About Xaveit

Why Xaveit exists, what it's for, and who it needs to reach. It starts with a conversation most parents will recognise.

How was the Sydney ballet exchange?

Okay.

Me. And every other parent I know.

That was the full report on a $3,000 trip.

One word for a week in Sydney

She'd spent a week in Sydney with her dance academy, training in an Australian studio and watching a ballet at the Opera House, and when I finally asked her about it I got one word back. We're not wealthy people. Three thousand dollars was a real stretch. I remember sitting there thinking that my wife had just paid for something we were never going to know much about. I wasn't annoyed with our daughter. Many of us were exactly the same at that age.

I've already forgotten most of it

If someone asked me today what my two kids have actually done over the last few years, I could give them half of it and I'd get half of that half wrong. Some of it I've forgotten completely despite being in the room at the time, and nobody else is keeping it either.

What I actually mind losing

What bothers me most isn't losing the achievements themselves, though. It's losing what those things did to them. At nine years old, that same daughter stood beside a game she had made while complete strangers played it. My son found out at ten years old what it feels like when a whole team is your responsibility. That's where the real growing up was happening, and that's exactly the part that disappears first, because nobody ever thinks to write down how something felt while it was still fresh.

So I started keeping a record myself. A folder, then a spreadsheet, then something that looked more like a system. What I found was that keeping it was the easy part. The hard part was that a list I typed myself proved nothing to anyone.

Why it matters more for the kids today than it did for us.

Grades will count for less than they did for us

I don't know whether grades will count for less by the time my two are looking for work. What I do know is what people are asking for now: someone who can work through a problem they've never seen before, stay steady while they do it, and keep going after it stops being enjoyable. You don't pick that up in an exam hall. You pick it up in a drill squad, on a court, in a studio, or behind a counter at closing time. And almost none of it shows up anywhere a stranger could ever see it.

We don't have unlimited money

There's a practical side to this as well. Enrichment isn't cheap here and it adds up quietly, a term at a time, and most of us end up saying yes to things we've had to think hard about first, because we don't want our child to be the one who misses out. What we never get back is any sense of whether it was worth it. You get a receipt, and you get whether they seemed to enjoy it, and that's roughly the extent of it.

This can't only be for families like mine

Something has been on my mind since the beginning. A tool like this could very easily end up doing nothing except helping families who are already ahead pull further ahead, and I have no interest in building that. A child from a lower-income home is still growing, still leading, still showing up and working things out, and very often doing all of it with a good deal less support than my own two have had. Their story deserves to be recorded and believed just as readily.

Xaveit is being built to be given away as well as sold

We're setting it up so that schools, community organisations and corporate partners can fund free and subsidised access for students from lower-income families, which means the cost of a subscription is never the reason a child's growth goes unrecorded. This isn't a programme we'll consider once the business is comfortable. It's part of how the business is meant to work.

If your organisation is looking for somewhere meaningful to put its community or CSR effort, I'd be glad to talk. Write to me directly at iskandar@xaveit.com.

Funding a place for a student who couldn't otherwise afford one

From the Founder

I spent ten years in the army, then became a teacher. For six years I taught in a school, mostly with the students the system had already picked out as the high performers.

Later I taught adults instead. People in their forties who had lost their jobs and were retraining. They would sit in front of me with a CV listing where they had worked, and no way to show me what they were actually good at. Twenty years of experience, and almost none of it written down anywhere that counted.

I had already watched the same thing happen to teenagers. A student plays in the same team for four years, gets better every season, ends up captain. He leaves school with a certificate, if he is lucky, and nothing that shows any of the rest.

I tried to fix this about ten years ago and failed, because I built somewhere to put achievements and gave nobody a reason to believe them. So this time we started with the proof. When your coach or your teacher confirms what you did, their name goes on it, and so does the date. Nobody can add it in afterwards.

I have children of my own. That is the real reason I came back to this.

Why I built Xaveit

Iskandar
Founder, Xaveit. Ex-Teacher. Dad.

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