reskilling
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Pierre Dubuc
He was 11 when he started building a website to teach people how to code. Two decades later that hobby is OpenClassrooms, and Pierre Dubuc still measures its worth in one thing - jobs.
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Nat Ware
Nat Ware is an Australian economist and social entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Forte, a New York-based company that finances education, reskilling and healthcare at zero cost to individuals or governments. An Oxford PhD and Rhodes Scholar, he invented the Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) mechanism, where governments repay training costs only out of the additional income-tax revenue that newly employed graduates generate. He earlier built 180 Degrees Consulting into the world's largest consultancy for nonprofits and social enterprises. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and three-time TEDx speaker, he calls his approach trickle-up economics.
Jamie Albers
Jamie Albers is the co-founder and co-CEO of Mento, a Los Angeles career-health company that pairs people with coaches who blend 80% coaching and 20% hands-on mentorship from operators who have done the job before. A University of Pennsylvania grad who spent five years across Google and then ran growth and marketing at Jigsaw, she built Mento after her own executive coach reshaped how she led and felt at work. Mento has raised about $11.5M, including a $6M seed in 2023 backed by M13, and is now folding AI into coaching to make high-quality guidance affordable at scale.