Podcast appearances and mentions of victoria ransom

Victoria Ransom is the Founder of Prisma — a cohort-based online school: “preparing 4-12th graders for a rapidly changing future, with an accredited, project-based virtual program where kids build real community.” Raised on an asparagus farm near Bulls — Victoria's journey over the past few decades is a truly inspiring one... she founded and led Wildfire, a social media marketing platform which rose to prominence helping brands build their presence on Facebook, before being acquired by Google for $450M in 2012; was honoured by President Obama as a “Champion of Change” for her accomplishments as an immigrant entrepreneur and innovator, picked up an MBA from Harvard; was named #19 on Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40 list, and so much more.In today's episode, we discuss:* The early days building Wildfire - building a culture and company that customers love as much as the product* How the Google acquisition went down, integration and operating inside the belly of the beast afterwards * What's wrong with the current education system, why Victoria chose to exit the system + build a new school for her family. * Strategies for developing resilience in children and what to expect in the future of education. Referenced:* Forbes 40 under 40 (2012): https://fortune.com/ranking/40-under-40/2012/victoria-ransom/* Google's $450M acquisition of Wildfire: https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/google-acquires-wildfire/* Obama White House - A Nation of Entrepreneurial Journeys: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/06/04/nation-entrepreneurial-journeys* Prisma: https://www.joinprisma.com/* Wildfire: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wildfire-interactiveWhere to find Victoria online:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom/* Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/victoria_ransomTimestamps:[00:00] Intro[01:37] Three traits of a great founder[03:31] Victoria's origin story[05:59] Pivoting from investment banking into adventure travel[08:37] Building and scaling Wildfire[11:46] Bootstrapping before raising money[12:30] Wildfire's path to acquisition[17:16] Why life after acquisition was challenging[19:29] Prisma's origin story[24:41] Inside Prisma's education model[30:19] The challenges of teaching kids resilience[32:28] Prisma's potential to scale[37:34] Will college education become obsolete?[39:24] Victoria's biggest role model[40:38] What it's like founding a company with your partner[42:04] Advice for Kiwi entrepreneurs[43:49] What's next for Victoria and Prisma[44:58] How to help Victoria This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diaspora.nz

Guest  Victoria Ransom  Victoria Ransom is a serial entrepreneur from New Zealand. She has developed four companies including Wildfire Interactive, a social marketing SaaS company, where Ransom was CEO until it was sold to Google in 2012. She was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Zealand in 2011. Fortune Magazine honored her as one of the Forty Most Powerful Women Under Forty in 2012. In 2013, she was invited to the White House by President Barack Obama to receive a "Champion of Change" award recognizing her contributions as an immigrant entrepreneur. In 2015, she was awarded the World Class New Zealander award along with former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark. In 2016, she was NEXT Woman of the Year in the Business and Innovation category. In 2020, Ransom co-founded Prisma, a remote education startup. Victoria has been interviewed by Bloomberg News, The Corner Office, The New York Times and The Wallstreet Journal.  https://www.joinprisma.com/ https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma/videos/the-prisma-story-vision/1128347837551554/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzqdwPI1kFylYq19kQ1F18g  https://twitter.com/victoria_ransom https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom   Show Notes Jenna's intro: Jenna begins the show by reminding listeners that they can leave a voicemail for the podcast and she will read it on the show. Good or bad, she wants your input! Your comments, feedback and suggestions are much appreciated. You can find the link here.   Jenna introduces Victoria and explains that while the online school Prisma is not completely self-directed, it can be a good fit for families with kids that need more structure or are eager for more of a community in light of challenges to group meet-ups during the pandemic. Prisma is an alternative flex school with five week cycles during the year. This makes it a good choice for unschoolers to participate in and for world schoolers who do a lot of traveling.  Victoria tells us a bit about her journey. She is the mother of three and her journey in education began when her oldest reached school age. One thing that concerned her with traditional education was the rapidly changing world we live in, which she believed needed a broader skill set than conventional schools could provide. She was also concerned about the fierce competition and stressful environment, especially where she lives in northern California. She researched homeschooling, alternative and micro schools. She wanted a flexible environment where children could be led by their interests. Something that focused on problem solving and critical thinking. This is when she began to imagine creating something that would not only be best for her own children, but for other families as well.  Jenna asks Victoria to tell us who Prisma serves. What do the families enrolled in Prisma look like?     Victoria says that a common thread is that most of the parents at Prisma want their children to love learning. They are looking to Prisma to provide a toolbox that can help them be able to do many types of work by teaching them critical thinking and problem solving. The kids should be challenged and excited.    Jenna asks about the ages and prior circumstances of the children enrolled in Prisma.   Victoria tells us that the program currently serves grades 4 - 8 at the moment with plans to expand. Prisma grew quite a bit during Covid19 because many children were homeschooling. With Prisma, families found much more flexibility versus a traditional school moved to online. Some of the kids in Prisma are gifted and just felt bored or unchallenged at school. Some have difficulties that made conventional school difficult for them. These children thrive when they are able to move at their own pace. Victoria mentions that Prisma does do some assessment tests and academic growth is occurring.      Jenna asks what a typical Prisma day looks like.    Victoria says that students meet up several times a day. There are workshops, learner clubs, and projects. Coaches help a few kids at a time. Each of the 5 week cycles has a theme. For example, one cycle the theme was “Unchartered Territories.” Within this theme some of the subjects they learned about were space and deep sea exploration. Also, the children regularly do presentations for the parents. In core subjects math, writing and reading the children learn skills that they can apply to real world problems.    Jenna asks how the child's interests come into play.   Victoria answers that a coach might encourage them to do a ‘Journey.' For example, a fifth grader has started a ‘Journey' to write a novel. Another student might decide to do a ‘Journey' on space travel. Within the theme of the cycle, any student can propose their own project or ‘Journey.' Within writing assignments kids are given a lot of choice and ability to write about things that they are excited about.    Jenna wonders how the Prisma school works with world schoolers, as they can do the work remotely.    Victoria says that the beauty of this model is that if the child has to be away for a while, they can adapt and alter the expectations for that student within the cycle. Every Prisma student can make their own schedule with the assistance of a coach. There are always physical aspects and options to the curriculum so that kids are not in front of a screen the whole time.    Jenna brings up the financial aspect of choosing a school such as Prisma as some families would not be able to afford the cost.    Victoria says that they have financial aid and that approx. 40% of the students are currently receiving some assistance. The school is also looking into trying some different ways to lower the cost and make it more available to everyone. One way to do this would be to offer different levels or versions which would involve more parent involvement. There are many plans in the works. As mentioned before they have plans  to extend the age range they serve. Victoria says that they are likely adding grades through high school but may not add grades younger than fourth. This is because younger children don't do as well working in a virtual environment and fourth grade is often when kids start to lose interest in school.This could be connected to the fact that standardized testing often begins then.    Jenna asks about how the Prisma families are registered in their state / country. As homeschoolers or as online schoolers.    Victoria states that most are registered as homeschoolers. She says that the accreditation process has many disadvantages as there are criteria to meet which might restrict their ability to run the school the way they envision.    Jenna wonders if Prisma could work for unschoolers.        Victoria says that yes, they do have a few unschoolers that attend a few cycles per year. She feels that it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to do Prisma if they only attended sporadically.              Jenna wraps up the interview asking Victoria the four questions she usually asks all of her guests.    What are you curious about? Victoria says she is curious about education of course, but also health. Everything about it. Nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc.    What is your favorite way to learn? Victoria says her favorite way to learn is reading, then podcasts and the news.    Jenna changes it up with this question. (Usually she asks “What is a resource you want to share?”) This time she asks “How have you used self directed learning in your life?”            Victoria says that as a young child she was very good at school and thrived in it.             But, as she got older she found it really hard to choose a career.             She became interested in education and entrepreneurship and once focused on              something she could really dig into, she went full swing into the self directed               learning path.        Jenna and Victoria briefly discuss their shared school experience and agree that maybe adults should be more mindful of a child's interests / what excites them before we steer them down a career path or degree. Allow them space to figure out for themselves where they are headed.    What is your favorite blog, podcast or book that you would like to share?              Victoria names two books that she read recently.              The first is “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, Steve West et al.                Description: The first sleep book by a leading scientific expert - Professor Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab - reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.              The second is “No Rules Rules” by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer et al.                Description: Hastings and Erin Meyer, best-selling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings's own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.   Helpful Resources Mentioned in Today's Show https://www.joinprisma.com/ https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma/videos/the-prisma-story-vision/1128347837551554/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzqdwPI1kFylYq19kQ1F18g  https://twitter.com/victoria_ransom https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom   “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, Steve West et al.     “No Rules Rules” by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer et al.   Ways to Connect Join me on the Show! Leave a voicemail! Email me: contact.roguelearner@gmail.com Facebook  Instagram Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rogue-learner/id1543224038 Google Play: https://podcasts.google.com/search/rogue%20learner Spotify: https://roguelearner.libsyn.com/spotify YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdCocbWsxxAMSbUObiCQXPg Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rogue-learner

Young & Victoria dive into topics such as a big picture perspective, education for children, prioritizing quality time with kids, the increase of entrepreneurial parents, and how your kids can influence your business and career choices.

