stickK promotes healthier and happier living by helping people achieve
their personal goals through the signing of Commitment Contracts. Happier
people = happier world!
stickK is the legitimate (and adorable) offspring of a marriage between
two unlikely mates: Personal Experience and Scholarly Research. (And they
said it wouldn’t last!)
Their courtship began and blossomed in the storied halls of Yale University
a few years ago, when economics professor Dean Karlan came up with the
idea of opening “The Commitment Store.” This would be a place
in cyberspace, where people could go to sign contracts obliging them to
achieve a personal goal, such as losing weight or quitting smoking. Karlan
had experimented with using such contracts himself
(click
here to read his personal weight loss story.) He had also
conducted and published* research on Commitment Contracts as a tool for
helping people save money.
*Ashraf, Karlan and Yin, Quarterly Journal of Economics May 2006, “Tying
Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence from a Commitment Savings Product in the
Philippines”
The Commitment Contract concept is grounded on two well-known principles
of behavioural economics: (1) people don’t always do what they claim
they want to do, and (2) incentives get people to do things.
Karlan believed that today’s health-conscious and socially-conscious
business market was ripe for a free and accessible forum to help people
create Commitment Contracts and follow through on them.
A brilliant idea whose time had surely come . . . but Karlan first had
some commitments of his own to fulfill; namely his ongoing academic research
on the use of
microfinance to alleviate poverty. So he put The Commitment
Store on the backburner . . .
In the meantime, he took every opportunity he could to bounce the idea
off his fellow academics, including Barry Nalebuff, a professor at the
Yale School of Management (SOM). Professor Nalebuff, a serial entrepreneur
and co-founder of
Honest Tea,
suggested that Karlan chat with Ian Ayres, a Yale Law School contracts
professor and SOM economics professor, who is renowned for thinking “outside
the box.”
At the time, Profesor Ayres was in the research phase of his book
Super
Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart. It just so happened that this research
required him to interview Karlan on the subject of poverty-alleviation
initiatives. Once that business was out of the way, Karlan told Ayres
about The Commitment Store. Ayres loved the concept, both as a personal
tool that he’d go on to try himself
(click here
to read his personal weight loss story), and as a business
opportunity. Before long, their discussions gave birth to a bouncing baby
stickK!
Priority number one was to appoint a Chief Executive Officer to steer
stickK through its infancy. Barry Nalebuff, the academic matchmaker who
had introduced Karlan and Ayres, now had another introduction in mind.
He brought in Jordan Goldberg, one of his star students. Goldberg was
enrolled in the Silver Scholar Program, an elite program for a handful
of promising undergraduates who Yale selects and admits directly to the
graduate-level MBA program.
Coincidentally, Goldberg was about to begin a summer program at the Yale
Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), a program that selects a dozen students
with extraordinary business ideas, helping them take their dream out of
the dorm and into the marketplace. But it didn’t take long for the
two professors to convince Goldberg to come on board. He would develop
stickK’s business model and then grow and run the company full-time.
And the rest, as they say, is:
Ian Ayres
Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. He is the William K. Townsend
Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale's School of Management.
Professor Ayres is a regular commentator on public radio’s Marketplace
and a columnist for Forbes magazine. Ayres has published 9 books including,
in 2007, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be
Smart. In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
He has a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. and a J.D. from Yale University.
Jordan Goldberg
Jordan Goldberg is a graduate of Yale University, where he earned his
BA in American Studies in 2006. Goldberg is a recipient of Yale School
of Management’s Silver Anniversary Scholarship, a scholarship
to the MBA program awarded to six undergraduate students each year. After
completing the first year of his MBA program, Goldberg decided to take
a leave of absence from school to work full-time on stickK.com.
Dean Karlan
Dean Karlan is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University.
Professor Karlan has done extensive academic research on commitment contracts
for savings and for quitting smoking. He is also president of
Innovations
for Poverty Action (IPA), an organization he founded in 2002 that now
has more than 110 employees worldwide.
In 2007, he was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists
and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States
government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent
careers, and an award given before to only three other economists. Karlan
is a research fellow of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and co-director
of the Financial Access Initiative, a consortium created with funding
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in Economics
from M.I.T., an MBA and MPP from the University of Chicago, and a BA from
the University of Virginia.
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
