Tagged: education
30 results
Po-Shen Loh
Carnegie Mellon math professor and former U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI surpasses humans at logic and language, the most important skill young people can develop is autonomous thinking. He warns that using AI to do school writing is 'like driving a car one mile for exercise,' explains why AI now solves original Olympiad problems he couldn't, and lays out a win-win-win education ecosystem that pairs middle schoolers, high-school math talent, and Broadway-caliber acting coaches to teach kids how to generate their own ideas, empathize, and think critically in an age of biased information.
Ken Ono: The Mathematician Who Stopped Racing the Machine
Mathematician Ken Ono recounts the year that upended his identity: hired to invent problems hard enough to stump ChatGPT for the FrontierMath project, he discovered that large language models now know more facts than any human alive. Rather than despairing about how to 'stay ahead of AI,' Ono argues that is the wrong question entirely. He reframes intelligence as the human capacity to ask new questions, create concepts, and connect ideas across fields, weaving in the story of self-taught genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, his own near-dropout youth, and a plea to rescue the wonder that machines can never replicate.
Axio Education
Axio Education is an AI-native learning platform, spun out of Arizona State University's Luminosity Lab in 2023, that helps colleges and universities design, deliver, and improve courses. It combines LMS, CRM, and SIS capabilities with agentic AI to compress course development from months to minutes, deliver personalized learning pathways, and give faculty real-time insight into how students are doing - while keeping instructors in creative control.
CL Global Academy
CL Global Academy is an independent international education company that runs academically rigorous, project-based short courses in the heart of Cambridge, UK. Founded in 2009 by Allen Hao and Katrina, it hosts residential programmes inside historic Cambridge colleges - taught by University of Cambridge-affiliated lecturers - covering fields from AI and data science to innovation and entrepreneurship. The Academy welcomes over 1,500 students a year and counts more than 24,000 alumni across 16 years, having grown into a multi-million-dollar business without institutional venture funding.
Optimal
Optimal is a Kirkland, Washington education-data company that uses independent research to help people make better decisions about college and careers. Founded in 2004 by former Microsoft manager Sung Rhee as SR Education Group, it rebranded to Optimal in 2020. Through its consumer sites - OnlineU, GradReports and SwitchUp - it publishes college rankings built on alumni salaries, manually researched tuition, and tens of thousands of verified student reviews, aiming to make the real return on an education visible before students take on debt.
Kelly Smith
Kelly Smith is the founder and CEO of Prenda, a Mesa, Arizona education company that helps ordinary adults run microschools - small groups of 5 to 10 kids who take ownership of their own learning. An MIT-trained nuclear fusion engineer who once sold a clean-energy software business, Smith stumbled into education by volunteering at a library code club, watching kids light up when they wanted to learn. In January 2018 he started a microschool around his kitchen table with his son and six neighborhood kids. Since then Prenda has helped more than 1,000 adults launch microschools and nearly 10,000 K-8 students learn to lead their own education.
Lauren Dachille
Lauren Dachille is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a Y Combinator-backed edtech company building data-driven applicant tracking software that helps K-12 school districts identify, hire, and retain effective teachers. A former DC Public Schools recruiter and StudentsFirst policy hand, she built the system she wished she'd had when sorting through thousands of teacher applications by hand.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Elisa Piscitelli
Elisa Piscitelli is the CEO and co-founder of Futurely (myfuturely.com), an Italian edtech platform that uses data and structured self-discovery to help teenagers choose what to study and who to become. A management engineer from Politecnico di Milano who went on to McKinsey and an MIT Master in Business Analytics on a Zegna scholarship, she traded a data-science career in California to build a company that now guides over 14,000 students a year across 50 schools and 30 companies. She was named to Forbes Italia's 30 Under 30 in 2021 for her work in education.
Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock
Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock is the co-founder and CEO of the Recurse Center (originally Hacker School), a free, self-directed educational retreat in New York City where programmers spend up to three months getting dramatically better at their craft. A lifelong unschooler who taught himself to code on an Apple IIe, he built RC with no teachers, no curriculum, no grades, and no certificates, funding it through an optional recruiting service rather than tuition. Since 2011, thousands of programmers from teenagers to sixty-year-olds have passed through its doors, guided by ideas like 'building your volitional muscles' and a handful of deceptively simple social rules.
Prenda
Prenda is an Arizona-based education company that gives everyday adults - called guides - the software, curriculum, training, and support to open and run small, tuition-free K-8 microschools of 5 to 10 students out of homes, libraries, and community spaces. Founded by Kelly Smith after he started a learning club around his kitchen table, Prenda partners with state-credentialed institutions and school-choice programs so families pay little or nothing, while students learn at their own pace through a 'connect, conquer, collaborate, create' day built around mastery and student agency.
Mohammed Ali Mukri
Mohammed Ali Mukri is an education operator and angel investor who works across the UAE and Pakistan with The Millennium Universal College (TMUC). A self-described people leader who runs on the mantra 'speed beats perfection,' he pairs front-line institution building with early-stage bets in health care, enterprise software, and education.
