ECE CEO Biography Podcast

Sage Wisdom for Childcare Leaders

EPISODE #5: FEATURING Deepanshu ‘Deep’ Pandita

Deepanshu 'Deep' Pandita

CEO of Kido Schools

Join host Tony D’Agostino as he uncovers the journey of Deepanshu ‘Deep’ Pandita, CEO of Kido US. Discover practical insights for your childcare business’s resilience and nurture your personal growth.

Key Takeaways

• Reflect on Deep’s memories that shaped his journey to Kido Schools
• Understand how Deep’s search for quality childcare in Houston, TX started his path towards Kido
• Hear Deep’s perspective on building and leading high-performing teams

Transcript

Welcome to ECE Biography, Sage Wisdom for child care leaders. My name is Tony D’Agostino, I’m the founder and CEO of Inspire Care 360. In this series of exclusive podcasts we will meet with tenured and growing leaders in the child care field, typically operating medium to very large Child Care operations from tens of schools to thousands of schools. Our incentive is to learn what has been the path and trade that make outstanding leaders. Join us to glean the sage wisdom from these experienced individuals. Now let’s get started with ECE Biography Sage Wisdom for Child Care Leaders. Today we have the great pleasure of speaking with deepanu Pand also known as deep who
is one of the founding members of us CEO of kiddo schools in 2017 deep along with
a few other parents and friends across the world were unhappy with the quality of Early Child Care education options
available so instead of sitting back relying on others to make necessary changes they got together to build a
truly 21st century program that is aimed towards both children and parents alike
and in 2019 deep took kiddo schools and expanded them into the US where he moved
his wife and two sons to open the first Us locations in Houston Texas thus far
he has contributed over 5 years to the kiddo School company and brings two to
Decades of leadership experience with him additionally prior to kiddo schools he co-founded a successful energy
trading platform most of us have heard the phrase CED fillan well that’s
exactly what deep did in the midst of the global covid-19 pandemic he
spearheaded the launch of kiddo home and a virtual Global classroom and kiddo
Village an Initiative for home-based aggregated care in response to the Pand mic since then he spoke with journalists
like pop sugar to discuss topics like what kids really mean when they say they’re bored and why parents shouldn’t
be let off the hook when homeschooling children he spearheaded the launch of Kidd home which is a global and virtual
classroom and Initiative for homebased aggregated care and response to the pandemic he also called kiddo village
where they are Blended teaching philosophies worldwide for customized play-based learning experience in stem
art literacy and numeracy in addition to the success of the international brand
of kiddo schools deeph holds a degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology and received a
Masters in Business from the Indian Institute of Management and to Lane University he’s passionate about his
role in AI facial recognition natural language processing especially in early
childhood education holds a certificate from Coria and the Deep learning in stute folks it brings me great pleasure
to have deep on our program today so um welcome welcome deep and it
goes I should be calling you deep or any other name that you would like to go by
no is perfectly fine and uh that’s my identity oh very good well it’s good to
know that well thank you well it’s a pleasure to have you on our podcast
today and this is the ECE biography this is Sage wisdom from Child Care
leadership and we’re very proud to have you on today and we want to go through
and ask you some questions we understand that you guys have been making some stirs in the marketplace with kdo and
love to learn a little bit more about your Ascension uh to your role but a little bit more about you too personally
so this isn’t just all about you know your business or exactly 101 of
leadership but it’s really to know you a bit so we’re going to kick that off and one of the things I’d like to do is sort
of get it started on if you have any kind of possible memory or favorite
story when you maybe were young that may have you saw a spark of why you might
want to eventually get into leadership did you see anything when you were young uh that sort of gave you an indication
that that might be a Destiny for you or maybe the opposite even um well first thanks for having me
and uh so when I think back to my childhood so I was born and raised in India sure my parents still live there
and I was raised in this um really a campus Town um one of the oldest universities
in the world the city kind of revolves around the academic life if you would
yeah and my dad before retiring was a professor and my mom was an elementary
school teacher and so there nothing particularly um you know strange about
that upbringing other than perhaps you know I had more than the usual um impetus or drive to you know to
do well academically and you know that was looked up as as kind of U as something you aspired to be um the there
is one thing though which I’ve always wondered if if it somehow made a difference uh in terms of this child
care thing which is that U my mom when I was very young had this weird
Quirk and I don’t even know if it was a quirk maybe this is what every mom does but every time I would get into trouble
with her um she would say something with the effect of what was I doing with you
when you were a baby or she would say something like where did I go wrong when you were four years old and I think she
said it often enough where it kind of might have become a background thought in my head and I’ve often wondered
like if I was 10 years old going back to my life at that stage if you asked me
hey you know have you ever heard of Maria monori or you know or reio Amelia
or or P or any of these pedagogical Titans of course I would have said no
but if you ask me is is early childhood education you think something important to a person’s life I would probably have
said yes I me so it’s it’s funny how much uh you know these kind of childhood
um kind of little things that you get you get told in your childhood can become a part of your personality and
I’m pretty sure that it was also at the back of my mind when I was leaving my um
Investment Banking career um to to start to be part of the founding team which
was already fairly well established at keto but I was joining them uh back in 2016 nobody had to convince me that it
was actually a very important thing um for all stakeholders to get this right
right just how important this was to society how important a business this was and just the sheer amount of
opportunity for making a difference nobody had to convince me of that and maybe those uh you know buried childhood
memories had something to do with it maybe they didn’t but uh you know I like to think that maybe they did well tell
me a little bit with what your mother used to say what do you when you reflect on that you said that but what do you
actually reflect on what she was saying to you at that point in time yeah so I think it’s the quality of the engagement
and the attention so clearly without having any kind of a
background in early childhood education you know granted my mom she’s 8 now and she’s not who she used to be but U I’ve
always considered her a pretty smart woman I mean she was a school teacher and it’s quite obvious that we’ve known
for centuries that this is an important thing we haven’t been able to figure it out right I mean even now um this idea
that um you know grandmothers and parents should sing and talk to their
kids a lot when they’re very young um you know we’ve known this for a very
long time but of course when a study comes out from the Yale infant cognition
