Bridging academia and job market realities with Extern’s Matt Wilkerson | E1945

0:00building products and services is a whole science to it but you have the right problem right and the right problem at the right time is so powerful and all these kids who are at columbia who are at these like elite schools uh or even you know they're going to you know their their local college they're all having the same profound experience which is well that was an interesting four years and here's this bill i have to hit every month for my student loan that i can never get out of and bankruptcy won't get rid of. And what now? And that fear. And to solve this problem, right? To be the painkiller here, you know, to be the medicine, to be the solution.

0:41It's just so profound. It's so important. What you're doing is very important. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Equinix. The Equinix startup program offers a hybrid infrastructure solution for startups, including up to 100K in credits and personalized consultations and guidance from the Equinix team. Go to equinixstartups.com to apply today. CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com slash tech. And HubSpot. If you're fundraising, be sure to check out the million dollar pitch competition from HubSpot for Startups and HubSpot Ventures.

1:32Apply now at HubSpot.com slash million dollar pitch. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startup. Sorry, I got a raspy voice. I was at the Knicks game for that heartbreaker game five at Madison Square Garden. I went into overtime, but good news. I got to go to game four in at the 76ers when we had an incredible epic win in Philly. uh i'm still going with my original nixon six and uh yeah i'm not going to be going to game six i got to get back to my family and my business and i am in the business of investing in great founders building important companies and one of the most important things for young people today is to be able to get work experience we know that getting a degree means less and less to elite employers so everybody needs to have work experience well how do you get work experience there's a classic internship but internships are a burden for employers full-time the person's there for 10 weeks you train them up by the time they get to week seven eight nine ten they might actually do something useful for your company uh and then what happens they leave maybe they go to a competitor maybe they take your competitive intelligence and go to a competitor it's a pain in the ass that's why i don't do them except for my friend's kids so i can build up favors in the favor bank from when my daughters need an internship i'm not kidding that's how it works folks it's an internal uh system where ceos venture capitalists and elite people use these internships and trade them with each other i'm just telling the honest truth i always call balls and strikes here what happens yeah then if you don't got connections like i didn't when i was an up-and-comer i didn't get the conde nests internship i had to start my magazine on my own silicon on our border cyber server shout out my guy brian alvey putting all that aside what if there was a better way well today we're going to hear about extern ships and i'm really excited because as an investor we run this accelerator we had this company paragon one it was um making progress figuring out product market fit and matt wilkerson the founder who came to our accelerator during COVID in 2020.

3:41He figured it out. And then we get the updates. Magical. When a founder sends you an update who went to your accelerator and they've just crushed it. We're going to hear all about externships right now. From Matt. Matt, welcome to This Week in Startup. Thanks for having me, Jason. Wonderful having you go through the program and even more wonderful to see exceptional performance. you know when you send these updates and our team is extremely as a fund we're extremely focused on hey we know 80 of the startups from an accelerator whether it's y combinator tech stars or launch accelerator or a pre-accelerator like our founder university we know you know most of those experiments go to zero ultimately 80 or 90 percent and then some survive the little turtles make it to the ocean and uh become wise and they survive and you are one of those great wise founders who's figured out a great business.

4:37Tell us about externships and your business. What do you do? Who are your customers? How do you make money? Thanks, Jason. Well, as you've touched on, students, they're spending$100 ,000 to$200 ,000 for a four-year degree. They come out. You go on LinkedIn today, you look for an entry-level job. What do you see? 40%, just about 40 % ask for three or more years of work experience. So you're an entry-level hire. You're not supposed to have work experience. They're asking for work experience. And internships are how many college students have addressed this problem to date. But the fundamental problem is there's not enough good internships.

5:17So the demand for good internships outstrips supply. And it's really, I think this is one of the most broken marketplaces that hasn't been solved. If you think about work experience as a market. And as you mentioned, internships are difficult to scale. They favor students who already have social status or social capital. And they're time consuming for employers to run. So to fix this problem, we created essentially a new form of work experience. It's called the remote externship. um and talk about how that's different from an internship but on the face of it it's a short online project-based work experience and instead of having a company just work with one to two interns they can now work with 100 to 200 externs for less time than working with those and we've now served over 25 000 students with multi-week externships but 40 of those have come this year alone.

