The story of Kognio is one of divergent threads coming together. My goal at Harvard was to surround myself with as many awesome, expansive thinkers as possible. To really swim in it for my short time here. To that end, I joined a house of five HGSE students that was aiming to have as many pseudo-intellectual discussions about education over whiskey and wine as possible in our short time in Boston. That led to the formation of an i-Lab team with three of us working on a scaling strategy for a Miami-based nonprofit (founded by one of the team members) called U-Doodle. Jordan (U-Doodle founder), Abhishek, and I spent all last semester drawing on white boards at home or trekking over to the i-Lab to scratch our heads at the shortcomings of the nonprofit. That project came to a close in December, and Abhishek seemed to be itching to just get back to India. After nearly canceling his trip last minute, he headed out to California, where he not only discovered a different ("better") side of the US, but also a fellow graduate of his alma mater who happened to be an engineer working on natural language processing and logical sequencing. This jived with an idea that Abhishek had been toying with and the two hit it off. He came back to Boston with a renewed sense of purpose for his time here. Meanwhile, I had gone to Mexico, spending the winter redesigning the curriculum for a startup incubator in Mexico City. Being around entrepreneurs and VCs daily reawakened my own passion for startups and entrepreneurship (I had worked for an edtech startup prior to Harvard). I came back and spent a week searching for jobs. Terrible. I couldn't go be some middle manager somewhere pushing papers around. Not after a year of thinking so expansively. Then Abhishek approached me to join Kognio, remembering our team dynamic from the previous semester. I told him I'd think about it, but that was a lie. It was the most "right" anything had felt in regards to my future. We were set.
Get Foundation'd
Kognio's business model is (and will always be, hopefully) a work in progress. Right now, it's a pretty big work in progress because we have so many untested assumptions. Our goal is to start tackling those in the next couple of weeks and making adjustments based on them.
Top 3 Hypotheses to be tested:
1. Customer segment - Our big hypothesis here is that our initial customer segment, university students, needs a better, more efficient way to search
2. Value Proposition - We hypothesize here that our solution, sequenced trails of content, will be a big enough value-add for users to get them shift away from their current methods of learning things on the internet.
3. Channels - Here our major hypothesis is that users can be meaningfully reached via marketing. This one might take a bit more time to test.
Get Funded
The big dilemma we're facing is in regards to funding. We've been applying for incubators, and the honest truth is that it's actually been pretty distracting from developing the actual business. We're currently in limbo, waiting to hear back from them, but we're wrestling with the question of what we do if we're rejected outright. Abhishek seems to be ready to bootstrap from his family's cash. I'm a bit hesitant on that end because we'd need to be very clear about what exactly it means for him to be putting his own money into it. Meanwhile, several people around us have pushed us to consider angel funding, especially because we're in such a well-connected environment here. But I think we'll wait it out to see what the response from the incubators is. We're also speaking with a VC in mid-April, not to pitch, but just get a sense of what our options are and how we should think about the next few months before working up to a pitch for VCs down the road.
Another dilemma we're facing is a split team. With Ashwin at Stanford and all of us full-time at school, it's hard to communicate consistently. The big problem here is keeping up-to-date on developments of the prototype. Without a prototype all we can do is surveys. This is great in a sense because it allows us plenty of time to really test our main assumptions, but it's also a challenge because it's hard to know if progress is really being made on the prototype. In building our applications for the incubators, Ashwin had some periods of absence, but I don't want to immediately attribute that to some unspoken low level of dedication. But it's something to keep an eye out on.
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