EdTech Mentor Founders Edition is back with Brendan Aldrich, founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Invoke Learning, an established EdTech helping institutions leverage all of their information to guide their students to success through data democracy, availability and transparency.
In this exclusive interview, Brendan shares his journey in the field of EdTech, from his innovative work at Ivy Tech and the California State University system to his current venture with co-founder Lige Hensley at Invoke Learning. Discover how Brendan's passion for education and problem solving is driving transformative change in higher education.
I’m originally from Southern California, I was born and raised there. While I’m married with no kids, I do have three dogs, all of which are a special breed called Chinooks, which are the state dog of New Hampshire. Currently, I am also wrapping up my tenure as the President for the Chinook Owners Association which is the national breed club associated with the United Kennel Club.
Now, my parents don’t like it when I tell this story, but I really wasn't a great student when I was in school the first time around. In fact, it took me 16 years to finish my bachelor's degree - in Theater Arts. The realization dawned on me over those 16 years, however, that without that bachelor's degree, there was a limit to how far I would advance in my career. This realization prompted me to keep going back to school, taking classes, and making progress towards completing my degree. Now, it's quite ironic to my parents that after taking so long to finish my bachelor's degree, I've developed a career and a company supporting higher education.
The issue wasn't that I didn't enjoy being on campus; I loved it! Rather, I simply lacked the skills and habits necessary for success as a student. Interestingly, as I entered the workforce, I discovered that the same skills I was developing to become a good employee were the ones I was missing as a student. This realization helped me become a much better student as I progressed.
I often describe my journey as kind of like an “American Idol” backstory. Despite not excelling academically in the past, I now find myself incredibly fortunate to be in a position where I've helped build a company focused on technology that assists colleges in identifying and supporting students like me, potentially reducing the time it can take for them to achieve their goals.
I entered higher education about 14 years ago when my wife and I moved back to her hometown of Chicago. At the City Colleges of Chicago, I built their first data platform and analytics tool with a focus on building a data democracy. This approach aimed to make relevant data available to virtually everyone at the institution, empowering advancements in operations and supporting student success.
We developed a platform called OpenBook, which eventually had 5,000 out of 5,800 employees using it. Our work earned us an Innovators award from Campus Technology magazine for the way we were making data accessible and useful in higher education. Soon after, I moved to Ivy Tech in Indianapolis as their first chief data officer, where I met Lige Hensley, my partner in Invoke Learning. Lige and I worked on innovative data architecture and created nearly 40 interactive data collections and, with our teams, trained over 3,000 employees in six months on using data relevant to their roles and goals for the institution and students and winning a couple of international awards.
I then returned to my alma mater as the first chief data officer for the California State University system working out of the Office of the Chancellor in Long Beach, California. It was during this time that Lige and I began discussing the challenges that we would eventually found Invoke Learning to solve. Despite moving back and forth across the country, Indiana has quickly become one of my favorite places to be.
One aspect that stands out to me is the shared sense of purpose among colleagues. In many other industries, finding people driven by a mission is rare. However, in higher education, I found a community where so many are dedicated to really making a meaningful difference. Knowing that our work directly impacts students and institutions is incredibly motivating.
The value of mission-driven work is something we've carried into Invoke Learning. We've embraced concepts like data democracy, evidence-based truth, demonstrable equity, and innovative courage. These values guide our approach to data, ensuring that we prioritize transparency, fairness, and innovative thinking in everything we do.
Honestly, while there have been noteworthy projects, I believe my greatest achievement lies in the relationships I've built. They often say the two most crucial people in your life are your spouse and your business partner, and I've been fortunate to have found excellent people in both. These individuals profoundly influence your life, shaping who you become and how you approach challenges. Similarly, in higher education, the relationships, networks, shared accomplishments, and even shared failures are what I'm most proud of.
Certainly, significant failures leave a lasting impact and should be learning experiences for growth. One such instance that stands out for me was during my time at the Walt Disney Internet Group. I was overseeing the Business Intelligence team, responsible for providing reports and analytics for the entire Disney family of companies. In this case, we were managing a mailing list for a game called Toontown, and I mistakenly sent out physical mailings with incorrect first names. This error resulted in several angry calls from recipients, including a mother questioning why her daughter received mail addressed to "Monkeysh*t" instead of her daughter’s first name.
Despite implementing filters to prevent such occurrences, the system allowed unusual names to slip through and someone had entered that one as their first name. The mistake was mine, as I assumed an ID from a previously extracted list was a standard identifier when it was actually from a new data warehouse in development.
What I remember from that incident was my director at the time, stepping in and saying, "Wait, guys. Is this a mistake? Yes. Is it going to cost money? Yes. Is it Brendan's fault? Sure, he did it. But come on, relax. Anybody could have made this mistake." He really provided cover for me, which I was already beating myself up about. As a result, Disney sent out a creative message to all its subscribers, explaining how the villains from the game had gotten into the mail system, mixed up all the names, and everyone was receiving a bit of free credit as a result. This, of course, cost the company more money, but it was a positive way to handle the situation.
