We interviewed the founders of two thriving tech businesses as well as one developer who maintains her side hustle while working full-time for a video game giant. According to them, their entrepreneurial magic comes from doing something you love, sticking at it and providing a fresh, genuine solution to consumers.
Read on for how they do it.
Jibo: bringing the world’s cutest robot to market
Six months before launch of its product – the world’s first social robot for the home –Boston-based company Jibo and its same-named ‘bot appeared on the morning TV show Today. Jibo presold $4m in orders of the automaton’s home and developer editions, priced at $749 each. And through the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, the company raised close to $4m; within just 10 hours of launching, the campaign had already soared beyond the initial $100,000 goal to $2.29m.
Steve Chambers, Jibo’s CEO, says the idea wasn’t always to sell robots on TV. Initially, co-founder and chief scientist Cynthia Breazeal, a social-robotics pioneer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor who came up with the concept during her studies, intended the robot for a different market: healthcare and the elderly.
Breazeal worked part-time at MIT while creating Jibo. With fellow cofounder, business executive and entrepreneur Jeri Asher, the pair wooed Chambers, then president of Nuance, who “loved the idea of a robot, in your personal space, that connected people-to-people in ways flat screens do not”. Chambers worked weekends and nights with Jibo until he left Nuance.
“Initially, it was difficult to get funding,” Chambers says. “When we made a finer point for Jibo to become a household robot – to start talking, communicating and socializing, inter-relating with others – we realized the concept of the social robot had a broader, social appeal, and the broader market was excited about this technology.”
Jibo now offers adults, kids and developers helpful features, like taking messages, snapping photos and making video calls. Jibo can say your name as it performs a task, share pictures and offer weather updates. Jibo can also play around, acting as the leader for games like Trivial Pursuit, Chambers says. “Once you combine a robot with character and personality who can recognize you as an individual,” he says, “there are a lot of things you can do that is way more exciting.”
One piece of advice for those nurturing tech-based side projects: always validate your company to crowdfunding investors with a prototype, since slide shows aren’t nearly as compelling, Chambers says. “Even if it’s only a glimpse of the unique capability, really strive to get that vivid prototype done. That’s the key.”
The company is still developing its earlier purpose: working on a platform whereby Jibo reminds the elderly about medicine and appointments. Ultimately, Jibo could let Chambers’ aging mother know that her son will visit at 10am.
Jibo – the company – will conducts field trials to ensure the robot performs within household conditions, then will officially launch in June. “And people are lining up just to see this thing. This is the year it all comes to be,” Chambers says.
EA Mobile developer Chelsea Howe: side hustle is key to creativity
Chelsea Howe always loved to create games – even before she could hold a controller. Growing up in Kansas, Ohio and New York, she spent hours drawing creatures, plants, ships and characters for the worlds building in her mind. “Once I got to college, I realized bringing them to life in games had far more potential,” she says.
Not surprisingly, Howe is a cofounder of a small development studio, creating experiential games for kids and adults while also working full time as a creative director at gaming giant EA Mobile. Howe, now based in Austin, Texas, has had considerable success developing games since 2009, long before she worked for EA Mobile.
In 2013, Howe helped design Terra, a fitness app, with a company called Funomena and also the University of California, Davis, to get at-risk American youths living in food deserts healthier. She also helped Kimochis make an interactive e-book on emotional intelligence. And she co-founded qgcon, the popular queerness and game development conference, now in its third year, at the University of California, Berkeley.
In spite of all the time she spends at her day job, Howe still keeps her consulting work as a side venture. She feels that 100% dependence on that thing you love changes the relationship. “Once you tie that passion to your sustenance, you can no longer play,” she says. “The consequences are too real, and you lose your willingness to experiment and risk.”
So working on different projects during weekends refreshes rather than depletes her. “I will come to work and would have thought of something I wouldn’t have otherwise,” Howe adds.
Howe feels excited for future opportunities and new fields within gaming, especially since the Top 10 grossing games in mobile, her speciality, haven’t changed in years. She sees opportunities for newcomers to break through the giants and create a mass market success. “The stagnation of the top 10 games is a really compelling,” she says, “and a fun challenge to crack.”
CourseHorse: cracking the nut
Call it serendipity or circumstance, but successful tech founders often say that the defining moments for their ventures come from timing, connections and solving a problem that few others could. Such was the case for Nihal Parthasarathi and Katie Kapler, the cofounders of CourseHorse, which helps adults discover and register for in-person classes ranging from cooking to finance to narrative art.
In 2014, three years after the thriving Manhattan startup’s launch, Forbes named CourseHorse one of “America’s most promising companies”. It works with more than 1,500 class providers, offering 70,000 classes to 200,000 members nationwide. In January, CourseHorse, which now has 20 employees, announced it raised $4m in series B investment funding.
Here’s how the venture unfolded. In a focus group, Parthasarathi, then an education technology consultant for a major provider of test-prep materials, heard a parent ask whether one central list detailed all Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) classes. Parthasarathi had a “eureka moment”: no central resource existed – but, hey, that service really should be there.
That night he reached out to Kapler, his best friend at New York University, who was then leading the product development team at Biz2Credit, an online marketplace for small business loans. They had talked about starting a company together and knew this might be a real venture. While the pair didn’t immediately quit their jobs, the idea grew so big and so fast that they swapped full-time employment for part-time gigs. A year later, they had to resign from those jobs, too.
The process wasn’t easy, and competitors already had crashed and burned in this very space. One problem Parthasarathi and Kapler found was that class providers didn’t list their courses online. “So that made it impossible for someone to organize the information,” Parthasarathi says. “Yet, that people were looking for information online is what made our business possible.”
Three months before launch, the founders realized schools weren’t willing to manage their own data, so they’d have to manage it for them. They created their own system to do so. “Unlike the bigger university systems, ours was simpler for the user to navigate and could carry everything from classes in yoga, art to finance,” Parthasarathi says.
From that point, things moved quickly. CourseHorse’s premise – improving people’s lives through education – helped them attract passionate talent. “People learned about what we were doing and wanted to be part of that,” Kapler recalls. CourseHorse also remained capital-positive, which made them credible to investors used to startups burning through cash.
With its new round of funding, the company’s priorities are geographical expansion, incorporating online classes overseas, and developing an analytic intelligence tool to help support schools and universities. Meanwhile, universities have reached out to CourseHorse to list their credit graduation programs, Kapler says. “We can be the only place where people can parallel online and face-to-face options from any location globally,” she adds. “So the challenge, and future opportunity, is our ability to share that information with the community to make our product even better.”
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