CTO  -  COO   2011-2013

I joined Teachscape as CTO in February of 2011. The company was working to complete a project with Stanford University for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The company's revenues were about $14m but the project was behind and off track.

I created a new project team and completed the project on time and budget. Following this, I became the COO. We productized the R&D we did for Gates, filed 4 patents, and built a 4 component SAAS platform which we eventually sold to more than 20 states and thousands of districts.

We scaled 300% in 2 years.

Teachscape was a challenging company. When I joined it, it was already 10 years old. There had been many attempts to build platforms in the past. The company had a strong board with many ideas about what would make the company successful.

A lot of what I did here was build culture. As an example, the music video was one of my initiatives for the sales meeting in 2012. I learned that when a team feels good about its mission, they can do anything. I also learned that executive leadership requires making tough calls. Although we were successful, there were some missteps, particularly around investing appropriately for growth and I avoided these at Dev Bootcamp, 2 years later.