The man who taught computers to Oakland kids, sold a startup to Thomson Reuters, scaled LinkedIn Learning, ran a blockchain company, and ended up exactly where he started - in a classroom. Sort of.
The Profile
There is a detail in Mike Derezin's biography that everyone glosses over in favor of the LinkedIn chapter or the blockchain era. He started his career teaching computers to elementary school children. First in Oakland, California. Then in Santiago, Chile. That is not a detour. That is the whole story.
His father taught at a university. His mother taught in public schools. The son graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley, got his MBA from Stanford, and instead of heading straight to consulting or banking like virtually everyone else in his class, he walked into a classroom. Two classrooms, actually - one in California and one in South America.
Then came the startups. VoxPop, a pop culture gaming platform that let users make predictions on things like the Oscars and Grammys, raised $3.5 million from Hearst Interactive Media and True Ventures before being acquired by IAC's Mindspark in 2011. Before that: Porvenir, an emerging markets financial information company that was acquired by Thomson Reuters. In between, a stint at Bain & Company advising Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms.
By the time LinkedIn came calling, Derezin had already built, sold, and pivoted multiple times. He spent over a decade at the professional network, scaling two business units to market leadership positions: LinkedIn Sales Solutions - the platform that became the standard tool for B2B sales professionals worldwide - and LinkedIn Learning, which grew under his leadership to more than 20,000 courses and became one of the largest online professional development platforms on Earth.
It's an honor to join an organization with such a rich legacy and sustained commitment to improving the lives of teachers, children and families.
- Mike Derezin, on joining Teaching Strategies as CEO, May 2025What happened next is the part that puzzles people outside the tech industry and makes perfect sense to anyone inside it. In late 2021, Derezin joined Chainlink Labs - the company building decentralized oracle networks for blockchain infrastructure - as Chief Operating Officer. He was recruited to deliver what the announcement called "operational excellence." He also joined the board of H1, a healthcare professional network connecting pharmaceutical companies with medical experts.
Then, in May 2025, Teaching Strategies, LLC announced him as its next Chief Executive Officer. Full circle. Not a retreat - an arrival.
Teaching Strategies is the company inside more than 240,000 classrooms across 80 countries. Its flagship products - The Creative Curriculum and the GOLD assessment system - are how early childhood educators measure child development, track learning milestones, communicate with families, and demonstrate program quality to regulators and funders. It is a $198 million company with 350 employees, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, backed by venture capital, and deeply embedded in the infrastructure of American early childhood education.
Teaching Strategies products are used in Head Start programs, private preschools, public pre-K classrooms, and childcare centers across six continents. When Mike Derezin took the CEO chair in May 2025, he inherited a platform reaching more early learners than most countries have children enrolled in preschool at all.
The through-line in his career is not technology. It is learning at scale. Sales Solutions was about helping professionals learn to sell more effectively. LinkedIn Learning was about professional development for everyone, not just those who could afford a $50,000 MBA. Chainlink Labs was about building infrastructure that enables new forms of trust and data exchange. And Teaching Strategies is about making sure that the most important developmental window in a human life - birth to age eight - is staffed by educators who have the tools, data, and professional support they actually need.
"I'm eager to collaborate with the field as we explore the potential for technology and learning communities to help educators deliver the highest quality, whole child approach across virtually any kind of program model from birth to third grade continuum," Derezin said at his appointment. The sentence is dense but the intent is clear: he wants AI and community-driven learning to reach every early childhood classroom, not just the well-funded ones.
He is not a pure technologist selling software to schools. He is not a career educator suspicious of tech. He is the specific kind of operator who has sat in a classroom, built products for learners, scaled platforms to tens of millions of users, and knows that the hardest problem in education is not the content - it is getting great support into the hands of the person actually in the room with the child.
Derezin has been a course creator as well as a platform builder. At LinkedIn Learning, he did not just run the business - he made courses, including "Leading a Team Through Change" and "Data Driven University." He taught. The CEO of a professional learning platform who still makes instructional content is not common. It signals something about what he actually believes learning requires.
For nearly a decade, he also served as a trustee for Semester at Sea, the global comparative study abroad program that takes students around the world on a ship. He has lived in Chile and Brazil. He has a wife and two daughters. He counts Boothbay Harbor, Maine as a place he returns to.
The career arc that looks zigzagged on a resume - teacher, founder, consultant, LinkedIn executive, blockchain COO, early childhood education CEO - looks entirely coherent from the inside. Every role was about building infrastructure for learning, at different scales, in different markets, with different technology. The teaching never really stopped. It just got bigger.
Career Timeline
The Thesis
Before the exits and the LinkedIn title, Derezin taught elementary school. In California and Chile. His parents were both educators. The mission is not adopted - it is inherited.
LinkedIn Learning grew to 20,000+ courses under his leadership. Sales Solutions became a market standard. He knows what it takes to go from product to platform to ecosystem.
Chainlink Labs was not random - it was about building trust infrastructure. The same problem, different domain: how do you create reliable data systems at scale for people who need them?
At Teaching Strategies, he champions the birth-to-third-grade continuum. Not just literacy metrics. Not just test scores. Social-emotional learning, family engagement, developmental milestones - all of it.
He explicitly named AI and community-driven learning as the frontier for early childhood education. Not replacing teachers - giving them better data, better tools, better support.
Lived in Chile, Brazil, and multiple US cities. Trusted on the board of Semester at Sea for nearly a decade. Teaching Strategies now operates in 80+ countries. The global instinct is baked in.
Education
In His Own Words
"I'm eager to collaborate with the field as we explore the potential for technology and learning communities to help educators deliver the highest quality, whole child approach across virtually any kind of program model from birth to third grade continuum."
"I love to bring new things to life and rally teams around an exciting mission."
"H1 has assembled a massive network of healthcare data that is vital to hospitals, healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies. I'm eager to lend my expertise to this very talented team at a time when timely access to healthcare experts and information is more critical than ever."
Fun Facts
He taught computers to elementary schoolers in South America before any of his Stanford GSB peers had shipped a product.
Mike literally wrote - and taught - a LinkedIn Learning course called "Leading a Team Through Change." Then he went and ran operations at a blockchain startup.
VoxPop, his early gaming startup, let users predict Oscar and Grammy winners. Social prediction markets, years before that became a trend.
Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley. MBA at Stanford. Chose a classroom over investment banking. Twice - both at the start of his career and again in 2025.
He followed a decade in professional SaaS into blockchain infrastructure (Chainlink) - then pivoted to preschool curriculum. No one has a career arc quite like this.
Teaching Strategies products reach children in 80+ countries. When Derezin became CEO, he inherited an organization bigger than most national education ministries in scope.
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