But it turns out that they don’t publish their recipes, and it’s like some kind of state secret. It turns out, further, that the Internet is REPLETE with recipes from people who have tried to clone Levain cookies. Seriously, just google it.

And I do love a challenge. So here is my attempt to reverse-engineer their cookies. Specifically, their dark chocolate peanut butter chip.  (I’m crazy for all peanut butter chocolate combinations.) The same principles should work to re-engineer their other cookies.

The recipe came out very well. I’d say it was extremely similar to and slightly better than the Levain cookie. (My cookies had the advantage of not traveling and being fresher than I typically get my Levain cookies. Plus, I used awesome ingredients that are hard for a professional bakery to use in large scale.)  They were wonderfully dense and doughy inside — chewy but not too chewy — with a nice delicate crunch from the exterior. The height of each cookie was 1.5 – 2 inches.

I used a blend of all-purpose flour and bread flour to increase the doughiness and rising power of the cookies without making them too chewy. You have to use a high ratio of flour to wet ingredients. I used mostly brown sugar for extra toffee notes. Very cold butter improves the texture of the final cookie. I felt like I used slightly too much cocoa powder (I used 3/4 cup) so I reduced it to 5/8ths for this recipe. Ripping the cookies in half and inverting the halves to conjoin the smooth ends – and leave the ragged, textured ends exposed — and then freezing the formed cookies, seems to drastically improve the texture.

Enjoy!

Sift dry ingredients together.

• 1.5 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup bread flour
• 5/8 cup high quality cocoa powder
• 5/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 5/8 teaspoon salt

Beat cold butter until pasty. Add sugars and beat until incorporated. Add vanilla and eggs. Don’t overbeat at any step here; stop when ingredients are incorporated. Extra blending doesn’t improve flavor; it just warms the butter.

• 1 3/4 sticks high quality unsalted butter, cold, cut into small pieces. I used Kate’s.
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 large egg + 1 large egg yolk

Add chips and fold in until evenly distributed.

• 1 cup peanut butter chips
• 1 cup small chunks of Scharffenberger or Valrhona semisweet chocolate (don’t use the dust or the very small pieces). Or use lame chocolate chips if you must.

Roll the dough into a cylinder about 2 inches in diameter. Cut into twelve 1.5 inch or so segments.

Rip each segment in half and conjoin the smooth ends, leaving the ragged ends exposed. The whole point is to increase the raggedness of the surface area to maximize crunch in the final product. This step really does improve the cookie.

Place all the uncooked cookies on parchment paper and cover loosely with plastic wrap.

Freeze for 1-2 hours.

Cook in center of oven for 17-18 minutes at 375. Adjust oven racks as needed to make sure the bottoms don’t burn.

Cookies are done when they are mostly firm on top (as opposed to doughy. They will still be delicate.) There should still be some darker spots here and there of not-quite-done cookie dough in most of the cookies.

Place on rack immediately.

It’s clear that the world is in love with gaming, but school? Not so much. Every year, 1.2 million students in the U.S. alone fail to graduate from high school. Of those who do graduate, a large percentage don’t have the skills they need for college.

What if students could feel the same sense of pride, investment and success in their schoolwork that they feel while conquering level after level of their favorite XBox game? How might that help tip the scales?

Maybe they can. Gamification — the use of game design elements in non-game contexts — is gaining increasing traction in the education world.

Check out The Gamification of Education infographic to see how educational games have progressed from the days of Carmen San Diego and Reader Rabbit, and learn how they can help teachers and schools deliver truly meaningful experiences to students.

Click on the image to go to the full infographic.

It’s hard to imagine my life without Amazon. I bought a Kindle for everyone close to me, I order hundreds of books every year. I’m always on the look-out for something new–the random, the obscure, the contrarian, the overlooked classic–and Amazon facilitates my search through its exhaustive lists and recommendations. It’s an addiction I don’t hesitate to indulge in. It’s ferociously entertaining. It’s cheap, it’s good for you, it’s fun: what could be better?

As a writer who constantly experiments with different literary forms, I love how Amazon has encouraged long-form journalism, novellas, essays, and humor through its Kindle singles (short-reads priced at $1.99, “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length”). After all, not everything should be a novel or a full-length book. And finally, as a compulsive reader and knowledge maniac, I appreciate the price point of Amazon products. At any given point, I need to be reading 7 books at once and the aggressively low prices on Amazon allow me to do this. There is nothing in the world I prefer to spend my money on–I love how I can show my support for so many artists at once.

