Our guest on the show this week was Steve Daly, the CEO of Instructure Holdings (ticker: INST), a $3.3 billion market cap educational software company. After serving on the Board of the company, Steve became the CEO in late 2020, right in the middle of a pivotal time for the company. Instructure’s core products consist of cloud-based learning management systems used by higher education and K-12 schools all around the world. Listeners may not be familiar with Instructure, but the Canvas brand is likely something many people have heard of or even used. In 2020, the COVID outbreak presented all kinds of challenges for schools, especially when it came to figuring out how to use technology to continue the education process in a remote environment. Given how well Instructure is positioned to help schools embrace new technologies, I was excited to hear from Steve about:
- How the outbreak of COVID impacted the demand for learning management systems in both higher ed and K-12;
- Why cloud systems are better than on premise systems and how that leads to very low churn among customers;
- Penetration rates of learning management systems across end markets and the different strategies Instructure employs to grow;
- How the company went from being quite unprofitable to generating very attractive margins in a short period of time; and
- How Thoma Bravo’s Orlando Bravo convinced Steve to join the Board of Instructure and eventually become the CEO.
For full disclosure, Cove Street is not an INST shareholder.
Please enjoy the interview at the following sites:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/using-canvas-to-ensure-access-to-education-for-everyone/id1579124518?i=1000577181486
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6AkPnofwDkFgVWbEGTBpRB
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Aj0a0HcTsEk
Podbean: https://compounders.podbean.com/e/using-canvas-to-ensure-access-to-education-for-everyone-with-steve-daly-ceo-of-instructure-holdings-nyse-inst/
If you missed our last Compounders episode with Scott King, CEO, and Jeff Gorman, Executive Chairman of The Gorman-Rupp Company, you can view it here.
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