6:13So we've enrolled over 10 ,000 here today. And who is your client? How do you make money? Yeah. So to date, we've mainly worked with large corporates. So as a company, you can launch a externship for free. It's cookie cutter. It's more of a constrained experience. But we also have large corporates like Home Depot, National Geographic, PwC, AT &T, and many others who pay for a premium enterprise experience. So about$100 ,000 kind of starting contract value comes out to about$2 ,000 per extern. And for that, we will take care of everything, recruiting, training, onboarding, supporting the students, and also giving them this more custom targeted approach to students they want to engage with.

7:03Okay, cloud computing has revolutionized startups over the past decade, you know that. But the reality is a fully cloud-based solution is not right for every startup. Sometimes a hybrid solution is your answer. Like if you're working with sensitive data that can't be trusted to cloud, or if you need to connect to multiple cloud providers at once, or maybe you just want a much more cost-effective solution. In that case, you need to check out Equinix. Equinix Metal will give you direct access to physical servers, but you still get all the benefits of the cloud. So no need to rack and stack your own servers.

7:37No, Equinix provides on demand infrastructure in over 25 major cities. And here's the best part. They have an amazing startup program for you. The Equinix startup program offers personalized consultations and guidance from the Equinix team. And of course, you'll get up to$100 ,000 in startup credits. So here's what I want you to do. Head to equinixstartups.com to apply. And when you apply, James from Equinix is going to reach out to you directly that's equinix startups.com to apply eq u i n i x startups.com okay so uh you have some pretty great clients listed on your website meta at &t hsbc the home depot pfizer hugo boss um how do they run a program if you can pick one that you've done a case study on that you're allowed to talk about i know people consider you an arms dealer you're like a secret weapon for them to beat their competitors so i'm not sure you know i see some quotes on the on the client page from at &t and other folks can you run us through how one of these high profile companies um uses your software and maybe if you could show the landing page or or what it is here for those of you who are not watching uh we will sportscast it which means we'll describe the product demo as we do it so don't fear but if you do and you're so inclined to go to youtube this week in startups search for the channel and subscribe hit the bell to get alerts and you can listen to this and man you got a great domain name extern.com yeah yeah it was uh it took a number of months to secure it but um uh definitely worthwhile let me start off by showing you the student experience that's going to merge okay great yeah that's yeah the student is in a marketplace you've got supply you got demand exactly um demand side in this case is the extern the student and supply side is the externship the company am i correct exactly that that's really how we think about it even though we we today monetize with the company and the future where we want to go is actually building this marketplace model and so it's there's a free version on both sides of the marketplace to get that supply and liquidity but then there's a kind of a premium tier on both sides So you could see a student saying, I will pay some amount of money to have an externship at this company eventually?

9:53Well, actually, a big part of our mission is, as you can see on our website, professional experience anytime, anywhere, and that's for anyone. So we actually want to keep externships free for anyone, where anyone has a shot to do it. But because the model is evolving, we're running some experiments right now where we might allow students to customize their experience or get additional support in ways that still keep it open and accessible for everyone. But that might have a small fee associated with it to have them have skin in the game? Similar to Duolingo, Coursera, where you can do the free version, but you might pay to, say, have a verified experience or get additional support.

10:38We're running some experiments in that realm because it's still really important for us that this is accessible to anyone. We work with a lot of underserved populations and low-income background students that didn't go to, again, the fancy school. They don't have that network. network as i said in my introduction here you know me growing up as a kid from brooklyn my dad a bartender my mom a nurse uh and my dad obviously a bar owner as well i don't want to sell him short um he owned a bar as well uh beards shout out to beards and beards cafe um the challenge there is i didn't know anybody i didn't even know how to get an intern i didn't know who condé nest was and then i met all these rich kids and their parents knew somebody at condé nest i wanted to be in the magazine business they were doing internships at vogue and vanity fair and i had no choice but to do my own magazines as zines turned out to be better because it was you know it wasn't pretty but it was gritty and you know it was better for me but most kids may not have that so you'd think hundreds of dollars is the accessibility point if you did an experiment like this i could see like if i was a student i would pay 500 bucks or 50 bucks a month for a service like you're providing if it helped with a little bit of coaching or whatever that's compared to the 50 to 250k they go in debt is a pit yeah i mean look if if we wanted to and there you know if we wanted to just charge for that access of course you know or we could um we'd be flooded still but but i think something um in that kind of hundred dollar range you know maybe 100 to 200 um even as low as 50 i think we'll probably have different skews over time right charging 100 bucks for everybody yeah that's that's kind of the zone where we're so affordable it's literally you know if you were driving an uber three hours of work if you were working at a fast food restaurant in new york city at the minimum 20 bucks or 25 bucks now it's about three or four hours of work if you can't do that you're not serious you know and so i think skin in the game is so important um and it's not like payola it's just to have a membership and get verified right and make sure you have good people in the system yeah and that's the big thing is we idea of like a base payment was as we grow um you know again we got 10 10 000 externs year to date um you know by the end of this year we want to be in kind of the 50, 60 ,000 number of externships, given the rate we're going, we, you know, at some point, we want to be able to distinguish the students for the employers.

