Jason Lavender’s wife gave him an improv class. Six weeks, presumably a manageable addition to the calendar. He stayed for seven years. An actuary had discovered an activity in which nobody could give him the questions in advance. Somewhere between the exams and the unscripted scenes, a different kind of working life began to look possible.
His first five career years had been actuarial. He recalls a manager noticing that he liked talking with clients and suggesting strategy consulting. The suggestion was welcome. “I can study less and I can see more people,” he remembered thinking. A subsequent innovation role brought him closer to entrepreneurs. His career was acquiring people, conversation and the possibility of making something himself.
Today Lavender is the Boston-based co-founder and CEO of Electives, the workplace learning company he started with Krikor Dzeronian in 2020. Its proposition asks employers to take an old experience seriously: sitting with an interesting person and coming away able to do something differently. Lavender has spent the intervening years working out how to sell that experience without draining the life out of it.
The mountain came to the classroom
Lavender and Dzeronian met at MIT Sloan. Both belonged to the Executive MBA class of 2020. One guest lecture supplied an unusually useful comparison with their working lives. The visitor was a mountaineer who had reached the summit of Everest six times. His stories made teamwork vivid. Decisions and cooperation had consequences that were considerably harder to ignore than a slide heading.
The founders’ question was straightforward: why couldn’t workplace training feel like this? The setting had changed their expectations of who could teach management. Expertise could come from a person who had done something demanding, then learned how to make the experience useful to others. A company looking for a leadership class might have more choices than its usual directory suggested.
An advertisement with an awkward confession
Lavender tested the idea with an Instagram advertisement. Interest arrived within days, leaving him to explain to respondents that the service was still an experiment. It is an awkward sales position: thank you for wanting the thing; please allow us to invent it.
One corporate training executive was willing to pay if he could make it happen. That small transaction matters to the story. An engaging classroom experience had suggested an opportunity. A prospective customer supplied a more practical test: would somebody spend money to bring it to work? The answer arrived before there was a finished company to take the order.
The anecdote also offers a useful glimpse of Lavender’s working method. He put an idea in front of people while it was still vulnerable to rejection. The advertisement could have produced silence. Instead, it produced conversations and a reason to keep going. The founding story contains a mountain, but the first useful equipment was a modest market test.
The person beyond the job title
By March 2022, Electives had announced an $8 million Series A led by Accomplice and G20 Ventures, with Boston Seed Capital participating. More than 100 teachers were available on the platform. The list included professional athletes, business school professors, FBI agents and improv comedians. Lavender’s extracurricular life had acquired an unexpected professional relevance.
“Learning is a human experience,” he said at the time. The phrase makes a fairly exact demand on a training business. A person’s history must become something another person can use. An unusual résumé can open the classroom door; the class still needs to earn the next hour.
Electives describes interviews, pilot classes and learner feedback as parts of its instructor selection process. That detail gives the assortment some discipline. A fascinating career and an effective lesson are separate accomplishments. Lavender and Dzeronian’s business depends on helping them meet. The former actuary’s attraction to conversation sits alongside the less theatrical work of choosing, organizing and evaluating it.
“Learning is a human experience.”
Jason Lavender · 2022
A company can choose. So can an employee.
Electives Membership launched in June 2023. It added a different decision-maker to the classroom: the employee. Members could browse a monthly selection of live sessions and choose classes that suited their interests and development goals. The launch announcement described interactive Zoom classes with a maximum of 60 attendees.
There is a sensible distinction here. A team might need a shared lesson on communication, while one person wants help presenting and another wants to understand a new technology. The private class brings colleagues together around a company’s priorities. Membership gives individuals room to recognize priorities of their own.
The unromantic work belongs in the picture too. Electives manages invitations, promotion and follow-up resources. Somebody has to make the meeting appear in the calendar. Lavender’s idea becomes a business partly through this administrative work: an interesting teacher becomes much easier to invite when the buyer does not have to assemble the whole occasion.
The instruction to leave the building
By autumn 2024, Lavender was describing a catalog of more than 500 classes and an effort to use AI to recommend learning from an employer’s stated goals. He was also urging a much older business practice: get outside and talk to customers.
Building a team creates plenty of reasons to stay inside. Features need attention. Instructors need recruiting. The company itself can become the most insistent person in the room. Lavender described pushing the team back toward prospects and customers, and encouraging people to test ideas rather than keep them private.
That is a revealing continuation of the early advertisement. The company may have grown, but its useful answers still live partly with people who have no obligation to admire it. For a founder selling learning, listening is a practical discipline. It keeps an appealing theory within reach of an actual buyer’s problem.
The unread books have a point
Lavender’s interest in learning extends into the books he has yet to read. In 2023, he described becoming interested in Japanese traditions and ideas after friends discussed a possible trip. One term caught his attention: tsundoku, the accumulation of reading material that remains unread.
He treated the pile as a reminder of how much remained to learn. The bookshelf becomes a small corrective to the founder’s occupational requirement to sound certain. Every unopened volume can quietly raise an eyebrow.
He also explored ikigai and the idea of purpose, connecting his work at Electives with bringing experts into people’s lives. The attraction is consistent with his career changes. The work he describes enjoying puts other people within speaking distance. A good class gives curiosity an appointment.
A poet, a car ride and a Wednesday afternoon
One of Lavender’s later accounts begins in traffic. He was driving to Gillette Stadium with Alejandro Jimenez, a poet and Electives instructor he had known for four years without spending much time together in person. They talked about music, books, travel, family and stand-up comedy.
Jimenez was going to teach storytelling to about 100 people. Lavender watched the room settle into the workshop. People wrote with pens and paper. They laughed and thought. In his telling, nobody was on a phone. The observation is modest enough to be useful. He was watching attention become visible.
The car ride belongs in the account as much as the class. His business puts people together to learn from experience; here he was discovering an instructor through the ordinary pleasures of conversation. The founder got a lesson on the way to the lesson.
Some conversations deserve a rehearsal
In March 2025, Electives introduced AI Simulations. Employees could rehearse difficult workplace conversations, receive feedback and try again. The examples included delivering tough feedback and motivating disengaged employees. Lavender’s company was adding an artificial conversation partner to a business built around human teachers.
The connection is practice. Listening to a class on feedback and finding the words in a tense meeting are different experiences. A simulation offers somewhere to attempt the second before a colleague is sitting opposite. Its feedback can address tone and delivery, and organizations can customize scenarios.
For Lavender, that extends the work beyond the hour an instructor spends with a group. The class supplies an idea and a human example. Rehearsal creates another occasion to use them. The sequence fits a founder who spent years in improv: eventually someone speaks, someone responds, and the next sentence depends on what just happened.
Private classes for a company’s shared goals.
Membership classes selected by employees.
AI simulations for trying a conversation.
An invitation for everyone
On October 19, 2026, Electives announced Electives for Everyone, a model offering organization-wide access to live classes and AI simulations. It also introduced a way for employees to discover and register for classes from AI tools they already use. The aim was broader participation with less work required to reach a classroom.
“AI can give you answers,” Lavender said in the announcement. His argument continued toward the harder business of changing how people work: hearing stories, learning from people and practicing with others. The point has followed him from classroom to company.
His own route gives that ambition some texture. A manager suggested a different career direction. His wife supplied a class that lasted far longer than planned. A mountaineer changed his expectations of a lesson. An interested customer made an experiment worth pursuing. Lavender keeps building ways for another person to make that sort of difference. There are worse reasons to put something on the calendar.