A Fireside Chat with Jeremy Rossman
by Priyanka Kumar and Jett Wang
Jeremy Rossmann, founder of makeschool.com, had a great computer science teacher in high school who emphasized learning by trying & doing. Jeremy was less impressed by the computer science experience at MIT, so he launched Make School as a summer program modeled off the project-based learning he experienced in high school and incubated the venture at YC.
In 2014, Make School started licensing their curriculum to universities as they realized that their students were landing internships due to projects done in their program. They launched a 1-year program, then a 2-year program, then an accredited college program. In the future, Make School will probably keep some portion of their classes online, and potentially launch a full online degree.
The following is advice that Jeremy shared during our fireside chat with him:
Optimizing how to be an elite student does not equal optimizing how to be a successful startup. Know the difference between real work that helps your product or builds your skills and fake work. Fake work is when you try to model success behaviors by looking like you’re doing something important when you’re not really doing something meaningful. You’re not trying to pad your resume and add credentials -- you’re trying to create a successful venture.
Examples of fake work: pitching at competitions, talking to investors, applying to accelerators
Examples of real work: focusing on helping growth, churn, and product market fit
“Coming out of college, you spent so long jumping through hoops; you have been taught to focus on marketing the product instead of learning the process.”
When offering insight on challenges that college-student startup founders face, Jeremy said:
College startups are bloated.They often come from hackathons, etc, the team happens to be the people who were around at the time instead of the people who are best for the job.
College students are still building their own skills. They often need to choose between optimizing for the market and optimizing for pushing their own skill set.
College students often come up with solutions to college student problems, but this is a tough market because college students are broke, don’t spend, and turn over every 4 years.
Building products and launching them is the best way to get to the point where you can create a start-up. Build things people love. Launching is easy, getting over the finish line is harder.
Jeremy’s advice for how to partner with large, established organizations:
Understand where the decision-making power lies. There are people who do not have that power, but who are incentivized to hide that information from you and keep you interested.
Identify an internal champion, someone who has influence in the organization that can vouch for you and speed along the process of making a sale.
Understand external policy/regulatory barriers. DO THE READING. “People follow a religion and don’t read the books.” The BEST way to understand how hard something is, is to READ about the process, read the contracts, read about the legal problems; that way you can be prepared when people point out potential trouble spots.
Make sure to unify your vision and get your team on board. This requires lots of internal transparency. When you onboard, just tell them what you measure every week, what matters, and how those key metrics evolve over time.
His advice for securing a good mentor/advisor:
Get into a well-respected accelerator.
Beyond that, many advisors are not that helpful. You want someone who has walked the path before. Treat it like a numbers game: Reach out to many people, follow up regularly, gauge their interest and let them know how they would help you, funnel it down over time.
“Asking two mentors and not getting responses and concluding that it’s hard to get a mentor is like going on Tinder, swiping right twice and not getting any matches and thinking that you’re going to die single.”
And finally his insight on trends in the education space:
There will be more flexibility and non-linearity of curriculum. 10 years from now, there will be new names in the higher ed space; many current institutions are on risky financial footing and the annual number of high school graduates is shrinking.