We had the pleasure of having Alex Koren ’12 come to campus to speak with Upper School students on D-E Innovation Day! Innovation Day was held on March 1 and is a new initiative aimed to expose students to new technologies, tools, and ventures. Alex was the keynote speaker of the day, reflecting on his career from D-E to the present.

Before his career as an entrepreneur, Alex was known on the D-E campus as that-guy-who-juggles, having created the Juggling Club on campus. He later attended Johns Hopkins University for Computer Science and Mathematics and thanked D-E faculty member, Mr. Joe Iwanski, for his introduction into Computer Science during his keynote.

In a very entrepreneurial fashion, Alex left Johns Hopkins in 2014 to pursue his own interests. The story goes that a friend of Alex’s father, Marty, had begun to experience hearing loss. The simple pleasure of going to the movies became difficult as there was little to no captioning in theaters. This lackofaccessibilitypushedhimtomakeasolution. Together with his co-founder Braun Shedd, they created ActiView, an app that offered closed captioning, descriptive narration, assistive audio, and other services.

ActiView had its first problem from the get-go: copyright laws posed trouble for converting film audio to captions on an app. By this point, Alex had moved to California and began meeting with companies about ActiView. At the age of 20, Alex received the license to caption Disney’s Cars 3. Soon, Alex expanded the app’s reach, providing closed captionning for movies in more languages like Chinese and Spanish. In 2019, ActiView was acquired by Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum.