Alumni Q&A: Zagaran, Inc.

Most technology or software start-ups don’t make it past five years. Keeping a software company going for more than a decade is an accomplishment in itself, but Zagaran, Inc. stands out because of its approach. Founded by Harvard graduates in 2013, Zagaran has since built its success on working with non-profit organizations, hospitals, colleges and universities, as well as government offices. Their products have been used to do everything from helping people to apply for public housing in Massachusetts to aiding teachers in tracking classroom participation to monitoring and assessing data in medical or laboratory research.

“If you look at Boston and Cambridge, there are four really strong areas that need software: education, healthcare, biotech and government,” said co-founder Benjamin “Zags” Zagorsky, A.B./S.M. '12. “Those slices represent most of the work that we’ve done. But we have also grown from working within the Greater Boston area, and at this point, we’ve done work all over the world.”

Having discussed working on a company over meals in the Pforzheimer House dining hall, Zagorsky and Kevin Fan, A.B. '13, have helped their company grow from a tiny start-up based out of the Honan-Allston Public Library to a team of 30, the vast majority of which are software engineers, based in downtown Boston. The pair of former computer science concentrators at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) recently shared some of their insights on how to not only start a software company but keep it going long past the failure point for most start-ups.

SEIZE OPPORTUNITIES WHEN THEY PRESENT THEMSELVES

“Our public-sector work began around January 2015, when the chief technology officer of Massachusetts at that time, Steve Strassmann, sent out an email to the Boston Python programming community asking if anyone could help them,” Fan said. “Of course, being young and hungry, we volunteered to help. That was our foot in the door to talking to public agencies that help and serve the residents of Massachusetts and beyond. We’ve really grown our footprint in the public sector since then, and at this point have built software for many government agencies across several states. A hybrid of product development and custom software development is what we’ve successfully pursued for the last 11 years, just now at a greater scale with a larger team and cooler projects.”

ADAPT YOUR PRODUCT FOR A RANGE OF INDUSTRIES

“The fun part about working for so many organizations is that about half of software projects are about applying the same technical know-how, and the other half is working on an application specific to whatever the particular organization is doing,” Zagorsky said. “That first half comes from the general software expertise that we’ve built over all these years, and then in the second half, we pick up the specific subject matter expertise or knowledge needed to succeed in building good software for a particular purpose. It’s the marriage of those two that makes for a great software project.”

Fan added, “One commonality across the software we build is data. Data is very much the lifeblood of most software, with automation being the other big piece. A lot of software is about collecting data, storing it, transforming it, and presenting it in a useful way. While in other cases, tasks would be arduous or too time-consuming without the automation that technology can provide.”

ALWAYS BE READY TO CHANGE APPROACHES

“Figuring out what is working and what should be continued, and what isn’t working and what we need to pivot from has kept us alive for over a decade,” Fan said.

Zagorsky added, “When our first product wasn’t making enough money, we killed it despite the emotional attachment. When our next product started selling, we allocated more resources into that.”

FIND A GOOD LEADERSHIP TEAM

“People caution against working with your friends because running a business is hard and can endanger an existing relationship,” Fan said. “In our case, I think having an existing friendship in place helped. Layering a business relationship on top of a friendship that we knew would still be there at the end of the day not only helped us collaborate professionally but also deepened the personal bond. That’s what’s kept us together for over a decade.”

Zagorsky added, “For many of the early years of the company, all the founders were living in the same apartment. We had half a house in lower Allston, and all of us were living together. You couldn’t let anything stew. If we had problems, we had to deal with them because we were always together.”

TAP INTO YOUR RESOURCES TO BUILD YOUR EARLY CUSTOMER BASE

“Both Zags and I had Jim Waldo as a professor, who served as the chief technology officer at Harvard and at SEAS,” Fan said. “He remembered us as past students and liked us well enough to give us a chance, and he connected us with various groups around Harvard.  Our Pforzheimer House headmaster, Nicholas Christakis, gave us a shot and licensed a piece of software from us to run a research study on the spread of the flu. After our success, Christakis connected us with other research and lab groups. These are examples of how we got our first starts.”

Zagorsky added, “People say the connections you make are the most important, and I feel like we’re living that mantra more than most people ever do. This is a business substantially built on the skills we got and connections we made at Harvard.”