Greg Porter, Founder of PowerSchool
By Scott Lillis on June 1, 2019
Greg Porter unofficially started the company as a teenager when he developed record-keeping software at his high school in 1983. Fourteen years later, in 1997, he sold his first version of PowerSchool Student Information System with a simple vision of improving education. Today the company led by CEO Hardeep Gulati, states that they “are proud to continue that original vision with the industry-first and award-winning Unified Classroom, a solution that combines PowerSchool’s student information system, assessment, learning, and gradebook solutions into a single, comprehensive software solution” (Continuing…, 2017).
In 1983, as student body president of Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, Calif., Greg and a classmate created record-keeping software for a class project to help get attendance and other information communicated over the district’s network to its computers. Greg and his friend were paid $350 for the program! Greg continued following his interest in coding and expanded the program into a web-based student information system, named PowerSchool, that was first installed in 1997 in Utah’s South Summit District. Greg’s vision of improving education was bolstered by his first major differentiator: a web-based system, which he describes as the company’s turning point. While other systems were either Mac or Windows-based, Greg’s PowerSchool SIS was browser-based to work on any system. According to Porter, “I didn’t care what kind of computer people had, I just wanted to build something anyone could use and it would also give parents access from home to get involved in their student’s education.” (Continuing…, 2017) His secret to success when competing with larger competitors in the beginning was attending their demos the day before he was set to present for the same clients, where he would take notes of the features that the purchasing committee asked about but that the competition didn’t have. “That night, I coded like crazy to get those missing features in place for my presentation the next day. They were looking at a live product that was basically being designed after watching their discussions from the day before. They loved it, and then after doing that 10 or 15 times in different presentations, I ended up with a product that encapsulated perfect features that school districts actually needed” (Continuing…, 2017).
To me the story he tells in the interview is one of a true entrepreneur – someone that will do whatever it takes to succeed! Oh, and I suppose being acquired by Apple in 2001 for $62 million in stock must have meant that he (and the company) was doing something right as well (Tenny, 2015)! Today, PowerSchool’s mission “to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their potential, in their way. From the back office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool helps schools and districts efficiently manage instruction, learning, grading, attendance, assessment, analytics, state reporting, special education, student registration, talent, finance and HR” (About Us, PowerSchool). As a result, PowerSchool professes to be the leading provider of K-12 education application technology supporting over 45 million students in over 70 countries.
References
About Us. PowerSchool. Retrieved from: https://www.powerschool.com/company/about-us/
“Continuing the original vision of PowerSchool founder, Greg Porter”. (2017, August 29) PowerSchool. Retrieved from:
Tenny, Austen. (2015, November 3). “Mulit-millionaire BYU alumnus encourages students to follow their passions”. The Daily Universe. Retrieved from:
By Danny, 2 JUN
Thanks for sharing. I think you’ve definitely identified a strong innovator-entrepreneur. Besides the innovations he introduced, I think one of the most impressive measures of his entrepreneurship is his dedicated and detailed pitch strategy. As we learned in a previous module, an entrepreneur’s pitch needs not only to be concise and communicate clearly the innovation and the value it adds, it also is a learning opportunity for the entrepreneur to hone his proposal according to the responses (or lack of responses) of the potential investors. The fact that Greg Porter would scope out competitor pitches, identify their shortcomings, and capitalize on them by addressing such concerns in his own pitch to the same group shows the forethought, planning, and innovative flexibility needed to successfully bring an innovation to market.
Hi SafaaAbuSaa,
The PowerSchool Student Information System is a Big Data to analyze information, measure outcomes and provides information to compare students’ performance between districts, states, and countries. Macro and inter areas analyses enable collaborative and cooperative growth.