Megan
Dusenbery

In October 2025 Megan Dusenbery took the CEO chair at Knack, a Miami-headquartered software company whose product is basically a system for hiring, training, and paying college sophomores to tutor other college sophomores. The company had just closed a Series B led by New Markets Venture Partners. The founder, Samyr Qureshi, kept the chairman title and stayed on the board. Dusenbery flew in from Austin, took the office, and, two months later, wrote a LinkedIn post asking her followers what they hoped to learn from her company.

This is not the kind of question a new CEO is supposed to ask in public. It sounded like a survey. It read like an admission. It was, on closer inspection, exactly the kind of thing you do when your entire career has been in higher-education partnerships - a field where the correct move at any given moment is almost always to shut up and let the customer talk.

Knack sells to universities. Universities do not like being sold to. They like being asked what they need, and then being sold to about six months later, quietly, over a call that could have been an email. Dusenbery is fluent in this particular dialect. She has been speaking it since 2005.

What excites me most about Knack is that our platform not only delivers measurable retention outcomes for institutions but also creates paid high-impact job opportunities for students. - Megan Dusenbery, October 2025

The pitch here is not subtle. Knack is a two-sided marketplace whose two sides both happen to live on the same campus. On one side, a Dean of Students who is measured on retention. On the other, a junior with a 3.8 GPA in organic chemistry who could use $18 an hour. The platform is the software that matches them and processes the payroll. The insight is that the tutor and the tutee are the same person, six months apart.

Dusenbery's job, insofar as it can be summarized in a sentence, is to convince more universities to write this specific check. She has been convincing universities to write specific checks for a very long time.

Dusenbery went to Auburn. She graduated in 2001 with a bachelor's in communication and business. She spent four years managing a Pappas Restaurants location, which is a Texas family steakhouse chain, not an accelerator. Then, in the mid-2000s, she joined Kaplan.

Kaplan is a test-prep and higher-education conglomerate that spent the 2000s and 2010s figuring out how to sell services to universities that had, until then, done everything themselves. Dusenbery rose through the partnership organization for something like sixteen years. She ended up as Senior Vice President of Higher Education, overseeing one of the largest institutional partnership portfolios in the industry.

In 2023 she left for ACUE - the Association of College and University Educators - to run partnerships. ACUE is a nonprofit that certifies faculty in evidence-based teaching. It is the kind of organization that does not close a lot of splashy deals but does, quietly, get invited to every major provost's convening. Two years there taught her something Kaplan did not: what a university's own faculty want from a vendor.

Then Knack called.

Students understand one another in ways no handbook or workshop ever can. - Dusenbery, EdTech Digest, Dec 2025

The industry name for this route is 'operator.' A founder builds the company because they had to. An operator runs it because someone had to. What the Knack board bought when it hired Dusenbery was twenty years of dial-tone with vice provosts. That is the entire pitch.