Category: Entrepreneurship

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Conferences/Events Entrepreneurship

Grockit is Rockin’ it

Lots of exciting news surrounding Grockit over the past few days, starting with the successful closure of a 4th round of funding ($7M series D) with New Schools Venture Fund joining as one of the new investors.

As mentioned in a previous post, Grockit’s founder, Farb Nivi, is inspiring other edupreneurs by partnering with the Gates Foundation to host several Startup Weekend EDU events across the globe. Grockit hosted their 2nd event at their SF Headquarters this past weekend and I was fortunate enough to attend and experience some of Farb’s energy and passion for edtech first hand.

Another benefit of mentoring yesterday is that I got a personal product demo of Grockit Answers that launched today and is definitely worth checking out. This smart Q&A system augments online video content by creating a connected and social way to have discussions around particular content. Designed by Grockit’s Chief Learning Architect, Ari Bader-Natal, he has considered thoughtful features for educators such as private discussion groups and moderator privileges to control the direction of the conversations. I’m definitely going to use this for my work with Khan Academy.

The evening ended with incredibly strong pitches from all teams. Congratulations to Alumn.us, the winners of the #SFEDU event and shout out to the other finalists- I’m with the Band (learning through music, and their team was made up of several Stanford LDT grad students :), DailyRead and Stacks. As a mentor, I had a chance to speak with several of the teams as they polished their pitches and am always impressed by the energy that people bring even late Sunday after a weekend of brainstorming, building and pitching.

The Grockit team did a fantastic job with the event and are taking the show on the road to DC next month followed by several other major international cities after that. If you want to get involved or help organize a Startup Weekend in SF or around the globe, contact the Startup Weekend team at events@startupweekend.org.

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Entrepreneurship

Are you reading EdSurge?

If not, take a minute to sign up today. Their growing team, lead by seasoned technology journalist Betsy Corcoran, is doing a fantastic job collecting and disseminating the most relevant edtech news. Looking forward to seeing what is coming next from this team!

Some of the highlights from this week’s edition…

APIs FOR ALL: Thank you, TeachStreet, for starting to gather up edtech APIs! If you have one, make sure you send the details here.

ED ELEMENTS: $2.1 million, San Francisco: Education Elements, founded by Anthony Kim, took on investors including NewSchools Venture Fund, Tugboat Ventures, venture capitalist Wally Hawley, and Imagine K12’s three cofounders. Kim is one of America’s top consultants in setting up blending learning programs at schools. Here’s the nail-biting truth about the most sophisticated learning programs: each one has its own, carefully designed “data dashboard.” That provokes air traffic-controller-like nightmares for teachers who try to use, say, three different programs to teach math, language arts and science. EdElements’ solution is what Kim has dubbed the “Hybrid Learning Management System,”—basically one dashboard to rule them all.

BUILDING CHARTERS: $25 million from the U.S. Dept. of Education to support 124 new (& 3 expanded) charter schools, serving 45,000 students over the next five years. Some of the programs will have to do more additional fund-raising than others. Recipients include KIPP ($9.5 million and planning for 18 schools), Breakthrough Charter Schools in Cleveland ($3.5 million, and building or expanding 11 schools) and San Jose’s Rocketship ($1.9 million and planning to build 56 schools).

…and so much more. The best way to get up-to-speed on all things EdTech.

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Entrepreneurship

Culture of Learning- The Real Disruption

 

Mitch Kapor gave a great keynote at the closing day of Startup Weekend EDU in Seattle this evening with a key theme being that we need to create a ‘culture of learning,’ and not just tools to really ‘fix’ the challenges in education. He shared some insights into his experience investing in edtech startups, and how at first he never invested in companies selling to districts/schools but has changed his stance on that a bit. He started off highlighting the work he and his wife, Freada, have been doing with The Summer Science Program, an intense six-week STEM-focused summer program for intellectually talented high school students from low income (SES) communities.

I especially appreciated his thoughts on social vs. tech entrepreneurs and how they can learn from each other’s perspective to maximize results. The sweet spot is where you build awesome (and useful) products with a sustainable business model.

