EdTech: Jason Beem Of Panopto On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education
…One thing my parents always told me was to make sure whatever you do, just make a positive impact. This doesn’t mean just in your career, but truly figure out how to help people wherever you go in life. When you enter the workforce and you scale in your position, make sure you use your position for the greater good and to help others get to your point or reach their own unique goals…
Jason Beem has over 20 years of experience leading innovative SaaS companies, spanning a breadth of critical business functions, from professional services and customer support to operations and Go-to-Market. Jason spent over a decade in progressive leadership roles at facilities management software provider Accruent, where as Senior Vice President, he led five key industry divisions, including higher education and healthcare, and was responsible for driving a large portion of the company’s revenue.
Under his management Accruent experienced exponential growth and world-class customer retention. With deep experience in high-velocity acquisitions and integrations, Jason has also worked with PE firms seeking to accelerate growth for their platform companies by priming their organizations for innovation through his expertise in building robust leadership teams, driving operational excellence and delivering financial rigor. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from California State University, East Bay.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
My family is from the San Francisco Bay Area and for generations we have been involved in photography. My grandfather actually started a family photography business in the early 1900s. While I worked for the family business while I was in school, I knew photography wasn’t something I wanted to do long term. Believe it or not, I knew that I wanted to be in technology from a very young age. When I was 6, my grandfather gifted me a computer and I started writing code when I was 7. That really ignited the spark for me to pursue the tech route.
At university, my first declared major was in mechanical engineering, but I changed this a few times before graduating with a degree in computer science. Computers have been a major part of my life since such a young age, and this early interest paid off as I received my degree before Y2K. During the Y2K frenzy, there was a major demand to recode software, and companies were hiring like crazy in the Bay Area. That’s how I landed my first job in software engineering.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
The most pivotal moment in my career was in 2012 when I was appointed to an executive team of a company running customer support. A few years later my boss at the time tasked me with running an acquisition as we were getting into the healthcare market. I had never been involved in acquisitions before, and being tasked with this responsibility completely changed my perspective on my career and what direction I wanted to go in the future.
In this role, I was basically acting as CEO, managing all aspects of the acquisition. I actually never thought I wanted to be in a leadership position like that, but it really changed my whole outlook on what it means to buy companies and grow enterprise value. Over the next four years, I oversaw six more acquisitions and am now up to 22 acquisitions to date! Entering the world of M&A is really the fastest way to learn everything about a business. I’ve mentored a lot of people, and this experience is always why I tell them to take risks earlier in their career to create opportunities they never would have thought of. I was in professional services for so long until I got involved in acquisitions. My advice to younger professionals is to try everything — you may like something you didn’t expect.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Mark Friedman has been one of my greatest mentors over the years. Mark was the founder and CEO of Accruent, where I spent 11 years of my career. Now, he’s the CEO of ST6, a very niche company helping private equity businesses grow and build platform companies that drastically accelerate enterprise value growth. He spent a lot of time with me over the 15 years I’ve known him, coaching me on what a good leader looks like. He taught me that business is not just about finances, it’s about how you treat your team and the ways in which you encourage them to grow and become leaders themselves.
One of the best pieces of advice he’s ever given me was what he calls the “3 legged stool of careers.” These are essentially 3 pillars that are critical to your career, and if one falls down the stool falls over. So if any one of these 3 things are gone, it’s a good indication that it’s time to move on and know that you’re not on the right career path. The pillars are:
1. Liking the people you work with for the most part. This might not mean every person, but generally you should like who you surround yourself with every day.
2. The job you’re in makes a fair wage for what you’re doing and there’s possibilities for upward mobility.
3. This is a big one — you need to be a little bit uncomfortable. It’s important to be pushed outside of your comfort zone and this is an integral part of growing professionally.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1. Integrity — It’s doing what you say, saying what you do, being accountable when things don’t go right. At Panopto, I want people to take risks and failure is a big part of that. I tell our employees to own your failures and move on. We really treat failures as an important learning opportunity and a major part of growth.
2. Discipline — When I was younger I struggled in school with discipline and had a hard time getting stuff done on time. That changed significantly once I started to really take discipline seriously. It’s all about creating a system of discipline that works for you and allows you to deliver on the results you need. It took a long time for me to figure it out but once you start you can measure it, fix it, and make it better.
3. Flexibility/Adaptability — Be prepared for curveballs, things will always come out of left field no matter what you do. You have to be prepared for anything. Jim Collins wrote a book called Great by Choice talking about productive paranoia which talks about looking ahead around the turn and being prepared for anything that can happen to your business. Be ready to solve the problem before the problem happens.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Panopto has been in higher education since 2007. We’ve been doing this for a long time and building our solutions from the ground up specifically for this industry. Panopto’s technology is actually built by professors and even incubated at Carnegie Mellon University.
While our focus has always been on higher education, what we’re trying to solve now is very different from what we were doing in 2007. Initially, our focus was on helping institutions find a repository for video used for learning, but now we’re using technology to improve student outcomes. Our thinking is that if we can move the needle even just a little bit on student grades, then that moves the needle on their ability to graduate. This makes a huge impact on students, universities and the parents that fund these institutions.
This is how our technology makes an impact. When you go to a lecture, you only retain about 70% of the information that you’re exposed to. We’re all familiar with the experience of our mind wandering off. In these moments of distraction, we miss important information. Panopto’s on-demand video platform allows universities to capture all of the information that is being shared and makes it accessible to students at their convenience. That might take retention rates from 70 to 85%, yet even that little bit more of content retention can make all the difference in learning outcomes.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Since we were tailor made from the ground up to focus on higher education, we are able to help institutions in a very unique way. While a lot of our competitors are all about video with general use cases, we were truly built to be an engine for higher education. We’re focused on capturing live learning content, improving it to help with information retention and serving it to students in an easy to consume and searchable way. We make information that is critical to their education available in whatever format they need and accessible 24/7.
For instance, if you take an Egyptology class on pyramids, you can search for that in Panopto’s platform. It won’t just show you the videos that happen to have the pyramids in the title, it’ll show you all the videos where this subject was talked about even if it was just written on the screen. This makes it incredibly easy for students to find and consume knowledge when they need it.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?
My passion for education started during my time at Accruent. We had a higher education vertical and I spent a few years owning that vertical before coming to Panopto. The beauty of higher education is how small of an industry it truly is. All of our customers are talking to each other and sharing both their good and bad experiences. When you create real value for your customers, word gets around fast and they truly do sell for you. As long as you do right by them, it is a great industry to be in and we’re proud to have the best reputation in the market.
How do you think your technology might change the world?
An educated society is a more productive society. If you can take a group of students and give them a better likelihood to pass class and graduate, that absolutely will change the world. They become more productive members of society and help to drive our future forward. We have 13M users of our software right now — someone in that group is bound to go on and do something truly remarkable. Enabling people to learn is part of the revolution we’re proud to be a part of.
In addition to this, we’re also proud to help with accessibility in higher education. Our platform enables students to learn on their own terms, which is imperative for those with learning disabilities. It also helps break down language barriers. Imagine if you move to Japan and English is your first language, you’ll obviously have problems learning there and vice versa. Panopto can translate to multiple languages — you could watch the videos in Japanese and then in English, again improving knowledge retention.
These all help democratize access to education — regardless of your background or how you learn.
Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Our technology embraces AI, which will inevitably have an incredible impact on higher education. However, AI and academic integrity will continue to be a big concern. A lot of teachers are worried that students are using AI to cheat the system. We’ve had many conversations with universities about their AI policies, and as a result, we’re focusing our AI tech to be utilized by professors vs the students when it comes to content creation. For instance, utilizing AI to more easily deliver content to their students — which in turn helps to improve learning outcomes.
How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?
AI is here to stay and it is bound to explode. Eventually, I do see a significant portion of education being replaced with AI, but that is many years down the road. As it stands, AI is not very consistent, and the market is still struggling with its unreliability. This will change and get better. Eventually AI will become a lot more accurate and a lot less biased. When it does, I see AI teaching some portion of student’s training. It definitely won’t eliminate professors, but some portion of education will be taught by AI. In the near future, however, AI will continue to be more of a collaborative tool for professors vs. a replacement.
Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
- Understanding the impact of what you are building: When creating technology you really need to consider how this can potentially hinder a subset of the population. In higher education specifically, you need to consider learning disabilities and language barriers when creating solutions. You have to be careful about who your solution serves and be sure not to leave any important groups out.
- Quality: Intuitive design is incredibly important. You want to make sure that your solutions are easy to use and don’t require a ton of training. When we create applications, we create them like iOS app developers, create apps. You should be able to login the first time and understand how to use it.
- Pain point: You need to have a deep understanding of what the pain point is for your end consumers. What is the problem that you are trying to solve? When you start with a real pain point, you will generally end with a product that drives real value for the customer.
- Affordability: When it comes to higher education, making sure that solutions are affordable is incredibly important. Budgets are always tight in education and you need to make sure there is significant value in the product you create. Smaller schools have needs just like the larger schools so it is important to enable your product to be used by both.
- Accessibility: It’s important to ask yourself if the technology you’re building is intuitive and if the learning curve is low. This becomes even more important when you’re integrating AI into solutions as well as service students with special need like language barrier and learning disabilities.
In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?
The ethical handling of data is very important in higher education, especially when it comes to using AI. Panopto is very firm on data protection and security — we do not collect student data and do not share data between different schools. Our data is isolated by institution and we have separate LLMs for each university. This is an approach we believe all companies should take when handling higher education data.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
One thing my parents always told me was to make sure whatever you do, just make a positive impact. This doesn’t mean just in your career, but truly figure out how to help people wherever you go in life. When you enter the workforce and you scale in your position, make sure you use your position for the greater good and to help others get to your point or reach their own unique goals.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?
While most of these individuals are not currently alive, I’d have to say either Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I consider all of them to have been (and still are) incredible creators and some of the most intelligent individuals. I can’t imagine what it would be like to pick their brain for an hour but I’d love to find out.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can learn more about Panopto by visiting our website https://www.panopto.com/ or find me on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasontbeem/.
This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!
EdTech: Jason Beem Of Panopto On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.