

Zuck makes his first major investment in Panorama Education (YC S13) - xantanner
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/21/zuck-makes-his-first-major-ed-tech-investment-in-panorama-education-the-brainchild-of-a-yale-coder/

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vellum
_Feuer told me that Zuck gave him some memorable advice on building out a
strong team. The two golden rules? Only hire people you’d spend time with
socially, and make sure you’d feel comfortable reporting to the person if
roles were reversed._

I'm not a big fan of the "culture fit" filter, but the second one is great
advice. Peter Drucker said[1] something similar: “Picking a leader: would I
want my son or daughter to work under that person?”

1: [http://robertamter.blogspot.com/2008/07/peter-druckers-
tenet...](http://robertamter.blogspot.com/2008/07/peter-druckers-tenets.html)

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Cyranix
> Panorama isn’t a vastly complex piece of technology by design. Feuer has
> found that analog, paper-based systems still work best with students,
> parents, and teachers. The team will work with communities to host pizza
> parties and other gatherings, where the surveys are handed out.

Awesome that they're not trying to force technology down everyone's throats,
which might keep real people at arm's length... and especially impressive that
they can scale this approach to 4000+ schools. Best wishes going forward!

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dcre
Very exciting — it looks like something school districts need very badly.

I wonder how much Panorama participates in the interpretation of the results.
It's one thing to efficiently gather responses to survey questions, but quite
another to effectively figure out what the results mean.

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research has done interesting
work on something similar with Chicago Public Schools[1], though they also
probably do more basic (i.e., academic) research about what to do with the
results.

Unrelated, what's with the website[2] for Zuckerberg's education foundation,
Startup: Education? I guess it's not really used for anything. But it's ironic
how cheap-looking it is. The logo is a JPEG.

[1]
[https://cps.5-essentials.org/2012/schools/](https://cps.5-essentials.org/2012/schools/)

[2] [http://www.startupeducation.org/](http://www.startupeducation.org/)

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martinshen
Excited for this. Checked out Startup Education fund. Zuck should've put a lil
more effort on this page. It's pretty awful and seems outdated.

[http://www.startupeducation.org/](http://www.startupeducation.org/)

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theuri
Congrats to Zuck on backing progressive looking edtech ventures...

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whbk
Nice, I work in EdTech and remember being pretty impressed when I looked into
them after they posted a job listing here, glad to see things are going well.
Now move to SF ;)

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dzhao
The Panorama team is awesome, this is just the beginning of something special.
Congrats guys!

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ZanyProgrammer
Ugh, can we keep calling him Zuck, as if we're all a member or wanna be member
of his social circle (though given the celebrity and class level of some HN
members, that's probably true).

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MWil
congrats Xan and the rest of the team!

