college-admissions
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Michael Weiler and the Question Before the Test
As an SAT tutor, Michael Weiler wanted students to have a reason to study. At Edupath, he built college choice into the preparation itself - an idea that carried his work from Berkeley to Beijing.
Luke Skurman Built a Company Out of the Choice He Couldn’t Make
He went looking for the truth behind college brochures. Two dozen years and several business models later, Luke Skurman is still trying to make the biggest decisions feel less like a roll of the dice.
Kamir Kothari
Kamir Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Inspira Education, an admissions platform pairing students with top-tier consultants for medical, legal, and business school applications. Before starting Inspira in 2020 with Arush Chandna, he held investing and operating roles at Social Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, LendingHome, and The Parthenon Group, after studying finance and economics at Oxford.
Tina Sheng
Tina Sheng is the CEO of PalmDrive USA, the North American arm of PalmDrive, an international education and mentorship company. A Stanford-trained educator who grew up in Beijing, she built her career inside Bay Area high schools as an admissions officer, teacher, and college counselor before founding PalmDrive's undergraduate department in 2015. Under her leadership the team has guided hundreds of students into top-20 universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, and helped grow PalmDrive into a venture-backed company serving thousands of students annually.
Will Geiger
Will Geiger is the cofounder and CEO of Scholarships360, a free platform that helps students find and win scholarships to pay for college. A first-generation college graduate himself, he spent nearly a decade inside the admissions machine - reading more than 10,000 applications as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Kenyon College, running its merit scholarship program, and counseling teenagers through the college maze at Hopkins School - before teaming up with his brother Brian to rebuild the broken scholarship search from scratch. Scholarships360 raised a $250,000 seed round in 2021 and now reaches students nationwide with vetted scholarships and personalized financial aid guidance.
Zack Perkins
Zack Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of CollegeVine, the Boston-based platform now deploying AI agents across more than 100 universities to handle recruiting, advising, and alumni outreach. He left Harvard as a sophomore in 2015 to build the company full time, growing it from a peer-advising side project called Admissions Hero into a service with millions of student members. His through-line is stubborn: the kid from a big public high school who never had an admissions officer show up for him now wants to hand that access to everyone.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.
Shaan Patel
Dr. Shaan Patel is the founder and CEO of Prep Expert, the SAT/ACT prep company that landed a $250,000 deal from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank Season 7 - one of Cuban's most profitable Shark Tank investments. He raised his own SAT score 640 points to a perfect score, then built a company that has helped 100,000+ students improve their scores and win over $100 million in college scholarships. Board-certified dermatologist, Yale MBA, USC MD - Patel turned a personal academic transformation into a $75M+ enterprise.