jwenig

Given that you believe the transformer is the future, this could flip the state of latency & cost to run these models overnight.

On [0], this "Meta-Analysis" was only for pro-social behavior and the longest study they looked at had people meditate for a total of only three months. You are right science does not have rigorous research to support some of claimed benefits of mindfulness meditation, but calling it fake and citing a sourc that starts its article by declaring meditation pseudoscience does not exactly seem rigorous either. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle: there are definitely benefits to mindfulness meditation, but we need more research.

Meta analysis: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257795314_The_Effec...

Research suggests Mindfulness increases empathy and reduces anger and fear. Wouldn’t reframing soldiers or CEOs worldview to be more compassionate galvanize more positive change than trying to convince Sundar Pichai or soldiers that they are bad people?

I wish I could tell you that I was an expert, but the truth is that we worked on a slow as 1990's software genetic algorithm before we found success with the MIP. :-) If you shoot me an email [email protected] I can connect you with our algorithms engineers who have the background to discuss

Thanks Brad!!

Hi also Justin,

You described what we do perfectly. We're pretty interested in expanding internationally, and would love to connect via a call if you are open to it?

Is your student information system handling that for you? I know some powercampus schools handle it that way. I can ping some folks and follow up if I get any recommendations

Yeah we’ve come across easy a and loved some of your blog posts. Will shoot you an email to connect! Nice product :)

Appreciate your interest, Lee. Coursicle is a pretty cool product: lots of users and engagement and really nailed the B2C2B play.

I'm inclined to agree that the best Higher Ed products are not actually all that great. Some of the VC's that I've spoken with joke that a B+ product in Higher Ed is a unicorn.

As for the CIO's - we're able to standardize a lot of that using something called the HECVAT which is basically a tell all for security reviews. If you're interested in learning more, looks like you have a super interesting github and would love to connect, just shoot me your email

We have lots of community colleges and one trade school. Not to get philosophical, but CC's are some of our favorite schools to work with because you feel so close to the mission. CC's have huge huge huge scheduling problems that actually impact grad rates

Open to connecting? Would love to exchange insights here and show how we incorporate faculty preferences to see if it could be helpful to your role.

What's the best email to reach you at?

Would love to connect to learn more about what you're trying to solve and exchange insights. Feel free to shoot me a note at [email protected]

To follow up more specifically - most of our schools right now are only using one or two of our products (scheduling vs. catalog publishing vs. degree program handling) but more than 90% of those schools are using that product across campus.

We're seeing a lot of schools now procure additional products once they enjoy their additional experience with us, like this school Laguna College https://coursedog.com/case-study123

Many of our schools like BYU or UMontana have campus-wide deployments and do all of their scheduling with us, while some other campuses have started with a subset (Columbia Law School) during the first year with us. We don't work with individual departments for the most part just because they often don't have serious budgets to work with.

Very cool. I believe there is a company https://www.ablschools.com/ that has a pretty good solution for k-12. You might want to check it out if you have not already!

Great to hear that - that's why we need help. Would love to get in touch to learn more

[email protected], would love to hear from you!

Yeah definitely - we're always interested in seeing if there could be a mutual fit, want to shoot me an email at [email protected] ?

Yeah they are one of these players that has been working on scheduling since the 90's. We've taken a few schools off of their tool mainly because it's not the most intuitive, it does not really provide course demand projections and we have a department scheduling piece that EMS is lacking. Have you used EMS before or how are you aware of it?

Appreciate the feedback!

Our sales are very outbound: personalized cold emails & cold calls have been very effective for us. We also attend lots of tradeshows and have found some success with webinars and digital ads.

To your point about moving to a better system - it's been an age old critique that universities are a slow moving bureaucracy.

We'd argue that the slow pace is a more or less an allergic reaction to the poor solutions that universities have been force-fed over the past 20+ years: including but not limited to incessant acquisitions, companies going under and products that don't work or integrate well.

Given that university administrators often work within a school for 20+ years, you end up with a lot of people who are just flat out skeptical of new products.

The good thing is that going from 0 to 1 product within a university is exponentially more difficult than 1 to 2 or 1 to an entire back-office solution. Now that we've got a couple of strong references and high NPS scores, we think that up-selling and cross-selling is going to help us break down these traditional barriers. Rather than rip and replace, why not go down the line with us and rebuild?

It's definitely not a fast sale. But at the end of the day, with all the murmors of Higher Ed changing and/or dying, universities are working toward becoming more cost-efficient and student-success oriented. In many cases states are incentivizing schools by offering grants or even direct funding to undertake these types of initiatives.

It's really a new day and age that we're living in where school will spend a lot of money on software - as 5 years ago this would have been crazy.

It's being pretty closely guarded, but one of them is Wellesley College which is using Workday's Cloud-Native Product.

The piece that is really holding back schools from moving to an all cloud erp is the "Student Information System" (SIS), which is the Higher Ed specific scheduling, advising, degree audit, credentials, advising, registration etc. piece of the ERP stack. A lot of companies that built Student Information Systems in the 90's/early 2000's are working to port their on-prem solutions into the cloud, but they are somewhat slowed down by having to support numerous legacy on-prem systems.

On the schools end, it also takes a lot of courage to flip off a system you've been using for 20+ years and start with something new, and right now there are basically no positive case studies of launched, cloud-based SIS systems.