Jake Schwartz and the education that starts after graduation

Jake Schwartz was finishing an interview when he noticed the recorder was still running. He warned the interviewer that the battery would drain. It is a small moment to preserve in the career of someone whose company would later command a nine-figure acquisition price. Yet it has its uses. Here was a founder attending to a loose end after the conversation was supposed to be over. The recorder needed switching off. Someone might as well say so.

The same interview contained a larger, less charmingly domestic problem: how to make a growing company behave sensibly. Schwartz had been revisiting an old statistics program to understand General Assembly’s marketing. The impulse is revealing. A good explanation of why customers ought to come was insufficient. He wanted to know what was actually bringing them through the door.

There is a familiar way to tell his story: prestigious universities, a startup, expansion, a sale. The sequence is accurate enough. It leaves out the question that made the enterprise interesting. What happens to a person who has finished an education and still needs help finding useful work? Schwartz helped build a business in that awkward space, where the graduation photographs have been taken and the practical questions remain.

A classroom with a rent bill

General Assembly opened in New York in 2011. Schwartz’s fellow founders were Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer and Brad Hargreaves. Their initial undertaking was a coworking space in Manhattan: desks, shared resources, people working on young companies. The school emerged through workshops held at night to help pay the rent. Web design was among the subjects. A landlord’s invoice can be a surprisingly effective curriculum committee.

The distinction matters because the company’s eventual shape can make its beginnings look tidier than they were. People came together around a place before the educational business had fully taken form. Teaching was something the group could offer, and something other people would pay to receive. The response gave the founders a reason to keep going.

Mimi O Chun, General Assembly’s first employee, remembered helping the founders articulate what they were building. As a designer, she worked through their differing convictions and perspectives, developing the language, values and identity of the project. Even explaining the business in a sentence or two required an exercise. The name on the door arrived through discussion, rather than descending fully formed from a founder’s imagination.

Chun’s account restores the other people to a story easily flattened into one executive’s biography. Brimer brought Schwartz into the group. Pritzker worked closely with Chun. Several people were trying to give a shared idea a workable shape. For Schwartz, being a co-founder meant participating in that unsettled process, well before there was a global organization to run.

Two degrees, several unanswered questions

Schwartz had earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Yale and an MBA in entrepreneurial management at Wharton. His professional background included investment advisory work at Capital Counsel and a senior associate role at Associated Partners. These were useful credentials for someone building a company. They also made him an unusual spokesman for education that happened outside the conventional university sequence.

The apparent contradiction becomes less puzzling when education is treated as something a person may need repeatedly. A degree can have value while leaving specific gaps. A career can require another kind of instruction years after the final examination. General Assembly’s proposition allowed those two ideas to occupy the same room without demanding that either apologize.

By 2015, its offerings included a twelve-week Android development program created with Google. The subject was specific, the timetable finite. Someone seeking that skill did not need to reenact an entire undergraduate experience. This was a different unit of educational purchase: instruction organized around a practical next step.

In a later reflection on General Assembly’s beginnings, Schwartz compared the founders to people forming a band. The analogy accommodates trial, adjustment and the discovery of a shared sound. It also makes room for an ordinary truth about starting things: working together can teach people what their project is before they have learned how to describe it.

“It was my persistence that allowed me to overcome the uncertainty.”

Jake Schwartz

Schwartz has described persistence and resilience as central to his entrepreneurial experience. He has also named Richard Barth, the KIPP executive and General Assembly board member, as a role model. That combination is worth keeping in view. Persistence can sound like an exclusively private virtue. Admiring another person’s management suggests a willingness to learn how to make that persistence useful to a team.

The accountant enters the classroom

Offering career training creates a difficult obligation. Prospective students need more than a stirring description of their possible future. They need a way to assess what previous students experienced. Schwartz’s background in investment management gave him a reference point: performance claims ought to permit meaningful comparison.

