Does it seem odd that some of the loudest voices in Silicon Valley declaring the future of education is all about homeschooling are young men without children? 🤷🏼♀️🤔
Jennifer Carolan
3,548 posts
Jennifer Carolan
@jencarolan
co-founder Reach Capital (@reachfund), former history teacher, mom to 3 awesome kids, partner to @shawnvc, Chicagoland native & Bay Area resident for 25+yrs
- I’ve been meeting a lot of MBA’s lately who believe venture capital is a glamorous job. I’m afraid they would be disappointed if they shadowed me for a day. It’s a customer service job with a lot of email and you really have to love working with founders!
- What is so humbling about venture capital is that when you make every initial investment, you 100% believe that startup will beat the odds and succeed. But most will not and you’re wrong the majority of the time. Keeping that optimism alive is so important
- Is there a docusign for school forms? I spent my morning filling out 18 back-to-school forms for 3 kids. And forms are spread across Google, Canvas, PowerSchool, bespoke websites, emails, offline 😬 😬 would love a mobile, notification-enabled, school docusign with calendaring 🤷🏼♀️
- Replying to @bsw5020 and @sabrevayaYou practice gratitude so beautifully . This hangs just outside of my home office. ❤️
- We @reachfund are excited to launch Reach III today to back founders who are making exceptional learning opportunities accessible to all Launching Reach Capital III, $165M Early Stage Education Technology Fund | by Reach Capital | Feb, 2021 | Medium
- The 4 Traits of Successful Founders - Reach Capital
- Just spoke w a philanthropist vehemently against VC in education but was OK w his public market investment in Pearson— the largest provider of K12 textbooks before they sold it off bc couldn’t transition to digital If I’m GenX, can I still say OK Boomer? 🤷🏼♀️
- Did a cursory analysis of our 75 AI founders. They are more likely to be immigrant (60%), have dropped out of their education (20%), and more likely to have been enrolled in a PhD program (26%).
- This week in education: @duolingo raises at $1.5b valuation @Instructure taken private at $2b @EllucianInc prepped for $5b sale by TPG And it’s only Wednesday. + couple weeks ago, @GuildEducation valued at $1B+ Interesting times, & all based outside of SV (Pitts, SLC,VA,DV)
- Not sure if this is just an edtech startup thing, but there seems to be an inverse correlation between Silicon Valley hype & actual performance. Some of the best edtech companies are beloved by their customers but unknown to SV tech scene— and are growing fast!
- Blown away by the @Desmos Art Winners - selected from 4000+ entries from kids age 13-17 in 100 countries. Every line, curve, shade, created via an equation. See all winners here: edsurge.com/news/2020-06-0…
- Part of the solution to the teacher shortage, especially in high need areas like SPED and STEM, is casting a wider net and hiring from outside the US. It has worked well in other high skilled areas like nursing. —
- Startups are inconceivably hard. So few break through to achieve meaningful scale. Yet, for a small subset of people, building something from nothing is the only work they want to do. And once they’ve had a taste, they can never go corporate or do anything but build again.
