Raising Capable Kids in a Fast-Changing World | Gary Surdam | Coffeez with Joe Shalaby

0:00What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Coffees for closers today we are sitting down with Gary Sertum the founder and CEO of the Illumini app an application that is a revolutionizing education for children. Please welcome Gary Sertum. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to another episode of Coffins. Thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to share our story, what we're doing and where we're going. I love it, Gary. Now, if you want to give the audience a 10 ,000-foot overview of what is the Illuminate app and how is it revolutionizing education for children today? Illuminate app, it starts off with the parents and the children working together, understanding that our parents are the first and most important teachers in the lives of their children and then connecting them together you know we've gone through the pandemic in fact i've written a book called illuminate that talks about how do we go from four years ago when our kids were 24 7 in our house that we normally send them off to school but now they were working with us How do we help our students to be successful?

1:13And how do we gear them up and prepare them for success in a global economy? So we combine them together. The parents have an activity that they can choose to have it once a week. They can choose to have it two or three times a week. But we give them activities to build responsibility, honesty. And one of the activities that we have is to build social justice. Having our children understand how do we respect each other. And when we don't get respected, how do we deal with that and how do we make life more positive for us. And then phase two is in 18 months. And we are looking at using the AI technology to give students exactly, we call it illuminate, because we want those illuminating moments to happen in every child.

2:09Because it takes the way, the learning style of each child, it takes their strengths and their weaknesses, and it takes their grade level, where they're at in their schooling, and focuses on STEAM education. Love it. Now, take me back to when you started this application. What is the problem that you are trying to solve for? Actually, 10 years ago, 10 years ago, I had this idea. Why not build an app that we can help students to really succeed? I was teaching an online class with students in Thailand, and I gave them an engineering problem. They had to solve the problem. Their minds were, you can see the gears just working.

2:54They couldn't understand it. All of a sudden, it illuminated in the face of a child. And within seconds, he gave me the answer. Ten years ago, we didn't have AI technology. It was just something in the far future. Now we're at the point where let's use that technology to give each student those illuminating moments. There are moments when everything clicks and everything comes together. So that's the concept that I had ten years ago. It took us 10 years to get to where we're at now, and we're at the right place at the right time. So it was 10 years ago, and it all started from when you were teaching engineering students.

3:37I actually, I've taught every grade from first grade all the way up to university, and I teach STEAM education at a university. At that time, I was in a university called University of Laverne in Laverne, California, And I was teaching teachers that were getting their degree in their teaching credential. And we would go, we would talk about STEAM education and I would instruct them, but we would go for two weeks at the end of the semester and we would teach in China. And we'd do STEAM camps throughout up and down China and give our teachers the opportunity to learn and to refine their teaching style.

4:25What they found out is that students are the same all over the country, all over the world. And it just gave them an opportunity to do that. So I was focusing on STEAM education with new teachers that were coming into the classrooms. Okay, gotcha. Now, you've worked all over the world in education. What originally drew you to the education space, and how did it become a calling to do this full-time for a living? I've got to tell you, I have an entrepreneur spirit. I was 19 years old. My uncle had a restaurant that was popular in Ventura, California, and he just was doing phenomenal work, just raking in the money and all of that.

5:10I would watch him and he would, at lunchtime after the lunchtime rush, he'd take his money, he'd put it in his pocket, go to the bank. And then after dinner, he'd take his money and then he'd take it home. So I saw that and I had that entrepreneur spirit and I said, I can do it. So he taught me the recipes. I opened up my restaurant when I was 19 years old with the help of my parents. Your own restaurant. Yes. and I didn't have any customers. I'm like, wait, what's going on here? So with the first month, I'm like, wait, my uncle didn't tell me about this. If you fast forward, basically I found after three years, I loved the business, I loved what I was doing, but my heart was in education.

5:59And so I went back to school and got my bachelor's degree, went on to teach in LA Unified School District for a number of years, moved on to different districts in in the county and then opened up my first business called bright start international education and i actually sold it to the chicago tribune wow and became an executive for the chicago tribune and they used to tell me i'm like that speedboat um they they would say the tribune is that that tanker that just goes straight down the ocean and i'm that speedboat that just kind of reacts to the market and reacts to what what customers want and what they need and so i did that which gave me a good um they gave me the 40 percent kind of um uh i guess if you if you're making less than 40 profit then you don't do it even if it's 30 39.9 it has to be 40 so that gave me a lot of a lot of um uh schooling in growing the company years later i found that i needed to grow the company as a entrepreneur and not an educator.

