EdTech: Rasheed Behrooznia Of Transact Campus + CBORD On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education
Be willing to fail. It may sound somewhat cliche, but you have to be open to failing and quickly pivoting. Impactful solutions require big swings, and sometimes you take a swing and miss. And that’s OK! Step back, recalibrate and go forward again.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. 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 Rasheed Behrooznia.
Rasheed Behrooznia, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Campus ID and Commerce for Transact Campus + CBORD, is an accomplished engineering, product, and technology leader who has demonstrated a remarkable ability to deliver impactful technology solutions to universities across the globe. Rasheed’s Campus ID division of over 1300 higher ed institutions has streamlined operations for upward of 200 universities with mobile credentials technology, where they have issued more than 3 million credentials, helping schools meet the rising technological demands of Gen Z students.
Throughout his career, Rasheed has excelled in managing global teams, showcasing flexible leadership in both hardware and software development, and his journey toward enhancing the campus experiences of millions of students is a testament to the transformative power of engineering and innovation.
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 share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
When I’m talking to my friends, describing what I do, I’ll usually explain that we provide the technology that the campus leaders and administrators use to support their students, and that our technology is what most students use on a day-to-day basis. People often have a light bulb moment and say, “you mean like the student ID card,” and believe it or not, a lot of times they’ll show me their old ID!
One day while shopping with my son, a salesperson asked about my work. When I gave my usual explanation, she excitedly shared that she attends Point Loma Nazarene University, which is one of our clients that recently went live with their Transact mobile credential. Then she pulled up her phone and proudly showed us her digital student ID in her phone’s wallet. It was such a cool moment for everyone, and I was proud my son got to see what I do, and the impact it has on student lives.
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’ve been very fortunate to have several mentors throughout my career, but one relationship really stands out.
In my mid-to-late 20s, I was leading a small software team of about five people when my manager approached me about running a test team for a Department of Defense project. This required rigorous, highly specific testing methods. When I admitted I had no direct experience in test engineering, she simply said, “You’re gonna be fine.” She believed in me before I believed in myself.
I got a lot of learning through that — sometimes the hard way — but gained invaluable experience. Some of the biggest lessons I learned here were about learning from your team, respecting those that came before you, and to being open about what you bring to the table and what you don’t. About a year and half later, the same leader entrusted me with leading the entire engineering department, which was about fifty people. Here I am, in my late twenties, getting these opportunities. I often reflect, maybe it’s one of those things where it’s better to be lucky than good, but when leaders see the potential in you before you see it yourself, it can transform your career.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have a few that I that I really love. The first one is a proverb that’s been said in a number of different ways, but the way I’ll say it is “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” I believe that wholeheartedly. Don’t be afraid to get started. You might not know how it’s all going to end up, and it’s a long journey, but you have to jump in.
And the second comes from someone I’ve always been a big fan of and followed throughout his career, Kobe Bryant. He said, “Great things come from hard work and perseverance.” I love that mentality because there are no short cuts. You’ve got to put in the work.
My third is from none other than Mike Tyson, who said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You know you’re going to hit some rough patches along the way, so you need to be adaptable. You have to pivot. Your plan may be great, but you’re going to get punched in the mouth a couple times, and you’ve got to be able to roll with it.
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?
First, and it may seem obvious, but I don’t see it quite as much as you’d imagine, is have respect for everyone, no matter what. Have respect for the people that are around you, and a respect for the history of the people that came before you. Once, I crossed paths with a leader of mine at a banquet. He managed over 150,000 people, but when we met, he was able to make a reference to a very specific part of a project I had just worked on. The fact that he could do that made me feel very seen and respected.
Another time, I saw a general manager field a number of challenging, aggressive questions from his team, and he handled it gracefully without getting emotional. Later, I saw him in the breakroom, and I asked him about it. He said, “Rasheed, what’s always worked for me is just to treat people with respect.” I’ll never forget that moment and that lesson.
The second most important trait for me is authenticity. It’s good to learn from others and model behaviors, but at the end of the day, you have to be authentic. Everyone brings something to the table, so being authentic helps you be the true person you are, but it also can help your team. There have been countless times I’ve turned to my team and said, “I have an opinion, but I’d love to hear what you’re thinking,” because I know they bring a perspective or a skillset that may be exceptionally valuable, especially in areas where I am not an expert and my team is. Sounds obvious, but it’s good to be open with your team or peers where you want them to provide more input. As a leader, I think it’s crucial to ask for input before you make impactful decisions.
My third trait, I’d say, is having a learning mindset. I’m exceptionally curious, and I’ve always gravitated towards people who want to learn, listen and spend time taking input before they act. Listening goes a long way with building trust, and it helps to better inform you, so its win-win.
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?
At a high level, our mission is to make the operations and the lives easier for the administrators on a campus. We want to make sure that the leaders have information at their fingertips, so they have the resources and the analytics to be able to provide optimal operations on their campus.
There are pressures on everyone in education right now, but especially on schools. They need to find a way they can operate with the resources they have, amidst an ever-changing and evolving environment.
How do you think your technology can address this?
We’re doing that both through the technology that they see and touch, but also things in the background. Whether it’s infrastructure that we’re building into the cloud, making their system elastic, geo-redundant and scalable, or ensuring the highest level of security and compliance standards are in place; it’s all done to make their lives easier and ensure the student experience is maximized.
If you think about what a student has on their plate on any given day, and all the different interactions that they’re having to navigate, the little free time they may have in a given day, it’s obvious that they could use help making their experiences more manageable. So, if they need to quickly order some food or have safe access to campus buildings, we don’t want them to be burdened in any way. We believe we make their experiences easier, and maybe a little bit more cool along the way.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?