His closing thoughts on startups today was most applicable to a Startup Weekend-type event —  Often entrepreneurs “confuse how far you can get in your first day of travel with how long it will take to get to the top of the mountain.” This captures the current environment where it’s so easy to get started, but it’s still very difficult to get past the early adopters, especially when hoping to sell to schools and districts, which have long and complicated sales timelines. Overall his message was positive and encouraged all edupreneurs to keep fighting the good fight, but just make sure you can make money!

Check out the feedback on Twitter- #swseaedu, @swseaedu

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Entrepreneurship

Just StartX It!

StartX, aiming to establish themselves as the “YCombinator of Stanford,” hosted a successful demo day today, leaving standing room only at Annenberg Auditorium. The teams, consisting mainly of Stanford undergrads, grad students and alumni, were chosen out of hundreds of applications and were full of praise for the accelerator program that introduced them to the lingo, mentorship and relationships necessary to launch their startups. The event started with a quick message from Board Member and long time supporter, George Zachary, from Charles River Ventures.

Half of the companies in their portfolio pitched today (see below for a list) and did a great job conveying their energy and enthusiasm. While the teams and product ideas were impressive, I was most excited by the program itself which is explicitly providing educational support to entrepreneurs, encouraging them to explore the unique opportunities available to them as part of the Stanford and Silicon Valley community. One of the speakers captured the theme of the day in their statement, “I know many of you could get a job with Google or Facebook tomorrow, but I highly encourage you to join one of the startups you see here, even as a side project.” I loved the positivity around the program and the overall message to explore entrepreneurship and take advantage of the resources right here in front of you (especially StartX.)

Applications for the next round are due this Wednesday, October 5th and they are aggressively recruiting for staff positions as well.

StartX companies that pitched today (in order of presentation):

  1. Morpheus: creating the first patient-specific airflow simulation software for medical applications.
  2. Kitchit: bridging private chefs and event planners to create personal, in-home fine dining experiences
  3. Modewalk: creating the most emotionally engaging shopping experience online for luxury goods
  4. 6Dot: developing a new portable, easy-to-use braille labeling device based on unique labeling technology
  5. Black Swan Solar: making solar energy cheaper than coal
  6. WifiSlam: enabling a technology for indoor positioning, location based tagging/check-ins in indoor spaces
  7. qWhisper: social search platform that will revolutionize the way people discover and find information from their social graph
  8. HungryTribe: meal planning and nutrition information targeted for corporations to save money on healthcare costs
  9. ClassOwl: online app for students/teachers to create personalized planners
  10. MotionMath: pioneering movement-based learning games for mobile devices
  11. Tactilize: creating the first publishing app for tablets
  12. diffbot: applies computer vision techniques to extract useful metadata from web docs.
  13. Loki Studios: utilizes GPS-enabled mobile devices to bring content-awareness to immersive social gaming
  14. FountainLoop: website and mobile application to help you find campus events and discover nearby friends.
  15. AiryLabs: creating the next generation of social learning games for kids
  16. Gameclosure: multiplatform. multiplayer. HTML5.
  17. Lark: enables the mobile phone to monitor, alert and improve sleep
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Entrepreneurship

Imagining a Better Way…

Imagine K-12 is quickly gaining exposure and recognition as the best education startup incubator around. All 10 companies from the first cohort got the chance to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, and you can read more about them and watch the pitches here.

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Entrepreneurship

Strengthening Demand for Innovation in Education

Bellwether Education Partners recently published the 3rd paper in a series focused on analyzing the emerging ecosystem of innovation in K-12 public education-  Pull and Push: Strengthening Demand for Innovation in Education.

This paper builds on concepts from Larry Berger’s piece (that I analyzed in a previous post), which seeks to identify the barriers that prevent innovative ideas and systems from being fully adopted into the K-12 landscape. This is a good read for anyone currently looking to transform the education space using technology tools, to help gain perspective of your target users, teachers and students, and understand how to encourage adoption in the current system. The paper revisits barriers that inhibit the number and power of early adopters and that limit the spread of innovations, and identifies ways to strengthen the demand for improved innovation and productivity in public education.

The core of the paper is the analysis of these 4 key ways to engage educators and increase demand for your innovation.

1. Encourage early adopters: Identify, support and strengthen the work of education’s existing early adopters.

2. Bolster smart adoption: Replace policy and operational barriers that inhibit smart adoption with infrastructure that encourages it.

