The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk (Part 3)

SM: Did you talk with venture capitalists? What was your funding strategy?

NE: When I spoke with venture capitalists, they were not sure that there was a niche for educational software. They did know that people spent a tremendous amount of money on test preparation. They thought it would be interesting if we tied our ideas to test preparation.

One of the interns I had from Columbia was attending the Stanford summit out here. I saw that John Katzman of the Princeton Review was going to be attending, and I really wanted to meet him. My intern met John at the summit and told him about the company, and John expressed interest in meeting me as well. I then met him and recruited him to be a mentor and ultimately an investor.

I only had $10,000 to hold the company when I left Citigroup. I really stepped into the fire. We went forward with the company. I did not know that politics could exist in a two-person company but all of a sudden it erupted. My co-founder was 12 years older than me and was essentially thinking that he should take over some of the roles I was doing. We talked back and forth and I finally said that we had to resolve this. We did have a three-person board which was me, my co-founder and my uncle, who is very objective.

I laid out what I thought was a logical argument and left the results to my uncle. I was ready for him to say that he agreed with me, but he did the exact opposite and said he agreed with my co-founder and that we should talk afterwards. As soon as we were done I called him up on the phone and exploded on him, and he said, “Stop! You have raised $437,000 to create an infrastructure and product. You have a person who is in charge of creating the product who is sitting there wondering if he should be sending out resumes or not because he has nothing to do. You have to give him something to do!”

He also told me that I needed to start seeing the forest through the trees. He told me that my job was to start raising money. We were talking to the Princeton Review, and he told me that I needed to start talking to other people. We needed more money to get to the next level. He explained that my job was to figure out how to control Rob in that situation, to give him a timeline after which if he did not accomplish it then you take the responsibility back. That all made sense even though I did not like it.

I decided to give Rob control of the Princeton Review account until July 4th, although I never turned over the realtionship with John Katzman. In the meantime, I scoured my brain for ways to raise money. I had to swallow my pride and go back to one of my Columbia Business School people and asked to borrow some money. The only problem was that I had created a structure that needed accredited investors. I could not raise money from random people. I went to two friends and asked them to loan me $22,000 each. They did, and I took half of that money and put into product development, and the other half allowed us to survive another two months on salary.

At this point the company was $100,000 in debt. We were essentially bankrupt, although I refused to acknowledge it. We were now getting people who were not prepared to work with us anymore unless we paid off certain things.

SM: You had to do creditor management.

NE: Exactly right, and very early in the company. I regained control of the Princeton Review account after July 4th, and in the middle of August we delivered a product to Princeton Review. John Katzman played it, sent it back and said, “The part that I thought the Princeton Review would play in this is no longer there, but if we co-brand it that would be pretty interesting,” which is something I really had wanted to do but could not push for it myself.

SM: What was the product?

NE: It was a two dimensional web-based set of instructional modules that had a very cool back story built around it. It allowed you to manipulate and move things around in a way that had not been done in education before. It was really cool. We had a story around a bio-digital virus that had escaped and was then changing all the animals and creatures on the island into bio-digital creatures. The game was about math, so unless you could figure out the equations that would let you understand the growth rates you could not stop the virus. It was well integrated.

This segment is part 3 in the series : The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk
1 2 3 4 5 6 7