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Posts by Jen Carolan

Steve Jobs on Programming Greatness

A few months back Fast Company ran an in-depth feature story on Steve Jobs. The material came from a previously lost interview conducted by tech journalist and former Apple employee Robert Cringely. The interview took place in 1995 when Steve Jobs was CEO of NeXt computer and Pixar. The unedited interview was released on iTunes in a documentary titled Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.  It’s captivating, and as Washington Post reporter Michael […] Read more

Towards a Better Place

I recently spoke with an administrator at a large urban school district and he expressed his frustration with the sheer number of education vendors he is charged with managing. He has no idea which teachers are using which technologies and what’s working. Similarly, the infographic below depicts the numerous technology applications a K–12 teacher might be tapping into throughout his/her day.No doubt, most schools are in an awkward stage of technology integration […] Read more

The NewSchools Seed Fund

NewSchools Venture Fund is excited to announce the launch of the Seed Fund, an initiative to support high-impact, K-12 education technology companies. We’ve been supporting education entrepreneurs for 13 years through four funds and have invested over $180 million dollars in some of the leading education organizations—including, Aspire, KIPP, BetterLesson, GreatSchools, Revolution Foods and Education Elements. We’ve had the great privilege of collaborating with many entrepreneurs during the earliest stages—including Don Shalvey […] Read more

Supporting Superman (and Woman)

How does NewSchools support education entrepreneurs?  I get this question more than any other and not just from those outside the education community so I wanted to give some real examples of how NewSchools helps entrepreneurs. Education venture philanthropy came on the scene in 1999 when then Stanford GSB student Kim Smith, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a few others (including Brook Byers and Dave Whorton) incubated the […] Read more

For Profit, For Good?

When starting a new venture, one of the first questions that education entrepreneurs wrestle with is the legal structure.  There are no hard fast rules to determine legal structure – it depends on your goals, as Jim Fruchterman so nicely lays out in the Stanford Social Review article “For Love or Lucre.”  Once upon a time, starting a for-profit education company might raise suspicions about your motives for doing good—now, that’s less […] Read more