Lay of The Land #199: John Knific (Squad) — The EdTech Guru
John Knific is a serial entrepreneur and investor who has built three venture-backed software companies here in Cleveland.
His latest venture, Squad, is a peer discovery platform designed to gamify ratings and rankings for Gen Z, starting on college campuses, delivering valuable preference data to marketers.
Before Squad, John co-founded Wisr, a virtual communities platform that transformed how universities engage students. Wisr ultimately served nearly one million active users before being acquired by the Education Advisory Board (EAB) and Vista Equity in 2021. For those interested in diving deeper into Wisr’s story, I’d recommend checking out Episode 35 of Lay of The Land, where Kate Volzer, one of John’s co-founders shared her perspective on their journey!
John’s entrepreneurial journey began with Decision Desk, a company he started out of his dorm room as a student at Case Western Reserve University when he was still on a music and pre-medicine track and ultimately raised $6mm in venture funding for.
Today, alongside building Squad, John is also a co-founder of K2 Venture Partners where he and Kris Ciccarello, his other co-founder from Wisr, invest in and advises regional startups.
In our conversation, we’ll cover how John has evolved as a founder, his philosophy on product management and go-to-market strategy, the intersection of jazz and entrepreneurship, opportunities in education and ed-tech, building for enterprise vs consumers, mentorship, and lots more lessons learned from his journey across three startups.
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LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnknific/
https://www.k2vp.com/
https://getsquad.app/
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