Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Welcome to the big leagues.

Favorite moment of the day: sitting in a conference room with a former CEO of Teach For America, talking about how to make life easier for Montessori teachers. Other attendees included a former SVP of Strategy for Teach For America, a tech entrepreneur previously listed on the "Top 40 Under 40," an engineer who built up a platform to remotely monitor the insulin levels of his diabetic daughter in his spare time, and Jeremy who originally built Transparent Classroom on nights and weekends to support the launch of a Montessori school.

There's nothing but all-stars in this room: welcome to the big leagues. It feels like I'm standing among giants, I'm scared witless thinking I'm so outclassed and under-qualified, and yet they still fully engage with my input. It's a positively thrilling experience.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Starting a new chapter: Transparent Classroom.

Today marks the beginning of new journey in life: I have left a rewarding and stable job with my previous employer, Amazon Web Services, to go pursue a rare and exciting opportunity working with Jeremy Lightsmith as Engineer #2 on his startup, Transparent Classroom.

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Transparent Classroom is a classroom management software platform for Montessori teachers and admins. It has grown 3.5x annually for the past two years, with over 270 schools now signed up, and is commonly referred to as the most user-friendly and useful platform in the Montessori edtech space. Jeremy accomplished all this over four years as the sole engineer while also wearing all the other hats necessary to get a startup off the ground: CEO, CTO, CFO, admin, customer support rep, trainer, sysadmin, sales rep, and designer (to name a few). Oh, and he's also a husband, parent, Agile coach, and facilitator. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to work with someone so passionate to improve education and so capable to actually make a difference with a product that delights users.

I'm thrilled to work with a small and scrappy team, all of us dedicated to improving education and the lives of teachers and children. I can now apply my skills in software engineering to make the world a better place, which was what drew me to programming in the first place.

I would like to thank Jeremy for the opportunity to join the team, to my family for their support and understanding as I give up a perfectly good job at one of the biggest names in software to go pursue my passion, to my friends and community that supported me as I deliberated over the decision and offered such valuable advice. I am so fortunate to be able to take this risk, and part of being able to conquer my fears of the unknown comes from the support and growth through being part of this amazing community.