A lot of startups never see the light of day because their would-be founders aren’t able to secure funding from VCs. A big chunk of the money they need is to pay the salaries of team members. It would be so much cheaper to launch if there were a way to reduce the manpower needed to produce a product.

Maybe there is.

Pooja Sankar is the 2016 Technology Entrepreneurship ABIE Award winner (presented during the recent Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Awards 2016 event) and founder and CEO of Piazza Technologies Inc., a real-time communication tool for students, their peers and instructors. She spoke to Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the the winning formula.

“We were three people when we had gotten to 30,000 students, and professors used to think we were a 100-person company because our product was so polished,” she said. “And it was just the three of us iterating constantly, working with the professors, working with the TAs, working with the students at Stanford, making the product much, much, much better with their feedback,” she said.

Using the feedback to rework the IT was a daily task, “And the push was done by night. And we would just constantly do that every single day,” she said.

Piazza allows students to ask questions about courses at all hours of the day and night. One key feature, said Sankar, is the ability to go incognito and ask “dumb” questions you might be unwilling to ask in class.

Recruitment day, every day

Sankar said Piazza is increasingly looking beyond helping students ace the classroom to: “How do you help them think about their career?”

She said her company has an “entire recruiting platform that now enables brands like Facebook, Google, Apple or Microsoft to really start leveraging the platform and the data to recruit kids.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Awards 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE