Q: How did you come up with the idea of BetaMatch?

A: The idea for BetaMatch came from a variety of different places. I had reconnected with my college friend, Kamal Ravikant, over some writing projects this past spring—Kamal is an outstanding Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which I hadn’t known much about when we reconnected; he was trying to get me to do some writing, and I read through his mind-blowing material, including the book he was in the process of releasing. I hadn’t known exactly what he did in Silicon Valley except that it was something to do with computers.

I had been looking for teachers who used technology, but I had the following restrictions. First, I had no budget, and second, no computers. I figured there must be teachers out there in similar situations. Kamal and I were talking about this—he’s not in EdTech, but the fact that he did something with computers led me to ask him about classroom technology. He said he knew people in that EdTech—that “there was a lot going on in that field.” I figured he knew some teachers. I was wrong–he knew a lot more. He sent me the Learnist beta shortly after it was I think it was released in May. This literally changed the direction of my life.

I sent Kamal an email saying how much I loved it. It was just what I was looking for. That email found it’s way back to Farb Nivi. I was able to give feedback to Farb and the team. Learnist was fantastic, but there were a couple things that would have made it better for teachers specifically, even though it’s an open platform. Farb and the team listened to the feedback and changed things so I can use it in and out of the classroom today. From there, I became increasingly more involved in EdTech.

I don’t think I’d have been as able to give feedback to Farb if he wasn’t Kamal’s friend—I thought I was helping a friend of a friend. Teachers are trained to be nice–I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings if I didn’t like a product or platform.  However,  startups need direct, pointed feedback. This whole experience made me realize that it’s important to match up entrepreneurs and teachers, getting the right types of honest feedback back to the entrepreneurs, and it would be great to have a large-scale process to do that.

Later on, I connected with Shawn Rubin, who’s doing great things in this area in Rhode Island. He works for the Highlander Institute, which does tech outreach locally, and he has his own startup, Metryx. He invited me to a group called the EdUnderground, which started as a professional learning network, and has morphed from there. We ended up creating monthly meetups for educators to meet entrepreneurs. We had people traveling great distances to gain access to educators for feedback at these gatherings, which have been growing and continue to grow.

When StartupWeekend came, I was going to go watch to see if we might organize something locally. Heather told me to compete, so I figured I’d pitch the idea for these meetups in platform format.  Shawn couldn’t go, but Kyle Judah, who came to one of the meetups, went.

Kyle and his partner Jason Woodward were going to help with this platform. By the time they got to New York they advised that they were more interested in doing something having to do with professional development. Ultimately, they stayed on board and were an integral part of the team.

Q: Who was on your team and what was it like to work with them during Startup Weekend NYC EDU?

A: The team consisted of me, Jason Woodward (engineer extraordinaire), Kyle Judah, (marketing, biz dev), Karleen Levellie (marketing), Arielle Norling (Front end design/ UX/UI), John Baldo, (former teacher turned engineer), Ope Bukola (who taught herself Ruby in a year—amazing!!!) and Yannick Guillemot (coder/developer, awesome).

Q: What was the best moment of Startup Weekend NYC EDU for you?

A: The best moment of Startup Weekend for me was talking to people—I came to meet incredible people, and I did. I always love hearing about other people and their vision. When I had mentors approaching me and talking about the vision this simple idea could bring forward—informing me that investors told them that this idea would be perfect for helping investors vet their EdTech startups because in addition to matching people for our original purposes—creating a feedback loop—we had the potential to own the data about what startups succeeded and in which demographic or under what conditions. Basically, I came with a simple idea that was put together from a variety of sources, and gained a vision about how that idea had the potential to be an industry game-changer.

Coming from public education, where things do not change quickly and there is a committee for everything, gaining the realization that I, as an individual,  can have an impact on the industry—whether through this venture or another—that was the best moment for me.

Q: What are your plans and what do you need going forward?

A: I felt that I couldn’t move forward without including the people who have worked so hard to get the boots-on-the-ground network we have in Rhode Island off to a running start. I went to SWedu to vet that idea, and found it to be wildly successful. I think that a couple people from the team are interested in getting the platform going right now, however, I’m going to continue to work toward expanding our networks here in Rhode Island and consider the best way to proceed forward.  I believe in this idea—I want to use this idea, and to some extent we already are. There are so many directions that it can take—from very, very simple—matching up educators and entrepreneurs, to pretty complicated data analysis. So, we shall see how it best serves the education community.

