Indra Sofian: The Student Entrepreneurship Journey | Seed Guest Series
Learn more about Indra and his goal to create a better high school.
This week, we’re excited to introduce you to Indra Sofian, the co-founder of Sora Schools. As a college student at Georgia Tech, Indra found his passion for entrepreneurship and technology, starting his own media company and leading multiple entrepreneurship organizations. Now, Indra’s building a virtual high school that aims to transform how students learn and grow. Here’s a summary of our full conversation with Indra, which you can read more of here.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what got you interested in the education space?
I'm from a very small town called Rockmart in Northwest Georgia. My parents immigrated from Indonesia to the US back in the 80s and had me soon after. Like most kids from a 2nd gen Asian American household, I was very focused on school, so for me, education was not an alien concept when I started Sora later in life. But I think the real reason why I started Sora and not just some test prep company was because my interest in education manifested when I saw the game of school.
The first time I saw the game was when I was in middle school. Our school made us take the SAT back then for the experience. After I took it, I felt pretty good about it. It was hard because I was in 7th grade, but I managed. When I later got the test score back, I got a pretty meh score. Later that day, my mom was comforting me in the car. I was telling her I didn’t get a great score on my SAT and she told me, "look Indra, this is just a test, all you have to do is do well on the test. The test does not determine how smart you are or how intelligent you are or anything like that, it’s just a test. You just have to prepare for it. Just do better next time.”
What I took away from that, aside from the fact that I should practice, was how I did on the test didn’t actually determine my intelligence. The more interesting question it spawned for me was “if the test isn’t measuring my intelligence or how smart I am, what’s it measuring?” And once I got into high school, I started seeing the game. I would do well in school, get good grades, my parents would praise me, my teachers would praise me, and then hopefully if I kept doing that, I would do well in life. Later, I went to Georgia Tech, got into a school that made my parents proud and studied business and mechanical engineering. I started getting involved on campus with lots of initiatives like Startup Exchange and Contrary Capital.
I also started my first business, Elevate Media, and it was then that I realized that school wasn’t that interesting to me anymore. I got a broader view of the world at Georgia Tech and what was out there beyond just grades and AP tests. I learned what an internship was for the first time, I learned about a bunch of different fields of study. I also realized that what I was doing outside of class was far more interesting to me than what I was studying in class. I felt like I was preparing for my career more so than I was by just sitting and studying and doing well in college. What really was the value of the academic portion of my education?
And that question sat in the back of my mind for a while until later I met my co-founders of Sora back at the beginning of 2018 when we had a very late night conversation in our apartment about our high schools. We just kept talking about what we would do if we started our own high school. Long story short, that little random conversation eventually led to us talking to people, talking to teachers, parents, and students. I started doing a lot more research into the history of school, the design of schools today, and how there are far more progressive learning models than what we currently have in schools, and eventually it led us to starting Sora.
What insight has stuck with you since college and has helped you develop your career in entrepreneurship?
The summer of my freshman year, I managed to, at the very last minute, get an internship with AT&T, which I thought was pretty cool, because I didn’t even know what an internship was before I got to college and now I had one. I got to work at AT&T and learn what it’s like to work at one of these big companies and got paid to do it, so what more could I ask for. But what I was doing that summer was, frankly speaking, boring, really dull. I think it was exciting for the first week since it was something different, but soon it was pretty average. It was just not an enjoyable experience. It was pretty depressing, but fortunately, at the time, I was involved in a couple of other things.
A couple of friends and I started an entrepreneurship hackathon on a whim. I didn't decide to come up with an entrepreneurship hackathon, a friend recruited me, but it was a very exciting experience and it introduced me to the world of technology and entrepreneurship. And that’s when I really decided that this whole startup stuff was really cool. At the time, I was starting my own business too, a video production agency called Elevate Media, and we were getting our first clients. I also made it my whole mission my sophomore year to get an internship at a startup in the bay area since that’s where they are.
That ended up happening, I did this thing called the True Ventures Fellowship in San Francisco that summer of 2016, and at the time I started getting involved in a bunch of other things. That’s when I fell in love with a student entrepreneurship organization called Startup Exchange. I became Co-Director starting that summer for my junior year. I had also joined on as the founding venture partner for Contrary Capital which was just getting started back then too. I found myself immersed in entrepreneurship culture on campus and that’s when I started thinking this was my thing, I really enjoyed it. I would make friends, make connections, learn how venture capital worked, learn how to start a company through my experiences and my clubs/organizations I was involved with. That was the period of time that I made it my focus.
What advice do you have for students that want to start a company?
For the student that’s leaning towards starting their own company in college, right out of college, or want to work at a startup with 5, 10, 50 people, for those people, frankly speaking, your classes are not going to matter that much. Obviously, you don’t want to be horrible, you can’t fail everything, but at the same time, I would not suggest prioritizing classes. If it’s just something you want to do because it’s a matter of pride, go for it but I don’t think it’s a great use of time.
Also, for a lot of students and young entrepreneurs, they get into this trap. When any person starts a company, they do it because they are solving a problem, selling something, or they’re building something that they have knowledge of or is in a familiar context. For example, if you are a college student, the types of companies most people tend to think of when they’re in college on average are things like dating apps, an app that connects students who need study space, an app where someone picks up your laundry, etc. What I can wholeheartedly recommend that you do is to start exploring other fields, not just fields of study, but other things in general, like internships, volunteering. Just get more experience. That will give you a far better field of knowledge so that when you do start your company, you are going to be at a much better place, either because you have more experience or because you see problems that no one else sees. You’re not going to be the umpteenth college student that wants to start a peer-to-peer tutoring app, you’re going to be a student that wants to solve some complex problem in healthcare because you had experience working in the field.
Another thing is I’ll say is that it’s a good idea to specialize in a certain field. When you start a company, you have to be a generalist, that’s just what happens when you’re an entrepreneur, but you do need to focus on something. It doesn’t have to be on one specific skill, like a computer science language or something like that, it can be slightly broader. For me, I knew I couldn’t code and while I was a decent designer, it wasn’t my thing. However, I knew I was really interested in marketing and growth stuff. That’s what I interned in, that was my role when I was in any student organization ever. I knew there was one thing I needed and wanted to be good at, and that was marketing and growth stuff. What that allows you to do is really prove your value in that area and also build some valuable skills so that when you do build a company, you have something that you can lean on as opposed to being generally ok at everything. That’s helpful when you talk to investors, as well as potential co-founders when you’re thinking about the skills and value of each member of the team.
My last bit of advice is to make interesting friends. Friends that might potentially be helpful to you later down the line or might be co-founders. I knew that the friends I made earlier in college during freshman year were not going to be friends that were going to help me in my startup journey. But once I started focusing and specializing in college, I started making friends that went to hackathons a lot, that were working on interesting side projects, were really into research, and just generally doing interesting cool things. I knew that through serendipity, something would happen where they would probably be helpful to me and I would be helpful to them.
You can find and reach out to Indra on Twitter!