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You’re the Boss Blog: High School Entrepreneurs Promise to Save Millions for Schools

Ann Johansson for The New York TimesJonathan Yan (left) and Zak Kukoff: improving grades and reducing crime.

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The adventure of new ventures.

Founded in January, TruantToday is a messaging service that alerts parents instantly via text and e-mail message when students cut class. The goal? Reducing truancy and restoring state and federal financing to school districts, which can lose as much as $50 each day that a student is missing.

Employees: Three full-time employees and hiring two more: a sales representative and a designer.

Location: Westlake Village, Calif.

Founders: Zak Kukoff, 16, and Jonathan Yan, 18, classmates, started TruantToday after Mr. Kukoff skipped a 7 a.m. honors geometry class at Westlake High School. Administrators took two days to call his parents and notify them of his absence.

“An actual person from the school called and said, ‘Your son was absent two days ago and, you know, get on that,’” said Mr. Kukoff, the company’s chief executive. By then, of course, it was far too late to get him back into class. On top of that, the school was expending limited staff resources to make calls that he felt could easily be automated.

“Being the entrepreneurial sort that I am,” he said, “I immediately thought there was a huge opportunity to make a much more efficient — and much more cost effective — system for the school.”

For the record, Mr. Kukoff adds that he was not actually playing hooky. “I wasn’t skipping to go to the mall,” he said. “I was helping the student government set up for a dance.”

Pitch: “Right now, schools are losing millions of dollars per year because students don’t come to the classroom,” Mr. Kukoff said, adding that public schools in San Diego County alone lost at least $102 million in financing during the 2009-10 term because of absences. “Because we send messages out instantly, and because they go out to parents in a medium they’re already interacting in, parents can then work with the school to bring the student back to the classroom in many cases that same day, which not only saves schools millions of dollars but improves grades, lowers dropout rates and actually lowers crime rates as well.”

Traction: So far, TruantToday has signed up three paying customers in the Conejo Valley region of Southern California: Mr. Kukoff’s own Westlake High School, along with Thousand Oaks High School and Newbury Park High School. The company is running free trials at 10 more schools in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It is also in talks with district-level education officials in Sacramento and Seattle, Mr. Kukoff said.

Revenue: TruantToday took in revenue for the first time last month (its customers prepay for a year’s worth of service). The company charges on a sliding scale — from $10 to $1 per student, annually — with lower rates going to clients with the most students. Mr. Kukoff declined to disclose current revenue or projections for this year.

Financing: The company is currently nearing completion of a $500,000 round of angel investment, with investors including Dave McClure of 500 Startups.

Marketing: TruantToday has been building buzz with a few early, high-profile coups. Last week, it won $15,000 in funding and took second place in the Innovation Challenge at NBC’s Education Nation Summit meeting. In June, it was voted the most promising of five start-ups selected to participate in CGI America, a Clinton Global Initiative event dedicated to creating jobs and improving economic growth in the United States. In August, the company completed a 13-week program in Boulder, Colo., with TechStars, a start-up accelerator that provides participants with seed financing and mentoring.

Mr. Kukoff said he was pitching TruantToday to media outlets that cater to educators and developing strategies that would give districts incentives to promote the service. He also blogs for The Huffington Post.

Competition: TruantToday’s primary competitor is SchoolMessenger, a service of Reliance Communications, which was founded in 1999 and is based in Santa Cruz, Calif. SchoolMessenger offers a notification system that disseminates information about emergencies, attendance and schoolwide events using voice mail, text messages, e-mail and social media. Earlier this year, New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, teamed up with SchoolMessenger as part of WakeUp! NYC, an initiative that sent chronically absent students recorded wake-up calls from Magic Johnson and other celebrities.

Other rivals include Edulink Systems, based in Orange, Calif., and ParentLink, a service of Parlant Technology, which has its headquarters in Provo, Utah.

Mr. Kukoff believes his system is more user-friendly than most other software now available to educators. He also said that TruantToday’s system lets educators address individual absences more rapidly than his competitors’ broad-based messaging services. “We’re pitching a very specific return on investment for schools,” he said. He added that his service was the only one that allows two-way text messaging, which lets parents reply to the schools with their phones rather than connecting to the Internet.