Want the shownotes & resources delivered to your inbox? Subscribe at evolvepodcast.substack.comVictoria Ransom is the Founder & CEO of Prisma, the world's first connected learning network for K-12 that fully replaces regular school. Victoria's track record as a serial entrepreneur comes from developing 3 companies including Wildfire,  a social marketing software company, Victoria led the company to profitability in just one year and built the company to tens of thousands of customers, 400 employees, and eight offices worldwide. Clients included 31 of the world's top 50 brands. Wildfire was acquired by Google in August 2012 for $450M. Victoria joined Google as Director of Product, initially leading Wildfire and later Google Express.  But after having 3 children, Victoria and her husband and cofounder Alain Chuard, wondered, could they prepare their children to thrive in a tumultuous, ever-changing world? So they set out to reimagine what school could be. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODEWhat are the problems of today's education systemHow to personalize a student's learning and scale it for othersHow to foster a community of learners online in engaging experiencesHow to decide big problems worth solvingand much more...Full show notes, transcripts, and resources can be found here: evolvethe.world/episodes/72The Evolve podcast is produced by Plato University and is a member of the  Social Good Media NetworkTIMESTAMPS(00:00) - Introduction(01:22) - What are the problems of today's education system(05:31) - How to research education from an outside perspective(07:40) - How school funding and higher education influence K-12 education(10:24) - What is Prisma?(14:10) - What is the purpose of education?(15:23) - A day in the life of a Prisma learner(19:56) - How to personalize a student's learning(23:16) - How to scale personalized learning(28:02) - Curating vs creating educational content(31:43) - How to celebrate student learning(34:37) - Badges vs grades(37:36) - How to foster a community of learners online(40:16) - Creating engaging online experiences for students(45:32) - Results of Prisma learning(49:42) - How has Prisma's model changed(53:40) - How to decide problems worth solving(58:26) - How to launch a company during a recession(1:02:17) - How Prisma built their team of educators(1:03:48) - Call to Action(1:04:16) - How we can push the world to Evolve

In this episode, Victoria talks about her learnings from Google and Wildfire, the audience for Prisma; How does Prisma provide socialization for a child, building a two-sided marketplace, unbundling of education, and much more!

Victoria has co-founded multiple companies with her husband, Alain Chuard. These include Access Trips, Wildfire, and now Prisma. She also earned her MBA from Harvard Business School.After starting her family and being unsatisfied with the options for educating her children, she knew there had to be a better way, so she co-founded her newest venture, Prisma. Prisma is redefining education by taking an entirely new approach to the system. Using coaches instead of teachers, quarters focused on STEM, Entrepreneurship, and real-world projects, online instead of classrooms, and much, much more. Victoria is an adventurer, and in the podcast, we talk about her experience living in a Brazilian favela, and the six weeks she spent living with a native tribe in the Amazon. Special Thanks To Our Sponsor, espresso Displays:Espresso Displays are the thinnest portable touch screen monitor in the world. Recently recognized as one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2021, espresso Displays give us the power of two screens anywhere we go and seriously improve our portable productivity. Learn more about espresso here: http://espres.so?utm_source=D2C&utm_medium=Podcast-Email&utm_campaign=Louis&utm_id=Channels&utm_term=Louis&utm_content=LouisLinks: Prisma: https://www.joinprisma.com/Follow Victoria on Twitter: https://twitter.com/victoria_ransomRead about Victoria on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_RansomHelp The Louis and Kyle Show:If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a review!Leave a review: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-louis-and-kyle-show/id1504333834Reach out on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouisKyleShowDrop us an email: LouisandKyleShow@gmail.comFollow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louiskyleshow/Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/65567567/Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb6qBiV1HAYcep87nKJmGhAGet email updates: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/LouisandKyle?via=twitter-profile-webview

I have so much I want to get out of this interview personally. Victoria Ransom in the co-founder of Prisma, a full-time virtual educational program for kids grades 4-8 that fully replaces regular school and is a low lift for parents. I want to find out how she found a way to make education better for both parents and kids. Victoria Ransom in the co-founder of Prisma, a full-time virtual educational program for kids grades 4-8 that fully replaces regular school and is a low lift for parents. Sponsored bySendinblue – Sendinblue is the smartest and most intuitive platform for growing businesses. They will guide your business with the right marketing & sales tools and help you reach the right people and produce the right content. Mixergy listeners who sign up will get one month free with 100,000 emails by entering the coupon code SIBMIX at checkout. HostGator – Ready to take your website to the next level? Whether you're a first-time blogger or an experienced web pro, HostGator has all the tools you need to create a great-looking website or online store. A wide range of options includes cloud-based web hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated servers. Founded in 2002, HostGator is the perfect web partner for business owners and individuals seeking hands-on support. Visit www.hostgator.com/mixergy to see what HostGator can do for your website. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Before remote learning was a thing, tailoring instruction to fit the needs of individual students was a daunting task for teachers. In a perfect world teachers would do this automatically because, in that world, every student has an understanding of what he or she doesn't know. However, in the real world teachers personalize the lesson plan for each student by incorporating technology into instruction. During COVID-19,  new opportunities for schools arose to do this while relieving much of that stress off of the teacher's shoulders. Victoria Ransom, the CEO of Prisma, has developed a 21st century school that's on a mission to change the way students learn.Contrary to the narrative that all students struggled with remote learning during COVID-19 Prisma's success is proving the contrary. In this episode, we speak to Victoria about Prisma and its role in education during COVID-19. She details why a school is an excellent option for learners in the 21st century and why student collaboration is key to its approach.Podcast Planner for Teachers and Students Flipboard EDU Magazine Flipboard Educators Blog Flipboard EDU Podcast Website Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/b9bb917bCopyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/6cd0b356Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/fae889b3https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/double-takeLicense code: ZQLKLMU6EZ4EZUVMhttps://uppbeat.io/t/ra/take-actionLicense code: 9OMFXRUMARMT10IPMusic from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/pryces/music-isLicense code: WO9N7QDIM5PFELOFSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/FlipEDU?fan_landing=true)

Victoria Ransom (Co-founder & CEO, Prisma) discusses online education for kids.Topics Discussed: Selling Wildfire to Google for $350M How Online Learning is Better Remote Learning for Kids Prisma Pedagogy Twitter:  https://twitter.com/victoria_ransomRelevant links:Reshaping Education Podcast Keep up with us:Ish Baid, Founder & CEO of VirtuallyWill Mannon, Course Director of Forte Academy

