Here at Edtech Insiders, we’ve followed a number of interesting stories around the AI movement in education: the rise of micro-companies, the constant risk of eclipse by frontier models, the changing investment landscape in a world where exit strategies might not lead to unicorns and IPOs, and so on.
For us, one of the most interesting aspects of the current AI moment is a change in where entrepreneurs are coming from. We’ve seen a number of technical AI experts leaving big tech companies to start edtech companies (see Soapbox Labs, Merlyn Mind, or Kyron Learning), and we’ve also seen a number of educators using AI in conjunction with their in-depth domain knowledge to start cutting-edge edtech companies.
It is this second category, educators-turned-founders (AKA teacherpreneurs), that we focus on today. We spoke to a group of amazing edtech founders with previous classroom experience about their transition into edtech and what advice they would give other educators looking to turn their ideas into ventures.
I was teaching for about 13 years in the classroom and I've always been into technology in general and always liked to push boundaries and limits, and see what I can do for students. I went to the ASU+GSV Summit— this was in 2023— a bunch of workshops were about AI, and we just couldn't get in. Everybody was interested in AI and I had a moment there where I was really deeply concerned with: okay, AI is gonna make a huge impact- this could be a really cool tool. But it could also be another thing to add to teachers' plates. I said, “Okay, I'm going to go out and create meaningful professional development for teachers. I'm going to create a space where I can amplify the teachers' voice to make sure that they're heard.”
It's awesome to go to ASU+GSV. I would highly recommend any teacher go and kind of have that wool ripped off from your eyes. I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you're not in a teacher conference when they're serving you wine, right? And it's free?
I started a volunteer teaching program at a private school in Harlem that serves exclusively low income students. I taught freshman Math and English, sophomore math, and then I was the athletic director, coaching a bunch of different varsity sports. You know, just basically totally overloaded myself.
I have always been kind of into entrepreneurship. I started a Web Design Development Company as a 12 year old, In 1996 I was making websites for local businesses in Kansas City, and like, that's how I paid for college.
But when I decided to start a venture related to education was really 10 years after starting teaching, when I was back at grad school, doing my MBA and my Masters in education. I missed the mission oriented work that I had been doing. I wanted to get back into something kind of social entrepreneurship more broadly, ideally, education, but didn't have the idea. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And so it was really during grad school I was doing a research project where a principal I was interviewing suggested this idea.
He didn't say AI, but he said. “You know, my problem is, I want to be in teachers’ classrooms. But I just don't have time to do that. And videos are great, cause I can watch the video in my pajamas instead of during the day. But it doesn't solve the main problem, which is, I just don't have enough time to watch all the videos or be in the classrooms. You're at Stanford. Don't you guys have all these fancy computers and stuff? Can't you just run the recording through one of your fancy computers?” And I'm like: “Yeah, you know, we do have those.” That is exactly what TeachFX is.
I was in the classroom for almost 10 years, including several years as an instructional coach. Jeff (Plourd, CEO and co-founder of Snorkl) and I knew each other through teaching. Jeff was also a teacher in Las Vegas about a decade ago and he had gone into software engineering. We ended up talking about some ideas that he was having - he had been talking to different teachers over the course of the pandemic and shortly after about what they were doing; what tools they were using.
When I'm teaching math, I want math class to be really rich and not just about students’ answers, but really about their thinking process and all that they have to share. And like. This is where math, education, conversation has been going for the last 10-20 years is around, “how do we make math class more creative and open ended and get kids talking more?” And I think that ironically, unfortunately, most of the math tools out there sort of do the opposite where it's actually like “be quiet and watch a video or put your answer in this box. That was the idea that that really resonated with me. And we started just thinking about ways that we could have students capture or their thinking, and then what we could do with that to support more learning.
I didn't immediately quit my job. We were working on this part time for a year and a half before I quit my job. I would say that I was someone who used technology in my classroom, but I wouldn't have said that I was a tech enthusiast in the way that some people are- on this side of things, I'm like, “Oh, wow! Some teachers are really tech enthusiasts”- I wouldn't say that was me. I I cared a lot more about academic outcomes. How do I leverage high quality instruction? And maybe technology is part of that. But sometimes it's not and so I think that was sort of the lens that I brought in some ways. You know, being a little bit of a tech skeptic around like this is actually impactful.
