Brainscape (www.brain-scape.com) is a web & mobile platform that helps you learn things faster. You can think of it as your personalized flashcard stream, repeating concepts in just the right pattern for you to remember them better. Brainscape serves as a content authoring tool, a social network, and a marketplace of premium educational content for a growing number of subjects.
Q: Do you think the education you’ve invested in helped you on the road to success?
Absolutely. My undergraduate degree in Economics & Finance (University of Georgia) taught me the importance of data-driven decision-making, while my Masters degree in Education Technology (Columbia University) gave me the technical skills, connections, and cognitive science background necessary to succeed in the industry.
Q: What was the “breaking point” in your career that made you decide to build your own brand?
I had made the original version of Brainscape as a Microsoft Excel macro to help me study French back in 2006. When it became so large and effective for me, I decided to go back to grad school to learn more about the education technology industry and turn this prototype into a real business.
Q: What were some of the obstacles that you had to overcome to get to where you are now? How do you overcome failure?
Being a young first-time entrepreneur who is not a rockstar software engineer, it was initially very hard to establish credibility among developers and investors. Nobody is willing to throw their career or money behind you unless you are able to prove something compelling. So I had to find the right balance of incremental successes that were always just enough to convince the next successful person to support my vision. Gradually, I built a bandwagon effect that has led to the great team I have today.
Q: Can you tell us of an interesting story from your professional life?
After I finished my Masters degree, I got a job at a Wall St. e-Learning consulting firm, to pay for Brainscape’s initial software development. While everyone else at my firm lived in cushy apartments on the Upper West Side, West Village, or Park Slope, I moved into a “rough” neighborhood in Brooklyn, got a roommate, and learned to dine on ramen noodles like I did in college. There was a period of several months where I literally had no life. I would stay at the office until at least midnight every night working on Brainscape, and I would spend entire weekends in coffee shops and libraries refining the prototype, building the business plan, and networking. Few people believed in me early on. I was broke. And I lost many friends because I was “no fun” anymore and never went out.
The point is that no huge milestones are reached without ridiculously hard work. You’ve got to pay your dues. I’m still working 60-70 hour weeks, but I will hopefully never again hit a period that was so physically draining as that year on Wall St. with a startup on the side.
Q: As a young professional, what were some of the mistakes that you made and what did you learn?
Having such an ambitious vision for Brainscape, I was convinced that we should not “launch” until the entire platform was complete. After all, I thought, if we just launched with a few core features, then some competitor with more resources might copy us and get much further ahead. We had to do everything at once. And that meant we had to spend a ridiculous amount of money up front.
In retrospect, the lean startup movement has it right: launch the minimum viable product as soon as possible, even if it is only useful by a small core group of power users. If anyone copies your core idea then it wasn’t very protectable anyway! Besides, your advantage is not necessarily to be conceiving that idea before anyone else does, but rather to be doing it smarter and with better responsiveness to early customer feedback than your potential competitors. Remember: the more features you have in your initial launch, the harder it is to be nimble going forward. It’s better to first iterate toward one feature that is 100% awesome than to launch with 10 features that are each 10% awesome.
Q: Is there any other achievement that you are extremely proud of? If so, why?
Before I went to grad school for Education Technology, I worked for a year in Panama on a Fulbright fellowship, helping the government improve its anti-corruption strategy. Although I had conceived the project on my own when applying for the Fulbright, I was in for a rude awakening when I arrived in the country not knowing anybody. I had a massive task ahead of me and would be facing an uphill battle fighting corruption in a developing country.
Nevertheless, by the end of the year, I had interviewed over 60 government employees & businessmen, published a 50-page anti-corruption strategy and two articles in the national newspaper, and had given two presentations to crowds of over 200 government employees, UN officials, and journalists – all in Spanish, which I only began learning in high school. Accomplishing these feats gave me a huge boost in professional confidence. I learned that if I can do all this, having started with nothing, then I can do anything.
Q: How do you measure success?
I measure success by how much effort you put into your passion – not necessarily the fruits of those efforts. Whether your passion is your job, your friends, your music, your sport, or your cooking, if you’re not giving it 100%, then you will never be successful. Success takes hard work.
Q: What is one advice that you can offer to your readers?
The person who you thought you were no match for is the person who you actually are.
Q: What do you do for fun?
Run, dance, read, eat, drink, play, learn
Q: What is your favorite 1) gadget(s), 2) software(s), 3) website(s) that makes your life easier and more productive?
iPhone, spreadsheets, and TechCrunch.
Q: Whom would you like to see featured here and why? (recommend us someone we don’t know of yet but really should)
Paul Gollash, founder & CEO of Voxy. Like me, he’s taken an education idea he wanted for himself and has turned it into a fast-growing startup.
Ways to Connect with you:
Website: brain-scape.com
Twitter: @a_s_cohen
Facebook: facebook.com/brainscape
From: http://www.moomkin.com/brainscape-flashcards/
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