Co-founder of Note Wagon won’t sell short education
“You have to love what you’re doing. And you have to really believe that you can make a huge difference in building the next great company.” Saif Altimimi
Saif Altimimi is a co-founder of Note Wagon, an online note sharing resource. Note Wagon was recently aired on the hit TV show Dragon’s Den. Although Note Wagon rejected the Dragons’ deal, the company has been a success and is now working in collaboration with Pay Pal. Altimimi had originally attended the University of Guelph for environmental engineering, and began Note Wagon in the UC. When he was in his third year, he dropped out to dedicate his time and energy to the company. Now located in San Francisco in the Silicone Valley, Note Wagon is on the cutting edge in terms of blending academics with social media for a new approach to education.
Beth Purdon-McLellan: How did you end up as a company on Dragon Den?
Saif Altimimi: Just an interview. I pretty much heard that they were coming to Waterloo and I thought that I would audition quickly– and I guess they liked it. So I got a call to do the taping.
BPM: Why did you reject the Deal?
SA: For a variety of reasons. The first reason was that I didn’t feel comfortable with who we were dealing with. I mean, obviously when you take money from people there’s always expectations to uphold from the person that’s giving you the money. It’s never free money. We didn’t really feel comfortable moving forward with them, and so we decided to reject it. We decided to raise money in the Sates, in San Francisco. We got a much better offer down here […] I think that if we took that offer we would be selling ourselves short.
BPM: What has been the greatest challenge of building a company?
SA: Everything is tough. Getting the right people around you especially. I believe that great companies are built on great teams, and great people. That’s been a tough part for us: to find exceptional talents join and to build something sustainable. And obviously in the early stages, when you’re starting a company you have limited finances– you have no money. So how do you make great people join you when you have nothing, resource wise? The way that we overcame the challenge, or what I was really good at, is selling the vision. This is not just a note sharing site. We really want to influence education. Selling that vision, and finding someone to support your cause, that passionately believes in your cause is critical.
BPM: What do you hope Note Wagon will do for students in the future?
SA: I’m a big believer that the classroom of the future is going to be very different than the classroom of today. We’re seeing the reoccurrence of online lectures being hosted for classes. I personally believe that the cost of a lecture doesn’t really make sense. What I mean by that is that students have to go to class and listen to a lecture for two hours to listen to the professor talk about the course topics– which is extremely valuable, but that can be done at home. That can be done on the computer because we have the technology to facilitate that.
I think the classroom of the future is going to have physical classrooms being used for collaborative thinking like group projects, lab projects, engineering problems to solve– more physical collaborative learning experiences. But listening to a professor speaking on theory should be done at home.
The benefit that I see with this model is that you can teach an infinite number of people with the web. Now, education is becoming very open. We’re seeing a truly democratization of education. What we’re trying to do is empower that solution. We initially started out with a note sharing platform, where students are just sharing their own separate content around the market place. But what I really believe and we progress the product, we’re really building collaborations tool.
BPM: Do people have to pay to access the notes?
SA: It’s technically free. You have two options. You can either invite your friends, and we give you free tokens for inviting your friends, or you can upload your own material, and we’ll give you free tokens for uploading your own material. The third option, if you need it badly, is to pay a small fee. Our goal is not to monetize students off early. We want to build a compelling experience before we turn to monetization. Because there’s other ways to do it and we don’t want to. Students make money off it too. I mean we have students who are literally doing this as a part time job. The token has a real cash value.
BPM: Do you have any suggestions for students if they’re starting a business?
SA: A lot of people in Canada, they start something in the hopes of flipping or selling something too early, with very short-term goals. You have to be very passionate about what you’re working on. You have to love what you’re doing. And you have to really believe that you can make a huge difference in building the next great company. That’s something that a lot of people don’t have. By really believing that, the possibilities are limitless in what you want to do. I mean, I started off out of my dorm, in my third year. We were just working on some project, and now it’s in San Francisco and it’s been incredible so far.
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