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Meet the teacher-founder behind Goalbook

8/19/2013

 
by Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam
PictureDaniel Yoo presents Goalbook at TechCrunch Disrupt
Although the potential for Facebook-scale growth and success provides the motivation for many to subject themselves to the roller coaster ride that is running a startup, some are driven by frustration born out of first-hand experience with the limitations of tools in a given domain. Such a backdrop witnessed the genesis of Goalbook, the brainchild of software engineer and special education teacher Daniel Yoo, a set of tools targeted at making personalized student lesson planning a more enriching and collaborative experience for those involved.

Goalbook’s utility lies in the manner in which it tackles the several logistical difficulties that teachers face when trying to interface with one another to create individualized lesson plans for students. “Essentially, there are several teachers and administrative staff involved in the education of any given student, and it may not be practical for them to be able to meet with each other.”

Goalbook thus allows teachers to keep track of learning goals and teaching strategies tailored to individual students, resulting in a more individualized educational experience for students, which can have tremendous benefits for those with disabilities.
 
Daniel’s first experience with software development came as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following graduation in 2001, he moved to Oracle to work on the eBusiness suite as an entry-level programmer. Although the job afforded him the experience of working in a large-scale corporate environment, Daniel was not quite satisfied; having nurtured goals of contributing to society as a teacher since his youth, he sought a job that would “help him learn to be a better teacher and engage with children in an effective manner.” Daniel thus made his way to Cal State East Bay at Hayward, where he earned his teaching credential.

Although his credential licensed him to teach both general education and special education, Daniel found himself gravitating towards the latter, citing the belief that it would “challenge him more as a teacher by forcing him to work with students that had a very diverse set of needs.”
"Daniel qualifies his first year in special education as the most challenging he has ever faced. “I honestly don’t think I would be able to get through that year again.”
Although he has experienced no trivial amount of turmoil and stress in running Goalbook, Daniel qualifies his first year in special education as the most challenging he has ever faced. “I honestly don’t think I would be able to get through that year again at this age,” he muses.

Daniel’s first experience in adapting the programming skills honed and refined in his undergraduate years to the education domain came in his second year as a special education teacher in the Ravenswood City School District. When inefficiency in the student data collection process, which was done manually by hand at the time, brought legal trouble upon the district, Daniel found a solution in creating software that could automate the process. Daniel’s tool was so successful that the district moved to adopt it in all of their schools just a year later. “Although it wasn’t the specific motivation for starting Goalbook, this was the first time my eyes were opened to the interdisciplinary opportunities for integrating software in education; up until then, I viewed them as two entities that necessarily had to be kept apart,” he reflects. “It really made me more optimistic that I could use a background in technology to the benefit of my students.”
The success prompted Daniel to apply to the Kauffman Education Ventures incubator program, to which he was accepted. Although he didn’t have a concrete idea at the time as to what sort of a product he sought to develop, he knew that he wanted to “tackle a problem facing districts nationwide.”
“It made me optimistic that I could use a background in technology to the benefit of my students.”
As with many successful startups, Goalbook’s initial design was based on a critical analysis of the tools afforded in the status quo to educators. For Daniel, this task was simple. “There aren’t very many tools that seek to make special education easier or more enriching,” he muses. “Goalbook’s goal at a fundamental level was to fill that void we saw in the EdTech domain.” Although many early-stage founders must invest a significant amount of effort into spending time with potential users to develop a more nuanced understanding of the problems they face, Daniel had to look no further than his own five years of experience. “As a teacher, I knew what was hard and what needed fixing.”
From there, Daniel made his way directly into the first cohort of startups funded and supported by Imagine K12. To him, the role that Imagine K12 played in Goalbook’s early years is one that can never be trivialized.
“As a teacher, I knew what was hard and what needed fixing.”
 “Imagine K12 brought together people who had the technical skills and vision to build an impactful product in EdTech,” he reflects. “At the time of entry, these software engineers weren’t necessarily people with a lot of business experience, and Imagine K12 was instrumental in throwing us into an environment that built up experience in the management side of the company.” The role the incubator played in helping Goalbook network also merits attention. “You really build a phenomenal network of people in Silicon Valley during your time in Imagine K12; our first major adopter and investor both came out of meetings arranged during this time.”
 
Although the challenges faced by Goalbook have been myriad, Daniel highlights negotiating with school districts as one of the most trying obstacles. “There is a fundamental mismatch in the philosophical approaches of startups and school districts,” he asserts. “School districts are very bureaucratic and complicated in structure, whereas startups strive for simplicity in their products.” The decentralization of authority in school districts also presents challenges in its own right. “The person we negotiate with isn’t the person who is going to be using our product, nor is it the person who is going to pay us for the service.”
 
Despite these challenges, Daniel has focused on adapting to their reality and working around them. “We have two full-time employees on our sales team that are now very experienced in the process, and we have a third one coming on board.”
 
In reflecting on Goalbook’s journey to this point, Daniel asserts his belief in having achieved product/market fit. “We now have a product that we are confident in presenting to school districts; our main goal at this point is figuring out how to market it in a way that is profitable for the company.”
 
Overall, the experience has been one that Daniel looks back on with pride. “I often find myself second-guessing decisions and choices I make on a day-to-day basis, but I have never questioned my decision to commit to the development of Goalbook.”

Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam is a rising senior at Palo Alto High School who is working on a series of interviews and articles for the Imagine K12 blog. Sidhanth is currently involved in research projects involving algorithms and computational biology. In addition, he enjoys tracking startups and their impact, as well as freelance programming. In his spare time, he often enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee and learning new (human) languages.

LearnSprout helps educators discover a 'lost world’ of data

6/21/2013

 
by Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam
As a student going through the hustle and bustle of a high school journey, I found both teachers and students often groping for useful information that would help them gauge student performance or information in relation to a peer group. It hadn’t escaped my attention that given the myriad systems used to capture every aspect of student life ranging from attendance to academic performance, schools were sitting on a wealth of information that could come in handy in any number of ways. I found myself lamenting that some of this mountain of data was not available to improve instruction, curriculum design, student counseling, teacher training and much more. LearnSprout aims to help users discover this ‘lost world’ of data trapped in Student Information Systems (SIS).
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Franklyn Chien presents LearnSprout at Imagine K12 Demo Day
LearnSprout helps external systems accessing SIS by providing a set of simple APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that dramatically reduce the complexity of systems integration. A set of well-defined APIs provide a consistent and controlled way for external systems to access any SIS data at the discretion of the school, without having to embark on expensive and customized systems integration efforts. From the school’s perspective, the APIs provide a convenient layer of abstraction that allows them to serve all the developers who seek to tap into their data consistently with minimal development effort. 

With the increasing focus on freeing up ‘big data’, and the proliferation and adoption of APIs in multiple domains, LearnSprout’s offering for the K-12 sector appears to be serendipitous, opening up several new avenues for data sources used by app developers in the Education Technology sector.

The venture found its bearing under the tenacious stewardship of Franklyn Chien. Chien reminisces easily and expansively about his journey from a childhood in the sunny climes of Hawaii to a double degree at University of Washington on a full scholarship. Subsequent jobs at Microsoft and DeLoitte offered little more than varying degrees of drudgery. The final stop on his corporate junket was Facebook in 2007, where he worked on a number of products, with monetization being the primary thrust. Chien’s idealism and introspection are difficult to miss. “I got tired of it eventually. With all the breaks I got, I had do something with a bigger impact on the world outside of making money for Zuckerberg.”

Education, the great leveler, was an immediate calling. “It opens and closes doors with finality. It was integral to my success and was the most fundamental element to my growth.” 

By the end of 2011, Chien’s enthusiasm had rubbed off on his friends and cofounders, Joe Woo and Anthony Wu, who had comfortable perches at Microsoft and Google.  The three agreed to hunker down in earnest and define a distinctive product for the Education sector. The first mile of this unchartered course provided the customary ambiguity and frustration as they built an assortment of experimental apps, and used these as a currency for conversation with over a 100 educators to better understand their needs.

