Diving deep into B2B SaaS metrics with Matt Kennard, CEO of BetterLesson

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Episode Description

In this episode of Diving Deep, Subscript's CEO, Sidharth, is joined by Matt Kennard, CEO of BetterLesson and former CFO of LearnZillion.

Sidharth and Matt discuss:

• The CFO skills that translate best to the CEO role
• How to build credibility when you join a new team
• Why an operator-first mindset gives finance leaders an edge
• Hard-earned lessons from M&A
• And more!

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Show Notes

Follow Sidharth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidharthkakkar/

Follow Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-kennard-0ba4145/

Follow Subscript: https://www.linkedin.com/company/subscript/

Follow BetterLesson: https://www.linkedin.com/company/betterlesson/

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About Diving Deep with Subscript

Diving Deep with Subscript is a video series where we dive deep and explore SaaS metrics with leading investors, CEOs, and finance leaders.

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Watch the entire series of Diving Deep with Subscript

Get caught up on the entire series right here: https://www.subscript.com/diving-deep

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Episode Transcript

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Sidharth Kakkar
I'm gonna actually ask you a little bit about, your path to being CEO, especially because you came up as a CFO, and I'm really interested in learning a bit more about that transition, and getting into the easy and hard parts of it—what are you particularly good at as a result and what did you have to change gears on as a result? So broadly, any thoughts on taking the CEO seat after being CFO?

Matt Kennard
I've been very fortunate growing up in banking—and private equity in particular—and then doing M&A for a lot of large companies. I had the benefit of really being an operational CFO versus, say, a more accounting and treasury-based CFO.

I actually started my career as a debt banker, before moving into financial sponsors and then private equity. But I think that in each of the financial roles I've had, it has really been using finance as a conduit to how do we operate our business more efficiently.

So, I had the benefit of sitting on boards. I had the benefit of working with incredible management teams and not just from a financial perspective. When you're in private equity, you're working with that team to deliver results for the board and investors. And if you're in M&A, you're really thinking about what are the operational capacities that I can put together?

How do I make a financial story that makes sense? But that really starts with an operational and efficacy story that makes sense. So I think I've had the benefit in my career of having finance be a shared language and an entry point, but so much of my time was really spent on the operations and function of a business.

And I had incredible mentors and folks who really poured into me the idea that if you're just a finance guy, you aren't really doing anyone any good. You're a dime a dozen. But if you're a, finops person, someone who really can dive into operations and isn't afraid to get their hands dirty, that's a lot of fun.

I'll give you an example: I was doing strategic finance at The TJX Companies. A company like TJX, which owns TJ Maxx, Marshall's Home Goods—they're scratching out half points of margin. If you ask someone at Procter & Gamble how much they make on Tide. They make pennies on that $20 thing of Tide. So anytime you can scratch out half a percent, but you have the volume, it makes a big difference. And one of the things I remember working through was we had this mountain of cardboard that was just sitting at our distribution centers. It turns out you can actually sell cardboard back for recycling for quite a pretty penny—and we were able to build an asset recovery and recycling cycle for that.

That was worth, half a point of margin against our stores. That's a lot of money when you think about a $45 billion, $60 billion business. So I think being able to really get into doing those things, walking into a distribution center, talking to folks, going into a data center—and I'll say this to anyone who's in finance, who's thinking about the rest of the world, go get your hands dirty in operations, because really that's what people need.

People need folks who are unafraid to roll up their sleeves. Use finance as a lever and an interpreter to help define success. But there's just no substitute for spending a lot of time in the guts of a business and talking to people who know how to run it and spending the late nights and the hours to do it.

Sidharth Kakkar
When you think CFO, you do not think, "walk into distribution centers," or " walk into stores," you think "stare at spreadsheets" and "format tables." How did you do that? How do you say, "I'm going to just go walk into the distribution center?"

Matt Kennard
You know what? You just have to keep putting stuff in front of yourself that'll give you an opportunity to do that.