Victoria Ransom is a serial entrepreneur from New Zealand who has built three different companies, the most recent of which is an online learning platform called Prisma. She was listed as one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, as well as one of their 40 under 40, and in 2015, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chad interviews Co-Founder and CEO, Victoria Ranson of Prisma. Prisma is a stealth-mode education startup on a mission to reimagine the way children are educated. Their mission is to create a generation capable of solving the world's biggest problems by creating and running a comprehensive virtual learning program for kids in grades 4-8 that is very unlike any other traditional homeschooling program you've ever heard of. Prisma's Website (https://joinprisma.com) Follow Prisma on Twitter (https://twitter.com/JoinPrisma) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma) Follow Victoria on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom/) Follow Co-Founder, President, and Victoria's husband Alan Chuard on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlainChuard) For more info, email info@joinprisma.com Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Victoria Ransom, founder, and CEO of Prisma. Victoria, thanks for joining me on the show. VICTORIA: Hi, thanks for having me. CHAD: So, Victoria, before we jump into this great product that you have, why don't you tell people what Prisma really is. VICTORIA: Sure. Prisma is a very comprehensive educational program for kids who are learning from home or from anywhere in the world. It is not at all like traditional homeschooling because we provide kids with a very social experience. Kids are part of a cohort where they're meeting live with other kids every single day and collaborating with them on projects, and learning from each other, and discussing. And we provide coaches who are there every step of the way with the kids, providing them with rich feedback, helping to bring out the best in them, providing really engaging, live learning experiences. So it's not traditional homeschooling, although it has a lot of the really great benefits of that with the flexibility and the ability to learn from wherever you are. But we're equally not like typical online schooling, which I would say has tended to be more of an approach of taking traditional school and bringing it online. So there's still a concept of lectures, and grades, and textbooks. They may be electronic in nature, but they still resemble textbooks. The Prisma curriculum is very different. It's rooted in learning through doing and project-based learning, and applying learning to the real world, and allowing kids a lot of choice. So they're ideally always learning through the lens of something that interests them and allowing them to go at their own pace. So a lot of the best practices from some of the most innovative bricks and mortar schools we're bringing to an online environment. And then, of course, we're very different from bricks and mortar schools because it is a virtual program where kids can learn from anywhere. So we think it's a new approach to education that is really uniquely flexible, really prepares kids. We're very focused on preparing kids for the kind of world they're going to live in. The world is always changing rapidly. But I think this generation of kids is going to experience a future that's unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of the level of shift and change, AI being one of the reasons. If you look at studies that look at the future of work, I think some studies we've read say 65% of today's elementary school kids will work in jobs that are yet to be invented. So, how do you prepare kids for that kind of future? And so, we're very focused on giving kids the holistic skills and the mindset that they will need to thrive in that kind of world. So yeah, that is Prisma in a very long nutshell. CHAD: [chuckles] Obviously, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the context of where we're in, which is kids just went through a year or more where a lot of kids were remote for school. And did Prisma exist before the pandemic? VICTORIA: It did in our minds very much so [chuckles] but not in reality. So Prisma arose out of our own personal needs. So my husband and I are the founders of Prisma. We've actually been entrepreneurs for most of our careers. After successfully selling a company to Google a few years ago, we said whatever we do next in our lives; we want it to be something that has the potential to have a large positive impact on society and on the world. And then struggled to figure out what that should look like because there are a lot of things that need solving in the world. But we have three children, and as they approached school age, it really caused us to do a deep dive into how do we want to educate our kids? What do we think is the best approach to education? And from that, we started to formulate a vision by looking at all kinds of different schooling models, from homeschooling to micro-schooling to innovative bricks and mortar schooling. We developed a picture for how we wanted to educate our kids. But that really inspired us to create something that could be accessible to many more kids than just our own kids. And so we had a good 18 months to 2 years of researching, ideating, thinking about the pros and cons of a virtual model. And then along came COVID, and at that point, we said, you know what? There's never been a better time to test out an innovative new approach to schooling, especially one that was always going to be home-based from the get-go. And so let's start ideating and dreaming about this, and let's just put it into action see how it goes. So it was born during COVID, but the roots of Prisma very much predate COVID. CHAD: So, what was the actual timing there from when you decided to do something? When was that to you had the first students? VICTORIA: Yeah, that was a whirlwind. [laughs] CHAD: I can imagine. VICTORIA: Yeah. So really, it was late March, I think of 2020, when we said, "We've just got to do this. The world is telling us to do this." To when we had our first kids in the door was early September. So between basically the beginning of April to the beginning of September, we incorporated, we refined our vision. The good news is we had a vision, and it was mapped out. We hired a curriculum team, hired coaches, created a website, found our first families, all of that. And we launched Prisma very clearly with the families saying, "This is a pilot. We're trying something new here. Let's see how this goes." And we actually told the families, "Look, we're going to definitely run this until the end of December, the end of the year. And if it's not going really, really well, then we will suggest you go and do something better." But it went great. It's not to say our model is perfect. And we believe very much in constant improvement and constant iteration. But in terms of kids loving school at a time, the national narrative was that kids were hating school, and they were falling behind, and parents were finding distance learning a disaster; we had kids that were loving school more than they ever had. And we surveyed kids, and that's why we know that. Parents were extremely happy. Everything was pointing to the fact that we really had found something unique that was really working. And so it turned from a pilot into something that we're now putting all the building blocks in place to be able to scale more broadly. CHAD: School is a big thing, a big concept, and a very important one. Working so quickly in the midst of a pandemic, you know, launching any product is as much an art and finding what those first features need to be. How did you identify what that is and make sure you had something that was viable but that you could get done on time? VICTORIA: I think that came down to...because obviously, our product is our curriculum and our model. We have a software development team and a product development team. And they are building the tools that we'll need to run our model. But when we first launched, we were piecing together different tools that already existed. So the initial product really was the curriculum and our model of education and the tools that we pieced together to make it work. And I think the reason we were able to be successful is that we did a lot of groundwork in saying, what really matters? What is our perspective on what is the goal of this educational model? We got clear on that. What do we think are the values or approaches that really are critical to achieving that goal? And then using that as our Northstar. So to be more concrete, we were really clear about two things in terms of why we were developing this model. One was we really wanted kids to love learning. We think they should love learning because learning is amazing, and it's exciting. And every kid is born with an innate desire to learn. And that if you want to bring the best out in kids, you want them to be excited about what they're learning. So kids loving learning was a very strong Northstar for us. And the second was what I already talked about before is developing an educational model that will really give kids the skills and mindsets they will need to really thrive in what is an exciting but uncertain future. And so that was the Northstar of why are we doing this. From that, we developed a clear perspective on okay; if we want kids to love learning, how do we do that? And so it was things like making sure that kids have choice so they can apply their learning to things that really excite them, making sure learning is applied to the real world, so kids are never saying, "Why the heck do I need this?" Making sure that learning is hands-on as possible because we think kids just get more out of it, and learn more, and enjoy it more if they can really be hands-on and project-based. Making sure...I won't go through them all, but we have our sort of core curriculum values, making sure learning is happening in a community-supportive community. And then the other thing we're really clear on is okay, what are these overarching skills or mindsets that we think are critical to succeeding in adulthood? And it was things like systems thinking and problem-solving, having a designer's mindset, which is this concept of being comfortable with iterating, and getting feedback, and putting yourself in someone else's shoes, being an excellent communicator and collaborator. Again, I won't go through them all. But we were just really clear. I think we had a really strong foundation of why do we exist and what is our approach here? And that enabled us to then be really clear about things like, okay, we're not going to throw the kitchen sink in terms of everything that kids need to learn, no. We're more focused on overarching skills than checking the box on 1,000 different science standards that kids might need to go through. So yeah, as you said, I think whenever you launch a product or a company, being able to narrow down because you can't offer everything you want to offer, being able to narrow down to what really matters is important. And I feel like we did a pretty good job with that. CHAD: Awesome. What was the makeup of the initial team? You mentioned you and your husband. How did you split the responsibilities between you two, and then who else was involved? VICTORIA: So my husband and I have been co-founders of several companies. And it's worked really well because we have very different skill sets. My husband has much more of a product mind. He's much more detail-oriented. And he has a real eye for design and user experiences and also a creative marketing mind. So that gives you a sense of where he tends to focus. And I've tended to focus more on people management and operationalizing businesses, being more that external spokesperson. And so that's how we have split. He's doing more of the software development and product marketing and marketing side of Prisma. And I'm more involved in the day-to-day running of the program. Our first two very, very critical hires were curriculum developers, and Prisma would not be what it is today if we hadn't hired the two people that we hired. And they really balanced each other well because we hired Kristen, who had really deep experience in education. She had at a pretty young age founded her own charter school very successfully and just had such super deep experience in education, teaching, teaching teachers, training teachers, managing her own school. And then we had Emily, who came from a really non-traditional background. She'd actually come up through the theater world, had done a degree at Harvard School of Education. And they actually had some good experience with working with professors at Harvard in innovative ways to assess, also, computer science education. And she's got a very out-of-the-box way of thinking. And between the two of those, it was a really great combination for us to turn what was a vision of a curriculum that Alain and I had created into something actually concrete. And then the other critical hires were our first coaches. Again, we got super lucky in hiring just really fantastic coaches. And we've now realized hiring great coaches is a very fundamental part of what we do. And in fact, it will be one of our scaling challenges, I think. But again, we got really lucky with our coaches. And then, over time, we've hired operations people and product people. But I think that initial magic of the curriculum team and the coaching team was really important. We wouldn't be where we are today if we hadn't have hired those people, I think. CHAD: Did you bring on the two curriculum team members full-time right away? VICTORIA: We intended to, I think, when we were still incorporating the business. And all of this was happening in such a rush that I think we technically had to bring them on as contractors. But it was intended as a full-time role. Having said that, our hiring process asked them to sketch out in a fairly in-depth way or at least to sketch out in-depth pieces of what the ultimate Prisma curriculum would look like. So we did have a chance, I think, to test them out fairly well before we committed. CHAD: So did you take investment to start Prisma, or did you self-fund it? VICTORIA: We have self-funded. We're super lucky to be in the position to be able to do that, and we are continuing to self-fund. We had a ton of interest from venture capitalists; I think partly because we're somewhat proven entrepreneurs with other successes. And then also, because there was just suddenly a big spotlight on education and the belief that education might really shift. But we have not taken funding because...it doesn't mean we won't ever. But we're very focused on being mission-first. And we're also very focused on growing carefully and thoughtfully. We think in the long run, we'll be far more successful if we really grow conservatively, at least initially, until we really feel like we've refined this and we know how to keep a really high level of quality and customer satisfaction while scaling. And I think our concern is that sometimes when you take outside capital that that capital might not be as patient. It might really push to grow faster than what we think might be the best approach. So thus far, we're just in the lucky position where we haven't had to take outside capital. CHAD: I assume that you're on a traditional school schedule based on what you said about starting in September. VICTORIA: We kind of are actually, which is funny because our initial vision for Prisma was to have it be year-round. And I think our families have been super open to so many innovative things. But the idea of having a summer break seems to be something that families don't want to give up on. CHAD: [laughs] VICTORIA: So I think our ultimate goal is that we'll be able to offer a summer program for those families that want to either go year-round or maybe they want to do the summer program and not do a winter program. And we do have kids already that are in the southern hemisphere, where that is desirable. But so far, we haven't tackled a summer program just because we're already tackling a lot. But we surveyed families, and they actually really wanted to mostly stick with the idea of having a summer, a more traditional summer break. CHAD: But does that mean that you can't add students outside of that cycle, so you really truly have cohorts? Or are you adding people along the way? VICTORIA: We're adding people along the way. We operate in five weeks cycles, actually. And each cycle has an overarching theme. And that's part of our goal of making things feel really-real world. And also, because kids have a lot of choice, we do want there to be some unifying factor to what they're doing. And so examples of themes that we've done are cities of the future, hidden histories, which looked at U.S. history but really from the perspective of lessons we can learn, inventor studio where kids learned all about design thinking through being real inventors. We have a super cool theme right now called uncharted territories, which has got some really strong STEM learning but through the lens of space exploration and deep-sea exploration. And kids are working on an interdisciplinary project during that time. We have live workshops that are aligned around the theme. And then they're also working on what we call missions. So math missions and writing missions, which again, are really honoring that idea of giving kids choice and allowing them to go at their own pace but just to make sure they're really getting the foundations they need in math and writing. But really, a kid could join at the beginning of any cycle. CHAD: Okay, that's great. Is that a happy accident of the model, or was it intentional in terms of from a product perspective making sure that you could continue to add people and weren't locked in to a small set of initial users? VICTORIA: No, that was intentional, although our original model that we launched with did not have five weeks cycles. It actually didn't have themes either. It was more trimester-based. We call them sessions, not trimesters. And so that was more of a model where we could have kids come in every trimester. And that's evolved to do these five-week cycles and themes. And from the feedback we got in that first trimester, we evolved the model. And so, I guess we've now evolved in a way we could have even more frequent intakes. But yeah, I think it was very...for us not coming from the education world, the idea that you could only bring customers on board once a year that felt very foreign. So we've always had the idea of let's make sure we can onboard kids throughout the year. CHAD: So what did the first families, I guess, the early adopters, what did they look like? VICTORIA: They were a real mix, so some long-time public school families and private school families, some long-time homeschool families. It was a real mix. I think it was a mix. Now, the Prisma families, I would say, are very much bought into precisely what our model and our vision is. But that first set of pilot families, I think some of them, if you ask them honestly, would say, "School was a disaster because of COVID. We're willing to give anything a shot. We'll give this a shot." And I think what's been really surprising to some of those families is, wow, we actually really only thought we would do this for a year, and now we're continuing because it worked. But it was a mix of families I'd say who had always really believed in a more alternative innovative approach to education but, for one reason or another, hadn't had the ability to test it perhaps because there were no schools like that in their neighborhood or because they just hadn't perhaps had the courage to try it out. So there was that