How a former charter school teacher and ex-Google employee dove into “Shark Tank” and snagged a billionaire backer.
Photography By Aaron Spicer
By Tim Regan • Photography By Aaron Spicer
In May 2013, husband and wife entrepreneurs Felix Brandon Lloyd, 38, and Jordan Lloyd Bookey, 36, received an unexpected email. The sender claimed to be a television producer from, “Shark Tank,” the ABC show that connects entrepreneurs with wealthy investor-celebrities like Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban. “We got a message through our website asking if we were interested in being on the show,” says Bookey. “We thought it was a prank.” But it wasn’t, and just weeks later, the couple was in Los Angeles, facing rapid-fire questions from a panel of some of the most infamous investors in the United States. How they got there—and how they fared against the Sharks—is a tale of hard work, networking and a little luck.
Aspiring Educators
When Lloyd and Bookey met—and soon after, started dating—in 2001, they were both teaching at the SEED Public Charter School in Southeast D.C. The school was new, ambitious and a little chaotic. “It was a startup culture,” says Lloyd. “I don’t know if I was made for it from the beginning, or if they helped make me into somebody who was more startup oriented. But the chaos and opportunity of that environment, I excelled in it.” Felix quickly moved through the ranks: he was D.C.’s Teacher of the Year from 2000-2001, and went on to serve as the SEED school’s Dean of Students. Though teaching was rewarding, Lloyd left the school in 2006 and founded the Pittsburgh-based Skill-Life, Inc., a hybrid online gaming and financial education company aimed at kids. Meanwhile, Bookey earned her MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. The next half-decade was a turbulent, but rewarding, time. The couple married in 2007, and soon after, Bookey was recruited to work as a K-12 talent and outreach manager at Google’s office in Pittsburgh. The couple had a son, Cassius, in 2009, and in 2010, Lloyd sold his company to BancVue, a financial marketing company located in Austin, Texas. Over the years, Lloyd and Bookey built their skills, made connections with other business people and watched each other grow professionally. But it wasn’t until the birth of their daughter, Florence, in 2012 that made the couple want to start something new together.
The Birth of Zoobean
Explaining something to children can be difficult. As new parents often do, Lloyd and Bookey wanted to find a book that could explain to Cassius what it would be like to be a big brother. But as they searched for books, they couldn’t quite find the right fit. The problem was that Lloyd, who’s black, and Bookey, who’s white, couldn’t find a story about having a younger sibling that totally reflected their racial differences. To make matters worse, there wasn’t a good system in place to look for books based on certain requirements. Sure, you can Google or search on Amazon for books, but unless you know exactly what you’re trying to find, it can be a shot in the dark. “We didn’t know what we were looking for,” says Lloyd.
Zoobean functions like a book-of-the-month club, while the couple’s new venture, Beanstack, functions like a marketing company for libraries. Photo by Aaron Spicer.
By pure luck, Bookey and Lloyd found exactly what they were looking for a few months after Florence was born. “We got a book in the mail from a good friend who’s a librarian,” Lloyd says. “It was the perfect book, partly because it featured a multiracial family.” When they gave the book to Cassius, his response was immediate. “He pointed to it and said, ‘That’s me, that’s me,” says Lloyd. Though they found the right book in the end, the process left them wondering if there was a better way. “The problem’s always been that we think it’s hard to discover the right book or app for your child,” says Lloyd. “We want to make it easier.” That line of thinking lead to Lloyd and Bookey’s shared eureka moment: They could create a company that catalogued and recommended children’s books with the help of parents, teachers and librarians across the U.S., and send users the books they liked each month. “It really felt like we had this great opportunity to pare that search down for parents, to make it easy and simple to use,” says Bookey. They took a leap of faith, hired a programmer and built Zoobean.
Here’s how it works: Instead of searching high and low for the perfect book, Zoobean users choose from more than 1,600 description tags to describe exactly what they want. For instance, say the child likes books with a “not-so-pink” female protagonist, fantasy books, or books meant for readers under the age of 10. No problem. Once the user selects the tags, a special algorithm chooses a list of books that meet the search. Where do those tags come from? That’s where the parents, teachers and librarians come into play. Each month, the Zoobean “literacy team” pores over a mountain of children’s books and assigns each one different keywords pertaining to the subject matter. Tagged books are added to the Zoobean catalogue based on what the team thinks kids would like. And the name Zoobean? Like the inspiration for the project, that, too comes from the couple’s son, Cassius. “It’s a riff on our son’s nickname,” says Bookey. “We would call him Cashew Bean and then Shew Bean. When we were coming up with things, we weren’t looking for something that connoted books, so much, as just kids and friendly and bright.” Zoobean rhymed and sounded friendly, and the name stuck.
But you can’t run a business without money, and Bookey and Lloyd didn’t intend to. Luckily, the couple had a generous friend in Mitch Kapor, the founder and designer of early spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, and his investment company, Kapor Capital. “I had been a teacher at a camp he funded,” says Lloyd. “Jordan, at Google, worked with his wife, one of the partners in the company.” Kapor invested $150,000, enough money for Bookey and Lloyd to work on building Zoobean full-time. But in order to focus full-time attention to their startup, Bookey needed to quit her dream job at Google. Her motivation through this difficult decision was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework, which emphasizes weighing the regret of not doing something against the risk of actually doing it. When Bookey put the two together, she realized that not taking the risk would lead to plenty of regret. “I saw how gratifying it was for Felix to build and have success and to see it in use,” says Bookey. “I thought, I really want to be able to do something like that. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so maybe it’s in my blood.” Bookey said goodbye to the catered meetings and bountiful benefits, and the couple headed back to the District to launch the company.