Two years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of driving a Tesla Roadster around a New York City block, twice. Pressing the accelerator can only be compared to watching the stars turn into starlines after Han and Chewie get the Millennium Falcon to jump into hyperspace. Mr. Musk and company are unabashedly swinging for the fences with Tesla Motors – but you know you’re onto something when the inventor of the internal combustion engine, Daimler, invests in your electric vehicle company. When I’m driving my Tesla Roadster on the SolarCity-powered Space-X Mars colony in 2050, I’ll be thinking of you, Mr. Musk.

Today Starbucks is much more than a charming spice, tea, and coffee vendor – it constantly pushes the frontiers of technology/corporate partnerships, from the in-store music promotions to the extremely cool augmented reality Cup Magic App. Starbucks will always have a hometown spot in my heart, and now, I’m excited to see it recognized as the innovative company it truly is.

We decided to interview some of the “fluxers” here at Knewton. Our first post focused on design and data science. This post will feature Senior Marketing Associate, Robbie Mitchell, who started his own educational rap company, Rhythm Rhyme Results, and Product Manager, Nathan Lasche, who has worked in a range of for-profit and non-profit organizations in the entertainment, tech, and public health sectors.

CY: What do you do here at Knewton? How has your role here changed over the past year or two?

Robbie: I oversee product marketing, paid search, and online acquisition. As part of these areas, I manage knewton.com and lead most technical projects for the team.

We now have a marketing team of about 7, but when I started two years ago it was just me and our former VP. I spent every day in the weeds and started by focusing on analytics and A/B testing, but quickly worked on everything from affiliate management to SEO to email marketing. Over time, our team has taken on more specialists, enabling me to spend more time working on team-wide goals and cross-functional projects.

Nathan: I am a Product Manager at Knewton. That means I try to envision and define the types of products and features we hope to create and then work with our teams to actually build them.

The focus of my role has changed a lot over the past couple years mainly due to evolving focus of the company. When I first arrived at Knewton, I worked on improving our test prep courses, since those were the only products that we had at that point. As we moved into higher ed, I focused on helping to build the original version of our College Readiness product. Now I work closely with our largest partners—mainly publishers and universities—to incorporate Knewton’s adaptive learning technology into their products, which serve millions of students.

CY: 5 years ago, did you see yourself working in tech or edtech? How did you find your way here?

Robbie: No way. 5 years ago I was pursuing a career in global trade, working for an economist and taking extra math and econ classes. On the side I was starting the educational rap thing, but it was a hobby. Parallel to this, I was heavily involved as a volunteer with National Model United Nations, a conference I had competed in as a college student. Both of those side activities kept me involved with education in different ways. I’ve been into computers and the web since 1994 or so, but hadn’t seriously pursued it in any way.

Nathan: From early on in my career, I had a feeling that I would end up in tech, although in hindsight, it took me a while to get there. I’ve always been driven by innovation and the ability to impact other people’s lives. At its core, that’s what I believe tech, and edtech specifically, is all about. Back in college, a friend and I started on online video rental store on our campus. This was in 2001, before Netflix had gone mainstream. It turned out people loved the store, because it was a new, more convenient way to rent movies. And while it was a very small endeavor in the grand scheme of things, it was an amazing entrepreneurial experience and one of my first glimpses into the potential that technology has to affect the status quo and delight users in ways they previously hadn’t even considered possible.

I later worked in Hollywood, sourcing and developing feature film projects for Sony Studios, and in Africa, co-founding the Uganda office of the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, where I focused primarily on increasing the pediatric HIV detection and treatment coverage. In each of these instances, I felt satisfied that I was achieving my primary goal of impacting other people’s lives, but upon reflection, I concluded that it was possible to have even a more widespread, global impact than one could achieve in these particular fields.

CY: How did this lead to your work at Knewton?

Nathan: Around the time of this realization, I had returned to the US and was in an MBA program. I started focusing on industries and areas where there was a great potential for innovation on a large scale, which could in turn impact the lives of millions of people. This, of course, led me back to the tech sector, and one of the companies I thought had this potential world-changing impact was Knewton. Education is one of the sectors that I believe has the most to gain from embracing technology. And in doing so, has the chance to improve the lives of millions of people. Everything stems from education. And I believe Knewton will be at the forefront of this trend when the revolution happens.

CY: Robbie, tell me about a learning experience you’ve had with your company that has informed your work at Knewton.

