seedWatcher

Interview with Grockit CEO Farbood Nivi

San Francisco-based Grockit today announced closing an $8M Series B round from Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital Partners. Though the company is still in stealth mode while it develops its MMOLG (Massive Multi Player Online Learning Game), I had the chance to catch up with Founder/CEO Farbood Nivi. {disclosure: I'm an investor in Grockit.}

Seedwatcher: It's been 11 months since you guys closed your Series A, what made you think now was the best time to raise another round of funding?

Farb Nivi: The market. While venture capital has hardly dried up, it has taken a bit of a dip and it's difficult to say how deeply the ultimate impact will be felt or what specific types of investments will garner less interest. We had an opportunity to work with a great firm and at the same time put enough fuel in the bank to expand, people wise.

SW: What does the Grockit team look like now?

FN: We're at a little over 10 folks and our team straddles the line between technology and learning. The majority of our team is developers, but we have academic people and folks with specifically one foot in each camp.

SW: Recently, there's been some well-publicized turmoil over the scalability of Ruby on Rails with the recent explosive growth of Twitter. Are you concerned about Rails as a long-term choice for Grockit?

FN: Rails is a great framework that may take the prize on certain things and not others. The load it carries at Grockit is pretty well-suited for it.

SW: You spent a good deal of time in the standardized test prep world, what is it about the current landscape that you saw was in need of disruption?

FN: Personally, I think education as a whole, not just the major commercial players, is in need of a fundamental re-design. The established method of applying manufacturing assembly methods to students is not working. If it was, then there wouldn't be illiterate graduates and almost all students would meet standards.

I think and hope that technology, namely the distributed web and carefully developed algorithms can help increase the efficiency in the market where those looking to learn can meet those look to teach. The efficiency I'm referring to is one of economics certainly, but more importantly one of maximizing the learning interactions.

We are all learners. We are ahead of other learners in one area, behind other learners in another. Those learners that dedicate themselves to teaching can offer an incredible value to the whole, but not if they are made to serve a system more than their learning opportunities.

SW: Where are the traditional players in this space, and how do you see them competing?

FN: We try and keep relatively abreast of what is going on in the edu-tech space. That said, we've found the asynchronous, single user modality to be what most people are developing.

SW: You've adopted the term MMOLG (a play on MMOG) to describe the Grockit technology. What is it about game mechanics that appeals to you so much?

Game mechanics are a subset/style of human mechanics. Like life, games have risk and reward. Unlike life, the risk and reward is more known and quantifiable. Also, most people 30 and older grew up playing games and understand the basic framework of experience points and levels. The Atari 2600 came out the year I was born and I can remember where I was standing when I first saw Pac-Man being played on one. Then, it was King Quest I, Nintendo, Sega Genesis and so on. Game mechanics are a part of what it means to have grown up in the past few decades.

SW: Tell me something you've learned about starting a company that you didn't expect.

Nothing. I expect the unexpected, so everything/anything is expected. Unfortunately, not everything can be prepared for.

SW: What's been your biggest challenge as a company so far?

FN: Finding enough great people.

SW: You're building what you've called a "Learning 2.0" platform - what specifically will be different that existing online learning tools?

I can't tell you.

SW: How will Grockit's platform fit into a traditional learning environment like a school or university?

FN: We hope that Grockit can become a powerful tool in the classroom and after school. We can see it being used in most learning environments from grade school through university. Most teachers have a pretty powerful passion for teaching and helping their students. We think that if we can give teachers more powerful tools, they can get more out of their own time and energy.

SW: When can we expect a public launch?

FN: This year.

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Grockit

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Benchmark Capital

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Integral Capital Partners

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Photo of the Day: D6 Conference Schwag Bag

Thanks to Rafat Ali at paidContent.org for his hotel room snapshot of the schwag bag from the D: All Things Digital Conference this year. Note the Guitar Hero III - Wii edition.

Photo of the Day

from We Made This.

Knewton raises $2.5M to join the Online Education hunt

New York-based Knewton, Inc. has raised a $2.5M Series A from Accel Partners and First Round Capital. There's not much to share about the stealth-mode startup which is looking to join the growing fray aimed at tackling the online education market. Founder Jose Ferreira has some pedigree in the industry, having served as Kaplan Inc.'s Managing Director of New Markets, where he acquired businesses and started new business units in the online education space. Later he was a partner with New Atlantic Ventures.

