Betsy Corcoran: I love journalism and I have loved working as a journalist. My first crush was science. I started as a science journalist and learned a tremendous amount – both about science and journalism – from the first two magazines that employed me: IEEE Spectrum, followed by Scientific American. Both were tremendous communities of writers and editors, who deeply cared about what we wrote about. It was thrilling, too, to join the Washington Post in DC, covering technology. The Post moved my family to Silicon Valley, where I eventually joined Forbes as the Silicon Valley Bureau chief – which you know well, as that’s where we met!

Eventually, I reached a point where I wanted to do more than just write about what other people were doing. I wanted something that connected the dots in my life: I loved learning. My kids were then in grade school. I cared tremendously about the experience that they and lots of other kids were having in school. So I took a crazy plunge and left Forbes to find a path in education.

Quentin Hardy: Did you know much about education?

BC: Sad to say, I was like so many people who jump into education – my only credential was, well, I had gone to school! That made me an expert on education, right? Oh, and hey, since my kids were in school, I was a double expert, right? Yikes. You don’t become a doctor just because you’ve had a medical checkup.

But my best credential was that I was curious. I was willing to learn. So the first thing I did after I quit my job was to, well, act like a reporter: I spent a year learning about education – trying to understand the world from the vantage of educators and then asking: is there a role that I can file here?

QH: How was that “acting like a reporter”?

BC: I was self-aware enough to know that I didn’t really know much about how schools worked or the pressures on teachers. So the most fundamental thing was that I wound up “embedding” myself in a school. I did a tremendous amount of volunteering at my kids’ school the year after I left Forbes. Part of the work was to support the IT team. As it happens, there’s on average 1 IT person per thousand students in K-12 schools across the United States. That’s true even here, in Silicon Valley. Climbing inside a school, cleaning out dust-bunnies from under defunct computers in classrooms, having to manage a group of 30, um, let’s say, high energy kids in a “computer lab” when some of them have trouble signing in – well, it was an eye-opening experience.

I got to see what the inside of schools look like. I began to understand the problems that teachers and administrators confront every single day. And I learned that schools had very few “Luddites” – instead, they’re filled with pragmatic people. In 2010, computer technology, by and large, simply didn’t work for most teachers and schools.

QH: How did it culminate?

BC: Coincidentally, I got invited to a dinner in San Francisco with a bunch of entrepreneurs interested in talking about “education technology.” Of course, there’s been technology in education since the pencil and the chalkboard. But 2010 was a special moment: New technologies had evolved in industry and thoughtful entrepreneurs were asking: What could this mean for schools?
The dinner took place in what felt like a very crowded room. The entrepreneurs, really, wanna-be entrepreneurs, reminded me of so many of the entrepreneurs that I had met in other industries over the years: they were super educated, really talented and motivated, contagiously enthusiastic – and yes, kind of naive about what it meant to apply novel technologies to education. Fact is, most of them didn’t know much about education than I had when I quit my Forbes gig.

So like any good journalist, I tried to see the big picture: On one side, I saw educators who weren’t necessarily conversant with the latest tech that industry had to offer. On the other side were technologists chomping at the bit to put the latest and greatest tech into school – but who might not know that much about the inner workings of education.

I heard that ringing sound in my head – you know, that sound that signals, yeah, I’ve seen this story before. It was the story of industry creation, a story that I had had the good fortune to cover a couple of times as a journalist. It was like seeing the beginning of the biotech industry, or the cleantech or nanotech industry. From my vantage, all those industries shared a couple of commonalities: There are wanna-be entrepreneurs, galvanized by an idea. There are a handful of financiers, who are intrigued by the promise of applying new technologies to long-standing challenges.

And in my experience, there was a third leg to the stool: Someone or group becomes the watercooler for this new industry. Someone who can connect the players, who can give them insights into the emerging industry, into their customers, into the challenges of the industry. It was exactly what Esther Dyson did in the earliest days of the personal computer industry.

When an industry is brand, spanking new, it’s simply too small for conventional media to bother covering it. Around that time, (2010), I remember flipping through TechCrunch. I think I only saw a half dozen articles about “education technology” during the entire year! So if someone is going to “cover” the industry, they have to devote themselves to it – and become essentially an entrepreneur, too.