7:18And so I went back to school, got a certificate from Harvard Business School, and was able to kind of change. And that's when I started the new company called Bright Start EdTech, using what I have learned through the Harvard program and really making things click and come together. What was the biggest takeaway you got from the Harvard program? okay as an educator it's like okay so um they asked me how much do you want for this well you know what i just want your your teachers to be successful so it doesn't matter harvard taught me you can't have a sustainable company if you're just giving it away so you have to bottom line you need to make sure that you make a profit in everything you're doing and so that was the bottom line.

8:09I brought on board an advisory board that is consisting of superintendents of schools, sales people, financial people, technology people, brought in those advisors that are helping me to grow the company. Now, what are the moments or struggles in your own life that helped you shape your passion for helping kids and parents connect through education? I actually, I go back to when I was in fifth grade. When I was in fifth grade, I was a struggling reader. I couldn't spell. I struggled through the reading. And I don't know if you've ever, you probably are too young, but we used to have peachy folders.

8:57And the peachy folders were things that students would carry around with their back. They didn't even have backpacks back then. But I took, I was in a fourth grade speller when I should have been in a fifth grade speller. I covered it up with a peachy folder so no one knew that I was below grade level. Those struggles that I felt, I don't want students to feel the same thing. I don't want them to feel like they are less than anyone else. And so that's where my heart comes into the business and into education. helping students to succeed, helping students to feel good about themselves and to have confidence.

9:41So does your platform help with those specific subjects like reading, spelling, or is it more like macro? Because you talked about social justice. You talked about various things that we deal with as a society. The first phase is working with parents, parents and children working together, gaining a bond with each other but also parents being those first important teachers in the lives of their children and and it it has a variety of activities if we look at let's say honesty honesty we have activities that they can do that bring in reading that bring in writing that all bring in all those other subjects, but it's all broken down into age appropriacy.

10:30So if you, there's step one, step two, step three for each one of the activities, but let's say I have a three to five-year-old. If the three to five-year-old is, I click on it and I can see this is what I do with my three-year-old. If I have a 12-year-old, I can click down, I can say this is what I do. So it's really age appropriate. But at the same time, we include the reading, the writing, and all those other subjects. Gotcha. I love that. Now, you're not just an educator. You're an actual entrepreneur. And I love that. What was the first big leap that made you think about building something of your own?

11:14Was it this business? Did you have multiple businesses other than the restaurant? The restaurant was the first leap. and the struggles that I needed to realize, you know, if you don't have the money, you still have to pay the bills. And so how do we do that? When I became an educator and started working in the school system, I still had that heart to be wanting to go out and to make a business and make it successful. So the kind of the benchmarks in between were, let's see, what can I do next? and what can I do next? So it started off with me after school, rushing after school, after one of my classes, and then doing a workshop at a local school, and just sharing some of the strategies that I have learned as an educator, and little by little doing that, which it ended up, I left teaching per se from teaching in fact I was teaching a fifth grade class that summer I had a I had an administrator leadership conference in the local mountains in which we had I believe we had probably around 50 teachers and 50 administrators that was my first leap at the same time I got hired by which was then the Chicago Tribune one of their educational arms and I got hired to work part-time for them so that helped me to build the business so little by little in that fashion and now you've been at this project how long have you been at Illuminate how many years Illuminate has been two years and you just had the full launch up until then the beta test who is your pilot who are the people using it well the funny thing is um as a startup company there's no money there's no funding available so i needed to find out how do i build a mobile app that it's going to be phenomenal that's going to be incredible when i'm not tech savvy.

13:26So I brought in some interns from USC, from Berkeley, from Arizona State, and they built the AB through my direction and kind of going piece by piece. And so it took us about eight months to build it, but they're doing phenomenal work. As the the interns continued to come on board with us if we felt that it was a good fit and and it was going to be the future for us we brought them on board as an equity partner so some of our our tech technicians or our tech technology developers they are now equity partners in the business and I feel like if you don't have if you don't have skin in the game sometimes when when life gets tough and it's it's not working out we tend to not focus on what we're doing but if you have skin in the game and you have a supporting community there's nothing nothing that we can't do and that's what we're doing right now that's a great idea to get those kids to actually have skin in the game.