I went to high school in a smaller town, and coming to University of San Diego was a big experience for me. College gave me access to things that I just didn’t have when I was growing up, and I loved everything about that. I loved learning. I loved seeing new perspectives. As it is for many people, college was an eye-opening experience for me, so my passion for higher ed started there.
But later in life, when I became the VP of engineering at a previous company, one of my responsibilities was to support the internship program, and I got to work very closely with the mentors of that program. Listening to students and getting fresh perspectives and ideas on what we were working on was so exciting. And as that program grew and we added more universities, I started forming relationships with the administrators on campuses. Being that close to the education space sparked something that I realized I was really passionate about. When the opportunity to join Transact Campus + CBORD came along, to serve the higher education community, that was a dream come true.
How do you think your technology might change the world?
The same way that smartphone technology has changed the way people navigate, pay and communicate, I’d say our student ID technology is similarly transforming campus life.
One thing we’re very passionate about is continuing to challenge how things are done. Whether it’s developing new technology or supporting the mission to the cloud, we want to continue to disrupt ourselves. We want to leave things better than when we found them.
Back in 2009, we believed a new technology could emerge in higher ed. We made a bet on near field communication (NFC) being a technology that could revolutionize many of the things happening on campuses. Transact invested heavily in putting NFC into first-party hardware and partnered with companies who were also deploying NFC as part of their technology stack. But it didn’t stop there, our leaders started knocking on the doors of some of the largest companies on the planet about integrating this technology into their phones.
After working for years on the technology and these collaborations, Transact Campus + CBORD went live with the digital student ID in 2017, as the first company to integrate IDs with digital wallets in higher ed. Since then, more than 3 million students have provisioned a student ID into their wallet and use it every day to open dorm doors, pay for meals, attend campus events, and navigate their environment seamlessly with just their phones.
We think this is making a difference in higher ed for these students.
Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
When I was an engineering student back at University of San Diego, one semester I had to take a class called Engineering Ethics, and I remember at the time thinking, “this is a different class than I’m used to having. What is this and how does it relate to what I’m doing?” What I came to understand is the importance of effectively thinking through unintended consequences.
Having a creative or innovative idea is not enough to bring something to market. You need to think about the full lifecycle, supporting end-of-life, disposal, how it can be used for good and bad, and how you can ensure safety of your users. You need to consider what could happen, both favorably and unfavorably. Obviously, you can’t always know everything that’s going to happen in the future, but we take a thoughtful approach to life cycle management, and we understand a product’s consequences before we bring it to market.
How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?
The speed of technology continues to increase, and I don’t see that slowing down. So, what we’re trying to do is focus on how we can have scalability and expandability in our system to support the emergence of new technology. We don’t know exactly what things are going to look like ten years down the road, but we want a scalable, elastic architecture that can adapt and pivot as things change.
There are going to be more integration of AI concepts in technology and solutions, and we’re all interested in learning about how that will responsibly affect higher ed. There will also be changes in how the student experience looks, given their access to technology. They’re inundated with information and their school-life balance continues to blend, so they’re going to have more flexibility in where they get their educational content and how they experience classes.
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 . Don’t start with the solution, start with the ‘why.’ Ask yourself why you are trying to solve something, or what you’re trying to accomplish, and your journey will lead you to the solution.
2 . Find your conviction. When you’re guided by passion and conviction, it means you’ll understand a problem more deeply, which will more naturally lead you to the conclusion you want to come to.
3 . Be willing to fail. It may sound somewhat cliche, but you have to be open to failing and quickly pivoting. Impactful solutions require big swings, and sometimes you take a swing and miss. And that’s OK! Step back, recalibrate and go forward again.
4 . Keep accessibility at the forefront. Everything we do starts with accessibility, and then we build UIs and standards from there. What I’ve discovered is that the best solutions are designed for people with needs, because they help everyone.
5 . Embrace feedback. When you’re passionate about bringing something to market that you believe will solve major problems and change the world, it can be hard to accept feedback. Sometimes feedback will challenge what you originally thought, but that’s what makes it so critical. It’s not always easy to embrace that feedback, but it will shape the course of how that new solution will be received by the market.
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?
When you’re talking about personal information and data collection, there are a number of standards that have to be adhered to, and we focus very heavily on ensuring that we’re compliant across those standards. But compliance is just where you start. We also ask ourselves, “what are the problems we’re trying to solve? And what kind of data do our clients really need access to as they’re navigating the problems they’re facing?” Often the most useful data isn’t tied to individuals but are patterns that can be looked at in the aggregate. We’re focused on protecting personal data while helping our clients do more and do their jobs better. We want administrators to be able leverage machine learning and aggregation of data across multiple input sources to provide a more robust operational picture, so they can make data-driven solutions.
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?
It’s the hard problems that are the most rewarding to solve. Something that has always resonated with me is the idea that nothing easy is worth doing. Taking on greater issues is more difficult, but they come with greater reward. You’ve got to be so passionate about it that you can work through the challenges you encounter. But if you start with passion and conviction, you’ll be going down a road that will be filled with a number of exciting outcomes.
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.
I have three. I know I won’t get the opportunity anymore, but I would have loved to sit down with Kobe Bryant and talk to him. The way he approached life and work was inspiring to me.
Another individual whose passion for business and flexibility has always been motivating to me is Robert Kiyosaki. I’ve read a number of his books and found that his resilience and approach to the challenges he’s faced to be fascinating. He’s navigated a complex business environment and been able to achieve so much. He also shares candidly about his experience, and so I know sitting with him would be enlightening.
And my third is my son’s and my favorite football player, Josh Allen. Josh seems like a great person and I love his leadership. He seems like someone that is genuine and good, works hard and plays with passion, but also seems like someone you could have a good time with. So, I’d love to get a chance to meet him, and God knows my son would love that!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best place to reach me is on LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
