EdTech Series 2: Michael Jensen of Labster

Hans Tung  

Today on the show, we have Michael Jensen, founder and CEO of Labster. Labster is a groundbreaking platform that allow students worldwide to learn life sciences through gamification education in the immersive 3D virtual worlds in app operatories. With ability to significantly enhance students motivation, these new and ever-evolving tools bring a revolution to the learning online. Michael is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building innovative technology companies that have the potential to change the world. Born and raised in Denmark, Michael’s first business venture came to life, which is 14 years old. He has a bachelor’s degree from Copenhagen Business School, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the school that my partner Jenny went to. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Thank you very much, it’s great to be here.

Hans Tung  

My first question for you is that the mission of Labster. Labster, according to your website, is to radically improve science education. What is the biggest problem with science fiction today as you see it, and how does Labster help solve that?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen  

There’s a series of challenges, I would say that we can help from a technology company’s perspective. And a couple of the ones were actually not what we first set out as our mission, but more what we realized later on. So, one of the major challenges typically in science education is that these facilities are very expensive, cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build science facilities. And so the capex costs of most institutions are incredibly high compared to most other costs, especially related to science. So we really set out to find ways in which we can replicate the success of flight simulators in train pilots in the flight industry, and essentially just virtualizing as much as we can, without compromising the learning quality. So, it was really a game of trying to help schools reduce costs while still increasing the learning outcome. But what we learned very quickly in our journey in the early days of Labster is that one of the biggest challenges in most science education today is actually engaging the students. One of the challenges that you see is that,  because it is so expensive typically, it’s also very hard to provide the students with high quality facilities and then million dollar microscopes, or allow them to take on field trips, where they can go out and experiment with science in the real world, all that is very costly and very difficult for most schools, even at the top schools. So what we looked a lot more into then is trying to understand other ways in which we can both help schools reduce the cost of education and science, free up resources for others, and look at can we bring some of the innovation that has been happening in the gaming industry, you know, billions of dollars being invested there every single year. Can we find ways to bring that innovation into the education space at the same time, and so really at Labster, we seek to virtualize education where it makes sense where we can either help save cost increase engagement, reduce time to learn, or make it more safe, which typically is in these virtual worlds. And that has been a very exciting journey of bringing together many very different skill sets and unique perspectives around the world. So really merging the gaming industry or the game design field was a lot of innovation. bridging that with the learning sciences and pedagogical instructional design, and then bridging that again with the sciences and the latest cutting-edge research within science and how we can teach students to solve important challenges real world challenges. So it’s an interesting journey that we are on and we continuously learn and talk to our customers and teachers around the world, how can we help them further? What are other things that we can do as a company to support our partners and customers around the world?

Hans Tung  

Yeah, in our first board meeting joined together by my partner, Jenny, she and I both noticed that you have the founder of Unity David Helgason on your board, how did that happen?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

So yeah, David helped us and he’s on board. And then they just IPO recently, it was an incredible success story.

We were observing closely how he did and what are the techniques, but the true story is I spammed David until he got tired of me. And then he said, Okay, Now I have to have a lunch with him, because they’re using our product. So I kind of felt almost applied to it. And so we had a launch. David, myself and Mads, my co-founder, and then we just got along so incredibly well, right from that first lunch. And I remember seeing David was like, wow, these guys got something, and so that was really the beginning of the incredible journey. And he’s been with us from very, very early, and been very supportive throughout the entire journey, which is incredible and very exciting to have him on as well.

Hans Tung  

That’s a great story. It’s hard to keep students engaged, especially learning about science in doing labs alive. So how were you able to find that magic to combine gaming and education, so that somebody actually can learn something, being stimulated or having some fun? We notice that you have done a little research result of learning in a simulated environment, you share something with us some of that learning, in your own sort of ups and downs in trying to make these two different things work together?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It’s a very interesting question. I think that’s also what we realize a lot of lectures, and one of the very unique competitive advantages we have is to find a way to bring together these very diverse fields and have them work closely together in a very scalable way as well. The core of it is because my co-founder, Mads is a professor in biotechnology and really understands both the sciences, and how to teach sciences very effectively. And at the same time, I have half a PhD, I should say, in the learning sciences, at some point left started growing so fast, I had to put it on pause. But I have a lot of insights and passion for learning. In general understanding what actually makes us learn when is it aha moment, triggers in mind. And what leads up to that aha moment? And how can we build and design experiences that really bring that together.

