ai-learning
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Shuai Ke Went Back Into the Rain
After helping turn a question bank into a major Chinese education platform, Shuai Ke chose the discomfort of starting again. His second act stretches from live American classrooms to an AI writing companion - and returns to a problem he has carried since school.
Brenna Lenoir Is Measuring the Moments Marketing Usually Misses
CodeSignal’s CMO has spent more than two decades making software legible to people. Her sharper idea is that marketing’s most important effects often appear between the rows of the spreadsheet.
Holly Hamann Keeps Choosing the Market Before It Has a Map
Before influencer marketing had a name, Holly Hamann helped build its machinery. Now the mathematician-turned-marketer is applying the same appetite for unsettled territory to AI, learning, and the stubborn question of whether training changes what people can actually do.
Don Spear
Don Spear is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSesame, the Portland-based marketplace that lets companies find, buy, and manage elearning courses the way people buy songs on iTunes. A Rice University engineer and Harvard MBA, he spent decades scaling companies - from PetSmart through its IPO to Banfield Pet Hospital's expansion from 4 to 250 locations - before founding BlueVolt and then OpenSesame in 2010. Today he leads a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and an AI-driven push to make workplace learning easier to find and use.
Sophie Novati
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.