Jeff Cassidy is a seasoned CFO who has held the title in companies such as EF (Education First), Flatiron School, and Prodigy Education. He sat down with our President, Sean Dowling, to discuss Prodigy, AI, the market, hiring the right team, and more.
What is Prodigy Education?
Prodigy Education offers a free, game-based math & learning platform for elementary schools with a premium version that parents can purchase for use at home. The goal of Prodigy Education is to make learning fun, secure, and accessible with curriculum-aligned gameplay.
With the variety of education in your background, this one marrying kind of into the technology business, how is that?
In my previous company, we were training folks in technology. So, we were training people to be software engineers, to be data scientists, and that was really at the time when AI started to take off, really part of the mainstream.
We incorporated AI into our curriculum to ensure that our graduates would still have applicable skills. During that time, many people believed they could become software engineers within a year, only to worry that AI might soon take over these jobs. We wanted to address these concerns by providing a more robust and forward-thinking education.
We had to combat that, which was definitely a tricky environment. We were able to leverage AI ourselves internally to help build curriculum. We were able to use self-built sort of chatbots to be like technical coaches, so if they were stuck on a homework problem, they didn’t necessarily need live support. We had chatbots that could walk them through the problem. So, it was really fun to be part of a company that was on the cutting edge of trying to incorporate AI when it was still new.
Just to give an idea, this company has been around for 13 years. What’s the size of your team, as far as in your CFO role now?
I oversee finance and accounting, of course, and then I also have a data team. I have it set up where I have a head of FP&A, I have a controller, and then I have a head of data, and then they manage their teams.
We’re a lean team and have been prudent with money from the start. Our business became profitable quickly, raising funds during the Covid era when many EdTech companies were doing the same. Unlike many others, we were already profitable at that time. We’ve maintained this approach, keeping our team lean and efficient.
All of my teams are really focused on being business partners to the best of their abilities, whether they’re in finance, accounting, or data.
In regards to the future of the company and market impacts, how are you feeling? Optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral?
I think we’re in a really good spot going forward. I think the fact that we’ve had a 13-year history of being a good actor in the space where trusted teachers have used us and where at some point in time we’ve been in 80% of schools across the United States and Canada, there aren’t many teachers who probably haven’t at least heard of our product. So, we definitely have an unfair advantage from that perspective.
We also have the unfair advantage of being able to figure out the go-to-market strategy, where we don’t need to have an enterprise sales team and we’re able to go about it in a different manner. We’ve recently partnered with Clever, which is a single sign-on (SSO) product. Clever addresses the issue of students struggling to remember passwords and access various platforms.
But, we’ve just created a new strategic partnership with Clever to be a premier partner with them. As you log in through their platforms, we’re seen as a trusted name on their homepage. We’re super bullish on some of the new marketing tactics and things that we have going forward.
We believe we’ve faced challenges because schools, with recent funding, haven’t sought free tools. As this funding diminishes, they’ll need more free solutions, and we are well-positioned to meet that demand. Our current efforts are laying a solid foundation for continued growth.
We will likely be launching additional subjects in the coming quarters as well. So being a little bit more than just math and English, we’re able to be a solution for science teachers or social studies teachers, potentially coding (which isn’t taught in a lot of schools), even financial literacy – you name it.
We’ve built a lot of the infrastructure up so that we can start adding additional content so that teachers and parents are getting added value from our products.
Do you have plans for future hiring, including when and in what areas you will add staff?
Specifically, from a finance and accounting standpoint, we are set in terms of the ability to scale. It’s still a pretty significant way from where we are right now. We’re reasonably set up to manage that because it’s not necessarily managing entirely new product lines or other things. It’s a building block off of what we were already doing well, we have some longer-term roadmap items that would be actual new product launches, that would potentially add additional headcount from the support functions.
Going forward, where we could potentially be adding is within marketing and game development. We have a school outreach program where, again, it’s not a hard sale to the school, but where it’s more an education program that we have to help get into districts and work with them, providing trained professional development on how to use our tool in the school.
So specifically, from a finance and accounting standpoint, we’re set in terms of the ability to scale. It’s still a pretty significant way from where we are right now, so looking forward to hopefully 2030; 40% growth in the coming years. We’re reasonably set up to manage that because it’s not necessarily managing entirely new product lines or other things. It’s really a building block off of what we were already doing well, we have some longer-term roadmap items that would be actual new product launches, that would potentially add additional accounts from the support functions.
