The Executive Who Kept Circling Back to the Classroom

Mike Derezin's first classroom did not have a boardroom attached to it. It had a room full of elementary-school kids in Oakland, California, and later another in Santiago, Chile, where he taught them how to work a computer - in Spanish. Two decades and several companies later, he runs an organization whose entire reason for existing is the education of children. In between, he helped invent a way of selling and rebuilt how millions of adults learn online. Look closely and the detour was never really a detour.

Most executive biographies read as a straight climb: bigger title, bigger company, bigger number. Derezin's reads more like an orbit. He keeps leaving education and keeps returning to it, and the leaving is what makes the returning interesting. To understand why the son of two educators became CEO of an early-childhood learning company in 2025, you have to walk the loop he walked to get there.

01 / THE ROOTSRaised by a teacher and a professor

Derezin's parents were educators - one a public-school teacher, the other a university professor. That detail shows up in almost every account of his career because it explains the gravitational pull. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, then earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Those are the credentials that usually funnel a person toward consulting or finance, and for a while they did exactly that.

He landed at Bain & Company, advising Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms. It is the kind of role that teaches you to read a business quickly, to find the lever that moves the numbers. But consulting is advice, not ownership, and Derezin wanted to build.

02 / THE FOUNDERBuilding, selling, and one exit to Thomson Reuters

Derezin describes himself in plain terms on his own profile: "I love to bring new things to life and rally teams around an exciting mission." He co-founded companies including Porvenir, an emerging-markets financial data business, and VoxPop. Porvenir was acquired by Thomson Financial, part of what is now Thomson Reuters - a first real exit, and the kind of outcome many founders would treat as a summit.

He treated it as tuition. The pattern that runs through everything he does next is a preference for the problem underneath the product: not "how do we sell this data," but "how do people find what they need to know." That question was about to get a much larger stage.

03 / THE SALESMANBetting a business on "social selling"

Derezin joined LinkedIn and helped launch and grow LinkedIn Sales Solutions - the team behind Sales Navigator. In the mid-2010s, the phrase "social selling" was met with a fair amount of eye-rolling. Derezin's job, as VP of Sales Solutions, was to convince skeptical sales organizations that the relationship graph was about to become a core sales tool alongside the phone and the CRM.

He made the case with numbers and with a memorable piece of advice. His most-repeated line - "the biggest mistake people make on LinkedIn is that they use their LinkedIn profile like a resume" - is really a philosophy in miniature. A resume looks backward at what you have done. A good profile, in his telling, looks forward at who you can help. He backed it with a statistic that became a rallying cry for the category.

His prediction was blunt: "It's inevitable that social selling will soon be as mainstream for sales organizations as the phone, email and CRM are today." The thing about calling something inevitable is that you only look right in hindsight. Sales Navigator grew into a standard tool, and the eye-rolling stopped.

04 / THE TEACHER, AGAINScaling LinkedIn Learning past 20,000 courses

In 2017 Derezin moved to run LinkedIn Learning Solutions, leading the global field sales and customer success teams for the learning business. Under his watch, LinkedIn Learning grew into one of the largest professional-development platforms in the world, with a catalog north of 20,000 courses reaching tens of millions of members.

Here is the detail that separates the operator from the org chart: he did not just manage the catalog, he added to it. Derezin created and personally taught courses, including one on leading a team through change and another on data-driven decision making. The executive responsible for the learning business was, quietly, one of its instructors.

The through-line explains the Semester at Sea chapter too. For nearly a decade Derezin served as a trustee of the shipboard study-abroad program, governing an experiment in learning that happens to float. Education kept showing up in his life whether or not it was on his business card.

05 / THE RETURNBack to the youngest learners

On May 6, 2025, Derezin became Chief Executive Officer of Teaching Strategies, a company focused on early-childhood education - the birth-to-third-grade years. It is the earliest and arguably most formative end of the learning spectrum, and it lands him back in the world his parents worked in.

His own framing connects the dots without straining: "It's an honor to join an organization with such a rich legacy, and I'm eager to collaborate with the field as we explore the potential for technology and learning communities." The vocabulary - technology, community, learning - is the same vocabulary he used at LinkedIn. Only the age of the learner changed.

There is a tidy symmetry to it. He started by teaching kids to use a computer. He spent 25 years figuring out how adults sell, buy, and learn at scale. Now he is applying that hard-won operating experience to the moment learning matters most - the beginning. The orbit closed.

06 / THE TAKEAWAYWhat you can borrow from his path

The useful lesson in Derezin's career is not "follow your passion." It is quieter than that. Pay attention to the question you keep returning to, even when the job title changes. His question - how do people actually learn and grow - survived a consulting stint, two startups, a fintech exit, a sales revolution, and a learning platform. It is what made a jump from professional networking to preschool curriculum look, on inspection, like a straight line.

The second borrowable habit: do the work you ask others to do. An executive who teaches his own courses understands the product in a way slide decks cannot capture. It keeps you honest, and it keeps you close to the people you serve.