Alice: save a million dollars, they sold a million dollars or they receive a million dollars in W2. So tell us a little bit about your journey to your first million dollars, including the challenges and the extent of how long does it take to get to that million. Um I’m sure our audience would love to know about it.
Kim: Yeah, absolutely. I started my career really working for companies and right out of school I went to work for Hewlett Packard and it was important to me coming out of school that I had a name on my resume that people recognized and I felt like that was going to give me future opportunity and it did. I won’t say there’s anything wrong with that decision. What I probably didn’t realize is in the structure of a big company, they do structure in a lot of learning. So, you know, Hewlett Packard has a very defined management structure and methodology, even more so in that time than they do now. And I was very well trained in that and that served me really well. So, that big company experience was really useful and I learned so much from them. However, I was I was working for HP and Corvalis, Oregon, and it occurred to me there was nothing I could do in my career being one player in such a large company that would actually fundamentally move the needle in the success of the company. And so that was one thing for me that I was like, “Wow, I’m looking for like a larger impact.” The other thing I noticed within a large company is you have to have very clearly defined roles. And so everyone was kind of in a box. I’m not very good at staying in boxes. And so I was always kind of jumping out of my box. And then I get feedback, it’s really great, you took some initiative, but you know, remember this is kind of your role. And so I started to bump up against that a little bit as well. And then a friend called and said, “Hey, we’re starting this software company in higher education.” And this was in 1999, so it was like very early in internet software. Exciting time to be in internet software. And I went to work for a startup company. I was in the first 30 employees. So I wasn’t employee number three, but I was an early employee. And just became so much more clear to me that I’m a very entrepreneurial thinker, a very entrepreneurial leader. What was exciting to me about that is I walked into a company where they said, “We’re going to implement this software at scale across all of these institutions, but we’ve never done that.” So, my job was to figure out how to create these relationships with universities. We were going to make more money and be more successful the more completely they implemented our soft, the more students they had using it, all of those things. And the approach that I ended up using was very much a relationship oriented approach. We identified a key champion at each institution. We worked really hard to help them fall in love with us to feel like they wanted to see us be successful and then to build out kind of custom strategies, but we did it in a very personalized human way. and I did not know at the time that was like my way. Like when I was pretty good at doing is going into very ambiguous environments where there wasn’t a known solution, engaging experts who understand those environments really well, building relationship with them, joining together in our vision of success and then finding creative solutions to achieve that success. And that is what I love to do. So I started doing that with that company. I left that company. I created my own consulting firm. I was doing that with others. And as I was working with all of these different companies to use this process to engage more deeply with their customers, ensure they really had product market fit, help their customers, be their biggest advocates in selling to new customers, all of that. I really realized that I was starting to have that kind of entrepreneurial uh itch of like I love doing this for other people. I kind of want to do it for myself. I was starting to look at this and say I think I’m ready to launch my own thing. And at the same time there was a guy at MIT. His name is DJ Kumar and he was an amazing person to work with, an amazing leader, an amazing visionary and he had done a lot of work with me in my company. And at some point he pulled me aside about the time I was having that same feeling and he said to me, “Kim, with all of the love I have for you, I need to give you this feedback. There aren’t a lot of us who know how to create this kind of change in education.” And we’ve really invested in you to help you understand also the dynamics, the most effective ways to do this. Excuse me. And you’re not bringing anyone along with you. I’m investing in you. We’re investing in you and you’re contributing a lot, but you need to be passing what you’re learning on to others. And so those two things together were kind of I’m ready to bring an idea to market. I’m inspired be it by the idea of building a team, building the capability of that team and those were in the back of my mind and suddenly the Gates Foundation launched a process that was called the next generation learning challenges grants and instead of them saying MIT I want to give you a grant or Stanford I want to give you a grant they just put out a set of problems and said here are 10 problems in higher education bring us a next generation solution. something that you’re seeing working that you could scale to address this problem. And one of the problems was how can we use open content to improve success for atrisisk learners. So looking at kind of the content side of open source software. Can we bring this openly licensed set of core resources to students to improve success specifically for at risk learners? And so I applied for one of those grants. I always joke about that being a friends and family project for me where, you know, I was like, “Okay, I think we could do this in general education courses.” I kind of had an idea and I was like, “All right, who are my friends across higher education who are crazy enough that