Events

Founder Labs are a monthly space for Transcend Fellows of all cohorts to come together and peer coach each other on our current founder challenges

Join us for an hour of meeting other fellows, hearing their current challenges, and brainstorm solutions to our challenges.

Founder Lab – December

 is an expert in building no-code and low-code products.

He's built no-code products at Pactero, Solodoers, Product School, and co-founded Spain's first blockchain bootcamp. 

He'll run a practical skillfest on how to build products using key no-code tools.

Building with No-Code with Aleix Ordeig | TN Skillfests

In our latest fellowship cohort, we proposed that you think of your "startup as a movement". I know very few people in the world who are as talented at doing this successfully as Raj, co-founder of Stoa School and one of our first fellows at Transcend! Excited to have him join our next Skillfest this week.

1. This week's Skillfest will be focused on getting people excited about what you are building, as Raj and Aditya did so successfully with the launch of Stoa School

2. You can expect to come out of the session with some tangible experiences and ideas from Raj based on his experience in the space – come prepared with your questions and challenges so you can share them live + get some feedback in the session!

3. To see more of Raj's thinking, knock on the 

**[🎟RSVP HERE](https://lu.ma/n4kma72w)**

How To Get People To Give a S**t About Your Product – Skillfest with Raj Kunkolienkar (Stoa School)

Founder Labs are a monthly space for Transcend Fellows of all cohorts to come together and peer coach each other on our current founder challenges. Join us for an hour of meeting other fellows, hearing their current challenges, and brainstorm solutions to our challenges

Founder Lab - January 

Follow up workshop on Raj's latest Skillfest on 

Getting People To Give a S**t About Your Product

collaborative workshop where all fellows will get to share their challenges + brainstorm solutions.

, each fellow will share their "movement", how they are sharing it with the world, and their main challenges today, and the rest of the participants will brainstorm solutions as a group.

Every fellow will get ~10 mins to share and brainstorm with as a group (depending on attendance!):

You'll come out of this workshop with a strong sense of how to share your startup's story and movement with the world!

Follow Up: How To Get People To Give a S**t About Your Product (Collaborative Workshop)

 empowers founders to build the future of learning and work, and we are now looking for 20 early-stage founders to join us for the Winter 21 Fellowship cohort. Applications to the Transcend Fellowship close on

Join us on Friday Jan 29th or Wednesday Feb 3rd to learn more about our program, meet some members of our founder community, and ask any questions about the program you may have!

More details about the Fellowship program can be found 

The founder community you need to be your best self

Transcend Fellowship – Office Hours

, one of the largest education companies globally. He helped design the first corporate strategy that aligned Pearson’s 12 businesses to connect the work and education ecosystem for learners and has also advised the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on $10m investments to accelerate adoption of technology-enabled student retention tools.

With his extensive background in this space, he helps founders with strategy, growth and partnerships advice. In this session, he will talk to

 Transcend Fellows about strategy for the future of learning and work 

you can use it to build sustainable businesses.

Winning Strategies in The Future of Learning and Work - With Neil Allison

Founder Lab - February

 is an experienced leader in the education technology industry with a track record of exceeding KPIs, leading market expansions, and building teams. She currently works on various initiatives including working as a GTM advisor at 

(run by our own F20, Edward Sturm!) She was also the former VP at 

, which has gone on to raise over 250M in funding.

Jen will be sharing her thoughts on edtech GTM based on her extensive experience in this space and then open up the floor for an interactive Q&A from Transcend Fellows.

Edtech GTM Best Practices with Jen Dyck-Sprout

for its 3rd EdTech fund!) and former Executive Director of co.lab; an accelerator for ed-tech startups leveraging the power of games to improve educational outcomes.

In this Expert Roundtable, you'll be able to hear directly from Esteban about his fundraising advice for edtech founders, his experience/valuable industry insights and have time for an open Q&A to pick his brain on all things edtech/VC.

You can also read about our collaborative work-integrated learning report that we co-created with Reach Capital and more on their investment theses 

Expert Roundtable with Esteban Sosnik (GP, Reach Capital) on Edtech Fundraising

, a learning experience platform that helps increase learner engagement & knowledge retention for universities and corporates.

He has built Eduflow, gone through Y Combinator, and is a Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund. He'll answer questions from founders about his journey and lessons learned as an edtech founder!

Expert Roundtable with David Kofoed Wind (Eduflow)

 will join us in this Expert Roundtable to share some best practices around B2B GTM in edtech and future of work startups, how to build sales teams, and think about your revenue operations as a founder of an early-stage startup.