It's one of the things that I've always been grateful for to Eric Westendorf and Alix Guerrier at LearnZillion, the co-founders who brought me in. They gave me access to all the operations, what we do, product. And I had an amazing CTO, Ian Lotinsky, who's now at Great Minds and great product folks, who came in and said "Hey, let's open the door and let you come in here and see how all these things work and get to play around."

And there's something to be said for that ability, right? That ability to really get in and see what that looks like. And I think about our product folks like Jodi Rothstein or Beth McHugh, who were there, all still in the industry, still doing great work. When you're willing to learn, they're there to open the door.

And one of the great things I got to do is run our CX team, and if you really want to learn a product, go spend a couple of years talking to hundreds and hundreds of users. Go into a lot of classrooms. See it deployed. See where it's working. See where it's not. And for someone who's new to education, it was an invaluable time to get to spend doing that work.

Sidharth Kakkar
When you joined as an exec like you did at LearnZillion, I think you come in with a little bit of having the benefit of the doubt from the CEO because they hired you, but you can very quickly lose that if you don't do the right things or play your cards right, so what did you do to walk in and continue to build confidence with them so that, over time, all these things that are not traditional CFO stare-at-spreadsheet type of activities, they were like, yeah, Matt, do those?

Matt Kennard
You have to do the stare-at-spreadsheet activities, right? Like you have to do those well, and you've got to be able to master those. And I think that most people walk into those roles, right?

They've done the martial skilling required to do their jobs. I think that, listen, this is like the most trite piece of advice I can give, right? But you just have to be willing to outwork it, right? It is, you do the staring at spreadsheets, and let's call that the first eight hours of your day.

Are you willing to put in a second day of work, which is that next five to six hours, which is going and diving into the other pieces. Are you willing to put in that effort, get on the plane, go talk to the folks, and then humble yourself to know what you don't know.

I walked in admittedly not knowing a ton and having to really get up to speed on that, and I was fortunate people who were there to support. I was fortunate there were people who held high expectations and were willing to push.

And for me, one of the nice things about finance and the way that I did it— I've been in tech for most of my career—I've had to interact and invest in a whole host of businesses. You learn very quickly how to get up to speed. On how things work, and you learn to just ask as many questions as you need, right?

I'll ask questions until the cows come home. But that's how you learn. And it's not a sign of weakness to ask questions, right? The smartest person in the room is the person who gets the thing that they need, and that is often the person who's willing to ask questions, admit that they don't know things, and defer to people who know more, until they can get their knowledge base to the point where they're like, "Yeah, I got it and I understand it." And there's no skin off your back. You're no less smart or brilliant or talented or accomplished to say, "Hey, you know more than I do and I'd really like to understand that. And in exchange, I'm willing to work really hard for you to learn."

Sidharth Kakkar
So you do all this broader learning and being someone who can really think holistically about the business, can you paint the picture of what was your role in that exec team or in the board meetings at LearnZillion? What was your contribution in those rooms?

Matt Kennard
Yeah. We had a visionary CEO, which was great, and I think that Eric—as he's done now, continues to do, in his new company—he really wants to change the way that people think about education, think about core, think about the way that we put kids into positions to find success. I think a lot of my job was how do we operationally accomplish the vision that's being laid out.

How to do that within the constraints of the money we have. How to do that with the constraints of the team we have. And then how do we make sure that we are building the machine that makes that vision achievable. And I think in that sense, it was a really good pairing and I deeply admire folks like Eric and Alix who came in and really saw a better way.

And my job is not to like—I'm not the guy who's going be your series seed startup guy. I am the guy who you bring in when you want to try and operationalize it and make it a reality. We were able to stick to our lanes.

It's been different as a CEO. I've seen a different part of it and I've been able to access a different part of it. But I think part of that was from getting to spend a couple years working for some folks I really respected and who could see the vision and help me to understand and find my own vision for education.