set of families. There were families that had kids that would be probably said to be gifted and were just not being challenged in school and were a bit bored and not really living up to their potential that I think were attracted to give Prisma a shot. There were homeschool families who really loved the idea of home-based learning but were looking for more community, a bit more support by having some structure and some coaches. And in some families where kids had not thrived in school because they had special learning needs. We even have kids at Prisma that have physical disabilities where physically showing up in school each day is really tough. And online learning just makes their life so much easier. So I guess the ultimate theme here is it was families for whom the more traditional bricks and mortar approach was maybe okay, but it wasn't wildly successful for their kids. CHAD: You focus on particular grade levels or age range, right? VICTORIA: Yes, four through eight right now, yeah. CHAD: And you said, "Right now." [laughs] So why did you choose that age to focus on, and do you plan on expanding? VICTORIA: Yes, we do plan on expanding. I think the first expansion will be to go up into high school grades. The reason we focused on fourth through eighth was twofold. One was that we just think parents are more open to experimenting with a new model at the elementary-middle school level than they are at the high school level, so there was that. Just because once you get to high school, parents and kids alike start to get more anxious about things like college admissions and perhaps become more risk-averse. But the other really big reason came from all the conversations we had with teachers. I didn't mention that when we hired for our first coaching roles, we got 1,400 applicants applying. [chuckles] CHAD: Wow. VICTORIA: And so we narrowed it down. I did not talk to 1,400 people, but I talked to a lot of teachers. And actually, we first started those conversations saying we were going to focus on high school. And we shifted our thinking in part because so many of those teachers said that they felt like fourth, fifth, sixth grade is a real turning point for kids in terms of their enjoyment of school and their confidence in their own abilities and part of the reason for that, not the only reason, is that testing starts to ramp up at that stage in schooling. But we just really felt like if we could catch kids at that point, before they'd sort of lost their enjoyment for learning and before they had started to internalize ideas like I'm not good at school, or I'm not good at math, or whatever it may be, that we could have the greatest impact. The other thing is there is quite an unlearning process that kids have to go through when they join Prisma because we give them a lot of autonomy, and independence, and ability to make choices and have control over their schedule. And we ask them to write self-reviews. And when it's time for a Parent Coach Learner Conference, the learner leads that conference. And the earlier you can get kids, I think the easier it is to get them to adapt to that approach than when you get them later in their schooling where it's been drummed into them that you paint within the lines. You do what you're told. You do this in order to get good grades. And so that was another piece that attracted us to that age range. CHAD: How old are your kids? VICTORIA: Good question. So they are seven, four, and two. So they're not quite old enough for Prisma yet, so we're doing our own version of Prisma right now until our oldest is old enough for Prisma. And the reason we didn't go below fourth grade, at least for now, is we do think there is a limit to how young you can go and be successful with a largely virtual model, and so that's why we haven't gone below fourth. And so, our seven-year-old is being homeschooled. But we've also put together a community of other homeschool kids that she learns with several times a week and gets that socialization piece, so that's the cohort piece that we offer through Prisma. But yeah, she's definitely...she's in training to be a Prisma kid. CHAD: How do you balance with both you and your husband working on Prisma, homeschooling a seven-year-old, the other kids? How are you balancing all of that? VICTORIA: And just parenthood in general because this is our first time starting a company while having kids. CHAD: Yes. VICTORIA: We had a pretty long gap in between our last company and this. So the honest answer is we have hired a teacher for the homeschooling piece, so that helps a lot. And she's super capable, and she's really the frontline person for managing the community that we've developed. So the harder piece is not that so much; it's managing parenthood with entrepreneurship. [chuckles] I would say it's a work in progress. And ask me some days, and I'll say, "That's going great." And ask me other days, I would say, "It's not going so great." We are really, really lucky that we can hire good childcare, so that helps a lot. But even if you have great childcare, I want to be involved with my kids. I love my time with my kids. There's also just so many decisions and things you need to be involved in with kids that you truly don't want to and should not outsource, whether it's as simple as like on my to-do list right now, is that the two-year-old's birthday is coming up, and I'm not going to outsource buying birthday presents or organizing a party. So that's on my to-do list. So I would say relative to when we had our previous company which was really successful, and stressful, and busy but that was the only thing we had to worry about. Trying to manage a company and kids it's a lot of context shifting. But for me, at least, I'm very, very rigid about my time. So I will organize my schedule so that I finish at least at the latest by 4:00 p.m. each day, and that is my time with the kids. And I'm with them until they're in bed, and then I'll jump back online. But there's almost nothing that will interfere with it. And that's just how I've prioritized, and it's just really important to me. So it's setting priorities, I guess. CHAD: Yeah, when we were setting up for the show, you said that you were in the office. So you separate home and work, and school places, I guess. VICTORIA: Kind of. The office is a little built-out area of our garage, [chuckles] so I walk from the front door three paces into the garage. But it is separated to the extent that the kids are not running in at any moment. They don't really come here. But it's really nice. And I think a lot of parents have discovered that during this whole COVID work from home experience and with kids home too, it's really nice. Because not every day, but some days I can go in and have lunch with the kids because they're all around. And some days, I can pop over to Elle's classroom and see what she's doing and be involved and do a bit of reading with her and that sort of thing. So I personally really love the efficiency of working from home, wasting no time with commutes, and also just the ability to be really flexible with my time. Maybe I will take an hour out in the middle of the day to do something with the kids, and then I'll make it up later in the evening because that's fine. I don't have that much going on in the evening anyway once the kids are in bed. So I personally really like that flexibility. CHAD: So, turning our attention back to the product, you said that you got started piecing together existing tools on the tech side. And so, what were the first things that you started to replace in that stack? And when did you start hiring a tech team to do that? VICTORIA: Yeah. So Alain, my husband, his background is product management. So we had product expertise already. We spun up a team of engineers, I think already by October or late October of 2020. So shortly after, we had officially begun the school year. And fortunately, these were engineers we'd worked with before in previous companies. And the first thing we started to tackle actually was the live learning experience, so basically a replacement for Zoom. And that was partly because we felt like there was nothing available that really designed a live learning experience through the eyes of fourth through eighth graders, through that sort of demographic. And also, because the other product needs that we have that we're now tackling is everything we need to just manage the whole curriculum like a learning management system. But our whole model was still too much in flux for us to want to focus on that right away. We needed some clarity about what the model would look like. Whereas the idea that we would always have a live learning component where kids would be online, there'd be a coach, but it would be very collaborative and interactive was very clear. We knew that wouldn't shift, and so that was the first piece we tackled. And we've really tried to tackle a few different areas there. One is to make coaches really efficient so that they're not trying to focus on creating this really engaging learning experience while also having 15 different tabs open and trying to play this YouTube video. So we've basically created what we call Prisma LIVE, where our curriculum team can create these semi-scripted because we certainly let coaches deviate, of course, but experiences with chapters. And there's a lot of shifting of the way the room looks, and the way the kids are organized, and the visuals. Because a lot of the research we looked at is that fatigue, Zoom fatigue, actually comes from staring for a long time at the same scene of this person you're talking to or these people you're talking to. So to make it visually stimulating and appealing for kids and seamless for coaches so they don't need to worry about managing all these different aspects of the workshop. They're just clicking through and focusing on making sure kids are participating. And participation was another thing we really focused on. We do a lot of breakout rooms because we want kids to be collaborating in small groups. So we wanted coaches to be able to instead of having to jump into breakout rooms and interrupt the flow and not know who needs help, the ability for them to stay in the main room and be able to listen in and get an oversight for how things are going in the various breakout rooms and jump into those rooms where it's clear that they're needed perhaps because there's not much going on in there. There's not much discussion, or maybe there's a lot of very animated discussion. So that was an area we focused on and then just making it more kid-friendly and more fun. And every cycle at Prisma ends with Expo Day, where kids present the project they've been working on to the whole Prisma community, parents, and grandparents. And one of the real downsides of virtual in that experience is that these kids are presenting these amazing things, but there's limited ability for people to express how amazing they think it is. And so just visual ways of people being able to express their emotions and their reactions during live workshops is another thing. We've focused on fun avatars that would appeal to kids and that sort of thing. So that has been our first focus. Now we're heads down on the learning management piece. Like, what are the building blocks we need to put in place in order to be able to keep the customer experience really high whilst making our coaches more and more effective and more and more scalable? CHAD: So as you got started or when you were thinking about getting started, what were you most afraid of? VICTORIA: Well, aside from the fact that we're trying to pull this off really quickly and being afraid that this would be a complete failure, aside from that, honestly -- CHAD: Just that small thing. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Yeah. I think the thing that we were most nervous about, and I think it's the thing we probably get the biggest question about, and yet it has proven to be the thing we really didn't need to worry about, is socialization. And to what extent can kids build friendships virtually? To what extent can they build community virtually? To what extent can they meaningfully collaborate and learn together virtually? And I think we went in hoping that all of that was fully achievable but not being quite sure about it. And honestly, the signs were so quick that that wasn't going to be an issue for us. Already in orientation...we organized this really fun orientation mostly oriented around making sure kids were excited and got to know each other. And so quickly, we started hearing from parents, like, "Oh, my kid can't stop talking about Prisma. They're jumping out of bed every morning. They've never done that before. They've never jumped out of bed to go to school. And my kid has already made their first friend." And what I think we've discovered is absolutely kids can make friends virtually, and probably kids would have never questioned that actually. That probably felt natural to them. I think it's maybe adults that might question that. Now, does that mean that kids shouldn't have in-person friends? Of course, they should. And we would strongly encourage Prisma families to make sure their kids are enrolled in extracurriculars in their community and that sort of thing. We've surveyed the kids. Every single Prisma learner has said that they've made strong friendships at Prisma. For some of them, it's many friendships. For some of them, it's a smaller number of friendships. And the other thing that's just going really well, I think, better than in-person school or bricks and mortar school is the community we've created. It's a really, really supportive community of kids. There hasn't been this sorting that I think happens in schools, particularly at the middle school and high school level of like, you're part of that clique, and you're part of that clique. And we're a little cooler than you are. Maybe just the nature of virtual makes it harder to sort kids like that. And there's not the natural time of in the cafeteria where you have to decide where you're going to sit and that kind of awkwardness. Plus, we did a lot of legwork upfront of working with the kids to say: What kind of community do we want to build here? What are the values of our cohort? What are the expectations of our cohort? And I think that really helped to create a community that's just really kind and supportive, pretty uniquely kind and supportive, I think. CHAD: Cool. That's great. And now that you're up and running and continuing to grow, looking ahead, what are you most worried about now as your next challenge? VICTORIA: I think the biggest, hardest thing for us to figure out is how to keep the level of quality, great results. I haven't even mentioned it yet, but we are making sure that kids are progressing both academically in terms of these holistic skills. And on the academic front, we've seen really amazing growth. So the kids did a nationally recognized assessment at the end of last year and at the beginning when they joined. And they grew in math at 153% of expected growth and 174% of expected growth in reading. So we've set a really high bar for ourselves. Kids are loving Prisma; 100% of kids said they're happier at Prisma than at their previous school. We have a really great Net Promoter Score, which means parents are really willing to recommend Prisma. We're seeing great growth in the kids. So how do we keep that super high bar whilst opening Prisma up to more and more and more kids? Because part of the attraction for us to offer a virtual model was the desire to be able to reach large numbers of kids if we came up with a model that really worked. And I think through all of our research, one of the things we noticed is there are amazingly innovative schools out there. There are a lot of really innovative brick-and-mortar schools, actually, but they really haven't scaled. They tend to be...a few have scaled a bit, but they're still very limited in the number of kids that they can reach. And part of our thesis was that if you could do this online, just online is inherently more scalable. You're not dealing with buildings and everything that goes along with that. But nevertheless, we still are a model where coaches are really important. So our ability to continue to find, train, and develop coaches that are really awesome I think will be a challenge, something we're going to have to get really, really good at. And then just making sure that we can strike the right balance because we also want to be a model that's as affordable as possible and that requires us to make sure that our costs are reasonable. So striking that balance and trying to use technology to be as efficient as possible, I think that is the next set of challenges that we need to deal with. CHAD: Are you comfortable sharing how many students you have now? VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm comfortable with that because the number we have was very much set by our own desire to grow carefully. So we have almost 90 kids. And we have a very long waitlist, basically. CHAD: Well, that's bigger than my high school graduating class. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, there you go. [laughs] It's funny because people react differently to that. Some people are like, "Wow, that's pretty big." It's not nearly as big as we intend to get. But we decided to cap. We wanted to be disciplined. We had way more demand than that. But further to what I said of quality first and delighting customers first, we said, "No, we'll cut it off at that point." And families have gone on to a waitlist, which is growing by the day. And then we'll be able to let more families in throughout the year. We're small, but we're a lot bigger than we were in our first pilot year. And I think what's been really exciting is we're still somewhat early into the school year. But that level of delight, and excitement, and families just writing to us and saying, "I've never seen my kids so excited." And that's happening again. So it's really exciting to see that we're getting that again even though we have actually grown quite a bit relative to where we were. CHAD: Well, congratulations on everything that you've achieved so far and in tackling these upcoming challenges. VICTORIA: Thank you. CHAD: If people want to find out more about Prisma and join or if they're interested in becoming a great coach, where can they do that? VICTORIA: So the best place to go is our website which is joinprisma.com, so not prisma.com, joinprisma.com. We have a super detailed website, which I think is really informative. So that's a great place to start. You can also sign up for an info session there if you want to talk to someone live about Prisma. And then yes, we have job postings on there as well. And we're always super excited to hear from talented candidates. So that's the best place to go. CHAD: And if people want to follow along with you personally or get in touch, where are the best places for them to do that? VICTORIA: So we do have Prisma social media accounts, so Twitter is @joinprisma. And I'm not the most active person on social media. My husband is much more active, so they may want to follow him. He's Alain Chuard. I presume his Twitter handle is @AlainChuard, C-H-U-A-R-D. [laughs] And you can reach me if you email info@joinprisma.com, but you address it to Victoria. It will reach me, and I will reply. CHAD: Awesome. And people can find all these links and everything in the show notes, which are at giantrobots.fm. You can also subscribe to the show there as well. And if you have questions or comments for us, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Everybody, thanks for listening and see you next time. Thanks, Victoria. VICTORIA: Thank you. Thanks so much. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Victoria Ransom.

