Meet Joshua Wohle, CEO and co-founder of Mindstone
Joshua Wohle is CEO and co-founder of Mindstone, a category-defining learning platform that enables individuals to save time by optimising their information diet, harnessing the wealth of information online to help them learn faster, remember more, and get stuff done. Mindstone recently closed the largest edtech funding round ever on the crowdfunding platform Seedrs.
Joshua is an experienced serial entrepreneur. He previously co-founded SuperAwesome, a company whose technology is used by hundreds of brands and content providers to ensure children’s safety and privacy on the internet are preserved. SuperAwesome was sold to Epic Games in 2020.
There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?
As is the case with lots of founders, my intention with Mindstone was to build something that I wished had existed for me when I needed it. Paradoxically, while I never really got on very well with education when I was younger - the rigid, traditional techniques and environments didn’t work for me - I have always had a passion for learning, often going away to self-teach myself various new skills outside of school.
I’m a self-taught developer and have had some truly life-altering informal learning experiences - from building my first website, participating in online tutorials at 16, dropping out of university twice, and attending the Open University for an MBA in Business whilst building SuperAwesome. I spent a lot of my formative years completing various MOOCs ranging from the science of learning to the application of artificial intelligence (AI).
Even before my time at SuperAwesome, I found myself sitting down with other startup founders to discuss questions like “What is learning?”, and I wondered how technology could be built to amplify those learning experiences. When I started investing in the edtech space, my interest led me to read How We Learn by Benedict Carey and I began exploring the science of learning. These experiences and conversations were the foundation upon which the Mindstone platform was built, aiming to address both macro and micro problems within online learning.
Tell us about your experience prior to launching your business?
Prior to launching Mindstone, I was a serial entrepreneur, launching my first company as a website developer in Switzerland during my adolescent years. I moved on to found Targetz, a real-time location-based mobile community marketplace for service and CMS facility. I also spent some time working for Richmond International to build their IP database systems across multiple continents before I co-founded SuperAwesome, a kidtech company that gives developers the tools to create a safer digital experience for younger audiences.
We were working with more than 300 top kids brands - including LEGO, NBC Universal, and Hasbro - to power safe digital engagement for more than 500 million kids every month, across thousands of apps, games, and services, and the company was acquired by Epic Games in 2020. I am also a very active angel investor within the edtech and learning sector, working as LP & VP of Emerge Education and investing in a wide range of edtech startups.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
The biggest lesson is the importance of a good team. No man is an island: building a good, trustworthy team takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s repaid several times over in the invaluable level of support and collaboration you get. You can lose your team’s trust in an instant - sometimes all it takes is one bad decision - and losing that trust and confidence affects every area of the business, hurting productivity as well as innovation and this can create serious setbacks.
Another big lesson I have learned is the importance of exercising patience. In startups, everything always appears much bigger than it actually is. You're growing fast and your problems grow with you. Every problem feels like the biggest issue you’ve ever faced - and technically it often is, because you probably haven’t ever had a company as impactful as the one you are currently building. Sleeping and reflecting before you make a decision allows time for reflection and makes the process of identifying the differentiator more easily, enabling you to make more informed decisions in the long run and making the problem appear significantly smaller in the rearview mirror.
What inspired you to launch Mindstone and what is the end goal?
I believe that online learning is broken, with providers hoping to replicate outdated traditional in-person teaching methods in an online environment, binding themselves to static one-size-fits-all curricula that don’t consider the needs of the learner. At Mindstone we are rethinking online learning from the ground up, replacing the traditional structure with something that places the learner at the centre and is actually built for today’s information-overloaded world.
The internet is the greatest knowledge bank in human history, and our platform makes it as easy for anyone to extract information from myriad sources into the Mindstone platform, from which users can engage with and learn from that information in the ways that best suit them.
Mindstone’s vision is to unlock the power of self-directed learning, envisioning a world where anyone can learn anything as fast as humanly possible, and that learning is recognised everywhere (including employers). Our core goal is to put individuals in control of their own learning.
How did you fund the business in the early stages?
