CEO @ Aspireship | Helping people get hired in tech sales and customer success

I’ve dedicated my professional career to helping people who want to help themselves. Currently, I’m building Orchard, an AI career counseling platform for K-12 education, and Aspireship, an employee benefits platform for emerging companies that want to stay lean and profitable.

Corey Kossack

There’s a paradoxical challenge facing innovation in schools.

You’ll hear a lot about what’s wrong with EdTech today. Here’s a few common ones I see talked about regularly.

Sales reps are too aggressive, don’t do enough up front research and only care about hitting their quota. The school is just a number on a spreadsheet, instead of a community to invest in.

EdTech companies are charging too much. Schools don’t have the money, don’t get enough hands on support and face serious trade offs with every dollar. Costs must come down.

The scientific evidence of impact isn’t there. Marketing claims are overblown. Impact studies get twisted to support the company’s marketing narrative.

The stakes are too high for school leaders to make bold bets on something new. Better to stick closer to the well established, status quo vendors.

While everything above is generally true, the irony is that much of it inhibits the change everyone wants to see in education.

There are founders out there who want nothing more than to change the future for the better for our children. We see the struggles ahead, and we know it’s more important to pursue this change than most anything else we could focus our time on.

Yet for new EdTech startups, the process of gaining adoption is slow and very expensive, especially without major funding.

Even with an exceptional product that delivers real value, it takes so long to get schools on board, complete the procurement process, roll out to students, create real impact, capture the evidence of that impact, and repeat the cycle to the point where the business remains sustainable and competitive in the marketplace.

The net result? Many of today’s innovators will give up and leave the education market to big companies or startups with mega funding who can withstand these cycles. In both scenarios, prices get driven up, investor growth demands remain insatiable, and schools, educators, parents and students lose.

This is not an easy problem to solve, and this is not a criticism of education leaders who are carefully safeguarding their students from getting exposed to the wrong vendor, or the wrong technology.

This is a friendly note from the other side of the table, on behalf of the many founders who are walking through the fire to help create a better future for all of us.

Have ideas on how to break this cycle? Drop them in the comments or shoot me a DM. There’s a big community of EdTech founders who are ready to listen and take action to make a difference this coming school year.

Founder & CEO @ Orchard & Aspireship | Helping People Climb to Their Goals

Teacher Career Coach ®

Podcast Host

Aspireship

Manager of Operations

Administrative Assistant

Alpine Union School District

Teacher

San Diego Jewish Academy

Cajon Valley Union School District

Rush Press, An RR Donnelley Company

A career pivoter who started out as teacher, Elizabeth is now the Operations Manager at Aspireship. Prior to that, she supported leadership at Aspireship as the Admin Assistant. 

She also has the privilege of hosting the Teacher Career Coach Podcast where she interviews teachers who have transitioned and change makers in the education space.

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The Battle

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