So before teaching, I was doing research. I eventually decided to go into the classroom to kind of see teaching firsthand, experience it firsthand, see if there were any blind spots, things I was missing, kind of get that first person POV experience that you just can't get any other way. And so when the AI explosion happened, I had already been thinking about AI from the research perspective for a number of years, having written AI in Education in 2019. And so I immediately sort of combined that with my first-person experience in the classroom and the struggles that I was having and just the day-to-day challenges; but not like the big ones, just the day to day little ones, because while it certainly can help with the big ones, all the low hanging fruit is available when there's a big breakthrough like that.
What happened was on February break, I was working and my husband was working next to me and he was working on AI stuff and I was working on teaching stuff. And after a couple hours, he was like, “come look what I did. You put in text and it writes questions.” And I was like, “Oh, that's funny. Come look what I did. It's the same thing, but by hand.” And I sort of walked him through how that was a process that I had to do pretty often, basically every day. He said,”Oh, we just never stand for that. It would need to be automated. So he created the tool for me and for the challenges that I had and the everyday requirements that I had. And that's how it got started.
Are there overlapping skillsets or mindsets between teaching and entrepreneurship?
Great teachers are constantly adapting, right? To new curriculum, new classes, new students, new situations. Every day is different, and I think that part of being an early stage startup is being really adaptive and gathering feedback and iterating quickly and moving quickly. In the classroom, you think the lessons are going to go certain way. And if it doesn't, you gotta take that data and move into a different direction quickly. You don't just stick to your guns there necessarily. I think there’s a similar mindset around “we're gonna try things. And we're gonna learn things quickly.” That’s really important in the startup world.
I was at a school that was like a startup anyway- I was told I was gonna teach English 3 days before class started. I'm like, Wait, what? So a lot of that was the exact right training for being at a startup.
One class was all students who had failed freshman year math. And then they had failed Summer school math; every single one of them had an IEP, and the challenge was a big one. How do you get someone to love math that says they hate math, and doesn't have a lot of basic skills that you would need to do Sophomore high school level math? Those are big challenges. You're not just gonna like hit a home run on the very first swing. So I think, having that mindset of “Hey, this is a hard thing. You gotta iterate. You got to learn from the past failure. But then put it behind you and focus on the thing you're going to try today.
More broadly, I felt like every day I was coming up with some hypothesis for what would work with them, trying it out, and seeing that maybe some little part of it worked. And so then I built on whatever did work. That whole mindset of: you just gotta come in every day with a new idea to try. You gotta be iterative. You've got to keep your chin up when it doesn't work, because it's not going to work a lot of the time.
I would almost say the biggest influence being a teacher has been on how we built TeachFX is just this underlying belief that students are brilliant and wanting to hear what they think. That was me as a teacher: I was like, you guys are capable of so much, you know. That was the message that I just said to them over and over again: “of course you can read that- you're brilliant, and we can talk about it, and we you can write an essay about that.” Just because 60% of my classes are immigrants that are English learners doesn't mean we like we can read the original Shakespeare... Nothing gives you a more optimistic attitude than interacting with young people.
I would say there's like a third thing that I brought into both, which is improv. I do improv comedy- I have for a decade. I brought a ton of improv into my teaching and I brought a ton of improv into my entrepreneurship. That has to do with like, comfort with uncertainty, listening, thinking on your feet, not ruminating on mistakes, seeing mistakes as potentially gifts and opportunities, basically being willing to say things, even if it's not the exact right thing. Fighting perfectionism and just like a long, long list.
It comes in everywhere. I mean, it's definitely part of every human interaction, and as a founder, you're constantly having interactions. You're bouncing your ideas off of people. You're seeing it from their perspective. Being able to ‘yes, and’ people and see where they're coming from and then add onto it from their perspective helps me to see what my users need from their perspective.
Gosh! This is gonna sound so bad— but when I tried transitioning out of the classroom into a “corporate job”, even though it was education-based, it was like, “You're just a teacher. You don't have the skill set”, which is funny, because we do so much in the classroom- people have no idea.
One thing I found really helpful is the people management skill that we use every single day in the classroom. Managing these different personalities, knowing their motivations- sometimes you have to smooth feathers, you have to use different approaches. It's just about knowing your audience really well and respecting their voice and their authenticity.
Networking is another one of the skills that I think most teachers don't realize that they have inside of them. It's a skill that we do almost every day in the classroom- it just looks a little different. For the most part you'll find no one on Linkedin that's a teacher… most teachers just don't go on to Linkedin because we don't have a need to network. And it's really really unfortunate, because if you give them the voice, if you get them out there, you'd be very surprised at what can be actually accomplished.
