Blessing in disguise

When I was 16 years old I knew I wanted to work in technology. What I didn’t know was what I wanted to do in technology as a career.

When I went to the University of Washington, the hot company to join back then in 2002 was Microsoft. I was fortunate enough to get into a co-op program with them for six months as a Product Manager in 2005 and boy was I excited! One month into my job at Microsoft, I knew I hated it. I hated the politics as well as the red tape. When the decision came to accept a full-time offer or find another job, I decided the latter. That’s when my second ideal company came up in 2006 - Deloitte Consulting. 

The green dot promised me the wonders of travel and the most exciting projects to work on. Not only did they ship me off for the entire year (which was to LA from Seattle), I got to work on boring government projects that moved incredibly slow. I knew I needed to leave and do something much more exciting and impactful and at that time I was fixated on a company called Zillow. Zillow was one of the hottest companies in Seattle and I really enjoyed the real estate market and that’s when I applied. 

I would have hoped to say I got the job and all my dreams came true but this was far from it. I didn’t get the job as Product Manager and I was torn. I thought I answered all the questions correctly but I guess that wasn’t the case. After that day, I was pretty devastated and down about it. 

A week later Facebook was announcing the Facebook Platform and while Zuck was giving his keynote and I remember I was instantly sold within the first ten minutes of his talk. I knew i wanted to work there since I saw the potential of his vision as well as the product. After his keynote, I put together my resume for a position at Facebook and submitted it online at 12:30pm that day. Three hours later I remember getting an email back from a recruiter and two weeks later getting an offer from Facebook. And the rest is history. 

As I reflect back I must admit that not getting that job at Zillow was probably the best thing to happen to me in my career. If I got that job, I wouldn’t have applied to Facebook, moved down to San Francisco, and spent the next 5 years of my life at one of the best companies in the world. It’s crazy to think that my entire career was based on that one event that I marked as a failure. 

Come and get your Libraries!

To all of you developers out there who gave us a ton of feedback around our APIs, thank you so much. We’re happy to say we just released a couple of helper libraries to our developer community. This should bootstrap you onto the LearnSprout APIs much faster. The libraries can be found here: 

http://developers.learnsprout.com/libraries

If you have any questions, feel free to email us at support [at] learnsprout.com.

Also, special props to one of our developer members who built our Ruby Library, Kabuko.

Cheers,
Frank 

Applying to an Accelerator Program - Imagine K12

In parallel of building and validating our hypothesis with our prototype, we also applied to a few accelerator programs. If you don’t know what accelerator programs do, check here and here for more info but basically they help your startup get off the ground. Fast. When applying to a few of the accelerator programs, you’ll have to expect 3 things: The application, the interview, and the suspense.

The application: 

The Imagine K12 application is very similar to YC (maybe that’s due to all the influence YC had on Imagine K12) which was pretty awesome for us since the application we used for YC we could use for Imagine K12. The application itself is actually a really good way to really make you focus on the main core aspects of your business and thing you’re building. It helps boil your ideas and business strategy into a couple of sentences. If you’re thinking of applying to accelerator programs, you should start early on your application. Even better, if you have an idea, build it and validate the hell out of it. If you can show you have adoption (and revenue!!) on the application, the more you stand out.

Once we had a rough draft of our application, we sent it off to a lot of friends for review. This helps a lot since you need to be very concise with what you’re getting act. If your friends don’t understand what the hell you’re building, how can the partners. After a bunch of revisions and numerous comments, we had an application we felt solid with. We sent the YC application a couple of weeks early. For Imagine K12, we sent it in the day of (whoops) since we didn’t actually know of Imagine K12 until Startup School.

On November 18, we got the email from Imagine K12 that we got accepted into the next round — the interview. 

The Interview:

The interview was scheduled for December 1st. We talked to a few of our friends who got interviews by YC or got into YC, and they helped us understand what the interviews are like. Chaotic. You actually can’t prep for the interview after chatting with our friends. The one way you can be confident into going into the interview is being logical with how you’re going to build your business and whether people want to buy what you have.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, we tried practiced a few times interviewing each other on what we thought the Imagine K12 team would ask us but after a few hours of doing that we realized that we can’t really prepare for the interview that way. Actually, the best way to prep for the interview is to try to run your business now. Understand your competitive landscape, how are you going to make money, why your team is the right team to solve this problem, are you sure people would use your product .. would they pay for it?  These are the questions they’ll ask and the only way to know these answers is to try to build your product and get it in front of people for feedback. And that’s exactly what we did or try to understand as fast as possible.

