Hire Ground Podcast Episode 23: The Playbook Nobody Reads - Arun Ramanathan on Mergers, Scale, and AI in Education

Episode 23 of Hire Ground Podcast

The playbook has been written on the for-profit side. It just hasn't been read on the nonprofit side.

Dr. Arun Ramanathan has led at almost every altitude in American education: a large urban district, a state policy shop, a professional learning nonprofit, and now edtech. Along the way he's followed founders more than once and led the kind of merger our sector rarely sees, one that brings together strong organizations to scale their impact rather than rescue a struggling one. He's now CEO of PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit reimagining how kids learn math. Before that he led Pivot Learning through its merger with CORE and later UnboundEd, served as executive director of Education Trust–West, and was Chief Student Services Officer at San Diego Unified.

What he and host, Christina Greenberg, get into:

On following founders:

• Why every part of the education ecosystem, from districts to policy shops to service nonprofits, has its own culture, language, and values, and why a new leader has to learn them fast
• The steep learning curve of stepping in after a founder, and what it took to learn edtech from scratch

On mergers and scale:

• Why most nonprofit mergers start with failure, and what changes when two financially strong organizations with little overlap join forces
• The math most boards miss: how few education nonprofits top $15 million, and what crossing that line unlocks, from a government relations team to the capacity to compete for federal grants
• "Impact without scale" versus "scale without impact," and what it looks like to marry the two
• Why nonprofits need their own support infrastructure, and some for-profit incentives, to merge well

On AI done right:

• How PowerMyLearning used AI to transcribe and analyze young children's mathematical speech, a problem researchers have worked on for 25 years
• Why kids up to third grade are better at explaining their thinking than writing it down, and what that means for educational justice
• Why you can't shortcut real engineering and piloting with a clever prompt, and why transparency, privacy, and accuracy will separate the AI edtech that lasts from the AI edtech that gets banned

Listen on your platform of choice:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Hire Ground Website
  

Hire Ground is the essential podcast for K12 school and nonprofit leaders who are serious about hiring, retaining and developing high performing teams. This podcast brings together thought leaders, executives, and board members for honest conversations about leadership, hiring, governance, and what it really takes to build a thriving organization from the ground up.

Hire Ground is hosted by Christina Greenberg - founder and CEO of Edgility Search and 20-year veteran of executive search and nonprofit talent - and was co-created with Josh Czupryk, founder of Josh’s K12 Jobs Blast.

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