Meet Indra Sofian | Co-Founder at Sora Schools

We had the good fortune of connecting with Indra Sofian and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Indra, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Our non-traditional, virtual high school program is a defining feature of Sora, but the most important factor that has driven our growth in enrollments by families across the country is our persistent focus on listening to and implementing customer feedback. We have always sought feedback from our parents, students, and teachers in our community from day one until now. We were not perfect in the beginning. But we were transparent in our progress and plans with our community, and we always included them in the process. It’s led to incredible improvements in our school in short periods of time. But for our community, it instills trust in them that we will provide the best educational experience for our high school students. In education, trust is everything. Many organizations can say that they have the best product or the best offering, but if the customer experience doesn’t live up to that, then they’ll inevitably fail. At Sora, we’re continuing to succeed and grow simply because the parents and students at our school LOVE Sora and constantly recommend our school to their friends and network.

What should our readers know about your business?
Sora is a live, virtual project-based high school designed to accelerate students towards their wildest dreams.

In our school, students work on hands-on projects in their areas of interest, whether they’re studying 19th century Victorian fashion or coding video games. Through these projects and our personalized curriculum, they learn important skills and the normal academic subjects of Math, Science, English, History, and more. Once students have explored their passions and decided what they want to focus on, we connect them with industry mentors to accelerate them towards their future careers and fields of study. Students do all of this in our incredibly social, vibrant online community, where they work together and form lifelong relationships with other students and our faculty. Sora reimagines the model of high school education to be more meaningful, useful, and fun!

We officially announced that we were starting Sora back in 2018. At that point, most people thought we couldn’t achieve our goals of reimagining high school through virtual education. Many people were wary of joining a new, unproven school. Some of our friends and family weren’t even entirely sure. But we persevered through the many roadblocks in the journey and put in the work: getting the word out about Sora to potential parents/students, designing the school, raising the money, hiring the faculty. Eventually, we launched the school in Fall 2019. In about a year and half, we grew from just 7 students back then to now over 50 students–and growing!

One of the most important lessons that we learned in starting and growing Sora is that, like life, success isn’t a linear path. It’s full of random events, delightful surprises, crushing failures, and sometimes plain weird incidents. If everything had went according to our expectations, I would be incredibly surprised. We had to change many things along the way, from little things like our school schedule format to big ones like transforming our whole curriculum. But the exact form of the product doesn’t really matter at the end of the day–as long as you’re solving the problems that you set out to do, you’ll succeed. The one thing I want the world to know is that education hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. The stagnation in our education system has sucked the creativity of our students and are currently preparing them for an economy and world that doesn’t really exist anymore. But, at Sora, we’re going to create a new kind of education system that will actually prepare students for life, not just how to be good test-takers.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
When it comes to exploring a new area, I do it through food! I’d take them to a few of my favorite spots around Atlanta: JR Crickets, El Rey Del Taco, Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit, Mamak, and some others. There’s also the coffee shops that I’d frequent: Brother Moto, Chattahoochee Coffee Company, etc.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I would love to give a shoutout to the very first parent that enrolled his son at our school back in 2018 before we even opened: Chris Griffin. Although he was skeptical at first–meeting him in a crowded Starbucks with a really empty website on our laptop probably wasn’t inspiring–he eventually grew to trust us and signed up his son Cade for our school after we interviewed him. He was the first person to truly believe in our team, and he’s been incredibly helpful to us beyond just being a parent at the school. Chris has recommended us to his friends, spoken with prospective parents, recorded videos for us, provided his advice on areas of improvement in the school, and so much more. We wouldn’t be where we are today without him.

Website: https://soraschools.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indrasofian/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/indysofian