By its own admission, Teach the People was one of the least well-funded startups to present last week at TechCrunch 40. Operating from CEO Jason Beckerman’s Queens apartment on $300,000 in angel money, it has but one unpaid, part-time employee. And let's face it, education doesn't have the cachet of, say, cash, which may be why bloggers largely overlooked Teach the People. But the company does have one big asset: its CEO.
At 24, he has the resume of an internet whiz kid you love to hate. At 16, Beckerman got a part-time job—not an internship—as a junior project analyst with Merrill Lynch. He liked to cut high school… to go to work. After hopping around to a few startups, he worked as a Siebel project manager for Princeton, New Jersey financial software platform Albridge Solutions while enrolled at Quinnipiac University. He then worked directly for Siebel before decamping for Salesforce.com, all the while earning a masters in organizational management through an online program. TechCrunch 40, he says, “was one of the greatest experiences of my life to date.”
Teach the People, meanwhile, is less than a year old and still mostly theoretical. An education-meets-social networking site where the masses who have knowledge will teach the eager learners who want it, it is just starting beta tests. There’s not much to see on the site. Beckerman can pitch -- at breakneck speed -- his ideas for a K-12 platform for teachers to use with their students and a reward system that gives frequent learners points to redeem for, say, gift certificates or gadgets. But none of this yet exists.
It’s easy to be skeptical of Teach the People, but you’ve got to hand it to Beckerman: he had the moxie to make Arrington’s top 40.
