EdTech: Jack Januszewski Of Spring Mountain Capital On Technology That Can Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

Collaborate with stakeholders from ideation to implementation. Much has been written about stakeholder capitalism and related concepts in recent years. In driving innovation in education, entrepreneurs and builders have to deal with one immense challenge in particular, which we usually call the “multi-stakeholder problem.” Education is one of the rare sectors in the economy, second perhaps to the food and beverage sector, that every individual has experienced in some form or fashion. Ask 100 people on the street about “what a good teacher is” and you will likely get 100 different answers. Moreover, the education sector also has many different “user personas” that most plainly manifests in an ever-changing end-point user on one side (students), and a generally more static user on the other (educators, administrators, etc.). Education entrepreneurs need to navigate these issues with humility, meeting students where they are while balancing the needs of teachers, parents, educators, administrators, and other stakeholders who have a vested interest in improving the life of students. The best advice I could give on this is to clearly identify and define your product’s users, secondary users, and all possible stakeholders and build practices internally to constantly seek feedback in order to improve your product offering.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad reputation. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jack Januszewski.

Jack Januszewski is a Vice President in Spring Mountain Capital (SMC), LP’s Social Impact Group, where he co-leads the Education Technology practice at West Harlem Innovation Network (WHIN). In this capacity, he currently serves on the Board of Directors of Hiveclass, an EdTech company that provides online Physical Education content to K-12 schools, and IEP&Me, an EdTech company that provides a compliance and management platform for Individualized Educational Plans, 504 plans, MTSS, and others. Prior to joining SMC, he served as President and COO of Lemma, a Philadelphia-based online mathematics education technology company that partners with college access organizations to provide students with high-quality education technology solutions and college preparatory materials. He received B.A.s, cum laude, in History and Romance Languages from Boston College and serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Governors at Blair Academy in New Jersey, as well as a Trustee of the Katama Airfield Trust on Martha’s Vineyard.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, a leafy and affluent town in Fairfield County that is home to many New York City commuters who work in law, finance, and other major sectors. I benefited from attending a local private school that my mother had started her career at as an elementary teacher — a fact of my childhood that deeply influenced my initial interest in education. From sixth grade on, I wanted to be a history teacher and constantly read books on a range of different subjects related to that field. I attended Blair Academy, a boarding school in New Jersey, for high school, and Boston College for my undergrad, where I studied History and Romance Languages. As I entered my senior year, I was prepared to continue my schooling and eventually achieve my goal of becoming a history professor. As I later found out, life had a different plan for me, but I do think I will one day find myself back in the classroom in some way or another.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of our portfolio companies, AtlasXomics, identified a need to get additional office space in New Haven, Connecticut. Spring Mountain Capital’s Social Impact Group has an investment mandate that includes a small allocation into what we call “Portfolio Amplifiers.” This allows us to make investments in companies or ideas that synergistically benefit our core portfolio, which focuses on the Life Sciences, Education, and Food and Beverage sectors.

As a result of this, I jumped on a train to New Haven and to look for commercial office space. Eventually, I identified a small office near Yale University and, rather than enter into a discussion about leasing, my team chose to purchase the property outright and spin up a new company that would sell co-working space to our existing portfolio companies, university spin-outs, and other selected local companies.

Given all my work on identifying, negotiating, and closing the purchase of this property, my team decided that I was best suited to run the underlying business itself after closing the purchase. Obviously, this was not part of my job description — I learned a lot about real estate on the spot — but I’ve found this aspect of my work to be interesting, educational, and fun.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I have too many individuals to list. I would be nowhere without the support of my family. My Mom (Kim), Dad (David), Brother (Charlie), Sister (Whitney), Grandmother (“DeeDee”), and Dog (Dustin, who just turned 14!), are a constant source of support, inspiration, and love in my life.

