FYIDC | INNOVATORS AND DISRUPTORS
LITERARY WONDERS ‘Shark Tank’ winners help parents and libraries find unique picture books for kids. BY VIRGINIA COYNE
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outreach at Google, and Lloyd, once a D.C. teacher of the year, are adjusting their long-term business plan and re-focusing their efforts to reach an even larger audience: the 4.2 million users the American Library Association says visit the nation’s public libraries on a daily basis. Their new ser vice, called Beanstack, works much like Zoobean did. Parents can sign up for free online by answering a series of questions about their children. Based on those preferences and tags — a child’s age, likes, dislikes and life experiences — librarians help recommend age-appropr iate books Felix Lloyd that reflect the child’s personality. Parents then receive emails with book suggestions, including where the books can be found and how to use them to help build their child’s vocabulary. Users are also sent a link to sign up for a library card, if they don’t already have one. “We’d like to be able to serve every family with little kids across the country,” Lloyd Bookey says. Beanstack is already being used in the Sacramento, California public library system and will be soon be available locally in Arlington, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. www.beanstack.org. INNOVATIVE THOUGHTS
What’s your advice to other start-ups? Always focus first on what’s next. Time is our most important asset, so we can’t afford to spend it in too many places. -Felix Lloyd
WA S H I N G T O N L I F E
| M A R C H | washingtonlife.com
P H OTO S BY JAY S N A P
Z
oobean founders Jordan L l oy d Bookey and Felix Lloyd are adhering to the number one rule that most investors and successful entrepreneurs set for a startup: be willing to adapt and adjust. The husband and wife team, who met as teachers at SEED Public Charter school in the Distr ict, launched Zoobean, a webbased book curation service they define as “a Pandora for children’s books” in 2013. They made a name for themselves on the national level last year when they snagged a coveted spot on the hit ABC television show “Shark Tank” and walked Jordan Lloyd Bookey away with a $250,000 investment from billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. The idea for Zoobean was hatched when they couldn’t find the right book to give their son, Cassius, when his baby sister, Florence, was born. The couple wanted a publication that featured a multiracial family such as theirs introducing a second child; not a book that addressed having parents with different skin colors. They simply wanted Cassius to see himself in the pages and feel understood. “It’s not until you have children that you realize the power of the picture book,” Lloyd says. They came up with a list of questions that created an algorithm for helping parents find personalized book selections for children, from infancy to age eight — in their case one that reflected a family like theirs — and for others, anything from books that feature girls who aren’t so fond of the color pink to ones about little boys who don’t like to play baseball. The idea stuck and they have since raised more than $1 million; but their core company, which initially started as a highly specific book-of-the-month type program with 81 subscribers and grew to about 10,000, is no longer taking new clients. That’s because Lloyd Bookey, the former head of K-12 education