I think that saying, “That was me. That was my fault. That's my mistake”, and owning up to it, was valuable. But then recognizing that there was somebody else who would come in to support you and to help provide that shield, was something that meant a great deal to me.
We all have those moments. I believe it's crucial to maintain self-awareness, recognizing when things haven't gone well and learning from those experiences. While I think everyone could cite numerous examples of mistakes they’ve made, I think the most important thing for anyone to do is to not dismiss those mistakes as insignificant. It's about taking those moments seriously, reflecting on what could have been done differently, and how to grow from them. This approach allows us to not only avoid repeating those mistakes but also to develop and seize future opportunities for growth in our lives and careers.
Whenever you innovate, there's always concerns: Will it work? Will that innovation scale to organizations of all sizes? Who else is using this solution? How have they done with it? What have they been able to build from there? I think the biggest challenge whenever you're bringing something to market that is really brand new, that's innovative, that disrupts the traditional way of doing things, especially in the realm of data warehousing (which is a 40-year-old practice that has not evolved dramatically over time), is getting people to take a risk on it. You work slowly, building success stories one step at a time, starting with individual colleges, and then expanding to more institutions, maybe even entire systems. The greatest challenge in our work has always been convincing people to change their approach to data, which may be different from what they're used to, and then retraining them to take full advantage of the new opportunities.
Lige and I had a process for discussing problems and solutions dating back to our time at Ivy Tech. We used to say that if we weren't working in education and had a good idea for a company to try, the idea only needed to be one of three things: better, faster, or more flexible than what the company was doing at the time. However, in higher education, especially at the community college level where we were, we felt it wasn't just three things; it was five. Any idea that we wanted the college to try had to meet all five criteria: it had to be better, faster, more flexible, cost next to nothing, AND require almost no one to build and support it. We called these our ‘Magic Five’.
So, we would discuss various challenges and problems, and we would come up with different approaches. Some ideas worked in some ways but not in others, so we kept refining them until we could find one that met all of the Magic Five criteria. Everything we built at Ivy Tech, at the CSU, and especially at Invoke Learning has been built using different combinations of dozens of these kinds of Magic Five ideas. Lige is the most brilliant engineer I've worked with in my career and what really sets him apart is not just his talent in developing incredible architectural solutions but also his creativity. While many engineers might see a problem and say, “That can’t be done”, Lige dives in and looks for alternative paths and ways to solve it. He approaches technology from a radically different viewpoint, focusing on how to leverage it to provide exponentially greater value and service to organizations.
That's a great question. In higher education, decisions are often based on a pretty limited set of data, mainly from the Student Information System and sometimes the Learning Management System. However, colleges operate like cities, with all these different operations focused on supporting students, faculty, and staff. Yet, much of this data isn't actually used today in decision-making. Lige and I aimed to leverage vastly more data and then greatly simplify its use, envisioning a future where every educational institution uses the right data to meet the unique needs of all learners everywhere.
This vision led us to confront the challenges inherent in traditional data warehousing, what I often referred to as the “seven deadly sins of data warehousing”. Through our Magic Five conversations, we created solutions for each of these challenges. Seven years ago, we raised funds from our friends and family and founded Invoke Learning to begin building this new kind of data platform. Even then, if you had asked me what to call it, I wouldn't have had an answer. It wasn't a data warehouse; but it did everything a data warehouse could do - and a lot more. This platform aimed to bring additional information to light and make it so much easier for colleges to gain insights, improve enrollment, retention, support student success and engagement, and ultimately increase graduation rates. Our goal was to empower colleges with information in a way that had never before been available, enabling them to positively influence the trajectory of their students.
From a less technical perspective, we aim to not only do the right thing, but to do it in the right way. If you're going to make a difference, you've got to be honest with yourself and others, and approach everything through the lens of qualities like democracy, truth, equity, and courage.
Honestly, Lige and I used to engage with many startup companies at trade shows during our time at our colleges. Some of these companies focused on super small, specific ideas but presented them as world-changing concepts. When we founded Invoke Learning, we wanted to do everything all at once, which presented a challenge in explaining the breadth of our innovations to others.
In those conversations with the smaller startups, some companies would admit they were building to be acquired, which I always thought was a mistake. If your goal involves working just hard enough to sell your creation to a bigger company, I believe it detracts from being fully engaged in the endeavor. For Invoke Learning, our goal has always been to build a sustainable, growth-oriented organization that makes a significant impact in higher education.
When Lige and I first discussed this, we envisioned how many colleges and universities could benefit from our ideas. Our drive was rooted in our decade-long experience at some of the largest city and statewide college and university systems in the U.S. We were motivated by the prospect of helping more colleges and making a substantial impact.
