Isaac Van Wesep and Walter Duncan are two longtime friends who first met in college. Both men have taken two distinct career paths: Duncan is a 15-year veteran English teacher who has taught across the country and Van Wesep has worked with various investment firms and startups in the Greater Boston area.

Duncan was teaching at the South Shore Charter Public School in Norwell, and started noticing how legacy assessment tools and platforms, such as Scantron, were not as effective as they used to be. In addition to these observations, he also thought about how developing technology could help teachers in the classroom.

“How am I going to improve my students’ outcomes without the proper tools and resources,” Duncan asked. “I noticed how much we can accomplish on a smartphone and thought, ‘How can I grade the many different types of assessments required to improve student's outcomes with pocket sized mobile technology like my smart phone?’ Going back and forth to a Scantron machine that is on its last legs, and doesn't even give me the data I sorely need is too inefficient when it can all be done on a phone in an instant.”

Duncan started discussing his ideas with his old college friend and the latter began outlining ideas for school districts and began developing a prototype application. In 2012, they decided to take the plunge and start an EdTech company together: Quick Key.

The Quick Key app initially started out as a platform to grade standardized tests and quizzes. Teachers will open the app and, using the phone’s camera, scan over the tests to check

answers. After a prototype of the app went viral when one of Duncan’s students shared it on Reddit, teachers from across the country and the world began voicing their ideas for Quick Key. With this abundance of information from teachers who shared similar struggles to Duncan, Quick Key began to implement other features. Last Summer, Paul Hiatt joined the company as Quick Key’s Head of Development, began to work on rounding out Quick Key’s new features, based on suggestions from other teachers.

Van Wesep describes Quick Key as having evolved into the “iTunes for rapid assessments.”  

“The goal is to make something that is accessible to anybody,” Van Wesep says. “We wanted to create an application designed to be as easy to use for teachers on-the-go as it is effective for district and school leaders.”

There are four main features making up Quick Key today. Along with the ability to grade all types of quizzes, tests, and essays from your phone, teachers can create quizzes and grade other class assessments in the app itself. Quick Key can be integrated with Google, and teachers can use those features to enhance their experiences with Quick Key. The newest feature of Quick Key is the ability to share content through a P2P system. Teachers can share questionnaires and assignments through the app.

“Quick Key was also designed for classrooms of the future,” says Duncan. “Districts, schools and teachers can import or create assessments in Quick Key for students to take on any Chromebook, laptop, tablet, or mobile device.”

A year after the company’s founding, a successful Kickstarter campaign followed; the company raised over $20,000. “An interesting aspect of our campaign is we were the first professional productivity application to not only be on Kickstarter but also be successfully funded,” Van Wesep says.

Quick Key’s crowdfunding success caught the attention of both investors and the company’s future VP Sales, Shawn Rosenberger. Rosenberger joined the team in 2015 and brings with him EdTech sales experience. Throughout 2015 and 2016, the company started gaining traction with customers, and schools across the world started to use their app.

Quick Key has been collaborating with other EdTech startups around the Boston tech scene, as well as some companies from LearnLaunch. “There aren’t many accelerators like LearnLaunch around the country,” says Van Wesep. “What they’re doing is very important because education, and especially education technology, is always evolving.”

The company is looking to do a soft launch of their new features just in time for the school year in early September. “School leaders have asked us to make organization wide data simple to access and easy to act on, whilst teachers request more solutions that work for them, without making more work,” says Duncan. “With our September feature releases, I think we will continue hit the mark on both of these fronts.”

Colin Barry is a contributor to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash.

When I was a child, I felt broken. While I had done well academically and socially in elementary school, middle school was a difficult transition for me. I had always been an active learner and insanely curious, but I found myself beginning to stumble on tests. I would organize my notes, read - and reread the material - and then end up with mediocre grades on my tests. I tried hard, but saw no real progress being made. This pattern continued through high school. Some point along the line, I came to terms with the notion that I just wasn’t that smart, and tried to compensate for it with a strong work ethic and friendly personality. Somehow, I made it into a good college.