As of now, the company website is just an empty placeholder, but I'd expect that to change soon. Hopefully we'll get a glimpse of what their approach will be in the months to come.

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Knewton

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The Hollywood Pitch for Startups

Excellent post over at Venture Hacks on the importance of having a high-concept Hollywood-style pitch for your startup. As in Alien: "It's Jaws in space."  Some great examples they came up with:

“Friendster for dogs.” (Dogster)

“Flickr for video.” (YouTube)

“We network networks.” (Cisco)

“The Firefox of media players.” (Songbird)

“Massively Multiplayer Online Learning.” (Grockit)

“The entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs.” (Sequoia)

“Venture Hacks.” (Guess who.)

Increo's Backboard Launches with seed round from DFJ

Silicon Valley-based Increo closed a seed round form Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) this week and kicked things off with the launch of their first product, Backboard. It's a simple collaborative tool for sharing a document, presentation, image or even a URL to a group and gather feedback over the web. Team-based collaboration tools are nothing new these days, with favorites such as Huddle, 37signal's BaseCamp, Onstage, and DeskAway.

The pro's of Backboard, are clearly it's painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. I went ahead and set up a Backboard feedback page for the seedWatcher blog. Anyone can comment on a document if they're given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I'd like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It's also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it's going to get wide-scale business use.

The company's been bootstrapping it for the past year on the Stanford campus before the recent DFJ investment. Increo's founders are all recent Stanford grads - Jeff Seibert, Kimber Lockhart, Rebecca Illowsky and Ray Thang, who came together as part of a CompSci class assignment to develop their own project.

For a first product from this new team, it's a good start. They whipped up a quick and dirty way to share something with a group of people in a shared space. On their site, they write, "the company's software supports teams throughout the innovation process, from brainstorming to conception." Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way. If that's the case, then I would suggest leveraging some of the social networking API's and getting it so users can share directly from some of the groups I'm already engaged with online.

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Increo Solutions

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Draper Fisher Jurvetson

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Photo of the Day

Daily Wikipedia tours in your RSS Reader with DailyLit

DailyLit has been quietly growing since its launch in September of 2006 when it first brought serialized daily chunks of a handful of classic lit titles to your email inbox. Today of course you can subscribe to over 750 classic and contemporary books in your RSS reader (or email if that's your thing.) Today they launched "Wikipedia Tours" which will give you a daily walk-through of sweeping Wikipedia topics from Major World Religions, "Best Picture" Oscar Winners, and Wine 101.

The idea behind DailyLit is that more and more people are becoming habituated to read in blog-post style amounts, essentially articles, rather than long sessions with our latest novel. Rather than fighting that trend, you can bring the novel into the the way we read today. Novels rose to popularity in the days before electricity, radio, television and of course computers. They were designed to occupy several hours of a person's time over several evenings. Today, we aggregate numerous sources of content daily into a single source with the rise of the RSS reader.

I think this is a tool we need to look at seriously when developing new methods to engage young people in the learning process. The truth is reading for pleasure is down in the US across all age groups.   

In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize, celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.” (New York Times, 11/19/07)

DailyLit could be a leader in the effort to bring traditional reading into modern formats. It's possible that this is something Amazon will pursue, though they appear pretty married to the Kindle approach. I think they've got the right idea by making its community features optional to those who chose to participate in the book discussions, while still allowing anyone to anonymously subscribe to any free feed of their choosing. For the Pay-Per-Read ones, that is books that are not yet in the public domain, you have to purchase the feed.

I've subscribed to two daily feeds from DailyLit to join my Google Reader staples, one classic novel and one Wikipedia tour:

1. Democracy in America, Book One by Alexis De Tocqueville.

2. Wikipedia Tours: "Best Picture" Oscar Winners.

(For anyone new to RSS readers, check out my favorite overview guys at CommonCraft's video: RSS in Plain English.)

Photo of the Day

From Flore Vegan on Sunset Blvd. in LA.

Time to Reinvent the Classroom: A Vision of Students Today

"Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects and schedules." -Marshall McLuhan, 1967

Watch the video.

Then come join the discussion at mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg