Isoph founders Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele.
Photo by Shawn Rocco of the Chapel Hill News.
Isoph founders Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele.
Photo by Shawn Rocco of
the Chapel Hill News.
By Matt Purdy
Correspondent
An important part of being a successful entrepreneur is being in the right place at the right time. When the dot-com boom began in the late nineties, Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele were in the comparative literature graduate program at the University of North Carolina. From this unlikely starting point, the pair went on to found Isoph, a profitable internet company based in downtown Carrboro that provides online learning solutions to non-profit organizations.
Unlike many internet start-ups, Isoph was founded using Cobb and Steele’s own money rather than venture capital. "We did it kind of the old-fashioned way," CEO Cobb said. "We created something with the idea that it was going to have value and people were going to buy it and fund the growth of the company and we’ve been very fortunate that it’s worked."
Although Cobb’s education was not in business, he looks and acts the part of internet company CEO. Wearing khaki’s and oxford shirt with no tie, he appears respectable, but in a relaxed, hands-on sort of way. When it comes to talking business, he fixes his listener with an unblinking gaze and describes his company and product in the oral equivalent of a glossy pamphlet.
To help pay the bills while he was working toward his PhD in comparative literature, Cobb took a job with an online learning company called University Access that was doing contract work for UNC. As the dot-com trend heated up, Cobb’s career ambitions shifted from comparative literature to online learning and, in 1998, he took a leave of absence from the PhD program. The next year he married fellow comparative literature graduate student and current Isoph Chief Creative Officer Celisa Steele and the two moved to Los Angeles to work for University Access full time. Cobb says that they loved Chapel Hill and kept their Northside home because they knew they wanted to come back.
In 2001 they returned with plans to start Isoph. By that time, Cobb said that the academic and corporate sectors had already latched onto online learning, but he saw a need for it in the non-profit niche. He said that some people doubted whether what worked in the academic and corporate worlds could be applied to non-profits, but he thought that, if anything, online learning was even better suited for non-profits than for other sectors. "What non-profits and other mission-driven organizations are all about in a sense is educating people," he said. "Everything that they’re doing is learning and education driven."
He and Steele were also attracted to the non-profit sector because they consider Isoph to be a values-driven company and they like working with other companies that are trying to have a positive social impact. Cobb says that one thing he really enjoys about owning an internet business is that it allows him to work with national and international clients as well as small non-profits who are trying to make a difference locally.
Isoph’s national clients include the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Isoph does volunteer work for their Carrboro neighbors at Club Nova, a non-profit that helps provide job skills and placement to people with mental illnesses. Cobb says that each Isoph employee is encouraged to spend 3 work hours per month doing volunteer work and that many of them, including him, choose to sort clothes at the Club Nova thrift shop. They are also working on a Club Nova website.
Also locally, Isoph has partnered with the Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce to offer a variety of online computer and business courses (learning.carolinachamber.org). The cost is $30 for some courses and $60 for others. Cobb notes that a few of these same courses, including training for Microsoft Office applications and Adobe Photoshop, are available free of charge through webjunction.org, an Isoph-built site for librarians that is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Perhaps the best illustration of Isoph’s slogan, "learning to change the world" is Endangered Species University, an interactive learning site that they are building with the National Wildlife Federation. Steele says that the goal of the site will be to provide the public with education and information and then convert them into advocates who will write to their legislators or, for example, go out in their backyard and create a habitat for migratory birds. "It’s public education and it’s focused on turning what they learn into action," she said.
As for future growth of Isoph, Cobb says that he is in no hurry. He likes the current staff and environment and his goals for now are to keep growing the client base and keep listening to his customers so that he can make the Isoph product better.
"We want to continue growing our business the old-fashioned way," he said. "Too many people tried to do too many things too fast a couple of years ago."