On top of that, my previous company was actually in the gaming industry, I’ve been very close to the entire gaming industry, lots of network connections and understanding within that. So from all of that, we were able to design initial hypothesis on what we thought would work, we didn’t really know but as you mentioned, we then set out to run research studies with my co- founder, it was both kind of half and one full PhD, very research focused. And we said if we want to convince people that this really works, especially in the education sphere, we need to do study, we need to do research that is statistically significant, and really demonstrates that this actually works. So we had a period of nine months, we planned this research study with the DTU, Danish Technical University, and we set ourselves a deadline for running this experiment, which was actually a good thing, but also a very tight deadline. So we had nine months to build the first product, get it out there and test everything I remember sitting until the late night coding and getting all the last bucks ironed out literally the hours before that first experiment. And then we ran an experiment, we had 120 students from both Danish universities as well as Stanford Online High School in the US. And we ran the study, we got the results back, we had statistical experts from the Danish education industry as well, looking at the data and when it got back, we were like this cannot be true, there must be something wrong, we must have measured this wrong. So we had experts come in to the analyze. No,  this is good enough. And what turned out was that the results are so incredibly good that it was much better than we had ever imagined. If you use Labster in combination with teaching efforts, like traditional teaching classroom follow up lectures, for instance, we saw a doubling of the learning outcomes in the same amount of time spent. So you have a  double amount of learning outcomes in a highly statistically significant research paper, which has been replicated by many other peer reviewed independent studies and published in Nature and so forth. So, we knew at that point, we’re onto something like, okay, we got this, but we honestly didn’t know exactly which pieces of our first product that really made it work. But we knew we got something here. And that was really the beginning of starting to bring in more experts and really working with the leading experts globally, both within learning game design and the sciences themselves.

Hans Tung  

You’re based out of Europe, and North America is your number one market. How did that come about? And what has happened during COVID-19 that makes any impact on your geographic expansion?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

I think it’s a very traditional journey for many European companies to build up in their home market, they demonstrate potential and the growth potential there and then realize that American markets just is such a gigantic market where we could really go for scale and reach more students much faster, which is really the core of our mission as a company that is really to empower the students by empowering teachers around the world. So, we saw an opportunity, and as we had done research already in the US, we knew that this technology would also work in the American education system. So we essentially set out on a journey launched a product in the US, built up a team in the Boston, where we have an incredible team that grows very fast, and dedicated to helping all our thousands of institutions across the US. We built this incredible product many years ago, and we thought at that point, wow, this is incredible to double learning outcomes, this is gonna go crazy that it’s still teachers, and students will love this. But you have a great product, it doesn’t mean that it’s just going to magically, I learned that the hard way. And since neither my co-founder and I are really good salespeople, besides maybe being very passionate, both of us are around education. But we really needed someone to help us build that commercial side of it. We brought in experts again in scaling, high performance sales organizations, teams and departments. We tried it three different times, three different ways, and learn the hard way in education, you have this interesting triangle where you have the users which are typically students, then you have the buyer, which is typically teachers, and then you have the payer, or the budget holder, which is the institution. So it’s a very tricky game of convincing the right stakeholders at the right time. And doing that in a scalable way, cost effective way is incredibly hard. And I know many tech companies truly struggle with this because it is very challenging to get everyone on board and aligned, and getting a new product adopted. So we experimented with multiple different approaches of selling and working with partners. And it was only the third attempt, I would say we’re getting close, like all this is talking not too good. But we nailed it, we found a way and have a incredible team in Boston that understands how our partners customers are thinking and how we can best position our product to demonstrate the high value effectively to teachers. So that model was already working very well before COVID. Luckily, because when COVID hit, we first entered a very uncertain period of, what’s happening here, how’s this gonna affect the market, no one really knew at that time, and no one knew how long it would last, and so forth in the stock market often have a very big bump. So those are uncertain time. But we really were committed to helping our partners and our institutions get through these challenging times, we actually made large parts of our product freely available to schools affected by COVID-19 due to closures and so forth. That was a massive boost for our growth awareness in the entire industry, We were featured in many publications, Forbes, among others, as some of the leaders in this space for our response to COVID, really going out there helping and supporting our customers. Even though we are self as a company, we’re in a very challenging time but we’re incredibly did the right thing. It was the right thing for our customers, and it was the right thing for our company as well because it really accelerated the awareness around Labster. It made people put us  truly on the radar for many institutions across North America and Europe and massively accelerated our growth that we’re already at a high pace, and it means now, just here in the last few weeks, we’re at about 20 x the usage at the same time last year, so massive growth, and probably our biggest challenges has been keeping our servers alive and running and humming away. We  have a few instances where it was out for a few minutes or, but already, our DevOps team have been incredible and constantly monitoring everything, so incredible journey. And super proud of our how our team was able to step up. It was luck, but luck being the time where preparation meets opportunity. So, it was really an opportunity as well for our company to step up. And we weren’t prepared for that, based on all these learnings that we’ve made over the last few years.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, it’s great timing for you guys, especially racing around in the summer.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Yeah, thank you so much.

Hans Tung  

It’s a great timing, great place where you guys are very good. And another great timing and planning by you guys is that up until recently, only college students get access to Labster. And then during COVID-19, you get somebody to strategic decision to open up for high school students initially free if needed, how did you decide to do that, knowing that would change the cost structure quite a bit. During COVID, it is a period of uncertainty.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It was very challenging. I remember it was a couple of very intensive weeks, just around the time where we realized, okay, this is not just in the US, this is going to go also to America, our biggest market and we talk back and forth, how is this going to affect our company, but we were very certain in the end that by making large parts of our product for free, it the benefits of building up the awareness and the adoption among multiple different players would have a positive effect for us in the long term as well. And that was ultimately right bet, but we did have to make multiple other decisions rapidly, because our product needed to be very easily available in a highly scalable way. Actually, over a matter of a weekend, even myself coding to help get the product out. We had one weekend to build a system that you would basically one click access, so that we could scale with this. And we had, I think more than 50,000 teachers sign up just in a matter of a few weeks, just after COVID hit as schools were closing down, and many more since. And I was thinking was it the right thing for us as a company? Was the right thing for helping our customers? But most importantly, the right thing for our mission as a company, again, to empower students to change the world and give them the tools that they need. And there was not a time more important than now during COVID, where we as a company could fulfill our purpose in this world of providing this to as many students who would otherwise have no access to quality science education.

Hans Tung  

What are some of the notable names in colleges or high schools, that became your customer during COVID-19?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Another very exciting story. We work with the California Community College System, which is more than 2 million students 115 colleges. And what happened there was they realized the need, we already had several customers within the system, so we work very closely with the system leaders to say, can we find a highly cost effective way, roll this out across your entire system helping many, many more. And so, we had two weeks periods to train and onboard 2 million students, hundreds of teachers across 115 community colleges. And somehow magically, it worked out incredibly well. I’m really impressed. And then it hats off to our team, I cannot take credit for their incredible work of planning out daily webinars, training, open hours, teachers could jump in time, administrators and so forth. So two very hectic weeks for everyone. But the outcome was incredible, and the adoption has been a huge success as well. Then I turn on the district side, we’ve seen a lot of districts now adopting labs as well. So early adoption within teachers, of course, but they very quickly help recommend this to the districts and so we have LA districts very large hundreds of thousands of students also signing up but now rolling it out across entire districts with our entire High School package which we are now also investing further into expanding the large catalog that we have and ensuring that we can help not just during the core topics but really across all the sciences.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, geographically. Take the US as an example. What is the sort of big districts and big states that are using our servers?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It’s pretty much every single state at this point, so now we have customers across every state, but especially California has especially a high adoption among universities. So we’ve seen great success there. But really across the US, it’s accelerating as well here in these days as we’re talking. And I think even more interesting for us now is our geographic expansion into other languages and other parts of the world, especially in Latin America, we’ve seen increased adoption of Mexico, more Spanish speaking countries as well across Europe, we’ve started really growing and expanding our team as well with rapid growth in our team. So typically, we have seen the European markets being far more challenging to sell into compared to the more privatized US markets. And because of the non-budget cycles, but due to COVID, we’ve seen a shift in the mentality around big shift. And we believe it’s not just a temporary shift, it’s something that will last beyond COVID. And in many different areas, but especially around the investment and allocation of budgets to EdTech tools, tools that truly do help teachers and students is an area that where there’s much more budgets and faster decisions being made, that has allowed us to also rapidly grow our team across Europe. And now we are really accelerating the translation of our system to essentially any language across the world. Because when you look at science, it may feel like a niche field, but when you look at it globally, it’s actually more or less the same curriculum. It’s structured slightly different in slightly different ways of teaching. But our simulations can typically fit into any curriculum with slight adjustments. So that’s really exciting too. And as you know, I’m very excited about our mobile push, which is something that we’ve worked very hard on. And I think, again, it comes back to our mission as a company, to change the world empower students all over the world, not just the privileged students, but anyone would even only have access to a low cost, maybe $50, smartphone or similar, how can we give them this same high level, quality education and training. And so over the last several months, our team worked really hard to port a version of our otherwise like desktop, grade to quality simulations, put them down to low-end devices. And we already have the prototypes, running and launching out in several countries. So looking to scale it up rapidly here in the coming months is a very exciting part of her journey as well.