Robbie: One of the big mistakes I made in early pitch meetings for our songs with Disney and Viacom was thinking they would recognize a good prototype (educational rap songs) and understand how to morph it into a profitable business. Because of this, we held off on marketing the product directly to customers in order to “reserve” it for bigger companies. Eventually we went to market, learned how to sell content online, and have now built a surprisingly successful e-commerce business out of it.

CY: What did you take away from that experience?

Robbie: Don’t rely on your audience to interpret the value for you–show people something concrete they can pick off the rack and evaluate. This lesson applies all the time—everything from presenting design ideas to senior management to telling customers how to use what they are buying from you.

Robbie Mitchell

CY: What about you, Nathan? Any experiences from the past that have unexpectedly informed your work at Knewton?

Nathan: While at a first glance, some of my past experiences seem unrelated to my current responsibilities, I’ve actually drawn on them a lot in my role at Knewton. As a Product Manager, one has to work with a diverse group of people—engineers, designers, content developers, and a variety of different partners—to arrive at a vision for a product and implement it successfully. When I worked in film development at Sony, I had to work with writers, directors, agents, and studio executives to shape scripts in ways that would satisfy everyone’s requirements and that would lead to a successful movie.

CY: And what about your work in Uganda? I imagine there must have been a good deal of consensus-building there as well.

Nathan: Similarly when I was building the HIV/AIDS treatment program in Uganda, I was constantly working with a diverse group of stakeholders—the Minister of Health, large NGOs, doctors, and patients with HIV. In both these situations, it was crucial to get input from all the various groups, build a consensus, and make decisions that I believed would lead to a solution that would benefit the greatest number of people and achieve our goals. This type of experience has been extremely valuable to my work building products at Knewton.

Nathan Lasche

CY: Have any advice for young people shaping their careers and looking to navigate these tricky economic times?

Robbie: Anyone can say they’re interested in something, but surprisingly few people prove it by actively pursuing their interests. There’s no excuse for not learning and experimenting on your own; either you’ll get better or you’ll realize you don’t care as much as you thought.

CY: Great advice. It helps in job interviews as well: most candidates for entry-level positions straight out of college don’t go through the trouble of thoroughly researching a company or a field before they go in to interview. So it sets you apart if you really know what you’re talking about.

Robbie: If you’re interested in software engineering, the languages are free and the tutorials are cheap. If you’re interested in marketing, almost everything is free—blogs, YouTube, analytics, AdSense, and basic design apps. Blogs and FAQ communities abound for just about any topic.

CY: Speaking of software engineering, one of our coders, Jon Bethune, recently wrote a post about why everyone should learn to code. Definitely worth reading… what are your thoughts on this, Nathan? Any advice for young people these days?

Nathan: I know it’s a cliche, but try to find something you’re passionate about. Of course, in more difficult economic times we don’t always have the luxury to wait for the one job that is perfectly suited to our interests and passions, but whenever possible, try to hold out for something that really excites you. Don’t settle for the first thing that comes along, as tempting as it may be. I’ve had too many friends and colleagues take a job purely for financial reasons or because it was the “cool” job to take, and then wake up 5–10 years down the road unhappy with their careers and regretting their decisions. How you spend 40, 50, 60 hours of your life week-in and week-out will have a huge influence on your overall happiness.

CY: Great advice, and helpful to hear in these times when so many young people feel pressured to give up on their dreams. Any concluding thoughts about “Generation Flux”? Robert Safian at FastCompany says the future of business will be defined by “chaos,” “speed,” and “rapid flux.” What do you think?

Robbie: Type faster and learn keyboard shortcuts.

Nathan: I think it makes sense. Our generation is characterized by the ability (and need) to move from one job function or industry to another, quickly and seamlessly. We’ve been trained to adapt constantly and view our careers as dynamic, ever-changing events, because if we don’t, the world might pass us by. Things are changing at lightning speed. Fifteen years ago, no one had cell phones and social networks didn’t really exist. Now huge parts of our economies are directly tied to these sorts of recent innovations. In another five years, everything will have changed again, and most likely, we’ll have changed with it.

