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Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

venturebeat.com

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Re: Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

#3
> Panorama isn’t a vastly complex piece of technology by design. Feuer has found that analog, paper-based systems still work best with students, parents, and teachers. The team will work with communities to host pizza parties and other gatherings, where the surveys are handed out.

Awesome that they're not trying to force technology down everyone's throats, which might keep real people at arm's length... and especially impressive that they can scale this approach to 4000+ schools. Best wishes going forward!

Re: Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

#5
Feuer told me that Zuck gave him some memorable advice on building out a strong team. The two golden rules? Only hire people you’d spend time with socially, and make sure you’d feel comfortable reporting to the person if roles were reversed.

I'm not a big fan of the "culture fit" filter, but the second one is great advice. Peter Drucker said[1] something similar: “Picking a leader: would I want my son or daughter to work under that person?”

1: http://robertamter.blogspot.com/2008/07/peter-druckers-tenet...

Re: Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13)

#6
Very exciting — it looks like something school districts need very badly.

I wonder how much Panorama participates in the interpretation of the results. It's one thing to efficiently gather responses to survey questions, but quite another to effectively figure out what the results mean.

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research has done interesting work on something similar with Chicago Public Schools[1], though they also probably do more basic (i.e., academic) research about what to do with the results.

Unrelated, what's with the website[2] for Zuckerberg's education foundation, Startup: Education? I guess it's not really used for anything. But it's ironic how cheap-looking it is. The logo is a JPEG.

[1] https://cps.5-essentials.org/2012/schools/

[2] http://www.startupeducation.org/