Marketplaces: Building the Future of EdTech
By: Adrianna Soto-Wright
Tags: Marketplaces, Edtech, Future Of Work, Education Reform, Startup

An interview with Dana Stephenson — founder and CEO of Riipen.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dana Stephenson, the founder of Riipen, who is on a mission to eliminate graduate underemployment. Research shows that students are choosing to go to postsecondary institutions for income and employment reasons, yet nearly 50% of college grads are underemployed. Even worse, students who start their career underemployed are more likely to stay underemployed five to ten years later.

This is where Riipen comes in. Dana and his team are focused on creating avenues for students to increase their employability throughout their education pathway. Lets start out by understanding Riipen’s roots and how the company came together:

Riipen was the product of a co-op program. For those of you who are unfamiliar with co-op’s, it is essentially run through career offices at many institutions. These co-op programs are structured as internships that must meet certain hourly requirements where students take a semester off to work and then bring their experiences back into the classroom. This provides students with the academic transcript in addition to multiple work experiences that are relevant to their studies.

Riipen was involved in a co-op program where students would graduate with three work experiences in addition to their degree. While the co-op was helping students, it was not reaching enough graduates. The Riipen team was shocked to find that of the 2 million graduating students in Canada each year, less than 5% had access to a co-op.

Dana’s *aha* moment pivoted Riipen’s strategy to reach the students who had no access to a co-op. Existing barriers of location, education program, background and parent connections were broken down so that all students could have access to high quality and integrative learning. Dana explained that “the co-op program was difficult to scale in the 21st century and was not right for every student or company involved.”

Riipen’s marketplace model acts as the intermediary between postsecondary institutions, students and companies. Dana believes that Riipen has “enabled industry employers to unbundle work placements into projects that are aligned with a corporations business needs, but also match the various career interests and skills that students are seeking.” Riipen solved the unique pain points for both 1) students 2) postsecondary institutions and 3) companies that used the co-op model.

Students no longer had to tackle the serious time commitment that co-ops required — ultimately enabling them to avoid a commitment overload with class and other extracurriculars. By embedding Riipen’s offering into courses, students could gain work experience and achieve academic credit all at the same time. Postsecondary institutions are looking to support their students and ultimately guide them to the right career. With graduate underemployment on the rise, Riipen helps strengthen the career support of postsecondary institutions. This solution also fosters experiential learning for faculty who may have otherwise stuck to traditional forms of classroom teaching. Companies no longer felt constrained by the idea of offering projects since the tough part was already done for them. They no longer had to design the projects or spend time sourcing the right students. Riipen’s solution was to unbundle these work placements and reduce the time companies spent curating projects. With Riipen, companies could filter through faculty curriculums and quickly offer projects that matched the learning criteria that students and faculty were seeking.

Next, I wanted to understand how Dana originally thought about fostering this community of schools, students and companies:

When thinking about building and scaling a marketplace, a key focus is how to crack the chicken and egg problem. I dove deeper with Dana on how he worked through this initial problem:

When Riipen first got started, Dana explained that they faced several challenges from companies posting projects with not enough students to do them and vice versa. They also found that students were busy and adding work experience to a students already packed schedule was not feasible.

Dana realized that the best way to crack the demand imbalance was to focus on the postsecondary institutions. Once he had schools like the University of Toronto on the platform, it was much easier to pitch the brand and value of the students and institutions to various companies.

Riipen’s strategy was to get these institutions on the platform by partnering with faculty members to embed these company projects into the curriculum. The pitch emphasized the reduced friction for students who could combine work experience and class credit, while also driving student engagement in faculty curriculum.

Riipen became an educator driven platform, where the educator designed the parameters for the types of products that fit into their course. This is when the marketplace essentially became a menu list where any company could: join, filter through projects, and offer relevant projects that fit their needs.

For companies in EdTech, a key component is selling into enterprises. How did you go about pitching this to postsecondary institutions as well as companies?