Michael brings years of experience in startups in the space, most recently 

, and now leads Techne, a Full-Stack growth consulting agency for edtech and future of work startups.

In this session we will leave plenty of time for Q&A so be ready to participate and share your questions!

Expert Roundtable with Michael Maiorano - EdTech GTM

Founder Fridays: Rotem (Clustered) on Monetization and Pricing

Michael will be following up on last week's session with a final overview of his RevOps mindsets – bringing together sales, marketing, customer success and operations.

Michael brings years of experience in startups in the space, most recently PeopleGrove, and now leads Techne, a Full-Stack growth consulting agency for edtech and future of work startups.

Expert Roundtable - Revenue Operations with Michael Maiorano (Follow-up)

 will join us in this Expert Roundtable to teach us how to improve our decision-making as company leaders using data, and appying it to our industry of edtech + future of work.

Rebecca is Transcend's GTM Advisor, the leader of 

. She helps founders with their growth, sales and operations.

In this session, we will leave plenty of time for Q&A so be ready to participate and share your questions! You can also find Rebecca through the Transcend Slack!

Expert Roundtable with Rebecca Sadwick - Making The Right Decisions with Data 

 will join us in this Founder Friday to share his lessons about consumer growth through his experiences at 

 (the company he founded to scale outcome-based education), leading growth at 

, and most recently throug his work with 

Wes is Transcend's Consumer Growth Advisor and Summer 2020 Fellow.

In this session, Wes will share his experiences and fellows will get to discuss any lessons learned through his experiences. You can find him in the Transcend Slack as @wes!

Founder Fridays: Wes Wagner (S20) on B2C Growth

, both experts in learning experience design, to our Expert Roundtable this week! In this session, they will help Transcend Fellows think through how to measure learning outside of traditional, outdated assessment methods.

, which aims to design social and silicon technologies that support life-long learning and the maker of 

— a complete operating system built in Notion to help create courses, workshops or content.

Tara is the learning experience designer at

, a virtual high-school with a curriculum designed around a student's interest and learning style. Previously she's worked at 

Expert Roundtable: How to Measure Learning with Serj & Tara

 (Transcend Fellowship Facilitator and Senior Fellow at 

) is a friend of Transcend who will sharing their insights on how to create emotionally-safe learning environments, and how to use our personal experiences (in education or elsewhere) to build such learning experiences. 

They’ll share their learnings from Minerva Schools, Degrees of Freedom, and many more facilitation, experience and curriculum design projects over the last years, and will leave plenty of time for Q&A. 

Building Emotionally-Safe Learning Environments Using Your Own Experiences

Ollie Rutherford (Fall 20 Transcend Fellow) is the cofounder of Unirise and Polymatic, and will be talking to fellows about how to improve sales by doing killer emails and cold calls! 

He'll share his personal experiences at Aula and Unirise, and answer questions from the audience!

Founder Fridays: Ollie Rutherford On How To Sell With Kick-ass Emails & Cold Calls

 is has spent over 10 years immersed in education, with experiences ranging from a researcher for the 

, and a two-time Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In this expert founder lab, she will be sharing ways to create effective online learning experiences drawing on her experience of consulting with top educators and professionals in this space.

Expert Roundtable: Aditi Parekh on Effective Live Online Learning Experiences

 is an angel investor focused on the future of learning & work and the founder of 

 where she currently works as the managing partner.

In this Expert Roundtable, she will be talking to Transcend Fellows about VC fundraising specifically in regards to angels/pre-seed VCs drawing upon her experience working as an Angel Investor.

Expert Roundtable: Gale Wilkinson on VC Fundraising 

, and he’ll walk us through his process to build our own Minimum Viable Community. His expertise in building communities will help Transcend Fellows create more strategic and welcoming community building strategies, starting with our first “MVC”. 

Expert Roundtable: Minimum Viable Community with Sascha Mombartz (Close Knit, Community Canvas)

, which creates educational access and equity to underserved communities in South Africa. Currently he is a product leader at the 

 that is aiming to put 2M young Africans to work by 2030 and empower 3M African leaders by 2035.

This expert roundtable will be an intimate discussion with David where he’ll share learnings from building learning experiences for the classroom and for digital media over the last decade. 

Expert Roundtable: From running a school to digital learning

 currently leads Mentor Strategy & Ops at 

, after having led Growth through a period of super growth for one of the most successful edtech startups in the last year. 

He advises startups on all things Growth Marketing, and will share his experience taking Springboard from a niche bootcamp to one of the largest players in the industry, and what it took to be able to grow their reach to students, mentors and employers. 