In early 2021, Mindstone secured $2.2 million in funding from investors including Moonfire Ventures and The Fund. As our growth journey continued, we ran the largest edtech crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs, in November 2021. The $1.75m million round was led by Mustard Seed Maze with contributions from all of our existing investors at the time and a series of angel investors including former co-founders at SuperAwesome. The campaign also received investment from US VC Scout Fund and Andrew Gault, founding partner of 7percent Ventures and previous early investor in Oculus.
What does your business offer its target audience?
Mindstone is building the StackOverflow + fitbit for learning. We help people learn faster, remember more, and quantify the skills and knowledge you acquire online, allowing them to have a tailored learning experience to make better decisions.
Currently, Mindstone helps you save time by optimising your information diet. The user can easily organise, share, and annotate web pages, podcasts, videos, PDFs, and other online content easily. It draws together the user's highlights and accelerates the learning process by making use of scientifically proven methods of learning such as spaced repetition.
With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
The education industry tried to take in-person learning and shoehorn it into an online format. What we actually need to do is reframe the narrative and rethink what learning means in a world with plenty of access to information and ever increasing pace of automation. The ways in which technology can permanently enhance the learning experience are vast - and we’re yet to really scratch the surface - but like many failed technology revolutions have shown, the answer is not to transpose old methods with new technology, but rather to re-think learning from the ground up, for the world we live in today.
At Mindstone, we place the learner at the centre, revolutionising the sector and giving the learner the autonomy to make decisions, while also employing the science of learning and using the internet as the most powerful learning resource ever created by mankind.
What are your thoughts on automation and how it could impact our economy?
Automation has historically improved and supported the economy through the encouragement of innovation and the development of more efficient methods of operation. Continued automation will continue to augment society at all levels. This means increasing shifts in the type of work people will be paid to do, shifting the workforce towards lifelong learning as re-skilling, upskilling and the ability to learn faster takes centre stage at the workplace.
Fears around structural unemployment through automation have existed throughout time but are yet to materialise. This doesn’t mean that a temporary re-balancing of skills won’t happen (it will); but these fears should be addressed by providing quality learning opportunities for the workforce to adapt, not by halting progress.
What was the journey like when you decided to raise funding for your startup? And what tips would you give to early-stage founders getting ready to take the same path?
In general, I would encourage early-stage founders to be hyper-focused on their immediate next steps and how they can improve their products and services for their customers, even if that sounds far from glamorous.
The biggest tip I would give early-stage founders and entrepreneurs is to focus on preparation and understand that funding is a numbers game. The more conversations you have with potential investors, the better. Start 100 conversations, have 30 more in-depth ones, get five interested parties, two or three term sheets and hopefully, one signed. This preparation allows you to familiarise yourself with the requirements, questions and answers whilst also developing your character as a founder.
I know that many people suggest only speaking with the people you are sure are interested, but in my opinion that neglects the value of doing your pitch 100 times. You just get better at it.
Grit and resilience are great characteristics of an early-stage founder; success stories are only forged from trying one more time, every time.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
“What is my immediate next step?” During my time at SuperAwesome, and then founding Mindstone, I found it most useful to hyper-focus on the immediate next steps for the business - worrying about how to make the various platforms better in the current week or month rather than long-term planning. This is because it encourages and allows for more fluidity in-between steps, resulting in a higher-quality product in the end.
On top of that, with the environment moving so fast around you, much of the time you realise that the problems you thought you might encounter never materialise (others will), which means you would simply have wasted your time thinking about them.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?
In the next decade, the market will have moved away from edtech to talking more holistically about learning. It will be re-focused on a more learner-centric framework, in which the learning journey begins with the individual and institutions adapt to their needs instead of the other way around. By adopting a learner-centric approach and building around social learning experiences, learning will be personalised and tailored to the pace and needs of the individual. This much more scalable approach will provide a solution both to the predicted teacher shortage, while at the same time accelerating people’s progress as well as enabling them to remember more of what they learn.
The education system has been crying out for innovation, and as we slowly see the traditional institutions realise both the value of more granular recording of people’s progress, traditional degrees will lose their value. I expect we’ll see a major paradigm shift in what “learning” means - moving towards a fully-collaborative frontier between the individual, industry, and learning with a granular skill record keeping track of what we are really capable of.