14:41And that was forward thinking. What was the motive behind that? The motive was, first I was thinking, we have no money, what are we going to do? So I started kind of reaching out and finding some of these tech people and asking them, would you be interested in working for equity? It was kind of funny, I was on an interview with this gentleman, And my director of technology had already talked to him about it's an equity position. You're not going to get paid. He got online and he goes, I'm not going to turn on my monitor because this meeting is not worth it. And I'm going, excuse me? He goes, I need money.

15:26I'm not going to work for free. And I thought, okay, well, you know, thank you very much. I will let you know. because he already knew but he he felt like okay let me just get on and see what they're going to give me but then when I got I started thinking how can I do it and I was talking with a student from one of my universities I was teaching that he goes well why don't you just find computer science students and see if they're interested in coming on board and and that that's how it works and that's how it clicked. We brought, at one time, we had a total of 10 interns that were working on the project.

16:06Right now, we're down to five because we've done a lot of the meat of the program and now it's really functioning very well. Now, the program is called Bright Start? The company is called Bright Start Ed Tech. The product is Illuminate and it's spelled with two O's. The reason why it's spelled with two O's is this. The two O's form infinity. Because once you have those illuminating moments as you're learning, learning goes on forever. And so the two O's represent infinity that we're building a community where learning is going to be top-notched and it's going to be something that students love to do.

16:56now you know you describe bright start as a parent-powered learning solution right now what does that mean in practice and why do you think a parent power a parent-powered solution is so powerful like i've said before that parents are our first and most important teachers in the lives of their kids we give parents an affirmation as parents sometimes we judge ourselves what do you mean an affirmation an effort a positive like um so it's a daily affirmation you guys have within the app right and it's it could be daily but it could be a push notification so on on monday more monday evening i know i'm going to be with my child at 6 p.m they're going to get a push notification, giving them a positive for the great things they're doing with their students, with their children, but also how they're changing the community, how they're changing the world by what they're doing today.

17:58So an affirmation that they can choose, let's say I also get it on Saturday, 10 o 'clock in the morning. So from there, they get like a pat on the back. And then after that they can click on the daily activity and each day they may have a different activity that they're going to be working on. We don't want it to be a checklist where oh I've done it for 10 minutes I'm done with it. We want it to be meaningful. So some of our activities may take two or three days for them to accomplish and we don't say you know spend two or three hours. Spend 15 minutes on working on this activity and then tomorrow pick it up again and work on that.

18:38So it's important to do that. Right now, it's a free app. In about two weeks, it's going to be pushed out as a subscription app. What we're adding to it is, number one, journaling at the end of each activity. As a parent, you journal, reflecting on how it went and what were the successes a community part of it where we join forces together you know they used to be the saying it takes a village to raise a child still we bring yeah still exactly we bring them together as a community form so okay so let's say today i i had an activity with my child to build honesty so we we go on our community forum and say you know this is what i did with my child did anyone have any other ideas so you can share you know this is how it went for me and a great support system there's going to be resources resources where they can go I've have a number of books that are there we have podcasts that are on there one of our our key person is Dr.

19:47Martinez she writes and does sessions on social emotional learning and so she'll have a podcast up there She'll have a video. Some of her parts of her books are on there. And so we have a variety of those. We also have a conversation where once a week a parent professional will come on for a webinar, but it's engaging. It's not a one-way webinar. It's engaging. So if you're a parent and I start to share with you an activity, and then you may have, well, how would that work with my five-year-old? the parent professional will be addressing those. So it's more of an open conversation. That's really cool.

20:38That's really cool. But this isn't live yet, the notebook, the journaling. That's not live yet. In fact, by the beginning of next week, it will be approved through the Apple Store and Google Play. Fantastic news. Now, you've mentioned closing learning gaps really early. What are some of the most common gaps you see and how can parents get ahead of them before it's too late? Number one, one of the most important gaps that we have is our self-esteem. Self-esteem plays a big toll in a child's development. A lot of times our children don't have the confidence to believe in themselves. And as they move through grade to grade, their confidence level goes lower if their reading skills are not the best, if their writing skills are not the best.

21:33So we need to build those reading, those writing skills, and those math skills so that they do feel confident. But also as parents, we need to support them and be their number one cheerleader. We need to be there for each one of their children, but also just put kind of like every child has a positive thing that they do very well, but they also have some weaknesses. Really enhance and encourage those positives and what they do well and continue to build that up so that their confidence builds and their self-esteem builds. You know, I'm asking these questions and it's like for me, I got four kids.

