Pooja Nath’s new company Piazza allows students to get study help online from professors and fellow students.While a first year student at Stanford Graduate Business School, she conceived of the site for homework help in 2009. Evelyn Rusli describes how Piazza works in the New York Times,
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 color-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.
Ms. Nath worked briefly for Facebook before starting B-School. However, her entrepreneurial zeal gets in the way of classwork. She failed entrepreneurship class because of low attendance.
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Is there some way to get the “F” framed so she can put it up on the wall at her place of business?
She failed the class for not showing up. That is not quite the same as the founder of FedEx, who submitted his FedEx idea to his professor. The professor gave him an F for the idea.
When I saw the headline, I thought Piazza was going to be another FedEx story, too.
I had no idea that Joseph P. FedEx did that. Makes sense.
I’m slightly mixed on this because one should not eschew education altogether, but, the idea one can learn very much of entrepreneurial value from Professor types is perhaps unproven.
Hahaha, I admire your impartial restraint in saying “the idea one can learn very much of entrepreneurial value from Professor types is perhaps unproven.”
Anyone who has taken an entrepreneurship class knows they are of null value. There are those with vision and the character to forge that vision, and those without.
I first heard of a Department of Entrepreneurship” at a university near where I live in Japan. I thought this was a typical Japanese, loony, collectivist, response to a problem of creativity and individual initiative. Rather like the “classes in a sense of humour” that sprouted up once the Japanese discovered that a sense of humour was useful, nay, vital, when doing business with Westerners. I am very disappointed (tho not entirely surprised, whatever Dr. Johnson may say) to see that the Japanese merely copied the Americans.
The very term “Entrepreneurship Class” is an oxymoron. The role of an entrepreneur in society is to see the world as it *might* be. You can’t teach somebody to envision the future.
“If I had an education, I would not have had time to learn anything else.”
–Cornelius Vanderbilt
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