Hans Tung 

Historically, VR cost-wise is a bit prohibitive for many people to enjoy it, especially for a mass market. And VR for learning definitely fit into that bucket the need to be more affordable and available. How do you solve that problem? and how is COVID-19 making it easier or harder for you to do it?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It’s a very interesting question. And I think a lot of people, if you went back two years, were certain that this is going to have massive adoption, and you saw the hype curves and everything truly going to trims everything. I was on board with that, I thought it was amazing how you could create such an immersive experience. And there was a lot of research, also showing 10 to 20% improve learning retention, when you have this in more immersive environments are really helping students burn faster again. But as you mentioned, cost is a barrier. And especially in education, it’s an extra high barrier. And so, when you have a product and the hardware cost increases the cost by sometimes 10 x, if not more, it just becomes practically impossible or very hard to sell. And then we had many very innovative institutions, working closely with us to still bring out this this even higher quality version of our product. And I think most notably, we work closely together with Google and Arizona State University to launch an entire online biology degree, a four-year college degree, fully accredited by using quite high quality, immersive 3D simulations using virtual reality. And so that’s a testament again, to the quality of these learning simulations that they can essentially, in many cases, replace a large part if not even full parts of the science curriculum if designed and built well. But what I think, to everyone’s kind of disappointment, adoption has been much slower. Costs are still very high. And the hardware barrier is still the main barrier for us not yet seeing the adoption that we were hoping for, at least in Labster. We continue to support VR, we know that it will be on the roadmap in the future, as well as augmented reality. So, our entire technology and platform is actually designed for that and all our simulations do work across mobile, Web VR or AR. But it will take a few more years, I think before the price point come down to around $100 per quality of VR headsets for it to be truly useful in in the education sphere. If we talk about corporate training, and that space, though, I think you’ll see much faster adoption just yet, because they’re a $300, $400. That’s not a problem.

Hans Tung  

Correct. We’re very bullish about that segment as well, that you’d probably see a more of a bit of slow down during COVID-19. But it should pick up more people working remotely and need to be staying engaged.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Yeah, we saw that. I mean, we do corporate training as well. And we saw a big dip in basically budgets allocated to training corporates, which are hit by Corona, which is of course very natural and normal. So we shifted nearly our entire focus over to the higher ed and K12 space, which has also been the right thing.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, and 5G is just around the corner. As 5G gets rolled out over the next three, four years. We saw what happened 3G and 4G, it just seems like your application is very, very well suited for 5G, and especially with being a big push on mobile, that’s just driving the cost of the hardware down.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Yeah, actually I’m more interested in 3G. And I tell you why. Because when we launched these mobile products at very low-end devices in the developing countries, 3G use maybe only available or 4G. Anything above 3G, I’m very excited about this. Because I do think that our simulations and technologies are designed for very low bandwidth access. So most simulations are only around 40,50 megabytes to download, so that means that any student in a rural area in Africa will get a phone and maybe, you know, 3G or even edge connection can actually download the simulation and get access to them. Whereas video streaming video bandwidth is typically a big prohibitive space for more video-based training. So our system and platform is actually designed for these more low-end bandwidth devices, which is very important, not just in developing countries, even in the US, there are still many parts where bandwidth is a challenge and an obstacle in low-end devices. It’s still also a challenge with low-end Chromebooks, for instance. So we’ve worked very hard to build high quality experiences at low end, low cost devices.