Dropbox:

“When I’m not working at Knewton, I’m writing musicals. The team has a composer, arranger, orchestrator, director, designers, actors, producers, investors, stage managers, etc. We need to be able to share large music and text files with specific people at various stages of development. Dropbox allows us to do so very easily, and most importantly for us bohemians, it’s free! It always makes me wonder how anyone wrote musicals before the internet.”
-David Ingber, Video Team

Chobani:

“You’d think caffeinated beef jerky is the food of choice at tech start-ups. Nope. It’s fat-free yogurt. Large Chobani orders arrive at our office and are gone within minutes. Devoured. And for good reason: 120 calories and 13 grams of carbs gets you a whopping 16 grams of protein. 16! That’s 36% of your recommended daily value. Mix in a little peanut butter and you’ll have enough energy to keep up with the 23 year olds—except that they’re eating it, too.”
-Katie Kurtz, Business Development

Southern New Hampshire University:

“Southern New Hamshire’s online business feels nothing like the traditional undergraduate campus up the road. Physically, its office is a quirky mix of high tech and retro, with an open layout, scuffed wooden floors, and vintage neon signs advertising products like radios, refrigerators, and beer. Culturally, a visitor from conventional academe might be jarred by the sense that its staff members are selling beverages, at least judging by the office jargon: Professors are ‘procured.’ Programs are ‘flavored’ with concentrations like ‘social media.’ The education is called ‘a good product’. In many ways, it was hard to tell if we were on the SNHU campus or the Knewton office!”
-Ken Goldstein, Sales

Gogo:

“Goodbye overhead monitors and movies I didn’t pick; hello in-flight internet! Thanks to GoGo, in-flight WiFi access has come to the sky. Knewton signed a deal last year with Pearson, the world’s largest (by far) textbook publisher to power all of their higher ed content and find ways to partner on their K-12 and International efforts as well. Somehow I naïvely thought this would take some of the pressure off and reduce my travel schedule. HAH! Instead my travel schedule exploded; I took three week-long trips in January alone. I used to hate air travel. Now it’s the only time I have to myself to watch movies on my iPad and – because of GoGo – aimlessly surf the Internet. And when I do need to work at 30,000 ft, I can. Thanks GoGo!”
-Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder

We’re thrilled to nab the number 47 spot on the list, especially considering the other honorees, many of them companies whose business practices we’ve long admired and looked to for inspiration: Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more. Plus, let’s be honest: just being included on the same list as household names like Chipotle, the NFL, Starbucks, Tesla, HBO and UPS is enough to get us excited!

As a company, Knewton has its eye on a big prize. We want to revolutionize education, to change the way that students learn, to harness technology to improve lives. We know it’s not an easy goal; there’s no guarantee of success. In a recent guest post for the World Economic Forum blog, our founder Jose went so far as to call our plan “crazily ambitious.”

There are benefits to this kind of ambition, of course. As Jose points out in his post, by going after such a large problem, we’re opening ourselves up to solving other issues too: education “drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species… if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too.”

From a business perspective, however, crazy ambitious can be difficult to pull off. With such a sweeping, large-scale end goal, it can be hard to measure and appreciate incremental accomplishments along the way. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If nothing else, we believe that succeeding at innovation — both as it relates to our day-to-day business solutions as well as the ideology that drives them — is the first step toward succeeding at our larger goals.

This is why, even as Knewton has continued to grow over the past four years, we’ve made a conscious effort to hold fast to our startup ways. To us, innovation means valuing experimentation and, yes, failure; it means eschewing unnecessary hierarchy and empowering each team member to influence decision-making and help shape the company’s path.

Thanks again to Fast Company for the recognition, and for further inspiring us toward our goal. Be sure to check out the full list here, and let us know what you think of the selections in the comments.

For some, this is a distressing trend. Many long for the “old days” when one could purportedly sit back, pay one’s taxes, and expect some security and certain life progression. Others, however–Safian identifies them as GenFlux–have survived and even thrived in the new economic climate. Safian defines the GenFlux mindset as one that “embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions.”

In the spirit of GenFlux, we decided to interview some of the fluxers here at Knewton. Their eclectic talent and out-of-the-box approach are imbued in both the products and the culture of our company. This post will feature Master Data Storyteller, Franc Camps-Febrer who holds a degree in neuroscience and Visual Designer, Abigail Ricarte who started her own headband company, Bambako before coming to Knewton.

CY: What do each of you do here at Knewton?          

Franc: I work as a data storyteller. This means that I look at the data coming from different origins… students, academics, technical and some business measures… with an inquisitive attitude and explore the narrative in it through statistical analysis. The goal is to find a story in the data that is informative and useful and that will help people make effective decisions. For information to be useful it needs to be readily understandable and easily accessible. The best way to do that is to present it visually, so that the digestion of that information occurs in a natural and intuitive way.

Abby: I’m a jazzhand weaver of dreams. No, but really, I’m a visual designer. Half of my time is spent designing and iterating on pages for our marketing website and campaigns and half of my time is allotted to helping design our student-facing products. This entails working with our brilliant team of user experience and interaction designers.

