teach-for-america
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Hans Ringger Kept Following the Question Behind the Job
Before Filevine, there was a Slovak vocabulary, a pile of untidy data and a downtown Los Angeles math classroom. Hans Ringger's route into legal technology is really a story about learning to ask better questions.
Brian Mokoro’s Career Has One Recurring Move: Learn the System From the Inside
Before finance, private equity and technology, Brian Mokoro taught ninth-grade algebra in Washington. His career since has been a study in entering complicated systems, learning their machinery and moving closer to where decisions get made.
Colton Calandrella Is Building Software That Knows When to Get Out of the Way
Before Barti, he taught math, timed airport lines, and built software inside Bain. Now Colton Calandrella is applying the same systems instinct to the invisible work behind independent eye care.
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.
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.
Harry DiFrancesco
Harry DiFrancesco is the CEO and co-founder of Carda Health, a New York-based virtual care company rebuilding heart and lung rehabilitation for the home. A philosopher turned coder turned operator, he taught with Teach For America, helped found a school, did business operations at Stripe, and started Carda in 2020 after caring for a parent who could not access prescribed recovery care. He blends human clinicians with AI to remove friction from care delivery, and runs ultramarathons and climbs mountains in his spare time.
Julia Stiglitz
Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and co-founder of Uplimit (formerly CoRise), an AI-native learning platform that lets companies build, run, and personalize training programs for thousands of employees at once. A fourth-grade teacher turned edtech operator, she was one of the first ten employees at Coursera, where she founded the enterprise business and helped grow the company past 40 million learners. She later managed Google Apps for Education and was a partner at GSV Ventures before starting Uplimit in 2021 with fellow Coursera alumni. Her bet: that AI can finally make high-quality, personalized education a renewable resource rather than a scarce one.
Zak Ringelstein
Zak Ringelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Zigazoo, a moderated, kid-safe social network often described as the antidote to TikTok. A former public school teacher and Teach For America alum, he built and sold his first edtech company UClass to Renaissance Learning, ran a left-insurgent 2018 U.S. Senate campaign in Maine as the only DSA-endorsed major-party nominee, then launched Zigazoo with his wife Leah during the pandemic. The company has raised roughly $26M total, including a $17M celebrity-studded Series A, and made headlines when Australia exempted Zigazoo from its sweeping social media ban.
Libby Roin
Libby Roin is the CEO of Goodreads, the world's largest social reading platform with over 150 million members. A Boston College English major turned MIT Sloan MBA, she spent nearly a decade building her way up through Goodreads product teams before taking the top job in January 2022. Along the way she founded Polk Street Press, a children's interactive app studio, and raised over $10 million for Teach for America. She grew up one of seven kids in Oklahoma - daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher - and brings a pragmatic, community-first sensibility to one of the internet's most beloved book destinations.
Aigerim Shorman
Aigerim Shorman is VP of Product Management for Meta's Horizon product, where she leads the platform connecting billions of people across virtual worlds. Born in Kazakhstan, she bootstrapped her way from community college to USC, taught with Teach For America, worked at UBS, and co-founded Triptrotting - a travel startup that raised $1.8M and grew to 150+ countries - before joining Meta where she built the avatar system used by 3+ billion people. One of the most senior women in Meta's metaverse organization, she's also an angel investor backing early-stage consumer and social startups.