Victoria Ransom, founder & CEO of Prisma, her middle school alternative to the antiquated education system. But don't call Prisma a school - she prefers a Connected Learning Network that aims to bring joy to learning today, and prepare millions of kids to thrive in the world of tomorrow. She's a highly successful entrepreneur from New Zealand, most known for Wildfire Interactive, a social marketing SaaS company, sold to Google in 2012 for $450 million. Ransom was listed as one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs as well as one of their 40 under 40 in 2012. In 2015, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum Now a mom, her mission has become far more personal. How can she prepare her child to thrive in a tumultuous, ever-changing world where we can't even begin to imagine the careers that will exist? Today we take a deep dive into this modern education model called Prisma.

In today's episode of Raising Adults, Deana and Kira discuss the changing face of education with guest Victoria Ransom from Prisma. We dive into what options exist outside of the conventional model, why the conventional model is failing some of our kids and how to find the right fit for your children.   Victoria, an entrepreneur since her early twenties, has developed four companies, including Wildfire, which Google acquired in 2012 for $450M. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of arts degree from Macalester College. In her spare time, she is an avid snowboarder, surfer, and passionate adventure traveler.    "For so many kids, part of the problem with school is they're sitting there thinking, when will I ever use this in my life? Why do I need this? And I think applying learning to what you see in your community is one way to make it feel relevant." - Victoria Ransom.   Today's discussion includes:  Where Victoria's interest in education began (8:02) Can traditional education's primary features be problematic? (12:04) What options exist outside the conventional model? (17:36) Finding the right model to fit your kids' learning styles (24:11) How Prisma brings learning alive for kids (29:00)   Are your kids in a traditional educational setting? If not, we'd love to know what you're doing and how it's working for you.    Connect with Victoria  Website twitter Facebook LinkedIn Instagram   Don't forget, for our show to keep going into 2022 we need our Future Focused Parents to become Future Focused Patrons. Join us so that we can keep this content coming your way:  patreon.com/ffp or futurefocusedparenting.com/membership   Huge thanks to our sponsor: The Cozi App!   Cozi is the #1 organizing app that families use to juggle school schedules, practices, meetings, doctor's appointments and even a work out or date night. The shared grocery list lets the whole family add items in real time, and you'll never find yourself at the store without the list - it's always on your phone and up to date. The best part? It's all FREE in Cozi. Just download Cozi from the app store to get the free app today!   Thanks for joining us on today's episode of Raising Adults! If you enjoyed today's episode, please head over to iTunes, give us 5 stars, and leave a review to help us reach even more Future Focused Parents. Don't forget to check out our website, visit us on Facebook, or hang out with us on Instagram, to stay up-to-date on what's in store for you.