When December 2nd came, we arrive at the AOL building on Page Mill. We got there about 20 minutes before hand and met with a few of the teams that were part of the last Imagine K12 cohorts. We chatted with them for a while and then I brought the team outside to clear our minds and focus on the task at hand. After 5 minutes enjoying the sun, we entered the AOL building again and they called us in.

The interview was concluded extremely quick. 10 minutes. Done, fin, all pau. Each team has 10 minutes with the 4 partners and it’s a fast pace conversation. No chit chat, but straight the point. We got into the room and I basically started the conversation off with who we are and what we’re building. After that, it was question after question. It’s like a group interview if you’ve been to one. The partners are just blazing through questions and you and your team’s job is to answer them as confident and logical as possible without stepping or overpowering each other. No tangents or side points (don’t waste time). Basically, in, out, done.

After the interview, you thank them and walk out. Now comes the suspense part. 

The Suspense:

After the interview, you have to wait until the end of the day to find out your results. In our shoes, we had to wait until the next day to figure out if we’ve been accepted. Imagine that. Your startup, your team, your ambitions are lingering on a phone call (or an email i hear if you don’t get accepted). The suspense gets to people I hear. People can’t concentrate, eat, or even sleep because they wait anxiously for the answer. 

We thought we’ll find out the day of our interview around 7 or 8pm. When that time came and gone, I was frantically checking my email to see if we got rejected but nothing. 

The next day, we basically continued our path as if nothing happened. We continued to build our product and idea since it was no use just waiting around. Then it happened. Around 3pm I got a call from a strange number so I stepped out of the room. It was Tim, one of the partners of Imagine K12, and we just got accepted into the program. After the call, I came back to the main space where Anthony and Joe were (my co-founders) and I told them the good news. Let’s just say a few drinks (and a game of settlers) were in order. 

Hopefully that helps on what’s it like to apply to an accelerator program.

2.5 Months in … Recap Time

After leaving Facebook back in late September, things have been busy, to say the least. In this post, i’m only going to focus on the startup life portion since that seems to be consuming a lot of my time and a lot more in the near future. So with that, let’s recap:

  • Brainstorming on ideas and finally deciding on doing an education startup
  • Applying / getting interviewed with accelerator programs (YC, Imagine K12, and AngelPad)
  • Meeting the startup community, especially the edu tech
  • Meeting with the education community (teachers, schools, admins, etc).
  • And designing, building, validating (rinse and repeat) in between

Brainstorming / Deciding on an idea

When we were brain storming on ideas our our main philopshy was to write everything down. It doesn’t matter on whether the idea was necessarily “stupid” .. just write it down. You never know whether that idea is dumb or not until you start evaluating it. Also, it may help spawn new ideas off of it.

Once we had a bunch of ideas down, we notice a pattern. All of our ideas were revolving around a couple main themes so we decided to pursue those ideas more in depth. With that, we came up with our first idea — syllabus hub. We had a clear idea on what we wanted to achieve and figured that this was a good starting point in working as a team as well as just executing an idea and pushing it out the door to validate. NOTE: syllabus hub is only the tip of what we want to build and we later realized that (more below).  

Designing / Building / Validating

Once we had a goal / vision on what we wanted to build, we went right in. We talked about the architecture design and what languages to use. We also started iterating on the design (UI/UX) of it as well. Over the course of 3 weeks we built syllabus hub. Boy was there a lot of learnings there: everything from what languages / frameworks to use, to understanding SEO and analytics (you must measure everything on what hypothesis you want to test on), to infrastructure stuff (Amazon EC2, etc). 

Once we had a rough idea, we shipped it to folks who are in our test market (teachers, students, TAs, school counselors, etc) for feedback. The info we got was extremely valuable; actually without that feedback, we wouldn’t have realized the idea we truly wanted to pursue and that was all due to understanding what our customers really want from them using our application. Actually, I think without this feedback, I don’t think we would have gotten into the accelerator program (or be where we are today). If you’re building a startup, I really do believe in the lean startup movement: Build, Validate, and measure whether what you built is true to your hypothesis. 

More info to come.


Adobe Illustrator CS 5 - Learnings

Since we got into Imagine K12 an education startup accelerator just like YC but for education (more info on that in the next blog), we’ve been designing our backend schema and getting the front end to work (sort of). It’s been fun designing it from the ground up but since we don’t have a designer (graphic or UI), i’ve been trying to learn more design. With that, I’ve been using Illustrator much more to do high fidelity mockups and now just creating basic images (aka art). 

I’ve been reading a lot of tutorials and design blogs recently and did my first trial. Here’s my first mock of mario .. not bad i must admit but i think his chin is a little .. crazy. 

Props to this site for a lot of good tutorials.