Myles Hunter and the price of asking for help

Before TutorMe had a matching engine, it had an accounting problem. At the University of Southern California in 2013, Myles Hunter was tutoring his fraternity brother Alex Convery. The lesson itself was only part of the job. Arranging a time and sorting out payment consumed attention that might have been better spent on the numbers. Accounting had acquired an administrative department of its own.

That small inconvenience became an opening. Hunter and Convery began considering whether software could make finding a tutor less cumbersome. By 2015, they were working on TutorMe, an online tutoring company whose premise would eventually fit into a few seconds: a student needs help, a qualified person appears, and the lesson begins.

The appeal of that sequence is easy to understand. Hunter also understood the obstacles surrounding it. His own education had involved repeated changes of school and a college experience in which private tutoring could be financially out of reach. He had experienced both sides of the exchange: the student looking for support and the tutor trying to arrange it. That gave the business a more particular starting point than a general enthusiasm for putting things on the internet.

A scholarship opens one door

Hunter grew up in Southern California, moving through home, private, public and military schooling. Each move required another adjustment to the pace and expectations of a classroom. A new school might supply a timetable immediately. Feeling caught up could take longer. Private tutors were available to some of his peers, while he went without that option.

He earned a scholarship to USC and became the first person in his family to attend college. A scholarship changes the arithmetic of attendance; it does not automatically arrange every hour of support a student might need after arriving. Hunter found outside tutoring costly and campus tutoring constrained by conventional working hours. The help existed, but price and timing made access complicated.

His family history supplied another part of that perspective. His mother had come to the United States as a refugee from Chile under Pinochet. His father worked as an electrician. Hunter has connected his father’s example to his respect for hard work. These details give his interest in educational access a personal scale: a family, a scholarship, a student trying to make the opportunity count.

The tutor needed a technical co-founder

Hunter’s early career crossed finance, consulting and startup growth. He worked at EY serving financial-services clients, and at Lyft on growth. The combination placed him around both established business processes and a young company trying to win customers. By the time he was building an education business, he had already spent time thinking about how people discover and adopt a service.

TutorMe required someone who could build the machinery behind the promise. Hunter used AngelList to find a technical co-founder, connecting with Victor Kotseruba. The early work took Hunter to Russia and Bali. A company intended to make academic help independent of location was itself being assembled across locations. There were less mobile ways to start a tutoring business.

The team decided to build its technical infrastructure from scratch. Owning the platform gave the company control over the experience and independence from an outside provider. It also meant accepting the work that comes with that choice. A simple customer promise can hide an extensive construction project; the student sees the connection, while the founders have to make the connection dependable.

Hunter joined Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH Accelerator as the company pursued venture funding. TutorMe raised $1.3 million, according to reporting on its 2019 acquisition. Money brought another kind of education. Hunter’s advice to founders seeking investment was to begin early and expect rejection. A functioning product and a successful fundraising process were separate assignments, each with its own grading system.

Who gets the bill?

The company began with the needs of college students. Its later expansion into schools followed the same underlying question: how do you make individual support available to people who cannot simply hire someone themselves? TutorMe worked with institutions and employers so that students covered by those partnerships could use tutoring without paying out of pocket.

That arrangement matters to Hunter’s story because it changes the moment when money enters the conversation. A student with an institutional benefit can ask an academic question without making a separate purchase for that session. The school or employer has already arranged access. The commercial negotiation happens somewhere other than the student’s desk.

By April 2019, the company’s academic partnerships reached hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and Canada. The product was designed to fit into learning-management systems that institutions already used. Administrative dashboards gave staff a view of activity. Those features are less photogenic than a video lesson, but they help explain how a student-built idea became something institutions could buy and operate.

The lesson space combined video, screen sharing and a virtual whiteboard. Sessions could be archived for later reference. Those tools made it possible to look at the same problem together without sitting at the same table. The point was to preserve the useful parts of a tutoring session while removing some of the travel and scheduling that had bothered Hunter at USC.

The year the timetable changed

Zovio acquired TutorMe on April 3, 2019. The transaction made TutorMe a wholly owned subsidiary, and Hunter continued leading it. The deal included cash, shares and additional arrangements for service providers. It was a change of ownership rather than the end of the founder’s day-to-day involvement. TutorMe retained its brand and operating model.

Then demand for remote learning changed the scale of the work. Between 2019 and 2020, TutorMe’s total tutoring hours rose 330%, the company reported. Its full-time staff expanded from five people to 25. That is a different management problem from persuading someone to try an unfamiliar product. Now the task included keeping up with people who were already asking to use it.

Growth also widened the company’s audience. In February 2022, Hunter described a service used by about 100 school districts, mostly in the United States, alongside higher-education partners including Louisiana State University, the University of Texas at San Antonio and Washington State University. A problem first encountered at one university had travelled well beyond campus.

By that point, Hunter put the tutor network at 15,000 people across more than 300 subjects. Those figures describe the service at a particular stage, rather than a permanent size. They also suggest the operating challenge beneath the quick connection: many subjects, many schedules and students arriving with different kinds of questions. Availability had to be organized before it could feel effortless.

Building a company other people can carry

One account of Hunter’s leadership comes from sales leader Armand Farrokh, who observed the TutorMe team and later recommended him publicly. Farrokh described employees who took ownership of their development and acted with the initiative of owners. He credited Hunter with giving people room to carry the company’s direction forward. That is a useful view of a founder whose product depended on other people showing up and doing careful work.

It also adds texture to the growth figures. A five-person company can run on frequent conversations among a handful of colleagues. A larger organization needs people who can make decisions without waiting for the founder to approve every move. Farrokh’s account describes that kind of delegation. The company’s ability to expand involved the judgment of the people Hunter hired, alongside the software they offered.

TutorMe received external recognition as it grew. In 2021, Hunter was recognized in the EdTech Awards’ Founder/CEO - Startup category. In 2022, TutorMe won CODiE awards for Best Overall Ed Tech Solution and Best Virtual Learning Solution. Awards mark a public moment in a company’s development; the daily service still had to work for the next person who logged in.

A sale, a handoff, a little skiing

On May 23, 2022, Zovio completed the sale of substantially all TutorMe business assets for $55 million in cash and the assumption of certain liabilities. GoGuardian announced the acquisition in June. The purchase brought TutorMe into a broader education-technology business. At the announcement, TutorMe offered access to more than 1.5 million students, with round-the-clock support in over 300 subjects.

Later in 2022, Hunter publicly announced that he had transitioned out of the CEO role. His farewell thanked the people who had helped turn the company into an institutionally used service: tutors, students, employees, partners and investors. He also looked back on the globe-hopping construction period with an admission that it had lasted longer than it should have. Even the fond recollection contained a small performance review.

His immediate plans were pleasantly specific: family time, learning, some investing and skiing. He also expressed an intention to work again with an early-stage business. After years spent making academic support available on demand, he was allowing himself a less crowded schedule. A departure announcement can accommodate both professional ambition and the perfectly reasonable desire to go outside.

The thread through Hunter’s TutorMe years is the effort to reduce the distance between a question and another person willing to help. The product addressed timing, payment and geography. His own account of what he learned put increasing weight on human connection. The original accounting lesson had contained that ingredient already: one student, another student, and enough shared attention to make a difficult subject less lonely.

“You can do this. I’m here for you.”Hunter, describing the encouragement a tutor can offer · 2022