How a Silicon Valley Microschool Actually Buys EdTech (with Joseph Dalton-Stark, Leadways)

Most vendors pitching Leadways imagine they're pitching a district. They're not. Joseph Dalton-Stark is the founding principal of a microschool in Cupertino, CA, with roughly thirty students and families who work at Google and Apple down the road. The site licenses, the five-year rollouts, the "we work with 400 districts" pitches: none of it fits, and most reps don't bother to find out before they send.This episode walks through how Joseph actually buys. He'll engage on LinkedIn if you sound like a human. He'll ignore a cold email unless it accidentally strikes gold. He doesn't pilot. He watches a short demo, makes the call, and moves on. He's allergic to the five-year vision pitch because his school is in year two and needs traction now. Most of his current vendors came through dinner-table referrals, not outbound. And when reps lean on scale to impress him, he tunes out: he doesn't care how many districts you serve, he cares whether someone answers the phone when something breaks.For vendors, the lesson is sharper than usual: K-8 isn't a buyer profile, and the size of the school changes everything about how the pitch needs to sound.