Jurnell Cockhren of Sophicware and the Age of Communal Empowerment Through Software
A talk about creating a business from scientific thought, and reconstructing the agency model.
fog is conducting a series of interviews with software startups who are social innovators. We look to their opinions on what the software industry looks like today and how it might shape the future.
For our first series of interviews, we looked right in our backyard of East + Downtown Nashville, where a new boon of startups is taking shape.
We spoke with Jurnell Cockhren, founder and CEO of Sophicware, who develops software serving simultaneously as a solution and a teaching tool for those in need. Jurnell is also a teacher at the Nashville Software School. Previously, the entrepreneur worked for Cabedge and Vanderbilt.
He’s also published 19 times in subjects ranging from Astronomy, to Clinical Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavioral Science. You can find some of his interesting work here.
With Sophicware, he aims to bring transparency and competence to the realm of web hosting and development. With a focus on internal tooling, they’re able to evolve at a pace that matches that of technology. Sophicware gives access to micro to mid-sized businesses to the talent and tools that are within arm’s reach of the largest enterprises without the need to enterprise sized wallet.
Personally, Jurnell has a interesting view on the role of technological empowerment, and the implications we as people have in the success and adoption of the technology in our daily lives.
Trust us, we were giddy interviewing this guy.
Can you go through a little bit of maybe the history of Sophicware and how it came to be?
Sophicware started as a hypothesis to the idea that we can redirect energy taken from software development to influence some sort of change in our community that we could measure. This happened back in 2010 or 2011, before the official inception of Sophicware. It’s basically where in Vanderbilt, where I used to work in a science lab and I noticed that the needs of the people who weren’t researchers — they needed some help to get to a stable environment in order to use and build technical tools for the things they were doing. At the time it was a pro-bono training for people to be software developers with two interns from the department [in Vanderbilt].
So you were training researchers at Vanderbilt?
No, these were interns who were working with the researchers at Vanderbilt, and for their internship they needed to learn web development. I was like “ok, here’s the deal —I will teach you web development if you agree to take that talent and apply it to this nonprofit that is in need.” Went through that instruction — it took about four to five months to get them competent — around the same time Sophicware was budding. And we paired with a non-profit, that I used to sit on the board with called Developing K.I.D.S out in Detroit, which provided a free after school program, mentoring for inner city school children. They needed a new website and it was HORRIBLE.
[laughs]
It was so bad, to the point where I was like, “man this is an easy win.”
By the time we started that project, Sophicware’s infrastructure was already ready to go. We had one intern come up with a design, another writing code — and we failed. Hard. On the face!
And that’s when I realized that even though we had good intentions, it wasn’t sustainable when it comes to the cost and time it takes to train people. But also, due to the skill set of the individuals when they are trained up, it’s just not enough. Sometimes you’ve got to provide even more time and resources to get them through the project. Also, not every organization is ready for that — not every organization wants to be involved. Even though we had really awesome concepts, given that they weren’t paying, they too did not have an urgency and so they kinda missed out on value a little bit.
That’s a really dense packet of lessons.
Yeah.
With that, I saw that it [our process] didn’t work in that form, so it really broke my heart. But, I figured that there’s still validity in that approach — the idea of the redirection of this energy can somehow be encapsulated in a manner that is serving the groups that need it.
My first step was to find non-profit or for profit organizations that are doing the most as a collective group to help people that I care about.
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We pivoted a bit and said:
How can you just devote services to primarily non-profits at reduced prices to get them technically competent to manage themselves and also be able to take advantage of the technical revolution that is happening so that they could be a little more agile?
So we tried a second customer who wanted the Episcopal Bible where priests can customize and automate their sermons whether online or offline. We’re like “cool, here’s the price, dadada, and [claps] fell on our face.”
Did you take that job on and attempt it?
Yeah we did, but the main contact got horribly ill, like pneumonia and fell off the map for two months. And we fell off because of that and it didn’t really help at all. So that was a failed attempt.
That kind of transferability, is so invaluable. You’ve come — through a couple of similar experiences — to appreciate the other side of the fence — the client side — you don’t know how much you might be their pet project. It could be something they are fighting for and if they dip, then it’s a wrap and you won’t get paid because no one else cares.
That was a very tough time, especially making Sophicware valuable in some kind of way and building a good reputation. So we said, “that failed, how can we focus on generating necessary revenue to fund things to help these organizations.”
So that’s what we did. We changed direction a bit and needed to build a better infrastructure and beat people in the city.
Start locally?
Yeah. The first approach was, “hey well, people can start a custom site and upgrade for more server space — the status quo of how people make websites now.” We soon realized that no bids were coming through the website. I did notice that I got paid because people were interacting with me directly and that was the money maker. So maybe making me more personable was the key.
So to provide some context, how did your previous agency work influence Sophicware and your ideology around the socially-charged mantra behind it?
