I spent the majority of my career as a professional journalist. I worked in organizations that included Scientific American, The Washington Post and Forbes Media, and I reached a point after more than 25 years as a professional journalist where I wanted to do more than just write about what I was seeing in the world. I wanted to have some direct impact. Secondly, when I thought about the things that I cared about the most, education was front and center. At that point, I had children in the elementary and middle school years. Also, education had a huge role in my life, my family's life. So in 2009, when the United States was still at the tail end of a recession, I took what seemed like a radical leap. I decided to quit my job, even though I was, at that point, an executive editor for all technology coverage for Forbes Media, which included the print magazine, the website and video. I decided to quit my job and learn something about education because I didn't think I was an expert. I wanted to take some time to understand what role I could serve in education. So I quit my job and became a volunteer IT-support person in the local schools. That meant that I went into the schools and helped work with teachers to make their technology work. The first thing I learned was the technology didn't work for schools. In 2009, most schools were still using desktop-based computers. Because schools had pretty thin budgets, they typically would buy a set of computers for what they called the "computer lab." Over the next couple of years, they would migrate those computers out to classrooms. As a result, in a school of, say 350 students, you might have six different operating systems. At the same time, most districts in America had an average of one IT-support person per 1000 students. The result was that nothing worked. Teachers were not Luddites. They were very, very practical. If you walked into a classroom and the lights didn't go on, you wouldn't use lights. Well, in this case, you couldn't reliably expect that computers would turn on and that they would have relevant and updated software. So they were just nonstarters. What happened in 2010 or thereabouts was (corporate) industry had already moved a ton of things into the cloud. A group of entrepreneurs started to realize that they could build cloud-based applications for schools. Over the course of my journalism career, I had spent a lot of time writing about the emergence of new industries, whether those were in pharmaceuticals or biotech or clean tech, nanotech, or fill-in-the-blank tech. It seemed to me that there was a collection of things that happened when a new industry was starting to emerge. One [phenonemena] was that you would have a group of entrepreneurs who were very excited about an idea --whatever the idea was. It could be cleantech, nanotech. In this case, it was education. Those entrepreneurs would typically be very, very, very smart, super-well educated, very highly motivated people who saw an opportunity to make a change in a field. They candidly wouldn't know much about the field (in this case, education). [Of course, education is particularly tricky because everyone thinks they're an education expert because I went to school. And if they have kids in the school, they think they're a double education expert. But in fact, they don't actually know much about what it means to be part of education as an industry.] In 2010 I got invited to a dinner in San Francisco. It was the third dinner [in a series] and the host was simply excited about the area. His first dinner drew 15 people. At the second dinner, he had 30 people. The dinner I attended had 60 people. It was a really crowded room--so crowded I couldn't even get to the bar to get a drink. And as I looked around at the crowd, I realized that there were two groups of people [there]. I saw this group of entrepreneurs--super smart, super ambitious--who were starting to circle around this idea of how can we use technology in education authentically. And then there was the second group of people, also fundamental in my mind in catalyzing a new industry: a group of funders. They are typically not the sort of famous names of Silicon Valley but they are investors, who have a little bit of money. They put the money out there, and it attracts and motivates the entrepreneurs. Then in my experience, there is the third leg of that stool. The third thing that has to happen for industry to actually formulate is there needs to be a "water cooler." There needs to be someplace where this emerging set of entrepreneurs, most of whom don't know each other yet can meet, can congregate, can share ideas, can share lessons, and [critically] where they can also meet their customers. Again, this group of [entreprenuers] doesn't know much about this early industry [that they are about to create]. They don't know their customers very well at all. And so, as a journalist, I knew that that was something I could do. So we started EdSurge with a couple of ideas in mind: Number one to be this "water cooler," to share that there was this emerging industry. Number two: to connect both the builders and the users of [education] technology because there was a big chasm between these two groups, a bigger chasm than I had seen in virtually any other industry I'd ever covered. And again I'd covered an awful lot. And then number three: As a technology reporter, I had spent a long time talking to engineers and was pretty convinced that if someone couldn't explain what they were doing, it wasn't on me, it was on them. So what I wanted to do is to give confidence to the educators--to the users of this [evolving] technology--that they could articulate their needs and their concerns [to EdTech builders]. Unless the customers are pretty clear and can articulate their needs and concerns, then the builders are never actually going to build the right products. So I wanted to give confidence to educators to elevate and amplify their voices. So we started EdSurge as a very simple thing: As a newsletter that I sent it to 50 people, who I thought might be interested in education. They were. They started sharing it. And we took off from there.