Center you know with a very well-respected research paper and some thought and scientific meth methodology
behind it obviously we all set up and take notice yeah and and that actually
strikes me as kind of interesting about a lot of the background in pedagogy in early childhood is that this kind of
it’s almost like we’re rediscovering conventional wisdom and putting some scientific heft behind it as opposed to
figuring out something entirely groundbreaking you know what I’m saying so that’s that’s the it’s interesting I
have a question later for you that’s a little bit on on that topic but as you say it it is is so true it’s sort of
like instead of like what is New Frontiers that we can now explore it’s
more like well maybe we’ve had a lot of it right but now we need the foundation
just to understand why does it work like that why have we always through centuries done things like this with our
children yep absolutely yep yeah wonderful who would you say growing up
and I obviously you mentioned your mom and your your your your father too uh who are your big influences Growing
Up So growing up I was fascinated by these scientists
entrepreneurs um and you know there was this kind of um it could have been just the the
people that I was surrounded by at the time but you know people like Thomas Edison and people who were just very
good at the math and the science and also then found a way to turn them into
um path breaking businesses and um something that benefited society as a whole in a very practical way right um
and there was a clear dirth of those kinds of people in India and one reason why I was also intrigued and fascinated
by America as a society is precisely because of the way it had gotten the
formula right with all its flaws it had somehow gotten the formula right for turning you know basic Sciences from
something that gets done in the iory towers into research and then into more practical research and then into patents
and then into this model where um you know you could actually keep on
innovating on a mouse straps and that’s something that uh was a big influence on me I don’t think anybody in particular I
already mentioned Arison but but you know a lot of people of that elk who
sort of uh inherit something I I was really fascinated by the the inventor of
U the Bose uh music company because you know similar idea they had a patent at
MIT and then they turned it into into this big acoustic engineering giant there was some examples of that from
Germany so those were the kinds of stories that fascinated me yeah well absolutely it’s probably interesting
because then you think of how many opportunities were where there was something that was actually truly
engineered or developed but there wasn’t the marketing wherewithal to actually
get it to Market and some things may have been Poss squandered because there wasn’t that
sort of Edison connection of being able to develop it and then get it to market the Steve Jobs be able to have wnc
created and then bring it to Market you know that whole that whole cycle that tends to be
successful yeah I mean look there’s a lot of very interesting research um and books and studies out there on um
there’s never really a light bulb moment this is just one continuing
sort of spectrum of evolution and then um sometimes it gets over associated
with one individual’s work and they’re the people that make all the press and who we think of as being primarily
responsible and that’s okay that has its place um you got to have role models to look up to that’s um also something
that’s needed um you know uh in civilized society but I think
uh the what jumps out at me is just this continuity I mean I just see this
causal network of something that was done in 1970 then somebody dusting it off and
putting something together in the 90s I mean this mRNA vaccine right this is a great story yeah somebody that’s shunted
to kind of the you know the outside Labs at upen but kind of dogging in their
pursuit of uh of like you know carrying on that same strine of research and 27
years later there’s a pandemic and that turns out to be the vaccine there’s plenty of examples like
that I mean for all the press that deep learning and machine learning gets um
people forget that what made it possible um there’s this temptation to look at it
as something even though of course it’s connected to uh the technology industry
and everybody understands very intuitively that the internet has something to do with it but back when uh
people were imagining how the internet would change the world in the late ’90s nobody ever said the biggest impact 25
years down the line might be because of the of the proliferation of the uploading of cat videos on the internet
that then provide all this free data to fit these large models right yeah so
it’s just the causal Network that fascinates me as well so it’s usually over time um as my views on this whole
entrepreneur scientist thing have evolved also grown to appreciate quite a bit the importance of teams The
Importance of Being in the right place at the right time the importance of being surrounded by people who will do
the process Innovation right just make sure that um you know somebody’s doing
the evangelizing somebody’s doing the process Innovation somebody’s making sure the trains run on time um talking
to the employees all that has its own place and you don’t get to build great companies without it yeah now it makes a
lot ofense sense well you know exactly what you’re talking about and as we sort of take a little bit of a path from the
traditional sort of biography interview you know you started mentioning some of the technology some of the flow but I do
want to harp on one of the things that you mentioned you know as you’ve ascended you know in your career you’ve
obviously worked with a lot of people and you’ve worked with people I’m sure where there’s times you probably
were an independent contributor as to a leader of leading teams and you just mentioned teams what is sort of your
philosophy in how to put together teams that are highly functionable highly capable highly
responsive so I think tone is important and culture is very important I mean
it’s something that uh we take pretty seriously at keto and I
think what tends to happen in a lot of companies is that um at least people
that are tasked with making important decisions they sometimes forget the
reason um and the underpinings for why what their role is in the overall scheme
of things right and I think uh maybe this is more to for child care than other Industries but I really see it as
a general principle that I think management should really look at their role as that of a facilitator right and
then um of course you should first and foremost design your firms to be as horizontal as possible to begin with but
given governance um given regulatory responsibilities given the needs for accountability there’s a practical limit
to how far you can take that idea right um so fine um then the the next kind of
big lwh hanging fruit is the culture that comes from everybody thinking that they’re there to make somebody else
successful right and I think um if
you you know frankly it starts with recruiting it’s starts with when you’re
building companies out the people that’ll be attracted by the idea of what
this at that point small team of uh individuals and it really is just that a
small team of individuals what it’s set out to do the only people who will want to be part of that is people who are
like-minded right so I think a lot of it comes down to um holding those core
principles together especially true in the beginning and then there’s a critical mass concept to play here just
like with everything else where once you have enough people who are all sort of off the mindset where their role is to
facilitate right um so I think this facilitating mindset servant leadership
those are things that I think I really think they’re generally true for any industry but they’re especially true for
these service oriented Industries like childcare yeah I would not disagree with you one bit I absolutely see that the
servant uh type of leadership role is so critical in this industry because it is
a tough industry right you know we watch what I always say like a director’s role
is probably one of the toughest roles there is out there you know it’s it’s it’s a tough role you know as you
started to evolve and just to step back a little bit you had a bit of a different total career prior to coming
into the child care world could you tell us a little bit about that of sort of how you got there and then how you sort
of came into this realm absolutely so um so I came to the US for higher studies
there was a there was a professor who um when I
was in business school in India was Keen that I um instead of taking the traditional path of joining industry
that I continue some um independent studies and uh become a PhD become an
academic so that’s what originally brought me to the US um and you know one thing led to another
and I found myself in the energy industry which was a very interesting exciting place to be back in those days
uh more or less an accident of geography that I was in school down in the Deep
South where energy was really the industry um over at tan and so um that
kind of kept me intrigued enough and involved enough and fascinated enough and it must be said reasonably well paid
enough um to keep me there for a long time right and the roles that I played
in that industry um portfolio management trading research all of that was very
interesting to me in the sense that um there was a linear you know here’s the
quality of your research you put it into play in terms of like how you look at the markets and there’s an outcome right
you know the quintess ential quick feedback um kind of kind of business
right but I always used to find myself thinking well what are you doing really
right I mean there’s a a little bit of a zero sum element to it that you can never really um you know get ahead off
or get completely rid off and it’s not like it’s not everybody has a little bit of existential an no matter what career
they’re in and not everybody just packs up and does something different it’s just that for me I think a lot of things
came together where despite having a clearly um demarcated path where you
know you keep Rising the corporate ladder in banking or in hedge funds and so on um I became a parent back in 2011
and we went around looking for preschools in the city of Houston which is by no means the backwaters um and
there was a lot of questions that me and my wife sort of raised to ourselves uh
you know which had to do with you know something doesn’t feel right I mean it doesn’t seem like this industry acts
like a lot of these other industries that we worked in or studied as um uh
you know or read about and at the same time
interestingly um some of my ex colleagues and Friends halfway across the world were actually leaving their
careers also in banking um to start preschools and or at sty with the idea
of starting preschools and everybody was saying the same thing can’t we do this better uh we’re going around looking for
excellent preschools and cities like Hong Kong London Dubai um you know
Houston and we’re coming with the same conclusions the parents don’t like what’s going on uh the schools could be
run a lot better can we could it be us can could we do it better right that’s the question we asked ourselves and I
think the answer was both good and bad I think the good answer was yes uh you
can actually bring a lot of change you can be disruptive uh there is such a thing as that kind of shining Beacon
example preschool that if you get everything right that you can create which can actually be an example and it
you can build from there and you can scale with quality that is you’re not bending the laws of physics in want
scale with quality in the preschool business right uh but also it could potentially take a long long time right
yeah um and so the question we were asking ourselves was well what’s different about 2015 2016
2017 um this is a 100 year old industry do we have reasons to believe
that we might have a better shot than many of the other teams that have tried it and I kept coming back at the time to
um my experiences with the world of AI and deep learning and machine learning
i’ had invested in some of my friend startups in saken Valley and um there was some very interesting things I was
seeing in the works which led me to believe that we’re actually on the cusp of um a lot of U empowering technology
powered by AI that can actually change the game inside schools um for employees
on the move for to free up teacher time uh it was pretty obvious to us early on
that the North Star for anybody wanting to make a difference in this business should be to free up teach your time
because this is a Time poor business um you know you got parents on one side who
have their own time issues you’ve got teachers who have to take the bus and you’ve got licensing and regulations
right and so in the middle of all this you got to find you got to pull off every trick in the book that you can to
free up that teacher time so that the quality of their engagement with the child is better right you take it for
that their intentions are always positive but how do you free that time and I was seeing a lot of things happen
in other Industries um in the field of AI in general that gave me hope that um
that over the next 15 to 20 years will actually be the fastest pace of innovation that we’ve seen in this
industry compared to literally the last 50 or 60 years so and I think it’s very interesting I want to in just a couple
minutes dive deeper into the AI llm deep learning you know uh you you know
language modeling and in there because I do think that’s going to be an interesting part
um we when you just to reflect though on how we got onto that topic you got into
the industry basically because you and your wife were like well we could probably do
it better yep now that you arrived okay now that you have I believe
17 locations in the US and the UK uh more than that we have um uh well if you
include the schools that are under development it’s more like 22 or 23 2023 wonderful now you’ve
arrived and you started going there a little bit without the technology yet of
AI in place or you know um those elements what have you found to be the
reality of what you thought you could do actually to what you could do because
you obviously have a lot I I also own my own schools so I’m very close to this one too
y so what are your thoughts on that deep yeah so look
um this is a very difficult business to
um to actually innovate in and the reason for that is that it’s neither
it’s hyper fragmentation right it’s it’s hyper fragmentation actually works
against any kind of um um you know the question we used to ask ourselves in the
beginning was well well the hospitality industry solved this problem you know 20
years ago why do preschools still do XY or Z right so that would be the general tone of a lot of the questions we used
to ask ourselves as a founding team and I think the reason is that the capital
model is quite broken right it’s because uh you never grow to the kind of scale
where your incentives are aligned still with innovating while at the same time
you have the capital available to actually put it to work and you’re actually employing best of
breed solutions that come from other Industries right and that was the reality that kind of hit us in the face
right away um well you still got to solve for Real Estate right um it’s a
means to an end but you know you can’t operate on the streets so you have to go
through this uh labyrinth in process of uh getting licenses uh sitting in front of the city