Prisma isn't teaching kids WHAT to learn, but HOW to learn. It's personalised, practical, teaching essential 21st century skills, and basically solving a lot of what i've ranted about on this podcast! We're joined by CEO and founder Victoria Ransom to discuss: - How her own children inspired the creation of Prisma - Why learners' academic outcomes have grown 150% (compared to the 'expected' rate) DESPITE not having grades and mandatory curriculums  - Why (and how) they carefully select Prisma mentors & coaches    And much much more of course!    Find Prisma here! https://www.joinprisma.com/ Youtube version of podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndDvY08yZ1ljNtoJ6C9_LA?view_as=subscriber Feedback, queries, anecdotes - send them on through! → itsjjyang@gmail.com   CONNECT HERE! FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/itsjoyang BLOG: https://itsjoyang.com (+ monthly newsletter!) INSTA: @its.joyang   Music: lukrembo cloud  

Victoria Ransom is a serial entrepreneur from New Zealand who currently is the CEO and Co-Founder of Prisma, an online, innovative school for 4-8th graders that tailors education to their abilities and goals for the future. Previously, Victoria started a social marketing SaaS company called Wildfire Interactive, but sold it in 2012 to Google. Prisma was started in April of 2020 with the vision of being the world's most effective Connected Learning Network (small cohorts of kids learning together with the support of coaches all across the world) that not only equips kids to live now, but also prepares them for their adult lives. Prisma's website: https://www.joinprisma.com/ Victoria's Twitter: https://twitter.com/victoria_ransom --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/riseyear/support

Show Notes: Victoria Ransom is the founder and CEO of world's first co-learning network that fully replaces regular school. Prisma is an educational startup providing its own live learning platform for 4th-8th graders (approx. age 9-14). It is Learner-centric, self-paced, outcomes-driven, interdisciplinary, and hands-on. Beyond the reading write and arithmetic, learners also enjoy Clubs, service learning, family events, and more. Victoria is a homeschooling mother and lifelong entrepreneur. She was also the Founder & CEO of Wildfire, a social marketing software company, which she led to profitability in just one year and built to 400 employees. Wildfire was acquired by Google in 2012 for $450M. Victoria joined Google, leading Wildfire and later Google Express. Key Takeaways: 00:25 What is Prisma all about? 06:44 How are you able to bring the magic of in-person to online schooling? 13:55 Three examples of amazing hand-on projects. 18:46 What's your prediction of where this is all going? 26:44 How are your kids? What school are you choosing for them? 28:02 Tell us about Synthesis. 31:03 How do you find Coaches? 34:31 If I'm a curious parent, how much is it and how many students? 38:02 What's your prediction on what learners will do from 9th to 12th graders? 40:20 How are you making sure that your learners are getting enough exercise and physical movement and free play? 42:35 Where are you geographically? 45:10 What's a metaphor to compare Prisma to Conventional School? Quotes: It's about working together to solve real-world challenges, discussion, collaboration and sharing ideas. We literally design a custom schedule for each kid. Give kids, especially 4-8 graders, some amount of scaffolding and not “do whatever you want” because that's overwhelming to many kids. Will this suit everybody? No. But could it suit a lot of people. You get to have a flexible model where you could still do your schooling no matter where you're living and you get to connect with and get to know kids from all over the United States and all over the world. This is about preparing kids to thrive in their adult lives and to contribute to the world. It's not to get good test scores. Work is changing so much and so now school has to change to meet that. We are looking for people that are really, really good at building relationships with kids, really good at giving rich feedback - because we don't have grades at Prisma. Social Links: Twitter- https://twitter.com/victoria_ransom LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma/ Website- https://www.joinprisma.com

SummaryOur guest today is Victoria Ransom, the CEO at Prisma. Victoria is a serial entrepreneur from New Zealand, having sold her last company to Google and is currently living in the U S with her partner and co-founder Alain Chuard. We are going to talk about their newest venture Prisma, a full-time virtual program (with a physical component) for middle school learners. Prisma is a full-stack connected learning network that is rethinking school from first principles.Listen and take note of what happens when you combine a stellar team, great technology and a state-of-the-art, progressive learning framework.In our discussion, we cover:Many education leaders integrate peer learning, but at Prisma they have thought deeply about how learning from & teaching another child is so beneficial.Victoria seems an inflection point before middle school, where kids start racing after grades and tests. Prisma catches them before middle school starts to keep and kindle their sense of wonder.A coach appears as the governor of Wisconsin, a task force is put on a major water problem. Is it a classroom or a Hollywood set? Kids get clues and reports. Curiosity and motivation kick in. They launch a PR campaign, a budget...oh, and hit all their learning goals as well.Teachers still do so much grunt work, so much waste, so much multitasking that takes their focus off the learners. Prisma is using technology and learning science to strip away the noise and let their coaches focus on delivering a pure, seamless learning experience.Zoom doesn't cut it for the kiddos. Victoria is bursting with ideas, both for sync & async learning that enrich and gamify the learning experience. One example: Expressing support in a virtual settingHere are some resources mentioned in our discussion:The concept of Hard Fun by Seymour Papert - http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.htmlPrisma's Learning Framework - https://www.joinprisma.com/frameworkPrisma LIVE - https://www.joinprisma.com/prisma-liveWhere to learn more about the guest:Prisma's Twitter account - https://twitter.com/joinprismaVictoria's Twitter account - https://twitter.com/victoria_ransomAlain's Twitter account - https://twitter.com/AlainChuardWebsite - https://www.joinprisma.comWhere to learn more about Enrollhand:Website: www.enrollhand.comOur webinar: https://webinar-replay.enrollhand.com

This week's guest is Victoria Ransom, co-founder & CEO of Prisma. Prisma is a connected learning platform for 4th-8th graders. Victoria and I talk about the idea of connected learning, Prisma’s philosophy, uncommon yet common sense approaches to learning, & more. Follow Spencer Kier on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SP1NS1R

Prisma (joinprisma.com) is a brand-new company that’s attempting to combine the best parts of homeschooling with the best parts of online education. In this episode I speak with Victoria Ransom, who co-founded Prisma alongside her husband Alain Chuard, about the Prisma model, who it’s for, how self-directed it is, why they don’t do grades or transcripts, and their vision for expanding Prisma into a global “co-learning network.”

