Sramana Mitra: Who’s shopping to whom and when? When Jenny wants to get a GIA certification, is Jenny shipping directly to GIA, or is Jenny shipping to you and you are shipping to GIA? Benny De-Kalo: The way it works is, Jenny goes online and describes her item to the best of her knowledge. Taking
Sramana Mitra: I understand. One of my objectives in this interview is to find gaps in the ecosystem. Rob Waldron: That’s a gap, right? Sramana Mitra: Yes. Let’s switch gears and talk about the instruction. What has been the evolution? Where are we coming from? Obviously, we’re coming from textbooks and prints. Within that text
Benny De-Kalo: Let’s take an example that will illustrate it. Jenny just got divorced after three years. When she got married, they had bought a $14,000 diamond ring from Steve, the retailer. Steve bought it for $9,000. Now, she’s deciding to move on. She wants to do something better with the money. She first goes to Steve
Sramana Mitra: In the old model, there was an annual testing procedure. There was a lot of lag and delay as you’re pointing out. With the introduction of technology, is there ongoing testing? Is the annual state-level testing all online? Rob Waldron: In a few places, it’s online. Mostly still, it is in print. Schools
The world is becoming a hopeless, dangerous place for people who do not have high-end skills. Anything and everything that can be automated, we can assume, in the next 30-50 years, will be automated. That leaves vast numbers of people of out the workforce, unable to acquire high-end, non-automatable skills. They simply do not have
Sramana Mitra: Why did you do this particular company? What was the idea that you started with and why that idea? Benny De-Kalo: It took me a while to come up with the idea. I’m a finance person. At one point, we came up with an idea to finance consumers and try to provide loans
Sramana Mitra: From everything that I have read about Khan Academy, they are also doing a lot of test analysis and skill gap analysis. What is your analysis of their work? Rob Waldron: I don’t analyze their work. I see it out there and my kids use it sometimes. It’s been a remarkable asset for