All work no play not a good recipe for happiness, startup founder says
Jul. 17—BEDFORD
AS A doctoral student at the University of New Hampshire, Kendra Bostick has been studying the impact of experiential learning on student success so it was natural for her to engage her early morning audience in an activity.
Her twist on rock, paper, scissors Wednesday had about two dozen women and one guy at the monthly Tech Women Power Breakfast on their feet and acting out the value cards they had chosen on a table before entering the meeting room at the Manchester Country Club.
Integrity. Cheerfulness. Collaboration. Optimism. Independence. Respect. Partnership.
The short game prompted the participants to loosen up a bit and let down their guard. When they finished several minutes later, the people sharing tables had become groups, and they had learned a little bit more about each other.
"When the play is novel you leave some of your defenses behind," Bostick told them. "You're yourself. You're not thinking about all the walls you put up and the protective measures you have."
Learning by doing is at the heart of Bostick's tech startup. In December 2017, she and business partner Bryn Lottig launched Kikori, an app that offers a library of activities that teachers and families can use with students to improve social and emotional skills as well as technical expertise and academic knowledge.
The software-as-a-service company has 8,600 users and 20 accounts with schools and organizations, including the Santa Fe public school district.
"The Suffolk school district in Virginia Beach is doing a pilot this summer with counselors to see if they want to bring it to all their schools. So we've been getting some traction," Bostick said during an interview after her presentation.
Kikori was one of six startups featured in 2021 at the New Hampshire Tech Alliance's Innovation Summit, where it received $100,000 from the Millworks II Fund. The company is about to close on the last disbursement of a funding round that will total $750,000.
During her talk, which focused on "workism," Bostick talked about the pressure to achieve and our overemphasis on careers.
We work longer, take fewer vacations and retire later than our counterparts in other developed countries.
In schools, organized sports trumps unstructured play, increasing the pressure to perform and inhibiting our imaginations.
Bostick packed one PowerPoint slide with troubling statistics about the mental health struggles among high school students, underscoring how early in their careers students begin to focus on achievement above all else — leading to a life where work dominates everything.
"The majority of our kids are feeling stressed," said Bostick, who spent six years working as a social worker in Chicago public schools and two as a therapist.
Bostick is not immune. Before beginning work on her Ph.D., she earned two master's degrees and confesses to struggling with work/life balance. She's traveled to 30 countries and has worked in London, Thailand, Chile and Ecuador.
While working in Chile, her Spanish-speaking colleagues were not impressed with her approach to life: Who needs sleep?
But her bilingual skills helped her secure development work for her young company. She traded English lessons for software development, and has learned to be scrappy — an important attribute for an entrepreneur juggling a business and an academic career.
"I've done a couple of different sessions on bootstrapping and all the different ways of fundraising," said Bostick, 38. "There's a wonderful program at the University of New Hampshire for startups, for interns, where a donor provides us with funding for someone to work with us 40 hours a week for the summer. We've done that three years in a row."
Since joining the graduate program, the Michigan native has taken advantage of the opportunities available for entrepreneurship at UNH to help her company grow. In 2020, Kikori won first place awards in both the NH Social Innovation Challenge and the Paul J. Holloway Prize.
The seven-woman business is officially based in Wisconsin, where Lottig lives. The young company began relying on Zoom to communicate long before it became a household name, says Bostick, who now lives in Dover.
"My partner and I were on Zoom a year and a half before the pandemic," she said.
When asked when she expects to finish her Ph.D., Bostick laughed and said "a year ago."
Now she's aiming for 2023.
"I promised myself one more year — one more year of these two crazy worlds together."
Mike Cote is senior editor for news and business. Contact him at mcote@unionleader.com or (603) 206-7724.
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