“In my mind there’s no downside—my goal is to be a successful business, but even if we fall a bit short, I will have gained a lot of experience.” says Ari Rosner, Founder and CEO, Pandemic Analytics
See what he has to say about his entrepreneurial journey, their vision and future plans. • Please tell us a little bit about yourself? What made you take the entrepreneurial leap so early on in life? I’m a rising Senior at Caltech, with a double major in mechanical engineering and business and a minor in computer science. I’ve always been interested in building things and when I saw the opportunity to provide a unique product that could help thousands of people, I took it. In my mind there’s no downside—my goal is to be a successful business, but even if we fall a bit short, I will have gained a lot of experience. • What is the quick pitch for Pandemic Analytics? Let’s face it, it’s wildly unsafe to hold in-person events right now. This is where we come in. At Pandemic Analytics we have designed tools to help schools, entertainment venues, businesses, and more return to an in-person model in the safest way possible. Our innovative solutions determine an optimal output of seating locations, and accounts for groups of people that want to sit together (e.g. families or friend groups), complex venue shapes, and more, allowing businesses or schools to create a plan for the future. Simple. Easy. Safe. • What was your inspiration to start Pandemic Analytics? My mom is a school administrator and oversaw the safe return of students to class. We were watching Jeopardy one night and she had the school blueprints open in PowerPoint and was dragging around circles to represent students. I saw what she was doing and figured that there must be a better way to do this. I looked online and couldn’t find anything better, so I did it myself and created the basis of what became Pandemic Analytics. • What have your accomplishments been so far? In terms of client side, we have well in excess of 7,000 schools using The Rosner Model including schools in Canada and Mexico, and we did the space planning for a Kygo music video which was fascinating. We have presented to thousands of private and independent school administrators and are slowly gaining traction in public schools. We were recently featured in an article on Forbes which was a great representation of our team’s achievements thus far. We’ve rolled out some new space planning products on our website and have received very positive feedback; I’m excited to see what the future holds. • What are some short term/ long term goals for you? Short term I really want to get this in the hands of more organizations, especially schools (and within that, specifically schools that are opening right now) and entertainment venues. We’re certainly making inroads with schools and have a userbase that is growing every day. We are working to partner with more venues, but the challenge for venues is that the best way to do so is through ticketing companies, so I’m looking to set up some partnerships with ticketing companies so that we can seamlessly integrate our services with a venues ticketing. Longer term I’m working with Dr. Richard Fiene from the Research Institute for Key Indicators on trying to drill down on more specifics about COVID transmission. He’s starting with early childcare facilities as they are already open. In addition to looking at the effect that different social distancing has on transmission, we’re also going to look at a metric Dr. Fiene calls “Contact Hours”, which is related to how long you’re in a space with other people for. There are a plethora of potential applications of this for schools and venues. You can imagine that if we can show how transmission rates change over time, we can give people a better idea of how social distancing should change as your performance gets longer or depending on the amount of time you spend in a classroom. For example, if the show is one hour you could potentially have slightly less social distancing than if it was three hours, however, we need to get some data first to be able to say for sure. • What is your mission, and do you see yourself continuing with this effort even after graduating? Our mission is to help everyone to reopen and plan for the future in the safest way possible. We’re committed to providing many of our tools for free to anyone, and any school or business that can’t afford the tools can get a fee waiver. Places across the country are struggling right now, and they’re going to open up whether it’s a good idea to do so or not, so we want to be by their side to help them do so in the safest and most efficient way possible. • What was the source of your initial funding for Pandemic Analytics? Initially we were funded out of pocket, but recently have covered most of those expenses. None of the team have been paid so far for our development time and I am hoping that I can at least compensate the team for their commitment. As a SaaS, we have a very low overhead. • Who all have been influential in this journey? You may include family, friends, mentors, books etc? My mom has been paramount in getting this out to other school administrators and giving constant feedback as a user. The team at Riot Ventures has been incredibly helpful (especially Jenna Bryant) by providing guidance and teaching me about what the right things to do as a startup are. And Ann Stimmler Johnson, a brilliant Caltech alum with a lot of startup experience, gave me great advice when I was getting started. • What are some of the challenges you see in being a student entrepreneur? It’s tough to balance school and work, but that just forces you to be better at time management. Being a student entrepreneur has had its benefits, as people are very willing to help and give advice if you reach out to them. • Tell us about the time you encountered rejection/Challenge because you are a student. How did you overcome? • How much time do you and your team spend working on your company? Depending on the week we each spend between 10-20 hours working on it. Some weeks are certainly busier than others. • Do you see academics getting affected? With classes being online due to COVID I have so far been able to balance both school and work, but that could change in the fall. Honestly with all I’m learning by directing the different divisions at Pandemic Analytics, if my academics suffer a bit, it’s not a huge deal. • What is the one thing that keeps you going? Hearing all the stories from the people who we’ve been helping, and seeing so many schools reopen using our tools. We’ve had countless school administrators email saying that they were struggling through the same challenges and weren’t sure what to do, and our work saved them hundreds of hours and really reassured them that not only were the students going to be safe in the classrooms, but teachers were as well. • What are some things you wish you knew a year (or two) ago? People with experience are willing to share it—you just need to reach out. At this young age, mentorship is incredibly helpful. A lot of people have gone through much of the same challenges, and being able to call upon their experience as opposed to reinventing the wheel is incredibly valuable. • How do you prioritize your activities in a day/ week? Customer service is important, so I always try and prioritize making sure I respond to people as fast as possible. Sleep is definitely pretty low on the priority list. And everything else falls somewhere in the middle. • Anything else you would like us to know about you or your organization? I have an awesome team of 3 other students working with me: Andrew Chan, Emma Wenger, and Max Shetterly. We certainly couldn’t have done all we have without them. Having a killer team has been key to our success thus far and I’m looking forward to building up and scaling with them. • What is the one quote you live by? “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.”
