Auckland Grammar School Online Community

From start-up company to worldwide business - Paul Organ '05

Monday, 12 December 2022

Tibbs House, the School's boarding hostel, sits adjacent to the campus and can accommodate up to 125 students across all year levels, giving out of zone students the opportunity to study at Auckland Grammar. With such a large number of students to manage on a daily basis with extracurricular activities and exeats, the hostel uses Orah (formerly known as Boardingware) to ensure they know where students are at any given time.

Co-founder and co-CEO Paul Organ '05 came up with the idea for the software while studying architecture at the University of Auckland with friend and business partner Kurt Meyer. "The initial idea came from interviewing former Director of Boarding and Deputy Headmaster Peter Morton, and the Head of Boarding at Mount Albert Grammar School where Kurt went."

The pair wanted to find solutions for schools to track students throughout the day, so they knew when they were in class or when they left campus. Orah (a play on 'kia ora') now includes a full suite of school management and student engagement software, including Nuture, which was designed with counsellors in mind, making it easy for them to measure and monitor pupils' well-being.

Initially, Orah focused on private boarding schools, before expanding to day schools in the independent market. Paul, however, is thrilled to give back to his alma mater, despite only being at Auckland Grammar for Form 6 and 7. Even though he was only a student for two years, he is proud to call himself an Old Boy. "Now that we work with schools all around the world, it truly is a special place. To produce such high outcomes from a school that is non-private is something very rare."

Orah is now used in schools in more than 20 countries around the world, including Eton College in the UK and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the oldest secondary schools in the United States, which Paul says is the company's greatest achievement to date. "Eton and Phillips Exeter were always the schools we aspired to have as clients - after Grammar and Mount Albert, of course! But we have a long-term goal to scale Orah to be used by 50,000,000 students globally.""

With 47 full-time staff employed, Orah continues to expand year on year, but despite its success, the company, like many others, were affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, Paul chose to turn the negative into a positive. "We had a flat growth year due to school budgets being frozen on new initiatives. However, we became even more cost-efficient which has served us well throughout the tenure of our company's life.

"At a macro level, the shift to online learning forced schools globally to realise the need to modernise their technological infrastructure. This resulted in bringing technology to the forefront of strategic planning in schools and a new-found eagerness to adopt technology."

Creating software that is used in different schools around the world, both private and public, is something that isn't lost on Paul, who says the environment he was a part of on a daily basis really resonated with him. "I was taught to raise the standards one should have for their life. All of my peers at the school I went to prior to Grammar had ambitions that were a lot less, but Grammar pushed me to think bigger and expect more for myself."

Paul realised quickly that software design was his passion, rather than architecture, and as time passed, his interests evolved to include education. But his advice for current students is to choose a field that you are interested in, not necessarily something you are passionate about. "Things will be difficult, and do not expect anything to happen quickly. Try to build a great business and the rest will follow."