Dana explained that traditionally schools rely on career services as a form of support for their students. When pitching to these institutions he focused on highlighting the scale and the cost efficiency of using Riipen’s platform.

The challenge came when Riipen had to scale from one professor to an entire faculty. While many professors loved the offering, they had to find a way to get the entire faculty on board in order to license the software to entire institutions. Dana approached this both top down and bottom up.

From the bottom up approach, they would pilot Riipen’s service with professors. As professors started using Riipen they noticed student engagement sky rocketed in their class. Not only was class engagement up, but professors realized it was much quicker to partner with companies through the Riipen platform.

What Dana found was that as more faculty began to scale they were able to sell to the top of the funnel — ultimately the institutions that would offer Riipen’s service as a license.

Selling to actual companies on the marketplace involved a different approach. The first overarching theme is that companies have an altruistic goal of supporting the next generation of talent. While this is an important theme, companies are also concerned about the bottom line and ensuring positive returns on their investments. With this in mind, Dana highlighted three other key selling points that ultimately hooked companies to use Riipen:

1. Gaining fresh insights for the next generation of leaders

2. Building employer brands

3. Building and diversifying the talent funnel

Riipen’s mission is to strengthen students employability down the road, but this marketplace created benefits for students and companies beyond work experience and completed projects.

Riipen did a recent survey on on a small batch of companies to see how many of them hired a student post project and 20% of students were hired. This is an incredible statistic that shows how Riipen’s offering extends beyond future employability.

Your team has announced expanding your partnership with RBC’s Future Launch program — could you share more about how you’re focused on these partnerships?

Dana explained that one thing Riipen has been really successful at is their ecosystem approach. They benefit from extremely powerful network effects. All schools and companies who join the same ecosystem foster an open and collaborative environment where everyone can learn from one another. Everyone benefits from the network effects — with this ecosystem they have been able to approach funding organizations like RBC, federal government’s and other workforce agencies.

Riipen served as the agent removing the barrier between companies and students and acted as the starting place for these organizations. Once they joined the ecosystem, the flywheel started to take off. More schools attract more companies…more companies attract more schools… and adoption continues. They have proven that the program is sustainable beyond the funding and RBC remains a great example of this.

What has your expansion strategy been like internationally? Have students been involved in cross border projects?

To date, Riipen has been educator driven by fueling their ecosystem with schools first. As soon as schools post on Riipen they can easily attract companies locally. This has continued internationally where the value proposition is exciting — Riipen is seeding postsecondary institutions with a massive market of employers from North America. This becomes immediately attractive to schools in the UK and Australia who gain access to international companies and work experience for their students — which then turns into a flywheel for both a local and global marketplace.

Where does Dana see the future of education going?

Dana believes we will continue to see a massive unbundling and re-bundling of the higher education space. Unbundling where students have more choice — schools will unbundle different credentials and build up multiple offerings to gain credit from both traditional and non-traditional programs. Students will then have the opportunity to re-bundle what they are looking for that serves their unique needs beyond a four year program.

Dana believes that “as the future of work continues to evolve, students and graduates can continue to re-bundle and add work to their experience as roles change, without necessarily having to sign up for a four year or two year program.”

Riipen has even expanded with other partners to workforce agencies, bootcamps, and last mile training programs because they personally believe that if you are not learning by doing, its a missed opportunity. There will be a time where students have much more control and visibility to what courses will gain them experience.

Students that add work integrated learning will received more demand and better employment outcomes for their education.

Dana’s parting thoughts:

“Perfection is the enemy of progress. You need to bring together as much information as you can and make measurable decisions. Don’t be afraid to take chances, to experiment, but fail fast and learn from that experience.”

I am incredibly humbled by all the work Dana and his team at Riipen are doing to eliminate graduate underemployment. I hope you enjoyed reading more about Riipen and how their marketplace is fostering a growing network of schools, students and companies focused on the next generation of talent!