Isolation inspires start-up offering homework help

Piazza is part of a growing group of technology startups hoping to disrupt the education market

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her startup in Silicon Valley, Piazza. Nath, who was the first woman from her hometown to attend the prestigious engineering school and later escaped an arranged marriage to become an entrepreneur, conceived of the site for homework help in 2009 during her first year at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Students post questions to their course page, which peers and educators can then respond to. Instructors moderate the discussion, endorse the best responses and track the popularity of questions in real time. Responses are also colour-coded, so students can easily identify the instructor’s comments.

Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes. “The whole idea of Piazza stems from the dynamics that I observed at IIT. From the sidelines I saw how effective it was to get immediate help, from peers in the same room,” Nath, 30, said.

Piazza, the Italian term for a public square, is part of a growing group of technology startups hoping to disrupt the education market. Its peers include Kno and Inkling, two platforms for interactive, digital textbooks. The trend has also given birth to its own Silicon Valley-based incubator, Imagine K12, which announced its first batch of investments in June.

“Education is a big focus area for us. You’re going to see big fundamental shifts in the way education is performed,” said Aydin Senkut, an investor in Piazza who made his fortune as an early Google employee. “With Piazza, it’s about turning data into actionable intelligence. We want to empower people to ask and answer questions and we’re going to measure every aspect of it.”

Piazza’s own metrics are promising. The average user, according to the company’s data, spends two to three hours a day on the site. The company has just raised $1.5 million in financing from several prominent Silicon Valley backers, including Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway and Senkut, the founder of Felicis Ventures.

Relying heavily on word-of-mouth, Piazza has expanded from roughly three colleges to more than 330 in the last year. At Stanford, the first to start using the service, more than half of the undergraduates are registered users. As in the case of Facebook, the wildly popular social network that sprang from a Harvard dorm room, the close-knit nature of college campuses has helped accelerate the adoption of Piazza.

Jennifer Rexford, a computer science professor at Princeton, started using Piazza for her programming systems class last semester. The platform, which replaced the traditional classroom email list, helped her reduce her office hours and respond to student questions faster. It also turned into an unexpected resource for grading; at the end of the semester she used Piazza’s statistics on participation to reward the most “helpful” students.

“Piazza gave the students a community, especially in the middle of the night, when the instructors were sleeping,” Rexford said. “The students were more interactive in general and it was a time saver all-around.”

Despite its early success, Piazza is still struggling to increase its adoption and find a road to profitability. Rexford, for instance, is one of fewer than a dozen professors at Princeton using Piazza. She says many of her peers are interested in the service, but are cautious with new technology. “I think some of them were waiting to see what our experience would be,” she said.

No hurry to make money

Nath says she’s in no hurry to make money on the service, which is currently free. Instead, she’s focused on building the number of users over the next year. “We have some ideas, but we’re not ready to say this is how we’re going to do it,” she said. “We’re going to stay focused on keeping our engagement rates high.” In part, Piazza is still a personal crusade for Nath. The immigrant engineer knows her path is not common.

She straddled India and North America, having spent several years in Canada and Ohio before returning to India at the age of 11. As a high school student in Patna, India, she watched several of her girlfriends drop out of school, one by one, at the age of 15, because their parents found them suitable mates. Her parents, meanwhile, encouraged her to go to IIT and later, back to the United States to receive a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland.

But at the age of 22, when it seemed an appropriate time to marry, Nath’s parents prodded their daughter, a product of Indian and American cultures, into an arranged marriage. Frustrated by the match, and what she describes as considerable pressure to conform to conservative standards, Nath fled, divorced her husband and even left a job at Oracle.

Untethered, she suddenly felt free to “pursue opportunities I was more passionate about,” Nath says. That led her to the world of startups. She became a software programmer for Kosmix, a social Web startup, and later joined a promising company named Facebook. Still searching, Nath left soon after, and in 2008 enrolled in business school.

There was one snag. Nath failed an entrepreneurship class because of low attendance. She had a good excuse: too many investor meetings for Piazza. and her new journey had begun.