421: How to Break Into Educational Technology w/ John Katzman, Noodle Companies [Espresso Shots]

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John Katzman is an American entrepreneur and education evangelist.  He founded The Noodle Companies in 2012 with the mission of increasing transparency and efficiency across the education landscape. For 38 years, John has been a pioneer, innovating new approaches to learning and teaching in higher education.  In 1981, he founded and ran The Princeton Review, which helped thousands of students applying to U.S. colleges and universities each year find, get into, and pay for school. In 2008, John founded 2U (NASDAQ: TWOU), an educational tech company that builds and runs high-quality online degree programs for leading nonprofit colleges and universities. Under his leadership, 2U was named among the “10 Start-Ups Changing the World” by Forbes and is now a $4 billion firm. John serves on several boards of directors, including Renaissance Learning, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. 

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE: 

• What sort of job titles you should search to break into the education technology field
• Why taking initiative to fix things on your own is one of the most sought-after skills 
• Which entry-level jobs in the education technology field require a specific major
• Whether or not a master’s degree is necessary to “succeed” in this field
• Why keeping promises to investors poses a big challenge to startups in ed tech
• How the best career advice John ever got taught him the importance of humility in his career
• Why “Silicon Valley” and “The Social Network” accurately depict the ed tech startup scene