Scott Heiferman the founder and CEO of Meetup wrote a great piece a week ago on why he has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to running a tech company in NYC. My favorite line:
I love New York. And I’ve got a great company to grow. Silicon Valley Companies succeed because of who they are, how they are, why they are… not where they are. It’s just been a coincidence. The non-SV companies haven’t had the right who/how/why. A company that NEEDS to exist — a company with a vital purpose to serve milions of people’s real needs — will attract the people to bring it to life — and it can exist anywhere.
I also love New York and could think of no other place in the world that is a better fit for a company like PlansForUs. Now back to hammering on Steve to fulfill our users needs.
Back in August a guy named Charlie O’Donnell tested an interesting tactic for garnering attention and feedback on a business that he was starting called Path101. At the time I wrote a quick blog entry admiring the tactic. The tactic, defined as Anti-Stealth, has been an unqualified success for Charlie as he generated significant interest in his business, found a technical partner, refined his presentation and successfully raised an angel round of funding. A consequence of this tactic has been an ongoing discussion within the NYC entrepreneur community about the business effect of this tactic.
Steve and I have always maintained an anti-stealth bias due to our shared belief in the effectiveness of agile development. Our first act of anti-stealth was launching PlansForUs as soon as we had a working set of tools, exposing ourselves as quickly as possible to feedback. Given that our target market, K12 teachers, has a reputation for a lack of tech awareness this was a risk…but it has paid dividends as we embark on our second iteration with a much better understanding of how teachers might interact and use a tool like PlansForUs. With our second iteration underway, a growing user base and a need to increase our development cycles we need to find our seed-stage financing. This leads us to our second act of Anti-Stealth; revealing our investor presentation to readers of this blog…I know the anticipation is building.
By revealing our investor presentation, we also want to better understand a fundamental question of the anti-stealth tactic, if you do not have 1,000+ readers on your blog would it still work as well?
I have 13 subscribers to my blog, went to Colgate, New Trier HS (Winnetka, IL) and play hoops at Stuy Town. Those are a few of my primary networks, so lets find out if this blog can spread the word on PlansForUs beyond these networks. I promise to give full disclosure on how this plays out. So with the lead of Charlie’s anti-stealth movement and our own agile leanings we offer you our investor presentation (slightly modified).
As for anti-stealth, we will continue to play around with this concept as an outgrowth of our convictions that agile development is the most efficient path towards success.
I have been pondering this thought off and on after I saw Jack Welch on CNBC a few mornings ago. Now, to be honest I am less interested specifically in what Jack Welch the person would do (though if you want to leave a comment with the answer Mr. Welch, then I would be honored), but what a personality type like Jack Welch would choose to do if he graduated today.
I mean he got his PhD degree in Chemical Engineering but from his biography seemed to revel more in the social than academic aspects of higher education. So my question is, would Jack Welch still go to work for GE today? or Would he do something else? and what would that something else be?
I apologize my relative quiet on the blogging front. Your regular dose of Tyler was most likely a highlight of your day, but I have been consumed with fundraising for PlansForUs. Next week I will share our fundraising deck, so that you can have a better sense of what we are thinking from a long term perspective.
Having grown up amidst relative affluence I had actually, silly me, thought that the fundraising would be a piece of cake…not the case. Needless to say, I am learning a ton and reaching deeply into my network which has been really great, as I have been able to reconnect with some folks that I had not spoken to in some time.
As for the first part of my title…Do you ever watch No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain? It is on the National Geographic channel and it is absolutely brilliant. I did not know who Anthony Bourdain was until I saw him as a judge on Top Chef. When I saw that he had a show, I figured it would be worth putting on the DVR. A couple shows came and went and then I sat down and watched one. Woah, it’s awesome.
In the show, Tony travels to locales foreign and domestic eating the local food with a heavy focus on street food. The characters that he meets and the food that he eats by adopting this very local style of travel is inspiring. I remember when my wife and I were in Vienna, Austria for a friend’s wedding and yearned to break out from the tourist district and get into the real, local style of Vienna. It is that same yearning that is realized every week on No Reservations.
If you like food and travel then I think you’ll love this show…if you don’t, well then maybe this show is not for you.
Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines and a generally amazing entrepreneur and leader, founded his company on the basis of amazing customer service. He was often quoted as saying that Southwest was not in the airline business, but rather in the customer service business. Interestingly enough, Southwest has continually lived up to this mission and it can be attributed in large part to their unique corporate hierarchy. That hierarchy states that employees come first, customers come second and shareholders come third. The effects of this are described by Herb in this interview:
…if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy?
So…what if we look at the K-12 education system through the same lens. What would the hierarchy be?
