By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Five years ago, Zeynep Young founded Double Line Partners in her dining room and has since grown it to $20 million in revenue with 120 employees.

The Austin-based startup provides data system dashboards and other tools to schools to improve student performance in grades K-12. Before founding the company, Young worked for the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

Last week, Young participated in the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network conference, a gathering of 200 female entrepreneurs from all over the world who run companies with revenue of more than $3 million. The three-day conference took place at the W Hotel and Austin City Limits.

Telling stories through data to help students and educators is Young’s passion.

Young was one of those students at risk of falling through the cracks when her parents immigrated to the U.S. and moved to Houston when she was in sixth grade.

One day, Young’s teacher called her mom and told her that her daughter would just smile and nod her head when the teacher told her to do something. Her mother told the teacher that Zeynep didn’t speak English. The teacher didn’t know that. That piece of data had not made it to her. Armed with that information, the teacher became one of Young’s biggest supporters.

“At middle school and high school, kids aren’t able to tell you what their problems are,’’ Young said.

Double Line Partners created a dashboard product that brings in a student’s records for attendance, discipline, grades, credits, local benchmarks, state assessments, AP, ACT and SAT scores.

The school districts already collected a tremendous amount of data on students. But Double Line’s system sits on top of all the existing systems and pulls the data together and recasts it in a student centric way that teachers can understand, Young said.

To develop the product, Young said they started off listening to the educators and their needs. Double Line also looked at the metrics that predict student success and then drafted a prototype product. Then they held focus groups nationwide with more than 3,500 educators and asked for feedback.

“We built the dashboard based on that, “ Young said. “The data provides a picture of the kid. It really resonates. It’s about the kid. It’s not about the technology. It is focused on individual kids in individual classrooms.”

Young first saw the need for the product when she worked at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

“We were trying to fund projects just like this to give teachers the power of data right in their classrooms at their fingertips,” Young said. “And every time we tried to make a grant and find a vendor that would help our school districts we just fell short. There weren’t very many people out there that had the right skill set and the mindset.”

It was difficult to find a company that had both cutting edge and innovative technology and a deep and nuanced understanding of the education sector, Young said.

“And finally after a frustrating year of trying to get these projects off the ground I thought surely I can do this faster, better and cheaper,” Young said.

Her background was in starting software companies. She was at McKinsey for eight years. Then she worked at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for four years.

“I felt like I had that combination of tech skills and analytical skills with that real understanding of what our grantees and our clients needed,” she said.

She left the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in 2009 and started bootstrapping her new venture.

“We decided to forgo raising capital in favor of working directly with our clients on Beta projects and self-funding the development of the systems through consulting engagements,” Young said.

The company started with a collaboration with the Texas Education Agency and the Dell family foundation to create a statewide system that would allow any school district to load up their data and power their dashboards for teachers on a voluntary basis and for free.

Double Line started at the state level because Texas has 1,200 independent school districts and 85 percent of them have less than 5,000 students, Young said.

“Our vision was to do this at the state level, create it once and allow districts to opt into the system for free,” she said.

Young named the company Double Line for its focus on profits and social good.

“What drove me, and I think what drove the success of the business, was the focus on the second bottom line – it has to drive value – social value to the sector,” she said. “It has to improve teachers’ lives and it has to improve students’ success. It has to make an impact at the end of the day. One of the things I wanted to protect was the focus on the second bottom line.”

That’s one reason the company didn’t raise venture capital, Young said.

“When you take capital the focus is on maximizing revenue,” she said.

Focusing on social good has paid off for Double Line.

“The other thing I’m really proud of is the culture that we’ve created in our company,” Young said.

The company’s culture drives success, she said. The first part is “amaze yourself.”

“I never started the company so we could fulfill our contractual obligations or even meet or exceed our customers expectations,” Young said. “I wanted to hire the smartest, most passionate people and at the end of the day have them step back and go wow I cannot believe we pulled this off.”

The next part of its culture is to assume goodness and lastly, people are expected to pick up the ball.

