Derek Pando’s Post

Working with Priscilla is always a good decision.

Last week I fulfilled a lifelong dream to go to Cuba. I wrote a really long blog post about my experience, which was truly incredible and a real personal pilgrimage. While LinkedIn may not be the typical place I would share something like this, throughout my career I've always been proud to share my Cuban American heritage and enjoyed connecting with other Cuban American and Latino professionals, so if it's of interest, take a look! https://lnkd.in/d9ZF4jK8

This was extremely well written and insightful.

Best thing on LinkedIn today.

Sales enablement friends, this is an incredible chance to be the first sales enablement hire at one of North Carolina's fastest growing companies. Check it out! Must be Raleigh based or willing to relocate.

I’m excited to announce some big updates on Beeloo and for me personally. TLDR. Beeloo will be focused on resources for educators going forward. Beeloo is not going anywhere, but I’ll no longer be working on it full-time and move into an advisor role. First on Beeloo, as we’ve grown and gotten to know our 1000’s of users better, we’ve learned that it’s not just parents looking for alternatives to screen time like we originally thought, but that a large portion of our users are teachers using Beeloo in the classroom. We’ve spent the last few months talking to educators and making some changes that we believe educators AND parents will love. Going forward we will have a more direct focus on creating resources with educational outcomes, but are also fun and engaging. You can read all the details in our blog post. We’ve introduced 8 more themes that are often used in the classroom (ie Human Body, Indigenous People’s Day). A new activity type, Word and letter tracing, across all of our themes with many more educational outcome focused activities being developed. Lastly, in addition to 20 free downloads, we’ve introduced flexible usage based pricing and a low cost unlimited annual subscription perfect for educators. On the personal front, I’ve decided that I will no longer work on Beeloo full time and move to an advisor role. I might write a longer detailed post with all the details as to why, but the short answer is that while Beeloo is now able to sustain itself with the revenue it is bringing in, it can not sustain me as a full time employee and will be unlikely to anytime soon if we grow organically. We considered raising money, but ultimately decided not to pursue that route for a variety of reasons. The good news is that Beeloo is not going anywhere, my co-founder has always been part time and there is a team of part time folks that will continue to improve and grow the platform. We’ve built proprietary, high scalable software and a highly cost effective organic growth engine. We’ve built Beeloo in the AI first era, so we can do a lot with a nimble part time team. We are hitting new records each week in terms of traffic, free account sign ups and revenue, but it’s not enough for me to dedicate all of my time to it. It has been an emotional rollercoaster as an entrepreneur, but I have zero regrets about taking the leap, but I do feel like this is the best decision for me. I’m also very grateful that Beeloo will live on and continue to grow and fulfill our mission. A big thanks to my co-founder, you know who you are, many others who have helped, given advice or support like Esaias Pech, Priscilla Barolo, Stacey Tanaka, Sachin Rekhi, Jared Verzello and the NC IDEA team whose grant supported our exploration and pivot to education and many many others. I’ll be sharing more about my new full time job soon and could not be more excited.

Wow…I’ve read a lot of headlines about the recent noble prize winning scientist that was constantly rejected and demoted, but reading her words that explain her perspective is extremely inspiring, full of amazing reminders and lessons. https://lnkd.in/emUwtdup

Thanks so much for having me Riley Whisler on the Pulling Focus show with Press Record Media. I got to share the inspiration for Beeloo, what we've learned from our early adopters, why we are focusing more now on educational content and how to use some of the amazing advancements in technology to help kids spend LESS time on technology.

Anyone in my network an Amazon seller with an opinion on the ftc lawsuit?