Sidharth Kakkar
For a lot of folks at that point, there would be these choices of "Oh, do I keep going deeper and deeper as CFO into bigger and bigger companies and all that? Or, do I like look at potentially being a CEO somewhere?" How did you navigate that sort of career choice?

Matt Kennard
With great difficulty. When we sold to Imagine Learning, IL has all of the resources and I think it's been shown to be building an incredible business. And, there were folks there who I really admired, be it Sari Factor or Gautam or some of the other folks that are in that leadership team who I think really care about great education.

And, Jonathan's been in education for a long time from the work he did with Kaplan to keep going to build this business, right? Like you have folks who have gotten a really good track record, have a great financial footprint, and, I think, have a great platform to create.

For me, I think what I became fascinated with was the human activity of teaching and learning. When I came to LearnZillion, like a lot of education outsiders, it was like, "Listen, let's get to one-to-one. Let's get to digital core. Let's make sure no one thinks that Woodrow Wilson is still the president of the United States—because that's what their textbook is saying," right? Like "We've come to some basic agreements on what things are. Here are the fact patterns. Fine. And that will solve the problem."

I had the benefit of an incredible, education and I got to go to a wonderful set of schools. And as I think back to the most transformative educational experience for me, it wasn't business school and it wasn't college.

It was my six years at Roxbury Latin. Super small all boys school. Been around since 1645, 380 years. It's the only time that, an American school child can be like, "Yeah, we're basically like the British." And it was an incredible place because I had a class of 42 brilliant guys with whom I'm so close today.

And it was about the human interaction. It's about the things that were drilled into you. It's about the standards that were set, right? Everyone who graduates there knows one thing to be true, which is like, "To whom much is given, much is expected," right? And that's why you see so many of our class end up year over year in some form of service, be it government or education, medicine, take your pick.

That's a human thing. That is an ethos. That is an inherited piece that you had instructors and administrators who were deeply committed to the idea that they were gonna produce boys for public service. It's the ethos of the school.

When I got a chance at LearnZillion to go and see teaching and learning up close, get into hundreds of classrooms and see what happens. You know and you can see the power of a great educator on their students, right? And teaching is at the intersection of content and craft. And the reality is, we can often withstand poor content if the craft is amazing, usually not the other way around.

And so for me, I got really fascinated with this idea of what would it mean for us to think about PL not as this like throwaway thing, but as maybe the most important empowerer of the professionals we're asking to do this thing that matters so much with kids.

And what would it mean to then also, not just think about classroom educators, but instructors and principals and district leaders. What would it mean for us to think about building a company? That not only did professional learning at a world class level, but thought about the support of teaching and learning organizations from planning to deep implementation to actually reporting on the results we had for retention and student outcomes.

And think about that business not as a bunch of disparate parts, but what would it mean for there to be a single source? And when the opportunity came to come and join BetterLesson, whom I had partnered with when I was at LearnZillion and saw incredible uptick in results for our implementation health.

It's like, you know what? PL the dusty backwater of EdTech might be the key to our future.

Sidharth Kakkar
What is a mindset shift you had to adopt as CEO versus CFO?

Matt Kennard
This is the hardest job I've ever had. And you're talking to someone who's happily worked 120 hour weeks, happily traveled 250, 270 days a year, has felt all of those impacts.

But this is the hardest job because I get the privilege every day of working with this passionate, intelligent, caring group of people who don't always agree, who are often pushing each other into places to be better and trying to make sense of what can often be a difficult market, a difficult transition.

Every school district has its unique aspects to it, and it's your job to emotionally lead the charge and set that vision. And it's different than being a CFO. It's not about just reporting numbers and saying yes or no, it's about what's next. And I think that idea of "Where are we going" as a consistent part of your day, is the hardest, but it's also the most fun and exhilarating part of the job.

