Build the right flywheel, w/Teach for America / Teach for All's Wendy Kopp

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We spent a very interesting summer in Northridge, California. Complete with a killer earthquake. And all kinds of other things happening. And I would say we were

Less than wholly prepared to enter the classroom. That's lifelong educator Kaya Henderson. Kai is describing a time in the early nineties where she spent a summer training with a group of young teachers for Teach for America. Teach for America recruits young people from top colleges to teach in under resource schools. Kaya is the former executive director of Teach for America's DC Office.

The former Chancellor of the DC public school system. And now she's the co-founder and CEO of the education technology firm Reconstruction. But back in the early nineties, Kaya was a brand new recruit for a brand new experiment in teaching and learning. I was in the third class of Teach for America and they were figuring it out. Um А на Тіч формерика.

didn't really have a solidified training model in place. There were roughly five hundred of us that were training, but I think we all entered the classroom feeling woefully inadequate, but feeling bound and determined to figure it out for our kids. Kaya was gearing up to be a bilingual teacher and her first placement after that summer of training was in the South Bronx. I taught Spanish and half of my kids were African American and the other half of my kids were Latino. My Latino kids could speak Spanish. but they had problems reading and writing it. My African Americans, it was easier to teach them to read and write and harder to teach them to speak. And so we did a lot in pairs. So that they could build off of one another's strengths and weaknesses. I wanted them to

learn some Spanish. I wanted them to have a curiosity about Spanish and Latino cultures. and I wanted them to feel like this was a skill that could be helpful to them in their lives. Even as a novice teacher, Kaya saw the power of pairing up students whose skill sets could complement each other's. It was important for her to teach them. But it was maybe even more important.

to create a format where they could help each other learn. Some of my kids dealt with things that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and they were resilient and they kept going and some of my kids were affected negatively and couldn't pull themselves out of their situations. It is optimistic to believe that one school experience can overcome a bunch of life circumstances. I believe that my job was to help my young people see themselves as worthy and valuable and smart in the same way that people told me that that's what I was when I was younger. Scaling the sense of possibility was at the heart of Teacher America's goals. Kaya went on to hold senior leadership positions at Teach for America and its international counterpart, Teach for All.

So as these programs scaled, Kaio was there to see the power of this growing network of leaders, teachers, and alumni. So how do you do that? The answer is Don't just build an organization, build a network.

For your team. Your customers. And yourself. My first year of teaching, which any teacher will tell you is hell. Uh

I only made it through because my Teach for America friends and I learned from one another and we supported one another and to this day some of my closest friends are my Teach for America friends. So it is it it makes a significant impact on your life. That's why I believe that networks are the key to amplifying scale. They help you find what you need, share what you learn. Build enthusiasm and motivate talent. So if you haven't found the right network

Build your own. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This

is masters of scale. I'm Reit Hoffman, co founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock. And your host. And I believe that networks are the key to amplifying scale.

They help you find what you need. Share what you learn. Build enthusiasm. and motivate talent. So if you haven't found the right network. Build your own.

I'm obviously a huge fan of networks. LinkedIn was created to leverage the power of networks. And unlike some headier business theories, this is one that people intrinsically understand. The idea is much, much older. than social networks or network TV.

It's even older than the concept of actual nets. In our earliest. Hunter Gatherer Days, we understood that collectively, when we share information, We succeed. But not all networks are created equal any more than any two actual nets are.

Some are tightly woven. Others loose and stretchy. Are you building a fishing net? or mosquito net. What are you trying to catch?

Because all this will affect your net size, stretch, and weave. I wanted to talk to Wendy Cop about this because she's founded not just one, but two networks across her career. The first Teach for America. was a brand new model for connecting high performing college graduates with underserved school districts across the country.

Since their founding in nineteen ninety, they have trained and placed over sixty thousand new teachers across the United States. With Teach For All, the learnings of Teach for America are scaled globally, reaching children in fifty nine countries around the world. But the shape And they each contain different lessons for entrepreneurs.

The first seeds of Teach for America were planted when Wendy herself was an undergraduate at Princeton. I was in my senior year for the first time in my life, I found myself in a total funk. I was just searching for something I wasn't finding in terms of what I wanted to do with my life. I mean I had become a you know, very concerned. College student concerned about the inequities in our country.

And all the recruiters in nineteen eighty nine of liberal arts graduates like myself were investment banks and management consulting firms banging down our doors saying, Commit just two years to work in our firms. And I just I really didn't want to do that. This aggressive recruitment. Didn't just happen in nineteen eighty nine. Inventure capital too, if you're not betting on the product or the tech.

You're betting on the person that will make it happen. And these financial firms had built themselves a highly efficient network to scoop up top candidates from universities as soon as they were available. But to Wendy, it seemed odd that other sectors weren't doing the same. Our generation was called the me generation. And supposedly we just all wanted to go work on Wall Street.

And all we cared about was ourselves. And I just thought that was so wrong. And one day I just thought of this idea, you know, why aren't we being recruited as aggressively to commit just two years to teach in Urban and rural communities across our country. Wendy wasn't an education major.

But the desperate state of the country school systems had been all over the news. I became obsessed with that idea. Like it was my answer to what to do, and it was my thesis topic, which I also hadn't thought of. Wendy might have written her thesis. Gotten her grade.

And been done with it. But the more she researched, the more the idea wouldn't let go. Which led to a classic entrepreneurship moment you might recognize. When I started writing the thesis, it wasn't to say I'm gonna start this. It was like I started just researching this as a policy idea, and as I researched it, I became all the more obsessed with the idea. And in fact, I spent two months of the thesis process trying to figure out, you know what, someone must be starting this. It is so obvious. It was the kind of thing you would tell people the idea and they'd say, doesn't that already exist? And I just kept thinking, it must.

That moment of doesn't this already exist is key to the founder's journey. It's actually one of the first signs a new product or a new network is needed. Another sign? If you see a potential talent base to create the thing that's missing. Wendy saw that right there in her own graduating class.

It just felt to me like the window was gonna pass, like the mood on college campuses is perfect. There's tremendous need in school districts. There was a front page article in Fortune magazine saying corporate America committed to education reform. So it just seemed like it has to happen. When they drew up a proposal. Modeled on the Peace Corps, a government run volunteer organization where volunteers commit two years to serving global communities in need. The Peace Course started with five hundred people. They thought that was the lowest possible number to convey a sense of national importance, and anything bigger would be unmanageable. So that became my number. The thesis

develop this four page plan with a budget saying we need to raise two and a half million dollars. My thesis advisors like he calls me in and says, Do you know how hard it is to raise twenty five hundred dollars? And he introduces me to the head of development at Princeton, who's going to explain to me how hard that is. Even though she was hearing bad news, this was a pivotal moment for Wendy. In making that introduction, her thesis advisor had expanded her network.

Wendy was now connected to someone who had critical experience she lacked. So even though the message was This is going to be almost impossible to do. The introduction itself. Was a major win. It helped her connect with some early funding sources after she graduated and let her get started on making her thesis a reality.

She worked out of donated office space in Manhattan. building a skeleton staff and recruiting those first five hundred core members. But Wendy had her sights on adding a new piece to her network. Someone She believed

Would be invested in the same mission. I said I think Ross Perot is gonna fund this. H. Rospero Billionaire CEO Philanthropist.

and Texan. He's from Dallas, I'm from Dallas, and one thing I know about him, I mean, I didn't know him, I had no access to him. Wendy's only connection to Rossboro was in their shared geography. being from Dallas Wasn't a strong enough reason by itself to get her an audience with him.

but it did give her advanced knowledge of what he cared deeply about. pushing all these education reform initiatives. I believe I wrote him eleven letters. Disputed that fact. But

One of them he responded to, he called in the office and I said, I'm coming to Dallas. Can you meet with me? By that point, we had raised maybe four hundred thousand dollars. And this was beginning to become pretty much the most existentially stressful situation. But I told myself

I am going to glue myself to The chair in his room. And I will not leave. Until he gives me a million dollars. While I wouldn't recommend this exact technique, there's a lesson in Wendy's persistence.

