Martina Tam

The chair Martina Tam sat down in this January came warm. Paper, the Montreal-born tutoring platform she now leads, spent 2024 contracting after years of pandemic-era expansion. Co-founder Philip Cutler stepped out of the CEO role. Investor Rich Yang held the seat in the interim. Then the board picked her. She is the first person to run Paper who did not start it.

That detail matters. Paper was founded in 2014 by two McGill graduates under the name GradeSlam, the kind of student-built startup that lives or dies on its founders' stubbornness. By the time Tam arrived, the company had crossed into a different chapter: 960 employees on the books, a Series D in 2022 worth $270M, and total funding closer to $390M. Founder energy was no longer the operating system. Operator energy had to be.

She is, by any reading of her resume, an operator. She spent four years at Eventbrite as a Senior Director, where she built and launched Eventbrite Music after the company acquired Queue, running a thirty-person team across product, engineering, marketing, sales, and strategy. She was Vice President of Marketing at MasterClass during its breakout year. She was Chief Operating Officer and interim Chief Growth Officer at Brightwheel, the early-education software company. Three sectors. One pattern. Take a thing that already exists, then push the gas pedal in places people forgot to look.

The Paper job is not glamorous in the way the MasterClass marketing chair was. It is a turnaround inside a vertical that became unfashionable. The pandemic poured federal ESSER dollars into school districts, which poured them into virtual tutoring contracts, which poured them into companies like Paper. Then the funding cliff arrived in 2024. Districts cut. Layoffs rippled through the sector. Cutler stepped aside. The pitch deck stopped working.

What Tam inherited is a company that had to learn, mid-flight, how to sell a tutoring service on its merits instead of its convenience. The product needed to do more than be available - it needed to demonstrably move scores. So the team built GROW, a high-impact tutoring program designed around evidence-based practice. Earlier this year GROW received Stanford NSSA's Tutoring Program Design certification. That is the kind of credential you put on the front of the deck the next time you walk into a superintendent's office. Tam, an operator, knows it.

Her path to that office is unusual. She holds a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Sociology, both from Stanford. Two degrees, two different ways of looking at the world: one quantitative, one human. She then went back for an MBA at The Wharton School. There is also a Reforge Growth Series certification on the resume - the kind of thing growth practitioners get because they are still curious about how their craft works, not because anyone asked them to.

The Sociology master's is the tell. Most edtech CEOs come in either from product or from the classroom. Tam comes in from both and from neither. She is fluent in marketing funnels and she is fluent in why students disengage, and the two ideas are not separate in her head. When she talks about Paper's mission - keeping students from falling behind - the language tracks more like an academic researcher than a quota-carrying executive.

None of which means the job is easy. Paper still has to answer the same uncomfortable question the entire high-impact tutoring industry is being asked: can a virtual platform really deliver the kind of intensive, relationship-driven instruction that the research literature credits with academic gains? The honest answer, the one Tam will not say out loud yet, is that nobody knows. The honest plan is to keep shipping and keep measuring until somebody does.

She is doing this from San Francisco. When she was hired, BetaKit noted that it was unclear whether she would relocate to Paper's Montreal headquarters or run the company remotely. The geography of the role is now itself part of the story. Paper is a Canadian company with a US growth mandate, led by an American who built her career in San Francisco, selling into school districts across both countries. The seams of that arrangement will be visible to anyone watching.

Her public footprint is small. There is a LinkedIn account, still registered under her pre-marriage name, Martina Wang. There is a Reforge profile, the kind serious growth practitioners build. There is the occasional company-blog announcement. There is no Twitter feed, no podcast circuit, no founder-influencer act. She does not appear to be selling herself. She appears to be selling the company.

This is a feature, not a bug. Paper has had enough story for one decade. What it needs now is not a louder narrative but a more legible one. Tam's job is to make the company readable to school district administrators who want a tool they can defend on a board agenda, and to teachers who want a thing that actually helps the kid in seat seven. The product needs to do what it says. The marketing needs to say only what the product does.

The operator's premise, the one her whole resume is built on, is that you can hold those two ends together if you pay obsessive attention to the middle. The Eventbrite Music chapter is the closest parallel: an existing platform, a recent acquisition, a fragmented user base, a new vertical. She put a cross-functional team around it and shipped something coherent. The Paper chapter is harder because the customer is a district, not a music venue, and the buying cycle is measured in school years, not weekends.

But the playbook is recognizable. Find the part of the product that works. Make it the headline. Build the operational muscle around proof, not promise. The Stanford NSSA badge is not the marketing win. It is the operational tell that the system is starting to behave.

It is too early to grade her tenure. Edtech is brutal on quarter-by-quarter judgments because the academic calendar is patient and the procurement cycle is patiently slow. The first real reading of her run will come in late 2026, when districts decide whether to renew or replace, and when the GROW data starts to look like a longitudinal study instead of a pitch deck. Until then, watch the small moves. Watch the hires. Watch what gets dropped from the website. Operators do their best work in the things you stop seeing.

Martina Tam is, at minimum, a credible answer to a hard question. Paper is, at minimum, a company worth saving - one of the largest experiments anyone has run in scaling academic support beyond the classroom. The next year will tell us whether the operator and the experiment fit. Either way, the chair is no longer warm. It is occupied.