I am a partner at EBLI. Prior to EBLI, I worked at Mainsail Partners, a private equity firm in San Francisco, and founded uwemp. With a passion for making other peoples' passions a reality, I realized it all starts with education. My free time is filled with cheesy romance movies, making it rain on the basketball court, and attempting to play left-handed shortstop on the softball field.
I have recently read several interesting articles on extremely successful modern-day entrepreneurs. The two that stand out in particular are Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) and Daniel Ek (founder of Spotify) and their approach around the concept of disruption. Tony’s approach to disruption was around creating the best customer service possible and built his entire e-retail empire (which he sold to Amazon to $1.2 billion) around the concept. Daniel was a serial entrepreneur and millionaire in his early twenties. After blowing through money and quote, “trying to be much cooler than he was” he set out to mirror his two passions together, music and technology. Six years later Daniel may have created the magic bullet for the music industry by allowing users to create playlists of music for free, but they pay a monthly subscription fee to take their music with them on any mobile device. The company has a run rate of about $300 million a year and licensing deals with all of the major music labels.
If you study the success of individuals like Tony and Daniel, there is a recurring theme of disruption. Taking an industry, product or way of doing something and turning it upside down. 90% of the time it starts with this type of intent that self-made individuals amass great fortunes. It never starts out with seeking financial gain.
When I first started working in education a few years back my intent has always been disruption. Finding ways to completely turn everything upside down with the ultimate goal of creating a brighter future for this country. EBLI is focused on the most integral component to having a functioning society, a literate population.
We are well on our way, but we have just begun.
The journey began over a year ago working with EBLI as a client building software for online instruction. Something magical transpired over the next 12 months. I found myself traveling from classroom to classroom seeing the lives of children, parents, educators, and administrators changed before my eyes. I saw emotions – laughing, crying, and hugging, from people whose lives were affected in a profound way from EBLI. I had an excitement and feeling that I had not felt for a long time (maybe even back to the college days, but we will not go there). A methodology and system (refined from over a decade of work), based on what the research says, that can literally teach any person of any age and skill level to read to their highest potential. For those of you who do not believe it, come check out one of our trainings or visit our literacy center. You will be blown away, I promise.
My misson to incorporate technology with sound pedagogy based on how the brain and memory work was kicked into high gear (by the way, this is the only way we are ever going to change education at scale). The most unlikely of business partners entered my life, a former nurse with the same passion, drive, and mission for changing the face of education. Nora is one of the most amazing individuals I have come across in my life. Her dedication, perserverance, and subject matter expertise to fundamentally change reading instruction blows me away. She is not only the brainchild behind the EBLI system, Nora is an avid reader, continuous learner, and most importantly, a dedicated mother to her three daughters. I consider myself very lucky to be in business with such a wonderful person.
Sitting in the back room of Ounce of Prevention Reading Center (our literacy center and research lab where we teach kids), Nora and I were talking about our goals and vision for education and she said these magical words, “I want to teach the world to read.” I responded quickly, “Yeah, let’s do it.” From there we formed a partnership and have set out to further the mission of fundamentally changing literacy education.
I guess I would characterize myself a social entrepreneur. After a stint in the investment banking and private equity worlds it was clear that for me to be fulfilled at my job, the mission must have a tremendous amount of meaning and a clear social impact. Instead of the traditional path in this country of making a bunch of money and then giving back through philanthropic causes, my goal is to have a tremendous of impact while building a company. I truly believe this is the only way we are going to reinvent America – every one of us must find some sort of socially-beneficial aspect of what we do day in and day out.
If I can summarize the essence of the United States in one word it is, “Dream.” Dreaming is how we have built a meaningful nation in this global economy in such a short amount of time. What is your dream? Are you following it? If not, both you and this country are suffering.
So, I will leave you with this – our dream is to teach the world to read – we encourage all of you to join in this mission and save society.