they will jump into this with me?” And I just kind of went down the list calling folks from craziest to least crazy. The first person I called, I don’t even have a home for this grant, was a a gentleman named ML Batino at Critos College. And I said, would Cerritos be willing to be the home for this grant? You know, you would be the primary investigator for the grant. The money would come to you and then I would work with you and do the work to implement this. And so we we did that grant. It was quite successful. I’m very competitive. And the Gates Foundation had said out of the gate, we’re going to make lots of small bets in these grants and then we’ll see what works and we’ll double down. That was always their linkage. We’re going to double down on some of the more successful project. And I’m like, challenge accepted. We will be the most successful project. And we did really good work on that project. We saw great improvements in success rates specifically in students who really had challenges coming into college in their math preparation. and it’s a big problem to solve. And so we got to the end of that and I submitted a follow-up proposal and it was declined. I was very upset about that. So I started calling around for feedback and one of the program officers who has since been just a long time a friend and mentor in all of this said, “Kim, we really admired the work you guys did in the first grant, but when you started to talk about how to scale it, you were saying we’re going to put up a pretty good website and that’s going to change education.” And I said, you know, Rahee, I think it’s a company. like I had considered creating a company that could do this work and really scale the work and he said I think that sounds really interesting. He said we won’t fund your company in this grant. We’re not doing any fun funding to core profits but you’ve worked really well with your college partners. Maybe one of them will be the lead and the company can support this work. And so I went back to Certo’s College and they said absolutely we will be the lead on this grant. we understand that what we’re doing is helping you do the proof of concept work around this early stage company. We love that idea. So it was really for me I think there’s been a lot of learning about myself through that process. But when I started all of that I wanted to be well compensated for my work for sure. But I wasn’t starting that saying my vision is I want a million dollars. I was saying I want to save students a billion dollars in technical cost. So I was kind of like framing my vision for myself in the change I wanted to create in the world. And you know that allowed me to really think big. I think if at that point you’d said to me what do you want to do from a revenue perspective from a personal net worth perspective? I felt uncomfortable saying I want this to be my personal net worth. I felt much more comfortable saying this is my vision of the change I want to create and I know if I create that change and I do this well I will do fine financially. But I think that kind of question of like personal ambition around financial wealth or around financial well-being for me personally I’ve always had trouble voicing that planning around that really clearly and I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think a lot of women really struggle with this idea of saying I deserve this. I’m going after this. I think I can do this if it is about something that is more self- serving instead of something that is serving others. And so it’s taken me a long time to say it’s completely legitimate for me to have my own personal financial goals and to make those priorities in my life to ask other people to help me be successful with.
Alice: Very good. So the one question I think the audience would like to know is how long does it take for the company from being created to that first million dollar revenue? Do you remember?
Kim: It was about three years.
Alice: Yeah. Good. Good. Good.
Kim: But I I’ll tell you at that point we were not making money. So we were not profitable. We had some grant funding coming in that was helping us build something. And then about 3 years in, we took a round of investor financing so that we could grow faster, so that we could mature our our offering. So when you do that, then there’s kind of an expectation that you’re going to be spending down that investor funding. And so we did a round of investor funding in 2015, one in 2017, and one in 2019. And each of those, you know, then kind of brought in some new investors, some additional capital from existing investors, and really increased the expectation about what we were going to do. And getting to that first million dollars of revenue was much more by us, for us in terms of the founding team of like proving out what we were able to do. And then you bring investors in and it does change the dynamic. And so I think when you and I talked the first time I mentioned this that there is a level of risk in saying you know instead of like working in a job where I create a salary for myself and I’m investing in the market I’m investing in companies. I’m investing in stock. I’m investing in real estate. whatever it is. I mean for for us it was like I got to a point where was like we’re starting the company and my husband and I made the decision that we were going to like really scale back a lot like you know there was a long period of time where anything I made was going directly into the company and there was really no salary to speak of and it was like we are making this investment in me and I’m investing in myself to grow this company and that matched up really well with how we like to do things and with our values But it was definitely an aggressive investment strategy. If this if it hadn’t played out, we’d invested a lot of our retirement, a lot of our savings into creating a company that was dependent on me to make it successful. And so there was definitely some risk in that as we were going through each of these cycles of investment.