“Working at Double Line partners is an active, not passive job,” Young said. “We expect everyone to be a leader.”

In the future, Double Line sees more growth from existing and new customers and it plans to expand internationally.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Susan Lahey, far left at Tiger Kingdom in Thailand, Photo courtesy of Anawat Chullasewok

Thailand is known for a lot of things: medical tourism, friendliness, elephants, tigers, beaches, sticky rice, automobile manufacture, sex change operations…. But they’ve never been known as a hub for tech, software and animation and they’re determined to become so.

They invited a group of tech journalists to spread the word—bring us your tech companies and investors. We can offer you three engineers for the price of one and a host of tax incentives. Plus entrée into the ASEAN market, a group of 10 Southeast Asian countries with a population of nearly 600 million people that in 2015 will become one unified market—like the European Economic Community.

As serial entrepreneur and Capital Factory mentor Fred Schmidt is fond of pointing out, these days almost any company can tap the global market. Why restrict yourself to the U.S. when some companies find a bigger, more enthusiastic market base overseas? Case in point, 7-Eleven. The company tanked in the U.S. but there’s one on every corner in Thailand. Plus, for any company that relies on social media, Thais are among the world’s biggest users. Facebook has 104 percent penetration in Bangkok—the largest of any city in the world.

So for five days, Supisara Chomparn and Anawat Chullasewok of the BOI wined and dined us, took us to see tigers, elephants and Buddhist temples and introduced us to Thailand Software Park and other incubators, members of the BOI, and companies that create enterprise software, robots and animated feature films. Two of the founders were expats from the U.S. and Canada who—like many Austin transplants—came for a visit and fell in love with the place.

The trouble is, while Thailand—which has had plenty of military juntas since the end of the absolute monarchy—treats the whole thing like a political “time out” from a frustrated parent, Westerners get pretty wigged about things like military juntas. So it’s hard to see that, really, there is a lot of opportunity.

The Labor Force

Thailand’s universities churn out 6,000 engineers every year, but many never take engineering jobs. As in the U.S., engineers are looking for stable jobs working on interesting problems. And many of the engineering jobs are in automobile manufacturing and similar industries present few creative challenges, particularly since Agile methodology hasn’t caught on with many Thai manufacturers yet. With a national unemployment rate of .7 percent, engineers and other techies can afford to be picky.

“They just don’t want to work in a factory,” said Apinetr Unakul, president of the Thai Embedded Systems Association (TESA) and a professor of engineering. “They prefer something in electronics and telecommunications.” Some employers, like Reuters in Bangkok which derives the bulk of its revenues from software development, has little trouble hiring and retaining qualified people because it has created the kind of culture contemporary Thai techies are looking for and can’t always find in traditional companies: a non-hierarchical employment structure, an office in the center of Bangkok, interesting problems to work on and community building activities.

But Thailand’s engineering graduates can prove challenging to employers. Many students graduate with little or no real-world experience and require an immense amount of training at the outset, a problem that—to be fair—is hardly restricted to Thailand. The U.S. deals with it, too.

“There’s so much demand for engineers, this country probably has eight-to-10 positions for every qualified engineer,” said Steven Prussky, founder of Aware, a consulting and developer of custom software and IT solutions in Chiang Mai. Prussky is getting ready to launch Aware Academy, which will be a finishing school for engineers and computer science graduates.

While many of the people he takes on as interns and employees are skilled engineers, designers or project managers, he said, “They have no business sense at all. “ In Chiang Mai, which is a hotbed of creativity, it is easy to find talented designers who know nothing about what intellectual property is, what an invoice is and who have never taken a single accounting course, he said.

Several organizations are working to combat that problem. Soft Square Group, which works with universities in Bangkok as well as Thailand’s northern provinces, offers internships and training not only in hard skills like programming, but also in soft skills like dealing with customers, managing your boss and change management. The organization hires developers then, after they’ve had sufficient training, incubates and spins off their own startups with an equity stake. Software Park Thailand incubates startups and works on “maturing people.” Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand has begun requiring tech graduates to take business courses. It also works with area software and animation companies to create internships and offer opportunities for students to work abroad.

