William Zhou is the Co-founder & CEO of Chalk.com, which is an education software for K-12 teachers. Much like Microsoft Office, Chalk.com is a group of productivity apps that help with lesson planning, assessment, and collaboration which help by providing a personalized education for students.
Zhao was born in Beijing, China, and immigrated to Canada, where he enrolled in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. While at Waterloo, he co-founded Chalk.com after he noticed how overwhelmed his teachers were. He explains,
“I had always thought that teaching is an easy job. I thought teachers taught from a textbook and got 3 months off in a year. It wasn’t until I visited my own high school teachers that I realized it’s not the case. They were struggling with an overwhelming amount of work—dealing with lesson planning, assessment, and attendance, in addition to fending off angry parents and bureaucratic administration. I told them I couldn’t help them with the latter two but I could help ease their daily tasks. That’s when I started Chalk.com.” Zhao created Planboard, an offspring of Chalk, which received $25,000 from the University of Waterloo in 2012. In 2013, Planboard placed second in the Singapore Management University global
business plan competition and also partnered with the Ontario Teachers’ Federation to provide ready-made lesson plan resources.
When they first started up, less than 100 teachers paid for it in the first year. Seeing this, they decided to pivot and change their business model by making the services free but charging schools and districts for special aspects. The plan worked, and today, Chalk.com is used in over 20,000 schools and is used by over 200,000 teachers. It is empowering teachers to focus on their students, not their many distractions. Recently, the website has used the effect of the COVID-19 virus and the sudden switch to online schooling to expand its network. By using Chalk.com to help with learning during the lockdown and give helpful tips to teachers, he turned this problem into an opportunity and showed the helpfulness of his website.
I love how you included the bit about how Zhou and his team had to pivot in order to make the service as successful as it is. It’s encouraging to see examples like this one where there wasn’t immediate success, but rather that they had to keep working at it until it really started making a change – it’s encouraging as someone who is very inexperienced at being an entrepreneur and finds the often large number of challenges and “failures” discouraging to see that even really good ideas like this one took some pivoting to perfect.
That’s a great idea! Creating a service to help out teachers, not just students will definitely provide a lot to schools. Many people are focused on helping students, but we often forget how much work that professors have to go through too. I like how you included that it even works for online teachers and tips they can get to help their own students. Good post!