Q&A Interview With Vanessa Didyk, CEO at ZeeMee

Hello, everyone. My name is Nana Kyei, and I welcome you to the next edition of the Houlihan Lokey CEO interview series. There are a few things in education today where there are consensus. One is, higher ed is mission critical and an important part of our economy today, really serving as an important avenue for how skills and knowledge is impacted onto the next generation of kids. Exactly how that evolves in this new AI centric environment is TBD, but that's not what we hear today. Fact number two, higher ed enrollment is not increasing. The rate of decline may be in question, but the fact that it's declining is not in question. That decline has elevated enrollment from mission critical to existentially critical for universities who are ill equipped to do that themselves. In that backdrop is where ZeeMee was formed. ZeeMee is a one of its kind AI powered intelligence platform designed for a moment just like this. While the platform is impressive and I feel deeply aligned with the mission of helping universities do more like ZeeMee has been doing, the whiz kids behind this platform are even more impressive. Today, have the honor of interviewing Vanessa Didyk, one of the whiz kids behind this platform, who is the CEO. Since joining the platform over a decade ago, she has helped evolve this business into the powerhouse it is today. Vanessa spent her career at intersection of education, data, and scalable platform, and couldn't have been better equipped for what this business needed. With that, Vanessa, you are welcome. Thanks for having me, Nana. Happy to be here. Great. So before we get into the business itself, I think it's helpful to reiterate that ZeeMee operates at the intersection of students, institutions, and technology, leading the charge of bringing enrollment to the twenty first century. The leadership matters. So before we jump into the business, I think it will be helpful to talk about your journey to the ZeeMee hot seat, if you will, and how you got here and how you've seen the business evolve. Yeah. Thanks. I've spent my whole career in education, tech, in Silicon Valley. I grew up here, went to Berkeley, and actually started my first company in my last year at Berkeley. And so that was in education as well. It was a tutoring platform. We did college advising, essay editing. I had that company for about eight years. And over the course of having that company, we transitioned from being an in person tutoring company that was a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area into a remote platform and into a virtual support and enrichment platform. And so I really got those kind of early principles of how to connect with students, connect students to colleges, and how to build kind of a scalable business using technology early in my career. And that company was then acquired by Rev.com in San Francisco. And I was brought in to build a subsidiary business, which was this amazing tutoring platform. This was, like, the time, like, twenty thirteen, the age of, you know, Uber for everything. Connecting students to tutors. Again, Uber for tutoring. Like, within, like, seconds, you could connect twenty four hours a day to a tutor. And it was an amazing opportunity to work under some really incredible product mentors, and that's where I developed really my deep product discipline, I would say, that's very Silicon Valley roots and built and scaled that business. So that was, well, the first company was a national brand. The next one was a global brand. And we serve students all over the world. And so it was a really good experience for me to kind of grow and hone my skills leading that company. And then I was picked up by the board at ZeeMee in twenty eighteen, and the company was struggling, kind of saw some opportunities to pivot and change direction. And I met with some of the board members and saw a huge opportunity. Met the leadership at the company. So Adam, you know, Adam and Minnie, and got an opportunity to come in. I saw what we could do with data, what we could do if we leaned into community. This is my background, kind of knows this space really, really well. It just felt like a really great spot for me to make a difference. And we turned the company around quickly, raised a little bit of money, and haven't looked back. That's great. And for the avoidance of doubt, Adam and Minnie are the other whiz kids behind this point. We all flattered. I think in most... in the tech world, shift happened quickly. I think this is particularly the case when you're dealing with younger adults. So maybe let's talk a little bit about that pivot, what you saw, and how you reacted to that versus also how the market itself evolved during that pivot and how that has changed what ZeeMee is today. Yeah. ZeeMee's been through a lot. We are definitely a battle tested team, I would say. Coming in at twenty eighteen, just a couple years right before COVID, there was a lot going on, a lot of shifts in the market. And ZeeMee's original vision was wonderful. Adam Metcalf, our founder, has... had a beautiful vision when he founded the company, and it was to really help students be seen by colleges. And that's still our roots today. That is still who we are today. What we learned in the journey was that not only did the colleges want to get to know students through the process, but students wanted to get to know students through the process. And there seemed to be a real opportunity there when... where students were sort of hacking our product in a way to try to connect with each other. And, you know, product one oh one, if you see people carving a path in the forest, pave the path. So we did. And we laid down the pavement to really help those students connect and built those pipes so that they could connect and built the community product that we have today. And we build student first. So we really listened to what the students needed and kind of pulled back actually in the early days on the college relationships and focused more on