David Kopf

How to connect teachers, pupils and parents

Individual moments matter. In autumn of 2015, a science teacher notified parents that Venus would be visible in the night sky. The next morning, he was thanked by one mother for the precious moment she shared with her child staring at the planet. ‘Those are the moments were that child ends up becoming an astrophysicist,’ says David Kopf. ‘And if we can get more of those moments, we’ll get more astrophysicists.’

This moment is an example of what Remind, the brainchild of David and his brother Brett Kopf, is all about. Remind is a messaging app that makes it easy for teachers to communicate with students and their parents. The idea was born from Brett’s experience. Because of his diagnose with dyslexia, it was crucial for his teachers to keep his mom updated on his assignments and progress.

In 2011, he and his brother David – a former IBM engineer –, after hundreds of conversations with teachers, created Remind as a simple way for teachers to connect with students and boost parent engagement. Twenty million active users now use the app in 70 per cent of schools in the USA. Only teachers can initiate communication, and for safety, no phone numbers are displayed.

With ‘teacher obsessed’ as one of Remind's three core values, their vision aligns with that of educators, ‘to give every student the opportunity to succeed’. The motivation is clear, as Brett put it in Fast Company: ‘We live in an age where you can have an Uber cab show up in two minutes. But if your kid is failing school, you probably don’t know for three months.’ Remind is changing that.