Games and Learning

Members of the Co.lab cohort must work at least part of the time from the accelerator’s offices inside Zynga in San Francisco.

What do some of today’s biggest names in educational gaming and making – like codeSpark, StoryToys, Montessorium, Kidaptive, Pixowl– have in common?

These companies have all been part of co.lab, the San Francisco-based accelerator that’s fostered some of the industry’s most visible games. Companies who are accepted into each co.lab “cohort” receive a stipend of up to $50,000, personal mentorship in co.lab’s offices, and the opportunity to build relationships and partnerships that may extend long beyond the duration of the program itself.

The co.lab equation has fostered games that not only garner awards and accolades for quality educational design, but have also gone on to raise more than $30 million in funding.

Since mentoring its first cohort of companies in 2013, co.lab has remained committed to the original principles of mission-first entrepreneurship while simultaneously adapting to the front edge of a market that is quickly evolving and changing.

“We are kind of betting on the overall market, on the big tectonic shift in the market that we’re starting to see but we still feel it’s still a little bit early in terms of… parents being much more conscious of the importance of screen quality as opposed to screen quantity, being able to invest the dollars into the kids having and reaching digital experiences and really embracing the opportunities that digital games have to offer for kids’ education,” said Esteban Sosnik, Executive Director of co.lab and partner at Reach Capital. Reach joins original partner Zynga.org in supporting co.lab.

To accommodate these changes, co.lab has begun to include additional educational support (how to approach the school market, work with teachers, develop curriculum, etc.) as well as additional fundraising support to enhance viability in a tough market.

“We understand the challenges of this market, and there’s something that two years of running the product taught us is how challenging it is, the monetization piece,” Sosnik said.

The more co.lab grows, Sosnik said, the more selective the program becomes – not in terms of numbers of applications, Sosnik said, but in the quality of companies who apply. The acceptance rate has been a consistent 10 to 15 percent since 2013, but with a fairly uniform increase in applicant quality, he said, “it’s getting tougher and tougher to select the companies.”

As the learning game space matures, Sosnik has noted that applicants have an increasingly better understanding of the educational gaming space and those firms have tended to emphasize subscriptions and a “bottom up” approach to the school market.

He also said he’s seeing more and more companies that focus on non-core, open-ended, 21^st-century skills like design and coding with a sandbox-style presentation – such as Pixel Press, codeSpark and Piper. Many companies apply two and three times before being accepted, Sosnik said, and the most promising of those not selected sometimes have received support from co.lab until they are ready to apply again.

So who’s right for co.lab? The program looks for companies that demonstrate long-term sustainability in a changing and growing market. More importantly, however, Sosnik said co.lab prioritizes companies that show potential to enhance student learning through sound pedagogy, product quality and/or the overall vision of the product.

“We’re looking for that combination of entrepreneurs who are really passionate and understand a problem, whether it’s math or science or SEL or coding, and really have a personal connection to the field … [to have] domain expertise from an educational perspective, but also understand software development, particularly consumer software and consumer trends. We consider whether you are targeting teachers or targeting parents and kids themselves, obviously. Your competition is the next best game – the Candy Crushes of the world or the Facebooks of the world… So we want the entrepeneurs to understand data and to really benchmark themselves against the best in class consumer software, but also have the other domain expertise and really have a personal connection with the problem they are trying to solve,” Sosnik said.

Program Director Deena Minwalla echoed those goals, writing that co.lab wants “collaborative teams with strong leaders who have a clear vision… who have a clear understanding of how co.lab can help and what they want to achieve in the program and who also, ultimately, will contribute positively to the overall experience of the program.”

But even as the accelerator has maintained its core focus, Sosnik admits they have matured as well.

“We might have began with a bit more of a romantic idea of the space, and thinking that this change was already happening, many times because we reflect among ourselves. In my case, I was already kind of going through that shift in my consumer behavior,” Sosnik said. “Short-term survival and funding and funding opportunities have become a much bigger consideration when we’re accepting companies.”

Want to apply? Co.lab is currently accepting applications for their fifth cohort, with a deadline of January 8 for a program that will run February/March through May 2016. Applications are evaluated on a rolling basis, so early applications are encouraged.

Although participating companies will need to be available for in-person office hours at co.lab’s main location, Sosnik pointed out that program content is often focused on two days each week. The program has experimented with the idea of a virtual cohort, for an accelerator that brings early-stage companies together with more mature outfits, but Sosnik and Minwalla said the value of face-to-face contact can’t be replaced.

“There’s just a sort of magic that happens – that organically these companies come together and collaborate and when you’re in a physical space together it’s much easier to do that,” Minwalla said.