Challenge: Getting the word out and hiring the right team members. “We’re looking for people who are not only going into business just to make profit, but to have a social impact as well,” Mr. Kukoff said. “It’s important to us to have a company that’s founded on an ethos of helping people.”

Now it’s your turn to weigh in. Can this pair of teenage social entrepreneurs go head-to-head with rivals that have been around for more than a decade?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1cdd656f219eaa446c1b0650e339ccfe

Corner Office: Bing Gordon: Power? Thanks, but I’d Rather Have Influence

Q. Were you in leadership positions early on?

A. I ran the high school newspaper and was in student government. I played sports my whole life but was never picked as captain. But even as an 18-year-old, I had to grow comfortable with my leadership style, which is that I was really impatient with under-motivated people — extremely impatient, to the point where I was counterproductive as a manager of underproductive people. And that hasn’t really changed. If people need to be motivated, I’m no good.

Q. What happens?

A. I get cranky. I stop being polite and I stop looking for win-win opportunities. It’s just: “What? You’re doing this thing and you’re not trying to do it really well? I just don’t understand.” As you grow up, you become more comfortable with your own peccadilloes, and I’m bad with people who aren’t self-motivated. And now, when I see them coming, I run the other way.

Q. Tell me about the first paid management job.

A. The first time I had a secretary, I was sheepish about being demanding or even asking questions. A woman was assigned to me named Sandy Fitzgerald, and she said, “You don’t know how to manage an exec assistant, do you?” And I said, “No.” And she said: “Well, I’m going to teach you. You have to ask for this, you have to do this and you have to do this.” So it was like Secretary 101. So it’s actually a lesson for management. It’s hire people who can teach you how to be their manager and to be real explicit. I think what a lot of managers know is that you’re owned by the people you’re responsible for.

Q. You were the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts. Now you’re in a different kind of leadership role as a venture capitalist. Can you talk about the differences?

A. Early on, I learned that I’m better with influence than power. And, in fact, I’m not power-hungry. My sense is that to be a good operator, you need to be power-hungry. You need to care more about power than prestige, and probably more about power than money, and more about power than intellectual stimulation. And people who are good operators tend to want power so they can get stuff done. They want to wield it. And there’s a cost to having power, which is that the people you have sway over actually own you, especially if you’re in a business where there are more jobs than there are good people.I like having influence. I like being with interesting people and helping them become better and being part of the flow of ideas. And that’s a little bit uncomfortable, as a boss. It doesn’t make sense to people that the boss, who is kind of a figurehead and maybe a confidence-giving parent figure, just wants to be an experienced helper. As a person of authority, I’m kind of teacher-consultant more than wielder of power.

The fitness function of a venture capitalist — meaning the metrics of performance, the report card — is pretty pure. You show up with money, and one way or another more money has to come back than goes in. So I just do stuff I’ve learned over time and work with people who I like who are really motivated, who want to listen to me most of the time and take feedback and then make it their own. And I work in areas that I want to learn about, areas that are fascinating, because fascination is a good thing.

It’s better to work with people who you would pay to be able to work with. So if you’re working with someone in an area that fascinates you, with people you can add value to and have good conversations with, who are capable and really motivated and you would pay to hang out with them, I’m pretty confident good things would happen.

Q. What were some other important leadership lessons?

A. One is, test yourself at extremes as early as possible.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. The interesting thing about team sports is that it’s hard to win all the time, so it’s kind of a true test. Even Michael Jordan couldn’t win all the time. You can take yourself all the way to the extreme and you start finding out that with billions of people on the planet, no matter how good you think you are, there’s always somebody better and you can’t bring it equally every day. So sports is a good real-world test. I think that living in cities is a good real-world test. Trying to make it in business is a good real-world test.So I’d say, first, be tested somehow in a way that feels legit. And I don’t think being tested by grown-ups is a legitimate test. I’ve seen people go to certain universities and get kind of a stamp and that gives them confidence. I’m not sure that that’s a sufficient test.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=99bd479b0d3e91590f332930e7049001

You’re the Boss Blog: High School Entrepreneurs Promise to Save Millions for Schools

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Corner Office: Bing Gordon: Power? Thanks, but I’d Rather Have Influence

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