Hans Tung  

It was very important to go into mass-market mature. In the intro, I mentioned that you started your first entrepreneurial venture back when you were 14. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And how did you decide over time that this is a problem you’ll want to solve and spend time doing this?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Yeah, it’s an interesting story.  I have a deep passion for education, and that’s why I’m so committed and passionate about Labster. Go back to the early days, I’m a self-taught geek with a big capital G and would always play around new technologies tested out in the early days. And at some point I was working in a gaming centers if you remember those internet cafes and gaming centers, and loved playing or Counter Strike Starcraft two. In fact, my co-founder and I connected over Starcraft two, we were both very huge Starcraft fans, so splitting that and I have a job and I had to turn off the computers, when students or players were done, so you can imagine having a counter strike player playing in the middle of a game and then I come down and turn off their computer, they would not have in fact, they got very angry. So, I had to come up with a way of turning them off remotely. So I taught myself how to code and turn off remote computer sections, press a button and then next to the player to get into and that turned into a huge business, very successful business, which was the most popular gaming industry on game cafe, internet cafe management software Pavilion. And that all came from that simple little idea. Through that I really learned that I could use technology and my passion for technology to help people and to come up with solution to real world challenges when you were 14. And then I sold the company at 22. I believe it was an interesting journey. Through that journey, I always realized that to really have success with technology, I needed to understand business better, I needed to get a better understanding of how to sell this, how to build a viable business model. So that’s why my education and studies that are actually from Copenhagen business school and Kellogg in the US dollar as well and really wanted to build an understanding of how can you build a highly scalable businesses use technology, which has always been a big passion. As I was studying, I was running two companies at the same time. And I realized, Okay, anyway, the only way I can get through this is to learn really effectively because I didn’t have time to study. So I started reading and studying everything I could about how does the brain learn, what are the things that make us click and make these aha moment come together? Through those years, I really developed this deep passion for learning how to learn and understanding how do you design a immersive or how did this sign an experience where students truly learn ,and really intentionally designing them in the right way. So  that was developed as a big passion. And at the same time, I was teaching as well, both Mads and myself were frustrated back in the days as we were teaching, it was really hard to engage the students and make them excited about a topic that we thought were super exciting, like science, bringing in the learning sciences and understanding how you design really good experiences and merging that with engaging storylines and engaging missions, project-based learning , it’s where you really start to see huge 2x learning outcome benefits from the same amount of time spent. And since then, we’ve done many other innovations and improvements upon that basic core idea. So that was how my passion developed. I think through the years launching multiple companies, I also learned that for me, my passion in life is to make a big impact in this world.  I’m genuinely concerned about this planet, and how we’re progressing in terms of global warming, diseases like COVID-19, like our ability to cope with these increasingly bigger and bigger global challenges. I want to make an impact. I want to help, but how can I solve global warming? There’s no way I can, I mean, I’m not smart enough to do that. But there’s all these incredible scientists all over the world, why don’t we find ways to truly empower engage them, give them the tools, the resources, the knowledge, and not only the knowledge but also the passion and their self-belief in their ability to truly impact and solve these global challenges. So this day, I have a big vision board of my big dream in life. And our big mission in the company is to see in 10 to 15 years when the Nobel Prize winner goes up on stage and solve global warming or any cure to cancer or other major diseases and says, It all started when I got Labster in my hands and they inspires me to learn. It gave me the confidence and belief that I could really go out and solve these big major challenges. So that’s our dream. and mission. And then we’re empowering our millions of students, and I hope just one of those guys, and I’m sure several of them will really go out and make a truly big impact. So that’s how I believe with Labster, we can really help change the world so we’re working incredibly hard at every single day.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, today of the content, that goes into Labster simulation, for students to use come from in house, it’s incredibly amazing in-house team. But I think over time, you also talked about having contributors content to come from anywhere else. To realize your vision of making this portable, accessible to everyone not just be a consumer of content, but also a contributor as well. Can you share more about that thinking, the background behind that thinking? And how do you see that happen?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Great question. Thanks for bringing it because many people actually don’t realize when you look at labs, we do look like a pure content, business or company, but truly we are a platform company. We build everything in house, and what we’re doing at the same time is to understanding how we can build highly immersive, high-quality learning simulations at scale, because that’s really the challenge here, we need to essentially rewrite every single boring textbook in the entire world into these more immersive, modern, engaging formats. And there’s no way that we as a company can ever do that. We can’t rewrite every single textbook there.

So what we’re doing at the same time is we’re building and hopefully showing the path and the way with Labster what can be done. We are also building what we call the Labster Builder which is a tool empowering educators not just in science in any field history or math or any field where you want to use virtual training, empowering them using very simple drag and drug tools, no coding required to use these modules that we create. And we have now more than 2000 assets and modules across all our different simulations that make it very quick and easy to build simulations in  hours if you have a simple simulation, or maybe several days for more complex simulations. So, our long-term mission and vision here as a company is really to empower educators, institutions, companies to build these highly immersive, engaging simulation across any vertical with this platform. And we already have partners creating content using our technology. We work closely with teachers also to design the simulations in the best possible way. So, we’re really excited about soon opening this up to everyone in the world.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, as you know, we invest globally, a lot of people ask us how we invest globally, most people assume that we just do information arbitrage see something happening in one region and apply to the next region. But what a lot of people don’t know from having a view global leads, you see elements of amazing platforms that become gigantic outcomes. Whether is Alibaba, Square or Peloton, what have you. And the commonality is that there’s always some combination of content, commerce and community, the three do intersect there even in Labster, we see that you have great content today and enabled by great tools. Over time, they will be a community of collaborators and consumers kind of emerging over time as you have a lot of contributors is inevitable. At some point, you have some kind of marketplace, and subscription for your end-user to use. It’s just very interesting how we can definitely see how you can have massive success. Hopefully you’ve had bigger market cap than Unity to some point. David would be very proud if you could do that.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

They build this very incredible stores that goes a big part of their success and Unity,  enabling game developers to collaborate together and actually creating a whole economy within Unity, which I think is very inspiring. And then something that we’re seeing a lot about how we can empower educators to help build modules that other educators can use, it truly is this drag and drop. And I can give you a simple example where we have expert game designers, really good at understanding how you create good engaging games and bridging that with learn design. So, there’s a lot of thought going into designing a module could be as simple as solving a certain type of mission or task. And we want to make that module available and generalize it so that any educator can easily drag and drop to make that reuse in other types of education context. Now, we want to empower other educators to create these types of modules, not just scientists, but also learning scientists who do cutting edge great research, which in many cases, are published as research, but take many years to really make it into feasible products. So we work closely with learning scientists to try and understand how can we help them build and design their research into these components or modules within the platform, so that we can empower more and more teachers to almost instantly take cutting edge research and bring it to market.

Hans Tung  

Another element that we saw was very interesting was the democratization of information and information technology. You mentioned time and time, again, that adoption come from bottom-up that people using it, and then lobby their colleagues and schools and districts to adopt, the biggest platform always start with serving the needs of the of the end-user. And then when more of them start speaking up. That’s how the system starts to evolve accordingly, the days of selling to the heads of it, or heads of the school heads of enterprises, it can still happen, but that’s no longer the case when we want to build a massive global platform.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It reminds me how customer focus we’ve been in all these years, in fact, many of our early simulations were built in close partnership with the teachers, not only to build that bottom-up to understanding interest of the web to truly understand what are their needs, and then how can we build the best possible products for the teachers. So yeah, so incredibly important to start, and understand that and through those efforts, we also we build, or we have this incredible community now Labster ambassadors, we call them who believe in our mission and ambition as well as a company, and several educators through that even joining us as well in our company and helping us actively. So building these communities, working closely with those community which does take time to do it well, and resources in trouble. But it really pays off, it’s the right thing to do. And we’ve done it throughout the entire day and still do that, and in fact, are hosting now, very soon as so inspired science online, inspired conference, which is again, our effort to really bring together leading experts, not just from that store, from any EdTech company online, that can help teachers out there and really bring the community together. How can we help teachers in these important challenging times during COVID-19? And so that’s where we want to give back as well.

Hans Tung  

Yeah, that’s definitely a third element having that community of superfans or ambassadors, but that’s grounded in making some kind of societal impact that people can relate to, and rally around. When that happens, you have an unfair advantage in user acquisition, and over time contributor acquisition as well. So very exciting times ahead. The last question is what kind of advice would you give to somebody who’s a first-time founder, a lot of young founders want to make impact immediately. If you look at your career, you can probably see traces everything they’ve done in the past, that help you to succeed  Labster today. So what kind of advice would you give first-time founder to be ready, and be patient, so over time, they can be successful, not just from first venture ever? Anybody want to be the Mark Zuckerberg have Facebook on the first go. But that’s hyped up way out of proportion.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