As they built the apps, a consistent impediment to their efforts was the inability to easily retrieve required data from the school SIS. Teachers could do little more than point to their source data system with a helpless shrug. Eventually, this led to the ‘eureka’ moment around providing a ‘once and done’ gateway to islands of SIS data.

Imagine K12 facilitated introductions to schools and districts to help develop the product further. As they spoke to other developers at Imagine K12, they realized that everyone wanted easy access to SIS data but stopped short of making this their problem statement.

“Big data is problematic. It can be very manual, and take a lot of time. There is a great deal of data fragmentation. Ideally someone should be able to integrate with a student data system in a few minutes.” Developers who use the LearnSprout API today can do just that. According to Chien, they can complete an integration in less than 5 minutes, allowing them to leverage data in their applications that they would otherwise be unable to harness. 

Chien is both reflective and cognizant of the limited window of opportunity that life usually affords for risk taking in the form of launching a startup. “We were all in our mid-to-late 20s. The time to do a startup was right then. It’s much harder after you hit 30 because you have family, responsibilities and so on.” Timing the jump well provided a longer runway both for them and for the venture, which allowed them to focus on their startup without too many distractions on the side.

Just a few months ago, LearnSprout hit a telling milestone of 4,000 adopter schools, touching the lives of over two million students. The more meaningful metric is the developer and end user community that can enter through the APIs, and the larger impact that LearnSprout-dependent applications have on the Education community by leveraging the big data that it offers. 

For Chien, this is just a milestone, a stepping stone to even greater bandwidth of service. “As an entrepreneur, you are never happy with the niche you are currently serving; you want to keep evolving and solving more and bigger problems.” More immediately, ‘back to school’ month is always a period of frenetic activity and excitement; one that the entire team is looking forward to.

Imagine K12 proved to be a timely springboard by quickly connecting them to an active ecosystem of educators, districts and students. This become a foundation for rapid growth of their network and testing ground for their ideas and experiments.

Chien sees a lot of smart people, time and money being invested in this space. He sees lasting innovation and success eventually in the industry, even if it’s going to be a rough ride in the medium term. 

Through the excitement and promise of success, Chien doesn’t fail to observe that ‘starting your own company is a roller coaster ride of emotions.’ No company that he knows of has ever been clear of hardships. “You go through a lot - investors turning you down, customers leaving, schools being cautious, unexpected competition - the possibilities are endless.” But even if it has been hard, it’s the ‘coolest’ thing he has done.

Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam is a rising senior at Palo Alto High School who will be writing a series of interviews and articles for the Imagine K12 blog. Sidhanth is currently involved in research projects involving algorithms and computational biology. In addition, he enjoys tracking startups and their impact, as well as freelance programming. In his spare time, he often enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee and learning new (human) languages.

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



Breaking down communication barriers between students and teachers

4/15/2013

 
by Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam
My personal experience as a student user of Remind 101 came in my Multivariable Calculus class at Palo Alto High School. As the class was scheduled early in the morning when it was too early for students to be checking their email accounts, Remind101 presented an easy and efficient way for my teacher to let us know about changes in the day’s syllabus, reminders for tests, and potential traffic delays. I thought it was a handy tool for my teacher without giving much thought to the element of safety and security the model provided for student-teacher interactions. In an interview with the founders, I learned that the importance of safety and privacy was one of the key discoveries that led to the company's rapid growth...
Picture
Brett and David Kopf, founders of Remind101
Remind101 makes it really easy for teachers to text or email parents and students about deadlines, reminders and other notifications. Remind101 ensures the privacy of teacher, student and parent contact information and supports mobiles, handhelds and desktops. According to the founders, “Simply stated, we make it safe and easy for teachers to communicate with their students. There are liability issues with a 30-year-old texting a 12-year-old; there are also productivity issues with a teacher having to contact students and their parents. Teachers don’t have an easy way to do it.”

Remind101 rides on the substantive intellectual horsepower of siblings Brett and David Kopf. Brett’s journey took him to Michigan State where he majored in agricultural economics and had his first brush with entrepreneurship in his sophomore year as a consultant. David studied networking technology at DePaul and later gravitated to a self-immersion in Rails development. As with many successful ventures, Remind 101 originated in a founder’s personal pain and needs. Brett’s battles with learning disabilities and dyslexia led him to look for effective and timely reminders of ever-looming tasks and deadlines. This resulted in an effort on David’s part to build simple tools for notifications before assignments and quizzes to help his brother.