Going forward, a lot of where we’d be adding is on the marketing side. We have a B2B Lite where, again, it’s not a hard sale to the school, but where it’s more like a school outreach program that we have and getting into districts and working with them, getting them trained professional development on how to use our tool in the school.
So really, back to basics on what has worked well for this company in the past, and doubling down on that. There’s definitely a likelihood of adding some sales folks, marketing folks, and to our Game Team as we continue to build out more sophisticated features.
Our new Head of Game previously worked at Candy Crush. So, he knows a lot of how to sort of really build games to be extremely engaging and really never end. The game before had 100 levels and you finished the game, sort of like the games we would remember as sort of original Nintendo. But now, really building games that don’t end, where you continue to gain additional benefits by continuing to play and so our game team will potentially see additional hires, especially with certain skill sets to get there.
The teams are also starting to leverage AI to assist with some of the creation of new games, or rather, some of the artwork that you can get a good running start with, with AI. AI is not at the point where we’re like “Okay, we need this, this, and this” and it just spits something out, but rather using it as an assistant for our creatives.
Who knows what types of roles we’ll need to hire for in the years to come as AI continues to advance and develop; I’d say we would be growing in continuing engineering work on any AI development that we would need. Should we incorporate more AI into the problems that we’re giving the students? If they seem to keep getting stuck on something, should we provide an AI assist to give them a clue? Those are some types of things we’d explore from product development, which would require potentially different skill sets than we have now.
AI has been a hot topic of people trying to figure out how to implement it, and whether it’s a replacement tool or a complimentary tool. It sounds like for your company, it’s an assistant, right?
You can just get a lot more done in a short period of time. As we launch new subjects, there’s a lot you can do around curriculum development. Like, how are we using the assistant to create new problems and new challenges? You still have curriculum people who are overseeing to make sure the questions that are being put in place are appropriate and at the right skill level – but they can just do it so much faster by having these additional tools at their fingertips.
We’re not inventing how to teach math—there are already plenty of curriculum companies and textbooks for that. Instead, we’re creating practice tools for students. We can ask the same question in various ways and align our practice tools with existing textbooks and curricula.
I’ve spoken with others who use internal chatbots to query raw data and answer questions. While we don’t plan to develop such chatbots, we use Databricks as our data platform. Databricks is creating tools that will enable us to perform data analysis much faster without needing SQL or Python knowledge. This will greatly enhance our efficiency.
As a takeaway for fellow finance executives out there – are there any interesting learns, in your broad-based experience across various industries? Any techniques or things that you’ve learned along the way that you lean on that you would pass along as something to consider?
I would lean on the people that you’re hiring and training. I’ve never been one to focus on specific credentials or GPAs or anything of that nature. I’ve always hired somebody who showed ambition, somebody who shows passion for learning something. So, even if they’re not the most technically sound person in finance or in accounting, if they have the right the right mindset that’s who I’ll hire.
I’ve taken people from customer service, taken people from sales, and turned them into finance and data analysts because they had the drive to teach themselves something. So, I definitely get annoyed when I see such specific job requirements for something like, Senior Financial Analysts, like, must have a degree in finance.
To be honest, I don’t have a degree in finance. I was a Marketing and Economics major, and my first job after school happened to be in the GE financial management program. I did not have a 4.0 GPA either. So, I look at the holistic person.
The best person I ever hired was somebody who was right out of his undergraduate program and his resume showed that it took five years to graduate from Suffolk because he had to work his way through. He was the number one salesperson for T-Mobile by teaching himself Spanish. He worked in a Downtown Crossing location and saw all these Spanish people come in and then leave because nobody could service them. So, he taught himself Spanish to make more money.
I was like, “You’re hired.”
To Sum It All Up…
Jeff Cassidy offered a wealth of insights into the intersection of EdTech and finance. With his extensive experience at EF (Education First) and Flatiron School, Jeff illuminated how Prodigy’s game-based math platform is revolutionizing elementary education. He talked about how the company leverages AI to enhance learning and adapt to market shifts, maintaining a lean and effective team. Jeff also emphasized the importance of hiring for passion and ambition over traditional credentials. His perspectives provided us with a compelling look at how innovation, strategic thinking, and a forward-thinking approach can drive success in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.