And probably the most important thing is the ability to adapt. And to just say, “okay, well, that didn't work. Okay, let's try something new.” We do it everyday. We spend hours on a lesson, and then it falls flat, and kids are just staring at you like, “this is garbage.” And so you're like, “Okay, well, let me try something different.” And then within minutes they're totally engaged.
How does your teaching background impact how you’re seen by customers, funders, or others in your business life?
There are certain parts of our product that we show people where they're like, oh, that's incredible. “That's exactly what we need. That makes a lot of sense. I can tell that you were in a classroom.” One of the things we do is provide teacher insights that summarize across the whole class— and a lot of teachers have been there where at the end of the day, you're sorting through all your piles of exit tickets or whatever it is, and it takes a lot of time. So that's one of our features that speaks directly to that need.
When I'm on the call with math teachers, we talk math. We talk about Peter Liljedahl and building Thinking Classrooms, and all this stuff that's sort of rich in the philosophy side or pedagogy side.
It really depends on who I'm talking to. Except in rare cases of people who like both, in most cases is going to go one way or another. And so I can sort of pick and choose from my background and either say, yes, I'm coming from three years of classroom teaching. This is what I learned. This this was my experience with my kids. These were some formative pieces that happened. Or like I have a master's from Harvard and I'm starting a Ph.D in the fall; I've written a book and all that. So like I have both to pull from, and I think that they complement each other in a really important way. But a lot of people kind of are listening for one or the other.
It depends on who you’re speaking to, right? You do kind of change language. When I'm talking to a superintendent, or I'm talking to a decision maker, for example, I do want to approach them in a way that shows them you know that their goals are. You usually have an understanding of what pain points they're going through.
When I'm talking to teachers, I let them know, I am one of you. You know, those kids that would interrupt your class every day, I name all my gray hairs for those kids. So they get that. I'm a teacher. I'm one of them, even though now I'm on the stage. I'm not trying to come up there and tell them what they should be doing differently. I'm telling them you already have the information. You are a professional. You are an expert in your field. Here is something that will enhance it, and I'm going to leave it to you to figure out the connection that works for you. You are valuable and valued. So I think that's what instantly connects teachers and staff, even admin to me, because they see that my overall goal is not necessarily to become some speaker where you pay $10,000 to talk to me. No, I want to see real change and real empowerment. I think that speaks volumes, and I think people can see that. Teachers are a funny group of people- they respect you if you have earned your own stripes.
It’s been 100 positive. I think it's less about ‘I was a teacher’ and more that when we're talking about the problems they face, they're hearing somebody who understands these problems. You know, our whole thing is about instructional practice. (When you can say) tThis is something I struggled with”, or “I'm sure that as an instructional leader you walk in and you see this, and you want this” they think “Oh, yeah, this is somebody who's an educator.” It's less about literally having been a teacher and more about that kind of deep understanding of the problems that they're facing.
What advice would you give teachers who are thinking about starting ventures?
Oh, I think that they should probably just go for it. I do think there's a ton of overlap in what is necessary to be a teacher and what is necessary to be an entrepreneur. And basically, there's a really good chance, knowing nothing else about them, that they would probably enjoy a lot of it.
It's a learn along the way kind of thing. And I think teachers are very passionate. And so if they're going into edtech, they're going to be solving something that they're passionate about.
I also think people don't talk about ways to have just a sustainable business that isn't like a multi-billion dollar business waiting to happen which starts by going into a lot of debt.
Don't underestimate the amount of hustle that is actually required. It's going to be a roller coaster. But there are going to be highs and lows, and if you really want to do it, you should do it."
One thing that I have found in this whole transition is that people truly want to help other people. We have this weird thing about not wanting to reach out for help. And teachers are very much like that. Because we're expected to know everything in our classrooms, showing some kind of weakness or gap in our knowledge, even though we encourage it with our students, we can't possibly do that. And so I recommend going to Linkedin, reaching out making connections, just saying, Hey, Alex, you know, can I have like 10 min of your time? I'd really like to get your advice.
The thing is is, you know, people want to help. And people also like be told that they have some kind of knowledge or advice, and they'll be willing to talk to you. And I think that's your first step. Just start asking.
I think everyone's different. But I we started small, right? So the way that we started- I was using Jamboard and Screencastify, and I was putting questions on Jamboard, sharing with my students, and I was having them record using Screencastify. And then, you know, the disadvantage of that is like, then the video doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. So like, we were like, well, definitely, we need the video to go somewhere, they need to be live in a platform. It was really clear to us. We also didn't start thinking we were gonna be an AI tool, like there was no AI feedback. I was literally watching students videos and giving that feedback. I think we were fortuitous as far as timing.
