Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chase Williams: A lot of the time it's just about centralizing and surfacing information
intelligently and doing it in modern ways that consumers, end users expect and can have a really
significant impact.
[00:00:16] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the EdTech Connect podcast where we
strive to bring you the innovators in higher ed tech. And today I have a guest I've been looking
forward to having for a long time. Chase Williams is the CEO and co Founder of Pathify, a
modern digital engagement platform that centralizes communication tasks and resources to
improve student engagement and success.
Launched in 2011, Pathfi serves nearly 250 higher ed institutions in five countries and earlier this
year the company received a powerhouse $25 million growth investment from Five Elms Capital.
Amidst growing tech and budget crises in higher ed, pathify is increasingly helping institutions
consolidate and amplify essential technologies, services, resources and people into one modern
interface, allowing institutions to simplify and optimize their tech stack. Addressing the
challenges of duplicated work, costly integrations or development work, and the complexity of
managing multiple engagement platforms, pathfind Engagement Hub ensures a cohesive
experience across web and mobile, reducing overhead costs, enhancing the student digital
experience.
Driven by dramatic outcomes, Pathfinder ranked repeatedly in the top 1000 of Inc 5000's fastest
growing US companies list, validation of both its market impact and operational growth.
Chase was recently featured in Forbes where he laid out the case for smarter tech consolidation
in higher education.
So welcome to the show. Chase. Great to have you here.
[00:01:58] Chase Williams: Nice to meet you Jeff. Very happy to be here.
[00:02:00] Jeff Dillon: Well, let's start off by talking about what led you to recognize the need for
a unified student portal into found Pathfinder.
[00:02:10] Chase Williams: We're starting to go back a little ways now. I say this all the time, but you
can probably tell I'm not originally from the U.S. i'm from Melbourne, Australia.
I went to, actually went to the University of Oregon for a couple of years. My dad is from out of
the west coast. But it wasn't until I was nearing the end of my degree at Monash University in
Melbourne. Big school, many campuses, talking around 100,000 students, multi billion dollar
turnover institution, and actually sat down with a few of my close friends at university, including
my really good friend and co founder James McCubbin. And I think that as we started to look at
the issues we were having with our student experience at Monash, it just, it became very
obvious that the digital experience with the portal that we were provided, the mobile app we
were provided, was just very distinctly different from what we the experience we were getting in
our everyday lives with Say an Instagram certainly, but also just like a YouTube or Spotify. Those
were tools that helped you connect with people or really like connect with a certain kind of
information or content via music or video, say.
And it was really easy to find a video or things were really personalized to you and you
algorithmically surface things that you might be interested. Like if you go, you open the YouTube
app right now, you can kind of within a few seconds you'll find something you want to watch
because it knows you so well at this point. And so we contrasted that to logging into a portal at
university where you were a student and maybe a bit more information about you, and then
presented a bunch of links to other places. And that was the tool for navigating the student
experience digitally, so to speak. So that's kind of that noticing that gap and that contrast is
where it.
[00:04:07] Jeff Dillon: All came from back when you did that. I'm trying to think what the space
looked like. You know, there were portals out there. But the definition of a portal, like you were
kind of one of the newer companies. What, what was different about what you were doing today
and what was the landscape like?
[00:04:21] Chase Williams: I think a portal is a good descriptor for what a traditional link farm portal is.
You log in, you are single, signed on into other solutions in the background that you may need to
access. But as soon as you click on one of those blue links, you are ported out to another place.
So we, we just store all of these other everyday apps, turning that experience upside down
where you log in and everything is brought to you. Not here's a web page, go find it. And so we,
we looked at how can we introduce modern application functionality like search, like
personalization based on knowing who you are through your user ID and your roles that you
might have. And not just one role like student, but I'm a student that's an incoming freshman that
lives at this campus and I'm in this residence hall and I play this sport and I'm interested in Harry
Potter and what have you and being able to surface information on that basis.
And then when it started to get really tricky was we began to learn how to big and complex and
siloed and fragmented irate institutions are. And to try to connect and surface information across
an institution like that was going to be a massive feat. And it actually wasn't until like 2018 when
I met our CTO to met him in 2016 and randomly I met him outside of Tampa, Florida and he's
from. He worked at Monash. I'd never Met him when we were at Monash either. So random
Albertanian out in the middle of kind of nowhere in Florida, met him there and he convinced me
over quite a few conversations that behind the single pane of glass front end that we have,
you're going to need a middleware integration engine or layer to go into all of these other
systems and transform that information from really outdated data formats into something that a
newer front end can receive and service.