13:14Yes. And so that verification - Seriousness level, right? How serious they take it. Like maybe even doing an onboarding where, you know, for$100, their account's verified, we know it's a real person, but for$500, you do an interview with somebody on your site who helps them make a professional video where they answer seven questions and they just get a one hour or a half hour onboarding mentoring session, you know, like superhuman does when you go use their software. And for 500 bucks, they get some value out of that. And plus the employers know, hey, these are the, you know, verified accounts.

13:45And then these are the verified plus accounts where, you know, we did an interview. But let's see the portal. Yeah, I think it's really great to show it. Sure. So if you're a student today, you can come to extern.com. You can go to explore externships and you'll see the current externships that we have. So we work with startups, medium companies, large Fortune 500s. And a lot of the categories of work we've started in have been marketing, BD, product management, data analytics, finance and consulting. Later this year, I want us to launch cybersecurity. That's an area I'm really excited about. There's a lot of demand, obviously, for cybersecurity professionals.

14:25But we actually are working with some industry experts here who have said, the reason people aren't getting jobs in cyber security after getting a degree or a certificate program is because they don't have work experience and nobody wants to give them that that chance they don't have the experience yet um so yeah so you go so you go to extern.com you then click on a program that you like so let's say i'm actually gonna switch here that was interesting you could pick a company like snap or at &t or you could pick um marketing or development or whatever That's kind of interesting. So you can pick what you want to do as a career, or you can just pick a company that you have an affinity for.

15:03I love that. Yeah. And right now it's an application process. So we accept today only about 10 % of the application. So the 25 ,000, we've had about a quarter million applications of people that want to apply. Now, when you apply, we don't look at school, GPA. We just look for indicators of, do you have a curiosity and determination to finish the externship? There's a little video interview that we do today um and then once you get accepted you onboard to our platform um we you know we make sure we onboard we educate you like what is this experience going to be like because it is a little bit different from an internship and how is it looking pause the video for a second let's let's pause on that question internships you show up at an office you do your 10 weeks you get out um externship is something different going on here what is going on that's different well the first thing is from from a student's perspective it's just more accessible right you know you don't start from home remote exactly and it's more flexible so i can do we run externships year-round so it's not just i gotta wait for the summer i gotta go to a certain city uh there's a lot of friction with it's asynchronous and it's remote changes everything compared to an internship it's remote we run them year-round except we try to avoid you know student holidays and federal holidays.

16:24And then it is asynchronous. So there is a live component where you engage with the companies and a Zoom session like this, kind of like they're doing a guest lecture. But then outside of that, you're doing the work in your own time. Evenings, weekends, students are busy, they might have another job or internship. And then you submit your work when it makes sense. There's some collaboration with students as well, online as well as live, but you're submitting your own work. And the training component of it is... Today, what we do is... And the example I'm going to go through is with HP's corporate internship.

17:10Sorry, corporate venture capital program. And we've worked with them for about three and a half years now to help students go through deal sourcing externship. So we'll break down all the components of, okay, well, first of all, what is venture capital? And how does it work? And how should you be analyzing companies? And they may have certain sectors that they want to do market mapping for. So we'll break down, all right, how do you actually go and research? How do you analyze a market? How do you analyze the company? How do you analyze the problem they're solving, the solution, the team, all those pieces?

17:45So for this example, I was a VC associate for three years. So I did the first version of it. associated to be at? TCV, Technology Crossover Ventures, big growth equity firm now. But we've brought in experts. So for all of our programs, we work with industry experts to help us work on the curriculum and not just build curriculum for curriculum's sake. Our requirement is we don't want to build any training unless it's directly relevant to doing the work. so so yeah this is a super point that i want to pause on because you know when this week in startups the podcast we're on right now is at its best is when the founder and i are having a really good dialogue about what the important components of the business and and why those create product market fit and alignment and i just want to pause here on product market fit i think what you've done here is brilliant when you're in school you you learn things that are academic and hey maybe a little history, maybe a little English.