So I've given you kind of the broad context of the industrial background. Also at that first dinner that I went to, I met a few folks there and as I started to talk with people about this idea of, kind of trying to build a water cooler, way of bringing people together, someone said that "There's a guy I should know, he's been talking about some of the same ideas" and in that way, I actually got introduced to two of my original three co-founders. One had a background in education, had been a teacher and was doing some journalism. So he came with a perspective that was similar to mine. The second was someone who had been involved in education startups, who really wanted to build a database, kind of a catalogue to list all of the ed-tech products that he was starting to see. Then he had a long time collaborator who is an engineer, and he was interested in trying to build this database. So the four of us got together and the first thing we did, of course, was picking name. We went through some really awful names until we came up with EdSurge and then we really wanted to do these two things, publish a newsletter and then ultimately build a database. So we started the newsletter first, started publishing it on a weekly basis, and we looked for every single cheap and free tool that we could use to help us. So we started on MailChimp (if you're only sending out 50 newsletters, won't charge you anything). So, we started working from there, and then we started to talk with a lot of people in the industry about this interest and need and desire to build a catalog and ultimately found some people who were willing to help support that work. So the first thing that we really got funding for, was actually building out this, which we ultimately called the Ed-Tech Index.

No one wants to fund media companies. Part of the reason for that is because the business model for media companies is really challenging. It does not lend itself to the typical product trajectory and expectations that many people have when they do venture funding. That said what was the case that people believed that when an industry is very young, traditional publications, even web-based publications, basically any publications can't afford to write about it because it's too small and there simply won't be enough readers. Also, at that stage, the traditional education publications really had almost no expertise and marginal interest in technology and what role technology could serve. So there was a real gap and a real need in the market place. And when we talked to people about funding EdSurge, we said that we felt that there was a model that was very much like other newsletter and media organizations at that point in time, which was we would build a collection of different revenue streams (some of which would involve advertising or events), and by advertising, I meant, advertising breaks into a bunch of different buckets. There's jobs advertising, sort of just adds, sponsored content. So we felt that we could build a pretty strong business with a collection of different business models (this goes against a lot of what Silicon Valley loves to say "You must be laser focused on one thing". So we were laser focused on serving our readers. But in terms of the business model, smart people in the media world will tell you that there are probably 30 or 40 different ways that media companies try to build revenue. Pick your five favorite ones and you have your business model. So it was a very tough sell with investors, but at the end of the day, we wound up discovering was that people who were very interested in the mission of education and building a collection or portfolio of companies that would focus on education, recognized that we were fundamental to the ecosystem. So our initial funders were people who felt that we're going to amplify the work that they were doing or the investments that they were doing across the board. So one of our first investors, of course, was from the media world was Don Graham, then publisher of The Washington Post, owner of The Washington Post. We're very proud to have him as a fundamental sort of initial seat investor. Other early investors again included GSV Capital (which became one of the organizations that was very involved in funding and supporting education technology ventures across the board), and other mission-aligned organizations such as New School Venture Fund (which ultimately became Reach Capital, which has the largest portfolio of startup education technology companies), then another group which is exclusively devoted to education technology. So once again, we found where we had struck a chord with people who wanted to see the industry grow, with mission focused investors, and that's where we found our initial support. We were growing very quickly in terms of users and readers of the newsletters. So people were very excited about the trajectory of growth that we had. It was entirely sort of word of mouth at that point and stayed word of mouth growth throughout the course of the time that we ran EdSurge and, we ran one conference, we saw tremendous interest from educators and entrepreneurs in this conference that was very exciting to people and we also began running job ads, and that was also a very, very interesting and very fertile area for additional growths. And so we definitely had to demonstrate that we had the ability to both continue to deliver on the media side, but also begin to ramp revenue. There was one additional area of revenue that we did develop, which was candidly a little bit tricky and is particularly unique to mission driven enterprises, which is that we did a lot of research projects for non-profits and that was a business that could have led us down a path of consulting. Consulting and media are not comfortable bedfellows. So, sort of walking the line between how much we could do that kind of work and still maintain a reputation as an independent voice on education technology, was probably one of the the tricky balancing acts that we had to manage throughout the course of EdSurge.