k-12-education
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John Jorgenson’s Quietly Radical Marketing Idea: Start by Listening
The Cambium Learning CMO built a career turning educational products into legible ideas. His more revealing work is quieter: making room for people to do the work only they can do.
Lucy Zarlengo Has Spent 25 Years Making Complicated Companies Make Sense
Her route from advertising agencies to Panorama Education is a lesson in translating complexity: begin with the customer, connect purpose to performance, and leave the jargon at the door.
Steven Gittleson Learned to Stop Worshipping the Software
He began coding games at 12 and sold software at 15. Decades later, LightSail taught its engineer-founder a harder lesson: in a classroom, technology works best when it listens.
Jolynn Shuler Built a Career at the Point Where Classrooms Meet Markets
Before she led marketing at McGraw Hill, Jolynn Shuler worked the product demos, district conversations and platform sales that make education technology real. Her career is a study in how fluency across functions becomes a leadership advantage.
Julie Jackson
Julie Jackson is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit network of high-performing public charter schools serving roughly 20,000 students across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The first Black Co-CEO in the organization's history, she has spent three decades in education, starting as a Teach For America corps member in Paterson, New Jersey in 1994 and rising from founding teacher and principal to President and now Co-CEO. She oversees all 53 K-12 Uncommon Schools and has trained more than 25,000 teachers and leaders across the United States and abroad. Known for her belief that schools should be places of both joy and rigor, she is a recognized voice on teacher development, college completion, and equity in urban public education.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin is the CEO and co-founder of CodeHS, the online platform that teaches computer science to millions of middle and high school students. A Stanford computer science graduate who cut his teeth as a section leader for the university's legendary intro programming courses, he launched CodeHS in 2012 with classmate Zach Galant to bring coding to schools that had never offered it. He wrote 'Read Write Code,' a friendly primer arguing that coding is the new literacy, and he still finds time to juggle, chase crosswords, and crack jokes rooted in his college days running the satirical paper The Stanford Flipside.
Andrew Rowland
Andrew Rowland is the founder and CEO of Classkick, a Chicago-based education technology company whose real-time digital notebook lets teachers see every student's work as it happens and respond instantly with notes, audio, or chat. A former Chicago high-school math teacher known to his students as 'Mr. Roro,' Rowland taught through Teach for America and started a school robotics program before retraining in computer science and working at Google and YouTube. He built Classkick to scale the thing he loved most about teaching: the 'aha' moment and the fast feedback loop. The platform now reaches more than half of U.S. schools and students in 180-plus countries, running on Firebase infrastructure.
Jacob Allen
Jacob Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Reportwell, a software startup that turns the slow, paperwork-heavy work of regulatory compliance reporting into a clean, AI-assisted portal, starting with K-12 schools and the agencies that oversee them. He came to the problem the hard way: as the co-founder and CEO of pilotED Schools, a charter network built around identity and sociology, he drowned in state and city compliance reports and decided to build the tool he wished he had. A Teach For America alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education honoree, Allen has spent his career on the conviction that students do better when they understand who they are, and that the adults serving them deserve software that does not get in the way.
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
Larry Berger
Larry Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Amplify, the Brooklyn-based education company he started in 2000 as Wireless Generation. A Yale-trained English major, Rhodes Scholar, and former White House Fellow at NASA, he built mobile assessment tools that put data in teachers' hands, then steered the company through a $360M News Corp acquisition and a 2015 spinout backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. Today Amplify's curricula reach millions of students across all 50 states. Berger is also a published poet and the rare edtech CEO who wrote a public 'confession' questioning the hype around the very personalized-learning future he once championed.
Patrick Cook-Deegan
Patrick Cook-Deegan is the founder and CEO of Wayfinder, a K-12 curriculum company that teaches purpose, belonging, and durable skills to more than 1.5 million students across roughly 4,000 schools. A former All-American lacrosse player turned human-rights advocate in Burma, wilderness guide, and Stanford d.school fellow, he built Wayfinder out of five years teaching character development in an Oakland public high school. He named the company after the ancient Polynesian navigators who crossed oceans without instruments - his bet on how to redesign the American high school for the 21st century.
Nat Malkus
Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he turns national datasets into arguments that policymakers can act on. He built the Return to Learn Tracker that mapped pandemic school closures and now follows the chronic absenteeism crisis it exposed, and he hosts The Report Card, AEI's education podcast. A former middle school teacher who once graded papers in Prince George's County, he now does his grading on the whole American school system - with the data to back it up.
Jennifer Carolan
Jennifer Carolan is co-founder and general partner at Reach Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm she helped build from the ground up to become the most active dedicated edtech investor in the US. A former K-12 history teacher in Chicago who spent nine years learning venture capital at NewSchools Venture Fund, she has since deployed four funds totaling over $500M across 100+ education technology companies. Her portfolio has produced five unicorns including ClassDojo and Handshake, and she continues to teach at Stanford while backing the entrepreneurs she believes are removing the obstacles standing between people and opportunity.
Wayee Chu
Wayee Chu is Co-Founder and General Partner at Reach Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm with $570M+ under management and 140+ portfolio companies across learning, health, and the future of work. A daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to the US for education, Wayee spent eight years at NewSchools Venture Fund - co-founding its Seed Fund in 2006 - before building Reach Capital into one of edtech's defining early-stage firms. She is a founding member of All Raise, sits on the SFMOMA board, and was named an ASU+GSV Power of Women honoree in 2025. Her portfolio spans Replit, ClassDojo, Clayful, Gradescope, and dozens of other companies reshaping how people learn and work.
Mark Atkinson
Mark Atkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mursion, an AI-powered immersive learning platform that blends live human performers with artificial intelligence to create realistic practice simulations for professional development. An Emmy Award-winning television producer turned serial edtech entrepreneur, Atkinson has spent over two decades building technology ventures at the intersection of human capital development and innovation. Before Mursion, he co-founded Teachscape, a pioneering video-based teacher observation platform that became central to the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. Under his leadership, Mursion has grown to serve more than a third of Fortune 100 companies, delivering 18 million-plus minutes of simulation-based training across healthcare, education, corporate, and hospitality sectors.