Jack Lynch once offered an unusually candid endorsement of a product consultant. Dan Olsen, he said, had transformed PresenceLearning’s development process “from chaos into a well-oiled machine.” For a founder, admitting to the chaos is the interesting part. The machine is what everyone puts in the presentation.
Lynch co-founded the company now called Presence with Clay Whitehead in 2009. They shared the chief executive title during its early growth. Their business connected schools with specialists working remotely, using software to make the arrangement possible. The premise sounds comfortably familiar now. At the time, they still had to persuade schools to try it.
His early career at Presence contains two quite different kinds of work: persuading a customer to take a chance, then building an organization capable of keeping its promises. The first produces a story people enjoy telling. The second produces processes, calendars and a surprising number of decisions about what should happen next. Lynch’s remark about Olsen gives that less photogenic work a speaking part.
A business partner, then a first customer
Lynch and Whitehead met at Stanford Business School. Lynch earned an MBA there after an undergraduate degree at Harvard College. He also worked as director of finance and operations at Lumos Labs. Those are useful coordinates for understanding his professional background: business education, operating experience and, eventually, a company of his own.
The partnership matters because the early Presence story belongs to two founders. Both carried the co-CEO title. Whitehead’s account of finding the first school customer is particularly revealing, provided the credit stays where it belongs. Whitehead made the calls. Lynch was the business partner with whom he was building the company.
Whitehead described calling all 52 special education agencies in California. One person returned the call and referred him to two schools. One school declined. The other agreed to talk. The founders worked with that school to develop the offering, then added two more contracts during the first year. A business emerged through a very small opening.
There is a pleasing lack of glamour to the sequence. Fifty-two calls did not produce 52 meetings. The useful response came from one person, and even that introduction included a rejection. A spreadsheet would have made the results look rather lonely. It would also have contained the beginning of the company.
The distance was part of the design
As the founders approached the end of business school, they studied the market and identified the difficulty small and rural schools faced in hiring and keeping specialists. PresenceLearning’s approach let professionals work from elsewhere. A school’s location would no longer determine the entire pool of people available to it.
This made geography a business problem they could work on. A specialist could live in one place and work with a school in another. The company brought together the people, the scheduling and the online tools. Its usefulness depended on whether all three could cooperate during an ordinary school day.
The attraction for remote professionals was also practical. Working from a distance could offer flexibility over where they lived and how much they worked. That gave the company a reason to consider both sides of the arrangement. Schools needed access to expertise; professionals needed a workable way to supply it.
Viewed this way, the founders were organizing a distributed workforce as much as developing software. Video made the connection visible. Behind it sat the less visible work of matching availability with demand. The business had to function across locations, with people whose working days did not automatically fit together. A map was part of the operating model.
The company’s early platform development received federal support. In 2010, it secured a grant to prototype its own platform, with provider efficiency among the aims. That milestone adds another practical detail to the founding period: the software was being developed for the demands of the work taking place through it.
Eight million dollars, and more promises to keep
In April 2013, PresenceLearning announced an $8 million Series B. New Markets Venture Partners and Blue Heron Capital led the round. Birchmere Ventures joined returning investors including Catamount Ventures, Calvert Funds and Allen & Company. Lynch and Whitehead were identified together as co-CEOs in the announcement.
The company said the funding would support growth and new offerings. It also reported that its student base had more than doubled in each of the previous three years. These were company statements at a particular moment, and they describe a business moving well beyond its first few contracts.
The investors brought an education focus as well as money. New Markets’ Robb Doub spoke about the company’s results, while Blue Heron operating adviser Mike Dan was to join the board. The financing placed additional people around the founders’ decisions about how the business should develop.
For Lynch, the transition can be understood in concrete terms. A handful of customers lets founders know individual arrangements closely. A larger organization needs those arrangements to remain dependable without every decision arriving at the founders’ desks. Money provides room to build that organization. It also makes the question of how to build it harder to postpone.
When the graph gets steep
By 2014, PresenceLearning had reached No. 146 on the Inc. 5000. Separately, it placed ninth among the San Francisco Business Times’ fastest-growing private companies in the Bay Area, with reported growth of 794.4 percent between 2011 and 2013. The early customer search had acquired a very different set of numbers.
A percentage of that size deserves to be read slowly. Starting from an index of 100, growth of 794.4 percent takes the endpoint to 894.4. That calculation describes the scale of the change; it does not tell us what happened in every intervening month. The two endpoints alone are enough to explain why preparing for growth mattered.
In the founders’ joint account of their mistakes, they regretted occasions when they had hedged rather than committed to growth. They connected the company’s progress to a clear mission, including its usefulness in deciding which opportunities to decline. That is an instructive pairing: a willingness to expand, alongside a reason to turn some business away.
Neither observation makes expansion automatic. Together they suggest the tension the founders were managing. Commit too cautiously and the organization may be unprepared for demand. Accept every opportunity and the organization may become difficult to recognize. The decisions arrive before the results, which is an inconvenient feature of management.
The founder who praised the process
Lynch’s endorsement of Olsen’s work belongs beside those growth figures. He praised a change in product development, using the language of practical improvement rather than a grand theory of invention. The endorsement appears with The Lean Product Playbook, Olsen’s guide to developing products through an explicit process and customer feedback.
“Dan transformed our product development process from chaos into a well-oiled machine.”
Jack Lynch, endorsing Dan Olsen’s work
It is a small piece of public testimony, but a specific one. Lynch gave credit to someone outside the founding pair for improving how the company worked. He also acknowledged that an important internal process had needed attention. Those are observable choices in his own words; they make the operating story more human.
The remark invites a useful reading of his founder years. Selling an idea and developing a product require different habits. A customer conversation can open a door. A repeatable development process helps a team decide what to do after it walks through. PresenceLearning had to undertake both kinds of work as its customer base expanded.
The word “chaos” is refreshingly serviceable here. It does not require a heroic explanation. Anyone who has watched a team juggle competing requests knows how quickly motion can be mistaken for progress. Lynch’s praise suggests he valued help in bringing order to that work. Even the founder’s story has room for someone else’s method.
A place among education’s builders
Lynch also took the company into conversations beyond its own customers. He was listed as a speaker at the 2012 NewSchools-Aspen Institute Summit, alongside education entrepreneurs and school leaders. His session included Daniel Yoo of Goalbook and Teddy Rice of Ellevation, placing him in a discussion about improving access and achievement in schools.
In 2014, EdTech Digest listed Lynch and Whitehead together among its leadership award finalists. The distinction was a finalist listing, and it recognized the partnership. It fits a period in which the company was becoming visible both as a growing business and as a participant in the education technology community.
Lynch is now identified as Presence’s co-founder and former co-CEO. The early record leaves a coherent professional story: a partnership formed at business school, a company assembled through customer conversations, outside backing and a growing need for organizational discipline. His contribution belongs within that shared undertaking, with the other founder, the team and the people who helped improve the work.
Return to the consultant’s endorsement and the story acquires its proper proportions. Lynch had helped build a company whose growth was measurable. He was also willing to say that its product process had required repair. The graph supplies the public achievement. The admission supplies a person you can recognize at work.