Welcome to GSVC Matchmaker

This blog has been created by GSVC to facilitate matchmaking among entrepreneurs with business plans and potential entrants. Business students looking for ventures and ventures looking for business school students are encouraged to share opportunities and interests here!

For ventures seeking student talent:

Please send a short description of your venture, including stage, sector, geographic location, specific project you need student help with, and contact information to gsvc [at] haas.berkeley.edu. Please keep your business background and description to 1-2 paragraphs, and your summary of desired talent characteristics to 1 paragraph or several bullets. Please also include your location, contact information, and preferred method of contact.

All of this information will be posted by GSVC as an Entry on this site.

For students seeking a venture:

Please browse the ventures posted here and contact them either by posting a comment to the appropriate venture, or by contacting them directly.

If you have any questions about GSVC's entrant requirements, please consult the GSVC website: www.gsvc.org.

Friday, October 27, 2006

School Leaders Network

The Venture:

The mission of the School Leaders Network is to advance student learning by enabling first-rate knowledge sharing and collaboration among school leaders. Today, school leaders – “the CEOs of their schools” – remain largely isolated. There are no systems to help them network with each other or collaborate on-the-job effectively, and hence they spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. As a result, there is low crosspollination of knowledge and resources as well as reduced innovation, which impair student learning. At School Leaders Network we believe that school leaders are the most influential individuals in their schools and have the ability to realize high quality teaching and learning. By enabling knowledge sharing and collaboration for principals and assistant principals, we seek to significantly increase the intellectual and capital resources available to school leaders, and thereby improve schools. We seek to build a specialized online forum with innovative technology and facilitation which assumes that the membership base is not like-minded, but diverse, and that advanced relevance engine and routing technologies is needed to make this work for school leaders.


We believe that the facilitation of knowledge sharing and collaboration among school leaders is an opportunity to make a high-leverage investment in education reform. By using technology, community expertise and the power of the network, we seek to make a meaningful impact on all schools with a small relative investment. We expect that crosspollination of knowledge and innovation will have a meaningful effect on how students learn. At School Leaders Network we have high expectations not only for students but also for adults, including ourselves and the leaders of our schools. We believe that school leaders can make a big difference, and that we can help them do so.


Status and Needs:

A group of 4 Stanford MBAs/MA in Education students have been working on this project since January, and we would love to partner with Berkeley or other students to expand and strengthen our team. Our plan includes raising funding for the project before the summer and continuing the startup upon graduation to make our vision a reality. There are lots of areas that additional team members could help us with, so we are flexible and can accommodate interests. Some areas that we need help with include: (1) helping take the business plan (which is work-in-process) to the next level, (2) conducting market/customer research to get feedback from principals on what they'd find most helpful, (3) finding people who can create a prototype of the product and get school principals to serve as alpha users and give us feedback, (4) working on the design of the full product and put together a product roadmap, development plan and budget, (5) putting together a financial model, (6) reaching out to partners (principal networks and content partners) to help grow the partnership base...


Those interested please contact:


Eduardo Briceño

Co-Founder, School Leaders Network

MBA & M.A. in Ed. Candidate, 2007 | Stanford University

(650) 219-8827

ed@schoolleadersnetwork.org

http://schoolleadersnetwork.org/

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