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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[Dr. Sanford Aranoff]

If you wish to best function in the classroom, you need to know how students think. See the new book on amazon.com: "Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better".