Who needed a stapler?
In April, Eric Mazur, Harvard’s Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, and Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, sold the startup company they had founded, together with postdoctoral fellow Brian Lukoff, just 20 months earlier. Enabled by the rise of cloud computing, which frees software companies from running expensive server farms, Learning Catalytics consisted almost entirely of intellectual property. When it was sold to education giant Pearson, the company didn’t even own a stapler. The Gazette sat down with Mazur recently to talk about the company’s start as an idea, its founding moment during a nerve-wracking presentation before 1,000, and about Mazur and King’s penchant for holding board meetings while mountain biking. GAZETTE: How did Learning Catalytics get started? MAZUR: I’ve been interested in student-centered teaching and in finding ways to engage students in the classroom. One of the ways I do that is by polling them with classroom...