About Me
I grew up in Michigan, surrounded by water, but far from the ocean, far from the surf. Convinced that the stork dropped me off in the wrong state, I moved to California in my early 20s. But my westward sojourn was brief. The company that I moved there to found took off. All within a year I had fallen in love with the idea of surfing, bought a surfboard, then started working 60-hour weeks, and subsequently moved to Chicago to continue to grow my education business. And then to start a second one.
My first education business was a tutoring company that provided government-funded tutoring to more than 100,000 students in failing public schools. One major hurdle we had to overcome was training adults to be tutors. I spent years studying how to train people from all walks of life - college students, parents, lawyers, social workers - how to be tutors. I created an online application that assessed their skills and trained more than 10,000 adults. I became an expert at teaching adults new skills in order to prepare them to work with at-risk students in inner-city schools.
My second education business creates math learning games and is used to replace textbooks in classrooms across the country. A big challenge we faced was managing a team of 40 writers, artists, and programmers - all of whom needed to learn new skills to create our product. In order to meet this challenge, I created online tools to track, measure, and educate a diverse workforce on the needs of our users. I became an expert in molding experienced professionals into the team members that we required to build a groundbreaking educational video game. In 2012 that video game was voted the best K-12 educational product in the country.
Fast forward a few years. I took an exit from the company I founded. Met a girl. Moved to the beach to have a baby. (See girl, baby, and beach in the above pic.) Suddenly, at 39, I found myself with an abundance of time on my hands, and living across the street from one of the best waves in Southern California. The only question that remained was: Was it too late to learn to surf?
After spending my entire career studying how we learn, I decided to turn the lens on myself. I’ve studied how young people learn in order to create groundbreaking educational products used in schools. I’ve studied how older people learn in order to train them to take on new careers later in life and to manage their ongoing success. After a career dedicated to the science of learning, I've become my own case study—tackling big-wave surfing and decoding the essence of acquiring new skills, no matter the age.
I’ve spent my entire adult life studying what it takes to learn new things, whether you’re young or old, and I’m deeply passionate about continuing to learn new things for the rest of my life. (And I really love surfing.)
I live in Cardiff, CA, with my two girls.