On a professional level, I’d like to highlight a colleague of mine, Pavel Greenfield, Ph.D., who took a bet on me right as I graduated college to be his first hire at Lemma. Pavel is a professor of Mathematics at Drexel University, where, after struggling to find a mathematics textbook that aligned with his philosophy for some time, he developed the Lemma platform. Lemma is an online content creation and curation, learning and assessment platform for mathematics. Pavel brought me onto the team as Lemma’s first external hire in 2017 to drive our business development efforts. That experience taught me so much about education, entrepreneurship, and “startup life” more generally — and that lived experiences influence my life in a myriad of ways to this day. Pavel’s commitment to his work, which is only eclipsed by his commitment as a father and husband, remains a constant source of inspiration to me. I will always be grateful that Pavel believed in me back then, particularly because I probably wouldn’t hire my younger self today if he forced me to.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I keep a note on my phone with many quotes, so this question is particularly difficult. However, one I really like is a quote from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” While Baldwin was discussing the importance of writers as socio-cultural and political critics, among other topics, I find a lot of meaning in his statement. In my opinion, Baldwin puts words to a duality — or even a sort of “tension” — between the necessity of confronting challenges that drive impactful change and the reality that some issues remain beyond our capacity to alter. More often than not, I take the glass-half-full approach, trusting in our ability to shape a better future through honesty, collective effort, and the willingness to confront difficult challenges head on.

To balance that quite philosophical quote above, here’s another one I like with a lot more levity: “Never take life too seriously… you’ll never make it out alive.” I believe I first heard it in Van Wilder, but I can’t really say that I live my life in-line with that movie.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I’m not sure I would describe myself as such, but a few traits I’m particularly proud of would be:

1. Industriousness: I credit my work ethic as a trait that has been particularly impactful in my career thus far. I have a very serious level of energy when I am put on or self-select a particular project. This has been described by some of my friends and associates as more of an obsessiveness, but I genuinely derive an immense amount of personal satisfaction from working very hard on complicated problems.
2. Honesty and Integrity: I believe that my candor and transparent nature have been particularly helpful in my career to date. While it might be naïve, I believe that treating all parties in my professional life (even those who might be sitting on the “other side of the table,” so to speak) as colleagues has served me well. I aspire to be radically transparent in my work, and try my best to treat those whom I interact with the common decency I’d hope to receive from them.
3. Cooperativeness: I deeply value the opinions of my colleagues, teammates, and contemporaries. I do not subscribe to the belief that “if you want a job done right, do it yourself.” In education, teachers, policymakers, and industry experts often use the aphorism, “It takes a village” when describing or delineating the most effective ways of educating young people at scale. I am proud of the ways in which I apply this axiom to how I conduct myself professionally and use it to build consensus and move teams towards a common goal.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

SMC’s Social Impact Group’s goal is to invest in companies that are attempting to build solutions to the disproportionate health, educational, and socioeconomic outcomes in historically overlooked communities and geographies. When it comes to education, I hope to follow the footsteps of other investors in the space I admire — such as the teams at Rethink Education, Reach Capital, Owl Ventures, Lumos Capital, among many others — by investing in a cohort of innovative education solutions that are combating systemic issues in our system.

If I were to attempt to pick one problem I see that’s impacting the education ecosystem from a venture capital lens, I would have to broadly summarize it as the problem of time. While we are all prisoners of the time we have in a day to achieve our goals, educators are particularly constrained as they’re often scrambling to meet their administrative obligations while still being required to build a positive learning environment for students. A friend of mine once described this problem as the “hands, head, and heart” issue in education. “Problems of the Heart” refer to how teachers feel about their careers and circumstances. “Problems of the Head” refer to how an educator’s practice is prepared and delivered. “Problems of the Hands” refers to the practical side of being an educator (e.g. designing lesson plans, grading assessments, managing classrooms, communicating with parents, etc.). This is where EdTech is best suited, at least in the relative near-term, to impact the education space. By assisting with the administrative and operational aspects of the education system, EdTech solutions will give more time back to practitioners. With that additional time, they can focus on the more vexing “Problems of the Head.” For example, one of our portfolio companies, IEP&Me, provides a digital platform that helps students, parents, and educators better understand, manage, and collaborate on Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) to improve accessibility and advocacy in special education.

It’s up to us as a society to collectively work on solving Problems of the Heart. I’d start by eliminating “those who can, do” from our popular lexicon and by paying teachers more, but that type of change is beyond my job description.

How do you think your technology can address this?

As an investor, I’m not building a specific technology that might change the world. Rather, I am investing in a range of companies that I believe may do so. However, I do believe that our specific approach of early-stage venture investing is uniquely positioned to assist entrepreneurs on their journey.

We seek to partner very closely with our portfolio companies at SMC. We roll up our sleeves and work directly on specific projects where we have the domain expertise to best assist them. To use some financial jargon, we identify points of entry where our value-added strategy assists in “de-risking” an investment ahead of the company raising additional capital and scale. This approach of investing “in the gaps,” as my team refers to it, allows us to be true partners with our companies.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

Earlier I discussed my desire to be a history teacher growing up. So why did I want to teach? And why did I focus on humanities in my schooling?