Swimming With Sharks
“Before we went in, we stood in front of those doors they open, trying to repeat the pitch, which we had done like 9,000 times before,” says Bookey. Then the doors swung open; Lloyd and Bookey walked onto the set, and the feeding frenzy began.
But Lloyd and Bookey didn’t wade in without a plan of action. Weeks before going on the show the couple developed a strategy: ask for $250,000 for 15 percent equity, and go for billionaire and investor Mark Cuban. To prepare, they screened other episodes for typical investments, which businesses were successful, and what questions the investors tended to ask. After making a spreadsheet of the data, Bookey and Lloyd discovered a pattern: Cuban tended to invest more money than the others. “We always knew Mark was the best target, partly because we went in asking for a relatively large amount of money,” says Lloyd. So, they rehearsed a sales pitch that would appeal to the Dallas Mavericks owner, right down to the choice of words. “We used the word platform and things that we knew he would respond to,” says Lloyd.
One-by-one, the sharks dropped out in dramatic, long-winded fashion. Software mogul Kevin O’Leary, who has a reputation on the show as an unlikable curmudgeon, said he thought the company couldn’t monetize its subscribers well enough to be profitable. Despite his reputation, however, Bookey thought his questions were on-point and fair. “He was asking us questions because he has legitimate interest in education-related businesses,” she says. “But he was definitely respectful. He was a good guy.” Meanwhile, real estate tycoon Barbara Corcoran simply thought the business wasn’t different enough to succeed over something like Amazon.
Though the other sharks dropped out, Cuban remained and listened intently. “Mark was very interested in the fact that we’d already gained an investor that he’s worked with,” explains Lloyd, referring to Kapor. “He said [I’ll invest] if you can explain this is something Mitch would invest in, and that it’s not all about books,” says Lloyd. “He’s more interested in the social trends, the discovery.” After a brief re-explanation of the idea and a little negotiation, Cuban agreed to invest $250,000 for 25 percent ownership of the company.
When it aired, the edited Zoobean segment lasted eight minutes of rapid-fire negotiation. But Lloyd says the actual filming process took about an hour, and wasn’t as frantic as it looked. “The show is high intensity when you watch it, but it slowed down at a point,” he says. Retroactively, Cuban admits he had no idea Lloyd and Bookey were aiming for his investment, but says he’s pleased with his investment all the same. “You don’t see a ‘Shark Tank’ company that is as tech-driven as Zoobean,” Cuban says. “It keeps getting smarter and improving. For where they are, that’s a great thing.”
Beyond Mail-Order Books
Though Lloyd and Bookey recall the experience like a recent memory, it’s been over a year since they appeared on “Shark Tank.” These days, nestled into a crowded compartment in Rosslyn’s UberOffices, they don’t worry too much about nabbing high-profile investments. They’ve got plenty on their plate. To date, they’ve already raised about $1.2 million in total for Zoobean. Their subscriber base, just 85 users when they went on “Shark Tank,” has grown to more than 10,000. And every Saturday, Lloyd and Bookey update Cuban on the business via email, a message that they admit takes a little courage to send, even to this day. “I still hover over the send button,” says Lloyd. When Cuban writes back, he passes along business advice, strategies, or words of wisdom. “It’s not like he’s telling us what to do day to day,” Lloyd says. “It’s more, have you looked at this vertical, what about this customer acquisition strategy, what about this offshoot of the product.”
And the company doesn’t just focus on books anymore; Zoobean now delivers curated apps for children. But the next target, the one that Cuban really wants to focus on, is libraries. “Their work with libraries is going to be key,” Cuban says. “It takes them where readers already are.”
Though it has yet to launch, the company’s new Beanstack service would do for libraries what Zoobean currently does for users. Starting later this year, Beanstack will launch at the Sacramento Public Library in California. Instead of creating a profile that feeds into a monthly subscription service, users pick tags correlating to the kind of library books their child might borrow. Instead of sending customers a book through the mail, Beanstack will suggest a book from a local library’s collection via email or a mobile profile. Unlike Zoobean’s subscription-based model, Beanstack would be free to the user.
To Lloyd, it’s a natural fit. “Libraries are judged by how many books are borrowed, circulation, how many people go through their doors and their presence in the community,” he says. “We can contribute to that because we can make people, who otherwise wouldn’t come into the library, very easily get a recommendation of a book that’s just right for that one child, and that’s in their local library.” To date, Lloyd says Zoobean has seen more success with Beanstack’s early partners in Sacramento, California, and Arlington than with what they’ve seen in over a year running the consumer business. Although the list of clients is short right now, it’s a careful, slow growth process.
One reason Lloyd and Bookey want to take their time is because it’s a new customer they’re serving. “Our core product isn’t the book of the month service,” says Lloyd. “The core product is the unique system we use to for cataloging books and apps, and for choosing which ones get included. There are 9,000 public libraries across the country. We’d love to be in as many as possible.” Another reason is that this is an entirely new business model. Zoobean functions like a book-of-the-month club. Beanstack functions like a marketing company, although Lloyd prefers to think of the business as outreach.
“What Mark wants us to do is sell,” says Lloyd. “To do that, you have to add real value, and then good things happen as a result.”
(January 2015)