Join us to learn how to scale your growth from 0 to 1 learning from one of the industry leaders in all things growth!

Growth Marketing Lessons from Scaling Springboard – Expert Roundtable with Rodrigo Aronas

 has opened up applications until May 28th – we wanted to bring more of the Transcend experience to prospective founders, so we are running two Founder Labs (our signature facilitated sessions for Transcend Fellows) for founders who are interested in learning more about the program. 

We’ll run two Founder Labs in the coming week – join us to learn more about the program and experience the high-energy, collaborative session that are Founder Labs!

Transcend Fellowship (S21) – Experience our Founder Labs!

 leads Education Strategy at Maven, where he helps creators build cohort-based courses and implement great learning experiences for students. Previously, he was the Head of Education at OnDeck, and one of the first hires at Thinkful (acquired by Chegg). Bhaumik will share his lessons learned from building scalable online learning experiences and new directions in the learning space he’s excited about. 

This will be an amazing session for founders thinking about improvements they could make to their online learning experiences and founders who want to scale experiences that work!

Scalable Online Learning Experiences — Expert Roundtable with Bhaumik Patel (Maven)

, a company that helps organizations win their content marketing & organic search (SEO). Silvia is the go-to person in this field — she was the first hire for digital & SEO for XQ Institute, under the Emerson Collective's Laurene Powell Jobs. She scaled their marketing efforts from 0 to over 650,000 members in 3 years, running multi-million dollar campaigns. She's led partnerships with all social media platforms and led marketing for two successful TV shows on the four major networks, reaching over 20MM people and generating 2B impressions.

Come and learn more about the digital world and marketing with Silvia!

SEO and Content Marketing That Work — Expert Roundtable with Silvia Li Sam (Slam Media Lab)

, where she invests in startups rethinking education. She was the first leadership hire at 

, joining the team one month after launch – she will share her learnings as an early operator at Coursera all the way to becoming a publicly traded learning platform! 

Julia sits on the boards of Outlier.org, Toucan, Fairygodboss, Team4Tech and Rocketship Public Schools. 

This session will help early-stage founders think through the early days of company-building, and what it takes to scale after finding product-market-fit.

Lessons Learned at Coursera – Expert Roundtable with Julia Stiglitz

 is the GP at Techne Partners, where he helps early-stage startups in edtech and future of work launch their sales teams and processes. Michael was previously at People Grove and is the Sales Advisor for Transcend Network. 

In this session, Michael will help us think about founder-led B2B Sales, and how founders can start healthy systems that can scale as a sales team is built. 

Founder Sales – Expert Roundtable with Michael Maiorano

 is Transcend's Learning Experience Advisor. She has spent over 10 years immersed in education, with experiences ranging from a researcher for the 

In this Expert Roundtable, she will be sharing ways to create effective online learning experiences drawing on her experience of consulting with top educators and professionals in this space.

Alive Learning Experiences – Expert Roundtable with Aditi Parekh

Equipping students with new skills is table stakes for any learning experience – teaching new skills is a commodity. Designing learning experiences, however, is where differentiation can be achieved.

To earn raving testimonials, loyalty, and repeat referrals, you need to go beyond skill delivery and move into worldbuilding - treating your company as a Michelin-star experience that doesn't just start and end at the teaching. 

In this 90 minute session, we will explore how fully bringing your life experiences into your company, aesthetics, inventive language, and doing things that don't scale can elevate your learning experience into a Michelin-star experience.

 makes learning beautiful by intersecting art, pedagogy, improv, and experience design for clients like Facebook, IDEO, Stanford d.school, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. 

," an 8-week program on learning communication skills as insurance for our relationships. Norman also facilitates Stanford GSB's Touchy Feely class, and occasionally advises other founders on worldbuilding and learning design.

World Building – Expert Roundtable with Norman Tran

, a leadership development startup recently acquired by Franklin Covey. Previously, he was an early employee and leader at Minerva Schools, Youtube for Education and Google. 

Will will chat with fellows about his experience raising a large seed round from top funds, pivoting, and finding product-market fit, all the way down to his recent acquisition. 

Pivoting and Product-Market Fit – Expert Roundtable with Will Houghteling

, a pre-seed VC based in New York. At his firm, Nicholas focuses on product, growth, and capital raising. Before Notation, he was Head of Seed Investing at betaworks, and led product for several betaworks projects.

Join us this Wednesday to hear more about fundraising for pre-seed founders and what investors are looking for in early-stage companies.

Fundraising For Pre-Seed Founders — Expert Roundtable with Nicholas Chirls

"... one of the biggest drivers of success, if you account for how motivated you are and you know how talented you are, is your ability to seek and use negative feedback," says Adam Grant. "Because that really determines how close to your potential you become."