18:45That's great. You become a well-rounded liberal arts person. And then you might have some computer courses or marketing courses. But we all know that the gap between what you're learning in a marketing, PR, growth, analysis class, even at the elite universities, is some number of years back from the market, right? And the market moves very quickly. So what you learned as an associate at that venture firm and what they're teaching even at an elite stanford or harvard or columbia columbia used to be elite i don't know what's going on there now but at these elite universities uh quote unquote elite universities i don't know what do you think the delay is between what they're teaching and how much the market has changed because things are very dynamic in the world right now ai distributed whatever give me your best estimate as the distance between curriculum and reality classic university even an elite one and uh actually what people are doing at the job look there's obviously some exceptions when you get into certain programs and you talk to certain professors and deans but in general on average it's way apart and you just give me a number of years man matt give me a number of years in your estimate because you're doing this every day I think that it's, you know, it's on average, it's probably five years old because five years, because you will, first of all, the curriculum, it curriculum is sort of dictated by these committees, right?

20:16That are, you know, they try to absorb certain things. But obviously, you have textbooks, you have homegrown curriculum, and it just to steer the ship that these large institutions takes a really, really long. right you gotta go through an approval process am i right is there an academic senate yeah there's a whole uh academic senate process um now we we've we've had and by the way there's some early adopter universities out there we've had some early conversations with how do we integrate externships into their curriculum oh and even the ones that want to do it have said well it's going to take a year just to like get through the senate process and we said you know what we're going to come back to that it's important we do want to get externships integrated but first and foremost we're going to build this marketplace out just get it to the students you don't need the universities they're going to slow everything down they're going to muck everything up just route around them go direct that exactly that's what we go we go straight to the students we don't even market through universities no it's a waste of time you know these guidance counselors are so disconnected from reality in nine out of ten cases we've just established on average five-year gap what you're doing is just perfect but now i'm thinking even if you hire an expert like if you came to me and said hey jay gal you do investing for a living can you help us with the curriculum yeah i could really help um but then you know one venture firm might have a different philosophy than another so yes or you know what so if it's goldman sachs or if it was you know some hedge fund it was tiger global and they wanted to do this they might say, you know what, Jake House method, early stage, mine's late stage.

21:51So when you make that perfect curriculum, then what you're telling me is you then go to the Goldman Sachs, the HSBC, the Snap, and you say, hey, how does this vibe with your system? Is that right? Yeah. So it's a little bit iterative, right? So we work with companies right now, we understand what are their needs, but what we're finding is for certain categories of work, the needs are consistent. So let's just take, for example, even within deal sourcing, there might be a component of... Now, some of our VC externships have a component where they talk to the startup, some don't. But if you're going to go talk to a startup, that's customer discovery.

22:29You've got to be really good at running a customer discovery interview. Turns out that skill set can be applied to a lot of places. Product management, obviously, if you're a startup, you need to do customer discovery well, should start with the founder. But at some point, you might need to talk to hundreds of customers or small businesses. Well, time is money. You've got to move quickly. So how could I leverage a team of students to learn about how to do customer discovery? It's important for them to learn if they are interested in product and build a process for them. And this, by the way, is where LLMs are perfect.

23:05So this is where we're going, actually, is we're running experiments around... Today, we have a team supporting students and helping to answer questions. We promote students to TAs, teaching assistants, so they help other students. But the next step is if we're going to go from 10 % acceptance today, we want to accept 100%. And what that really means is enroll. Enroll 100 % to start the journey. We need to support those students. And what better way is this example you mentioned where you might have different perspectives on how to do deal sourcing from different firms? Those experts we can bring together, you build a prompt around, hey, here's how to do jobs to be done for customer discovery.

23:48Here's how to give them some examples. So funny you mentioned that. I just had Bob from the rework group with the jobs to be done framework on the pod. So you guys can get that up as well. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. Stephen Estes is with us again. He's a principal at CLA, a professional services provider. They specialize in CPA, tax consulting, and wealth advisory. His areas of expertise lie in VC-backed startups, VC funds, high-growth startups with complex tax issues in multi-state and international filings. Welcome back to the program, Stephen. Hey, thanks, Jason. Appreciate it.

24:21All right. Give us an overview of how CLA works with startups. What kinds of companies do you like to work with? Is there like a specific zone where you like to engage with startups? One of the great things about CLA is that we're nimble enough to work with two startups, right? So whether that's a seed round or series A company, but then on the flip side, we're large enough that we really have the depth of expertise that's needed to help companies when they become, you know, multinational entities with a lot of tax complexity or audited financial statements, consolidated corporations, you know, M &A, due diligence, whatever it is, right?