3. Provide better information to encourage smart demand: Create useful information tools to inform and strengthen both early and mainstream demand.

4. Reward productivity improvements: Redefine the culture of public education so that people and organizations are able to identify, obtain and be rewarded for improved outcomes and productivity.

If you found this piece interesting or useful, I recommend checking out the previous two publications as well.

This paper is the third in a series of publications from the Innovation for the Public Good: A Case Study of US Education project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. This project analyzes key aspects of an emerging ecosystem for innovation in public education in the US, highlighting recent efforts to fuel and steer more innovation, and framing the challenges that lie ahead for the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. The first two papers Steering Capital: Optimizing Financial Support for Innovation in Public Education and Supporting and Scaling Change: Lessons from the First Round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) Program, were released earlier this year.

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Conferences/Events Entrepreneurship

Great overview of Mega Startup Weekend

Great overview of Mega Startup Weekend

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Entrepreneurship

A visit to Blackbox Mansion

As a follow up to Startup Weekend, this evening I attended a casual networking event at Blackbox Mansion, hosted by Bjoern Lasse. Blackbox is one of the hottest seed accelerators in the valley and this evening’s event was a great continuation of conversations around the newest startups on the scene. Over the past few days I’ve also learned about the Startup Genome Project, which is a research based process for benchmarking startups and identifying which stage they are at to understand how best they should grow/move forward to be successful. While it’s potentially enlightening to have a classification system to help see patterns and trends (especially given the proliferation of startups over the past several years) it is also a bit controversial to use this labeling system. I see startups as living organizations, continuously evolving and adjusting to their environments, so I bet they move back and forth between different stages throughout their growth process.

Given that “More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition,” my take is that more data is better to help determine and prevent those self-destructive tendencies. Overall, TONS of great information and cool infographics on their site- check it out and maybe you can learn more about your startup.

Bjoren Lasse also has an interesting blog post from Oct 2010 discussing some of his thoughts on traditional vs. disruptive technologies around education. He ends with a key point stating, “if you want to empower and accelerate this process then you need to anticipate a completely new education ecosystem and value chain.”

I’m anxious for us to discover this new education ecosystem…

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Conferences/Events Entrepreneurship

Mega Startup Weekend=Amazing!

3 days. 3 verticals (Education, Healthcare, Gaming). 300+ people.

It was an intense experience, cramming hours of brainstorming, researching, designing, networking and pitching into one packed weekend. I started out on one team building a product initiating offline sessions for people to teach what they know and love (very similar to SkillShare and TeachStreet) and then decided to break off with one team member and focus on Startup-U, and online university for entrepreneurs. By Sunday at 5pm 16 education teams pitched their new businesses and we were all impressed by the winning team for the education vertical, ClassParrot,  who built a robust iphone app (with an awesome logo and design) providing a safe way for students/teachers to text.

I highly recommend this event for anyone interested in meeting like-minded folks excited about entrepreneurship; brainstorming and creating a new business in an accelerated environment. Next Startup Weekend Education will be held October 14 in San Francisco.

Overall, it was great to see all the energy and entrepreneurship around tools and services to improve education. One of those entrepreneurs is Roby John, founder of Tap to Learn, a company building apps to help kids learn math, grammar and chemistry who was one of the lucky few chosen to have office hours at TechCrunch Disrupt with Paul Graham and Harj Taggar. During Mega Startup Weekend, Roby’s team built a tool to help parents sort through the 75,000+ ed apps and find apps most appropriate for their child’s age/learning needs. Good luck to them and all the edtech entrepreneurs out there!

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Conferences/Events Entrepreneurship

Startup Weekend EDU version

I’m getting ready to attend my first Startup Weekend event tomorrow and find myself excited and nervous… really just not sure what to expect. I’m sure that intrigue is a bit of what makes the events so appealing! This mega Startup Weekend is expecting ~300 attendees passionately focused on 3 verticals: Education, Healthcare and Gaming.

I’m especially excited to hear that Startup Weekend has partnered with Grockit and the Kauffman Foundation to created a dedicated EDU vertical at their events.

I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of people who are as excited and optimistic about EdTech as I am and will be sure to provide an update next week. If you’re attending, see you there!