Teachers first
Students second
Parents/Government third
I think that it is counter-intuitive to think that any group but the child/student should be in the first position, however that could be just our problem. PlansForUs is utterly focused on the teacher, because it is the teacher that is on the front lines interfacing with the customer. Providing the teacher with the flexible tools to do their job best should be the focus of any administration or government. We tend to focus on the systems that prevent teachers from failing and have the effect of dis-incenting their own customer service/teaching impulse.
Southwest would not have grown had it imposed rigid systems on its employees. By empowering employees, Southwest created a company that solved problems at the edge and then redistributed that new knowledge to all others within the system. That is how we can reform education, that’s how we can help our students. It is not about centralized systems, but rather empowered employees, solving problems at the edge and redistributing those solutions to all who can benefit.
PlansForUs is not the solution, but we are part of a broader solution that recognizes the impact of empowered teachers on education.
On Friday I received a request from one of our PlansForUs users. The request was for a lesson plan on Spiders that was appropriate for a pre-k age group. Lucky for our user I was actually sending our monthly newsletter so I included the request in the newsletter. Last night a lesson was posted on spiders:
While the math portion did not necessarily work for our user, she is using the plan as an art project and is really excited at how this worked. This is the power of the community and we are working on solving the problem of how to simply engage you in this sharing of ideas.
I am going to be working on this thought over the weekend, but I wanted to share it with you, my loyal readers, to get your thoughts. I am interested in knowing what the layers of needs would compose the PlansForUs Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs. I began to ponder this on my walk home after a thought provoking discussion with Tom Hatch of Columbia Teachers College that I was privileged to have this week.
The fact is that there may be a myriad of different Hierarchy of Needs due to the variety of educational contexts that teacher are faced with on a daily basis. Having said that, I want to be crass and un-nuanced and try to come up with a few generalizations. I am particularly interested in your own theories of what these needs may be.
Now, should you choose not to participate, fear not, as I will provide my theory to you regardless of your participation. Below you will find Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (image is from WikiMedia); have a great weekend and I look forward to your thoughts. (FYI-I did a Google search on”Maslow’s Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs” and came up with nothing…we’re breaking new ground here folks)
As the title would suggest, this post is unrelated to teaching.
Do you enjoy the pulpy goodness of Ken Follett? The riveting pace of John Grisham? or the story telling of JK Rowling? My friend Matt, a real up and comer at the NY Fed, published a piece entitled “Buybacks in Treasury Cash and Debt Management” that for many of you Fed watchers will be a must read. For those of you who are not fed watchers, perhaps the character development will be what hooks you.
Matt has assured me that this piece has none of those qualities, but you have to start somewhere. I can tell you that the phrase “…smoothing week-to-week fluctuations in Treasury bill offerings” sent me right to the download button.
Thanks to Matt and his co-author Kenneth for their hard work in analyzing this complex problem and for allowing us to peer into the heads of these brilliant men.
With the Christmas season fast approaching I have a feeling that the barrage of catalogs that are headed to my apartment is not going to abate. My wife and I don’t mind the Patagonia catalog, but beyond that singular great piece of cataloging, the rest are annoying and an environmental drain. In addition, one of the benefits of living in NYC is that you have all the shopping you could want without the catalogs, so I want to stop getting so many stinking catalogs. I have looked into the Direct Marketing Associations website, but the process seemed annoying and I think it cost me money….which is ridiculous.
So I was excited to see that there is a new website out there, Catalog Choice, devoted to ending this mountain of catalogs filling our tiny mailbox. I have signed up and will report back on the success of this service in curtailing our catalog problem. (It would be kind of funny, if this site were just the Direct Marketing Association harvesting email addresses. If that is the case at least spam doesn’t have such a major environmental impact and my gmail is pretty good at protecting me).
By the way, if you haven’t listened to the National yet, make it a priority. You can most likely find them among my Last.FM selections.
I just read my last post about ratings. It is really terrible. I usually let these entries sit for an hour and then come back to them with a clear mind, in this case I did not…and it shows.
I use Last.FM it is an awesome. There are many reasons I think that it is great, but I want to make this entry short. One of the great things is that it allows me to say I love a track or ban that track from my library.
That’s what got me thinking. I very often will press love or ban a track. It is simple and connected to how I feel about the track. I either love or hate it, all the rest of the stuff is in the middle and I can just skip it if I don’t really love it. But I really want more stuff I love and less stuff that I would ban.
Why doesn’t NetFlix do this? or everyother site that uses ratings. I mean there are really only two meaningful vales on a 1-5 scale. 1 and 5. The rest is just sort of in the middle and can be scanned efficiently because 50% of the time you may like it and 50% of the time you won’t.
So my new position on ratings is: Ask me do I love or hate and the rest give me a simple way to scan through it.
Marc Andreessen is a pretty influential dude and a midwesterner. Then he started blogging, which has only increased his influence in tech circles. While Marc is unimpressed by my choice of major, Political Science, he has been posting some interesting thoughts on career planning, which I would encourage you to check out on his blog.
