About 18 months ago, novice entrepreneur Sue Khim flew to San Francisco from her home in Illinois to take part in an uncommonly public version of a Silicon Valley rite of passage — the pitch. With thousands of other young techies in the audience, she was scheduled to be onstage at the Launch Festival, a showcase for "stealth" startups that have managed to keep their products out of the voracious tech press, or have as-yet-unreleased products to announce.
Launch is more competition than festival. Over two days, tech entrepreneurs pitch to a panel of hotshot technologists who issue on-the-spot critique of products' market viability and revenue models, and, potentially offer funding.
Khim's presentation knocked it out of the park, bagging $75,000 for Alltuition, a "TurboTax for student loans." But within six months, the founders had turned their attention to a new endeavor, entirely fueled by their success at the Launch Festival.
Khim has gone from talking about a potential market of 21 million students to about 20 times that number. And she's targeting children across the world as young as 11 who are the best among their peer groups at science and math.
It's called Brilliant.org — an online hub for the world's most promising young minds to come together, connect, and see how they measure up against one another. Launch judge and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya helped spark the idea.
"There's a ton of people outside the U.S. that are trying to get into U.S. schools that have no path to figure that out," Palihapitiya told Brilliant founder Khim after her Alltuition presentation. There also seemed to be plenty of offerings for adults and remediation programs for struggling high school students in online education. But not a place to challenge A and B students.
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