Sven Liden
TeachTown: It Takes a Village
Before coming to the UW Business School, Sven Liden (MBA 2004) shuttered his start-up — a technology that extended any point-of-sale system to any wireless device, allowing, for instance, stadium-goers to order food via cell phone for in-seat delivery.
“It had some potential,” Liden says. “But ultimately, I was talking about helping people sell hotdogs more efficiently. Even though the technology was interesting, I didn’t really feel like I was doing much for society.”
He is now. The CEO of TeachTown, runner-up at the 2004 Business Plan Competition, Liden is leading a promising computer-based therapy for children with autism. And that’s a lot of children. Today one in 166 is diagnosed with this lifelong neurobiological disorder. Conventional one-on-one therapy costs between $40,000 and $100,000 per year. Worse, long clinic wait-lists can mean delays in getting therapy at a critical time.
“If you catch and treat this early, you can have a dramatic effect,” Liden says. “The effect of early intervention is exponential. And it can reduce lifetime costs by millions of dollars.”
Enter TeachTown. The company’s roots run to the late 1990s when Dr. Christina Whalen, a UC San Diego autism researcher, began designing a system that would make early treatment for autistic children available to families immediately. The idea was to meld the best autism research with the best in multimedia and software design. Game designer Eric Dallaire and artificial intelligence expert Dr. Lars Liden joined up in 2000. And Sven (brother of Lars) signed on in 2004 to create a working business plan, raise funds, assemble a “who’s who” scientific advisory board, manage product development and enter the market.
TeachTown is the amazing realization of a vision. It is a relatively inexpensive suite of fun, addictive computer games, devised of the latest research, that have proven astoundingly effective in helping autistic children function better socially, emotionally and academically. The Internet-enriched platform links parents, teachers, clinicians — everyone who has a stake in a child’s development.
And the TeachTown platform has been ingeniously designed to empower researchers to update and expand offerings without any deep technical knowledge. This expands the potential market enormously. “Our goal is to create products that not only grow with the autistic child into adulthood, but also reach across other development disabilities,” Liden says. “There is a lot of opportunity to take fundamental research and turn it into high quality products, and we have the platform to do it.”
That’s deeply satisfying for everyone involved. “It comes down to doing well by doing good,” Liden says. “I think everyone involved in TeachTown felt like there was more we could do with our talents. The idea that we could really help hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in a fundamental way — and be rewarded for doing it — is pretty powerful.”
Sven Liden has since stepped down as CEO at TeachTown as the company enters the next stage of its rapid growth.