General Assembly’s student-outcomes reporting required work with two major accounting firms. One helped develop the framework; another independently reviewed the data. Schwartz described roughly six months spent establishing the framework and verification processes, followed by about four months for KPMG’s review. The work reached into operations, because a report is only as dependable as the procedures that produce its numbers.

This is the part of an education company’s story that rarely makes an attractive poster. Uniform definitions do not photograph especially well. But they bear directly on whether a student can understand a claim. In Schwartz’s account, getting the reporting right required precision that the organization had to build deliberately.

A second customer walks in

Students were only one side of the undertaking. Employers also needed people with particular skills, and existing employees sometimes needed new capabilities. At a 2017 Cornell Tech discussion with Coursera’s Leah Belsky and New York Code + Design Academy’s Jeremy Snepar, Schwartz described General Assembly’s work with almost 150 Fortune 500 companies. The conversation placed his business inside a broader system of learning, recruitment and development.

That setting suited the argument. Universities, specialist schools and employers each had a part to play. People could require additional instruction without needing every institution to become the same institution. For Schwartz, relationships with companies created another way to connect the course to whatever came after it.

When two other bootcamps announced closures in 2017, he resisted treating demand for coding courses as a complete account of the market. He pointed to growth in data science, digital marketing and design. He also emphasized employer revenue and the unresolved question of who should pay for training. Those are business-model questions with consequences for the people doing the learning.

His view widened the frame around General Assembly. A student buying a course and a company preparing its workforce could need related instruction, while having different reasons and different resources for purchasing it. Serving both required more than putting a second price list beside the classroom door.

Who gets a seat?

There was another question beneath the commercial one: who could enter this community? In February 2017, Schwartz publicly reaffirmed General Assembly’s commitment to inclusion following the White House’s immigration executive order. He connected the company’s international character to the variety of experiences its members brought with them.

The statement included a concrete commitment: $150,000 worth of places in full-time web development and user experience design programs for refugees and other immigrants. An educational mission becomes easier to examine when it names seats, subjects and an amount. The gesture also put a practical dimension behind Schwartz’s argument that a learning community benefits from people whose lives differ.

General Assembly’s language about empathy could have remained a pleasant sentiment. Here, it accompanied an allocation of access to the courses themselves. The relationship between the two is the interesting part: a principle about belonging translated into an offer somebody could use.

The price of a bridge

In April 2018, the Adecco Group announced an agreement to acquire General Assembly at an enterprise value of $412.5 million. The announced plan kept Schwartz and his team leading it as a separate division. General Assembly had reached 20 campuses, 50,000 alumni and more than 300 Fortune 500 clients.

Adecco’s business supplied an intelligible destination for a company concerned with movement from learning into employment. In explaining the transaction, Schwartz described General Assembly as building bridges between those worlds. The buyer could connect its training activities to a larger range of workforce services and employer relationships.

The price attracts attention, as prices tend to do. The fit explains more about Schwartz’s work. A school built from evening workshops had developed into something a workforce company wanted to own. Its usefulness extended beyond the experience inside the classroom to the decisions people and employers needed to make afterward.

After the founder’s chair

Schwartz continued as General Assembly’s CEO until 2020. His subsequent roles include co-founder and chair of Brave Health, and venture partner at New Form Capital, where his remit focuses on firm strategy. New Form describes an interest in blockchain investing dating to 2014 and a desire to challenge the concentration of power in the internet economy.

He also served as an independent director at BIC, joining in May 2020. In September 2025, BIC announced that he had decided to step down and that Albert Baladi would replace him. The sequence adds an established consumer-products boardroom to a career more readily associated with classrooms, startups and investing.

Looking back, the recorder remains a useful detail. It suggests the scale on which much of running an organization actually happens: a process to fix, an assumption to check, a loose end somebody notices. Schwartz’s career contains a conspicuous acquisition figure. The story around it contains people trying to make education useful after the ceremonies are over, and doing the less ceremonial work that requires.