As you know, PlansForUs is working in education because we think that we can help solve a problem for teachers and that education is on the cusp of a major transformation, of which PlansForUs intends to play a significant roll. So, I will set the stage with Marc’s quote and then add a few figures which I think are worth considering.
If you are young and want to have an impact, you want to be in an industry where there is a lot of growth and change and flux and opportunity.
As an industry ages, the vitality drains out until all that’s left is a set of ossified remnants in the form of oligopolostic entities of which you would find being a part to be completely soul-killing.
The exception comes when an industry has gotten so old and ossified that the clear opportunity exists to up-end it and introduce a new order, a new way of doing things, and therefore a new set of companies.
In some industries this happens routinely — e.g. every 10-20 years. This is the case in technology, for example, and financial services.
It doesn’t seem to happen ever in certain other industries which I won’t name for fear of being permanently cut off from my necessary supply of oil, gas, music, and movies.
and this
Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can.
Your target is the core of change and opportunity — figure out where the action is and head there, and do not delay your progress for extraneous opportunities, no matter how lucrative they might be.
Here are a few interesting figures and thoughts:
2.4 million new teachers in the US by 2012
Record enrollment in K-12 schools through 2015
93% of classrooms are connected to the Internet
15-35 million new teachers needed by 2015
Continuing decline in the cost of computer hardware
Potential for Democrat led Executive and Legislative branches of the US government
A major rise in innovative philanthropic/social entrepreneurship engagement in K-12 education
Education is on the road to change and improvement and at the center of that change and improvement is none other than teachers. PlansForUs is happy to be working on the platform that can help teachers. I hope this has provided some insight as to why in the world we have made the choice to be a K-12 education start up company….a sector that has brought down many a talented (and I’m a poli sci major) entrepreneur.
My buddy over at Apple passed along this site because he thought there may be some synergies between what we’re doing at PlansForUs and what Jeff is doing with Hellmansoft’s Planbook. I am going to look more deeply into it, but my first thought is that writing a lesson at PlansForUs and linking to it in your planbook seems like a pretty nice way to organize your work. It would also allow you to access your stuff on the web wherever you are. Write and link the plans at school and update them at home, hmmm. Sounds decent.
Jeff is a teacher in Oregon and I think it is awesome to see his work helping other teachers. If you have any thoughts on how we might work together, leave them in the comments. I’ll work on getting in touch with Jeff sometime next week and let you know how it goes.
In other news we began our user interface improvement project with a few interviews last night. I am excited about what we are learning and can assure you that there will be some serious improvements in usability. In the meantime, thanks for soldiering through and contributing to the growth of PlansForUs.
As you may have noticed I really depend on finding new content and commenting on it. I may not be utterly original but I figure that’s ok if I can expose you to a piece of information that you might not otherwise have seen. That is really the beauty of blogging and of the Internet in general. An individual generates a degree of trust and you, the reader, use that trust to sift through the mass of content produced on an hourly basis. Of course that’s also the premise of what we are doing at PlansForUs.
In any event, I was doing some research on the NewSchools Venture Fund a veritable hub of innovative educational organizations and came across a posting from the Huffington Post entitled “Get Out of Their Darn Way and Let Educators Innovate“. This posting caught my eye because I happen to think that teachers, empowered with information and support, are the key to success in evolving our educational system.
I am going to quote two particular lines that reveal clearly why we ought to stop with the notion of top down solutions and let educational innovation happen on the edge. Those edge innovations are then shared and efficiently distributed to the places where those innovations can have the most impact.
First:
Let’s also take as axiomatic that most teachers and school administrators would prefer that their students learn, grow in mind and heart, and succeed in life. Students, we can assume, would also like to grow and to succeed. So there is a general disconnect between what we want for students, what students want for themselves - and what students get out of the educational process.
Second:
Part of the resistance…Why would they approve somebody to start a middle school that might do better than theirs, and would make them look inadequate? The charter schools can be models for them, but in reality, they’d rather not see us exist, because if there’s a school that’s doing better than they are, it’s going to propagate the growth of the movement and make them look worse.
Who is the “they” that is resisting? I’ll tell you quickly, it’s not the teachers. Innovative educators and social entrepreneurs are spreading throughout the educational system. Some of their ideas will work, some won’t. What we need to do is support these efforts, because if teachers and administrators want students to learn and to grow, we can rest assured that even if an experiment fails, that student will still learn.
As for you innovators out there, PlansForUs can and wants to be your distribution point for virally spreading your teaching ideas, lessons and passions.
This is totally unrelated to teaching, but is really a hilarious SNL short from Andy Samberg. It is a pitch perfect ridicule of the President of Iran’s remarks on the absence of homosexuals in Iran. It was also interesting that while I intended to embed the video from NBC’s site, they were unable to get it right…so enjoy on YouTube (until they have it removed).
