Thomas MacMillan Photo
A year after he and friends started a high-tech school-survey company as Yale undergrads, Aaron Feuer picked up $4 million and an hour of personal advice from another dorm-room dot-com success — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Feuer’s (pictured) company, Panorama, Monday announced raising $4 million in seed funding from a group led by Zuckerberg’s Startup:Education fund and Silicon Valley’s SoftTech VC. Other investors include Yale, Google Ventures, and Ashton Kucher’s A‑Grade Investments.
New Haven won’t reap the benefits of that new investment. Like some other New Haven-bred entrepreneurs, Feuer found himself leaving the city that nurtured his company’s start once he obtained money to grow. He said he needed to go somewhere with more engineers.
Zuckerberg, the hoodie-wearing billionaire who invented Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, created Startup:Education in 2010 as a foundation dedicated to improving education. Zuckerberg’s funding of Panorama is his first public investment in a startup, according to multiple media reports.
Zuckerberg couldn’t be reached for comment.
With friends, Feuer started Panorama last year as an undergraduate at Yale. They invented a cloud-based platform for administering school surveys and presenting the results interactively. The New Haven school system started using Panorama’s services a year ago for its “school climate” surveys.
Since then, the company has taken off. Panorama is in 4,000 schools in 250 school districts in 26 states, according to Feuer. That’s up from 700 schools in six states less than a year ago.
Impact
Feuer spoke by telephone from Cambridge, where he now lives. Half of Panorama’s seven staff members live in Cambridge. The rest are in New Haven.
Feuer and his co-founders graduated from Yale in May and spent the summer at Y‑Combinator in Silicon Valley, a startup incubator in the heart of the nation’s tech industry. They picked up the experience and the connections they needed to start raising money for the company.
“We’ve been profitable from day one,” Feuer said. That’s unusual for a startup, and it’s allowed Panorama to focus less on profit and more on “impact,” he said.
As Feuer describes it, Panorama is a company with a mission that goes beyond simply making money. He said he’s interested in not just coming up with a new product and then looking for people who will buy it, but also working with schools to discover what they need to function better, and creating a product that will help them.
In other words, he doesn’t want Panorama to be just a hammer. “When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail,” he said. “Let’s try to figure out what is the best way to help these school districts.”
The new investment in Panorama reflects that ethos. “A lot of the money is done as a philanthropic investment,” Feuer said. That means, again, that the investment might not create a big return, but it will have a big “impact.”
“We wound up with folks who believe in the mission,” Feuer said. “Ashton Kutcher invested. The guy who invented GMail invested.”
Advice
And, of course, Zuckerberg invested. Feuer said he and his co-founders had a chance to meet with Zuckerberg for “an hour-long consulting session with one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our generation.”
“We met with him for an hour a couple of Fridays ago,” Feuer said. “He’s a super nice guy. Humble, kind, down to earth.”
Feuer said they asked Zuckerberg about how to build a great team, how to build a company culture, how to stay “mission driven.” And, as a 22-year-old CEO, Feuer wanted to know: “How do you actually build a company coming out of your dorm room?”
“In previous years, you would hire a more experienced CEO to run the company,” Feuer said. He wanted to know how to build a company on one’s own.
“[Zuckerberg] said, ‘Look, make sure your company establishes really clear values,’” Feuer said. “The values are the things you’re going to want to break in the short-term” but if you stay true to them, they’re what “will help you accomplish what really matters in the long term.”
“The other piece he suggested is when you’re thinking about hiring people” don’t look for people who would make good underlings, Feuer recalled. “Hire people who you would be happy being your boss. Always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and who impress you.”
With the new influx of money, Panorama will be looking for those smart impressive people, in New Haven. But not just in New Haven.
Flight
After spending the summer in Silicon Valley, Feuer and his co-founders headed back east. “We ended up in Cambridge because we love the Northeast.”
Feuer said he’s a big fan of New Haven, especially after experiencing the fantasy-land of Silicon Valley. “New Haven is such a real place,” he said. But he couldn’t keep the company here. Why? “The pace of hiring is hard to sustain in New Haven.”
Feuer said Panorama will expand rapidly in the coming months. So he’ll need software engineers. “If we hire 10 folks at the New Haven office, that would be great. But I imagine it will be hard to find that many engineers in New Haven.
“Engineers are hard to come by in New Haven, both because they are few and because New Haven has so many start-ups, Feuer said. “Supply is too low and demand is too high.”
“That’s why we have to have two locations: to find the best possible folks,” Feuer said.
Panorama’s trajectory follows that of Hadapt, another Yale-startup that took off like a rocket—and flew to Cambridge once it obtained significant financial backing. Hadapt founder Daniel Abadi developed a new way for companies to analyze huge amounts of data, then found investors wouldn’t fund his company if it stayed in New Haven.
Peter Salovey, Yale’s new president, has promised to address the problem of Yale startup flight.
New Haven has had some success stories in harnessing the job growth of new-economy companies started here: Higher One, a financial-services company, started here and built a new headquarters on Winchester Avenue when it took off nationally. And pharmaceutical company named Alexion, which left for Cheshire after incubating at Science Park, is returning to New Haven in a 13-story new headquarters at 100 College St.
Here's what the software engineer job pays, according to their website.
"For Class of 2014: $100,000 starting annual salary, $15,000 signing bonus, $100K in equity"
Good luck, Panorama!