Pooja Sankar – Founder & CEO of Piazza
Pooja Sankar –Founder & CEO of Piazza
Pooja Sankar – allthingsd.com
Piazza’s platform helps classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they’re also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there’s a version history that shows what each student wrote. Both students and professors can create Piazza hubs for their classes. Instructor answers are separated from the students’ to make them easier to find. And professors can also look to see which questions have been bookmarked by the most students to gauge which topics they should explain better in class.
Pooja, Piazza’s founder and CEO has overcome oppression, fleeing an arranged marriage and segregation, growing up in an all girls school and then attending university where she was only one of three females in her class. This feeling of not being connected with her fellow male classmates in university and not having a comfortable way to ask questions gave her the inspiration for Piazza:
“I want Piazza to be a remedy for students who are not given the intellectual space, freedom, or support to fulfill their educational potential and desire for learning. And I want Piazza to empower instructors to have a positive, personal impact on more students.
Piazza is designed to connect students, TAs, and professors so every student can get help when she needs it — even at 2AM.”
Her education in Computer Science gave her the technological expertise for her venture and her software development work at very successful tech and social networking companies such as Oracle, Kosmix and Facebook helped develop her skills and network further.
Her team seems very creative, self-motivated and innovative. Some are heavily involved in sports, others in creative arts, singing and comedy. They all have skills in software development, design and/or social networking. There doesn’t appear to be any members of the team that have a background in education.
After reading about Piazza, it made me realize the importance of self-motivation and focusing on a venture that you have a personal interest or passion for, also I think it is important to have, at minimum, background knowledge and understanding of the field you are venturing into. I think the importance of creating a dynamic team of creative, self-motivated people that have unique talents and interests can really help move your venture forward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/technology/04piazza.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Posted in: Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp
rebecca42 8:22 pm on September 25, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
That’s a great point about personal interest and passion. It’s like that saying about finding a job you love; basically that it will never be work. In addition, we have been learning how important a CEO’s enthusiasm is. A person who loves what they’re doing will be able to relate their passion to others and get them excited by being excited.
Pat A Son 7:39 am on September 29, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
From what is placed here she certainly has what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur for she has leveraged the available technology to create a social approach to answering questions at the class level, With the large numbers of educational ventures on the web this is one that stands out to me and one that I can try with my class.