Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/21/zuck-makes-his-first-major-ed-tech-investment-in-panorama-education-the-brainchild-of-a-yale-coder/

by xantanner • 13 years ago

60 9 13 years ago

venturebeat.com

MWil• 13 years ago

congrats Xan and the rest of the team!

Cyranix• 13 years ago

Panorama isn’t a vastly complex piece of technology by design. Feuer has found that analog, paper-based systems still work best with students, parents, and teachers. The team will work with communities to host pizza parties and other gatherings, where the surveys are handed out.

Awesome that they're not trying to force technology down everyone's throats, which might keep real people at arm's length... and especially impressive that they can scale this approach to 4000+ schools. Best wishes going forward!

ZanyProgrammer• 13 years ago

Ugh, can we keep calling him Zuck, as if we're all a member or wanna be member of his social circle (though given the celebrity and class level of some HN members, that's probably true).

vellum• 13 years ago

Feuer told me that Zuck gave him some memorable advice on building out a strong team. The two golden rules? Only hire people you’d spend time with socially, and make sure you’d feel comfortable reporting to the person if roles were reversed.

I'm not a big fan of the "culture fit" filter, but the second one is great advice. Peter Drucker said[1] something similar: “Picking a leader: would I want my son or daughter to work under that person?”

1: http://robertamter.blogspot.com/2008/07/peter-druckers-tenet...

dcre• 13 years ago

Very exciting — it looks like something school districts need very badly.

I wonder how much Panorama participates in the interpretation of the results. It's one thing to efficiently gather responses to survey questions, but quite another to effectively figure out what the results mean.

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research has done interesting work on something similar with Chicago Public Schools[1], though they also probably do more basic (i.e., academic) research about what to do with the results.

Unrelated, what's with the website[2] for Zuckerberg's education foundation, Startup: Education? I guess it's not really used for anything. But it's ironic how cheap-looking it is. The logo is a JPEG.

[1] https://cps.5-essentials.org/2012/schools/

[2] http://www.startupeducation.org/

theuri• 13 years ago

Congrats to Zuck on backing progressive looking edtech ventures...

martinshen• 13 years ago

Excited for this. Checked out Startup Education fund. Zuck should've put a lil more effort on this page. It's pretty awful and seems outdated.

http://www.startupeducation.org/

whbk• 13 years ago

Nice, I work in EdTech and remember being pretty impressed when I looked into them after they posted a job listing here, glad to see things are going well. Now move to SF ;)

dzhao• 13 years ago

The Panorama team is awesome, this is just the beginning of something special. Congrats guys!

Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

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