My Life as ‘Practice Coach’?—?The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Part
From venture investor to university venture creation
In mid-2012, eleven years after my first professional disruption — a transition from the classroom to the board room — I was poised for a second round of what’s next?
Having been a modestly successful venture investor devoted to education innovation since the dot-com trough, I began to feel the need to reframe and recalibrate my professional purpose.
As a lifelong coach, I have long tilted to the build + prepare phase of learning, entrepreneurship, and life. Basically, I have always had a teach a person to fish mentality; hopefully you know the rest of that analogy.
After more than a decade of national emphases on education innovation, the venture capital industry and the firm I helped introduce to education technology were in kinetic energy mode when it comes to edtech investing. I was feeling my hometown Baltimore, Washington, DC, and the Chesapeake Region as places and a broader ecosystem where numerous education enterprises had been launched and were thriving either as stand-alone entities or as part of other organizations; certainly this region could and should continue to avail and nurture such enterprises. Combine an industry-focused ecosystem or cluster with the need to adequately parent three children in the K-12 phase of life, and you derive and embrace change. I was in need of another dose of what Whitney Johnson calls ‘disrupt yourself’.
2012 was a milestone year for the Baltimore education ecosystem
In 2012 and early 2013, alongside some hearty but patient Baltimoreans, we turned over, tinkered with, and banged on the idea of a new education technology incubation and acceleration enterprise. We got right up to the goal line on a real estate lease in a very cool spot in Harbor East before pulling the plug on the whole concept.
Something just wasn’t right. The risk-reward ratio seemed off.
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I am an edupreneur, edtech investor, and teacher-coach located in Baltimore, MD. As Towson University’s Director of Venture Creation, I help support Maryland’s largest cluster of edtech companies via TU Incubator and associated programs.
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