building a product that students wanted to engage deeply with. And I think we've been very successful. We're top ten in the App Store for all social networking. So I think we figured it out. But that was really our roots and figuring out what students wanted, building a product that they wanted to use, that they want to use frequently and intensely, and then inviting the colleges to come on board and get to know the students in the process. And I think pivoting not just the product itself, but sort of our orientation as a company was one of the pieces that led to our success. Maybe taking that a little further, that student first approach, how has that helped? As you know, it's really hard to maintain engagement. These young adults are moving a thousand miles per hour, in this... particularly in this era of hyper socialization, how have you evolved the business and the platform to continue engaging the students from the beginning all the way through the process? Yeah. We've built a first class product and development team. I think that's where it starts is really listening to the audience. And so we interview students constantly. We listen to what they want. We are always measuring their engagement and metrics and what they're leaning into more because where they're voting kind of with their feet and even just in terms of our features and our feature set, what they need from us. I think in ed tech, a lot of the time, you get these sort of Frankenstein monsters of tech because people just listen to the buyer and maybe just listen to the colleges or the district or whomever is sort of the... where the dollars come from. And so then what happens is you kind of build this, like, you know, an arm goes in here and a leg goes in there, and you build this really weird monster of product. And then students, who are the most critical audience of all and the most tech savvy audience of all, engage with these platforms and throw them away. They have enough distraction, enough to engage with in their lives. So I think listening to really what they needed from us, building a space that is safe, building a place that has all the features that they want to engage with, they come ready to deeply engage, I guess, and to try to take advantage of all of the different features that are available to them. Makes sense. You know, it's almost... I heard someone say this. Build it and they will return. And trust in that if you build a great product with a good value proposition, they may look around, but they would return. Ultimately, that's what you want to build, and it seems like you have done that. So, V, you alluded to the payer, where the dollars is coming from a little bit there. Help us understand the mood there. How do you actually engage with the universities? I know we spent the first few minutes talking about your engagement with the students. Yeah. We have more than three thousand active communities in the platform. So students can come in. They can join all the schools that they're interested in looking at, potentially going to, applying to. They join when they are juniors, seniors, sometimes sophomores in high school as they're going through that process of exploring which schools to look at. And we have over three hundred paying colleges that come on board to engage and sort of curate that community experience a little bit more. So while all colleges basically have a community and it's probably working for them and working well for them, the ones that come on board and partner with us get access to a whole bunch of additional features, and they can really shape that community experience to help kind of pull students through that recruitment funnel. And so when colleges engage and students are engaged in the platform, those students are more likely to convert through the recruitment funnel. And it's tangible ROI. We can actually point to students that, but for their engagement in ZeeMee, would not have landed on campus at the end. That is great. And how do you monetize on the investor side of things? Yeah. They pay us. It's an annual subscription. Most of our schools are on multi-year contracts. So they pay us for two, three, four years at a time, and they get sort of, at different tiers, they get different access to all of our feature set and all of the amazing things that are in ZeeMee. It's great. You know, one of the things that's impressive with what you've built is how quickly you've scaled it, particularly in the higher ed space, which is known for long sales cycle and just complexity and the fiefdoms that exist. How have you done that, and how have you evolved your sales effort towards that? Yeah. I think we're... over time, we have really seen the value that we add and the tangible value. So our retention is incredible with partners. Our brand is very strong in the market. So there's not anybody in enrollment who doesn't know ZeeMee. And I think that that helps because it's a very tight knit community, the higher ed community. And having this sort of elite brand that people trust, we're known for building really good product, we're known for delivering results, I think has helped us to kind of rise in the ranks. Enrollment's a really weird space where there's a lot of massive players in the space, these big consultancies that help to do everything from identify which student, you know, names to buy to how to market to them to predicting outcomes. They kind of do a little bit of everything, and they have massive contracts. But a lot of their techniques and models are very stale and haven't really innovated as the rest of the world is innovating and constantly, you know, tech is kind of changing and evolving the space. I think we've kind of broken through all of that to be a new model, a new way to kind of do things, and a company that people trust to do things a different way, to innovate. So as you build and you commute to think through that motion, where is the priority? Building... adding more students, adding more universities, a little bit of both? Like, how do you do