You can’t blame Kayvon Beykpour for his aversion to the term “student-run company.” It’s not as if he has been running his business to get some kind of Junior Achievement award.
Separately from his undergraduate life at Stanford, Beykpour and a childhood pal founded Terriblyclever Design, a web services firm, in the summer of 2007. It has offices in San Francisco; its paying clients include Best Buy, Comcast and Sprint. And its intellectual roots are in Mill Valley, Calif., where sixth-grade buddies Beykpour and Joseph Bernstein, began to think of themselves as web developers.
Indeed, it was almost a matter of coincidence when Stanford “found” Beykpour on campus and hired Terriblyclever to create a trendy suite of user-friendly applications dubbed iStanford. The free apps enable students, faculty and staff to use an iPhone or iPod Touch to search a campus map or the University directory, read course descriptions or download Stanford sports news. Basically, iStanford signals the University’s recognition that its culture and operations should accommodate wireless, always-on-the-move lifestyles.
“You would have to be a village idiot not to know that mobile is on its way,” says Thomas Black, the administrator who talks about iStanford as if it’s the first launch in a planetary campaign for tech-injected higher education.
Black, the registrar and associate vice provost for student affairs, is an intense iPhone devotee whose vision for using smartphones and other wireless devices goes dramatically beyond the opening set of iStanford functions. He’s as motivated by the notion of cell phones eventually taking the place of University ID cards as by students using them to register for classes, which is planned as an iStanford update. Before the current budget crunch, he even contemplated making iPhones standard issue for the student body. But for the moment, he needs to proceed more modestly.
His first step was to ask for ideas from Apple, which sent him to Beykpour, one of the company’s student evangelists and a junior computer science major who epitomized the right person in the right situation at the right time. Although the circumstances were fortuitous, Beykpour had assumed that Stanford would be a fount of special opportunities and relationships. Terriblyclever, which already had drawn four employees from the ranks of Beykpour’s Stanford friends, made the most of the referral from Apple by focusing on its firsthand understanding of campus needs and habits. “Our thinking,” recalls Beykpour, 20, “was ‘What would just be really cool for students?’”Not only did the iStanford downloads quickly jump into the thousands—despite being created only for the cutting-edge iPhone and iPod Touch so far—users were spending relatively big chunks of time with the applications, according to Beykpour. And what’s working at Stanford might end up being lucratively duplicated by Terriblyclever at colleges all around the country.
“We’ll market it to all the schools that we can,” says Beykpour. “It has turned into an incredible opportunity.”
Black is looking forward to Stanford-specific updates that will enable students to check back on courses they’ve taken, grades they’ve received and their financial transactions with the University. As for whatever Terriblyclever can accomplish elsewhere, says Black, “If I was a catalyst, then that jazzes me to no end.”
Terriblyclever—unattached to any venture capital firms in this early stage—also got a major boost in October from winning AT&T’s national higher education competition for mobile application development. The team members divided a $10,000 prize and received second-generation iPhones, but more importantly, they received trips to Florida for a conference on information technology in higher ed. That provided Terriblyclever with a chance to pitch its apps to colleges across the nation.
“That exposure,” says Beykpour, “was what made it so particularly valuable.”
