{"id":5640,"date":"2011-09-26T17:52:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T01:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/?p=5640"},"modified":"2011-09-26T17:52:18","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T01:52:18","slug":"grockit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/2011\/09\/26\/grockit\/","title":{"rendered":"Grockit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grockit is the brainchild of two founders, Farbood Nivi and Michael Buffington in 2007. Farbood is a former Teacher of the Year for the Princeton Review and was the academic director at Kaplan. He names his “teachers” as Peter Senge, Peter Drucker, Steve Jobs, Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Covey and Seth Godin (to name just a few). His company blog displays a proud founder claiming “Putting my learning into practice, co-founding Grockit to help the world teach itself.”
\n\"\" <\/a><\/p>\n

Grockit’s co-founder, Michael Buffington is also co-founder of Price.com<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 Grockit’s name is a play on words, with “grok” meaning “to understand something so well it becomes part of you.” \u00a0This company has high aspirations in ensuring that students will be successful in their preparation for these difficult tests. \u00a0Their product is based on collaborative games, online tutoring, online testing and even Grockit TV for full-length course offerings. \u00a0Their company also expanded into Grade 7-12 learning, called the Academy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Grockit has also integrated with Facebook to help students create and join study groups. \u00a0The site suggests that this service is free, once you create an account, but to gain access to the Premium service, the cost is $9.99 per month – perhaps a good price point for students anxious to succeed on these difficult tests, but quite costly for the Grade 7-12 Academy.<\/p>\n

An interesting addition to their site is the “Grockit for Good” proposition. \u00a0For every student who purchases the premium product, Grockit, through one of their non-profit partners will donate their \u00a0service for free for one “under-resourced” students. \u00a0They don’t name these partners, and then proceed to state that the paying subscriber can choose their own organization that will receive this free service. \u00a0I found this confusing – do they give the free service to a student or to an organization?<\/p>\n

This company is headquarted in San Francisco, and have key business leaders from Google, Goldman Saks, Sylvan Learning Centres, Microsoft and IBM. \u00a0They obviously knew how to assemble a knowledgeable team. \u00a0They received venture funding from an impressive list: \u00a0Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners, and two angel investors (Reid Hoffman – founder of Linkedin – and Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga). \u00a0I expect that with the backing of these impressive venture capitalists, their value proposition was evidence of \u00a0a worthwhile investment.<\/p>\n

The two co-founders, as entrepreneurs, knew when to step away – their CEO is Roy Gilbert. \u00a0They obviously had an exit strategy.<\/p>\n

Their product is not a new idea – there have been preparation packages available for purchase in book stores for years, and there have been many face-to-face courses offered for nervous students. \u00a0But this product is very appealing in this online format of games, collaboration, and online study groups. \u00a0I wish I had thought of it first!<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.grockit.com<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.crunchbase.com\/company\/grockit<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grockit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grockit is the brainchild of two founders, Farbood Nivi and Michael Buffington in 2007. Farbood is a former Teacher of the Year for the Princeton Review and was the academic director at Kaplan. He names his “teachers” as Peter Senge, Peter Drucker, Steve Jobs, Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Covey and Seth Godin (to name just a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325975],"tags":[26687,2825],"class_list":["post-5640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-4-entrepreneur-bootcamp","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-online-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5645,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640\/revisions\/5645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}