Q: What advice do you have for others interested in jumping into the edtech space?

A: I came to this field completely by accident—I literally hadn’t known this entire world existed beyond some newspaper stories here and there. I hadn’t known the impact of the connections my friend Kamal was making for me. I thought he’d connect me with a few people using technology in the classroom, maybe teachers who had budget constraints, too, and I would compare notes and learn. To some extent, entering the space in this way has given me a better perspective and more honesty in offering my opinions. Now I understand the arena a lot better—something which competing in Startup Weekend helped me to do. This competition filled in many of the missing pieces as to how one gets from ideation to iteration with a startup. I do have some business experience—I own a business of my own—but this has been an entirely different experience. I think that I have learned critical things. EdTech is highly competitive, but there is space for good ideas that solidly have the educator and students in mind.

There is a lot more to succeeding in this area than having a great idea, however—there is promoting, connecting, and building relationships, something I have learned becoming involved with  the EdUnderground and the Rhode Island EdTech scene, and from working with a number of the industry’s leading visionaries at Learnist.  I have always loved education and connecting with people—this is the foundation of marketing and outreach—having a genuine love for the space and a passion to make education perfect. Even if I can’t make it perfect, I can, as one single individual, make it far better over time.

My advice—as someone who is very new to this field and decidedly unqualified to give advice—is if you have that love, that passion, get involved. Build a team you love that has the same passion as you. If you can do that, you may find an area of opportunity that is not being currently addressed in the field, or you can tweak an idea to make it work better.

There are a ton of startups out there. Everyone is a co-founder this, entrepreneur that. That’s true—you have to be those things, but if you are a “lover of all things ed/EdTech,” that’s the most important thing. Then, you will have a real shot of succeeding and making something that truly has an impact on students and the field of education.

—

A note from the Startup Weekend #NYCEDU webmaster: This blog post represent the last blog post of the 2013 Startup Weekend #NYCEDU experience. Thank you to all the organizers, mentors, judges, volunteers, and most importantly, participants who made this weekend incredible. Please stay in touch via Twitter and email, and look for updates next year when we start this whole adventure all over again.

~Deborah Chang

Produced by Andrew Young

And special shout out to our audience favorite, KickArt Games, with an impressive 4.5 out of 5 stars possible!

Special thanks to our judges, Frank Bonsal, Joanna Cannon, Matt Klein, Amy Rosen, Bela L. Musits, and Matt Greenfield for their expertise.

Watch Live

Judge Each Presentation as It Happens

1. Go to www.socrative.com on any internet capable advice
2. Click on Student Login
3. Join room 0499
4. Vote Away

Modified Friday Schedule

Final Pitches from 4:00-6:45 PM
Dinner at 6:45 PM
Judging Results Announced at 7:15 PM
Wrap-Up at 9:00 PM

Order of Pitches

Each pitch is 4 minutes of content & 3 minutes of Q&A from the judges

Pitching for success:

“Include a startling statistic. it’s powerful and memorable.” @arsSamantha Samantha Diamond of project Light & Shadow

“Showcase why you’re the one to solve the problem, you need to show that you are someone people can trust to invest their time or money.” Nelson Chu, founder @Tidbit. Project Lesson Bloom

“There are lots of ways to structure your pitch, but if you want people to remember you you need to be energetic and appeal to emotions. connecting with the audience is the most important part.” Bo Wen @wenboown from Project Top Notch Teachers

On teamwork:

“Clearly articulate your ideas because communication is the key.” Latrice Davis @LatriceLDavis of Project WeIntervene

“Teamwork is about communicating. Have sync-up meetings every couple of hours.” @overworkedasian Andrew Young, SW Videographer

On picking a name:

“Name brainstorming sucks. Make sure you fully understand your mission and then find keywords that are relevant.” Sahil Rahman, @sahil1224 from project Class Speaker.

On forming productive teams:

“Project leads should set up benchmarks for each team member. The expectations should be clear from the beginning.” @Ariel_n Ariel Norling from project Beta Match.

“Team leaders should focus on the core agenda to engage all members in the road to productivity.” @annacurran Anna Curran, Mentor.