that in the context of, you still need to be cool in the eyes of students? Yeah. Adding both. We are aggressively working to always add both. The colleges, we still get a lot of inbound. We continue to innovate and to build incredible new product. RISE, our newest product, is a good example of that, to solve real problems. I think, you know, again, that product discipline that I developed under those great mentors, we only build product that solves real problems. I think a lot of people come along, build a product, and then try to convince people they have a problem. And instead, we go out and talk to the market and figure out what do students need, what are the problems facing colleges today, and then we go figure out... How can we help? How can we plug in? And we sit on the biggest data lake, I think, in all of higher ed. And I think that puts us in a position to be able to help both parties. But I think that is... if you keep that as your core and your north star, you will always continue to innovate, evolve, and carve away budget from entrenched players that just aren't really able to change and move as fast as we are. You have built, and you continue to scale quite a great platform here. But I'll be remiss if I don't ask this question, right? What does the next two, three, four years look like? You already touched on, perhaps, the next iteration is getting closer and deeper into campuses, but help us understand what the vision looks like. Yeah. We're adding agents and automation. We're continuing to lean into AI. RISE is an AI product, so we're going to continue to do that and expand and just help. One of the benefits of knowing who the people in your audience are, you can really figure out who needs a high touch outreach and who needs a scaled outreach and start to segment your audiences. So we want to serve students longer in that way and sort of better in that way and the offices better in that way. And then we're going to continue to build and support students on campus and communities, enrich these records, and just kind of grow up with our student base. So for us, continuing to support them, serve them, and then share some of this data that can help colleges to support them better is just a natural extension of what we do. And then building that intelligence layer, our AI and machine learning intelligence layer on top, continuing to feed that back to campuses just makes sense. We've got... the advancement offices are also asking for our records, asking for our data. So we're just trying to get there as fast as we can. Yeah. That's great. And there's so many things going through my mind here in that question. But maybe sticking on one thing you said at the beginning. You mentioned RISE a couple of times. Help us understand. What is RISE, what is that product evolution, and how has that been very disruptive in the market? We collect a lot of data. So you can imagine that we sit on so much data, not just the behavioral data of how students are behaving in the app. Which communities are they looking at? How much time are they spending in each community? Where are they making friends? Where are they engaging? Where are they asking questions? Which live events did they choose to attend? For which schools? So that's all of this behavioral data that we generate and that we're able to collect and feed back to colleges. But we also know the students really well, and we have evolved into what you can think of as almost a system of record of kind of who these people are. So when a student joins ZeeMee, they fill out profiles. They put in a bio. They answer all of these fun facts about themselves. So we know everything from what do you wanna be when you grow up to when was the last time you cried to what's your coffee order to are you an introvert or an extrovert, what's your Myers-Briggs. They answer all of these questions that can help schools to really know who that person is. And when you really know who a person is, where they're going, what they think about, what they talk about in chat, what makes them tick, you can then personalize the experience for that individual much better than you otherwise could. But then, if you have this system of record of who a person is, you can also make recommendations. You can say, here's what Nana needs today. This is the message Nana needs to hear from you. Or Nana took this action yesterday, and combining that with everything else we know about him, we think he needs to receive this message tomorrow. So we're able to make recommendations with RISE for counselors to help them make sure they're recruiting each individual student, but in a scaled fashion with personalization that you just can't get really anywhere else. And the last piece that... when you have this massive system of record of who all of these students are, your marketing teams can better understand their audience. And they can understand which students are most concerned with campus safety, which ones is mental health the top concern, and they need to hear messages about that. So there's... you're able to kind of segment your audiences and create campaigns that hit students again with the right message at the right time. And that's what RISE does. It supports those admissions offices, adds like three to five years of experience to these super junior counselors who are trying to figure out how to... where to focus their attention every day. And so we're pointing them in the right direction and relieving a lot of pressure on those admissions teams. That is great. Thank you for helping our students and our kids be seen and making sure they're finding their homes in really important part of their life when they leave home for the first time. It's been a pleasure catching up with you. Now the secret is out about this great platform you've built. I am sure your phone will start ringing off the hook. If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We'll be happy to help you if you have questions on ZeeMee. Thank you for the time, Vanessa. Thank you, Nana. Have a good one.