Category: Geoff

IK12 + YC

2/10/2016

by Geoff Ralston and Tim Brady

We are excited to announce that Imagine K12, the original edtech accelerator, is joining Y Combinator to form an edtech vertical within YC.

We founded Imagine K12 in 2011 to help companies innovate in education technology in order to improve outcomes for children in the United States and around the world. YC founder Paul Graham believed in our mission, and with his help and advice, Imagine K12 was launched and has run like a sister company of YC. We utilize a nearly identical application process and startup philosophy and, in fact, Geoff became a partner at YC at the same time. Several companies have participated in both IK12 and YC, and YC partners, including Paul, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and others have given their time to IK12 companies.

Just as YC’s goal is to fund companies that “Make Something People Want”, the goal of Imagine K12 was to work with edtech companies to make something teachers, students, and parents want. We have funded over 80 companies, and in 2016 nearly every school in every district, in every state of the country uses a tool created by an Imagine K12 company. Several of the fastest growing edtech companies in the country are IK12 alumni, including, for example, Remind, ClassDojo, and Panorama Education. During the past five years, the edtech ecosystem has evolved and matured, and technology adoption by schools in the US and around the world has become inevitable. President Obama even promoted computer science education in his most recent State of the Union address.

YC has expanded and changed as well, with renewed efforts in focused areas such as hardware, healthcare, and enterprise. With this in mind, we began talking to Sam last year about more tightly integrating Imagine K12 within YC and creating a YC education vertical. Future YC/Imagine K12 edtech startups would then get the benefit of being full YC participants and we would eliminate the duplication of effort that Imagine K12’s separate schedule, application and interview process, and funding events represent.

We agreed that this year was the right time to create YC/Imagine K12 and decided to launch our first combined batch in the summer of 2016. Going forward, Imagine K12 will operate as an edtech specialization within YC’s program. New YC/Imagine K12 companies will have access to YC’s incomparable startup network and resources coupled with Imagine K12’s robust Educator Network and specialized understanding of the education market.

Edtech companies in the future will use the regular Y Combinator application process and will automatically become part of YC/Imagine K12 if accepted. The entire Imagine K12 team will join YC and YC/Imagine K12 will emerge as a new and potent force in edtech.

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Startup Priorities

2/12/2015

by Geoff Ralston

One of the most difficult tasks for a startup founder is deciding what to do. Where should the tiny number of people working on a brand new company spend their time? Choosing wisely can place your company on the road to success. Spending too much time on the wrong things can condemn the startup to an early death. How do you know whether you are making the right decisions in time for your company to not die?

Usually, my answer to founder questions such as “how should I be spending my time?” is spectacularly simple. Choose a key metric to track and focus exclusively on making that metric grow. When deciding what to do, choose the activity that you believe will directly result in increased growth of your chosen metric.

This is simple and sometimes enlightening. Although making those decisions is still never easy. That is one of the reasons startups are so difficult. Even choosing which metric on which to focus is often the subject of great debate. It is best to pick a metric you are pretty sure you know how to increase. But it is equally important that that metric matter. And by “matter”, I mean its growth will be a good objective measure of how your company is doing, for example by an investor.

There is also a special case where you are trying to decide what to build. Usually you are concerned with metrics around how many users you have and how engaged they are with your product. For simplicity I call the former b for breadth and the latter d for depth. This leads to a rudimentary but surprisingly helpful way to think about how to prioritize product decisions. If c is the cost of building a feature (in whatever unit, engineer days, time to completion, etc., you like), then you can create a simple ranking with the equation:

(b * d) / c

b tells you how many of your users, current or new, will be impacted by a new feature, d describes how important that feature will be to the average user, and c gives you how hard it is to build the feature. The application of this simple formula tends to arrive at a blindingly obvious conclusion: first build the features that affect lots of users as profoundly as possible, and which you can build quickly and cheaply. It is surprising how profoundly hidden the obvious can be and how enlightening it can be to bring it into focus.

Naturally, it can be difficult or impossible to accurately estimate each of the above variables. However, who cares? This is a startup and most decisions will be made using your gut. Make your best guesses and when in doubt, talk to your customers.

There is a bit more to say about the breadth and depth of your product. In a company’s earliest days, it is important to place more priority on d in order to ensure that you have product/market fit. It is useless to try to grow or scale before finding 100 users who really love your product. Only then should you refocus on b and grow your user base in order to get the data you need (from your customers) to determine where to build depth.

None of this is to say a simple formula can replace great common sense and better product sense. It will turn no one into a Steve Jobs. But it does help one think in an organized fashion in the presence of many different possibilities, and can even help resolve impassioned arguments over “what the hell do we do next?!”.

Thanks to Sam Altman and Karen Lien for providing helpful comments on earlier versions of this post.
For the original post, please click here.

Silicon Valley and the Edtech Revolution

6/24/2014

by Geoff Ralston

Silicon Valley holds a certain mystique among entrepreneurs and investors. More cool technology was born here, more wealth created, and more technology revolutions begun, than anywhere else on the planet. The Valley’s formula for success has been the subject of debate and business school cases for decades. It certainly helps to have excellent local universities churning out scores of engineers and entrepreneurs. It also helps that founding a company, whether it be a success or failure, is viewed as acceptable and even desirable by the community. When the folks you bump into at the local watering hole, the supermarket, and cocktail parties are all starting companies and changing the world, it feels like anyone can.

But one tech revolution that escaped the influence of Silicon Valley the first time around was education technology. Although the past is littered with efforts to make technology matter in K-12 education, few of those companies came from the Valley, and even fewer were successful. The Valley’s bold investors have generally stayed far from the space.

In the past several years, however, there has been a major realignment in the edtech world. Silicon Valley is once again leading the charge in a technology revolution, and this one might just have the greatest impact of all. Ironically, the revolution was kicked off by a hedge fund analyst in Boston, who got funding from Silicon Valley and then Bill Gates to create--not the next edtech Google--but rather, a non-profit: the Khan Academy. Nearly singlehandedly, Sal Khan made competent teaching available to any child in the world at any time. He based his new organization in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley and in the five years since there has been an explosion of edtech ideas, companies, and investment emanating from the Valley.

The idea that great education was never for the few and should always be available to all led to the creation of MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, led by Silicon Valley companies like Coursera and Udacity. New school models like Rocketship Education and Summit Public Schools bet on “blended learning” curricula that merge traditional teaching with individualized, adaptive learning technologies. More recently a tech founder from Google and Aardvark, Max Ventilla, founded a new kind of school called AltSchool to rethink how children are taught. Companies like Edmodo, ClassDojo, and Remind (formerly Remind101) are rethinking how communities of parents, teachers, and students can connect and collaborate on learning and related skills. And new classes, notably in programming and computer science, began spreading from Silicon Valley and out to the world via companies like CodeHS.

In 2011, we founded Imagine K12 because we believed the conditions for an edtech revolution were in place. The ideas above were beginning to germinate and we believed then and still believe today that connecting the people of the world to each other, and to the internet, the repository of all knowledge and information, would inevitably have as big an impact on how our children learn as it has had on almost every other thing we do. So far we have funded over 50 companies (90% of them remaining in Silicon Valley) who intend to make this happen.

You know a revolution is happening in Silicon Valley when the money shows up. Venture Capitalists and angel / seed investors have gotten in on the game. CB Insights records a record $509mm in edtech financing in Q1 of 2014 [1].

In many ways California is the perfect place for the revolution. We have Silicon Valley and amazing public universities, and yet the California K-12 school system is in disrepair. We have wealthy schools next to low income schools. We have an active charter industry. We have big urban districts as well as rural districts. We have a healthy immigrant population (ESL). We’re working on solutions to our very own problems and bringing a wonderful Silicon Valley sense of optimism and possibility about technology, and the positive role it can have in making education better for every child in California and elsewhere.

EdSurge, edtech's main information source and the author of the eponymous, must-read industry newsletter, points out that 43% of all the edtech jobs being offered are now in the San Francisco Bay Area. The next highest contender, the Greater New York Area, has 22% of the total. [2] It is worth pointing out that EdSurge is, itself, a Silicon Valley startup.

The edtech companies and jobs are here. The preeminent edtech accelerator is here. The top VC firms in the valley are writing checks. There is definitely a new game in town. Edtech has officially arrived in Silicon Valley.