I cannot tell you how many times he tried to get me out of his office, and I just said Honestly, you Are the one Yeah. And he finally said, I'll tell you what, if you can raise the other one and a half million you need, I'll give you five hundred thousand.

And at that moment I knew it was all done. Cause the credibility, the leverage, like I just knew I had enough people out there who were just sitting on the fence and sure enough, like it all came together. So that's how the first year funding came together. As it turns out, Perot wasn't the only person who would help Fun teach for America. Because he knew that if he gave her some of the money, others would follow. And a sort of domino effect.

His gift. Would open up a whole new network of funding sources for Wendy. Once they secured funding, Wendy and her team got the Teach for America ball rolling. Somewhat chaotically that first year. Because, as with any early stage network,

The funding. It was a bunch of people recently out of college and we were giving it our all and We really forgot to plan for a lot of stuff.

For instance. We had no plan for what to do when twenty five hundred applications came in and needed to be reviewed. Like we did have people interviewing, but there was just never thought given to who's gonna review those applications and figure out who we're selecting. But despite the youth and inexperience of her small team, it all managed to come together.

They lined up donors, visited schools, and recruit a board of directors. One year after I graduated, I was looking out at the first five hundred Teach for America Corps members who were such pioneering spirits and who started teaching in six regions across the country. And I always think that's the moment Teach for America really began because the learning curve was just It was even steeper from that moment forward. The steepness of that learning curve wasn't just due to their inexperience, but

What Wendy and her team were attempting is hard. Teach for America made a promise to young raw talent from elite universities that they train them and then deploy them to high need school districts across the country. But American school systems are locally run. Each school district has its own distinct community and its own challenges.

As networks go. It was a loose one. Teaching is a little like driving. Once again. Kaya Henderson.

Founder and CEO of Reconstruction. There's a lot that you can learn in the classroom or in these kinds of simulated environments, but you actually learn teaching when you do it. And just like you learn driving when you drive. That's a timeless lesson, not just for teaching, but for entrepreneurship. Now. Back to Wendy.

We ran into the education politics and most importantly figuring out how do you recruit and select people who are actually ready for this and train and support them so that they don't just survive, but actually succeed and There were just immense lessons on all fronts. Teach for America work to pull these lessons together into centralized institutional knowledge. They met their first funding targets, then blew past them. They made national headlines.

for their approach to education reform. But like many startups. Teach for America hit a snag a few short years into their existence. We hit the wall like year four. I call these the dark years. We spent three years where literally every two weeks

I was truly uncertain that we would have the money to meet payroll. We had all these startup donors who had never So we had an eight million dollar budget with grants. dropping off in five hundred thousand and million dollar chunks. And we're still at staff of Like

people in their lower twenties who really have no idea how to pull this off. It's very common in early stage companies to hire the people in your immediate network. In Wendy's case. Young enthusiastic graduates from premier universities like yourself. But as you grow.

You must look beyond your own circle. and start thinking strategically about who you need next. We had huge management challenges. I had the idea that we were all on a mission and It's funny because I've kind of returned to this idea thirty years later, but That we shouldn't need a lot of hierarchy, so we would just hire people who were aligned in spirit and send them off. And that was, of course, I I ultimately came to think that

Whether or not we fulfilled our mission would be so much about whether we were well managed or not. There was also another challenge Wendy faced as Teach for America scaled. How to grow their network of recruits. Every year for ten years. we would get, no matter what we did, 3,000 people would apply. I mean it did not matter. The first year 2500 people applied and every year thereafter, 3,000 people applied.

We would put these posters out. and the people who would look at the poster and intuitively think that's what I wanna do. would apply and that was three thousand people a year. And we started realizing what our competition was doing. By competition, Wendy's referring to that legion of consulting and investment firms that recruited aggressively on college campuses.