24:54so we can truly take them from incubator all the way to IPO and then really come alongside some of the founders with our wealth management platform also after the exit. So I think CLA is really unique in that regard. There's not a lot of firms out in the US that really operate with that breadth and scale of helping companies that early stage and also being able to help partner with them as they become really large and complex. All right. You need a trusted advisor. Tax is accounting. You don't want to play games of this stuff get it right get a great partner like cla go to cla connect.com slash tech and let them know your boy jake al sent you once again cla connect.com slash tech now i'm looking at this again when this week in startups is at best we're talking about the business we're doing a little brainstorming and doing a little ping pong back and forth here maybe a little pickleball i'm wondering hey you put all this work into creating how to do discovery product discovery you have this one on how to source could we not take that i'm using the word we because we're investors in the company and and we are on the journey together that's how our firm launch looks at it so we could we not take that module and say to people you can we're going to teach this module and we've got a teacher associated with it this module is you know five hundred dollars and there's a collection of modules here and together they're three thousand dollars there's 10 modules so you can take one for 500 you can do the collection for 3 000 and as you do those we put these badges on your page and there's a teacher who's going to check your work and we we we do them rolling so you know like a sourcing is going to happen you know the first week of the month this one's gonna be and then we pay those teachers and so i don't have to wait to be at a company i can just grab that scale and put it on my page, put it on my LinkedIn and get a certificate?

26:42What do you think of that idea? That must have come up. Oh, it's come up. We've definitely talked about all sorts of ideas around monetization. I think that... So I need to answer that in two ways. The first is, we want to go to this model where, again, mission, 100 % of students can give it a shot. Because you might have a student that doesn't have that$500, but they're super talented, they're super hungry, they're super motivated, we want to give those students a chance to just plow through, prove that they've got what it takes and keep leveling up, keep getting verified. Because if we go to now a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, in the finance world, or we want to go to, let's say, a CrowdStrike, when we're talking about doing a cybersecurity externship, they're going to want to know all right who are the just the genuinely like great students and talent not based on what school they went to but hey maybe they did five six seven externships now in a short way shorter amount they're optimizing for most motivated they uh yes and skill so this combination of the skill plus the grit motivation is something that we're shifting like the mindset traditionally is, well, just go after the top 20 schools.

27:59We're saying, no, no, no, no, no. This is the new way is look at who... First of all, we've got to... We're bringing this kind of training and experiential aspect of students. They graduate, they go to work for a year, then they're like, ah, this isn't what I wanted to do. Now I'm going to leave. And companies are like, ah, everyone's not sticking around. Well, because they didn't have the chance to figure out what they really want to do. And so we're bringing that forward. got it while you're in college do eight externships you have a killer resume and you actually know what you probably want to do because maybe the first four were just test runs of okay i don't know what i thought it was going to be like now you've built this verified skill set with a real work experience not a simulation not a course because employees have been engaged here and now when you apply to a job if i'm in a recruiter uh i look at this and i say ah, you've got verified work experience through Xtern, who I trust, because they're actually monitoring and you're getting structured training.

28:59Now I have more faith to bring you in when I would have never caught you before. Got it. Love it. Genius. And we can still, again, there's still a revenue model on top of that. What is a great candidate worth to your elite employers? The top 20 % of employers, if they were to look and say, hey, you brought me somebody for, you know, had done these modules, you know, in the venture private equity, you know, investing space, you brought me these people in cybersecurity, those are really well paying jobs. Those are six figure jobs out of the gate. So for those people, if you bring somebody who does get employed, what is that worth in a dollar amount to that employer?

29:44Well, we know that if you look at an internship, which does translate to a full-time hire. We know that it costs anywhere from$4 ,000 to$10 ,000 to support. On the upper end is where you're talking about software engineers. And then for a full-time hire, just to hire them, the recruiting costs can be basically the same amount. If you were skipping the internship, you go, So it's going to be in close, 5 to 10K, call it, depending on the company in the field. That's what I'm saying. It's got to be 10K if you fully bake it with the attention it takes from the company to do the work that you're doing.

30:25If you're adding that in. So this is why the internships are better. Because when we look at the internship costs, it's the cost to recruit, which is what I was talking about for full time. But for internship, it's cost to recruit and then costs for an employer or employee to support the student. So when you make that implicit cost in, yeah, it's easily 10k. Some could even be more than that. So, but we've... And even on that point, we spent a lot of time exploring how do we sell into large recruiting budgets and HR budgets. Because our early customers, the big corporates we work with, the budgets have come from more kind of recruiting adjacent budgets, employer branding, corporate social responsibility, and they want to run maybe a pre-internship program, for instance.