22:18I'm always trying to figure out balancing, you know, their self-esteem, education, etc. Because it's very true. Like if they feel like they're not at the same level of their peers, like their self-esteem is just shot. And it's a struggle I deal with frequently myself, you know, for my own kids. Exactly. Exactly. And what we're building is we're building a society, we're building children that in the future are going to be successful in a global economy. As we're looking at a global economy, I am a professor of global education. We're working with our students to really look at the economy worldwide.

23:01And how do we become successful in not only dealing with our own community here, but globally, how do we deal with the issues that are out there? There's three areas that I focus on. Number one, helping people to be successful, helping countries to prosper, but also saving our planet and looking at how do we save our planet. So those items are also part of our training that we do with our kids and our parents. We talk about how do we keep our environment clean? How do we, you know, it's kind of funny. I started teaching at Yokohama, Japan, at Kanto Kakuin University. And I had this idea, let's go do a volunteer project.

23:57and they go volunteer like what do you mean and i said well let's go do this and they go we already do that that's not a volunteer okay i said well let's go pick up trash okay so i go over there we have all these big bags and we have gloves and we're going out to pick up trash they they were humoring me in japan there's no trash and so we started at the beach uh the The university is very close to the ocean. We started at the beach, and there was no trash. And we walked across the bridge. We ended up with a handful of trash in these big bags. Probably a handful out of maybe two or three bags. But in other parts of the world, there is trash.

24:49And so how do we help our children to see it's important to keep our community clean and to do positive things in our community? Actually, while I was in Japan, I had paper in my pants and I got something out of my pants and a paper fell to the ground. And the gentleman came over to me and tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the trash and I picked it up. nothing negative, nothing judgmental. He just reminded me there's trash on the floor. So how do we become a community that is really looking at keeping our community safe, keeping our community clean, and everyone working together? So I learned a lot from that experience.

25:40Lovely. It sounds amazing. Let me ask you this. What is the framework right now that you use to create content, to design content? And, you know, how do you support it with research-backed articles and, you know, all the different things that you're doing to basically verify this? The interesting thing is back when I started my company, it actually was called Healthy Gente. Gente in Spanish means people. So it was called healthy people. My background, I was on the state of California, I guess it was the advisory board on health education. And so I went from there and transferred into growing the business that way.

26:30But throughout the years, I have developed activities focused on helping parents to be that educational leader at home. So over 20 years, I've been developing all of those activities. So those activities are put into our app. The same thing is, one investor asked me, how do you keep it unbiased? because oftentimes people will have their own agenda or whatever they feel is most important. We keep it very neutral. We keep it just basically these are activities that you can do with your child, and there's no bias in what we're doing. It's all about just good stuff, good stuff that we do to help our students and help our children to succeed.

27:29When you focus on only developing and only creating things that students need and not looking at them in a biased way is where we really grow our children to be successful, but also to be nonjudgmental. Now, if you're in an education business, what kind of competitors now do you worry about in your space? Couldn't Hooked on Phonics come in? In education, there are a number. In fact, I shared with some investors is the ed tech market is over$404 billion a year, the ed tech market. And how many competitors are in that space? When you get to EdTech, there's probably 20 % of them. It could be anywhere from maybe 50 to 100.

28:31It's not a large amount globally. Who dominates? I don't think there's a dominating force. I think it's like the large companies are kind of coming up to the plate to try to figure it out. We have a five-year plan. our five-year plan is to get traction to make it work to make it successful to get to the point where we partner with one of those large guys or we sell it to one of the large guys or we go public because what we have i shared on a show that i was on that as entrepreneurs we seem to think that we're the only game in town that we are the best at what we do and nobody else does it everyone thinks that but in reality we're not but what can we offer is we can offer a niche that nobody else offers what would be our niche our niche is that we provide the parent portion of it but we provide a community we provide resources we provide instruction we we give the whole package.

29:40In the future, in 18 months, we'll provide that personalized learning for every student. So we're not only providing for our parents, but we're providing for our students. As a teacher, we tend to teach the way we learn. And if I learn visually, i'm only going to reach probably about 20 of my students in that fashion because there may be some that learn auditorily there may be some that learn by reading and so i'll miss the mark on some of those students but when we have each one of the content give it to them the way that they learn we can pretty much reach 100 of our students. Wow. So it's not only going to make it phenomenal for our students, but it's going to make life easier for our teachers.