Come and join us at a Pitch Practice party, and the least scary one because it is a practice, and it is with your people. We'll have 2-3 presentations and open the floor for feedback after each one. If you are not presenting, you'll get a chance to share your inputs and learn for yourself!

Pitch Practice with Your People | Transcend Network

 is a product and growth advisor, and he is also an angel investor. He joined Coursera as one of the first PMs, and stayed as Sr. Director for Growth & Consumer until recently. During his time there, Kapeesh helped scale Coursera from 8M to 80M+ users, among many other accomplishments.

Join us for this Expert Roundtable with Kapeesh where he is happy to answer anything around product and growth!

Product & Growth | Expert Roundtable with Kapeesh Saraf

 is a founder & partner at Airfoil, a design and product studio that works with early-stage founders to design their ideas. Under Airfoil, Phil also helps build different products, from a fellowship for rising designers, a newsletter reader to a billing tool for crypto-native companies. Phil is happy to share the framework and best practices Airfoil uses in thinking about and designing a product. Wherever you are in your journey, refining and creating a functional and beautiful product can only make everything better.

Product Design | Expert Roundtable with Phil Hedayatnia

Exploration Lab is a 5-week cohort experience for aspiring founders to validate and launch their projects in 12 months, and the application is now open! Our goal is to support super early founders — often with ideas and a full-time job, to discover their strengths as leaders and validate their startup ideas.

These info sessions are designed to help you decide if Exploration Lab is right for you. Join us to learn more about the Lab and fire away any questions you might have!

🔍 Exploration Lab Info Session

Learning Experience Design | Expert Roundtable with Lucy Chen

is a partner at NEA, an angel investor & startup advisor. Previously, Ann led business development at Twitter and Uber. She has led business functions at every growth stage, from first go-to-market to hyper-growth to public company. For our Expert Roundtable, Ann is happy to share everything about partnership! With her, we'll cover how to start investing in partnerships as a startup and leverage partnerships for growth!

Partnership 101 | Expert Roundtable with Ann Bordetsky

Business education is changing: it is evolving from something costly and limited to the top of the company hierarchy (MBAs, coaching, leadership training) into something that's affordable and able to reach the full organization. Read the latest 

to learn more about it and get inspiration for this discussion. 

Join some of the leading founders and investors in the space as we discuss what's next for business education!

 is building Collective Academy into the challenger university for LATAM, focusing on the skills to grow sustainable businesses. 

 runs New Campus, upskilling employees into leaders and change-makers through interactive sprints.

 from Stoa School, where they are building the MBA Bootcamp for top Indian talent through a 6-month program.

 from Section 4 who is helping employees level up their career through sprints in strategy, business and product.

 from Disco, where she's helping creators build experiences that teach how to build with no-code or manage time.

 is the Head of Education at OnDeck, where they help individuals accelerate their ideas and careers.

There are so many open questions in this growing sector: Will business education grow by partnering with employers or going direct to consumer? Is there a tradeoff between cost and quality in using cohorts vs self-paced content for learning? What key business functions are still underserved when it comes to business education. 

This discussion will be open to all to join as members of the audience, who will be able to ask their questions through a Q&A section. 

Next-Gen Business Education: Open Discussion

 is a co-founder at Electives.io, which empowers companies to build their own unique faculty and bring employees together through shared learning experiences. Electives.io recently closed its seed round (woohoo!!!), and Jason is delighted to share his learnings around 

Fundraising Lesson Learned | 🍐 Peer to Peer Workshop with Jason Lavender (W21)

 is a Director of Product & Community Wyze, where he helped the company grew from 200k to 6M+ customers and 3x in revenue. Mark is all about building consumer products, thriving communities and has been a PM for 10+ years. Mark believes that your early adopters will help shape the future of your products, and he is excited to share more about leveraging the community to build a product!

Building Community Driven Product | Expert Roundtable with Mark Tan

cohort-based courses. It is challenging to create and manage, yet it seems to be the solution that many are trying to pursue. What is your take on CBC? What is your experience so far?

Instead of our usual Expert Roundtable, we want to take this moment to bring a group discussion around CBC. Transcend Network is running one with our Exploration Lab, and we have one thing or two to share. Most importantly, we create a space for us to explore this minimally charted territory of CBC.