So integration was a massive piece as well and is core to our vision because without that we
can't surface information and personalize it to student from across the digital ecosystem.
[00:06:42] Jeff Dillon: So you integrate so many systems. I mean that's what a portal really
needs to do.
What's your strategy for avoiding digital overload?
[00:06:51] Chase Williams: We think that the vision that we have in terms of being able to log into a
single dashboard and present what's important from across your ecosystem really helps with
digital overload in that there's less of a situation where you log into the portal and it's like where
am I meant to go to go find this thing? And you start running down rabbit holes or going on like
treasure hunts as we describe, without kind of knowing where you're going. So we think that
helps reduce digital noise for the end user and particularly the student where they can come in
and your service, the things you need today and a nudge towards what you're looking for.
Candidly like thinking about it a little bit separately or differently if you're talking about digital
overload because so much is brought into the hub.
I mean it's one of the biggest problems that we will need to tackle as we continue working with
institutions, is helping provide best practices from other institutions that are seeing really strong
usage rates and really strong return rates to the platform and helping them understand how to
like scaffold, like what's too much noise, what's, you know, if you hand over permissions to the
announcements module in our platform to too many people across campus, you're just going to
get people hammering students and they're going to turn off the notifications and leave the app.
So that, that's a big part of like that white glove, high level customer experience around a
platform like this is really important. We.
[00:08:22] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, and you talked about Link Farm early on. That's how I. That's the
old portal, right? Just a bunch of single sign on links, if that, you know, and now we evolved to
this, you know, almost portal is almost the outdated term now. Student engagement hub or
whatever you call it. That's how I See, what you've evolved to is where do affiliated people log in
to get their stuff. So it's a real test and personalization. Right. So can you walk us through a
standout case where colleges have transformed student engagement with pathfi?
[00:08:51] Chase Williams: Yeah, we sort of look at it in two ways. I think Pacific is a really good
example because you can see it on both sides where they took 29 systems and brought it down
to five. And we were one of the core systems as part of that five to bring down all of these
solutions and centralize not just a lot of information, but a lot of different workflows for
administrators and students.
And Portals didn't necessarily, in a vanity metric way have a usage issue or engagement issue, if
that makes sense. You kind of got to go there to get to everything else, but it's just more around
the return metrics. And what are some of the things that we can look at at Pacific? They from the
year before using Pathfinder to the year after instituting it and they created a specific role around
students who had not yet taken off a financial hole before starting the fall semester, I think it
was.
And they sent out that they created that role. And based on the students that had that role, they
added a task or a nudge which was like you need to pay or take off this financial hold and pay
this bill before X date. And the holds came down by 85% compared to the year before. And it's
just, it really is like, it's a useful example in this kind of environment to use because it just speaks
to a lot of the time. It's just about centralizing and surfacing information intelligently and doing it
in modern ways that consumers end users expect and can have a really significant impact. So I
think that's a good. Like the portals haven't had an engagement issue, but like an impact issue
is. Is what they've had and that's an impact example.
[00:10:38] Jeff Dillon: What's been the most surprising piece of feedback from students using
pathify?
[00:10:44] Chase Williams: This is more just like coming to the top of my head while we're on here,
but there's really two sides of our platform. The everyday, popular, everyday applications better
connect us with information and content. They also better connect us with people and people in
different circles. And we have those two sides to our platform. The, the community module of our
platform, the part where you connect with people and support and services and advisors that are
relevant to your experience happens in our platform.
And given how commoditized people to people connection has become like you still have A lot of
students still log into groupmeet before they come in and join an institution or they're obviously
connecting. They can connect through WhatsApp and other places. And I have been surprised
at the success we've had in institution run communities where they can take roles and
automatically have students join. And then we'll hear these anecdotes from someone that might
be a student on the student representative council or a student worker that's helping implement
the platform. And they're like, we didn't have anyone really turning up to this volleyball game
before we started hosting this event and had this at a volleyball group in the platform. And all of
a sudden we have like many more people turning up to it to like a particular sports game or
different events and things like that. I'm always given how commoditized like community tools
have become.
That one continues to surprise me. When we hear, when we hear those anecdotes, it's like, oh,
okay. People are actually hearing about that and going and taking action based on this.
