Features: Interviews

I Need a Pencil

I first encountered Jason Shah in an e-mail describing his web site, I Need a Pencil. I get lots of PR pitches about web products and I almost always ignore them. But something here caught me eye. First, Jason is a student; an undergraduate at Harvard, to be precise. Second, the service is free. And third, and most important, I Need a Pencil works in close conjunction with college access organizations around the world.

Put simply: Jason thinks that everyone should have access to SAT prep tools, especially those for whom access to college is neither expected nor guaranteed.

I concluded that Jason is someone that we had to meet. He agreed to sit through an interview to talk about his vision, life at Harvard, and what’s it’s like trying to run a company while a student.

Tell me the I Need a Pencil story.

I started INeedAPencil.com in March 2006 out of my frustration with limited options for students seeking quality test and college preparation tools without paying an arm and a leg. I was a junior in high school, and I was tutoring fellow students for the SAT when I realized how limited my reach was and how repetitive my job became.

Inspired by my family, especially my sister who had taught in charter schools, I decided to launch INeedAPencil.com as my attempt to extend college access to more people.

What specific events led you from Jason the high school student to Jason student with a company?

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The Dream Job Diaries is a new semi-regular feature that investigates the reality of various glamorous post-college paths. If you have a job or know of a job you would like to see profiled, send me an e-mail.

Update 10/8/08: I inexplicably reversed the names of Lance and Dana in the original version of the article. It has been fixed below.

9 AM

The world headquarters of Wiggio Inc. can be found on the first floor of a triplex, situated across from the fire station in a gentrifying North Cambridge neighborhood. At 9 AM, one Friday morning this past September, Dana Lampert arrived to start the new day. He had been at the office until 9 PM the night before. This was considered good. The two nights previous he had been there until 3 and 4:30 AM, respectively, coaxing along a tricky upload of their web site to new servers.

Dana is soon joined by Lance Polivy, his college friend and co-founder of the company. They begin their day by diving into the more than 100 product feedback messages that have gathered over the past 24 hours. The feedback concerns Wiggio’s flagship (and only) product: the wiggio.com website.

This site was launched by Lance and Dana the previous spring, while they were seniors at Cornell. The idea is simple: it makes organizing groups easier.

Here’s the pitch: with one web site, your group can setup shared calendars, construct polls, store files, and send mass text, e-mail, and even voice messages to members. Their primary market is student groups, though its potential audience is wider.

In this early start-up stage, Lance and Dana feel it’s important to respond personally to every piece of feedback. The process is tedious, but it helps keep the founders connected to the users. For a web start-up, users are everything. Without them, all you have is a fancy web site and a business plan.

10 AM

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An Interview Experiment

My friend Ben recently pitched an interesting idea for a blog post. He proposed that instead of a formal interview, we just have a conversation, drifting from topic to topic as we find things interesting. Ben’s a fascinating guy. His blog is well-trafficked, he commentates on NPR, he writes professionally, and is, relevantly enough, a college student. So I jumped at the chance.

Below are excerpts from our conversation. Check out Ben’s blog for his version of this post which will include different excerpts.

A Conversation Between Cal Newport and Ben Casnocha

Ben: So Cal, here we are on instant messenger. You have expressed concern about how email can be distracting. You don’t use Twitter because you say you don’t need yet another short-text distraction. Do you IM?

Cal: Not intentionally. Though people occasionally find me on gchat. I don’t like the slow pace and partial attention. Do you?

Ben: No. Same. Slow pace, partial attention. I wonder whether I will flip to other windows during this chat, or just watch the screen say “Cal Newport is typing…”

Do you adopt 4HWW habits with email?

Cal: Not really. I don’t do auto-responders, and I check more than twice a day. The big thing I’ve done with my e-mail was move from a single inbox to multiple “mono-typic pigeon holes.”

Ben: WTF is that?

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