Grockit’s CEO explains how startup life is like navigating an attack submarine in Fast Company’s Fast Talk and talks about tackling big economic issues in USNews & World Report.

Catch up on all of the Grockit news right now:

San Francisco Chronicle: Hires and promotions notes that Grockit has hired Chris Henley.
Wired: The 6 Facebook Timeline Apps to Check Out First
Fast Company: Poke! You Need To Study More. What Facebook’s Open Graph Means For Online Study Groups
Onlineschools.com: The future of online social learning with Grockit

Startup Weekend Receives $250,000 Grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for EDU Events

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 2, 2011 – Startup Weekend, a non-profit organization, powered by the Kauffman Foundation, and Grockit, a social-learning Internet start-up, today announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a grant in support of Startup Weekend EDU, a dedicated education (EDU) vertical within Startup Weekend that is designed to attract and assist the education community working to bring new solutions to the industry. With a grant of $250,000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is backing educators, developers, designers, marketers, product managers, and startup enthusiasts, all of whom share a common goal – to bring new innovations to education.

“The Kauffman Foundation is excited to have the Gates Foundation support this important initiative that will help entrepreneurs with innovative education business solutions learn how to execute their ideas,” said Nick Seguin, manager of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. “Startup Weekend EDU builds upon the Kauffman Foundation’s interest in teaching entrepreneurs how to build successful education ventures that have the potential to be some of the next great high-growth companies of the future.”

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups with the ultimate goal of bringing new innovations to education. October has already seen three successful Startup Weekend EDU events in Seattle, San Francisco and Washington. The first London Startup Weekend EDU event is slated for November, and the series will announce additional events around the world taking place over the next 12 months.

“Given its dedication to education reform and extensive networks in the space, the Gates Foundation is the ideal partner for us to scale the Startup Weekend EDU initiative,” said Farb Nivi, founder of Grockit.

To register for the London Startup Weekend EDU event please visit edu.startupweekend.org. To learn more about becoming a Startup Weekend organizer please visit startupweekend.org/about/event.

There’s a wealth of educational videos available online, but the primary mode of interaction among viewers — short-form commenting — doesn’t do much to enhance or facilitate learning. When you’re trying to grok a challenging lecture from an AI course at Stanford or an open talk at MIT, you need more than comments. You need a way to ask a question about a particular point that confused you, or ask for a clarification or maybe a useful reference on something mentioned in the video. You really need a Q&A site, and you need to be able to attach each of your questions to a particular time in the video. You need Grockit Answers. Here’s a quick video clip (live Q&A discussion here). Feel free to ask questions about this video on Grockit Answers.

Built on Popcorn.js, a fantastic new HTML5 media framework for better connecting web videos to web pages, Grockit Answers displays each question and its answers at the exact point in the video that they are most relevant. As a viewer, some of the things that confuse you are are likely to be the same as what confused others before you. In a time-anchored Q&A on Grockit Answers, just as the question begins to form in your mind, it may magically pop up on the screen, along with a few great answers.

For the educators out there, I’m happy to say that we developed a number of additional features with you in mind. You can create a Q&A page on a video that only you and your students have access to, and you can moderate the conversation to get additional controls and deeper insight into what’s happening. Finally, and most exciting, you can add these Q&A pages to your own course websites (example), easily replacing links to YouTube or Vimeo videos with your moderated discussions. Feel free to contact us at answers@grockit.com with any questions about this.

Start a Question & Answer page for any video on YouTube. Share it with your classroom or share it with your friends. And please, let us know what you think.

Here is my take on the similarities and differences between the two as well as how they relate to the changing world of learning and education.

Lean Startup Machine

Lean Startup Machine (a for-profit entity), led by Trevor Owens, is focused on Lean Startup methodologies as developed by people like Eric Ries and Steve Blank. The weekend-ish long events help entrepreneurs experience the process of identifying a problem, validating that the problem exists, developing problem-solution fit, and testing product-market fit. LSM pushes participants through a series of exercises and forms to keep them on track. There is a strong GOOB (get out of the building) mandate to push participants to try and connect directly with their market and presentations on Sunday night are focused on learnings and are not in the style of ‘investor’ pitches. I was really impressed by how each team seriously tried to work through the Lean Startup methodology and while results ranged from not much learning to a lot, seeing so many people focused on validating learning instead of ‘reasons’ for why their idea is so great was refreshing and exciting. It’s rare to see people get up and present all their mistakes as they move through the learning process.

Startup Weekend EDU @Grockit

Startup Weekend (a non-profit entity) has been around for several years now and they help grass-roots organizers run SW events hundreds of times a year, all over the world. SW is backed by the Kauffman Foundation and, in full disclosure, we (Grockit) are also working with SW to launch an EDU vertical focused on the problems of the education and learning market. SW is a proponent of Lean Startup methodologies and they work to educate and focus participants on the task of problem, solution and market validation. SWs, however, are also very focused on building founding teams and connecting technical and non-technical people to launch real companies and prototypes over the weekend. SW is not as strict about moving teams through the steps of the Lean Startup methodology and the pitches and demos on Sunday night are closer to the ‘investor’ pitch style as opposed to focusing on just learnings from the weekend.

I think both of these organizations are quality and the people who started them are passionate, dedicated and making a real impact on the world of entrepreneurship and ultimately on the world.

In the end, LSM and SW events are about learning first. When people ask me to describe these events, they sometimes respond with ‘oh, it’s a class’ and I have to reply with ‘no, it’s not a class but it is about learning’. These weekends are experiential in nature and while a picture is worth a thousand words, an experience, like my dad says, is worth a million. The experiential nature of these events can be transformative experiences for participants who sometimes work without much sleep or break from Friday night until Sunday night. More than a few real startup have launched from these events and many more people have changed the direction of their lives from the experience.

These weekends point to the changing nature of education and learning and the power of the Confucian saying that goes along the lines of ‘Tell me and I will forget, Show me and I will remember, Include me and I will understand’. The most critical way they are doing this is by breaking down the ‘class’ model for one of deeper student engagement in the learning. It would be easy for SW and LSM to run classes with teachers and students and desks and books, but I don’t believe that this would lead to the transformative experiences and the deeper understanding of what’s being learned. I’m looking forward to watching and helping these organizations grow and I’m looking forward to seeing more learning experiences like this popping up in verticals beyond entrepreneurship.

I’m a phone freak. I know this because of the look people give me when they see all my phones. I usually sport 2-3. Some people like Shervin Pishevar don’t flinch at this. Mostly these people are in Silicon Valley from my experience.

Now for the Blackberry 9700, iPhone 4 and Android Nexus S showdown! Here are the pros and cons of the the three devices as I see them and also how I use them.

The verdict: A Blackberry + an iPhone or Android = Still The Winner

Blackberry 9700

Wins – Blackberry wins for typing and therefore messaging. Touchscreens are still too slow and sloppy. Emails, text messages and IMs can be fired off quickly and easily and this is the only device you can write long emails on. Blackberry Messenger is also still the benchmark for mobile messaging apps.

Loses – Apps. Total joke except for Google Maps and Twitter and Gchat. The screen is also too small for browsing the web so Blackberry is also the web browsing loser.

iPhone 4

Wins – Apps. The best apps are still coming out on the iPhone first although the Android marketplace is finally catching up. Most of the apps I use heavily on my iPhone (Yelp, TripIt, Foursquare, Google+, Facebook, Twitter etc..) are now available on Android. The iPhone is still the winner on media too especially integrating your music with the device and the cool Apps that let you leverage your music library.

Loses – As a phone and messaging tool I still don’t think it’s as good as a Blackberry and this relates to the other con which is battery. There is no way you can get through a day of full phone usage plus full app and web and email usage on an iPhone. You can make it a full day with the Blackberry but that’s because there aren’t enough apps to drain the battery that much.

Android

Wins – Google. If you use Google apps and products heavily like I do, the integration here is great. The Gchat app on Android is a curse and a blessing. The easy video chatting is great (even works over 4G) but the app constantly has to re-sign in each time it loses network connection for even a bit. The Blackberry Gchat app actually is way better for staying connected and not being told by people that you are constantly logging in and out.

Loses – Battery. If I try and use the Android as my only phone and eschew the Blackberry for phone and messaging, I run out of battery around 2:30pm. This renders the Android useless as a stand alone device and it’s the worst of the three in this regard.

The Bottom Line

If you’re a power user like me, there is still no one device that can get it all done for you. The Blackberry screen is too small and it doesn’t have enough great apps. The iPhone battery doesn’t last long enough for standalone usage and the mail, calendar etc integration is not as strong as Android’s. The Android hasn’t caught up to the Apple App Store and it’s the worst when it comes to battery time.

But, the good times aren’t over. In fact, they are just getting started. Several of the people and teams from SFEDU are still working on their ideas and still launching into their lives as entrepreneurs. It’s also been great to see people from the weekend at other EDU events.

Teaser. More EDU Startup Weekends are coming in cities all over the country and countries all over the world. Our goal of expanding from one weekend into a larger movement across the nation has only grown steam since SFEDU and you can expect more announcements in the coming weeks as well as new sponsors, dates and cities a new website and more. Thanks again to everyone that has helped make Startup Weekend EDU a success!

If you want to be involved and know more as we go just add/contact me via twitter @farbood and we’ll keep you in the loop!

That’s where I learned that folks loved their teammates, hated shifting priorities, and wanted more info about when we were going to move to bigger space.  And each person lauded our culture.

