Beth Antony: Navigating a Better Way Through the College Application Process

05/20/24 • 61 min

Fortune's Path Podcast

Key Takeaways

“Applying to college is a series of tasks where you need information, guidance, and you need support through your own discernment process. It doesn’t have to be terrible. It doesn’t have to be scary.”
“I use the word discern a lot. And I do that intentionally to discern who they are. Because when you start a college as a freshman, you're not the same person you are when you finish as a senior. And we need to get that right environment where it can be flexible and support that kind of academic, social, and emotional growth.”
“...what's your philosophy of education? Do you view it as a means to an end, or is higher ed kind of this banquet table, you go and you feast and you try things, and it's just important to know what you don't like as it is to find out what you do like and what you're passionate about. We need to be strategic and intentional with choices for our students.”
On her pro bono clients: “Helping them realize their potential, but to also broaden...horizons...look at it through this lens.”
“If someone starts off a conversation, I want my child to go to a really competitive school. There's a lot to unpack in that statement. Once we start teasing out those factors...what I'm really hearing is I just want the best for my child. I don't know what that means. I don't have language around this, so I'm going to say an Ivy, I'm going to say, the best, the most competitive and what the most competitive for I'd say the majority of people isn't always the best decision.”
If you work with Beth, you’re getting a process, not an outcome. It’s sometimes hard for parents to understand.
“Children learn what they live. When they're shown another way. They're always receptive. I always said I can work with any student - parents: That's a different story. Kids are not the issue.”
“Sometimes people just need to be reminded that they can do hard things.”

Key Takeaways

“Applying to college is a series of tasks where you need information, guidance, and you need support through your own discernment process. It doesn’t have to be terrible. It doesn’t have to be scary.”
“I use the word discern a lot. And I do that intentionally to discern who they are. Because when you start a college as a freshman, you're not the same person you are when you finish as a senior. And we need to get that right environment where it can be flexible and support that kind of academic, social, and emotional growth.”
“...what's your philosophy of education? Do you view it as a means to an end, or is higher ed kind of this banquet table, you go and you feast and you try things, and it's just important to know what you don't like as it is to find out what you do like and what you're passionate about. We need to be strategic and intentional with choices for our students.”
On her pro bono clients: “Helping them realize their potential, but to also broaden...horizons...look at it through this lens.”
“If someone starts off a conversation, I want my child to go to a really competitive school. There's a lot to unpack in that statement. Once we start teasing out those factors...what I'm really hearing is I just want the best for my child. I don't know what that means. I don't have language around this, so I'm going to say an Ivy, I'm going to say, the best, the most competitive and what the most competitive for I'd say the majority of people isn't always the best decision.”
If you work with Beth, you’re getting a process, not an outcome. It’s sometimes hard for parents to understand.
“Children learn what they live. When they're shown another way. They're always receptive. I always said I can work with any student - parents: That's a different story. Kids are not the issue.”
“Sometimes people just need to be reminded that they can do hard things.”

Previous Episode

Sloane Scott on Healthcare Self-Pay, Creating Shareholder Value

2:12 - Why she became a self-pay patient after two medical bankruptcies.

9:22 - How to navigate self-pay by removing fear-based thinking (I must have health insurance) and negotiate with every single healthcare service you pay for.

11:02 - The freedom that comes with leaving health insurance behind and embracing self pay.

11:58 - How hospital foundations and patient pay advocates have emerged to embrace (somewhat) self-pay.

12:49 - As a high earner, she does not use these foundations, but negotiates to pay her bill. She's also a member of Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM), a health cost sharing ministry.

13:20 - How CHM works - you become a member, pay a monthly fee. When a healthcare episode arises, you access CHM to get your healthcare bills paid, or shared.

15:14 - Sloane details the self-pay patient journey, how self-pay doesn't trickle through to all areas of the healthcare industry, and how to educate each sector about self-pay.

22:50 - How to ask for the self-pay rate as a patient.

25:00 - Where Sloane negotiated for care from one provider that was 75% less than what another provider quoted.