QH: Somebody has to be the connector, the pollinator.

BC: Yep. It happens over and over. Doesn’t even matter what industry you’re talking about. But in the case of education, I had just the right skill set and passion for jumping in and filling that hole. I also realized that if I didn’t do it, someone else would. You know how they say, the only things you really regret are the things you don’t do? Well, I didn’t want to look back a decade later and say to myself, “Yeah, I shudda done that.” So I started what became EdSurge.

QH: For the home audience, what do you mean by education technology?

BC: Ah, that’s a good question. As I said, you can say that “education technology” started with the pencil or chalkboard. But around 2010 there was a change that began slipping into schools that wasn’t really appreciated at the time.

Remember how I said that schools have about 1 IT person per 1,000 students?

Imagine being that IT person and having to update every single, individual desktop computer in a school. It’s worse than the old “Lucy in the chocolate factory” scene. By 2010, lots of schools had hundreds of computers – and not just cloistered in a computer lab. Teachers had desktop computers in their classrooms. Some might have been gifts. Some might have been old ones cycled out of the school library or computer lab. But somebody – usually that much beknighted IT person – was supposed to keep them all running. And frankly, it wasn’t happening.

Now by then, industry had already come up with its own solution: It had pushed computing to the cloud. Happily, the industry folks had already done battle over industry standards and “cloud computing” was the way of the future. Applications could live “in the cloud” instead of on a desktop.

And that made all the difference.

Suddenly that one IT person could press a button and update, well, everything. And so when I say “education technology,” I mean the use of digital technologies that basically live in the cloud to support teaching, learning, curriculum, as well as all the administrative chores school perform (including communicating with families, managing data, grading, attendance, compliance with regulations and so on).

And these days, “education technologY” plays a role in everything from tiny preschools to corporations that offer employees opportunities to learn. The buzz phrase is “pre-K to Gray.”

QH: So, you reported yourself, and found a passion. You found a place where that was needed, where you could build a business. People like Esther would have a newsletter, run conferences, sometimes they’d invest. Early on, did you think about how this would make money, or did you think about creating something people would come to, and the money would follow?

BC: I was driven first by mission – I wanted to help educators understand the technology that was going to flood schools and I wanted to amplify their voices to try to inform some of the choices that entrepreneurs would make. At the same time, I believed that media was a business. At the time, we chose to start EdSurge as a for-profit, not as a nonprofit. Most of the media organizations I had worked for were for-profits. So it didn’t seem incongruent to me: Media could–and should–support itself.

Newsletters had traditional business models: You created a newsletter, sold subscriptions and ran conferences – that kind of thing. Plenty of people had done that.

But in retrospect, the media industry was also starting to implode around the time we started EdSurge.

Bottomline – and we did care about the bottom line – we explored many different avenues for generating revenue. Business gurus always advise tech startups to “focus, focus, focus!” But media – at this time – is different. We had one savvy media advisor who once showed us a slideshow that listed maybe three dozen different ways that media companies could earn money. Then he said; “Okay, pick five.”

So EdSurge experimented with many ways of generating revenue: We built a jobs board – that was huge. A lot of people in edtech got their first jobs or made their first hires through the EdSurge jobs board. We ran conferences, everything from large national events that went up to 600 people to very local events. Over a decade, I estimate that we ran about 200 events. We were early in the podcast world – and to this day, the EdSurge podcast, now run by a wonderful editor, Jeff Young, is a huge success. We published newsletters and ran ads on those, created a website that ran articles and sponsored content, and carried out research programs that were either sponsored or available by subscription. We experimented with creating an advisory service to help schools select the technology products right for them.

About the only thing we didn’t do – and I’m still not sure we should have – was invest directly. We were too concerned about conflicts of interest – which we took very seriously – to do that. And yeah, we never sold tee-shirts. (We did give them away to some fans!) Otherwise, we explored a lot of paths to revenue.
It’s worth noting that the role of philanthropy grew in both education and media during the decade when I was running EdSurge. Philanthropy is a powerful force and can do tremendous good. It can also add a layer of complexity for for-profit organizations.