[1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/ed-tech-venture-capital-record
[2] https://www.edsurge.com/n/2014-06-16-where-are-the-edtech-jobs-a-look-at-openings-in-the-u-s

Reflections on Imagine K12’s First Three Years

2/27/2014

by Geoff Ralston

Just over three years ago, Tim Brady, Alan Louie, and I approached Paul Graham with the idea of creating a "Y Combinator for education." We were prepared for summary rejection. Paul does not hold back if he thinks an idea is bad, and we had serious reservations of our own. Was a vertical accelerator a good idea? Were there enough edtech companies to populate one? Did we know enough about accelerators to run one? As it turns out, Paul was not only enthusiastic about the idea, he offered to help us get started by showing us how YC works, by sharing great edtech companies with us, and by helping Imagine K12 launch. He also helped us pick our name!

A short time later Imagine K12 was born, and we were live with a website, an online application, and a really, really bad logo:

Despite the logo and hastily generated website, the applicants began to show up. Our first cohort launched that summer, and now five cohorts later we have worked with 54 great companies, the vast majority of which are still alive (sadly, six are no longer operating). Three years into this venture, so many things are new and different that a moment of reflection seems deserved. Let’s start with the overall environment.

Education Technology
It is an overstatement to say that edtech has been transformed over the past three years, but there is no doubt that change is happening rapidly. We take little credit for this change, except perhaps the amazing proliferation of new edtech accelerators that we seem to have launched. (There are now twelve.) But equally impressive is the growing reach of edtech companies. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are serving a global audience via providers like Udacity and Coursera. Tools like Edmodo and Imagine K12’s own ClassDojo have enjoyed impressive viral spread throughout the US school system, and there was even an edtech IPO (Chegg).

The country is moving shakily towards adoption of the Common Core, and the government seems committed to true broadband connectivity via the ConnectEd initiative (supported by industry’s Education Superhighway). One-to-one classes (where every student has a laptop, iPad, or other device) are increasingly common, although the economics of implementation means that more often than not these classes are found only in the wealthiest schools. And innovative teaching methods enabled by technology, from the flipped classroom to hybrid models, continue their spread.

With the edtech landscape shifting and changing, Imagine K12 has not remained static either.

Our Team
We are still three partners, but our friend and original cofounder Alan Louie is no longer one of them. Alan left Imagine K12 to focus on literacy and early childhood education, and our first employee, Karen Lien, was promoted to partner. We also created a new position, manager of educational partnerships, and Jonathan Jew-Lim has done a fantastic job in the role. At the same time, our program has significantly evolved.

Our Program
The basic structure, derived from YC, has not changed. We continue to attract great speakers like PG, Jeff Weiner, Dan Rosensweig, and Reid Hoffman to our weekly dinners. We have added an Educator Demo Dayearly in the program where founders demo/pitch their products to an audience of teachers, principals, and administrators.

The program itself now runs only once a year in the fall, rather than twice in the winter and summer. Demo day is in January followed by rolling admissions for the next fall’s session. We also raised a Start Fund which writes an $80,000 note to each company accepted to Imagine K12. Finally, we are about to move offices from Palo Alto to Redwood City (thanks for three great years, AOL).

Our Results
Imagine K12 companies have had a serious impact on the world of education. ClassDojo is used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms, as are Remind101 and Socrative. Hapara is used in thousands of schools around the world and CodeHS is rapidly changing how programming is taught in middle schools and high schools around the country. Bloomboard and TeachBoost are professional development platforms of the future used to help teachers improve, and Panorama Education provides tools that allow schools to measure their own performance and use that knowledge to improve.

These are just a few examples of the dozens of Imagine K12 companies who have raised tens of millions of dollars and most importantly are making a difference for schools, teachers, and children around the US and the world. Actually, upon reflection, that was the goal all along.

Meet the Fall 2013 Cohort

2/4/2014

by Geoff Ralston

We are proud to introduce the 13 companies that just graduated from Imagine K12’s fifth cohort. The companies from our Fall 2013 session presented at Demo Day on January 14th. We are now considering applications for our sixth cohort and will accept companies on a rolling basis. We will begin holding office hours and working with accepted companies even before our annual program begins in September.

The Fall 2013 cohort was an exceptional one, including several companies that achieved ramen profitability by Demo Day. All of the companies are launched and have achieved impressive traction. They comprise an impressive range of ideas, from programming courses for kids to enrollment tools for education administrators. Here is a brief summary of each company. More information is available via the link above as well as on each website.