David asserts that it was an uphill battle trying to be entrepreneurial in Michigan. When they got together to make a go of it in Chicago, it became evident quickly that the terrain did not favor young entrepreneurs in pursuit of an idea. Brett’s relentless online research charted a course for their entrepreneurial journey, though finding an audience for their story still proved difficult until they entered Imagine K12.

The decision to quit their day jobs was surprisingly easy, especially for David who had never swum in new venture waters. “I was working from home for IBM. It paid well but was never fulfilling. I didn’t even know what an incubator was until a few months before I applied to Imagine K12,” says David. 

Brett’s enthusiasm clearly helped. “I woke up one morning and told David - you have no choice, we’re leaving.”

Imagine K12 was much more than a milestone for the duo, it helped Remind101 turn a corner. David is quick to point this out. “Everything failed at the company until Imagine K12 began to help us. Once we got into the incubator everything took off at once.” 

The early days were not without anxiety. Brett still reminisces about the uncertainty and doubt that plagued them the night before their big TechCrunch Disrupt presentation, “The night before we launched on TechCrunch, in front of 2000 people, we were pacing back and forth in our digs. We wondered if we should really go through with this. We were already thousands of dollars in debt - should we shut the site down? Our mentors had anticipated this and told us that it would be scary but we should still keep things going.”

David chuckles at the recollection of his brutal indoctrination into coding. With just a couple of Java courses in college behind him, he plunged into 16-hour days of self-training in Ruby-on-Rails and willed himself to become a rails programmer in 90 days. As with all successful teams, David and Brett are cognizant of their individual strengths. Brett is quick to clarify, “I can’t code. David’s far better at applying logic. I enjoy talking to teachers and figuring out what problems to solve.”

The early days at Imagine K12 echoed with a single message from their mentors. “They kept on stressing the need to talk to your users to design a really good product.” While David burned the candle at both ends coding the product, Brett skyped at length with over 200 teachers in the span of a few weeks. All this effort precipitated the users’ biggest pain: "There was a communication problem. We then built the product that combated this problem.” 

Before Imagine K12 accepted them, Brett had tried pitching it to students in Michigan State and signed up 1500-2000 students but couldn’t get traction. “Our product wasn’t simple enough, and we weren’t listening to the needs of our users. So we had to rip the entire site down and start from scratch.” 

The importance of speaking to users rings home with David’s example, “Initially I thought, I want students to be able to reply to their teachers. We thought ok, let’s build it. I didn’t think we could build it. That’s the reason we didn’t do it. It’s amazing we didn’t do that, since we realized later after speaking to users that 2-way communication removes the whole safety component of the conversation, and they could have an inappropriate conversation. The reason a lot of teachers sign up with us is because there is no way you could have an inappropriate conversation. It’s tempting to focus on features instead of just listening to users and really solving their problem.”

With several hundred thousand users across the US and Canada, and visible signs of a business model, Brett and David now find time to focus on evolving the product to make it ‘more portable and friendly.’ For now, they are laser-focused on their core proposition - making communication easier. ‘There will be enough time later to diversify into other domains,” says David.

Competition doesn’t seem to unduly worry them. “A few other companies such as Blackboard are in the frame. But they’re administrative and corporate in nature and grow from the top down. We’ve built our company organically from the ground up and have a much stronger connection to the user base.”

The support provided by Imagine K12 is often reiterated. Brett reflects, “We’re not joking, the reason that we’re in the position that we are in today is all because of them. If you move from Chicago and try to break into the SV network, it’s really hard without any sort of gateway. Our mentors really understood how things work. Fundraising aside, the people here understand how to design and build a product really well, regardless of the specific domain that it falls in. To be able to work with Tim, Geoff, Alan on a daily and weekly basis and get a constant feedback loop of critiques was supremely helpful. All the other companies in the network were helpful too."