QH: Did you think of EdSurge as primarily a media company, a consultancy, or a hybrid?

BC: Hybrid. There were times we were a media company with a dash of consulting. As I mentioned, we went through a period where we considered leaning more heavily into consulting with a side of journalism.

Ultimately we were about helping foster a healthy education technology community for educators and entrepreneurs and even investors. We didn’t fangirl any one company or approach. We were a fan of innovation, a fan of trying new things.

QH: How big did the staff get to be?

BC: Originally there were four of us. One left early for his dream job, setting up digital programs for schools in San Francisco. From there, we grew to a point where EdSurge was stable with about 30 people. During our plunge into consulting we grew to about 50. That’s a tricky moment for any startup. You have to change a lot of internal processes and reporting structures around that size. Ultimately we resized to about 30.

QH: This sounds like this may have been bootstrapped initially, but pretty quickly you must have been looking for funding.

BC: We did a lot of things to raise money while we were earning money. Education operates on a different funding scale than, say, AI, so we’re talking millions more than billions, over a couple of rounds, which I’m incredibly proud of achieving.

Our first investor was Don Graham of The Washington Post. I was really grateful for his support – not just funding but really, for believing in us. Over the years, we attracted the support from a number of key venture investors who focused on education as they understood our role was fundamental to the entire edtech ecosystem. We had several Chinese investors as well. Ultimately over several rounds we raised about $10 million.

QH: Were there journalism skills that were useful in that part of the business?

BC: Absolutely. I think the core of being a great journalist – and being a strong leader – starts with asking good questions. That includes asking questions of your team, your customers – and really asking tough questions of yourself.

I’ve talked about “connecting the dots” – I think journalism helps you look beyond the immediate challenges of the day and see bigger opportunities. Journalists – and anyone raising money – also have to be good at “reading the room.” When you’re raising money, you have to size up pretty quickly how enthusiastic or neutral a potential fund is.

And yeah, then there’s that old truism about having thick skin. As a journalist, you learn not to take it personally when people won’t take your calls or won’t do the interview. You just keep going. Raising money is kind of like that experience in HDTV: Far more people will say “no” – or just plain old ghost you – than will say “yes.”

You know, just about everyone suffers from “impostor syndrome,” wondering: Why do I deserve to be in the room? A long time ago, I think I realized that I could shield myself a bit by using the mantle of the organization. Bill Gates didn’t care about talking to Betsy Corcoran; he was talking to The Washington Post.

It takes more courage to build an organization to be that kind of shield. But I had a tremendous amount of pride in what the whole team at EdSurge was building – and so that gave me the confidence to walk into those rooms.

QH: What did you have to learn in running the organization?

BC: I had some very practical stuff that I had to learn: I had never done a PowerPoint presentation as a journalist. I had to learn a lot about accounting. Happily, journalism is about learning new things, so I did have a sense of what it means to learn.

More seriously, I learned a tremendous amount about management in a way that was fundamentally different than when I interviewed other CEOs. All those phrases that sound kind of squishy when you’re a journalist, say, “building a learning culture,” or “giving voice to everyone” become real obsessions when you run a company.

QH: You sold EdSurge in 2019. What led to that?

BC: It was the right time. I’d run the company for a decade. There was an opportunity to combine EdSurge with a terrific organization that supports educators who use technology internationally. So it was the right group and the right time. The timing was fortuitous, as it turned out, since we sold just before COVID, when everyone in education – and media – was getting slammed.

QH: Had you stayed in journalism, you might have found yourself in exactly the same dilemma. Sounds like an extremely worthy thing to have done. You learned a lot. You got a lot from it. Would you have advice for people who are thinking about doing this kind of stuff?

BC: You’ve got to believe with every fiber in your body that this is the thing that you were meant to do. Running EdSurge has been one of the great experiences in my life. It challenged me in a thousand ways – but also rewarded me in another thousand. I am so proud of all the people who worked for EdSurge: Watching them flourish as professionals has been very cool. Meeting thousands and thousands of educators and entrepreneurs who want to build an education system that serves all students inspires me.
Great educators are inspiring people. EdSurge gave me a chance to give back to the people who put themselves on the line, every day, for kids. That’s genuine purpose. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to be part of this world.