An Interview with Fotis Georgiadis
Never argue with people’s feelings. I learned that from my boss when I was a newly minted manager. I have found this advice to be very useful. There is no point to try to convince people to change how they feel about something by argument. Many studies have shown that to be case.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Avida.
Dan Avida, CEO and Co-Founder of Engageli, a comprehensive learning environment purpose-built for higher education. Before founding the company, Dan spent more than three decades as a tech executive, board member, and venture capitalist. Throughout his career, he participated in scaling several companies from a small founding team to over $100 million in revenues and valuations of over $1 billion.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your back story? What led you to this particular career path?
We had a front row seat to the very poor experience most learners had as they found themselves about two years ago being asked to learn using systems intended for business meetings — video conferencing software. This led to lack of engagement and, for the most vulnerable populations, the loss of critically important years of education.
One saying I take to heart is “from who much is given, much is expected.”
As an experienced team with deep roots in innovative product design, we quickly put together a company with the mission of delivering a purpose-built, engaging, accessible, and dynamic online learning platform. Our founding team included Serge Plotkin, CTO of Engageli and an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University Daphne Koller, the co-founder of online learning platform Coursera.
Since we built the company during the pandemic we structured it as a distributed organization, which enabled us to hire the best and brightest from around the world to build Engageli. The platform is designed by educators and built from the ground up for teaching and learning in higher education across all modalities — synchronous, asynchronous, in-person, or hybrid. Engageli offers features to accommodate blended classes, with learners online and in the physical classroom, and provides concurrent access for hundreds of learners.
Engageli’ s unique virtual table seating allows learners in large classes to break into smaller groups, or communities, of 10 where they are able to communicate with their peers and participate with each other in learning, driving even greater engagement in the classes. Using Engageli, the experience is better for all learners in the class, whether they are in-person or remote.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
The pandemic has dramatically accelerated key trends that started years ago. Even as the pandemic restrictions are being lifted, surveys of employees, instructors and learners have been consistently showing a strong preference for a new hybrid future — where people can choose some days to come in person to their work or university, and some days to work and study from home.
Engageli created a disruptive platform with an entirely new category of multimodal learning technology. It is a comprehensive, digital-native solution built from the ground up to focus on improving learner outcomes. Up until now, instructors had to cobble together different applications to create a mediocre solution; with Engageli, everything is built in the platform.
Engageli is purpose-built for adult education which includes higher education, alternative credentials, employee and customer training. We aren’t repurposing a video conferencing tool for learning. Engageli starts with a classroom setting (supporting all class sizes, from a small seminar with a few learners to hundreds in a large lecture hall), with learners seated in smaller groups at virtual tables to promote peer-to-peer learning and community. The tables have between two and 10 learners each; either assigned by the instructor, self-selected, or automatically assigned based on learners’ responses to a quiz or poll question. The instructor can observe tables individually, like walking around a physical classroom, or join a table to interact with or coach learners, but also address the class as one large group (gallery view), similar to a face-to-face classroom setting.
The learners can send chat messages (1:1, to their tablemates, the entire class, or their instructors), talk amongst their tablemates without disrupting the teacher or class, virtually raise their hands while a presenter is speaking, join breakout sessions without leaving the class, and more. Most importantly, learners are always in the same space as their instructors.
Engageli blurs the lines between learning modalities, reaching learners in the modality they are most comfortable with — be it synchronous, asynchronous, blended, or hybrid.
With Engageli, instructors get real-time and anonymous feedback during the class and can monitor the activity levels of learners at each table, seeing whether a learner is active and engaged in conversation. Engageli also has integrated interactive polls and quizzes instructors can use to keep learners engaged. The ability to share feedback anonymously, makes engagement easier even for the shyest learners. Until Engageli became available, these engagement metrics were not available to instructors, though they have now become a key tool that helps them routinely optimize learners’ experience and increase both comprehension and participation.
Further, Engageli’s ability to measure student behavior provides instructors insight into student habits and understanding at a level that is almost impossible to collect in the classroom. Instructors have an unprecedented opportunity to leverage that data to make short- and long-term changes to teaching practices and curriculum content.
Finally, the Engageli platform is designed for accessibility and to protect student privacy with state-of-the-art encryption, unlike any other online platform. By default, learner video and audio are not recorded during the class session unless their hands are raised. Only the instructor is recorded. A class can also be setup so only the voice (not video) of the students that raised hands will be recorded.
