Lisa started her career at a venture capital internship, but didn’t enjoy the experience. She realized she wanted to build products, so she went to Google for her first job out of college to work in education at Google Classroom. Once there, she was exposed to a massive audience to test products on.

Standardized testing showed up as a problem early on for her since it reflects the prior cultural experiences or knowledge that privileged students have. That means that marginalized students who are using that content to learn or test on feel alienated and have a hard time building a foundation for their understanding from them.

At Almost Fun, the goal is to create content that builds upon the prior knowledge and experiences of marginalized students and students today in general. 

“I had this fear of falling, of not being able to turn this into an impactful organization, of not being a leader that could lead this organization, but at some point the fear of not trying became bigger than the fear of failure.”

While Lisa was at Google, she volunteered at various organizations so that she could interact with more students and understand their learning needs. She ended up creating the first set of Almost Fun content out of the motivation to teach her students. She could see that they were motivated but that they didn’t feel safe or comfortable with what they were learning. Once she saw how effective her new content was, she began to think about building out a product. 

A couple of months after leaving Google to build Almost Fun, Lisa discovered FastForward, and cold applied. It made a massive difference for her as a new startup founder to connect with a community of social justice-minded non profit professionals. The program took her from concept phase to connecting her to funding opportunities and giving her strategy for content, partnerships, and more.

With several of its products, Almost Fun is in the ready-to-scale stage. They are considering different models to scale in the future, including sponsored content, but core to their mission is to never charge a student for the content they provide. Lisa’s dream is to fund students’ education through corporate partnerships.

“I’ve always felt that corporations and organizations should be larger funders for the education system at large. I mean, I think that it benefits them in the end to have a better educated group of students, group of people, entering into the workforce. There is a little bit of that obligation to invest in the future for any society that you have a big part in creating or sustaining.”

When it comes to supporting students who are graduating right now, in the midst of a pandemic and all the disruption it has brought, Lisa suggests that it’s essential to focus on the quality of content being taught so that it feels relevant and meaningful to the students. 

“Our secret sauce is that we try to really meet students where they are and that feels like a very simple thing but it’s actually quite a nuance because you need to think about what are students learning right now, what prior knowledge do they already have, what can we build upon to help them understand these concepts.”

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