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Amanda DoAmaral closes a $615K seed round and opens up about her roller coaster year as a founder
Amanda DoAmaral is the founder and CEO of Fiveable, an edtech livestream platform with a growing user base of teachers and students from every state in the US. She has described Fiveable as Twitch for education: “If kids can get help with video games, they should be able to get
A Look Back at our SOCAP Diversity & Impact Gathering
As we enter the winter season approaching the end of the year, we wanted to reflect on one of the highlights of the previous season. In October, we attended SOCAP19 in San Francisco. As every year, this impact investing conference created an amazing space for connecting to other change-makers, sharing
Founder Spotlight: Cindy Mi of VIPKid
Here in the US, the fable of the dropout-turned-tech-billionaire is a familiar one. But it doesn’t usually bring to mind a young Chinese woman reinventing her country’s foreign-language education system. Meet Cindy Mi, the 35-year-old founder and CEO of the online teaching platform VIPKid, who’s bringing new life–and considerable business
New Pattern Spotlight: Amanda DoAmaral, Founder of Fiveable
Amanda started out as a Teach for America teacher in Skyline High School in Oakland, where she taught Advanced Placement U.S. and World History. After leaving the classroom, she still wanted to help all students do well on their AP exams and started tutoring students online. Amanda didn’t know it
New Pattern Spotlight: Jude Chiy, Founder of Flamingo
In this first episode of the New Pattern Spotlight series, Kimmy speaks with Jude Chiy, the founder and CEO of Flamingo, which lets property managers offer residents a plethora of services ranging from housekeeping to cooking classes. Kimmy and Jude discuss building a quickly-growing tech startup in Chicago, the advantage
3 Must-Know Tips for Getting Your First Sales
Many inexperienced startup founders expect sales to come flooding in as soon as they launch their product and marketing campaign. In reality, that rarely happens even if you have an outstanding product that is fairly priced. I have seen many startups flounder at this point as the team gets discouraged
Diversity as a Driver For Innovation
Yes, it actually does matter It’s 2019 and people still treat diversity building in their organization as a checking-the-box exercise. If you are still applying the Rooney Rule or saying things like “we need to fill our quota,” you’re getting it all wrong. What do I mean by diversity? I’m
The first thing you should do when launching your product
Like many of the topics I cover in my Startup Basics podcast, this article is based on a mistake I’ve made repeatedly: not ensuring that all of our analytics are installed and working correctly. While this advice is particularly relevant to software products, it applied even if your startup is
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