The other challenge is possibly connected with Thailand’s culture which tends to reward deferential rather than aggressive behavior. According to John Douglas, founder of Mycos Technologies, that means fewer techies will self-train in various skills such as programming languages. On the other hand, Douglas said, “The younger generation knows that that independent way of thinking is okay,” he said. Partly with his encouragement, his team is more willing to take the lead in innovation. “They’ll say ‘Why aren’t we using SignalR communications framework for sending messaging across different platforms? We’ve got to be on Java 2.8….’”

But while they may be less aggressive than developers in his home town of Denver, they’re consistent.

“Burnout really doesn’t exist here,” Douglas said. “In the west coast there’s this philosophy that you generate huge amounts of enthusiasm early on—‘We’re crazy, we’re going to take over the planet with our app.’ The sustainability, from my view point, is not so good. In Thailand, things get done. Nobody’s jumping up and down but they come in every morning and do their job and they come back and do their job.”

Thailand’s Political Troubles

Over the decades, Thailand has continually rebounded from one disaster after another to be named a success story by the World Bank. In 2012, after a flood devastated the country the year before, Thailand’s GDP was around six and a half percent, after growing steadily for 30 years. But its current battle over control of the government seems to be tanking its economy, whose GDP is now closer to two percent. Resolution over the issue has caused many investors to be cautious about putting money into the country.

In March, Moody’s Investor’s Services gave the country high marks, saying that the country’s rating was still high given “prudent monetary, macroeconomic and debt management, sustained external strength despite erosion of the post-Asian financial crisis current account surplus, a relatively strong growth outlook and an overall healthy banking system.” But it warned that if the country’s political issues aren’t straightened out by the second half of 2014 with a new election, the rating could drop. That’s right about now.

The Land of Smiles

I’m not an investor or even a startup. But I wound up thinking several times: I could live here. The weather is awesome by Texas standards. The jungles are beautiful. The fruit is twice as flavorful and a fourth the price. You can get an hour long massage for $5 and a nice two-bedroom apartment for around $250 a month. And the people are just…so….nice. Coming from Austin, that’s a big statement.

In all our high level meetings, government representatives and industry leaders were honest and self effacing about the places where the country is behind. And there was always a lot of laughter.

While some companies have dealt with bribery, the U.S. and Canadian entrepreneurs we talked to hadn’t experienced that. The BOI tries to make it easy for companies in sectors it’s interested in—like software. Qualified companies get corporate income tax exemption for three to eight years, double deduction on public utilities costs, and exemption or reduction of import duties on raw materials and machinery. The BOI office also helps handle visas and other immigration issues with an on-site immigration office.

But one of the easiest ways to get into Thailand, representatives said, was building partnerships with companies that are already there. In the U.S., you might be able to take a vague idea to an engineer and he or she will help you iterate. That’s not so much the case in Thailand where people are used to more direction.

But “Partnering is easy,” Douglas said. “Just call me.”

You might want to wait until the military junta’s over. Or not.

Thailand Stats

• Thailand ranks 18 in a World Bank list of easiest places to do business in and 91 in a list of easiest places to start a business. Though, if filtered for East Asia it ranks 5th and 11th.

• It takes 156 days, on average, to get a business up and running in Thailand, as compared to Singapore, where it takes 26.

• Thailand is outranked by Malaysia, Korea and Singapore in some categories but beats them when it comes to construction permits, registering property and some other measures.

• Thailand ranks first in the HSBC Expat Survey for best places to live as an expatriate, compared to Singapore which ranks sixth.

• The cost of living in Thailand is roughly half that of the cost of living in Singapore.

• According to JobStreet, monthly salary ranges for software engineers in Singapore range from $2,500 to $4,800 whereas the range in Thailand, sources said, is $500 to $5,000.

Editor’s note: Susan Lahey’s trip was sponsored and paid for by the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI), Thailand’s national economic development agency,