# Larry Berger

> Larry Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Amplify, the Brooklyn-based education company he started in 2000 as Wireless Generation. A Yale-trained English major, Rhodes Scholar, and former White House Fellow at NASA, he built mobile assessment tools that put data in teachers' hands, then steered the company through a $360M News Corp acquisition and a 2015 spinout backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. Today Amplify's curricula reach millions of students across all 50 states. Berger is also a published poet and the rare edtech CEO who wrote a public 'confession' questioning the hype around the very personalized-learning future he once championed.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Amplify
- **Organizations:** Amplify, Wireless Generation, Academy of American Poets, Lapham's Quarterly, Touch Press, Institute for Sustained Attention, Southern Education Foundation
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BA, summa cum laude (English Literature), Yale University, Rhodes Scholar, University of Oxford
- **Known for:** Co-founded and built Amplify into a leading K-12 curriculum and assessment company serving millions of students nationwide, Pioneered mobile software that made formative assessment instructionally useful to teachers (notably mCLASS for early reading), Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow

## Career timeline

- **early 1990s** — As a Yale student, co-led a poetry program at Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill children; co-authored the book 'I Will Sing Life'
- **1994** — Completed Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford
- **1990s** — White House Fellow working on educational technology in the NASA administrator's office
- **1990s** — Educational technology specialist at the Children's Aid Society; built four community computer labs in disadvantaged neighborhoods
- **2000** — Co-founded Wireless Generation (later Amplify); served as CEO 2000-2010
- **2010** — News Corp acquired a 90% stake in Wireless Generation for about $360 million
- **2015** — Led the spinout of Amplify from News Corp to a management team backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective; became CEO
- **2018** — Published a widely-discussed 'confession' questioning the 'engineering model' of personalized learning
- **2020s** — Amplify's curricula and assessments reach millions of students across all 50 states

## Achievements

- Co-founded and built Amplify into a leading K-12 curriculum and assessment company serving millions of students nationwide
- Pioneered mobile software that made formative assessment instructionally useful to teachers (notably mCLASS for early reading)
- Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow
- Co-author of 'I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp' (1992)
- Negotiated Amplify's 2015 spinout from News Corp with Emerson Collective backing
- Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow

## Latest updates

- **2023-05** — Amplify's most recent reported funding round (Series C-stage financing) closed around this time as the company continued scaling its science-of-reading curricula.

## Links

- Website: https://amplify.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/larry-berger-amplify
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/larryamplify

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/larry-berger
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-11