And for anyone who has wondered, could I do it? Should I make the leap, should I try? Just know that it will push you in some ways that you will never imagine you carried those people with you in a way that no other job, at least for me, as, has made that reality and you carry that in your family. You carry that in your life. You carry that everywhere you go.

It impacts you every day. And at the same time, I can't tell you the privilege it's been to spend four years with people entrusting me with that vision. It's very humbling.

Sidharth Kakkar
That's cool. Now as CEO, how do you work with your finance team?

Matt Kennard
I've often joked that being a CFO for me has got to be the worst job ever.

And we have an incredible SVP of Finance and shout out to Adam for having to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. I think for me, the biggest thing is letting him lead in the way that he's going to lead and not try and make it the way I would do it. I think that it took a minute to get there, but he's got an incredible teammate and he's got incredible people working for him and with him.

And I think between him and our awesome COO, Hannah, they have created a pretty good firewall to remind me to stay here. Do not come anywhere else.

Sidharth Kakkar
How do you use your exec team to create the best outcomes for the business? Because as a CEO, it's probably the most powerful tool you have—your exec team—so how do you use it?

Matt Kennard
I say this a lot to my team, and I think they, finally maybe, believe me: If we go at the pace of me, we're not going to go very fast, right? It's not about that. It's about how can they work together to deliver the outcomes. my job is to make sure they're funded, to make sure that the obstacles are removed, to help set the vision.

But ultimately, anyone who tells you a CEO job is the most powerful job. It's only powerful in the sense that you get to empower a whole lot of smart, talented people, hopefully smarter than yourself, more talented than yourself to go and do and create this incredible vision with you. And so you know, you are powerless without the people that you have with you.

And I feel very fortunate to have a team that cares as much as they do and is as dedicated as they are. And, as we've grown over the last four years and become more mature, it's been awesome to see that team take more and more off of my plate from the execution and "how" perspective, and to really step up to help define the vision of the "what" and "where," and what that looks like.

And I think that should always be your goal as CEO, right? You should be developing the next group of people who could be better than you. I damn well hope you are. Because these companies—we think that they need us forever. They don't. They need us to be stewards of them for the period of time we're supposed to be the stewards and then put them in a better place to hand off to the people who are more talented to do the next phase.

Whatever that phase may look like. We may be told in a year, we may be told in 10, but we're all told.

Sidharth Kakkar
What's something that as CFO, from that vantage point looked trivial or at least not terribly important, but as CEO, you're like, "Uh-oh, that is actually very important."

Matt Kennard
I think, sometimes as CFO you underestimate the soft skilling that's needed. You are looking at hard results all day long and hard results matter. There's no question about it, but that motivation and how you get people there, you are an important part of that, right? Like your accountability.

And I think that's important to have. I think that it's accountability, but also support. And I think, as a CEO helping to use that accountability to move people to the next thing as opposed to just looking at his accountability for accountability's sake. I think that's the part that you don't see until you sit on the job.

And then once you see it, you're like, "Whoa, apologies." So I'll just take this chance: I apologize, Eric. I didn't see it as well as I should have, and I didn't until now.

Sidharth Kakkar
I love it. We can send him that clip.

Matt Kennard
Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Sidharth Kakkar
These spreadsheet formulas do not care about soft skills.

Matt Kennard
They do not. They do not, but you have to learn to account for them. And it's kind of like dark matter, right? You know it exists, but until you have really seen it screw up your world, you don't believe in it existing.  

Sidharth Kakkar
That's pretty great. That's so good. It's exactly like dark matter.

You can feel its gravity, but you can't see, it.

Matt Kennard
Correct. Correct.

Sidharth Kakkar
Ok, changing gears a little bit again: You are unique in your breadth of experiences around M&A? Both from being on the advisory side, then being on the seller side, then being on the buyer side, and that is unusual. So I'm curious to dig into that experience a little bit more and what you've learned over time from all of those experiences. Maybe starting with your first experience from being in the advisory side to going through M&A at LearnZillion.

Matt Kennard
Yeah. Being an advisor and an investor—because I've done it both as a private equity investor directly, both buying and selling, as well as a banker advising on buying and selling—you just learn what a complicated process it is, right? You just have so many moving parts and pieces and, helping keep deals on track and on time doing the evaluation effectively.

You learn a couple things: One is there's just going to be stuff you don't know. Like you can do the best diligence in the world. There is a closet full of things you did not see and you couldn't find the guy to anticipate that. So what does that mean? It means that your most important part of M&A besides getting the pricing right—but I even can even stand a little pricing movement because no one ever prices it perfectly.

Did you have the right post-merger integration plan to get to success? Did you put in the right pieces, so that first one hundred eighty, three hundred sixty days, you know how to bring the people in. You know how to think about the products. You know how to evaluate the customers.

And once you own it, that's when you learn all the stuff you really needed to learn about the problems and the things that you're going to find and the hair that's gonna be there.

If you as a team are willing to do that—be flexible, know that there's unknowns—you're gonna be able to get through it perfectly. I don't care how great your team is or how experienced. There's just unknown unknowns and you can mitigate against that with preparation.

The other thing that's really important is you've got to be willing to walk away. You've got to be able to look at something and say, "Hey, my thesis was this." And if my thesis isn't proving out, you can't be so arrogant enough to say, "Well I'm gonna jam it together anyway and it's all going to work out." Sometimes the answer is it's not gonna work. And that's the point of diligence, right?

Sometimes you get into it and say, "Hey listen, I really thought this. Sorry guys, we wasted a lot of time, but this isn't the thing for us. This isn't where we're gonna find success."

So I think, to me, that's where—I've been doing this for 20 years and that's the best part, right? You've got to be able to walk away and you've got to be ready to prepare to get there.

And as a team, there's no substitute for just doing the process. We'll be better at the next acquisition than we were going through Abl. For the first time as a team.

Sidharth Kakkar
For folks out there who are at companies that want to think about M&A in their future, what does M&A readiness look like?

Matt Kennard
I think that you need to know exactly what it is that you are trying to fill, and you need to have a good understanding of what your post-M&A future looks like as a company. We are doing it to do this. We are hoping to accomplish this, and we're building our diligence and planning around whether or not this company can effectively get us there.

And I think that's the hard part, right? Consistently doing that is what I think folks can struggle with. And again, you can fall so in love with your own idea of what this could be, that you miss what it is. And that's the part that like, unfortunately, there's just no way around that as a problem.

Either you're going to see it properly or if you don't see it properly, you are going to find yourself in a world of hurt because of it.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yep. That makes a ton of sense. and when it comes to, the seller side and the LearnZillion experience, what does readiness look like?

Matt Kennard
I think that's where it's understanding, what are we trying to accomplish as a team and what's preventing us from getting there, right? Or are there opportunities for us to move our mission forward faster?

I don't know that we wanted to sell LearnZillion when we sold LearnZillion, but practically speaking, we were not gonna be able to grow LearnZillion, which now grew into Imagine Learning Classroom faster than Imagine Learning was gonna be able to.

So if you care about that impact in the long run. As much as it stinks to give up control, you built an amazing thing that was already influencing millions of students. How can you get to tens of millions and how can you do so as fast as possible? And if what you built, you believe, is the thing that helps move things forward in the right way, you've got to sometimes be willing to give it up to folks who can shepherd it to that next level of growth faster and better than you can.

And I think that's the hard part. I remember it distinctly. It was, December 20th, 2019, right before COVID. I was sitting at a hotel in San Francisco in case I need to chase like a last couple of signatures. And I remember the closing call and—for those who haven't been through M&A—the last thing you do is you basically go through a closing call, which is a checklist and a funding call, right? You've got to make sure the money moves to the right accounts and documents are released from escrow. It's like a very exhausting 45 minutes of perfunctory stuff that you like get through.

