Today we’d like to introduce you to Ian Cohen.
Hi Ian, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I first came to Atlanta from Philadelphia to attend Emory University and graduated in 2012. After graduating, I joined Teach For America where I was placed as a high school social studies teacher here in Metro Atlanta at Benjamin Banneker HS in Fulton County Schools. While teaching, I also had the privilege of starting the Varsity soccer program and was awarded both Teacher of the Year and Coach of the Year in 2013.
After two years in the classroom, I decided to step outside the school building to co-found an education non-profit organization with two other teachers. The organization – Next Generation Men & Women (www.nextgenatl.org) – was formed to partner with schools and address the gap in post-secondary exposure and support that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were receiving compared to their more affluent peers. I served as Executive Director of the organization from 2014-2017 and recently rolled off the Board of Directors into an emeritus position. The organization continues to thrive and now serves 300+ students with half a dozen full-time staff.
I transitioned out of the non-profit in order to get into tech as an entrepreneur. While I worked part-time as a peer advisor and Fellowships Co-Director for the Center for Civic Innovation, helping impact-driven entrepreneurs across the city, I also started sitting back down with teachers and principals.
After six months of discovery work, I realized there was a huge gap in the tools created for K-12 teachers and schools around workflow management, which contributes significantly to the difficulty and high attrition rates for teachers.
So, in April 2019, I founded TARA to be the world’s best SaaS teacher assistant that can curate resources, organize tasks, and deliver support directly to the teachers themselves in the way that they want.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No entrepreneurial journey is ever smooth – in fact, anyone who says otherwise is lying. In addition to the daily challenge of remaining psychologically confident, driven, and adaptable, our main initial obstacle – like so many others – was COVID.
We came to market with our initial lesson planning tool in Jan 2020, with the goal of using our first sales season (Jan – June for schools) to show initial traction and raise some capital. However, once COVID hit, schools understandably had to go into crisis-response mode. In less than a week, we went from 15-20 prospective initial customers to zero. No calls or emails were being answered and our money was running out pretty quickly.
Fortunately – after 75+ emails in one night and countless hours perfecting a sales pitch – we managed to secure a national summer partnership with Teach For America that provided us with the capital and user feedback we needed to keep going. But we were just a couple of weeks away from zero…
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I started TARA in order to put teachers first – because I believe that when teachers come first, students win. Without teachers, a school is just another building.
It is no secret how challenging it is to be a teacher today. And in spite of the endless number of tools and resources available to (theoretically) make teacher’s lives easier, the reality is that we continue to fall well short. 48 out of 50 states in the US are currently experiencing teacher shortages.
What we’ve learned is that teachers don’t want or need any more niche tools. Teachers currently spend 400-500 hours per year doing work outside the classroom – and now the growth of education technology and digital curriculum is actually exacerbating that problem.
No – another tool is not the answer. We need to think bigger.
What we believe every teacher needs (and deserves) is an assistant – someone (or something) to organize and manage teacher tasks, find/curate content that could be helpful in the classroom, and stay on top of communications. Most importantly, teachers need an assistant designed for them and that understands their specific needs.
TARA is being built to become just that – a SaaS assistant for teachers and schools that brings everything into one place.
We have a lot of exciting announcements coming up so we don’t want spoil the fun, but if there are teachers out there (or friends of teachers), we highly recommend adding your name to the list of educators who will be getting the first look via our website.
(There is also a fun little quiz on there – a “love languages” for teachers – to help teachers learn what they need to be at their best – also highly recommended 😊)
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
This is such a tough question because none of this has been accomplished alone. TARA would not be where it is today without our first two employees, Liz Rary and Laura Jackson, both of whom work their a**es off and care so much about putting teachers first.
We also have benefitted greatly from partnering with Teach For America and a couple of local KIPP schools alongside some innovative charter schools like Atlanta Unbound Academy, Charlotte Lab School, ScholarMade Achievement Place, and Citizens of the World Charters – all of whom have been amazing clients and sources of feedback to help us improve our platform to better serve the needs of teachers and school leaders.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@taraedtech.com
- Website: https://www.taraedtech.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taraedtech1/channel/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taraedtech1
Image Credits:
Alex Acosta