It’s very few people. In fact, only one hope becomes Mark Zuckerberg. But it’s a great question. And it’s something I’ve reflected a lot throughout my life, I think I had this interesting idea early in my career that everyone should be an entrepreneur, everyone should just go ahead and do it. But I also learned through that and observing miniatures that it’s actually not everyone who should be an entrepreneur for various reasons. Number one, it is really hard, it is very tough, you’ve got to be up for it. You have to be passionate about the journey in certain ways. And often, when I failed, it was in my previous ventures, it was either because I wasn’t passionate, or my co-founders in some way weren’t passionate enough, and therefore kind of died away after a year or so that you meet up a barrier of some sort. If you truly find that passion and thing you truly believe in that it’s going to either help the world or your friends or something that you really want to make an impact on. They don’t do it for the test. If that, there’s going to be a tough, boring, painful journey, and you can get consulting or financing step that’s easier. So be passionate about it, because for 99% of startups, the journey is really tough. And it’s a series of nonstop battles and challenges, you just have to constantly get over them, like not luckily, though, if you’re a passionate and then that’s what I have experienced, you see all of these challenges and failures as learning opportunities. And in fact, I don’t know if I’m addicted to it, but I’m sort of like, I look forward to the next challenge. Because I know, number one, we’re going to learn a lot. And number two, we’re going to move forward, we’re going to get through that challenge. It is that mindset and that energy of being able to overcome a hurdle and challenge after challenge failure after failure and learning quickly and adapting. That’s going to take you through it. And you really need the passion to be able to do that. So turning failures into two opportunities to learn and having a deep passion. And I would say is that the main things I would recommend any entrepreneurs.

Hans Tung  

That’s consistent with what we have seen as traits in great founders as well. Now we go to quickfire questions. First one is if you could spend a day in someone else’s shoes that are alive, whose shoes would that be and why?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

I just think Elon Musk is absolutely amazing. I don’t know how he does it,  But I would like to try and see one day in his life. How does he pull it off? What was the secret? I read his biography but I didn’t fully figure it out still yet, that’s just really impressive and inspiring, I’d say. So, I’d love to see how one of these days is from start to finish.

Hans Tung  

Second question, what is an investment, financial or otherwise you may know the past year or two that yielded the biggest return for you?

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Huh, it’s interesting. So many. I would say it’s an interesting one because I actually think what we talked about earlier, the decision to make labs freely available, which is actually an investment that didn’t cost us totally. I It was loss of revenue. And it was a risk. But it was the best investment we made in sort of taking off the cost of our customers and partners, putting on our end to help them through these challenging times. That was the best decision.

Hans Tung  

It’s actually a key example of your team and you and Mads way of thinking, that impressed us to make that investment. Not many companies have that kind of boldness, yet is so on mission or value. So it makes a lot of sense. Third question is, what’s something that you have read or seen recently, that you will recommend, it could be a book, a show,  a movie, or any content that you consume.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

I actually found the Atomic Habits book very interesting. I’m a productivity geek as well. And I love to just absolute Max performance in everything I do. My partner’s is an elite sports athlete as well, so we really strive for the absolute top performing, I always had a dream of waking up 5am every morning have like a miracle morning, basically every single day. And I always struggle to keep the habits, I always struggle to maintain a good rhythm, I could do it for a couple of weeks or a month if I was lucky. But then you get back into the old habits and so forth. But the book Atomic Habits, and the idea that building strong habits is not about a physical action that you need to build a habit around. It’s an identity that you need to build around,  building an identity of being a morning person or being a person who’s a high performer or being a person who want to change. Those are the types of habits that reinforces that identity, self-identity is what really matters. So I found that book very practical.

Hans Tung  

It was a couple of others. Interesting, one of the Stanford also want to figure out how do you learn, how do you think, how do you talk, and how you make good decisions? What’s the process it takes, and I always felt that if someone could master that over time, because everybody is similarly smart, it’s hard to be more than 2 x intelligence someone else. But if you learn how to think and function more efficiently, more systematically, the result will be quite dramatic.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

1% improvement every single day, compositive massive. So that’s my mission every day I wake up like just 1% better today.

Hans Tung  

That’s right. Well, thank you so much for this joining us for this. It’s fantastic.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Yeah, it was awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day.

Hans Tung  

Thank you for listening to this episode of evolving for the next billion. If you have any feedback for the show or want to suggest a guest feel free to email us at nextbn@ggvc.com !