30:42Now, what's the long-term vision you have for the company? Is it to go public? Is it to gain market share? Is it to dominate your competition? Long-term is to connect. There are some companies that I feel we would be an incredible enhancement to what they already offer. But no one's going to talk to us right now because we don't have traction. In the last, the app came out two weeks ago. Right now we have 120 followers. Users, yeah. Users, yes. Users. And so we need to get up to a million, two million users that then. It's free right now, right? What's that? It's free. It's free right now. You know, we're kind of taking the Duolingo business model.

31:30Duolingo, their revenue annually is about$932 million. However, 92.7 % of their users are free users. How do they make that money? they have advertisers that are on there. But then if you decide not to want to see those advertisements, then that's where you have the page description. So we want to get to the point where we have millions of users. We're not only talking the United States, we're talking globally. I really feel that our program is going to reach out to the world, to families all over the world. So that's our focus. But to begin with, we're starting with the United States. Now, I want to ask you a couple last questions.

32:24This one's about legacy. Now, at the end of the day, what do you hope kids and parents remember about Illuminate, about you, about your mission? I want them to feel and understand when they see Illuminate, they know it may illuminates makes my life better i feel confident because illuminate has given me that confidence illuminate has helped me to be a successful individual globally successful in what i'm doing here successful in building a life whether it's as a parent in the future or as an entrepreneur or as a doctor or whatever it may be that illuminate when they look at that that word they say they made my life better what a great mission and you know the other thing is that i teach when i when i teach new teachers coming into the world i want them to be those teachers that 20 years down the line students come back into their classroom and just praise them for you touched my life you made my life better because I was your fifth grade student that's what we want illuminate to be we want illuminate to be you made my life better because what you offered this last one this this is the last question before the final question but this is a three-prong question and you kind of answered this question a little bit already right now but i want to kind of dive deep into your goals what's a personal goal that you have for yourself a family goal you have for your family and a business goal you have for you you know as an entrepreneur um i'm not i didn't come from a rich family so my parents didn't give me millions of dollars to grow the company so it's been a struggle i left the classroom years ago and built what we have now my wife has been the support 100 percent um we still struggle we still need to meet you know meet our our obligations and so i would love to get to the point where as a family we're living okay but the most important thing that i believe is i raise kids My children are good people.

35:01One of my sons is a police officer. When he was promoted, I went to the promotion. Other lieutenants and other police officers came to me and said, you've raised a good boy. You've made a difference. It's the best compliment you can get. And that's what my life as a family member, as a father is. I want to be able to see that I've raised good kids. And I have. I've raised solid kids. As a company, I want to see us get the traction and make the difference. Like I said, illuminate. I want people to see illuminate and say, you changed my life. You made a difference. As a business, we need to look at our business goals financially and be able to raise the money.

35:55Right now, we're doing a fundraising campaign to get to the next level. I'd love to be at the point where we don't have to worry about money, that we can do the things that we want to do and do it successfully. So two-pronged. Number one, raise the company so that it's sustainable. and number two raise the company so that people look at it and say you've changed my life and i don't know if you talked to family goal yet family goal it's kind of funny because people say you should be retired by now why are you not retired and i said my kids know that my life has always been in education raising my kids in a in a home that has been loving has been what we've done from day one and so as a family goal our goal is to someday enjoy the reaps of our harvest or harvest of our reeds or whatever it may be but but just enjoy my family grandchildren children and just continue to just grow.

37:07One last question. When you're in front of the pearly gates, what do you think God's going to tell you?

37:18God's going to tell me that you've worked hard, you've struggled, but you've shared your heart with your family, with your students, and with everyone that you've come in contact with. That's the important thing is that it's not about the money that you have in your bank account. It's not about the car you drive. It's about how did you touch the lives of someone else. One thing that I share with my kids are when they were young, I used to say, what was the positive thing about your day today? Number two, what was the struggle that you had today? and number three how did you touch the lives of someone today just understanding those three concepts is what i want my family to remember powerful gary you've been a pleasure to have on the show if people want to get in touch with you how do they find you we are on illuminate.net which is I-L-L-O-O-M-I-N-A-T-E dot net.