Eduflow facilitates interactive e-learning experiences with educational technology
The edtech company Eduflow is not only building educational technology that facilitates interactive e-learning experiences. They are also erasing the taboo of paternity leave. In this interview, David Kofoed Wind – Co-founder and CEO of Eduflow – shares how they have managed to do both.
We must erase the taboo of paternity leave
“At Eduflow we are three young male co-founders – me, Malthe and Simon, and we have all become dads while running our company which we started 2015. I have two kids now, one who’s one year old and one who was just born a few days ago. All of us have taken the time to stay at home with our small children - for four to five months each. Unfortunately, we don’t talk enough about it, and it is still not the common expectation and culture in the startup scene.”
“In our company – and in Denmark in general – we are very privileged. We are hard-working, but we do have the privilege to run a company where we can step out without the company shutting down. If we educate and train people to do the right things and if we make some minor adjustments it is possible to have our CTO step out for five months of paternity leave and still survive.”
“Our international co-workers from the US are not used to this. They’re used to 14 days of leave as a male parent. So, seeing the co-founders taking parental leave several months in row can be a bit weird. But hopefully we can show that this is a possibility when working for a Danish company.”
Building software very fast has consequences
“The idea behind Eduflow was born as I was doing my PhD at the Technical University of Denmark. I got the chance to teach my own course which got a lot larger than expected. Around 150 students meant 150 assignments every week and I would have a full-time job of just grading. So, I started building the software tool ‘Peergrade’ that allowed students to review each other’s homework. Because the students got to grade each other’s work the assignments were reviewed really carefully, and they also learnt a lot by seeing how other people solved the same problems.”
“Even though Peergrade has grown a lot and has turned out to be a great success it was still built somewhat by accident. We built it to solve a problem – not to build a business. And building software very fast has consequences. You make some decisions based on short-term perdictions but that might not be so smart long-term. That’s one of the reasons why we built our new product Eduflow.”
With Eduflow we aim to empower instructors with a learning experience platform
“We’re building an online learning experience platform for the educational and corporate sector. It is a product that allows you to run online courses and learning experiences and we focus a lot on trying to make it as interactive and collaborative as offline learning. Right now, there’s a huge problem in how the universities and companies are doing all their teaching and training online due to COVID-19. Often, they take this great pedagogically designed course and put it into a Zoom-call - and all the good pedagogical ideas and social elements just disappears. We want to make it possible for instructors to run more interesting learning experiences online.”
“We’re at the point now where Eduflow is ready for primetime and we’re starting to see growth. But it took us some time to get there. If we had started Eduflow five years ago, we wouldn’t have seen the same results. The technology we built and the capital we have from Peergrade – and of course the experienced team – are what makes it possible for us to succeed today.”
People don’t realise the ease of starting a business in Denmark
“We created the company five years ago on a couch in my living room. It took a few clicks on a website and the next day we officially were registered as a company. I don’t think many people know how easy it is to start a business in Denmark before they try it in another country – holy moly.”
“Besides our Danish company we also have an American parent company that owns our Danish company. That has shown me how different and complex the American system is: No social safety net, no healthcare system to take care of you. Of course, there’s always two sides of it. The Danish model offers an incredible welfare system and a lot of safety in the job market for employees. But as a CEO there are of course some immediate benefits to the American model where it’s easier to hire and fire employees, fewer vacation days and where the law and culture around things like parental leave are much more in favour of the employer. So, it has been a very interesting experience to run a company where you have one foot in the Danish society and one in the American society. Overall, I do feel that the Danish system is more efficient, fair and long-term best, and it is definitely a lot easier to start and run a business.”