explaining your case pouring over design and blueprint and making adaptations and modifications how can I still run a good
preschool and have a good playground and still somewhat more or less be stay true
to Regio uh you know inspired design but then make the city happy so these were
all challenges that we had to Grapple with pretty early on the other thing that we realized was that um there is
the idealized model of this uh extremely motivated well-intentioned
caregiver or preschool teacher right and thank God we would say that the majority
of our staff would definitely be that right um and I think a lot of it has to
do with again the kind of people you attract to begin with right the kinds of things that you say about yourselves um
at least aspirationally do matter because if you don’t even do that then the right people don’t want to join you
um but also we realized pretty early on that um things like recruitment things
like training and how you set up your training and how personally engaged your team appears to be in um How concerned
they appear to be that everybody gets trained well those things actually make a big difference right um and again I
think going back to that original not Star right um what is that one thing which if I
could wave a magic wand and make happen you’re not going to give me a um a a
prettier school you’re not going to give me um you know a better location or a
full School even what is that one thing that could drastically transform and not
so good prechool into an amazing preschool it’s teacher retention right y
if you if you attract and recruit the right talent and then they stick with you and you get enough time to invest in
them and they get enough time to inv invest in you and you’re constantly engaged with them and they’re constantly
engaged with you I think you will end up with an amazing preschool right that
that has been our learning that was our learning studying the best preschools and that has been our learning uh with
our own experience also right um and that was the biggest kind of you know
hello keto meet reality for us because um we were thinking in terms of okay 5
10% retentions are rate and then we were like wait the the industry average is
what 35 40 your entire Workforce turns over in a year right how do you invest
how do you do um adult training how do you invest in people give them the right benefits make sure they get their cdas
make sure they get that uh that diploma or degree in in infant cognition that
you think will really improve the outcomes in your school how do you do all that if everybody’s leaving in six
months right and of course this is before covid hit right yeah we were
doing we were grappling with these things back in 2018 2019 and then covid hit and then of course that took things
into a completely different orbit right yeah now the good news here is
that um even though this is very clearly the kind of industry where uh this is
not like the tech business Where You Came Upon something Innovative I’m um
you know I’m I’m obviously generalizing a bit you came You Came Upon something path breaking Innovative you have a
pattern to your name or something and then you started a company around it um and you’re outrunning a bear that bear
being somebody else coming up with something Superior um you know some better algorithm and you have to get it
to Market quickly before any of that happens and you have to build a mo right here you’re not outr running the bear
the bear is way way behind what you’re outrunning is 50, th000 other
competitors right and so honestly in a situation like that
um you know it’s not even it it the question of what you’re out running how
you’re out running it doesn’t even like begin to arise right right there’s so much churn in this business that there’s
a lot of space there’s a lot of space for thoughtful management teams to build
platforms to take it to a certain size um do it well be proud of the product
that they’ve built but unfortunately nobody’s yet solved the problem of how
do you do it over such a vast scale that society as a whole um benefits right.
yeah and you know what’s interesting in this industry is we all know a lot of us know in this industry that Recruitment
and Retention is absolutely key it’s the secret sauce you know to having some
level of success you’re part of the challenge is in our industry from my
observation has been that many people who are involved in our
industry have not gone to school and have not seen this industry as a career
so in turn they see it as a waypoint in their Journey for a career and I think
the innovators in this industry have done a good job of helping frame it as a
career opportunity for people so you can get them up to competency you can retain
them you can invest in that person what would have been the kind of things that you’ve done to take on directly and
address that issue of you know in addition to recruiting for your culture deep which you talked about what are the
kind of things you’ve done to really embody the retain retention of key
quality staff so I think you got to check the basic boxes right I mean you have to
first maximize the probability that somebody that comes into your
school um as a caregiver or a teacher that first they’re doing it for the
right reasons right so there at least has to be some aspiration or intentionality and I have to say that uh
while there have been plenty of what you call um you know surprises learnings
insights that have come to me um which should fall on the cynical side of the spectrum on this account I’ve actually
been been blown away um compared to the other industries that I’ve worked with
the number of people that you come across in our line of work who want to do it for the right reasons is amazing
and I think we’re TR blessed to have um you know I get it you know some of it is
just the large numbers there’s 2 million people that work in some way shape or form in the childcare industry in us but
I have to say there’s just to be able to make the statement there’s hundreds of thousands of people in in our country
alone that would happily come into an establishment for the express purpose
that they get to be near young children for all the right reasons hug them um
you know and can’t stress this enough that was one of the casualties of covid the number of uh the number of
caregivers who told us they actually really enjoy hugging children and that
was one of the first things to Fall by the wayside in Co heartbreaking right um
but you think about the intentionality and the sentiment that go be go behind saying something like that right this is
probably a very unique industry where somebody could actually say in an interview um hey you know I just want to
be around young children and be able to hug them and console them and make sure that they’re that the good things are
happening in their lives and not have it come across as cliched or something you just said say in an interview because I
see them living there in the schools right yeah um so I think a lot of it is
um I think a lot of it is you have to help them help you right you have to first make sure that hey you know if um
it’s free child care that you need if it’s benefits that you need you need to be able to check the basic boxes and
that’s where the kind of under capitalized nature of this industry really turns people away right um I
think we consider ourselves uh um one of the you know one of the best employers
out there but you know not to brag but in terms of at least the kinds of benefits we provide and the pay scale
and so on uh and there are other people who tried and to take that to an extreme and that hasn’t worked either where
they’ve said okay um the average teacher makes $30,000 a year what if we paid
them $70,000 a year does that mean that the teachers would be two and a half times as good no it turns out there’s a
