Jason Richards
Founder
Minga
Minga is an educational technology platform focused on K-12 campus management. It aims to offer schools a safe and secure central platform from which they can send out communications, track attendance, provision digital school IDs and hall passes, and log student conduct. With this data, Minga helps schools reduce student tardiness, support behavioural interventions, and increase student engagement – all while avoiding the need to use multiple different platforms or manual processes.
Minga is not Jason’s first venture as a founder. In 2013, he exited his venture in networking technology when his company was successfully acquired. He has been a pillar of the startup and entrepreneurial community in the Okanagan, BC, through mentorship, advising, and other subsequent ventures.
Minga is a great example of a founder identifying a pain-point they encounter, and having the drive and vision necessary to establish a venture built around solving that problem. As a father, Jason encountered the discombobulated communication his children’s schools engaged in – paper announcements, phone messages, emails – and quickly realized he wasn’t alone in his frustration. Thus, he founded Minga. Through his leadership of the venture, Jason demonstrates clear entrepreneurial traits such as adaptability and responsiveness. Minga has refined its value proposition multiple times, and features are continuously evolving based on customer feedback. I worked for Minga briefly in 2020, and it was clear Jason had established strong relationships with school administrators and teachers, whose pain-points served as the guiding force for the product’s development.
A perusal of Minga’s team on LinkedIn reveals a diverse mix of expertise spanning management, software development, customer support, and sales professionals. The team appears well-rounded for rapid expansion, with sales, support, and infrastructure all represented.
When I asked what makes him uniquely skilled to run a company like Minga, Jason quickly remarks that he isn’t. Instead, he highlights what he believes are characteristics shared by all successful entrepreneurs: “an outlandish optimism and the social skills to convince a community around you of that outlandish optimism.”
Excerpt from Victory Lap | A Conversation with Minga’s Jason Richards
For me, this analysis emphasizes the importance of responsiveness. Jason’s initial frustration with school communication may have been the initiating pain-point for the Minga venture, but from that point on it seems it was the client-base – teachers, principals, schools, districts – whose needs and feedback steered the product. The willingness to pivot, and the awareness to know when to do so, are essential entrepreneurial qualities. As a founder, I imagine it would be challenging to shift a venture away from its original direction, scrap product features one is passionate about, or make changes one doesn’t personally love. It’s easy to become attached to our creations! If I were ever to dive into entrepreneurship, I suspect I would be in a persistent struggle with the sunk-cost fallacy.For me, this analysis emphasizes the importance of responsiveness. Jason’s initial frustration with school communication may have been the initiating pain-point for the Minga venture, but from that point on it seems it was the client-base – teachers, principals, schools, districts – whose needs and feedback steered the product. The willingness to pivot, and the awareness to know when to do so, are essential entrepreneurial qualities. As a founder, I imagine it would be challenging to shift a venture away from its original direction, scrap product features one is passionate about, or make changes one doesn’t personally love. It’s easy to become attached to our creations! If I were ever to dive into entrepreneurship, I suspect I would struggle with sunk-cost fallacy.
References
Victory Lap | A Conversation with Minga’s Jason Richards
The Final 6 | Minga’s Jason Richards
Kelowna’s Vineyard Networks Acquired for $28 Million
Hi Duncan,
With your write-up and reflection on Jason Richards, I think you highlighted a key trait of strong entrepreneurs, which is flexibility. This is reflected in Richards’s ability and willingness to take on ventures in networking technology (his previous start-up) and educational technology. His diversity of experience, as well as the diversity in skills among his Minga staff, positions Minga well to pivot and be responsive to the needs and feedback of his user base.
I’m with you in that I would struggle with the sunk-cost fallacy because I would have a difficult time straddling the line between believing in my vision and understanding when my market/user base needs something that doesn’t align with what I had in mind initially.
I am so curious about this platform and I am sold. Once I had read that Jason as was: from BC, that he is a father of school-aged children like myself, that he was frustrated with the poor communication and connections between the student, the teacher, the family, and the school community like myself (both as a father of a student and as a teacher of students) — I was sold. I then went to the site, watched some videos on Youtube, and then drafted an email sharing everything I found with my district’s IT department. This goes to show how impactful a founder’s background (and product design and vision) can motivate a potential customer/user to further explore a given venture or startup, being better able to view said venture from a lens of commonly values and even frustrations with the founder.