[00:12:25] Jeff Dillon: I'm interested in how you connect with these legacy systems like Sass
and LMSS. I remember PeopleSoft have their own portal that never really took off. They've been
around for a while. Like a lot of schools are stuck with them. Where do they fall short and what
does a great integration look like with these systems?
[00:12:44] Chase Williams: Yeah, and this is where it starts to get nuanced in terms of the definition of
a portal. Because there are instances of SIS portals that we don't really view as like the
traditional portal. The traditional portal is that link farm. Like, hey, it may have been offered as an
appendage to the sis and it's a separate module that you can purchase.
Or an institution really just like spun up a webpage, put SSO around it and made a bunch of links
and very little personalization, no search. And like that's our portal. The lms, the CRM, the sis,
the financial aid system, the academic planning, these all have their own interfaces and they
kind of have their own portals in terms of how people are. Like traditionally, if you go to the
doctor, they might have a medical portal that you go on and pay your bill on. Right. We kind of
think of ourselves as like the single pane of glass from all your portals and information.
Like we're taking this sis, CRM, lms, financial aid system, degree planning, all your calendars
that might be in different departments that are relevant to you. We're going and getting them and
pulling on them and bringing them to one place. So it can get a little like nuanced around the
edges of what the S.I.S. has a portal. What do you mean? Like, why do we need you guys?
Well, the SIS has a lot of information, but it has a proportion of the information and activity that's
going on across the institution. There are way more systems now and way more activity that's
happening even on the academic and co curricular side that isn't captured in the sas. So there's
that piece of it. But when it comes to actually integrating, this is where the integration layer
comes in, where we have again, sort of two sides of the integration layer out of the box
integrations, we call them recipes that have been built with all the different popular sissy, all of
the different popular LMSs and so on. As you look at different systems in the space.
And each of the sass have different ways of connecting. Like if you look at PeopleSoft from
Oracle, there's not a set of APIs that you can go and connect to there. The institution themselves
needs to have built like a set of API connections around the outside of that web services.
And so we let you plug your web service that you've built on the outside of PeopleSoft to our
solution. Whereas when it comes for like Elysian Ethos or Elysian Cloud, connect that up directly
with the recipe that we have. Same as like a Canvas API. But when it comes to something like
calendars, you might have a calendar in one department running on RSS, you might have
another calendar running on iCal, you might have another calendar. We can go pull a JSON
feed off, we take those, we can transform them into an ICAL and then pass that to our front end
which can receive ICAL only. And that's where it's like the integration layer is much a data format
transformer as anything.
[00:15:47] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, that's, that's the core of what I think sounds like makes it useful.
Looking ahead, what emerging tech like AI or digital wallets, what excites you most about higher
ed and new tech?
[00:16:00] Chase Williams: I feel like there's a lot of AI agents are what's very buzzy at the moment.
And you've got MCP and everything that surrounds that. I'm excited in terms of our position and
our ability to execute on an AI taking or executing on tasks on your behalf, whether it's one or a
series of two or three tasks within our chat interface because we connect to the data at a really
fundamental level and at a pretty sophisticated way. Like there's a lot of talk about agents in, in
and around the Space and it all comes back to the data and the ability. Like how sensical is the
data? Do you have access to it in order to carry out a task where you just even booking an
advisor appointment or enrolling in a course.
There are so many different pieces of data that need to be made sense of and connected to as
part of those kinds of actions that not only I think we're a little ways off that in higher ed, but it's
going to require someone who's like deeply understands the data and how to connect that and
make sense of it for those agents to operate in any reliable way. Because if you think about the
ability for an agent to hallucinate if they're wrong 5% of the time on one operation and then it's
5% you having them do a series of tasks that 5% just compounds and compounds and
compounds and pretty, pretty soon it becomes relatively useless.
[00:17:38] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:39] Chase Williams: So yeah, that is exciting and what that can do for user experiences in the
industry. And I'm just excited about our position to be able to execute on that. We're going to
have to head in that direction.
[00:17:51] Jeff Dillon: You've recently received $25 million investment from Five Ounce Capital,
which is exciting. How will that fuel your roadmap?
[00:18:00] Chase Williams: Very much product in new regions. So we're embarking on opening the
UK and parts of the EU here over the next six to 12 months, which I think is, is exciting for us.
And then it is very much on pushing further into the AI side and the integration side and building
up that team. It's always important when you take on new investment not to forget about the
platform and the things you were doing that got you there and start to focus on the new shiny
strategies and objectives. So we've been pretty diligent or focused on, okay, let's, let's pick three
kind of things we're going to do. But then also continue to invest in growing the existing team
and making sure the account management team and that that customer experience team grows
with us so we can continue to have the same level of customer experience and support. That's
the kind of stuff that can get forgotten about pretty easily when you raise a bunch of cash.
[00:18:58] Jeff Dillon: You're a global company, you're fully remote. How do you nurture pathify's
culture across continents?
[00:19:08] Chase Williams: Yeah, we have gotten quite used to it. I mean I think we, we're trying to
use the best of both worlds. So I think you have kind of come to believe that you are better
operationally from home where it's Less distraction. Here's my to do list. Let me get things done.
And you're much better strategically in terms of planning when you're together. And there's also
the component that you just, you need in person, human connection every so often to build the
culture and really maintain it as well. So we get together like teams of ours get together and we
get together as a company at least every quarter. So we do a big end of year get together but at
the same time teams themselves are getting together and making sure they're doing that both in
local senses. And then we're just. This year we've got our exec level and our operations
management level. We're bringing over like a number of a couple of VPs from Australia as well
for the first time which will be fun. So we use that and we also use events to get together. We'll
often bring people from different teams to our events. So when we go to educors bring devs
along as well who put their hand up and say like I want to get involved, I want to see what it's
like for us on the ground. And we use those as opportunities to continue to build the culture and
have fun. But it's hard. Yeah.
[00:20:35] Jeff Dillon: Any of your listeners, if anyone's at educause, go check out pathfi
because they always, they're not hard to find. Like they always a great, a great place to, to hang
out and come to happy hours.
What early lessons have you learned from building pathify? What, what stuck as it scaled?
[00:20:53] Chase Williams: Oh, it's a lot of lessons from the journey. I mean I think the, the biggest
one is it will be slower than you think it will be unless you are like riding a rocket ship. And a lot
of the time that that's just like timing and luck. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, like maybe they get
into it and they expect it to be quicker.
Those that I've known and seen, I go in the last five, 10, 15 years that sort of growing up
alongside as a company, the ones that have been most successful, it's kind of, it's a marathon
type angle on, on your business.
[00:21:30] Jeff Dillon: Persistence, perseverance is, is the lesson.
[00:21:33] Chase Williams: I guess it is for sure. But it's also like not being distracted by too many
things. One of, one of the biggest. Like again you raise money, you have like your own shiny
different initiatives that you want to take on and remembering what got you there and it's like it's
incremental.
Sometimes you need to make big bets. You get put in a spot whether it's competitive or it might
be something at the macro level you can't control. You need to make bigger bets. That happens,
but just in terms of like slow, steady growth, persistent attends to. It's kind of like compound
interest. Right. Just sort of starts to grow and it can balloon over time. And I think that's, that's
what's happening with us.
[00:22:12] Jeff Dillon: I love your take on you've talked to a lot of higher ed leaders. How do you
advise higher ed to evaluate vendor partnerships beyond the slick demo?
[00:22:23] Chase Williams: Yeah, I mean always back channel and speak to customers.
Anyone in higher ed. It's a big market, but it's also a very small market. At the same time, like all
of the CIOs. Like if you go on LinkedIn, you're going to be connected to at least 100 of them and
probably 20 of our customers. And same with a different vendor.
Go talk to other people.
That's what you've got to do. Same with hiring on our side.
[00:22:48] Jeff Dillon: I always say higher ed likes to be on the leading edge, but not the
bleeding edge. Like they always want to see what their peers are doing and you're so much in a
better spot if you use those references that you have from your happy customers.
So for aspiring edtech founders, what's the biggest lesson from your journey with pathify?
[00:23:09] Chase Williams: I mean, I think you probably said it, it just is. It's persistence. It's a
marathon continued dedication. Kind of a boring answer, but that's.
[00:23:19] Jeff Dillon: The kind of truth, hey, they got to hear it over and over. A lot of my guests
say that you just gotta not get distracted and persevere. So.
Well, Chase, it was great having you on the show. I'm gonna put links to PathFi and Chase's
LinkedIn bio in the show notes, so. So thanks for being here.
[00:23:36] Chase Williams: Awesome. Thanks for having me.
[00:23:38] Jeff Dillon: As we wrap up this episode, remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted
companion on your journey to enhance education through technology.
Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies,
or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights
you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform platform so you never miss an
inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your
feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and
connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions.
Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