I think just the ability to start small; I was doing that in my classroom with my real students and getting feedback from my students, and so I think that’s probably true for a lot of ideas. There's probably ways that you can sort of app smash, or do things manually to mimic that experience in a way that you think you may want to eventually develop into a full product.
Teachers are the best entrepreneurs. They try things in their classroom all the time, and they're, you know. We've been doing a lot more with curriculum partnerships these days and understanding how teachers use curriculum. It makes you appreciate the amazingness of teachers and how adaptive and entrepreneurial they are- a lot of what they're using is their own stuff. Their district adopts a new curriculum, and they start to incorporate that into their own stuff and adapt it. That is ‘building the plane as you fly it”
Empathy for the classroom experience is a double-edged sword. On one hand, as a teacher-turned-entrepreneur, you hold an immeasurable amount of nuance about the pressures and intricacies of being a teacher. On the best days, this means you can weigh all of those considerations in the products that you build. But on the flip side, this could lead some teacherpreneurs to assume they know what's best for teachers and to build in a silo. The best teacherpreneurs remain curious about what teachers want and need, and bring them early and often into the design process.
It's incredibly helpful to be teaching while you're working on your solution, because you can conduct action research while field testing your product.
That being said, I'd recommend starting a conversation with one's district early on to become aware of the district policies around developing a product while teaching, deploying it within one's district, and establishing an MOU to protect one's IP.
It's powerful to have a wide community of educators and a reputation with students, community members, and administrators to draw upon after decades of being an educator.
On the other hand, it's been surprising how people across that network of contacts are hesitant to welcome your idea due to the perception that they're now trying to be sold something.
The workload of simultaneously being a full time teacher while becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business is formidable. It's a juggling act to maintain a high level of quality instruction and care for your students while at the same time becoming self-educated about how to start an EdTech company, raise money, and enact your vision. Being patient and honing in on my inner voice and a sense of calmness, conviction, and belief in however things unfold have been a key to maintaining balance through the process.
The EdTech community warmly embraces teacherpreneurs (at least it has in my experience) and provides a net of support that envelops us to become as successful as potentially possible while helping us tangibly overcome obstacles.
And last but not least, a clip from teacherpreneur Claire Smith of HiLight:
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5. Crunchbase: Edtech Funding Has Not Hit Bottom
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Mark Heaps shared his journey to joining Groq, highlighting his extensive background in technology and education. He described his experiences at Google, Adobe, and running an agency, which led him to work closely with Groq's CEO Jonathan Ross, ultimately joining the company.
“I was working very closely with Jonathan Ross, the CEO and founder. And I felt constantly like he was pushing me to think differently about things. And I love that when you get with these real visionary leaders, and technologists that sort of challenge your conventional thinking.” - Mark Heaps
Groq and AI Infrastructure
Mark shared an overview of Groq, a company that builds the world's fastest infrastructure for AI inference. He explained how Groq offers a full stack solution from silicon chips to cloud services, emphasizing the unique positioning of Groq in the AI landscape.
“At the core of the company, Groq builds the world's fastest infrastructure for what's called AI inference... We build the infrastructure, everything from the silicon of the chip, all the way up to the cloud service.” - Mark Heaps
Open Source vs. Closed Source Models
Mark discussed the ongoing battle between open source and closed source AI models, asserting that open source often moves faster and innovates more rapidly. He highlights the advantages and challenges of open source development in the AI space.
“Open source has kind of always eaten closed source for breakfast... The speed of iteration is the speed of innovation. And I think that's why we've seen things move so fast.” - Mark Heaps
Speed and Efficiency of Groq’s Technology
Mark dove into the technical aspects of Groq's technology, explaining how their LPU (Learning Processing Unit) is designed for speed and efficiency. He contrasted it with traditional GPUs, noting Groq’s significant performance and cost advantages.
“If you were to look at a picture of our chips side by side, compared to a GPU, it's a little like looking at an aerial view of Manhattan... We just rip all the way through. And it’s almost like the crew move with you on the track to help you execute things.” - Mark Heaps
Educational Applications and Tools
Mark highlighted Groq’s educational applications, including an “educator mode” in Groq Chat and tools for curriculum development and test grading. He emphasized the transformative potential of AI in education through enhanced efficiency and consistency.
“The goal is how these tools are going to change everyone's lives, it really isn't about replacing humans as much as it’s human plus and augmenting their abilities... The breadth of user level is wild, you can see that a single educator can use this to write a curriculum or can use it to create projects or tests.” - Mark Heaps
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