31:14But the typical company we went after, we would have deals. I mean, I would cold email CEOs at Fortune 500s. I cold emailed Jamie Dimon, Michael Dell. I don't know if they read the email, but their team followed up. We would get on phone calls. And ultimately, a managing director would say, we want to do this. We've got budget, we're going to do this. but hr would would pause it or block it and it was happening enough where i thought why why is this keep happening and i talked to some hr experts and i got some back channeling that said when they hear that we do all this work they hear that we're kind of taking a chunk of the their kind of fiefdom away got it okay so that's uh political and you got to route around them and you got to make them advocates because yeah you're you're taking the fiefdom but that's okay you know it's like arms we'll get there you know we'll get there it'll be i think when we build the marketplace eventually we'll get big enough you you will have to recruit on extern because we'll have the best talent that's been verified yeah i mean having a profile page for each person you got to get the namespace nice and tight so i can be extern.com slash jason calicanus you got profile pages for these folks and no for the students yeah not yet but that's definitely on our on our roadmap when we get there that's number one it's number one if you have a paid account you have the hundred dollar account you get to make a page extern.com slash your name and it can't be slash a slash your name it's got to be extern.com slash so they can remember it and send it that becomes a thing and you tell people you put that in your um your bio you put it on your linkedin page you still have a linkedin page right but um it just has all your badges your skills, etc.

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34:15That's hubspot.com slash million dollar pitch. How does a company deploy this? What does it cost for them ballpark to get involved to create a course? Give me the current pricing because there's a lot of big companies who listen. And I know Michael Dell, I could I could forward an email on to him and just check in with him on this. But the first thing they're gonna ask is how much? And how do you charge? Is it like a platform fee? Or is it per externship that's created with the curriculum? This has got to be at least 50 100k right to get up and running because you can't do this at a quality level, I think, for less than minimum of 50K.

34:50I would think a minimum of 100K, but it pays for itself after five people come join the company. Yeah. So we do have this kind of base version that's free, but it's very constrained. It's very restricted. And the goal of that is if you meet certain requirements of jobs that we want to see on the platform, we want to bring you in to build that market liquidity. But if you want to target a certain group of students, you want to give them more support, you want this additional custom experience that most big enterprises want, yeah, it's basically about 100 grand to get going. And that's because we want to bring a big enough cohort of students in.

35:28There's some startup costs. But for the company, all that it takes is we just need... Step one is give us some goals for a project. You don't even have to have it fully fleshed out most people they don't have the time to do that we'll we'll do that yeah you got to do all that that that's the whole point here matt it's like they just want it done and only one champion in one important vertical cyber security comes to mind as like those people are rare you know like elite developers in a certain vertical rare and so once you get the rare thing like and and and big impact players man it just yeah i think if the salary is over 100K, that's where you got to focus.

36:09Yeah, we're focused on where, one, given where AI and generative AR are going, what skill sets do you need to have for that future? But also, what are the skill sets that generative AR is not going to replace? And how do we double down on making sure you're really good at that? For instance, students learn in college, I got to write 20-page essays and just I got to fill up space with words to make the professor happy. and then they show up on an externship and it's like, you've done all this work. Now the top students have to synthesize that in three minutes. And that's new. I mean, that's new for most people, but especially students to really think about how do I synthesize how I'm communicating?

36:54So yeah, it's both the kind of the technical hard skills and soft skills. You know, I just think like when I hear your business and you're in the thick of it, I always like to open the aperture up a bit. um because you're in the weeds you're standing right next to the elephant so you see a big gray wall and uh always try to get founder step back 10 steps and then see what you see you may see the trunk and the whole picture of like an elephant or maybe a herd of very different right and when you're looking at it from here oh yeah i know for people watching that i'm showing me uh i'm showing like a six by six inch piece of the elephant so let's step back a second in first principles, what is extern.com actually doing for the student?

37:37What is it actually doing? I want to hear you answer that. It's taking that despair away of I've sent out 50 job applications or internship applications. My friends are getting internships. I know I need to get something. My parents are hounding me. And I'm not hearing anything back. okay i want to pause right there this is so important you've identified because you talk to these customers right the students are your customers ultimately um they have fear this is very profound and so everything uh that's one group they have fear and the fear is manifested from their parents pressure and that parent pressure is because they want the best for their kids and they want their kids to be safe.