About a year ago, I moved from Outspark to Grockit. I remember joining the team knowing that the product had a ways to go, but the people are outstanding.
A year later, we've done some amazing things in terms of furthing social learning: Grockit for Good tranformed Grockit into a 1-for-1 company; Grockit Answers uses video to make asynchronous social learning a reality; Grockit in Facebook lets you create private study rooms with friends; Grockit SchoolMatch helps students find the right schools for them; and Grockit is working very closely with Georgetown University to provide students and alum with online test prep.
And, the team at Grockit has grown and proven to be more oustanding than I first understood. Together, we've attracted another round of financing, launched an open-source project to improve our adaptive learning algorithm, and partnered with Startup Weekend and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create StartupWeekend.edu.
Grockit has a lot in store for this year, including working with some high-profile private K-12 schools to provide more data points supporting Grockit's efficacy in social learning. And, I'm totally loving my work.
Recently, I was approached by a Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow researching incentives-based learning. Peter was an investor in Gazillion's Smartycard, a founder's fund investment. Working with the Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow has been very stimulating.
Over the last month, I've spent several hours discussing and rethinking the lessons learned in nearly two years of working on SmartyCard as a game division, and then as a potential "spinout" of Gazillion. The mental exercises have really reinvigorated my thoughts about incentives and payments in educational games, sites and services.
There's a real opportunity to create an incentive structure for learning in high school. But increasingly, I'm convinced the application context in which incentives are provisioned needs to be viral -- somewhere like Facebook. And, incentives need to appeal to ego -- the developing super-id that feeds off of social reward and "knowing" and "helping".
Finally, I've come to realize that friends are an acceptable currency for millenials. Offers are too. There's one other currency that people are starting to understand -- user-generated-content. There's going to be a beautiful little collision at that intersection, I'm looking forward to seeing it happen.
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