Sidharth Kakkar
You're bringing back memories. I remember exactly where I was sitting while doing mine.

Matt Kennard
There's a bunch of people right now who are like diving for pillows or calling the therapist saying "Hey, yeah, we've got to talk about it. I got triggered today."

Sidharth Kakkar
Sitting on the couch. 7 am. Whew!

Matt Kennard
Yeah, I remember sitting there and I went to sleep right afterwards. We had a 3:30 closing, like Eastern Time to accommodate the West Coast. And man, I remember waking up on the 21st and feeling like—there's a little part of you that mourns the deaths of something.

And I say this to, folks who I work with all the time. Right when we're in the middle of the hard days and everything else. Just close your eyes and do your best to remember these days because one day they won't be here anymore.

Either we'll grow so much, and it's not the same. Or we'll sell, and it will change. People will leave. You know, the magic of it. There's this old saying like, "Do you wish you would know the last time you went bike riding with your friends and the last time you were going to get together?"
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Right? You don't know what that is until it happens and then you realize it. It's the death of something, but it can also be the birth of something else. And I think that being able to have the perspective of, I loved this. This was amazing. I think we did great work, and I can see how someone can do this better than I can.

If, especially in our industry, you really care about outcomes for kids. The job is to get to distribution. The job is to get in as many places as possible. And if what you're doing is the best thing possible for kids. It's much more meaningful when it's 50 million than when it's five or fifty.

Sidharth Kakkar
Thinking about the birth of something, when it came to, Imagine Learning Classroom, what did y'all do in that first thirty, ninety, one hundred eighty days to set up, Imagine Learning Classroom for success.

Matt Kennard
You know, it took a good 18 months before it really started—18, 24 months before it really became ILC, I think, Imagine always takes the smart thing of let's make sure we can run the thing that we bought, figure out what's there, what do we not know, and then incorporate it into what we do next.

And so I've got a lot of respect for that team. They've done M&A forever. They're obviously pretty seasoned pros at that point, and I think they took the right crawl, walk, run approach and then figured out what made the most sense.

And I think that, just because you bought something yesterday doesn't mean you have to do something with it today. Sometimes it's like a new job, right? What do you do in a new job when you come in? Spend the first 30, 60, 90 days talking to people and really understanding what it is that they're trying to accomplish, where they've headed, how they've run it, And I think that if you're smart, you're building some of that into your integration plan to really deeply understand it because it's different once you own it.

Sidharth Kakkar
When I talk to both parents and educators now, it's obvious that there's this very high degree of consternation about AI and I think a lot of it ends up being driven by the fact that our educational institutions and regulatory apparatus are much slower to evolve than AI. Pretty much everything in the universe is much slower to evolve than how fast AI is going—and that mismatch is concerning. It's like what are the impacts of that mismatch going to be as the technology zoom while the adaptation crawls? Do you have perspective on this?

Matt Kennard
Listen, I think that AI will be obviously deeply important to us, right? Just like the Internet, just like personal computing, right? I think that we need to be smart enough to look at AI as a tool. And it's not a tool that's out of our grasp. Like you see a lot of smart folks like Erin Mote and the InnovateEDU team working on things like the EDSAFE Alliance, right?

I know that the administration's going be talking tomorrow about how do we think about AI? I know the Biden administration did, as well. I think the question for me in education is going to be how do we think about AI and its various tooling uses as a part of what we want to do, right?

Machine learning is not new. You can, go back to Alan Turing cracking Enigma, if we want to talk about large dataset analysis—and we've been doing that for 70 years.

Using AI for things like differentiated instruction, right? Being able to look at tens of thousands of millions of use cases, thinking about differentiated outcomes. That's just a huge help because it allows us to get out of our own bias and our own limited data sets as educators.

And so I think that's nothing new. I think generative AI will also have its places. When we think about lesson plan creation. We think about being able to easily grok complex concepts.

