The people
What they build
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Working at Sokanu
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On the TechVancouver stage
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About
Thompson started Sokanu after noticing that his high-school classmates were choosing careers on the advice of parents and friends rather than anything about themselves. He set out to build, as he put it, the Pandora or OkCupid of careers: assess what someone is actually like, then match them against a labour database. That database grew to hundreds of millions of data points and CareerExplorer became one of North America's most used assessment tools, adopted by US government agencies and colleges. The problem was revenue — assessments were free and the company had, by Thompson's own 2016 admission, barely a business model. He looked for an acquirer who valued the user base instead, and Penn Foster, an online educational institute, bought the company in March 2021.
Backers
Venture-backed before the 2021 sale to Penn Foster; investor names not sourced.
Quick answers
What was Sokanu?
A Vancouver career-discovery company. Its CareerExplorer platform assessed a person's interests, personality and abilities and matched them against a large labour database to suggest careers.
What happened to Sokanu?
Penn Foster acquired it in March 2021. CareerExplorer still operates under that owner; founder Spencer Thompson stayed on as president and a board director before founding the cybersecurity company Prelude.
What did Thompson argue on the TechVancouver stage?
That every company exists for one of five reasons — money, a personal problem, a market need, a social issue, or the use of personal abilities — and that a founder, a board and employees pursuing different ones will pull the company apart. He put Sokanu in the social-issue bucket and said trying to be something else cost the company a year.