CY: Abby, tell me a bit about how you made the switch from marketing to design.

Abby: When I started at Knewton, I started as a social media intern and this led to a full-time position as social media coordinator. Since I knew Photoshop, it was easy to make changes to things like banners on the fly. Working at a startup, there’s ample opportunity to wear different hats. Rapidly, my marketing design work evolved into more robust projects. During this period, a position opened within Knewton for a junior user interface designer. I applied and switched from being a social media coordinator to a designer.

CY: 5 years ago, did you see yourself working in tech or edtech? How did you find your way here?

Franc: Definitely not. I started looking seriously at my interests in technology and the startup culture just when I moved to the US from Barcelona. Most of my educational background and work experience was in science. I was in grad school for neuroscience, but always felt that the academic research environment was not where I could contribute and grow the most. I had some background in communication, too, and started developing my skills in design and focusing my programming abilities on data visualization. It felt like the natural way to go because it seemed to pull together a lot of my interests, more so than any other field.

Abby: No, but in college I always imagined myself ending up at a company that had an altruistic edge to it. I had no idea what user experience design was in college, but I certainly knew that I wanted to be dealing with the web and interfaces. They interested me from a very early age from the days of AOL profiles and making pages on Geocities and Angelfire.

In college, I was on a track to work at a record label. I majored in marketing, and all my internships were at record labels. By senior year, I had my own radio show on the college radio station. I decided to start a music blog just because this made it easier to keep track of artists. That was my first foray into social media.

CY: So you started Bambako, your headband company, after college?   

Abby: So this is how the story goes… I wanted something nice to wear in my hair for a friend’s party. I went to Urban Outfitters, saw a headband that cost $40. I knew I could make it (I had the time, too, had just finished of school, didn’t have a job). So I went to an arts and crafts store that night, got the supplies, and made a headband. After that, I just had to keep going. I made 10 by the end of that night, didn’t end up going to my friend’s party. Then came the epiphany: I needed something on my resume to prove that I could “social media the shit out of something” and what better way to do this than to start my own company?

The day after this revelation, I made more headbands. By mid-week, I took photos of all the headbands and made a website. By the end of the week, I had a website for my company. It was a total adrenaline rush. I remember not sleeping for the whole night and working for hours straight until 11 AM or so, and then crashing.

CY: So what was your strategy? How did you end up getting in some of the hottest fashion magazines out there?

Abby: I don’t know if this was the best strategy in retrospect, but back then I knew there were certain bloggers I wanted to contact, so I made a hit list of 500+ bloggers. I contacted a few per day and simply did not stop. I wanted to be as genuine as possible, so I took the time to write a personal email to every single blogger. Slowly I got some good mentions.

CY: Instyle, Glamour, Vogue, Elle, Self, NY Daily News, right? All this happened in the span of 3-4 months? And I know you got into some really great retailers too.             

Abby: Yes, it was crazy and it all happened very quickly. The main challenge here was scaling a handmade business.

CY: Franc, are you working on any side projects right now outside of work?

Franc: New York is a very exciting place to try out artistic initiatives, but it also consumes your time really fast, which can be conflicting. I’m trying to find some time to start DJing again and get a little music project started.

One of the projects that I would like to develop this year is to find a solid way of combining data visualization with information taken from how people dance during a DJ set. I’m trying to figure out any possible solid measures from dance and work on some sort of visual interaction there.

CY: To wrap it up, do either of you have any advice for young people shaping their careers and looking to navigate these tricky economic times?

Franc: I think that one of the qualities worth working on in such a confusing economic environment is the ability to reinvent oneself. You can get a lot out of the effort of looking at the skills you already own from new perspectives. For me, it is important to dare having interests that are diverse. It is good to nurture that diversity because it allows you to learn faster and be rapidly adaptive.   

CY: Yeah, that totally makes sense. The idea of “daring” to have interests that are diverse.

Franc: It looks like the main characteristic of the economic landscape of our time is instability. Changes are fast and of great magnitude. The wider your reach and the shorter your reaction time, the better.

CY: Super solid advice. What about you Abby?

Abby: Learn how to multitask and work at a level that’s fast-paced and on tight deadlines. If you don’t have deadlines, impose them on yourself! This will help you think on your feet and develop unconventional campaigns. It will also help you evaluate your progress constantly and iterate on plans. Also, if you want to do something–just teach yourself or don’t be afraid to ask questions. The great thing about working at Knewton is being surrounded and inspired by a team with such diverse interests and talents.

Stay tuned for our next post to meet more Generation Flux Knewtonians!