David adds, “You form a really great network of people. Just the structure of an incubator program - deadlines and a demo day where you need to get traction and pitch your idea - is really good and really motivating, but the mentorship, the guidance, the speakers, the funding - enough to justify quitting jobs and move out here. They allowed us to concentrate 100% on Remind101.”

With venture capital beneath their sails, hiring is underway at Remind101. With seven employees and the proverbial dog already, they have no illusions about the struggle to find top-tier talent in the valley, “We know hiring will be hard moving forward - it’s hard for everyone.” But hiring is critical to executing their product strategy and rollout over the next few months. “We will be doing 10-15 things - all designed to make the site easier to use,” says Brett. “There will also be a huge speed improvement.”

Months of hard work afford the duo a few moments for reflection, “No company in the EdTech industry has managed to grow to the scale of a company like Dropbox for example, which has raised millions of dollars and is on its way to IPO. Imagine K12 is great because it enables us to create some really good companies to address this sector. We don’t necessarily like to say we’re revolutionizing education; we think we solve one really big problem in education. If you look at the big scope of education, there are lots of problems, and we take one of those problems and solve it with Remind101.”


Sidhanth Venkatasubramaniam is a junior at Palo Alto High School who will be writing a series of interviews and articles for the Imagine K12 blog. Sidhanth is currently involved in research projects involving algorithms and computational biology. In addition, he enjoys tracking startups and their impact, as well as freelance programming. In his spare time, he often enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee and learning new (human) languages. 

The personal impact of edtech

4/9/2013

 
by Karen Lien
At Imagine K12, our big-picture goal is to see technology enrich and transform education as it has the business and consumer experiences. Technology is not the silver bullet for education, but we know that it can have a meaningful, positive impact on the education system and learners.

We work with startups, and while it’s incredibly rewarding to spend our time with smart, motivated entrepreneurs, sometimes we can feel very far removed from the teachers and students who inspire us to do this work. Every now and then I like to take a look at what educators are saying about our portfolio companies, as a reminder of the very real impact they have.

Here are a few quotes from teachers talking about the transformative power of the edtech products they use:
ClassDojo is a behavior management tool that emphasizes positive behavior and provides a behavior record for each student.
Not only has ClassDojo improved my classroom behavior, but it has helped improve their math and reading scores as well! I don’t know of any other behavior management site or system that is this versatile and effective. The days of needing to call home about my students’ behavior have passed…but, I sure have made a lot of ‘Compliment Calls.'
Angela West, 4th grade teacher (source)
Remind101 allows teachers to communicate with their students and parents via text message in a simple, safe environment.
My students are still talking about how awesome it is to receive messages from their teacher. They come to my class prepared and on time more regularly than I have ever experienced. Parents have told me that they enjoy feeling more “in the know” of what their student is doing in my class.
Catherine Flippen, high school teacher (source)
Socrative is a student response system (like clickers) that works on any web-enabled device.
Socrative saves me time, gives students immediate feedback, helps me to make better, more informed decisions and is helping me easily gather the data that the job demands.   
Shawn McCusker, high school teacher (source)
Goalbook makes it possible for every student to have a personal learning plan that connects all of the key players in their education: teachers, parents, and other specialists.
During the day, when my student is facing a challenging moment, I’m now able to share in Goalbook a play-by-play of the steps and actions I’ve taken with the student... The parents love this. They’ve told me, ‘When we hear which strategies have been successful, what’s been working for you, this information helps us be more successful with our child at home. We appreciate the communication we get from you.’
District Post-Secondary / Transition Coordinator (source)
InstaGrok is a research tool that displays any topic in a visual, interactive concept map.
Teachers of every subject area will see students of almost every skill level benefit from what instaGrok has to offer... instaGrok isn’t designed to feed users simple answers; rather, it fosters customizable levels of inquiry that will help your students learn how to be critical thinkers and creative problem solvers, instead of mindless button pushers. And that’s transformative learning!
Shawn Jacob, high school teacher (source)
This list covers just a handful of Imagine K12’s startups, which are part of a larger ecosystem of great edtech companies working hard to support students and teachers.

Are you thinking about starting an edtech startup? How will you make life better for educators and learners?


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