Naturally, my next question was, “Well, what do you think our culture is?” That proved to be a stumper. People could give great examples, but they couldn’t pin down what it meant to live and work like a Grockiteer.

I think that part of the reason we form software companies, cricket teams, Rotary chapters, and Corvette clubs is that we like to be around people like us. We like serving a goal greater than ourselves, and we like to do it with people who believe in similar things. This is why, by the way, that the military focuses as much time on unit cohesion and core traditions as it does on physical fitness and shooting things. Big, complex, scary problems are more fun when team members can point to each other and say, “Here is what we believe to be true.” So it was worth a couple of hours to figure out what was the secret sauce that made us believe so strongly in each other at Grockit.

Our approach? We started with figuring out what we believed as individuals, and worked together to see what we had in common. Each team member listed three people they wanted to be like (the answer set included Teddy Roosevelt, Superman, and “my mom”) and what qualities made them special. We formed small groups to share these lists and then reformed into bigger discussion teams. Our long list shortened quickly when we realized that our stories about bravery, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking were all pretty similar. Except for a sharp argument as to whether we believed in “collaboration” or “teamwork” (we resolved that one inventively), we moved through this pretty quickly — just like you’d expect from a group of amazing folks who have hired other amazing folks.

How does this help us disrupt education? This is what we use for hiring and promotion, and the words we fall back on when we spot something going well. I want a team of people who independently can make decisions quickly with little guidance, and a common language of values and beliefs is a big tool for accomplishing that. Like in any internet company, our opportunity is so large that not having a common language around how we think of ourselves would be deadly.

Give me feedback on how we do on this and I’ll share the conversation on Twitter @roygilbert. And if these values resonate strongly with you, email jobs@grockit.com and join our cause!

Grockit Values

Here’s a preview of some of the things that are changing.

Guidance on a Dashboard:
You will now have a handy ‘dashboard’ home page that offers you one next big task to work on. The task, should you choose to do it, will guide you through taking your diagnostics, getting some group study time in, completing study plan tasks and completing a video course (if applicable). Grockit’s newly designed dashboard will tell you what you need to work on so that you cover everything and take advantage of everything we offer.

An Activity Feed:
Keep an eye on your fellow community members and see what badges they’ve earned. We hope this inspires you to encourage others, meet people, study together, earn more badges and get more accolades for your hard work.

Solo and Group Study Options Together:
We’ve consolidated the Solo and Group tabs from the current lobby into one page of practice options. Solo study is still the same content rich experience that you can take at your own pace. Group study is still the same social collaboration environment where you can learn through teaching and stay focused by studying with other motivated students.

Skill Data:
We’ve moved your skill data from your profile to it’s own page and only show you the data from the group you are currently working in. Easily get to your data any time to check-in on your strengths and weaknesses and start a custom review.

Study Plan:
The link to your study plan used to be called “Progress” in the header. Your study plan is a place where you can assess your progress on clusters of skills. Use the study plan as a guide to cover all your bases and try to attain gold medals across the board in order to earn a gold trophy for each section of your test.

Tutoring:
Easily purchase personalized tutoring sessions. When you do, an academic coordinator will help you select times and tutors that will taylor lessons to your needs and work with you in 1-to-1 in online session to bring you up to speed and help you strategize for your test. Grockit’s tutors are a fantastic resource and we wanted to make it easier for you to find them and get their help.

History:
This tab combines an index of review sessions, a list of questions you’ve bookmarked and a short list of skills to improve.

We are looking forward to helping you get more out of your time on Grockit and hope you will enjoy the new design.

Your site is a motherf#%king bullshit.I paid 100 dollars for this shit.Your questions are insane, you f#%ing liars.Your f$%king questions make no motherf#@king sense…

After an interaction with our customer service, the customer’s response was this.

i apologize for my foul language…To be honest i had a conplete meltdown because tomorrow is my test day and i had a nervous breakdown after answering 5 cr questions in a row.Nevertheless, i think your site is very good

What was that customer interaction? We offered to connect the user with someone in Grockit Academics via email and also to fully refund their membership. The only caveat was that we would have to, of course, close their account. Turns out they wanted their account after all.

Sometimes the feedback you get from your users isn’t really or completely how they feel. Sometimes your customers have a bad day. I’m not suggesting you ignore customer problems or that they aren’t often real, but I would suggest that you not catastrophize customer emails even when they are strongly worded.

Our customer service process in general is to try to respond with 1) empathy as opposed to sympathy 2) an attitude of learning and 3) the goal of turning an unhappy customer into a Grockit evangelist.

We deal in the sometimes emotional world of high stakes exams which means that our customer service, which is really just a part of our product, has to account for that. We work hard to bring that about and we keep learning more everyday.