“Remember and address your team members by their names. It goes a long way.” Cyndi Knapic @cyndi02, Kevin Ramos @kvnmr, and Anonymous Hacker @zzzz7777777

curated by Cyndi Knapic, Zeeshan Mughal, and Kevin Ramos

Universal Startup Weekend judging criteria is broken up into three sections. Teams are judged according to the following 3 criteria (weighed equally):

Business Model:
The heart of it all. If you haven’t got answers to these questions, you’ve spent too much time on frills & features and need to get back to the basics:

Who is your customer?
What is your core value proposition?
What are your key activities?
What are your revenue streams?
What is your cost structure?
Who/what are your key partners/resources?
What are your distribution channels?
What is your rollout strategy?

Customer Validation:
 Have you taken the proper steps to ensure that the people who matter (your future customers) support and reinforce your assumptions? Think of Customer Validation as ‘evidence’ to back up the core structure of your ‘theory’ (your Business Model). The more feedback you gather (quantity), the more this feedback comes from your specific target market (quality), and the more you’re able to actually integrate this feedback into the Business Model and product development (execution), the better.

Execution:
The nitty gritty: what has your team been able to actually build over the weekend? Even the strongest of Business Plans are useless in the hands of those who can’t properly execute on them. Getting as far as possible in the development of your product/prototype not only helps give Judges a tangible vision of what the final product could be, but proves your strength and skills as a team. This is what truly matters: investors don’t invest as in ideas so much as teams.

We get a lot of emails asking what Startup Weekend EDU is all about, how it works, etc. It’s almost exactly like a traditional Startup Weekend (if there is such a thing as a “traditional” Startup Weekend), but with a few tweaks:

1. All of the pitches on Friday and companies demoed on Sunday will be designed to solve problems in the education space, broadly defined–not restricted to K-12 or other “formal” education.
2. EDU events add a fourth crucial participant category: educator. Who better to speak about problems in education than teachers? In fact, they’re so well-suited to this task that we give them the authority to “teacher approve” Friday night pitches before they’re opened up to general voting and team selection!

You may still be thinking, “As interesting as that sounds, I don’t know how a regular Startup Weekend runs.” If so, here’s the scoop:

Startup Weekend is no ordinary event. It where like-minded entrepreneurs gather for a weekend of company creation. In 54 hours, you take an initial idea from the Friday night pitches through to a mind-spinning startup company at the Sunday night finale.

Just don’t think it’s only developers; this isn’t a mere hackathon. Hackthons produce products or features; Startup Weekends produce companies. Startup Weekenders are marketing maestros, design gurus, business development wizards, legal geniuses, and the specialists of startups, the jack of all trades coming together as one, creating a harmony that can only be envied by the corporate world.

OK – so that may be slight sales mode, but it truly is all about bringing together knowledge of the local entrepreneurship scene and helping those in need find their footing in the world of startups.

Friday night is all about networking and the pitches. Those with an idea who are brave enough will stand in front of 150 strangers and give a 1-minute elevator pitch to the crowd. The ideas that people like–and want to work with–then get created over the remainder of the weekend (and often beyond). You and your self-selected team will have approximately 48 hours to deliver a product and plan that can stand up to the harsh light of day. Mentors will be on hand throughout the time to help you fine tune the idea from a fledgling concept into a working company with huge potential in less than two days.

Sounds intense? It is!

Sunday night is where the jury panel comes in. Seasoned professionals who have been through the startup mill many times over will scrutinize and find the holes in the plan to evaluate your chances of real world succession.

From there? Well, it’s all up to you. Startup Weekend can only help you start your dream. It’s up to you to live it out.

Go on, what are you waiting for? Get your tickets here and take the plunge. After all, the best way to learn entrepreneurship is by doing.

1. Dash
2. Vocabslam
3. ReturnOnWhatYouLearn
4. Kinobi
5. NfoShare
6. Teachspace.me
7. Bundle
8. Spriggle
9. Hidden Gems Uncovered
10. Lean Pickup Lines
11. AbroadIn
12. VentureBoard
13. Mystro
14. Classroom Blueprint
15. TeamTime
16. Fate of Civilizations
17. PenPalNews
18. Student Dashboard

Follow @SWeduNYC and #NYCEDU on twitter for the live play-by-play!