lot of other things that people are driven by in this business in a very
amazing way I mean it it makes you question a lot of the conventional wisdom that goes into frankly just the
design of business in general right and and um and it’s a lot of
different things like how do they how do you set up a culture where people feel like the workplace is the safe place
right yeah it’s their Sanctuary uh it’s where they make friends it’s where they’re at their happiest right those
things seem to matter in early childhood in child care as much if not lots more
than simply paying people more right yeah so uh and I would say that that’s
fairly unique so look I think um we we ask people who are in a position
to come into our schools we tell them all this and we say well do you agree and they say I
wholeheartedly agree nobody ever agreed with me on this but it looks like we’re on the same page and then I asked them
like what ideas would you bring to the table to make that happen and I’ve always been pleasantly surprised um I
mean one one um Senate director that was actually interviewing uh after Co I said
well um you know on these similar lines well what was your bigger biggest learning like what was uh an Insight
that now you’re going to take away and apply in every preschool that you do even if you learned it in these very
fraud circumstances during Co and she said well I I just stumbled on this
where um instead of like paying for Uber rides for my teachers to come to school
I actually started paying other teachers to pick them up so they could actually spend time with each other on the car
ride to the school right uh now of course like you know we’re pragmatic and
you know you start thinking about a lot of other things hey you know what about auto insurance and liability and time
management and and scheduling and all that has its own place but the idea you’re you now kind of touched on
something that is very interesting the idea of like teachers spending time with each other and you’re finding a way for
them to do it right right so those kinds of things really get us excited over and
it’s a lot of those uh Small Things uh we’re a small enough company where um
what used to get us even more excited was when we had schools in India throwing up a creative idea that the
team in London would love and then the team in Austin would love and just this crosscultural kind of influence on hey
we tried this here and it worked like Gang Busters and you guys should try it and run with this run with this ball
there’s a little bit of more than the sum of the parts idea there that we also find fascinating and that’s one reason
why we’ve chosen this kind of cross geography um expansion model well it
sounds like there’s a obviously several benefits that you’ve had for being in
multiple cultures that have sort of I guess maybe would would it be fair to
characterize it deep in saying that there are things that traditionally you would not have thought
of in your own culture but because a different culture is doing it you can see and go wow that’s actually very
interesting we never thought about it that way and then they start to apply it into their own is that sort of what
you’re getting towards it’s been one of the biggest upsides of doing this the way we have that um so there’s two very
interesting things that we found one is that parents um the parents the children
are children all over the world there’s never any controversy over that usually um but the parents we are struck by how
similar they are right the kinds of things they’re looking for for their kids um their priorities and I think it
may have a little bit to do with the particular geographies it is a hyperlocal business it may have something to do with the particular
geographies and neighborhoods that we’re in which do tend to lean a little bit more urban Cosmopolitan um in every city
that we’re in around the world but we’re just struck by how similar the expectations of the parents are the
Western parent wants the same thing the Eastern parent wants the same thing except there’s always a little bit of
the grasses greener on the other side element um hey how do the Americans churn out Creative Kids and hey how do
the Asians churn out kids that are so good at science and math right so there’s a little bit of that happening
but uh in general those are tones and modulators right yeah everybody wants uh
kids to grow up to be um you know to have empathy compassion uh be very good
managers of others and S and interactions um you know be good there’s
just been this explosion in the recognition for emotional intelligence and as being something to be pursued in
its own right um just not even just to kind of create the corporate Executives
of the future that’s too cynical but just to create happier individuals right
yeah um and if you think about it with between what we do for our children and
what we do for our staff at the end of the day a lot of it gets down to belonging people want to belong you know
staff wants to belong like you T about the ride share kind of thing that’s about building camaraderie and belonging
to an environment you know when you look at the emotional intelligence of a a child it’s really about engagement right
and having them feel like they’re part of something and uh so I do find that you
know pretty interesting as the way that you guys have approached it what would you say it’s probably the most unique
thing that you have taken from one culture and brought it to another one is
there anything that pops out I think one of the most interesting things I’ve personally observed is I
won’t call it cultural except um I think it’s a bit bit of a stair step
kind of process because we adopted this method um of card reading doen cards
which is used to teach numerical literacy the kids with the learning disadvantages right and it’s a very
visual method of learning math um and there was something unique about the the
ecosystem in Hong Kong when we were trying it at the time um that it was a
big hit with the parents and that gave us confidence for the first time to try it out out in the west and it’s been a
big hit here right so there’s so there’s that example right and I think there’s other you know you just look at the the
The Life and Times of Maria manasu and obviously she started her work with disabled kids and and so on and so
there’s always been this tradition of like um if you kind of perfected a
technique in a much more uh demanding educational circumstance and then bring
it over to teach you know uh the median U population it’s tended to produce
better results than you always have except that in the US unfortunately we’ve siloed ourselves into where that’s
a totally separate stream and what you do with your regular pedagogy is a separate stream um but we’ve actually
been um the interesting thing is that that itself is a very cultural thing in
the East people are not shy about taking something that works for older kids and
trying it with younger kids right uh they generally have higher aspirations
for sort of academic milestones and a lot of it like a lot of the parents in
the West who have asked me tongue and cheek hey you know so you know when um
you’re the the kids at keto and in in Bangalore or um you know or Dubai or or
you know some such place um I I assume that they’re like two years ahead in math like you know compared to what so
you know this is typically again Asian par parents who live in the US who asked that question yeah stingly but I um but
I always find it interesting that um the only difference in those
cultures when it comes to certain uh dimensions of learning right um is that
they expect more they just try more they expect more right higher expectations higher bar higher expectations higher
bar and you come to the US um we love
the idea of four or five year olds um engage Eng ING with the generation serve
doing volunteering getting confident speaking in class and I tell the parents
in Asia all that’s different is you expect more right yeah you get what you
expect look I think one of the the most interesting insights about this age group is that um you’re setting up an
environment and you’re setting up more or less expectations in a very subtle way right right and then you’re
basically they’re observing mentoring guiding setting up the right
infrastructure observing assessing all that stuff but fundamentally what you
expect is a big part of the input yeah absolutely and it is it’s like you know
clear that that’s 101 in in leadership right is just if you set very clear
expectations and create a road map to get to those you usually can achieve those things if you do not really have
expectations set up yeah there’s nothing to hit you know so and that by the way
is one of the challenges with our industry also is that again the there’s
there’s a um flora and fauna and then there’s the Amazonian rainforest
right there’s a there’s just so many there’s such a cacophony of like methods
to assess and measures and outcomes and different standards and you know this
research paper that research paper you can’t go to a childcare conference without seeing at least four competing
ideas and at one level that’s beautiful right you want to see that you want to
see those ideas come but it never kind of coalesence to the point where somebody might be able to say school a
is doing a better job than School B because there’s never any kind of uh any
way to truly measure the outcome except in uh um you know these kind of subjective anecdotal ideas of right kids
go out from this school um they seem to do a lot better in later life than you
know all very subjective um and so that is one of the laments and of course the other lament is that um early childhood
education when done right um is patently
not something that should be looking to make kids kindergarten ready
because uh its objective should be to actually prevent future damage from the
public school system and from private education um and literally you’re
teaching the kid kids to learn right and orienting them in certain ways um versus
others forming their relationship to learning and so um all that stuff is
actually to me a far more important Enterprise than anything that happens later on which is you know facts and
assessments and standardized exams and so on and so forth right so let me ask you this with what you just said and I
and I definitely get where you’re going with that deep is it’s not so much about just preparing you for kindergarten but
it’s actually preparing you to be a lifelong learner it’s really to be a
great Citizen and so I want to pull back something you were talking about before
into this part of the conversation and that is is when you envision the future of tech you know of
this industry and we’ve seen some automation advances over the past 10 years or so
but now with artificial intelligence large language models deep learning machine
learning these all things that are starting to rapidly hit us and it’s
going to be a a big you know Avalanche I believe and things we’re actually doing a number of things in AI at inspirare
360 right now that we’re rolling out in beta testing but what what is it that
you see not so much on the back office of the efficiency to give the teachers more
time but where do you think this can help on the development of children in the future of child care yeah so let’s
step back one and just think about just imagine a future where um AI is a much bigger part of our
lives uh that are currently in is and I think at this point it’s inevitable um it might slow down it
might get derailed um but you know it it’s generally heading there
so one of the statistics worth considering is that seven or eight years
from now um machine generated content online will
um be about 99 to one in proportion to
actual content generated by humans right so in other words 99% of what you find on the internet would have been
generated through and through right by a machine right um there’s all kinds of
conversations around how would we decide in this world what’s authentic and what’s not what was created by a human
what was created by a machine run AOK there’s talks about digital watermarking I personally don’t think that those
ideas are very practical right so um very going to Lurch or keep lurching um
in good ways and bad ways into a world of bespoke reality right where basically
people might end up believing what they want to believe more and more right and
you can see it in many different ways in our political discourse and um in many other social trends um you can see it
overlaid with different cultural um uh kind of overlays in different countries
geogra geography specific but we’re we’re going there there’s no question about it so then what determines what
you want to believe right I think we’re we’re probably going to find out in the
next 8 to 10 years that the very core of who you are as a person right is going
to lead you in certain ways than not are you the kind of person who reads the first thing that they believe or do you
want to hear other people’s opinions right always as a matter of practice as
a matter of habit right how core is that to you um do you want to always belong
to a tribe or do you have the kind of courage to every now and then question things a little bit right right what
what are the elements in your life that are wanting you to be part of a tribe at any cost versus being a little bit more
original in your ideas right right me those things all keep pointing towards
this phase of early childhood education where you’re creating the relationship
to how you assimilate the outside world right you know those two terms that P
used to to use assimilation and accommodation right that actually your
model for assimilation and accommodation right actually becomes that much more critical right so I think a lot of it
goes back into I I really at this point don’t see the public education system
which is the main stay of everything K through 12 I really don’t see it rising
up to the task right and whatever small difference we can make hopefully a very
big difference but whatever small difference we can make in early childhood education in essentially
making sure that we have the right not Star right we’re going after the right things um and there’s multiple pads to
get there um that that we’re doing everything we can to make that possible
I think the industry needs honestly a lot more Capital but the good news is I mean if you look at
what machine learning and deep learning we actually just had an investor coming to one of our schools the other day who
works in one of the Silicon Valley companies that’s coming up with these very cool varable gadgets right and uh
we decided to click some pictures and this gentleman clicked on his glass um
and snapped a couple of pictures and we started uh toying with a little bit and we realized that this could actually cut
out a few minutes of time every day from a teacher who’s communicating with parents right you um there the cost of
these things is not cheap right uh if you want every classro to have it but it’s falling very very fast right yeah
so I think in about four or five years my prediction is that you could spend
maybe um 10,000 bucks a year right so maybe $1,000 a month in a school and
have some pretty Cutting Edge Technologies Cutting Edge now right that
have become commoditized enough where you’re taking away a lot of time spent
on these mundane tasks that teachers have to do right y um observing kids
assessing kids um video transcripting their motions in class right through smart cameras right so those kinds of
things so that then you’re going back ironically to this model of what you
used to have back in the days when people actually had a lot more time where the teacher would just sit down
with the child and understand their background their personal story actually
talk to them engage with them in a very high quality fashion right what you want is technology to make that possible
right you don’t want technology is very much a means to an end uh in our industry and ultimately the the the
biggest currenc you’re going to have in any preschool is the empathy and
compassion the teacher and the child have for each other right that’s what drives the learning outcomes everything
else is a means to an end yeah well when you so there’s many things you brought
up there that are very interesting deep and thank you for doing that you know when it looks like the onset of AI I
think there’s a little bit of you know a paradigm shift that seems to be going on that will happen and it’s in other words
we’re not moving the pieces around the chest board possibly with invention of where Ai and
deep learning are coming from We’re actually changing the chessboard itself so unlike putting childcare Management
systems or crms or those kind of efficiencies we realistically have an opportunity to change the actually the
whole Paradigm the whole chessboard as to how things go about there there could be very positive sides obviously that
we’ve talked about the efficiency the time efficiency the effectiveness do you think that there’s risks Associated
going back to your like 99% of things will be probably machine developed in the future where 1% may be very well
cornered to authentic human beings developing do you think that you know if
we fast forward 10 years 15 years which if you said this back in the 80s you’d
be like well that’s a long time no for this there’ll be Lighty years in difference of what’s going on do you
think that there’s risks of this possibly not helping children as much as
it possibly could be for the fact of profitability for the sake of
efficiencies for the fact also there’s a little bit of gobbling up that’s going on in our industry right there’s you
know Acquisitions that are going on which is rightfully so this happens in different industries that have the right
kind of capitalization in it so what are your thoughts about that yeah so look technology is technology it
always comes with opportunities and it comes with risks we inventor electricity and the same electricity that’s uh being
used to power homes in in a totally different application could be used for something harmful right you reinvented
nuclear energy powers plants but then now we constantly have to worry about
nuclear nuclear peration and bombs right um a lot of
the so there’s obviously these days a lot of the do there there’s a lot of Doomsday talk about Ai and AI Ma and
obviously the the the titans of Silicon Valley obviously have made their
positions clear that they think this is going to fast and so on and so forth so
maybe look maybe I look at it too much from a child care practitioners lens but
so I mean you you come across a baby that’s wearing a diaper and it’s scowling and looks very angry there’s no
need to automatically assume it’s going to destroy the world it could just have wear as diapers right yeah and I think a
lot of the Dooms mongering that I see around AI is actually more a reflection
of our political and social Zeitgeist than it is a reflection of the true nature of the technology and really
where the technology is and how easy or hard it is to misuse it right because I’ve calibrated these models with my
bare hands right and um you know I have a a degree in in machine
learning and and so when I think when I look at the kinds of things people are
scared about will happen it seems to come from one of two sources either it’s
being written by people whose business it is to just write and yes those professions are uniquely a threat from
AI but may mainly you just think back to um you may be younger than I am but in
the late ’90s um you know you remember how the Dooms were supposed to change
the world entirely and complete you know nobody was ever going to have to work a day in their lives it was going to bring
peace and Harmony and everybody was going to be well connected right 25
years later AI is at that same stage and all that’s changed is how we feel about
these things right what was grounds for optimism in the late 90s because of
where we were politically and socially now we’re at a different place politically and socially and so everything has a darker undertone right
that’s all that’s changed but this was happening 100 years ago this was happening when you know cars were
replaced by buggies um it happened 70 years ago 50 years ago and here we are
again right so it’s both not as good nor as bad as people fear it is uh but I
think it’s very powerful and it’s here to stay um I do think that in terms of
connecting it back to Early Child education I do think that we need to arm our kids to tell good from bad to be
emotionally intelligent to be resilient there’s going to be a lot thrown at them
that wasn’t thrown at us right um you know we’re going to go from a world even
as recent as two or three years ago or perhaps right now where you’re worried about oh our children don’t interact
with their friends in person enough to a world where our children have 10 friends
and none of them are are persons right they’re Bots yeah and and then there’ll be a
generation after that which will consider that normal and that’s the way it goes yeah it’s all part of it you
know now that we’re we’re sort of wrapping up here a little bit um so I want to pull it back in you’ve gone over
a lot of good stuff especially from where you’ve come from how you’ve ascended into this role your thoughts
about the future where we’re going this is really some brilliant stuff which I’m very happy to hear from you on your
opinion on these things if you were to glean as you’ve taken leadership into
the child care industry what would you say of some of just your very best top practices your best practices that you
say well when I show up every today this is how I like to show up what can I do
for you what can I do to help that’s it being there and being a servant fantastic and if you were to say
that you made any mistakes or missteps along the way to your journey to where you are now and you reflected back on
those and of course if you have any stories about any that’d be great if not no worries but if you had any mistakes
or missteps what kind of learnings did you get from those that helped you become the person you are now so I think
it’s uh I would say it’s okay to be patient not everybody can afford to be patient it depends on who your investors
are and you know and so on and so forth but I think look a preschool is a very
unique um proposition in the sense that a lot of things need to come together
for you to get past the the threshold of success you have to have the right
teachers you have to have the right Administration and then there are some other things that come in in a subtle
way you have to be uh in the right neighborhoods where the parents actually
appreciate and have respect for what you’re doing that might be different from others right because it’s also a
very competitive business so um it’s okay to kind of wait for those kinds of
opportunities to come and so that you’re giving yourself as much of a chance of
success um as you possibly can right make sure that you’re surrounded by this
environment where you can go find good teachers but then the parents also have the right mindset um you know if you’re
doing a fully Spanish emerging preschool that there which we do that um it
actually means something to a lot of the parents that it’s actually um you know
it’s not just a life scale that it’s they appreciate how it rewies the brain
and the children and what they’re gaining out of it Beyond just knowing knowing a language which can come at any
point later in life so little things like that I think uh having setting up