Cohort-Based Courses | Community Discussion

 is Co-founder & CEO at Wonderpath, the next-gen feedback software designed to make feedback at work actionable, continuous, and human. As she is building Wonderpath, there are so many learnings about feedback at work. Dafni is happy to share about 

building a feedback culture at an early-stage startup and/or feedback principles

Feedback Giving & Receiving at Work | 🍐 Peer to Peer Workshop with Dafni Chontou 

Estáis tod@s invitad@s a este encuentro informal de buena gente edtech en Madrid! No hay más plan que conectar los unos con los otros y aprender sobre nuestros proyectos. 

 nos dejan usar su oficina en la Calle de Jenner 3, Madrid, así que nos vemos ahí a las 19h!

Alberto se encargará de proveer cervezas y bebidas, así que va a ser todo muy informal. Si quieres, trae tu propia bebida y nos ayudas! 

Si tienes alguna pregunta o idea, escríbenos a 

Edtech Madrid 🙌 Happy Hour 

 is an Associate Vice Provost for Career Education Initiatives at the University of Rochester. He has over 20 years of experience in higher education, career education, and workforce development. Throughout his career, Joe has bridged the university with employers and corporations. If you are thinking about building a partnership with universities, this Expert Roundtable is meant for you. Learn from Joe how these collaboration emerges and evolves, and ask anything away!

Partnership with Universities | Expert Roundtable with Joe Testani

early-stage founders building the future of learning and work. 

If you are interested in being part of the most global founder community in this space & tap into resources to help you grow — come and learn more about it here!

These info sessions are designed to help you decide the Fellowship is your right next step. Join us and fire away any questions you might have!

Transcend F21 Fellowship Info Session

Cohort Based Courses (or CBCs) propose a new personalized, intimate model of learning. But how do they work in practice? Let's learn from the leading course builders about what it actually takes to build a great learning experience, the most common challenges, and the lessons they have learned. 

Come and discuss with us the present & the future of CBCs. This open discussion welcomes everyone and is brought to you by 

P.S. The Transcend Fellowship is welcoming applications from early-stage founders building the future of learning and work until Friday, October 8th, and Lectureless is sponsoring one founder with half a tuition. If you are a founder building a CBC product, 

apply for this sponsorship by October 8th

Cohort-Based Courses – Open Discussion with Leading Course Builders 🙌

 the Managing Principal Consultant at RYE Consulting, and she often works directly with schools, districts, and diverse education technology companies. Join us and learn from Rayna around Go To Market strategies for K-12.

Go To Market Strategy for K-12 | Expert Roundtable with Rayna (Yaker) Glumac

No Code Startup | 🍐 Peer to Peer Workshop with Yash Tekriwal

 is the person behind UX for Edtech community. As an EdTech product designer, M.S.Ed., and former classroom teacher, her work is at the intersection of UX design & strategy, pedagogy & learning sciences (LXD), and teaching (K-12). This Wed, Alicia is excited to share more about her learnings around UX for edtech, happy to answer any question related to her domains and give feedback to your UX if you like! :))

Live UX Feedback with UX of Edtech | Expert Roundtable with Alicia Quan

Companies in the learning/work space are known for having high customer acquisition costs (CAC). And yet, Duolingo, Coursera, 2U all built unicorns based on unique CAC strategies! 

We are all taking different creative approaches to get in front of customers and convert them, so why not jam together in a trusted and safe space?

If you are wondering how + how much to spend in acquiring customers, you should join us! 

We’ll discuss our different approaches based on sectors, different approaches we have seen work well and terribly.

Customer Acquisition Costs | Community Jam

Introducing and warmly inviting you to Founder Fireside!

This coming Wednesday, we'll have Joe Connor, the co-founder at SchoolHouse, which helps families set up at-home, in-person Learning Pods — for a group of kids to learn, socialize, and develop together. 

We'd love to have you join the circle, sit comfortably and listen to 

How I Built an Educator-First Microschool Network | Founder Fireside with Joe Connor

Esteban Sosnik is General Partner at Reach Capital — an early-stage venture fund for edtech startups, and has been working in the industry since 2013. Esteban is also a serial entrepreneur who also co-founded Wanako Games (acquired by Vivendi Inc) and Atakama Labs (acquired by DeNa Group), both in the gaming industry.

Join us to learn more about the investment in the edtech world and Esteban's advice on fundraising!

Fundraising Advice | Expert Roundtable with Esteban Sosnik

Convocamos al ecosistema edtech de Barcelona🎉 | Calling on the edtech ecosystem in Barcelona (🇬🇧 below) 🎉

, un encuentro informal para todos los emprendedores, educadores, creadores y demás participantes del mundo de la tecnología y la educación de Barcelona. Ven a tomarte una cerveza y charlar con otras personas del universo edtech.