Aside from my general love of learning and being inspired by my mother, one of my teachers back in middle school offhandedly suggested that I “might not be a math person” when I was very young and struggling with the subject. This offhand remark, which I am certain was not meant in a malicious way, deeply impacted my perception of my own self-worth, my intelligence, my ability to persevere, and had the effect of paving the road for the remainder of my educational career.

As I’m now working in financial services, I think it’s safe to say that my teacher back then was wrong. But more importantly, that one statement, one that truly shaped a large trajectory of my life, continues to impact me to this day. My goal in investing in education is to drive us towards a world where young students are not told they’re a specific “type” of learner or that they are “more suited” to one topic or another. That middle school teacher of mine did not intend to hold me back; they were playing with the hand they were dealt. Arming educators with tools that help them better identify the learning needs of individual students — something that can only be done through advancements in educational technology — is the only way to achieve this long term goal of truly personalizing learning.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I do see risks of excessively relying on the for-profit sector to “save” particular sectors. In education, I genuinely believe that shifting away from government or state-funded efforts at democratizing access to high-quality educational resources, schools, systems, and pathways will have an immensely deleterious effect on outcomes. I believe that this potential unintended consequence is a completely reasonable drawback towards venture investing in EdTech products and companies.

More generally, for EdTech solutions, more research is needed across the sector when solutions are being ideated, developed, and implemented. Much hay has been made about excessive screen-time for school aged children (linked here is a more academic study, but just Google your local news and I’m sure you’ll see something). Excessive reliance on technology tools could have unintended negative consequences across the space. I’m not at all a believer in the idea that educators can be replaced by a technology tool, but I sometimes worry about the chatter I see in education innovation that indirectly or directly calls for this sort of reality.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

I encourage you to review the work of the team at HolonIQ on this matter, as they’ve conducted periodic surveys on this topic that have shown some very interesting results.

Education policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and innovators have all predicted imminent and radical revolutions in education for hundreds of years. For example, in 1915, Thomas Edison predicted that by 1925, textbooks would be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages. Similar predictions have appeared with calculators, PCs, the internet, and MOOCs. Today, recent advancements in neuroscience and learning sciences, greater general awareness of educational policy, and artificial intelligence have set the stage for similar claims to be made… only to be later proven wrong.

However, I genuinely believe that this time is fundamentally different from previous eras, and that we are poised to revolutionize how we teach and learn. Thoughtfully designed, developed, and implemented educational technology solutions — products that keep issues such as equity, accessibility, and efficacy at their core — are poised to enable this predicted revolution. Even if the various predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market are 10% correct, millions of individuals will need to transition into new careers in the midst of their careers in the coming decades. EdTech can assist in meeting this need by augmenting and bringing efficiencies to the existing system.

Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

1 . Collaborate with stakeholders from ideation to implementation. Much has been written about stakeholder capitalism and related concepts in recent years. In driving innovation in education, entrepreneurs and builders have to deal with one immense challenge in particular, which we usually call the “multi-stakeholder problem.” Education is one of the rare sectors in the economy, second perhaps to the food and beverage sector, that every individual has experienced in some form or fashion. Ask 100 people on the street about “what a good teacher is” and you will likely get 100 different answers. Moreover, the education sector also has many different “user personas” that most plainly manifests in an ever-changing end-point user on one side (students), and a generally more static user on the other (educators, administrators, etc.). Education entrepreneurs need to navigate these issues with humility, meeting students where they are while balancing the needs of teachers, parents, educators, administrators, and other stakeholders who have a vested interest in improving the life of students. The best advice I could give on this is to clearly identify and define your product’s users, secondary users, and all possible stakeholders and build practices internally to constantly seek feedback in order to improve your product offering.

2 . Watch your half-life. Sometimes education entrepreneurs are former educators, school leaders, or other individuals with lived experiences from the classroom that inform their product/solution dichotomy. This is a huge positive in my opinion, as I believe in entrepreneurs who are brave enough to build solutions to problems with which they have lived experience. However, watch your half-life. While this relates to point one above, I use the term “half-life” as a nifty measurement that calculates the amount of time an entrepreneur has been removed from a classroom. As time passes, your genuine knowledge of what is happening in the classroom quickly decays. While all entrepreneurs are necessarily confident in their convictions, the best education entrepreneurs build boards of advisors with practitioners and/or students who are currently in the classroom, create regular feedback sessions, go to industry conferences, and are constantly seeking for ways in which they might be a step behind, rather than assurances they’re ahead.

3. Collaborating is better than uprooting. If you build it, they won’t come. The problems and opportunities in the education sector are so numerous and so wicked that sometimes entrepreneurs attempt to build a new system that will replace every app, learning tool, information system, and rostering tool. We love ambitious entrepreneurs, and we don’t discount these types of goals as being too lofty or ambitious. However, the best education products approach the sector with humility and seek to build easy-to-use tools that integrate with existing systems, rather than a comprehensive and total replacement to the existing paradigm. Building these “trojan horse” products can eventually scale into the all-encompassing solution that a well-constructed and stakeholder-aligned education technology platform might aim to achieve in the long run.

4 . Measure what matters. I am stealing the adage from John Doerr, of course. Measuring educational outcomes is a frequently debated topic amongst educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and students. For education entrepreneurs, clearly identifying the advantages and shortcomings of your specific product is a crucial component in achieving success. Do not conflate correlation with causation; your claims will catch up to you eventually. In tandem with developing and implementing your product (all while hopefully using the takeaways in 1–3 above), clearly identify the specific performance indicators your solution is able to acquire, determine the specific relevance these indicators have to your stakeholders, and communicate these points clearly and with humility. It is far better, in my personal opinion, to under-promise and over-deliver.

5 . Filter out the noise. As I alluded to earlier, education is one of the most “hot button” issues in our society. Everyone has opinions, and entrepreneurs will usually have critics in various forms regardless of how effective and useful their solution may be. While being responsive to shifting consumer demands and pivoting in new policy or regulatory environments is an essential skill for any entrepreneur, education entrepreneurs occasionally have to have the courage of their convictions — particularly with curricular products — and provide material and learning experiences that have been vetted as being pedagogically effective. If a student or parent reads that 1 x 1 = 2 or that the earth is flat on the Internet, you don’t have to compromise your product to meet that consumer demand.

In the world of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

It’s one of the most sensitive issues in the education space, similar to PII in technology and EHRs in healthcare. First, EdTech entrepreneurs need to deeply study how and where they will be collecting student data in any form. Management teams cannot bury their heads in the sand and simply bet on the quality of existing technology and cybersecurity platforms to protect them. Rather, the ethical handling of user data in education requires a combination of strong data governance policies (e.g. cybersecurity, administrative access at the company level, and fundamental platform architecture), compliance with current regulations (e.g. FERPA, COPPA, GDPR, CCPA, etc.), and other best practices in matters like privacy and security (e.g. anonymization of sensitive data, transparent communications with users, etc.). Finally, the emergence of artificial intelligence has also introduced other important discussions around ensuring bias mitigation and fair decision making assessments when such engines are used.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

To put it simply: go for it.

If you’re interested in impact investing, I’d say that we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift due to the confluence of technological innovation and unprecedented socio-cultural, political, environmental, and economic change. I firmly believe that as millennials, Gen Z, Gen A and beyond get older and acquire wealth over the coming decades, more and more attention will be paid to what that capital is actually doing. As more socially conscious and impact-oriented individuals acquire wealth and savings, investment managers will need to allocate into impactful ventures as a result.

If you’re startup curious, go for it. In my years as an investor at SMC, I’ve had the immense pleasure of directly partnering with Joe Titus and Paul Suhr, the co-founders of Hiveclass; Bridgette Leslie and Coretta Martin, the co-founders of IEP&Me, and Reva McEachern and Katie McPollom, the co-founders of Lessonbee. One of my closest friends, Luke Mairo, left his job at a bank to co-found Voltpost, an electronic vehicle charging company in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

I am constantly inspired by the grit, passion, and work ethic of the entrepreneurs and founders I engage with, whether they’re in our portfolio or not. It is truly one of the hardest professions out there. I can do nothing but offer an open line of communication and whatever support I’m able to provide to any entrepreneur who is brave enough to be one.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Ray Dalio. I mentioned Radical Transparency in an earlier response, but I would really enjoy discussing some of his more recent work on the global economy and history — two topics I am immensely passionate about.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can check out Spring Mountain Capital’s website, my LinkedIn, as well as the websites of some of our portfolio companies that I mentioned in this interview (Hiveclass, IEP&Me, and Lessonbee).

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.