that right equos system it can be um you know a few things have to come
together to make that happen and I think it’s okay to wait for those that’d be my are you saying in the past maybe you
didn’t have the patience for it and now you have learned to have the patience
for those things yeah and I think a lot of it is look you got to start somewhere right when you do your first three or
four schools um you’re very much experimenting right you haven’t figured
everything out you don’t necessarily even know how to ask the question um am I going to find the right
kind of teachers and caregivers in this location just like I did in the other location right who do I go ask that
question to right how do I solve that problem to myself so that I can get myself comfortable that this is actually
a great neighborhood right to put up a preschool in um and honestly like even
if you look at the the traditional models with which people look at these things they will look at a demographic
report and say what is the income level of parents in a three M radius nobody asks questions about what kind of
teachers am I going to find right inter yeah you know and so in just in
wrapping here a bit is there anything else you think that it’s worth you know and I do want to have a little bit of
vanity for you after this and tell about kiddo just for a second but is there anything else that you would want to
impart to any of the people who listen to this podcast about being a leader in the child care
industry so first I mean just the fact that you’ve chosen this uh as something
you decided to spend your time and energy on um I’d say I’m personally
grateful I mean I think we need more Inspire carees we need the people who
listen to inspir care podcasts um for people are take an interest in this industry um I do think
that this is one of the last remaining massive opportunities for human potential that has gone unrealized for
almost 100 150 years and I think we can change that I think we can change that
collectively we can change that individually and so everybody who who decides to spend their time doing it I
applaud you wonderful I really appreciate those words too because I do think it is where
of the potential is and that’s why I’m involved myself tell us a little bit about kiddo and tell us a little bit
about what is your endeavors I don’t believe you’re doing franchises right now correct you’re doing more of a
corporate uh expansion correct doing a corporate expansion um we are not um
100% opposed to franchising but it’s a little bit of a head head scratcher for us because I’ve personally in my um
studies of there and other Industries um I’ve never seen the early
childhood education space as being necessarily a good fit for franchising that’s not to say that there aren’t
great franchisers out there um but uh I do think that the reason we have so many
franchise ORS in the US for example compared to Europe and East Asia is
because we have more franchising period not because it’s a an inherently good
fit for the early children education space that said we have ideas on the table where uh with the right partners
and with the right kind of careful attention to Quality um some control
over hiring that doesn’t run a foul of you know franchising laws and doctr and
so on um that it could be a a good solution as well that said our model is
one of corporate expansion because we’re simply far too experimental um to accommodate it within
a franchising cont concept and uh you know our schools do have important
differences we hold to some core principles but uh some of our schools the majority of our schools in Texas I’m
proud to say do a fully immersive second language which is Spanish for obvious reasons uh in London it could be other
languages and we do think that that’s a very important part of this unique early
childhood development where um you can literally create a lot more um of
objectives outcomes simply by exposing kids in an immersive way to to additional languages right and there’s a
pretty good body of research that it actually um results in children that are
you know they they have they’re emotionally more intelligent and empathetic and so on and so forth so um
there’s all that um at keto I think it’s
fair to say that we’ve set ourselves an impossible task which is that uh we want
our preschools to both be satisfying the
checking the big high-end Hospitality box the um the kinds of things with
their paranoia and attention to detail and checklists that Medical Care Facilities have and finally somehow also
do it in a way that you can achieve academic objectives right and Milestones
and developmental Milestones right um so
we try and do all that I think it’s pretty obvious to us this is a line of work where you have to do 100 things 10%
better as opposed to one thing that completely changes the game right yeah there are some very interesting things
on the horizon where with AI and the stuff we talked about where that 10% might end up being 20% in certain areas
and that could exponentiate and and be hugely important but still it ain’t going to be that one big thing it’s
going to be a lot of showing up doing the small things right and um and
getting that culture in your team’s right so that everybody’s uh wanting the same outcomes right um
obviously we started this because we were young parents ourselves and uh
there’s a lot that we didn’t like about the way the nature of the engagement with parents and we’ve tried to change
that at keto uh um while respecting parents’ time and U the kinds of things
that they actually care about we’ve tried to uh create this Community Field
where uh we’re engaging with them on a variety of different topics right um so
that they can be our biggest you know spokespeople right within the community and and so on and so forth so the growth
model is very much still um based on private Capital but
friends and family and I think the next big stage of our growth we’re probably going to at least try and solve the real
estate um uh part of our growth in an Institutional fashion maybe some
development Partnerships where people can build school’s TurnKey to our design
um and then from that point on with a little bit more size we’ll again take a timeout and look at okay how do we grow
from here um but we we are quite conscious of the fact fact that it’s
hard to scale with quality in this business and we want to learn from a lot of the other um very well-intentioned
and I would say well resourced uh players in this industry who’ve kind of
gotten to a certain point and found that there’s challenges to scaling with quality we are remotely not even at that
stage yet so I’m not worried about it day-to-day but um you know it’s something that I observe and I do wonder
if things have changed enough where that doesn’t need to be a a a constraining feature anymore yeah well you know I
don’t know if it’s going to be a constraining feature anymore but we are going to have some constraints we still deal with but you know I want to say to
panu Panda I want to thank you greatly for participating in
ECE biography sage and wisdom from childcare
leaders uh it’s been great that you’ve taken this time to share with an hour plus with us today just flew by and
honestly I know there’s a whole bunch of things I could have easily gone into depth with you so uh I want to thank you
again and you spending a little bit of time with us and hopefully we can have you back in the future I would love to
do that pleas you have been listening to ECE biography Sage wisdom for child care
leaders thank you very much for listening we are greatly appreciative of your time we will continue to produce
these programs on an ongoing basis and please hit the download button and
subscribe to our podcast so you do not miss an episode thank you very much and
hope you have a wonderful day

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