Jan Rihak and the answers nobody hears

The amount was £151. It had been collected at a summer barbecue in Cambridge, and on 23 October 2010, Jan Rihak signed a letter saying thank you. The recipient was Creating Cambridge. The beneficiary was Aiducation International UK, which helped talented students in Kenya afford secondary school. A small sum, a polite letter, an educational purpose. Long before his work reached school assessment dashboards, Rihak was doing the less photogenic business of helping somebody get an education.

It is an instructive place to begin with Classtime’s Zurich-based co-founder and European co-CEO. His professional record contains the credentials one expects from a Zurich technology executive: ETH Zurich, Cambridge, McKinsey, banking. The barbecue receipt supplies something the institutional names cannot. Education had already become a practical commitment. There were donations to acknowledge and opportunities to finance before there was a platform to sell.

Today his work sits closer to the other end of that opportunity. Once a student is in the classroom, how much of that student’s thinking does the teacher actually get to see? A raised hand is useful. A roomful of answers is a different proposition.

A career in making things comparable

Rihak studied computer science at ETH Zurich and completed an MBA at the University of Cambridge. Before Classtime, he worked at McKinsey & Company, became chief operating officer at MoneyPark, and led multichannel strategy at UBS Switzerland. At UBS, his responsibilities also included the Digital Factory. These were jobs concerned with the everyday difficulty of making systems work for the people using them.

At MoneyPark, the information problem was financial. In September 2012, Rihak was explaining a service built around comparing providers and offering an alternative to conventional bank advice. The company combined personal consultation with online comparisons. Its early team went to unusual lengths to check costs: rather than rely entirely on advertised credit-card charges, it obtained cards and examined the bills. Fine print, it seems, can benefit from fieldwork.

By that September, the company employed 40 people. Rihak helped take MoneyPark from four employees to eighty. That is operating experience measured in colleagues, processes and customers. It is also useful preparation for selling something whose value depends on whether another person can understand and use the information it produces.

The long way to a second scholarship

The scholarship work continued alongside the corporate career. Rihak began helping develop Aiducation in 2009. He was on the organisation’s Swiss board in 2024. This is a long-running association, spanning different jobs and a change of industry. It gives his educational interests a history longer than his current company.

One episode involved rather more exercise than writing a thank-you note. In 2019, Rihak cycled 1,000 kilometres from Switzerland to the Atlantic coast to benefit Aiducation. Sunnie Groeneveld, who was running a birthday scholarship fundraiser, described teaming up with him after the ride. Her campaign had money beyond its initial scholarship goal; working together helped support a second scholarship, for a student named Margarate.

There is a travel video of the ride. It is a welcome detail in a career otherwise documented through executive biographies and financing announcements. Business profiles have a habit of treating every hobby as a management allegory. This one can remain a bicycle trip that helped pay for school. A thousand kilometres is quite enough work without asking it to carry a theory of leadership as well.

A classroom has more than one answer

Rihak has a useful classroom example for explaining Classtime. A teacher asked an open question concerning social Darwinism in the 1920s and responsibility for people living in poverty. The usual few students volunteered. With written responses through the platform, the teacher suddenly had 25 contributions to discuss. Students who had generally stayed quiet could hear their ideas debated and join the conversation.

His account is about participation as much as marking. A teacher can work with an answer once it exists in a form the teacher can see. Silence is harder to interpret. The practical attraction is that a familiar classroom discussion can acquire more starting points without requiring every pupil to win a race to raise a hand.

“The online and physical class experiences need to complement each other.”

Jan Rihak · 2022

Rihak has also described collaborative challenges in which the class works towards a shared result, such as solving a puzzle or sending a rocket to the moon. For once, getting everybody to the same destination is part of the assignment. The emphasis fits his broader interest in students taking part rather than merely occupying seats.

The teacher is part of the route to market

The way Rihak describes growth puts teachers close to the centre of product development. He describes adoption beginning with an individual trying Classtime, finding it useful and introducing it to colleagues. Feedback from those teachers then helps shape the product. Distribution and development meet in the same classroom.

Classtime was among the fourteen innovations selected for the HundrED and Jacobs Foundation assessment spotlight documented in June 2022. The report describes uses ranging from checks on prior knowledge and homework to digital examinations. That variety matters because teachers need different questions at different moments. A tool intended for regular use has to fit the lesson already under way.

Some of Rihak’s own published work is deliberately workmanlike. His name appears on help-centre instructions for preparing examinations and activating publishers’ question banks. The exam guidance walks through choosing questions, assigning marks, setting timers and reviewing responses. There is a modest kind of accountability in putting an executive’s name beside instructions someone will follow on a busy school morning. The product eventually has to survive the clicking.

A school has questions of its own

Getting software into public education also means satisfying the institution buying it. In 2022, Rihak discussed Classtime’s successful procurement in Lower Saxony and the demanding requirements around educational value, scale and data protection. He regarded meeting those conditions as validation of the team’s work. A school system needs reasons to trust a supplier before it can ask teachers to trust the tool.

His work with public clients has included Lower Saxony’s education ministry, Bavaria’s justice ministry, and the cantons of Basel-Landschaft and Basel-Stadt. The range suggests the practical breadth of his European responsibilities. Alongside the product conversation sits the work of meeting public customers’ expectations. The person discussing classroom participation must also be able to discuss a contract.

That is where the career in operations becomes relevant again. Educational purpose can get a company started. Sustaining it requires other kinds of competence, including the ability to answer a detailed question from someone whose job is to be careful.

The founder gets a lesson, too

In February 2024, Classtime announced Series A financing with Swiss Post Ventures, SuperCharger Ventures and private investors. The stated plans included expansion in its German-speaking European and US markets, further development of assessment functions, and work with generative AI. Rihak also called for more empirical investigation into the effects of educational software. Growth and evidence appeared in the same announcement.

His own public reaction supplied a less polished accompaniment. The round had taken longer to close than he expected. He acknowledged that people had warned about a difficult fundraising environment; he had nevertheless thought the company’s metrics would make the case. It is an admission many spreadsheet owners will recognise. Numbers may speak, but they seldom arrange the meeting.

He thanked the new investors and early supporters, then turned to the work ahead. The tone was grateful, candid and still impatient to get on with things. Success had arrived attached to another list of tasks. For an operator, that is probably the most recognisable part of the announcement.

Later that year, Classtime obtained growth capital through Lendity. The November 2024 arrangement was intended to help the company handle larger deals, add resources and onboard customers. Rihak welcomed the capital and said the process had also exposed operational gaps the company could address. A financing conversation had produced another sort of feedback.

In the subsequent founder discussion, he considered the appeal of funding without giving up additional ownership, the stability of a longer term and the importance of understanding default risk. The former finance executive was dealing with finance again, this time to support a company selling to schools. His February 2025 introduction to the discussion put “my wisdom” in quotation marks. A small precaution against sounding too pleased with oneself.

Before the lesson moves on

A scheduled appearance at the German School Leadership Congress on 12 November 2026 returns Rihak to the classroom question. His session concerns making students’ current understanding visible more often and what AI changes about that task. The subject is consistent with the years of work behind it: how to notice learning while there is still time to respond.

His stated ambition reaches hundreds of millions of students and teachers. The earlier record supplies a more human unit of measurement: a donation letter, a scholarship, a teacher trying something, a student contributing an answer. Those are the moments that give the large ambition something concrete to stand on.

The distance between £151 and a company operating internationally is considerable. The question running through Rihak’s story remains close to the person at the desk: having made education available, how do you help somebody take part?