If Teach for America wanted to grow their applicant pool beyond the same fixed number every year, they needed to do more. And put up posters. They needed to recruit, like a McKinsey. Without. We don't have a million dollars of campus.

But we do have a lot of Volunteer energy. We ultimately staffed up our recruitment team pretty significantly, but each of them would then find volunteers for each campus among core members, alumni, student volunteers. And we would just go at head honey. Every year we'd have coffee with 40,000 people. And some of them we'd have coffee with ten times like the people we would most want. Like what's holding you back? It was a very relationship driven.

Once we figured that out, we started being able to manage our growth. Once Teach for America had reimagined their recruiting, the organization broke through their hiring ceiling. By year ten, they'd reach eight. Eighty thousand students. That

Dark years, it would seem were over. But a funny thing happened on the way to scale. People from outside the US started to notice. We were fifteen years into the Teach for America journey. And I was like

all in on Teach for America. We were scaling, you know, at twenty percent a year and working to increase impact in classrooms and alumni impact It had actually never occurred to me that this would be something that people in other countries would think would make sense for them. Looking back, I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me, but it really hadn't. I met thirteen people in one year. From India to Chile to China to Lebanon, who were just determined that something similar needed to happen in their countries. And they were looking for help. And I felt like I needed to be responsive, but I was a little bit conflicted because I knew that I needed to stay focused given the massive continuing challenges in the US.

When did that okay, we need to have another organization And it needs to have learnings from Teach America, but be a new model. w when did you go, okay, that needs to happen and That's For me to do.

There's a very inspiring woman who had found her way to my office, who herself was a very accomplished social entrepreneur from India. Who ran these incredible transformational after school programs in India and She met a couple of Teach for America alumni who were volunteering in her centers and she's like We need to teach for India because her biggest challenge was to figure out how do we actually intervene in the school day and how do I find enough people power to actually provide the kind of transformational education they were providing. Anyway, she said, you have to come to India.

Before we go any further, let's replay something Wendy just said. She met a couple of Teach for America alumni who were volunteering in her centers and she's like We need teach friends. This is a powerful example of the network effect in practice.

Yeah. Teach for America had recruited, enlisted, and placed these core members in schools in the US. After their two years in that program, some of them went on to work in India, bringing their expertise with them. That's how networks can evolve. Even if you're sitting at the head of an organization, your work can spread and reach borders you can't even see.

Oh Ironically, Wendy was the one who most had to be convinced. I got on the plane to head over there and even then I was thinking this makes no sense. Like whatever I've learned here is not gonna have relevance in India. I mean it everything will be different, but the minute I got there. I mean the first thing we did was go on a school visit. And I was having deja vu. I mean it was like

Down to Sitting in the principal's office. And having them wipe off the table and put the you know, donut holes. I mean so that we could have a conversation with the principal. And the principal started telling me through a translator I need to explain to her why our kids can only accomplish so much given their background.

This sounded very familiar to Wendy. And a might to you too. You might remember Kaya Henderson at the top of the episode speaking about teaching in the South Bronx. And I just thought I can't believe it.

I can't believe I'm seeing the same movie here. We then went into the classrooms and I realized The kids' circumstances is actually probably closer to the circumstances of the kids in the Bronx than the more privileged kids in India. In this moment. Wendy saw that the lessons from Teach for America could be applied directly. The school children

Had similar needs. But that was only one half of the equation. Teach for America had learned how to scale their teaching core by recruiting at American universities. Would that method work in India too? We went to a college campus.

And I still remember this because Shaheen Mistri, who actually ended up going on to found Teach for India, she was so depressed at the end of this session. I mean, it was at one of the really selective colleges in Mumbai. And only maybe ten percent of the kids were super into this, but those ten percent were like live wires. I left thinking This works. This is incredible. Like this is gonna take off in India. And she was just so depressed. I'm like, but you only need ten percent. That's like Yale. Like go to Yale. These kids are on the edge of their seats saying, This is what I wanna do with my life. Let's take a moment to appreciate what just happened.