I entered school as a psychology major. I never questioned what I would study, as understanding how people think and engage in the world has always been fascinating to me. I went to school and listened intently to my professors, eager to understand the different theories and perspectives about what makes us tick. I had one professor who I greatly admired. She taught my intro class in addition to running a practice at the National Institute of Health, and I sat front and center in each session she taught. I prepared hard for that class, and was so passionate about it, I was convinced the tide of my academic career was about to turn. And then I got a C on the midterm. I went to see her in tears.

Unlike my high school teachers who had clearly just written me off as someone who didn’t take school seriously, she asked me a series of questions about the material. I responded with the correct answers. I think at some point  asked her what was wrong with me. “Nothing,” she responded. “But you likely have a learning disability.”

I felt as though I had been slapped across the face. In a good way. Perhaps there was an explanation for why it was so hard for me to prove I understood these simple things. Maybe I wasn’t, in fact, stupid - I just learned “differently.”

That professor and that experience changed the game for me.  I quickly learned I have a mild form of dyslexia, coupled with a more severe form of its cousin, dyscalculia.  After some testing, it became evident that while I didn’t have a difficult time reading per se, I did have an exceptionally hard time with anything to do with numbers or individual letters. Math had always been a major challenge for me, to the point where I carried my locker combination on a piece of paper and still keep notes on how to do simple calculations like percentages in my wallet. Now it all made sense. On my tests, I had always performed well on those that were essay based.  However, when it came time for multiple choice - which was the majority - it all got jumbled in my brain. I could tell you the right answer. I just couldn’t find it among the options.

Rather than get upset and limit myself, I took this as a challenge that could be solved. Instead of my earlier years feeling “broken” and “less than,” I now had an answer. That answer allowed me the freedom to get creative about how I could interact with the world to better navigate it. Of course, the days of tests would come to an end, but performance at work would always require me to use math and reading skills. No, the quadratic equation thankfully doesn’t play a role in my career, but certainly budgeting and planning does.

Zoom ahead. I’ve had a fairly successful career. I was fortunate enough to find a career I am passionate about, and select growing companies that have allowed me infinite opportunities to grow and learn. Sure I had a challenge I needed to solve for, but who doesn’t?

My point is this: there are numerous people in the workforce who have disabilities or challenges far greater than mine. Mine is not visible to the naked eye, and as a result, I haven’t faced discrimination or anyone overtly perceiving me as “less than.” In fact, for something that took such a negative toll on my psyche earlier in life, most people I work with have no idea about this aspect of me. And yet, we live in a world where many people who live with something that makes them “different” just creates one more reason for people to judge them. I don’t accept that.  

Why?  Because we all struggle with something.  

I have been incredibly fortunate to work with some pretty exceptional people throughout my career. At first blush, perhaps people don’t notice those among them who struggle with mental illness. Or eating disorders. Or ADHD. Or just about anything else you can think of. And yet, those people who chose to find the way to work around their challenge area and thrive? Those are the people I have infinite respect for. They don’t use it as an excuse; they use it as a motivator.

To this day, it troubles me that I don’t know the phone numbers of my parents or children. And yet, that’s what speed dial is for. It is an exercise in futility watching me try to master excel, but I’ve learned enough to be functional, and have complimented my lack of skill by hiring people who have strength in this area. Essentially, I’m at a place in my life where I’m not going to let a hurdle get in the way of allowing me to make an impact in an area I care deeply about.  I won’t ever rely on it as an excuse; rather as a motivator. Before college, I had built up a perception of myself as broken, and struggled with the notion that I would never amount to much. All it took was an insightful professor, and a new perspective to change my outlook. And my outcome.

None of us are broken. While it’s easy to get down on ourselves for whatever our own challenge might be, I encourage each of us to rethink our own perspective. Turning your “issues” into your motivator might make a pretty significant difference in your path to success. By finding creative solutions to work around your challenges, you can let your successes aid you in thriving.  

Together, we can change the mindset to become “unbroken.”