Schooled in Safety: Peter Luba '22 Co-Founded Successful SmartPass App

As a young man recently named to the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 Education list, Peter Luba ’22 has reached professional success quickly, yet he didn’t follow a conventional, thought-out plan to achieve it.

Luba feels that the lack of a specific plan has been a strength as he and a high school friend built an app called SmartPass, which now helps thousands of schools manage student movement and increase student accountability and safety.

To Luba, SmartPass was one concept created in response to voids he saw.

“Teachers have the hardest job in the world, and we want to make it easier,” says Luba.

The app works this way: Students who want to leave the classroom ask a teacher for permission, then press a button in the app to make a formal request. At that time, a countdown timer will start to let the student know how much time they have.

On a practical basis, SmartPass minimizes classroom disruption and provides information about where students are at all times. It can put students in a queue for the nurse or the restroom.

It can deny a hall pass to a student if another student of concern is also out of the classroom or if a student has had too many passes in one day. SmartPass encourages students to be responsible for themselves.

One of the app’s primary functions is improving school safety. Bullying can be addressed. Vandalism and vaping can be disrupted. And in cases of emergency, administrators will know where all students are, which wasn’t possible under the old system.

Soon after, Luba and Sringari were off to college, but they kept working on SmartPass. Sringari went to Penn State to study computer science. Luba says he chose Lehigh because he could combine his interests in business and technology. He enrolled in the Integrated Business and Engineering program but switched to Computer Science and Business when he realized he wanted to be in the tech space.

“I knew that even if I didn’t want to do coding, having the understanding and fundamentals would be super important,” he says.

In between classes and activities, Luba and Sringari were improving, marketing and selling SmartPass. Luba says working on SmartPass in tandem with taking classes “helped solidify my Lehigh education. It made everything so much more real instantaneously.”

For example, when he learned about a marketing tactic, he immediately applied it to SmartPass. “All my computer science classes made me literate in talking with our engineers and developers,” he says.

Luba says Lehigh excels in providing freedom and opportunity. “If you wanted to do something new, there was nothing stopping you and all the resources were there to absorb. The vibe was very entrepreneurial.”

MOVING SMARTPASS FORWARD

Luba and Sringari grew SmartPass with an educator-first approach—relying heavily on input from the people closest to school problems. They formalized that approach by creating customer advisory boards to offer immediate feedback on new ideas and prototypes.

When Luba graduated, he says he still thought of SmartPass as a side project even though it was being used by more than 200 schools. He took a full-time job as an associate product manager at Salesforce, a Fortune 500 software company, and moved to San Francisco. He says it was an important experience to learn how to work inside a company.

But during that time, SmartPass took off. The COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated its growth. When students returned to school, there were more behavioral issues and monitoring them became more difficult. In addition, COVID forced more schools to embrace technology.

After seven months at Salesforce, Luba left to commit full-time to SmartPass. By then, it was in 1,000 schools and serving 2 million students. “We realized that SmartPass was not just going to be a thing we could do on the side. This rocketship is going with or without us. This is our time to shine,” says Luba.

In 2023, SmartPass raised $2.2 million from investors, led by Reach Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that supports entrepreneurs who develop technology solutions for challenges in education. Within two years, SmartPass expanded its staff from eight to 55, including engineers, designers, product managers, sales and customer support specialists, and operations and marketing professionals.

SmartPass is now one of the two largest companies in the digital hall pass space. Luba sometimes feels surprised at his success, but then he reflects on the amount of hard work he put in.

“A challenge was how much work it is to build something—especially with competitors. You have to move fast; every minute counts.” He says Lehigh helped him learn to manage time. “I was always juggling a million different things.”

Still, Luba doesn’t feel like he is special. He believes that if he could do this, anyone can.

“I tell this to a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs. Just start small. Just start right now. There are so many resources online. You don’t have to have a whole business plan. We were super naïve, but we said, ‘Let’s just do this thing and do it one step at a time.’ That benefited us.”

He adds, “Embrace not being the smartest person in the room and leverage that.”

—Story by Jodi Duckett