Charu Noheria is the CoFounder and COO of Practically. Practically is an experiential learning app for STEM subjects. Practically's vision is to reshape the way the world learns, as technology is still lagging behind in many parts of the world in education. This means bringing modern methods and tech to help educators create a more interactive, engaging, and better experience for students to learn in some dry-subject areas in STEM.
Also, you know whenever you're learning something new, whatever it is, there's that saying of you learn best by doing? That's based on The Cone of Learning by Edgar Dale and that's what's Practically is built upon. Practically's objective is for classrooms and students to learn by doing rather than rote learning (learning by memorizing, repetition).
View Charu's interview to learn more about:
How she got into education with her cofounders.
Advice about choosing the right investor.
Advice for entrepreneurs trying to scale their own company.
“The important thing was, I would keep asking people if they used any one of these hundred options, and they all said no. These are my favorite problems to solve. You can’t focus on what everyone else is doing — it has to be about what’s really broken and what you can do to fix it.” -Drew Houston, CoFounder & CEOs of Dropbox
As Dropbox is one of the most successful companies out there, even Drew had a rocky start to his journey before meeting his cofounder and getting into YC. Drew shares 6 strategies for you to take into account to help through fears and cutting out noises to win as a first-time founder. Our favorite is #3 - assume nothing and the first-mover disadvantage. Check it out!
"You're building a startup to last, don't you? Your affinity is your startup foundation. If it fails - your startup will fail too" -Ana, from NoTech Ana
Ana is helping aspiring founders to build startups that last after going through her own mistakes (like losing $500k). As one of the very early things that founders can do is doing audience discovery, or finding your specific target audience. Part of that also entails, as Ana mentions, is measuring your affinity level with the audience you're targeting/working with to determine if your startup that you're building that is serving a particular audience would last. Take the Affinity Stress Test (6 questions that have the Fear Setting exercise by Tim Ferris as the foundation) and see where your affinity level is!
"Which metric, if it were to increase today, would most accelerate my business’ flywheel?"
Lenny Rachitsky, mostly known for his newsletter on product, growth, people management compiled data and case studies on the 6 common North Star metrics that 40+ growth-stage tech companies like AirBnb, Dropbox, Instagram, Slack, Netflix, Tinder use to help them in their business. Which North Star metric will you and your team focus on for your business today?