  One of the ways that Human Resources (HR) can help to operationalize compliance is to assist each level of an organization to have a proper tone. While the top of an organization rightly gets much of attention, the tone about doing business ethically and in in compliance is equally important in the middle of an organization.  A company must have more than simply a good ‘Tone-at-the-Top’; it must move it down through the organization from senior management to middle management and into its lower ranks. This means that one of the tasks of any company, including its compliance organization, is to get middle management to respect the stated ethics and values of a company, because if they do so, this will be communicated down through the organization. Adam Bryant, in a NYT article, entitled “If Supervisors Respect The Values, So Will Everyone Else”, explored this topic when he interviewed Victoria Ransom, the Chief Executive of Wildfire, a company which provides social media marketing software. Ransom spoke about the role of senior management in communicating ethical values when she was quoted as saying “Another lesson I’ve learned as the company grows is that you’re only as good as the leaders you have underneath you. And that was sometimes a painful lesson. You might think that because you’re projecting our values, then the rest of the company is experiencing the values.” These senior managers communicate what the company’s ethics and values are to middle management. So while tone at the top is certainly important in setting a standard, she came to appreciate that it must move downward through the entire organization. Bryant wrote that Ransom came to realize “that the direct supervisors become the most important influence on people in the company. Therefore, a big part of leading becomes your ability to pick and guide the right people.”  Ransom said that when the company was young and small they tried to codify their company values but they did not get far in the process “because it felt forced.” As the company grew she realized that their values needed to be formalized and stated for a couple of reasons. The first was because they wanted to make it clear what was expected of everyone and “particularly because you want the new people who are also hiring to really know the values.” Another important reason was that they had to terminate “a few people because they didn’t live up to the values. If we’re going to be doing that, it’s really important to be clear about what the values are. I think that some of the biggest ways we showed that we lived up to our values were when we made tough decisions about people, especially when it was a high performer who somehow really violated our values, and we took action.” These actions to terminate had a very large effect on the workforce. Ransom said, “it made employees feel like, “Yeah, this company actually puts its money where its mouth is.””  Ransom sought to ensure that everyone knew what senior management considered when determining whether employees were “living up to the company culture.” The process started when she and her co-founder spent a weekend writing down what they believed the company’s values were. Then they sat down with the employees in small groups to elicit feedback. Her approach was to look for what they wanted in their employees. They came up with six.  Passion: Do you really have a thirst and appetite for your work? Humility and Integrity: Treat your co-workers with respect and dignity. Courage: Speak up - if you have a great idea, tell us, and if you disagree with people in the room, speak up. Curiosity: They wanted folks who would constantly question and learn, not only about the company but about the industry. Impact: Are you having an impact at the company? Be outward-looking: Do good and do right by each other.  Ransom had an equally valuable insight when she talked about senior management and ethical values. She believes that “the best way to undermine a company’s values is to put people in leadership positions who are not adhering to the values. Then it completely starts to fall flat until you take action and move those people out, and then everyone gets faith in the values again. It can be restored so quickly. You just see that people are happier.”  What should the tone in the middle be? Put another way, what should middle management’s role be in the company’s compliance program? This role is critical because the majority of company employees work most directly with middle, rather than top management and, consequently, they will take their cues from how middle management will respond to a situation. Moreover, middle management must listen to the concerns of employees. Even if middle management cannot affect a direct change, it is important that employees need to have an outlet to express their concerns. Therefore your organization should train middle managers to enhance listening skills in the overall context of providing training for what she termed their ‘Manager’s Toolkit’. This can be particularly true if there is a compliance violation or other incident that requires some form of employee discipline. Ransom believes that most employees think it important that there be “organizational justice” so that people believe they will be treated fairly. Ransom further explained that without organization justice, employees typically do not understand outcomes but if there is perceived procedural fairness that an employee is more likely accept a decision that they may not like or disagree with.  So think about your lines of communication and your communication skills when conveying your message of compliance down from the top into the middle of your organization.  Three Key Takeaways While tone at the top is critical, the tone in the middle can actually work to more fully operationalize compliance. How do you train middle managers? What compliance tool kit do you provide to middle managers? This month’s series is sponsored by Advanced Compliance Solutions and its new service offering the “Compliance Alliance” which is a three-step program that will provide you and your team a background into compliance and the FCPA so you can consider how your product or service fits into the needs of a compliance officer. It includes a FCPA and compliance boot camp, sponsorship of a one-month podcast series, and in-person training. Each section builds on the other and provides your customer service and sales teams with the knowledge they need to have intelligent conversations with compliance officers and decision makers. When the program is complete, your teams will be armed with the knowledge they need to sell and service every new client. Interested parties should contact Tom Fox.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs makes clear, a company must have more than simply at good ‘Tone-at-the-Top’; it must move it down through the organization from senior management down to middle management and into its lower ranks. This means that one of the tasks of any company, including its compliance organization is to get middle management to respect the stated ethics and values of a company, because if they do so, this will be communicated down through the organization. Adam Bryant, writing in the NYT in an article entitled, “If the Supervisors Respect Values, So Will Everyone Else”; explored this topic when he interviewed Victoria Ransom, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Wildfire, a company which provides social media marketing software. Ransom spoke about the role of senior management in communicating ethical values when she was quoted as saying “Another lesson I’ve learned as the company grows is that you’re only as good as the leaders you have underneath you. And that was sometimes a painful lesson. You might think that because you’re projecting our values, then the rest of the company is experiencing the values.” These senior managers communicate what the company’s ethics and values are to middle management. So, while tone at the top is certainly important in setting a standard, she came to appreciate that it must move downward through the entire organization. Bryant wrote that Ransom came to realize “that the direct supervisors become the most important influence on people in the company. Therefore, a big part of leading becomes your ability to pick and guide the right people.” Ransom said that when the company was young and small they tried to codify their company values but they did not get far in the process “because it felt forced.” As the company grew she realized that their values needed to be formalized and stated for a couple of reasons. The first was because they wanted to make it clear what was expected of everyone and “particularly because you want the new people who are also hiring to really know the values.” Another important reason was that they had to terminate “a few people because they didn’t live up to the values. If we’re going to be doing that, it’s really important to be clear about what the values are. I think that some of the biggest ways we showed that we lived up to our values were when we made tough decisions about people, especially when it was a high performer who somehow really violated our values, and we took action.” These actions to terminate had a very large effect on the workforce. Ransom said that “it made employees feel like, “Yeah, this company actually puts its money where its mouth is.”” Ransom wanted to make clear to everyone what senior management considered when determining whether employees “are living up to the company culture.” The process started when she and her co-founder spent a weekend writing down what they believed the company’s values were. Then they sat down with the employees in small groups to elicit feedback. Her approach was to look for what they wanted in their employees. Passion: Do you really have a thirst and appetite for your work? Humility and Integrity: Treat your co-workers with respect and dignity. Courage: Speak up - if you have a great idea, tell us, and if you disagree with people in the room, speak up. Curiosity: They wanted folks who would constantly question and learn, not only about the company but about the industry. Impact: Are you having an impact at the company? Be outward-looking: Do good and do right by each other. Ransom had an equally valuable insight when she talked about senior management and ethical values. She believes that “the best way to undermine a company’s values is to put people in leadership positions who are not adhering to the values. Then it completely starts to fall flat until you take action and move those people out, and then everyone gets faith in the values again. It can be restored so quickly. You just see that people are happier.” What should the tone in the middle be? That is, what should middle management’s role be in the company’s compliance program? This role is critical because the majority of company employees work most directly with middle, rather than top management and consequently, they  will take their cues from how middle management will respond to a situation. Moreover, middle management must listen to the concerns of employees. Even if middle management cannot affect a direct change, it is important that employees need to have an outlet to express their concerns. Therefore your organization should training middle managers to enhance listening skills in the overall context of providing training for their ‘Manager’s Toolkit’. This can be particularly true if there is a compliance violation or other incident which requires some form of employee discipline. Most employees think it important that there be “organizational justice” so that people believe they will be treated fairly. He further explained that without organization justice, employees typically do not understand outcomes but if there is perceived procedural fairness that an employee is more likely accept a decision that they may not like or disagree with. Employees often look to their direct supervisor to determine what the tone of an organization is and will be going forward. Many employees of a large, multi-national organization may never have direct contact with the CEO or even senior management. By moving the values of compliance through an organization into the middle, you will be in a much better position to inculcate these values and operationalizing compliance with them. Three Key Takeaways Tone at the tops- direct supervisors become the most important influence on people in the company. Give your middle managers a Tool Kit around compliance so they can fully operationalize compliance. Organizational justice is a further way to help operationalize compliance. This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Oversight Systems, Inc. Oversight’s automated transaction monitoring solution, Insights On Demand for FCPA, operationalizes your compliance program. For more information, go to OversightSystems.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victoria Ransom has never been afraid of doing things a little differently than her peers. By never shying away from the risks associated with making big changes, Victoria has reaped the rewards - one of them being an acquisition by Google for a reported $450 million. In this episode, Victoria tells us about the risks and rewards of being acquired by Google and the power of taking a break to unlock career growth.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Victoria Ransom Date: August 1, 2011 [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women in Information Technology. With me is Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi, Lucy. We are so excited to be a part of this series. At W3W3.com we support technology as well as business, and we have a particular interest in what we can do to help promote women and young girls into technology. Lucy: Well, and this is a series of interviews with fabulous entrepreneurs who have started tech companies. They have a lot of great advice for our listeners, and so we'll get right to our interview today. We're interviewing Victoria Ransom, who is a serial entrepreneur. She has a very impressive track record. She has started three companies, all of which are operating today. That's very unusual. Larry: [laughs] Yes, it is. Lucy: And her existing company has been profitable after just one year. It totally blows my mind. [laughs] Larry: Wow. Lucy: It's such a great accomplishment, and she is an adventuresome spirit as well as being a serial entrepreneur. She once spent over a month living with a remote Amazonian tribe, so we won't let her off this interview until she tells us what that was all about. Today she's the founder and CEO of Wildfire Interactive, which helps organizations leverage and engage millions of users of the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Basically what they allow people to do is leverage the power of the social networks to do things such as branded campaigns, sweepstakes, contests, or giveaways and really getting into that viral nature of the social web. So it's not only the campaign, but they also provide tools and analytics so you know if the campaigns are successful or not, which is really important. Larry: I love it. Lucy: Yeah. So Victoria, welcome. Victoria Ransom: Thank you very much. I'm excited to be involved with this. Lucy: Well, tell us a little bit about what's going on with Wildfire. It seems like a lot. Victoria: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, it has been a wild ride. We only started the company three years ago, and for the first year it was pretty much my co‑founder and I and a couple of engineers. Then once we launched our product, it really took off, which we launched the product officially in August of 2009. So really about two years ago. We hit a real need at the right time. Within the first month we had hundreds of customers, like you said, reached profitability, and now we've got tens of thousands of paying customers. We've got over 140 employees. [laughs] So it has been a really busy, busy time. In terms of what's new or what's happening at the moment, we actually just launched a pretty expanded version of our product. So the introduction that you gave about Wildfire is very accurate in terms of what we started out in terms of what our original product was, which is a social campaign builder that makes it really, really easy for companies to launch different kinds of social media marketing campaigns like contests, sweepstakes, give‑a‑ways, coupons, group deals. All sorts on different social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others we select as well. But we've now expanded really to create what we consider is a