Cellabus is a Mobile Device Management Platform for Education that helps schools manage large numbers of different types of devices in diverse settings.
Class Central is a search engine for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Classroom IQ is a cloud-based platform for managing open-response questions.
Classwork replaces pencil and paper in 21st century classrooms. Students write their work – math problems, drawings, text, etc. – on Classwork whiteboards.
DeansList is a new gradebook that helps schools assess critical “soft skills” like perseverance, diligence, leadership, teamwork and grit.
Edoome turns the classroom into an online community to connect teachers, students and their parents so they can communicate and collaborate in an easy and secure way.
EDpuzzle allows teachers to create a personalized lesson from any video.
Front Row is math practice for 21st century classrooms: adaptive, gamified, and data-driven.
Geddit is classroom feedback that starts with students and gives teachers the real-time feedback they need to address each student’s individual needs.
Kaymbu is an iPad-based documentation system that allows teachers to capture the essence of classroom activities and strengthen relationships between home and school.
Kodable is a curriculum introducing kids aged 5 and up to the basics of programming in a fun game.
Panorama Education is a survey tool used in more than 4,500 schools for data analytics and collecting feedback from students, parents, and teachers.
SchoolMint helps schools and families manage the enrollment process simply and cost effectively.

Our application for the 2014 cohort is now live. As noted above, admissions will be done on a rolling basis, so it is advantageous to apply early not only to reserve a place in the 20 companies we will accept per year, but because admitted companies immediately get funding and advice, as well as access to Imagine K12’s extensive networks of founders and educators.

Imagine K12 Manuals

8/22/2013

by Geoff Ralston

At Imagine K12 we spend lots of time helping founders develop the skills they need to build successful companies. Some of these skills revolve around building and presenting a pitch, fund raising, running a company, and other basic entrepreneurial skills. Whenever possible, we will write very short manuals or primers in these various areas as references for Imagine K12 folks or anyone else who might find them useful. You will be able to find these documents on our Manuals page here on the Imagine K12 website.

Imagine K12 Announces Start Fund and Rolling Admissions

4/23/2013

by Tim Brady and Geoff Ralston

We are excited to announce the creation of a Start Fund for Imagine K12 companies. Beginning with our fall 2013 cohort, Imagine K12 companies will be eligible to receive $80,000 in convertible debt seed financing upon commencement of the program. This is in addition to the $14k to $20k in funding from Imagine K12.

A fantastic group of people and institutions have agreed to participate in the Start Fund. It is a collection of prominent people and firms from Silicon Valley that understand both the power of great software to change industries and the importance to the nation of improving our K-12 education system. The group includes Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, the New Schools Venture Fund, and GSV Asset Management. We are grateful to this group not only for their participation in the fund, but also for the work they have already been doing to improve education.

With the advent of the Start Fund, there will be a change in the timing of our program and how teams are admitted. We will now be holding one program per year, rather than two. The length and content of the program will remain the same; but rather than running programs both in the summer and in the winter every year, we will hold one program each fall. Our next program will start at the beginning of September 2013, and we will admit up to 20 companies.

We are also moving to a rolling admissions process. The application will be opened every February and kept open until either we have funded 20 companies or the summer has ended. We will review applications as they arrive and determine which we would like to interview. Following each interview we will make a decision regarding admission. Once teams are admitted, they are immediately eligible to receive the (up to $20,000 of) Imagine K12 funding. The Start Fund financing will be available once the program starts in September. This year we are beginning the admissions process a bit late, but as of today we will start reviewing applications from those companies that have submitted their applications.

Our fourth cohort of edtech companies is currently finishing up the Imagine K12 program. It has been an exciting journey so far, but the changes described are going to make the future even brighter. Imagine K12 companies have raised more than $30 million dollars in venture financing and are used by thousands of schools around the country and the world. The Imagine K12 Start Fund and the changes described here will give future Imagine K12 startups even more chances to build great businesses. And those great new businesses will play a role in the inevitable transformation of education taking place in the United States and around the world, bringing all children the education they need to reach their potential.

Press Release: Imagine K12 Launches First Ever Start Fund for Educational Technology

IK12 + YC

Startup Priorities

Silicon Valley and the Edtech Revolution

Reflections on Imagine K12’s First Three Years

Meet the Fall 2013 Cohort

Imagine K12 Manuals

Imagine K12 Announces Start Fund and Rolling Admissions

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