The administrator who had invited Wendy to India was devastated but what she saw as a low engagement rate. To her, ten percent enthusiasm meant Ninety percent failure. But because Wendy had spent fifteen years on recruiting visits just like that, she had the experience to say No, actually.

Ten percent is great. And sharing that insight would help scale not just teach for India, but teach for all. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

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I hope to see you there. We're back. with Wendy Cop. When we left her, she had just finished a revelatory trip to India, where she learned it might be possible to scale the practices of her first organization, Teach for America, in a global way. But a lot would rest on how they structured this new entity.

Teach for all. We decided to set it up as a network of independent locally led organizations with a global organization that could help accelerate progress of the network by helping everyone learn from each other. Note. This network structure is different from how Teach for America was built, which had a more centralized organization. There isn't a separate.

Teach for Cleveland. Teach for Tucson. And teach for Brooklyn. But Teach for all.

would be sort of like that. Except here it was Teach for India. Teach for Estonia and a co-founding program. Teach first. In the UK.

The night before we launched Teach for All on the stage of the Clinton Global initiative, I had a total panic. Like called the person who was my partner in crime at the time was like I don't think this is gonna work. I had learned so much at Teach for America about the challenge of scaling with quality. And this is such an intensive program to run. And I just started worrying You can't blame Wendy for those last minute butterflies. Her prior experience had been building a centralized organization, like the Peace Corps, that would then dispatch core members to their posts.

But as a distributed network. A meta network, if you will. Teach for all would leave most of the control in the hands of the local organizations. This is a concern for any franchise business. There's a certain amount of trust handed to each individual outpost.

Each regional manager, each store manager. And on down. That's Can be scary. But it wasn't long before Wendy's expectations evolved from panic to a different feeling.

What I have seen through Teach For All has been mind boggling to me. I mean it shattered all of my preconceptions about how to generate scale with increasing quality over time just to see the power Of a network. I mean brilliant people all over the world in very diverse contexts, which inspire different ways of thinking and innovation.

But also supported By a lot of central capacity building, the Pure Effects. Pure effects. The theory that when a student is surrounded by high-performing peers,

Their grades will go up. and when surrounded by lower achieving peers. Their grades will go down. So what I've seen is Problems resolve themselves much more quickly in the network than in a more centrally managed structure.

This is a phenomen that isn't unique to teach for all. Examples of quality distributed networks abound from host communities on Airbnb to Wikipedia. Wikipedia, in fact, is a perfect example of how quality can actually be improved by a less centralized structure. Imagine the errors, embellishments, or acts of wiki vandalism that might linger if corruptions had to run through some Wikipedia central. Instead, Wikipedia scales its value system of factual integrity amongst its editors.

Mistakes get flagged quickly and quality improves. This is the sort of pattern Wendy saw emerge after Teach for All's launch in two thousand and seven. And it's fast success. was nothing but good news. Except

That the sheer speed of scale Force Wendy to make a choice. We launched Teach for All with seven network partners in year one and thirteen in year two, and by year five there were twenty five. And Teach for America doubled in that time. From something like four thousand teachers to eight thousand

So I had no option. So I was just realizing I need to choose. Like Teach for America needs a dedicated leader, and so does Teach for All. Wendy transitioned out of the CEO role at Teach for America in two thousand thirteen. Though she stayed at the head of the board. It was time to commit to teach for all full time. Since then, Teach for All has grown to include fifty-nine organizations across five continents.

We have a set of unifying principles which you could write on A half a page of paper. That's Every one of these organizations, now fifty nine of them, that's part of Teach for all are committed to living into. They say a lot, but there's nothing prescribed about how to do it. We don't go trying to expand into countries. We

Respond to people who come to us and say I really want to start. Teach for Nigeria or whatever it may be. And then we come behind them. We never get out in front of them as they work to develop the plan to adapt. these principles to their context. This. You come to us approach to the distributed network is actually the opposite of that early method Wendy described for recruiting Teacher America teachers.

