Meet The Disruptors: Garrett Smiley Of Sora Schools On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Lean into the hard conversations. Delegate less– a founder’s job is to understand and integrate every area of the organization. It is never proper to delegate the “why” behind a team’s work. Take care of your body — your mind is an emergent property of the body; mental health and acuity begin with the body and the fuel you provide it. The body is where your energy, drive, and happiness originate. Painful lesson.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Garrett Smiley.
Garrett Smiley is the Co-Founder of Sora Schools, an education startup based in Atlanta. Sora is a virtual, project-based high school where students explore their interests, learn however is best for them, and gain exposure to future careers and fields of work.
Prior to Sora, Garrett co-founded a charity which built wells in developing nations called Drops of Love. Garret also directed a university startup incubator called Core Founders at Georgia Tech, and started an education non-profit that worked with foster children to develop financial literacy called Flip. Garrett studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Garrett also worked as a Venture Partner at Contrary Capital where he scouted, invested in, and mentored startups in the Atlanta area.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
As a child in a military family, I attended many different types of schools; some worked for me, but most didn’t. This constant experimentation in my schooling sparked an early interest in education — I was curious how different classrooms could operate so differently. I thought, do we not know the best way to do this by now? And, although the game of school came easily to me, I always felt I was learning more through my extracurriculars than in the classroom; challenges I took on like starting a water nonprofit with my sister, becoming a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, or spending a summer at Stanford University learning Einstein’s theory of relativity, all contributed to my worldview and future much more meaningfully than any textbook, lecture, or test. Carrying this passion for education through college at Georgia Tech, I threw myself in the middle of the conversation about school reform — with all of the forceful opinions I had developed — and then also got my hands dirty co-founding a non-profit focused on game-based learning on financial literacy for Georgia’s foster youth. Then, looking to pair this passion with an understanding of innovation more broadly, I worked as a venture partner at Contrary Capital, supporting and investing in Atlanta-area startups. After that, I extended my knowledge of entrepreneurship by partaking in a short fellowship with renowned venture capital fund True Ventures. After that, although I was still quite young, I felt so strongly about school reform that I just had to get involved as soon as possible. Enter Sora!
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Most of the education industry is looking for two or three percent improvements on the margins — schools have pizza parties if their test scores improved 0.2%. Fortunes are made and lost playing that game. But, most people ignore — and it’s convenient to ignore — the elephant in the room: school, the thing every student has to do for eight hours a day for 13 years, doesn’t work for many people. At Sora, we’re attacking that big challenge head-on, bringing the latest learning science and wisdom from fancy private schools to scale a transformative education to everyone, grounded in tenants like real-world, interdisciplinary learning, mastery-based assessment, and student-led curriculum based on their interests.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Too many to count. For every lead we got through the website or an event, all three of us cofounders would drive to their house (separately), blocking their driveway in the process, and rant at them about education reform until we either closed the sale or got asked to leave. Our research, passion, and hustle were the only things we had to break into an industry dominated by legacy and bureaucracy.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Almost every education innovator or entrepreneur has been extremely generous with their time. We have only been able to make it this far by following their wisdom. There are too many to answer a question like this — I would worry about leaving one of them out.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Our lead investor, Hemant Teneja from General Catalyst, has written an excellent book on this topic called “Intended Consequences”. The short version: being disruptive can be terrible if not approached mindfully. The era of “move fast and break things” is over. Companies must change their mindset from simply “increasing shareholder value” to a more nuanced goal of doing good, avoiding harmful consequences, and innovating responsibly. To achieve this, companies need to rethink their business model and incentives from the ground up to actively encourage adherence to those values. For example, there are millions of truck drivers in the country, making it one of the most popular occupations. Assume that overnight, a company could produce millions of autonomous trucks that were faster and safer than a driver. That innovation alone could meaningfully increase the nation’s unemployment and cause tens of millions of people to have profoundly negative feelings toward that technology and technologies like it — it could destabilize society. We saw a similar story play out with companies like Uber and even Facebook. That hypothetical autonomous truck company should take personal responsibility for the broader implications of the innovation; one possible method is tracking Key Consequence Indicators like “percentage of displaced truckers upskilled” alongside more traditional metrics like revenue and gross margin.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey?
There are dozens of lessons in education, but I’ll focus on the leadership principles I come back to over and over. Read more books and read them slowly — books represent lifetimes of wisdom, indulge often. But treat each book as a meditation, don’t read to “finish”. One of the only common traits I can identify between top performers is their consumption of a ton of nonfiction. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast — stolen from the Navy Seals, don’t sprint through life or decision; move carefully and thoughtfully. Minimize the adrenaline as much as possible. As Ray Dalio says, “nothing has been more instrumental to my success than meditation.” Don’t be a coward — the burden of leadership is making the necessary, hard decisions that can cause pain. But someone’s got to do it or the mission will not be accomplished. Lean into the hard conversations. Delegate less– a founder’s job is to understand and integrate every area of the organization. It is never proper to delegate the “why” behind a team’s work. Take care of your body — your mind is an emergent property of the body; mental health and acuity begin with the body and the fuel you provide it. The body is where your energy, drive, and happiness originate. Painful lesson.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
This is a big growth year for Sora. We’ve been working on our school model for the last four years in close collaboration with our families, and we’ve landed on something everyone’s really excited about and I’m seeing it make a huge impact in many students’ lives. So, our goal this year is to grow our capacity to help many, many more students who desperately need a school like Sora.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
It’s hard to choose just one. After I got sidelined from sports in my 8th-grade year, I became obsessed with reading and haven’t stopped devouring hundreds of books yearly; each one molds my mind in some unique, unpredictable way. When I was a kid, I remember reading books like Abundance by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, being absolutely mesmerized by the power of technology to help people. At the time, I was under the impression that the world was getting worse all of the time — thanks to the news — but at that moment, I realized the world is always getting better, primarily thanks to the innovations of people who cared enough to try. Now, I’d recommend The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, a beautiful case for optimism. Some other childhood favorites are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs.
Can you please give us your favorite Life Lesson Quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Love the struggle”. The foundation of the learning process is adopting a growth mindset which is the self-fulfilling belief that skills and intelligence can be improved through hard work. People with a growth mindset learn to love failure and see it as information to guide their learning. These individuals consistently reframe failure away from a personal attack to an exciting and necessary step towards the final destination. Understanding how to “fail well,” see instruction in roadblocks, and embrace iteration is foundational to the learning process. When you’ve steeped yourself in a growth mindset, you come to really crave those moments of struggle because, quite literally, struggle is the moment of maximum learning. Every moment you can sit in the struggle, you are improving at the fastest possible rate.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Exactly what I’m doing! Building a new school system to inspire students to challenge themselves and chase a meaningful contribution to the world. If we create a million students on fire for making an impact, leading with love and empathy for others, the world would be completely transformed. Nothing is more important or impactful!
How can our readers follow you online?
Twitter at @gw_smiles
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Garrett Smiley Of Sora Schools On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