software product that helps companies with all aspects of their social media marketing. So we are within that suite of tools. We have a product that really helps companies, like a content management system for their social properties like their fan pages, for example, helps them create really engaging content, edit it, change it, review the performance, the analytics, et cetera, which is really important because one thing that I think companies forget is that we can't just launch a Facebook fan page and put up some content and then leave it because then why would anyone ever want to re‑engage with you? So we have that product. We have a messaging product that really helps you understand what your friends and followers saying about you, helps you communicate efficiently with them, respond to them. Then a really robust analytics dashboard that helps companies understand not only how well are they doing with their social media marketing, but how do they compare to their competitors? How do they compare to their industry? So that's been a pretty major expansion on our product, which we're getting really great feedback on and yeah, a really, really strong response to, which we're very, very excited about. Lucy: Larry, maybe you could use it for your fan page? Larry: Boy, I love it. Lucy: [laughs] Larry: I like that idea. Victoria: Absolutely. Let me know. [laughs] Lucy: OK. Well, so Victoria, you have a very interesting background, and our listeners always want to know how entrepreneurs first got into technology. So why don't you just spend a few minutes and say what led you to technology? Victoria: Sure, absolutely. It's worth noting that I didn't study engineering. I'm not an engineer. I didn't have a tech background originally, so I think it's important that people realize you don't necessarily have to be a technical person or an engineer to start a technical company. Basically my first foray into technology or into software development was, of course, I think about five or six years ago when my co‑founder and I were running an adventure travel company called Access Trips. We had I think about over 30 trips in 18 different countries. We'd scaled that business up so that we had many, many clients. We got to the point where the tools that we were using were just not efficient enough for us to be able to manage all those clients. So we felt that we needed some kind of software to help us collect deposit, collect remaining balance, send out travel information, collect flight information. All the things you need to do when you run a travel company. We needed software for that. We couldn't find anything on the market, so we decided to build one ourselves and in all honesty made all sorts of mistakes with that. It was a good time building software, and I think there were some really classic mistakes that we made but learned a lot from it, which was great next time around. But also found that we really, really enjoyed that process and realized that to build a good software product, yes, you need engineers and good ones. But also you really need to understand a business problem. You need to be able to map it out, understand the processes, and just have a really good intuition for how you can create something that's simple and easy to use and really found that I enjoyed that process a lot. So that was the first foray into technology, really. Larry: Wow! Now Wildfire, that's your third go‑around as an entrepreneur. What is it about entrepreneurship that really turns you on, and why did you become an entrepreneur? Victoria: Well, again I think the first dipping of my toes into entrepreneurship, it wasn't that I was from age 11 I always knew I'd be an entrepreneur. I hear a lot of people that tell those kinds of stories. They had a lemonade stand from the time they were six. Actually, I hadn't intended entrepreneurship as a career. When I graduated college, my first job out of college was in investment banking actually. What I discovered is I just wasn't passionate about it, and I said, "OK, this moment, if I've got the rest of my life ahead of me and work is going to be such a big part of that the rest of my life, I really want to find something that I'm really passionate about." So I decided to move on from investment banking, and actually that's when we founded Access Trips. But in all honesty I think the initial idea was, "Well, let's create this travel company. We can do that for a year or two while I figure out what I really want to do with my life," and just found that I absolutely loved the process of building a company. Once you get your toe in the water of entrepreneurship, it's hard. It's pretty addictive because if you like it, it's just such a challenging, wonderful, exciting experience. So for me what keeps me in it, I think first of all is I just love the fact that I am having to wear so many different hats, and I'm challenged in so many different ways. One moment I need to think about our sales bridge, and the next moment I'm in a marketing meeting thinking about how we market the company. Now I'm involved with the product development and the product vision. I really drive on that level of challenge I think. It's just really exciting. So there are pros and cons to that because it's stressful, too, and you never have certainty about anything. On the same token, every day there is something exciting going on here, and it's really wonderful to have this big vision and goal that you're driving towards. Then the other thing I'd say, which is not the case when you first start your business, but when you start growing it and you build a team‑‑and like I said, we're now up to over 140 people‑‑what really motivates me today and inspires me is actually our team and the amazing people that are in the team and who are working so hard for the business. They're so fun to be around, and all of that is just incredibly inspiring and motivating and probably my favorite part of the business now. Lucy: Well, along that path to become an entrepreneur, who influenced you? What special people can you point to and a little bit about perhaps what they did? Victoria: In all honesty I haven't had one particular mentor that said, "This is what you should do. You should go into that." I think there are a lot of people along the way, once we got into entrepreneurship, who provided wonderful advice and wonderful help. But there wasn't one particular person in my life that put me on this path initially. Like I said, it was more the fact that what I'd been doing previously wasn't really exciting and so decided to try this path. But certainly there's been some wonderful people along the way that have helped advise us. Then there's other certainly companies that have helped shape the way we think about our business. I know Zappos has been a big influence in terms of just their dedication to their employees and their customers. Companies like Sales Force we've learned a lot from, just because they're such an incredible sales company. Mint is a company that we've learned a lot from in terms of their design. So I would say it is companies that have influenced us more than individual people. Lucy: Well I think that's one of the things that's so special about entrepreneurship, it does seem to be an ecosystem where people get advice and give advice and I think that it's maybe one of the best ecosystem for that that I know of. Larry: Victoria this is your third company, along the way I know we've had some of our businesses in the past be very successful, and some are learning experiences. What were the toughest things you had to do in your career? Victoria: As I said before, entrepreneurship is exciting, but it's like riding a roller coaster, so there are lots of ups and downs. So there's definitely been with all of my experiences of entrepreneurship, there's been some tough times where you really weren't sure things were going to work out. But in all honesty, the toughest things I had to do is actually letting go of employees. It is just not fun, particularly employees where actually they were really wonderful people, they just weren't a good fit for the company. It becomes pretty emotionally draining I'd say that's something I haven't enjoyed doing in my career in entrepreneurship but it is a very necessary thing and at the end of the day you will not be a successful start‑up unless you build an absolutely top notch team and every person in the company needs to be top notch. So it's one of those necessary evils that you have to do sometimes if you're leading a company. Lucy: Well, I think too that the people who are not a fit for the jobs they're in, most of them know it, it causes them a lot of stress, and they usually end up in a better spot. Victoria: We try very hard to make sure anything like that is a mutual discussion and a mutual decision, which certainly helps for both parties. Lucy: Well I think that's a great piece of advice and I'd like to follow along with that in terms of more advice around entrepreneurship. If you were talking to a young person today what would you tell them in addition to the things you've already said about entrepreneurship, what advice would you give them? Victoria: The advice that I can give and I have been given. I guess one thing is people should just be very critical about their ideas. So before they even jump in they should think very carefully about this idea that they had to start this company, it's so easy to fall in love with their idea, but I think people have to really ask "Why me and why now? Why am I really the best person to bring this idea to market and why is now a really great time to do it?" If you're working on some kind of idea and there's already three companies out there that are doing it, you've really got to be able to answer the question of what special talent or advantage do you have that is going to make you better those other three companies. Or if you've got an idea and no one's doing it then you've really go to ask yourself why is no one doing it? Why is now a particularly good time to start this business that no one's done it before? And if there's not a good answer to that, it may be that people haven't done that business before because it's not a good business, or they've done it and failed. So I think just being really critical; because some people just love the idea of being entrepreneurs and will try to latch on to something. That's OK because a lot of people will start a business and pivot, and that's OK too. I think being critical about your idea is important, another thing is that if you're going to start out with a co‑founder, then choose very wisely. I have an amazing co‑founder who we balance each other so well in terms of our talents and our abilities and our interest. I have talked to way too many entrepreneurs who at the end of the day are going to fail because they didn't find someone who is a good fit, match, and balance for each others skills. Another thing is I think we really benefited from in our business is just being really careful about the first people that you hire. It's easy when you're a small company to actually be glad that anyone's willing to work for you because all you are is basically an idea and a few people in a room. But those first people you hire really shape the whole culture and somewhat the destiny of the company, and I know for us the first hires we made we were really lucky. They were great cultural fits that helped us build a really great culture. Plus, they had really strong networks so they were able to help us in addition to our own networks really build out the team and really hire additional great people. So being very careful at those early stages, I think, is really important. Another thing, to be honest, is to be aware that entrepreneurship probably sounds more glamorous than it is. I would not want to be doing anything else; I'm having the time of my life but it's a lot of hard work and stress and the vast majority of start‑ups do fail in the end. So you've got to really believe you're going to thrive on the challenge and not the potential glamour of what it might be like if you happen to build a multimillion dollar company. Lucy: Now you see Larry, that's why she has three successful companies. Larry: That's right, and that's why I had 12, only not all successful. Victoria, with all of the things you've done and been through how do you bring balance to your personal and professional lives? Victoria: So honestly, this is an area that I'm not doing particularly well at, but kind of deliberately so. My feeling right now is this is an incredible opportunity that we have, to build this fast growing company, we're in a fast growing space and really I need to give it 100%. And so as a result I'm comfortable with the fact that work is everything at the moment and takes up a lot of my time. So I made that decision, and I'm not really trying to find a huge balance in terms of what requires balance. Having said that, try to eat well, try to exercise, try to take some time for friends and try to build in balance. But I would say the reality is, work takes up the vast majority of my time now. Lucy: Well, we've heard that from a number of the people that we've interviewed who also talk about balance, not just on a daily basis, but over periods of your life, and I think that really reinforces that statement as well. Well Victoria, you've done a lot, you've achieve a lot, you've had an interesting life so far and you're consumed right now in your company, but do you have any sense of what's next for you? Victoria: Right now it's very much just Wildfire. I've still got so much to achieve and I've got a big move‑in that we're going after. Truthfully, I haven't had a whole lot of time to even think about what could be next or when it might even be. For now, it's just very much focused on building this great business that I think we're on a wonderful path to achieve, but still have so much work to do. So for now it's pretty much living in the moment with Wildfire and thinking about the vision for Wildfire, but not a whole lot of focus on what will be after it. Lucy: Now, I'm going to go back in time, like I promised at the beginning of the interview, and ask you what were you doing in the Amazon? Victoria: It was an amazing experience. When I was in college, four other friends and I took a bus to pretty much where the road ran out in Venezuela, so basically the last town before you hit the Amazon jungle, and we managed to arrange with a local tribe that was in the village getting supplies, that we could travel back with them to their village. We spent seven days in their canoe traveling back to where their village was, every night we stayed with a different village, which was absolutely amazing. Then spent four weeks living in that village and participating in the life of living in the Amazon. So it was very remote and honestly, it is sometimes hard to believe that that world exists as the same time as the world that I'm living in now. It was an incredible experience. Lucy: What was your biggest lesson from that experience? Victoria: I guess part of it, it was just very humbling to see a civilization that's living in a very traditional way where I think a lot of people lived like that a thousand years ago, and how much things have changed here and what a happy society that was and what a happy community that was. I think another part, frankly, was just resourcefulness, it was pretty amazing, crazy thing that we did to just take a bus to a village and try to find a way to go deep into the Amazon and we were persistent and resourceful enough that we were able to pull it off. Which I guess you can pull right back into entrepreneurship, that you've got to be really resourceful and persistent if you want to pull off some amazing things. Lucy: It sounds like it was a great experience. Larry: You bet. Lucy: Indeed, Victoria. Thank you very much for your time. We really appreciated talking to you and I want to remind listeners where they can find this podcast series you can find it w3w3.com and also at ncwit.org. Thank you, Victoria. Larry: Thanks you very much. Victoria: Thank a lot. I appreciate it. Lucy: OK. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Victoria RansomInterview Summary: As founder & CEO of Wildfire, Victoria led the company to profitability in just one year and has built the company to tens of thousands of customers, over 100 employees, and five offices worldwide. Clients include major brands and agencies including Facebook, Pepsi, Unilever, Sony, AT&T, Ogilvy, Publicis and Digitas. Release Date: August 1, 2011Interview Subject: Victoria RansomInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 19:27