Grockit

» see grockit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Grockit was named after grok, the verb Heinlein invented for understanding something so completely that you stop being outside it. The product it attached that word to was a multiplayer game whose content was the SAT.

Farbood Nivi founded it in San Francisco in 2006 with Michael Buffington. Nivi had spent years inside Kaplan and the Princeton Review as a master teacher and curriculum developer, which is the most useful fact about the whole company, because he was building against a business whose economics he knew from the inside. Test prep in the United States was a classroom you paid a lot of money to sit in, run by instructors on an hourly rate, and the thing Nivi noticed was that the expensive part was the room.

So Grockit put the room online and filled it with other students instead. You joined a live session for your exam, worked through questions alongside people studying the same section at the same moment, and the system watched which ones you got wrong and adapted. It covered the SAT, ACT, GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Investors liked it enormously. Benchmark was in from the early rounds and stayed in, and in December 2012 Discovery Communications led a $20 million round, at which point TechCrunch put the cumulative investment just under $45 million.

The ending had a tidy shape to it. On 31 July 2013 Grockit sold its test-prep assets and the social learning platform underneath them to Kaplan, Inc., and the remaining team went all in on a second product, Learnist, which the press of the day described as a Pinterest for education. The name Grockit stayed on a login page for three more years and then stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ playing against strangers ~

The mechanic was genuinely new at the time and it is worth saying what it actually felt like, because the word "social" was doing a lot of work in 2009 and most of it was decoration. Grockit's version was not decoration. If several people were working the same quantitative set, you could see them working it, and you could see that somebody else had also missed the question you just missed. For a category whose entire emotional content is private dread, turning the dread into a visible shared activity was a real idea.

Where it ran out was the economics underneath. A test-prep customer is only your customer for a few months and has no reason to come back afterward, because nobody wants to discuss the exam again. You can adapt the questions and you can gamify the room, but you cannot extend the relationship past the test date, and $45 million of venture money wants a relationship longer than one exam season. The Learnist pivot in 2012 was an attempt to find one.

~ one tweet ~

There is no shutdown blog post, no farewell page and no press release. What exists is a single message from the @Grockit account titled "Retiring Grockit", posted at 00:29 UTC on 27 September 2016. The platform had already been inside Kaplan for three years by then, so what was being retired was a brand and a login page. Today grockit.com redirects to kaptest.com/study, which is Kaplan's own site, so a domain built by a former Kaplan teacher to compete with Kaplan now points at Kaplan.

What sat between me and this product was an entire exam system. I took Turkey's university entrance exam in the early 2000s, and the Turkish equivalent of this market was the dershane: physical cram schools on every main street, run at scale, with their own test banks and their own mythology, and nothing online about any of it. An American startup selling collaborative SAT practice was solving a problem whose local version was answered by a building with a sign on it. Grockit's idea was good enough that it would have worked here. It was simply built around the wrong exam for this country.

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