Kevin Stone and the work between the breakthroughs

The telephone is an unlikely place to begin a story about lesson planning. But before Kevin Stone helped build software for teachers, he helped build software that people could talk to. His career runs through mobile communications, a company acquired by Nuance, and the decidedly less theatrical business of helping a teacher decide what to do next. A useful way to read it is to follow the handoffs: from a caller to a service, from a standard to a lesson, from an assessment to another attempt.

Stone’s connection to schools also came through public service. He had been a school board member before starting EdCaliber. In 2009, he brought that experience into a new education company. His explanation was direct: “I wanted to make a big impact.” The ambition was broad. The work would be specific: resources, planning, instruction, and the information teachers need when a lesson has not yet landed.

Before the lesson plan, the telephone

Stone studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, then earned a master’s in Electrical Engineering there. His early work included engineering and product management at ZSP Corporation and a senior digital signal processing design role at Panasonic. He helped design the processors used in Panasonic mobile handsets in Japan. This was engineering close to the machinery of communication, where speech had to become something a system could handle.

At Panasonic, Stone worked with Mikael Berner and Amol Joshi. Those professional relationships later became founding relationships. In March 1999, the three joined Steve Tran to start BeVocal. The business supplied voice-enabled services for telecommunications companies, with customers including BellSouth, Cingular, Qwest Wireless and Virgin Mobile USA. Voice dialing and spoken access to information were among the uses. A phone could be an interface to software, even without a person staring at a screen.

There is a particularly tangible trace of that work in a patent for looking up business addresses and directions during a voice dial-up session. Stone is named alongside Lisa Guerra, Berner, Joshi and Tran. The idea places an everyday request inside a technical system: someone wants to get somewhere, and the system has to turn the conversation into usable information. The patent was published as a grant in April 2006.

An exit with another job waiting

By April 2003, Stone was BeVocal’s senior director of products. The company’s Hosting Lite service offered developers a prepaid way to try small deployments of voice applications. Customers could test an idea before moving to a larger hosting service. It was a practical accommodation to uncertainty: begin with modest call volumes, establish that the application works for the business, and expand from there.

His discussion of customer service also extended beyond speech. In 2006, he argued for combining channels such as telephone, email, text messaging and web chat, with attention to the channel a customer preferred. The detail is useful because it resists the temptation to make every problem serve one technology. A voice business still had to think about when someone would rather receive a message.

Nuance announced its agreement to acquire BeVocal in February 2007. The announced consideration was approximately $140 million, net of BeVocal’s cash, with a potential additional earn-out. The acquisition closed on April 24. For Stone, who had also held marketing and network operations leadership roles, the company represented experience across both the product and the business around it. The next company would put that experience in a classroom setting.

“I wanted to make a big impact.”

Kevin Stone, on his move into education software, 2012

A different kind of board meeting

EdCaliber brought Stone together with Ruth Miller, a school-improvement specialist with more than 30 years of education experience. The division of work mattered. Miller developed the educational systems and content behind the company’s tools, and oversaw professional development and ongoing support. Stone handled company strategy and the commercial and operational responsibilities. The founder’s desk contained sales, marketing, product management, finance and human resources. Apparently one job title was expected to do the work of several.

The partnership gave the company both software experience and knowledge of school practice. That combination is central to understanding the enterprise. A curriculum tool enters a profession with established responsibilities. It must make sense to the teacher planning instruction, the colleagues sharing resources and the administrators trying to coordinate work across a district. Understanding the software is only part of understanding the purchase.

In August 2013, EdCaliber announced $500,000 in convertible debt financing, including $165,000 from TiE Oregon Angels. Nitin Rai and Daren Nelson led the round. The announcement also brought Dan Tierney in as chief revenue officer and Ralph Risch as chief marketing officer. Stone’s stated focus was expanding the company’s reach in the United States as districts worked through the transition to Common Core standards. Financing and hiring arrived together, attached to a defined market problem.

Stone also appeared in Portland’s entrepreneurial community as a mentor. A July 2013 TiE Mentor Connect event offered members a lunchtime conversation with the EdCaliber co-founder, drawing on his experience in software, education, mobile services and customer care. It places him among people comparing the practical problems of building companies. Mentoring was another setting for the same professional experience, shared across a table rather than packaged inside a product. A founder’s connections can carry knowledge as well as investment.

The curriculum meets the calendar

The company’s Lessoneer product put curriculum creation, mixing, sharing, teaching and reteaching inside a planning tool. Those verbs describe a cycle rather than a single act of publication. A lesson gets prepared, used and reconsidered. Colleagues may need the same resources. A plan has to occupy an actual place in an actual school calendar. Software has plenty of room for ambition; a Tuesday morning has rather less.

EdCaliber’s 2013 Common Core Building Blocks release addressed the materials within that process. It offered curriculum components organized around standards, integrated through a Standards Browser. The release also described work connecting California’s 2012 English Language Development standards with Common Core. That is a more exacting task than putting documents in a shared folder: the relationship between the material and the intended learning needs to be visible.

A September 2013 partnership agreement with the California Association for Bilingual Education shows another part of the work. CABE would create content for a series of hour-long webinars; EdCaliber would handle technical production, hosting and promotion. The agreement placed educational equity and biliteracy among the shared aims. It also separated the jobs plainly. Educational expertise would shape the material, while a technology company would help get it to its audience.

For Stone’s story, these arrangements are revealing. The product sat among people and institutions with their own expertise. Building it involved relationships with educators, a professional association and school districts. The calendar and the standards browser were visible pieces of a larger undertaking: organizing materials and support so other people could use them.

The small print has a long memory

The legal name behind that education business was Performio Solutions, Inc., doing business as EdCaliber. An April 2016 order form for Tulare Joint Union High School District names Stone as CEO. Its scope included Lessoneer curriculum tools, collections, building blocks, a calendar and a standards tracker. The purchase also included setup and training. The list makes clear how much of a software sale happens around the software.

The order provided for help uploading district-created resources, tagging material to standards, setting up accounts and preparing planning calendars. Training included an in-person session and online sessions. A tool could arrive with useful features and still require people to prepare the material, learn the workflow and bring colleagues along. An implementation plan is where the promise of saved time acquires appointments of its own.

The relationship continued to appear in later paperwork. On June 12, 2024, Stone signed as CEO of Performio Solutions, Inc. doing business as EdCaliber in an agreement with Salinas City Elementary School District. That date anchors his documented leadership role. It also gives this career a longer perspective than a launch announcement: a business serving schools carries responsibilities that continue well after its first introduction.

Back to the ringing phone

In September 2026, Stone publicly introduced himself as being from Intertidal Tech, explaining that the team previously known as Family Law Voice was operating under a new name. He described voice agents that answer calls, qualify prospective clients, book consultations and write information into Smokeball. He also announced the company’s sponsorship of an October event in Chicago. His favorite part to demonstrate, he said, was a callback triggered by filling in a web form.

That update brings the telephone back into view, with a different audience and newer software. Read alongside EdCaliber, it suggests a recurring product question: what happens after someone makes a request? The useful action may be a recorded appointment or a lesson scheduled for another day. Stone’s career has moved across those settings. The work becomes interesting when the system has to carry the request far enough for another person to act.