MAKE UP FOR EVER
MAKE UP FOR EVER is a French professional cosmetics brand founded in 1984 by makeup artist Dany Sanz to give artists the high-pigment, high-performance products they couldn't find anywhere else. Acquired by LVMH in 1999, it became known for backstage-grade staples like the HD Skin foundation range, an inclusive shade philosophy, and a worldwide network of MAKE UP FOR EVER Academies that graduate roughly 1,300 students a year. The brand sits at the intersection of professional artistry and consumer beauty, sold largely through Sephora.
Dagogo Altraide
Dagogo Altraide is the creator and narrator behind ColdFusion, a YouTube channel with over 5 million subscribers known for deep-dive documentaries on technology, science, and business history. Born in Mumbai to Nigerian parents and raised across multiple countries before settling in Perth, Australia, Altraide built ColdFusion from a 2007 smartphone review channel into one of the internet's most respected educational documentary platforms - all while remaining largely faceless on screen. He is also a published author, music producer (under the alias Burn Water), and co-host of the Through The Web Podcast.
Alan Zhang
Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
Geetha Murali
Dr. Geetha Murali is the chief executive officer of Room to Read, the global literacy and girls' education nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. The first non-founder CEO of the organization, she leads a team of roughly 1,200 staff across 29 countries and a network of more than 20,000 partners and volunteers. Under her watch, Room to Read's programs have reached over 60 million children. A PhD in South Asian politics with a master's in biostatistics, she frames her work through a personal lens: her mother was nearly a child bride, and her family's trajectory shifted in a single generation.
John T. Ehrbar
John T. Ehrbar is a career YMCA leader who, starting January 26, 2026, takes the helm as President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley after six years running YMCA Buffalo Niagara. He has spent over two decades inside the Y movement, climbing from a high school Leaders Club kid in northeast Ohio to running an 80-million-dollar nonprofit serving 2,300 staff across the Bay Area.
Priscilla Chan
Priscilla Chan is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a pediatrician-turned-philanthropist directing one of the largest private bets on biomedical science. With husband Mark Zuckerberg she has pledged the bulk of their fortune to a mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century, increasingly through AI-powered biology and the Biohub network.
Course Hero
Course Hero is an online learning platform that gives students access to crowd-sourced study materials, AI-powered explanations, expert tutors and practice problems. Founded in 2006 at Cornell, it grew into an edtech unicorn and now anchors Learneo, the parent company that also owns QuillBot, CliffsNotes, Symbolab, LitCharts, Scribbr and LanguageTool.
Make:
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
Cindy Mi
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.
Kevin Zerber
Kevin Zerber is the Founder and CEO of Treering, the edtech company that turned the school yearbook into a personalized, sustainable, and digitally-native experience. Since co-founding Treering in 2009, Zerber has guided the company from a scrappy startup to a platform serving 15,000+ schools across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - printing over 11 million yearbooks along the way. With $7.6M in funding backed by notable investors including Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow) and Mike McCue (Flipboard), and recognition on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, Zerber has carved out a distinctive niche at the intersection of nostalgia, technology, and inclusivity.
Treering
Treering is a Redwood City technology company that reinvented the school yearbook. Schools design online; families personalize their own pages; each book is printed on demand. For every yearbook sold, Treering plants a tree with Trees for the Future - over 4 million planted to date. Used by more than 15,000 schools worldwide.
CGP Grey
CGP Grey is an Irish-American educational YouTuber and podcaster based in London who has spent more than a decade turning constitutional minutiae, geographic absurdities, and the strange edges of human systems into addictive short animated films. He works alone, never shows his face, draws himself as a stick figure in glasses, and treats production schedules as raw material for podcasts about how creative people get anything done at all.
Ethan Chlebowski
Ethan Chlebowski is an American cooking educator and YouTuber who teaches home cooks the how and why behind food. After leaving a consulting job at Deloitte, he turned a weekend hobby into a 2M+ subscriber channel and founded Cook Well, a learning-first recipe platform and companion app.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Philipp Dettmer is the founder, CEO, and head writer of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, the Munich-based animation studio and YouTube channel with over 25 million subscribers and 3.6 billion views. Starting as a university passion project in 2013, Kurzgesagt has grown into a 70-person studio that transforms dense scientific, philosophical, and technological ideas into visually stunning, widely-shared short films. Dettmer is also the author of 'Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive' (2021) and co-creator of the video game Star Birds, launched in early access in September 2025.
Mark Rober
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Mike Boyd
Mike Boyd is a Scottish YouTube creator behind the channel 'Learn Quick', where he documents learning new skills - from kickflips to lockpicking - in remarkably compressed timeframes. With 2.7+ million subscribers and a philosophy of learning in public, he turned a bored thesis-writer's side project into a sustainable media business, all while making the messy, fumbling process of skill acquisition oddly compelling to watch.
Peter McKinnon
Peter McKinnon is a Toronto-based photographer, cinematographer, and YouTube creator with nearly 6 million subscribers, known for his cinematic visual style and fast-paced, coffee-fueled tutorials. A former magician and Ellusionist Production Manager turned self-taught filmmaker, he built one of YouTube's most distinctive photography channels from a spare bedroom, won the 2019 Shorty Award for Breakout YouTuber of the Year and the 2020 Streamy Award for Cinematography, and had his landscape photography minted on official Canadian currency by the Royal Canadian Mint. Beyond tutorials, he has launched his own multi-tool for photographers, multiple Lightroom preset packs, a signature coffee blend with James Coffee Co., and the 'Pete's Pirate Life' EDC brand.