Mark Gross
"Why do we do it that way?"
I built my career fixing things that annoy me. Turns out the things I fix help real people in important ways. Go figure.
Question Power
"That's nice. But does it work?"
In the late 1990s, I was responsible for internet strategy for a large newspaper and magazine publisher. We were making things up as we went. The question on everyone's lips:
What works now?
That question became a key organizing idea behind Business 2.0, which I helped launch during the birth of the modern internet.
A Different Path
“I had to do something to help”
9/11 was very personal. I committed to work with a social purpose and became a teacher.
Running a company. Hard. Teaching. Impossible.
Keeping kids on track means engaging their parents. Because my kids shared core teachers, they all had the same homework. So I assigned a kid to email all the homework to the other kids. And their parents.
It rocked.
School Loop
“When people ask what I teach, I say kids.”
Elementary schools are organized around kids. Secondary schools are organized around subjects. The adults who have a stake in a kid’s success have no easy way to see what everyone else is seeing.
What if every kid had a connected team?
I took that email and turned it into School Loop, a software company I founded to help the adults around a student work as a team.
Technology with purpose.
School of Ranch
“Idiot Needs Help With Chainsaw”
I sold School Loop and moved to rural Oregon during COVID. I knew nothing about rural life, so I hired a local guy, Kaleb, to teach me.
We came from very different worlds. He was a rancher, had served in the military, and held strong political views that were, well, uncommon in San Francisco.
But we had something we wanted to accomplish together. We worked. We talked. And we discovered common ground.
Common Ground Through Common Interest.
I figured that if Kaleb and I can get along, anyone can. So I started School of Ranch , a nonprofit I still lead as a volunteer. School of Ranch teaches people heritage skills, and helps them discover common ground.
Workshops That Don’t Suck
“I have a goat, a llama, and an open pit silver mine.”
At a typical workshop, an expert teaches. Then people ask questions.
But listen to the questions.
They’re often intensely personal: Here’s my property. Here’s what I’m dealing with. Here’s what I’ve already tried. What should I do? No one else cares. They have their own problems.
What They Know. How They Think.
I figured we could do better. What if we taught how experts think about problems, and then baked the know-how and the framework into an app for people to use at home.
Jalana Labs was born.
Jalana Labs
“Here we go again.”
I’m supposed to be retired. But I can’t help myself. Ways to help people with cool services demand to be built.
Jalana Labs builds the Guides I developed for workshops for organizations like yours.
In one sense, Jalana is something entirely new. In another, it’s the same work I’ve been doing my whole career.