26:35 - How physicians are fairly knowledgeable about self pay, but those in their business offices are not. They are trained to work with insurance. She packs her "patience and grace" to ask them to do something that is unusual.

29:25 - Tom pivots the conversation to how Sloan copes with a diagnosis of a terminal illness (at age 23). She doesn't let it define her, and looks at her condition as a chronic illness.

30:23 - How Sloane and Tom agree that it is the dying person's responsibility to prepare the living for their own death.

34:14 - Why doctors ignore DNRs (hint: it has to do with litigation).

35:10 - Tom laments that modern Stoics don't talk suicide the way the original Stoics did - it is the last vestige of our wills.

37:50 - Sloane shares her grandmother's advice about friendship: you really only need 6 friends in life; 3 on one side of the casket, and 3 on the other.

38:10 - The extreme rarity of having one really close friend.

40:00 - Shifting to business, how she found herself in Nashville's health tech scene. Pre-pandemic, it was crowded, healthy and vibrant. Backed by Nashville and nationwide private equity and venture capital firms, and also supported by local institutions like the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Nashville Healthcare Council, local family funds, and others, founders were getting a lot of support.

41:13 - When founder-led companies become responsible for creating shareholder value. The trajectory to create shareholder value is a big change, and she learned how sales and marketing played such a significant role in creating that value.

42:35 - Creation of her secret sauce: the strategy/methodology/execution of marketing to build to exit, and understanding how to make quick pivots as needed.

44:02 - What healthcare doesn't talk about post-pandemic: the rise in chronic disease, chronic care. Fortunately, many tech companies have come forward to begin to address this issue, but the exits are not as speedy as they once were.

45:29 - The role of a strategic story in an exit, and how your fly paper is still whether or not you created shareholder value. But healthcare needs to re-think intellectual property.

47:00 - The other way to re-frame and look at shareholder value: the customer relationships you create. If you can own a swim lane in the market, and really own it well, that has enormous value.

48:16 - How mergers often destroy value by devaluing the brand and the culture.

51:24 - Who shaped her marketing philosophy, Marty Neumeier, who was Steve Jobs' brand mentor. She believes, as Marty maintains, that a brand isn't what you say it is, it's what your customer says it is.

54:17 - How she loves founder-led companies, and how she gets so much more out of it than what she put into it. Her emotional paycheck gets cashed every time she sees someone get a check they never thought they would get.

Next Episode

Jake Levirne On How to Use AI and The Internet the Right Way, How It Affects Our Psyche and How to Use New Tools Ethically.

On the risk of AI programing leading to crummy software: "At the end of the day AI is just a tool, right? And so it's how we choose to use it that could have impacts there. If we allow AI usage to be an excuse to move quickly [when developing software], but sloppily, then yeah, we're going to build more and more software that is is tenuous and has the potential of falling over."
On the idea of AI being able to help junior developers become senior developers more quickly: "Unless we are intentional as an industry, we run the risk of replacing the natural apprenticeship that's been in place for a few decades."
On AI taking our jobs: "Humans will always seek to work on the things that they're uniquely able to deliver value on, and I think so we'll just keep doing that in software development. But but I am worried about what the path looks like for people to get to that level of expertise."
On his new venture Ducky.foo: "Ducky.foo is is the outcome of me wrestling with the disparity that AI assistants are creating in terms of junior developer versus senior developer productivity... Create a human community where more experienced developers can teach and mentor and share their hard won expertise and real world knowledge with junior developers, but do it at scale...it's not novel to think of a community of software developers of different experience levels helping each other out. But I think what is novel is that I think we can hyper scale this type of community by injecting AI into it."
"Those with the most going into any kind of innovation tend to be the ones who benefit the most." Ducky.foo is hoping to stop this from taking place with AI innovation, and prevent the fruits of AI innovation from resting in the hands of the wealthy.
On the toxicity of Stack Overflow and general trolling: "here's a place where AI does have a leg up. It's infinitely patient, infinitely pleasant. And so I think That's one thing we can borrow from AI as we're building Ducky.foo.”