Jennifer Carolan spent seven years teaching history before joining NewSchools Venture Fund, where she now co-leads a seed fund for ed-tech startups. NewSchools applies venture-capital rigor to education while prioritizing impact over pure financial returns, backing everything from charter schools to teacher-training programs.
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Yeah, a lot of people ask how does a teacher end up running a venture philanthropy fund. And I had taught for 7 years, loved teaching, but felt I had plateaued and really wasn't meeting the needs of my students very well. What were you teaching? I was teaching U.S. history and then my last year I actually taught teachers differentiated instruction.
And for what age group?
Middle school and high school.
Okay.
So I felt like I had plateaued a bit, decided to go to grad school, came to Stanford, got my Master's in Curriculum and Teacher Development and I started hanging out a little bit at the business school and I saw Kim Smith speak and she was the founder of NewSchools Venture Fund and she talked about this idea of hybrid teams, bringing educators together with MBAs and entrepreneurial people and people that had more of a business and technical background. And I was really taken with her vision of there is a place for me in this world of entrepreneurship. So begged her for a job. She hired me on as a part-time research assistant and I worked there for— I've been there, this is my 9th year actually and so after my— so really kind of learned how to do this job by shadowing, basically like apprenticeship, shadowing the partners at the time. I had great mentors and then 3 years ago, my friend and I, Wei Yi, we actually launched this seed fund to formalize the structure of ed-tech investing at NewSchools.
So let's back up. You've raised some really interesting questions. One is this idea of Kim Smith had what, 9, 10 years ago or even further, that was something unique. I mean, what was the unique insight and what were people doing before and what changed after NewSchools Venture Show?
Sure. So she had this— so she founded NewSchools with Brook Byers, venture capitalist, and John Doerr, another venture capitalist. And they came together and they thought, can we bring the venture model into education and can we bring the kind of rigor and discipline of investing in early-stage entrepreneurs and support them. But the difference between our model and a traditional venture fund is that we prioritize impact. So we are— we're looking for sustainable, scalable, strong businesses, companies, but we are above all else prioritizing impact. So that was the first difference.
So what does impact mean? Are you doing charter schools or software or— Teacher training?
We have this belief that there is sort of no silver bullet for education, so the answer is not charters or ed-tech or teacher development, that it's really a complex system that requires entrepreneurial energy across all of these different sectors. So we do invest grant money to nonprofit charter schools. We have close to 400 charter schools in our portfolio.
Wow.
Yeah, and we invest in teacher training programs and then I focus on education technology investing through the Seed Fund.