Every year we'd have coffee with 40,000 people. And some of them we'd have coffee with ten times like the people we would most want. Like what's holding you back? This kind of aggressive recruitment wasn't the way to scale teach for all. Because of each network node is going to grow and scale locally. It needs to be opt in.

You can't force a school system. Much less a sovereign nation to do things your way. Each new country that joins the network needs the space to make their version and innovate at their own pace. At times that pace has been shockingly fast. And I don't know if it's like the power of local ownership or the pure culture created across the network, but I would just see problems getting solved.

Maybe more quickly. So because there are problems everywhere, but the question is how quickly Are you solving them and evolving and improving? And I've just seen the power of a network approach. Was there one particular kind of place where you saw this kind of learning in This particular country context that then spread.

That was the ah, this is the validation of that network thesis. Probably the first place this really struck me was in India. I mean, one of the things that we were always and still are all across our network trying to figure out is how do we grow The percentage of truly transformational teachers. There are really good teachers. And then there are teachers who are just fundamentally somehow overcoming all the constraints of the circumstance and really putting kids on a meaningfully different trajectory.

Remember, it was in India that Wendy saw ten percent of college students respond positively to the recruiting pitch. That percentage had delighted Wendy. Even as it had frustrated her host and colleague, Shaheen Mystery. Keep that in mind when you hear this next story. I remember visiting

You know, a year in to teach for India's launch and realizing They might have more Percentage wise truly transformational teachers. Then than we had Shaheen had taken what we had done and said, Okay

Like, for instance, the summer training curriculum. She said, Okay. Ninety percent of it at Teach for America is building skills and knowledge about how to be a teacher. Maybe ten percent is working on people's mindsets. She's like We're gonna go thirty or forty percent mindsets. We're gonna immerse people in experiences and help them reflect, because this is a mindset scheme.

If you're starting to feel like you need a master's in education just to follow along, don't worry. This isn't all that different from the mindset work we talk about on Masters of Scale. We go in depth on this in the Masters of Scale Courses app. What Sheheen had done was shift the focus of Teach for India's summer teacher training program. Putting less emphasis on what the new teachers would be teaching.

and put a little bit more time into how. The results impressed everyone. In fact, Teach for America sent fifty teacher coaches to India just a very few years later to say How are you all doing this?

This is the beauty of a network. It allows information to go, not just from the top down or the center out. But in all directions. Networks are how you find what you need, share what you learn, and scale enthusiasm for your mission in every way. For the first year or two.

We actually did think, Okay, teach for America and teach first. I mean we have so much we can share. So, you know, we had a set of lessons from our experience and we went out and tried to Propagate them. to inform People's local choices. I realized this in our second year.

that this was a bad idea. And that in fact we needed to reorient. our support from being around answers to being around questions. This lesson cannot be stated enough. In fact

Let's say it again. We need To reorient. Our focus. From answers to questions.

A network is not just about What you can give me. It's about What we can give each other. You don't show up at an industry mixer saying, Hey, what can you do for me?

The success rate for that kind of approach is very, very low. But we don't talk enough about how important reciprocity is for organizations, too. This organic give and take can be a little messy. But it produces better information overall.

And it puts a lot less demand on the overarching organization to be all things to all groups. Instead. It can facilitate conversation and learning between two of its network nodes. So Teach for All is structured as a distributed network with information. Flowing across it.

But its structure isn't the only network it produces. What have been some of the things that have come out of that alumni network? So in the US, the start here. There are probably seventy thousand Teach for America alumni. Eighty four percent of them are working full time in mission related work.

They become a huge percentage of the school principals and the district leadership and the people running the NGOs and the school board members we weren't sure how this would play out across the world. In fact a lot of people thought That part of it is not gonna play out in our country. Like they thought they're never gonna stay like across the world, seventy-four percent stay full time in education alone. They're in their twenties often, but they are starting the social enterprises, moving into the ministries, running the schools networks, seeing that. leads you to wonder what is happening during these two years. Because it's not even that they

Are staying in this work. And that they're exerting leadership. It's that They're the kind of leaders we need. If you go back to your mental image of a network as a physical net, This alumni effect is like building it with an ever stronger weave.

Those who come out of the system emerge transformed. And they put their energy back into the system. We actually went through A huge shift. And how we were pitching the organization to folks. One more time, Kaya Henderson.

In the beginning, it was all looking at pictures of cute little kids and talking about educational dysfunction. And really what we ended up shifting to was helping potential core members understand that you are absolutely helping the communities that you are serving, but you are also learning and growing and developing leadership skills that would take you into whatever you wanted to do next. Kaya is a prime example of an alumna who has gone on to make a lifelong difference in the field of education. That includes her most recent venture, the online learning platform Reconstruction.

Reconstruction was a dream in my head for a really long time. I watched other cultures be intentional about the cultural and identity development of their young people. And I wondered what would that look like for African American kids to learn our history and our culture from our perspective, not from the public school's perspective. Many of us don't live near our extended family anymore. And so how are we teaching our young people to cook the dishes that we love and that are hallmarks in our community or or to play the games that we play or what have you. And so I was really worried, frankly, about who was minding the cultural store for African American people. We have a history of

educating ourselves from citizenship schools to freedom schools to, you know, Marva Collins and West Side Preparatory in Chicago, I thought why not extend that tradition in a new way by taking advantage of technology to allow kids wherever they are in the country to access These classes and this curriculum, and that is how reconstruction was born. As it happens, Kaya co founded Reconstruction while She was running a global learning lab for Teach for All. I was spend my time traveling the globe, working with communities to help them think about how to transform education.

And when the pandemic hit I was grounded and I thought this is as good a time as any to try to work on this. moonshot project that I had in the back of my head. The global pandemic, of course, upended more than Kaya's Teach for All work. When you could see its effects play out across the entire network.

Teach for all and each of the teach fours across the countries would be one of the things that you would think would be massively affected by the pandemic asteroid. Right, it's the congregation of places we've seen troubles with schools, like can we teach online? Should we get back to person? What's happening with socialization of our children? It has been, of course, like just a very challenging year for sure. It was also just a year for our network. I mean, I think we were kind of built for this within a week of March fifteenth or whenever we had fifteen hundred teachers in teaching without internet WhatsApps in four different languages with solutions there just flying across. Like how are you keeping kids learning where they don't have access to the internet? We put a posting up about these Teach for Nigeria fellows who went to the government and said, there's no way we're gonna reach kids if we can't

take over the radio station. We put this out and Yeah. bunch of people in Chile saw it, alumni of Insignia Chile, and said We're gonna start a radio station and

Within Two weeks they were on 200 radio stations with their episodes. Now they're creating what they're calling the Netflix of education. It's basically a podcast library and they're saying it's never gonna go away. And now we have a whole community of practice among people all over the world. A year ago, I too was worried, I mean, these many countries were gonna see such a diversion of resources to food security, to health. Would all these organizations make it? And they have all made it. They have more than made it. They're thriving.

There is no one magic bullet when it comes to navigating a crisis or scaling a business. But harnessing the power of a network. Really might be. The closest thing. So look around you.

Do you have a network that supports you and you can help support? If not. it might be time to build it for yourself. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thanks for listening.

Masters of Scale is a Wake What original. The show is recorded remotely with sanitized audio gear. Our executive producers are June Cullen and Darren Treff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are Jordan McCloud, Adam Skuse. Catherine Clark Ray, Halibondy.

Marie McCoy Thompson Christina Gonzalez and Chris McCloud. Our editor at large is Bob Sapian. Our music director is Ryan Holliday. Original music and sound design by Daniel Nissenbaum.

Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson, Steven Davies, and Andrew Knollt. Mixing and Mastering by Baron Bastanelli. Special thanks. Chris Shay, Alisa Schreiber, David Sanford. Ir esa piada.

Adam Heiner Emily McManus. Kelsey Capitano. Kim Cronin, Sarah Sandman. Carrie Goldstein.

and a pisano. Mina Korsawa. Charlie Menesis and Colin Howarth.

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