I worked for a design agency called Cabedge and was hired to manage all of the infrastructure for all of their clients. It was fun to get involved in that environment but I realized that it wasn’t helpful for me as a developer in terms of someone who wants to get better, learn more things — to have some level of enrichment. That’s when I learned that the space for Sophicware would be in serving the need of agencies. Because at that agency, people didn’t monitor websites, “hey the data has been deleted by mistake. Oh well, tell the client.” There were things I wanted to do to help, but the impetus wasn’t that they didn’t trust me, it was more so that they were so bought into their structure of revenue that they couldn’t allocate resources to make it easy for them in the long run.
One of the things we’re really excited about coming into this new year, is (and it sounds a bit nerdy) simple business practices like the way you structure things like our bookkeeping, salaries, the way we codify aspects of marketing and contracting. Is that something of a mindful focus or something that happens in between the lines as you do work?
In terms of business structure, I am to be as simple as possible. I did take some structure from Atiba (a business he worked for previously), because their organizational structure was flat. And that gave me insight on how they built their actual business, but there’s only four of us so it doesn’t really matter anyway. In terms of that, things like our invoicing, the way we get paid, we have that out of the way upfront. Like we get compliments on how smooth it is for people to pay us. I spent the most time on that.
That’s great. Compliments on — it’s so easy to work with you guys.
And that’s because I spent a lot of time early on, vetting solutions out there that we can use as a small business to reduce the cost it takes to run our business. I actually have a huge Trello board full of things that we’ve tried out like, “invoicing, this stack? We can only use three.” I learned that sometimes, the tools aren’t all readily available for what I want to do. Sometimes they have to be prepped by creators to be ready for my consumption. So I’ll pin it and keep an eye on it.
That’s actually something really exciting about starting a business, especially in the tech sector, is just the extent to which backend services, billing, infrastructure, etcetera — so long as you’re not talking about bricks and mortar — are extracted, abstract services online that you can just consume and compose a business in a hour from three or four different products. The administrative cap is really small and fast to gain back your cost.
Yeah, exactly.
So, what has been something in your experience, a surprise to learn that was valuable, and not just in the business side, but, “we did not expect this to be as important as it has been for clients.”
If I get discouraged, everyone gets discouraged. I knew it from a theoretical sense but not a personal one.
And one of the things I learned early on in life, “hey…I’m not like other people.” I went ahead and said that I can be different and it’s okay — I’ll make my own way.
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I did not think it would be valuable for an organization. As an individual, sure, but I learned that it is valuable through a recent experience with Code 2040 — there are times that these programs that cater to small businesses or the demographic of the owner, they want to to fit in a group and if you don’t, you’re out.
The personal connection is just as important than what it is you’re actually selling.
Yeah. It’s a hard pill to swallow when you want that type of community, but with that community comes an acceptance of the template that you fall into. So we learned that it’s very valuable from the jump to just be different and be okay with that. And know that, in part of being different, there will be some opposition. It’s always there, and when you go for a template, you fall into the problem of distinguishing yourself from the rest. That’s a problem we’ve never had. We spent that time building tools internally to help the masses.
We like that notion too. At fog, we try to own our own self and the presence we have in the market. Differentiation isn’t a problem. Of course, the flip side of always having to chart new territory is that there is a much higher risk/reward ratio. This could be good or bad, but there’s a thought that if you walk uncharted territory, the winner doesn’t come from the economy of scale. If you’re gonna be a template, you have to do whatever everyone else does and be better than that. Which usually means zeroing in on a couple of things like efficiency or being the smoothest or the fastest. We prefer the creative alchemy of “we are different, let’s figure out how to make it work and create value rather than being a faster templated thing.”
Yeah.
Sophicware is a part of a master plan. It embodies that hypothesis that we can redirect the energy and we can direct you to develop technology to solve problems with social change. So it’s a shell to encapsulate that effort. It is something that you can hand to one another back and forth to get some of output and that’s essentially what it is. We generate a set of outputs that people can measure. And that’s — that’s everything and that’s the reason that pushed me to put into words our mission which we make communities and societies programmable. And so that’s huge.
Being able to say, given the nature of who we are as people, we are able to take things that people give us and then yield some results in the community. And we are an engine — it may not be a piece of software that magically does this, but people with technology make that happen. And so that’s what Sophicware is. An insightful software that requires both a technical element and human element. So we have individuals in partnerships that yields some insightfulness and have tooling to compliment that and then we generate the output of change in society.
As an aside, I felt that Sophicware had a Greek root in knowledge or something…
Yep!
As far as this interview goes, thanks for being the guinea pig for this experiment. We hope we did you justice!
[Laughs.] No problem.
A transcript of the interview has been edited for content and clarity. To listen to the full interview, you can listen to the audio here: Visible Podcast 002.
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Fog is an early stage design firm focused on companies that require software, found through the interwebs.
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