Founding Team
LearnLaunchX's management team is comprised of five individuals with a total of over 75 years of learning industry experience.
The team has extensive experience in entrepreneurship, venture capital, product development, and market development. The team has deep domain expertise in education and publishing, powerful relationships across the broad spectrum of education technology, and a track record of bringing ed tech products to market.
The team has extensive experience in entrepreneurship, venture capital, product development, and market development. The team has deep domain expertise in education and publishing, powerful relationships across the broad spectrum of education technology, and a track record of bringing ed tech products to market.
Jean Hammond is a successful serial entrepreneur who co-founded Quarry Technologies and AXON Networks, both computer networking startups. She is a leading Boston angel and is a member of Hub Angels, the Launchpad Venture Group, founded the Boston Forum of Golden Seeds. She has served as board member or board observer for more than 30 startups. She is a LearnLaunch.org Co-Founder. On the board of Thompson Island Outward, Jean supports the growth of science education in the inner city. She earned a M.S. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and BS in Biology at Boston University.
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Mark Miller is a lifelong entrepreneur with experience up and down the education spectrum since winning the business plan competition at Cornell University. Miller has co-founded, built and/or served as CEO or Executive Chairman for a set of leading -edge publishing, technology and community companies. Many of these companies had successful exits including, TakeNote, The Daily Jolt, CollegiateLink, and The Custom Publishing Group. Miller was tapped by a set of University CIO's to commercialize their on-demand custom publishing platform offering a new model for creation and consumption of textbook, journal and scholarly monograph content which became NetPaper. As a result of exits of his own companies and a major success selling the company of a friend, Miller made a career shift and he now serves as Managing Partner at Good Harbor Partners, a merchant bank providing consulting and advisory M&A services to EdTech companies. Miller is a member of the Cornell University Entrepreneurship Advisory Council and is a member of the Quill and Dagger Honorary Society.
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Vinit Nijhawan has over 25 years experience building five startups: as CEO of three, four were acquired, and the fifth has grown to over 300 people. Recently, Vinit was Venture Partner at Key Venture Partners and over two years sourced over 200 deals and made one investment which was acquired for $430M.
Vinit is an advisor and board member to several technology startups and was a Mass High Tech All-Star in 2005. Vinit has participated in over 120 panel discussions and paper presentations, and is a Board of Trustee of TiE Global, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship globally. Vinit is Managing Director, Office of Technology Development, and Director of Enterprise Programs at ITEC (Institute of Technology, Entrepreneurship & Commercialization) at Boston University. Vinit also teaches an MBA course on Entrepreneurship at BU. Vinit earned a B.A.Sc in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
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Rudden is co-founder of LearnLaunch and LearnLaunchX. Rudden served as Chief Officer, College and Career Preparation at Chicago Public Schools, where she led the efforts of the third largest public school system in the US to ensure that its 400,000 students are college and career ready. She was a 2009 Broad Fellow and graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy. Rudden received her MBA from Harvard Business School, and her BA from Brown University, where she served as a Trustee.
She is Board Chair of SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ: SDBT) and serves on the boards of the Achievement Network, The KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. She led the Unified Communications Division of Avaya, a Fortune 500 global business communications leader and was SVP and GM of IBM Lotus Software’s Lotus Notes and Domino. Under her leadership more than 50 million began using the software and she was named to serve on IBM’s Technical Leadership Council. Rudden was CEO of FairMarket (NASDAQ: FAIM), which was sold to eBay, and a manager at The Boston Consulting Group. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life.
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Hakan Satiroglu is a seasoned EdTech entrepreneur and executive. He was the founder and CEO of Xplana Learning, one of the first social learning networks, and creator of the early eBook and learning management systems for the education industry. He is currently the founder of Xlibrio, virtual bookstores for international markets, and EdTech Times, a growing EdTech news organization.