It will also be a help for us. It's not that we need to get rid of AI, it's that we need to start thinking about what is responsible use. And I think for us as a business, we're thinking about professional learning in three pathways.  

First is, "How can I use AI to help make administration of my district significantly more efficient?" There's lots of ways that we can reduce some of the time and difficulty of administration, right? Using AI to help support that work.

I think the second thing is, "How am I gonna use AI tools in my instruction?" Everything we can do to help teachers get to what are the differentiated needs of the students in my classroom, and how can I best address them every day from a planning perspective? AI is an ideal tool for helping support there.

I think the final piece is, "How am I helping my students responsibly think about the use of AI tools in their educational process, in how they think about research, writing, et cetera." I remember I was in college—if we were in college around the same time—when Wikipedia was just coming in—Wikipedia, which we knew was actually more accurate than most encyclopedias.

"If you look it up online, how could it actually be real?" Because I don't want to go to the stacks every time I want to look up a fact, right? Like, it's insanity. That doesn't make any sense, right? I have a laptop and Internet and a more accurate source. Wikipedia is a perfectly legitimate source to go find information.

And in fact, it updates in real time, right? It can be crowdsourced, et cetera. So yeah, I can go to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I don't think I want to. I think the question really becomes how do I think about responsible use, because it can be incredibly helpful, right? And it can be incredibly, useful tooling when you're using it to support your work, not to do the work for you.

And then there's certain things we probably shouldn't be doing anymore because they are an actual waste of time. So I think that, every job in the future is going to look at you and say, do you know how to use AI tools to work efficiently?

That'd be like walking into, an investment bank and saying, "Sorry guys, I'm not going to use a computer in Excel. I'm just going to hand write it, and see where that takes us. I bet I'll be faster." You won't be, right? And not to pick on Booth, but there's no reason to be doing hand regressions for an entire quarter just to prove that you can.

Calculators get the job done. So I put all that out there to say, this is not the first time we've had to deal with new tools. We know how to deal with them. I think my encouragement is for folks to look at ways to demystify it, embrace the tooling. Really understand it and before you say anything, really try it.

Okay, I'm gonna give one personal anecdote and I'm going hope my mom never actually listens to this podcast, so I hope you're down one listener, which is: We were sitting around the kitchen table the other day, and I was messing around with Claude and my mom goes, "Ah, I don't like it. Can it really..." Blah, blah, blah. Something about, "Can it really tell me the same thing or write with the same efficacy I could?"

I said, "All right, you know what?" Now, both my parents are lawyers. This is like one of these fun debate things, right? Where I lose far more than I should. When debating I said, "Give me something," right?

And she's like "Tell me why lawyers hate writing regulatory documents,  based on rules that can often change." And so I'm on the clock, "Give me a lawyerly response and blah, blah, blah in one paragraph."

And she reads the paragraph, read it out loud. She's like, "All right. Well, that was really good." And that took 10 seconds.

And she's like "But..." and I said, "No, but there's no "but" here. You asked the question, it gave you the right answer." Does it need refinement? Sure. But I said, you know, if you needed to explain to that to someone in 10 seconds and it was like a throwaway answer, why would you ever spend an hour crafting it?

Pump it in, give it a read, send it out like it's not an important part of your job. Go spend your time on the critical stuff. And that's not to say that that's a perfect example for teaching and learning, but it is to say we sometimes let our own imaginations of Skynet and everything else we've seen run wild versus saying these are tools like every other tool you've got to find responsible use for.

Sidharth Kakkar
That's really good. I just wanted to give you a huge thank you for recording this and sharing all these insights. Just really appreciate your perspective on everything from education to M&A to CFOs. What an awesome conversation.

Matt Kennard
This was super fun. I really enjoyed it and like I said, I hope I'm not getting tomatoes thrown at me the next time I roll into the Kennard household.

Matt Kennard
You might, but just send us pictures. Fair enough. Thank you for the time.

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