With Engageli, the disruption in the EdTech industry — and higher education, particularly — means both learners and instructors have a superior experience, specifically curated and optimized for them.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I have been building companies for a long time (I did my first start-up as a university student almost four decades ago) so the mistakes I make now not are thankfully not rookie mistakes. Personally, I don’t find making mistakes particularly funny, given the responsibility given to me by Engageli’s stakeholders (employees and investors).
One mistake I made early in the company is not thinking big enough. We were initially focused solely on the higher-education market but over time, due to every increasing incoming requests from companies for our platform, we have now expanded the markets we serve.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
My late grandfather taught me that only fools learn from their own experience, so I always tried to learn from others.
I learned a lot from Efraim “Efi” Arazi. Efi was the founder and first CEO of Electronics for Imaging (EFI), his namesake company that he started in 1988 after a 20-year career as the founder, president and CEO of one of the first Israeli high-tech firm, Scitex Corporation. He was a brilliant innovator and entrepreneur.
Efi was seen in the 80s as the Steve Jobs of Israel, so when he started EFI I joined him as one of the first employees. Efi asked me to build a product, named the Fiery, which ended up dramatically changed color printing. We launched Fiery, in 1991, and it was an immediate success. In 1994, we were named one of the nation’s fastest-growing public companies by Fortune.
Efi promoted me to president and CEO at age 32, and we took the company from a market cap in the low $100 million to a $3.5 billion valuation by the time I left the company at the end of 1990s. The Fiery product line is the world’s leading digital color workflow technology, with approximately 20 million users worldwide.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
We aren’t out to unsettle the learning environments of the fortunate, those who have the opportunity to study with the top professors at top universities in small, personalized classrooms. We can make it better with digital tools but disrupting that wouldn’t be ideal. But few people have that experience.
We do not wish to change the experience for those who are in their perfect learning situation, but we want to improve teaching and learning for everyone by offering a collaborative and engaging environment. Engageli improves and democratizes education in a positive way, without taking anything away.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Never argue with people’s feelings. I learned that from my boss when I was a newly minted manager. I have found this advice to be very useful. There is no point to try to convince people to change how they feel about something by argument. Many studies have shown that to be case.
- Another executive early in my career explained to me that it’s not what you did with the last million, it’s what you are going to do with the next dollar you invest. It has always freed me to manage investments looking forward instead of in the rear-view mirror. Every new dollar invested is influenced by what comes next, rather than what happened last. This is harder to do than it seems.
- One of the things I personally learned from a conversation with Steve Jobs is to be focused on the long-term goals, sometime at the expense of short-term gratification. It means there’s no need to act impatiently. ROI can be calculated over years, versus weeks and months.
- Efi used to say that it important to treat all employees equally, no matter where they are in the organization and to provide people with challenges and opportunities so they could shine.
- I have always greatly enjoyed spending time with my colleagues no matter what their specific role is. Hewlett Packard used to call this “management by walking around.”
- Another thing I learned from Efi is not to go into negotiations with a backup position in mind. Efi felt that if we had one prepared, we would get to it prematurely.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We are only at the beginning of the Engageli journey. Recently we held our first user conference using the Engageli platform. It dawned on us that we inadvertently built the world’s best virtual event platform! There are many use cases for our platform that go far beyond where we started.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Adam Gran’s Think Again! is one of the best books I’ve read recently. He makes the point that instead of favoring the comfort of our conviction and being blind to our own limitations, we must be flexible and open, to argue like we are right, but listen like we are wrong. The book is an invitation to let go of what’s no longer serving us and value flexibility over consistency and to realize what we don’t know — and see the wisdom in it to be open-minded.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I recently saw a movie about Nirmal Purja and his team who set out to climb all 14 peaks over 8,000 meters in less than 7 months, when the previous record was doing so in seven years!
There is a scene in the movie where he and his team show up at the base camp of K2 to find a dejected group of climbers that have tried several times unsuccessfully to ascent to the K2 peak and were all about to give up. He told them, “I have been going from mountain to mountain, and sometimes you feel like you are f****d, but when you say you are actually f****d, you are only about 45% f****d.”
He and his team not only ascended to the peak of K2 shortly thereafter, by coming up with a non-intuitive approach, but also laid the groundwork for the other climbers to ascend to the K2 peak within a few days.
The point here is clear — don’t give up, just find another approach. There usually is one available.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Many of the word’s problems are directly caused by lack of access to quality education. Providing access to high quality education for everyone in the world is of critical importance.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/company/engageli/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-avida/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Dan Avida Of Engageli On The Five Things You Need to Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
