A ten-year-old in Green Bay spent his paper-route money on a TRS-80. Four decades on, he is still trying to make a machine teach you something you will actually remember.
David McCool runs Muzzy Lane, a small Massachusetts company with an outsized idea: that the best way to learn a skill is to practice it, get it wrong, and try again inside a simulation that grades you while you play. He is the co-founder, President and CEO, and he has held some version of that job since 2002. The product line has changed shape many times. The conviction underneath it has not.
Today the work is about skills. SkillBuild, launched in 2023, drops learners into role-play scenarios where they practice the soft skills employers keep saying they cannot find - critical thinking, collaboration, communication - and walk away with microcredentials they can put on a resume. In 2024 the company shipped generative-AI features: a Production Assistant to help authors build faster, and open-response question types that let learners answer in their own words instead of clicking the least-wrong bubble. McCool frames the whole thing in four words he says more than any others: no coding required.
That phrase is the entire bet. He wants the people who actually understand a subject - the instructor, the instructional designer, the publisher's editor - to build interactive lessons themselves, without waiting on a software team. Muzzy Lane Author, the platform that grew out of Gates Foundation research in 2015, now spans more than 100 higher-education course areas and has delivered tens of millions of assessments. The pitch to a skeptical professor is simple: you know the material, the tool handles the engineering.
Before edtech, there were modems
McCool was born in New York and spent his early childhood on Long Island before the family moved to Westchester, and then, in 1976, to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where his father took a job at Shopko. He grew up between the East Coast and the Midwest with an older sister and a younger brother, absorbing the small culture shocks of a kid who keeps changing zip codes. The TRS-80 he bought around age ten, half paper route and half parental help, turned out to be the first move in a career.
He went to MIT and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. His first jobs were in networking and telecommunications in the late 1980s, back when the internet meant dialing into a bulletin board and waiting. He joined Shiva Corporation as its third employee and watched it grow, moving from engineer to business manager to vice president. Along the way he became the person who could stand in a customer's office and explain the hardware to people who did not speak fluent engineer. He traveled with sales teams. He helped open Shiva's office in Valbonne, France, near the tech cluster at Sophia Antipolis.
In 1997 he and two Shiva colleagues struck out on their own and founded Aptis Communications, a venture-backed maker of carrier-class networking gear, with early money from Shiva co-founder Frank Slaughter. McCool ran software, built and led a 25-person group, and was the architect of the Aptis system. The company was acquired by Nortel Networks in 1998, and the CVX product line it became went on to bring in more than $600 million. By his early thirties he had already helped build something that worked and sold it to a giant.
The pivot nobody asked for
He could have done networking again. Instead he turned toward something that had nothing to do with routers. McCool has a long-running love of history and political science - he studied security studies in graduate school and still likes modeling how geopolitical systems behave. He looked at strategy games and saw a teaching instrument hiding in plain sight. In 2002 he co-founded Muzzy Lane to find out whether software could make learning as engaging as the games people actually choose to play on a Friday night.
The first real answer arrived in 2005 with Making History, a World War II strategy game built for high schools and colleges. Students did not read about the pressures that pulled nations into war. They felt them, managing resources and alliances and consequences. It was the proof of concept for everything that followed: that a simulation can carry content a textbook only describes.
By 2011 the company was working with McGraw-Hill, releasing Practice simulations across marketing, operations management, American government, Spanish, and the medical office. The shift was telling. Muzzy Lane was moving from making finished games toward making the tools and engine that let publishers and educators produce their own. The 2015 launch of Muzzy Lane Author cemented it. The original goal of building one great game had matured into a platform that lets a thousand people build their own.
The number he keeps coming back to
Ask McCool who Muzzy Lane is for and he points at a statistic: roughly 41 million Americans have some college experience and no degree. They started, life happened, and they left without the credential that would have paid them back. He talks about affordable, skills-based credentials as a bridge for exactly those people - a way to turn what someone can actually do into something an employer will recognize and hire. He is careful not to oversell it. He admits that deep, systemic problems sit underneath educational inequality, and that no simulation makes them vanish. But the direction of the work is clear.
His advice to students is unsentimental. Before you enroll, he says, ask why. What purpose will this serve in your individual career plan? He pushes employers in the same direction, urging them to weight demonstrated experience over credentials on paper. The throughline is a belief that skills are more portable than roles - learn the underlying capability and you can carry it from job to job, even into jobs that do not exist yet.
On data, he is plain to the point of being blunt. Muzzy Lane, he says, collects only what users willingly provide, keeps it encrypted, and guards against unauthorized access. He argues that the bigger risk in edtech is not the dramatic breach but the quiet, profit-driven misuse of data by companies that should know better.
A method, not a slogan
When McCool is asked how to build technology that does some good in the world, he does not reach for inspiration. He reaches for a checklist. Identify your audience and understand who you are actually serving. Define the specific challenge and the solution it points to. Find the collaborators you cannot do the work without. Decide up front how you will measure impact, so you can tell whether the thing worked. And put end-users at the center of the design from the start, because, in his telling, user involvement is the foundation and not a finishing touch. It is the kind of framework you would expect from an engineer who learned product the hard way, by standing in customers' offices and watching what confused them.
That same instinct shapes how he reads the arrival of AI. Where some educators see a machine that does students' homework for them, McCool sees raw material for the kind of learning he has always wanted to build. Generative models can power dynamic, branching role-play, a simulated colleague or customer or patient who responds differently each time, so that practicing a conversation feels less scripted and more alive. He has talked about the journey from those early history games to a platform now spanning more than 100 higher-education course areas, and frames AI as the next tool in a very old project rather than a break from it. The label he uses is AI-resilient: assessments designed so that the point is the doing, not an answer a chatbot can hand over.
He is comfortable being called a pioneer of game-based learning, a phrase that has followed Muzzy Lane through conference panels and press for years. But he wears it lightly. The interesting part, to him, was never the games. It was the stubborn idea underneath them, carried across three companies and a couple of decades, that people learn by doing and software can finally let them do it at scale.
Kindness, France, and Elvis Costello
For all the talk of skills and systems, the thing McCool says he tried hardest to teach his own children is kindness - the most important thing a person has to offer. He is married to Katie; their daughter Maggie is part of a family he built in parallel with the companies. One decision still nags at him. He once turned down a year living in France because Katie was pregnant with their first child. He calls it an enduring regret, the kind of small fork in the road you keep glancing back at.
He has a list of people he would like to share a meal with. Richard Haass, the longtime head of the Council on Foreign Relations, for a long conversation about international relations and where the world is heading. And Elvis Costello, to talk about songwriting, with particular affection for the debut album My Aim Is True. It is a revealing pair: the strategist and the lyricist, structure and craft, the two halves of a person who builds systems but cares how they feel.
What makes McCool worth watching is the patience. Edtech is littered with companies that chased the trend of the moment and disappeared when it passed. He has spent more than twenty years on a single thesis - that interactive practice beats passive consumption - and kept rebuilding the company around it as the technology caught up. Serious games became authoring tools. Authoring tools became skills platforms. Now AI is arriving, and rather than treating it as a threat to assessment, he is folding it in, building learning he calls AI-resilient. The medium keeps changing. The question he asked as a ten-year-old with a TRS-80 has not: can this thing actually teach you something?
His own answer, after three startups and one acquisition by Nortel, is the same optimism he tells his teams to operate on. Assume the problem is solvable. Stay focused long enough and you can learn anything - even, he would joke, in about eleven hours.