep learning curve after a company like Facebook, join something where your decisions could actually make or break the company. The advice would be not to shy away from risk.

Education isn’t a luxury. It doesn’t go up and down with the market. It needs people excited to work on structural problems who are willing to be courageous and persevere. That’s why you should enter the space.

It also feels like you’re suggesting it’s a very particular time. On a collective basis, this is the first chapter in a new story.

Exactly. I’m reading this book — Jeff Bezos’s biography by Brad Stone. Bezos is interviewing an MBA candidate and asked him, “Why Amazon?” The guy says, “I’m a student of history. I feel like what you guys are doing is about to shape history.” I was like, “Holy shit. That’s a really good response.”

What’s happening in tech and education — K through 12 specifically — is exactly that type of moment. An urgent need, zero precedent, and a bunch of smart people trying to figure stuff out. At the same time, you have big vectors like policy, charter schools, and incredibly wealthy philanthropists all adding to the intensity. There is so much happening in this space. It’s a great time to be part of it.

Thank you so much.