Front Row Education: Making Things That Kids (and Teachers) Love
There’s a lot of technology trying to get the attention of kids these days. Teachers have seen many fads come and go over the years. Trying to build something that both children and teachers love is hard.
At Fresco Capital, we’re always trying to find teams who are able figure out this equation because that means they’re doing something special. Among the many reasons we invested in Sidharth Kakkar and the team at Front Row Education is that they spent a lot of time in classrooms with kids and teachers. That’s always a good starting point.
The lessons learned from that time in the classroom have led to some impressive results. The company has helped more than 5.3 million students and 300,000 teachers across 41,000 schools with math, language arts and most recently social studies. I hope the Q&A with Sidharth below inspires more people to get excited about the massive opportunity that still exists to help both students and teachers.
Education is sometimes viewed as a very slow moving and traditional sector. Why does the team at Front Row find it exciting?
Luckily for us, we find it neither slow-moving or traditional! What we do find, though, is that education lends itself to particularly complex business problems — much more so than traditional enterprise sales. Here’s why: when you sell to a company, you can pitch your buyer on ROI where the I is in dollars, but so is the R. When we sell to schools, the R isn’t in dollars.
Or, in most enterprises, budgets aren’t extremely tightly defined. If sales has a certain amount of budget but then runs out and finds an excellent opportunity, they can get more money. Budgets are much more rigid in education — curriculum has the budget they do, and none other.
These differences are just that — they’re differences. And while it lends itself to more complexity, we actually love that — we love hard problems, and we also know that if we solve them better than others, that creates a huge competitive advantage.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that when you work in education, you get to make things that improve students’ learning, and consequently the trajectory of their lives. That’s some pretty incredible stuff, and even if education were slow/traditional, I’d still be happy to work in it.
The history of technology companies in education is mixed, with many stories of technology which did not get used by teachers or students. How is Front Row approaching the challenge of using technology to actually support both teachers and students?
Here, we took a page out of the playbook of some great bottoms-up enterprise SaaS companies. Companies like Slack, Dropbox, Yammer, Atlassian, and tons others are famously bottoms up — they start with the end user of their product as the point of entry into a company. Then, they grow within that company by getting more people on board, and eventually get the attention of a department head. The department head purchases the product for her department, and over time, they catch the attention of the CTO or CIO. That person then buys for the whole company.
We do the same exact thing — we start with teachers (professional employees), get a school leader on board (department head) and then get a district on board (whole company).
What’s so amazing about this model is that your interests are much more aligned with the end user. Slack has to make a much better chat program for users because otherwise they won’t bother picking it up. And we have to make much better educational software for teachers and students, because otherwise they won’t pick it up. And we wouldn’t want our incentives to be any other way!
Recruiting and talent are a top priority for any rapidly growing company. What kind of people does Front Row look for and why should they join you?
When looking across the team, the two characteristics that I think uniquely define Front Row employees are a strong mission-orientation and very high empathy for each other and our customers. We’re smart and work hard and all that, too, but that’s not unique to us — the unique parts are really caring about education as a whole, and always working on things from a place of empathy first and foremost.
Personalized learning, especially for diverse student populations, seems to be one of those goals that is always on the horizon and yet never quite achieved. How is Front Row trying to turn the promise of personalized learning into reality?
I think personalized learning is one of those ideals that we as society will constantly be working to improve. We’ve been doing that for a while now, and education is definitely more personalized today than it was 100 years ago. The way we see our role is to take the next step in that journey — by really using the power of technology to personalize learning.
The way we do that is by having an incredible set of amazing content that we make in house, and technology that works with that content in a highly integrated way to adjust to each student.
Front Row has an unusual mascot character, a little pig, which both kids and teachers seem to really enjoy. Can you tell us a bit more about the Front Row pig?
JT, the Front Row pig, has a very startup-y origin story. He came around in one of the earliest versions of the program when we realized that we needed to make it more kid friendly, and an early idea was to have a mascot in there. But we didn’t really have any funding at all, so we found an artist in Ukraine who made really cute mascots, and she agreed to make one for us for $5. Irina got to pick the kind of animal (you can’t be too demanding when you’re paying $5), and she made JT. We thought the top hat and tie she put on him made him look like a certain pop star with those initials, so that’s how he got named!
There are so many ways to get involved in making education better for students and teachers.
Join a startup in education, become a mentor to someone, or just even take the time to read books to kids. The best part is you’ll actually learn something in the process too!
