Many K-12 schools around the country are looking at effective ways to use data to improve student success and the quality of education. However, a key ingredient to this is having a great team of data professionals. How do you find and retain these highly skilled professionals when you cannot always compete with the private sector employers. Education Pioneers has answer to this problem. We chat today with Benjamin Persett who is the director of Washington DC region of Education Pioneers. He helps recruit talented professionals from diverse backgrounds to work for K-12 school districts, charter schools, and other educational organizations. In his current role, he supports partners in meeting their strategic talent needs.

Thomas works is the Director of Data Strategy at Uplift Education, a charter school based in the Dallas, TX area. In this role, he has significant experience in building a data-driven culture in the K-12 education sector. We chat with him today to understand how data-driven approaches can be used to improve student success and the quality of K-12 education.

Dmitry Gudkov is the founder of EasyMorph. As a data-lover, he had a quest for a simpler and more efficient way to transform and manipulate data. Something so simple that people without a technical background can use it as well. Fast forward a few years and now EasyMorph is a small software company with a rapidly growing customer base in 4 continents.

Jon Schwabish is an economist by training and currently works as a Senior Research Associate in The Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. He is also the host of PolicyViz Podcast and the author of "Better Presentations", his new book on presentation skills to help you improve the way you conceptualize, create, and deliver your presentations.

Garrett Dimon is the founder of Sifter. Sifter enables small teams to efficienty manage defect and bug tracking in their development process. He founded Sifter in 2008 and it was acquired in 2016. He is also the author of “Starting & Sustaining“, which is a book about how to build and launch a SaaS web app with less pain and fewer mistakes.

With increasing adoption of cloud-based services, there is a growing data fragmentation problem. The problem is particularly severe for small businesses & startups with significant use of cloud services. Many organizations attempt to solve this by building custom reports and database solutions. Unlike the vibrant open source culture for application code, the analytics world suffers from a lack of reusable reports. Even in 2016, an open source solution is not on the horizon. This is because custom business rules embedded in the process flow. Can analytics marketplace be an intermediate solution? The founders of Rocketgraph think so.

Ryan Knoll owns & operates TidyCasa.com, a cleaning services company in Phoenix, AZ. He started the company in April 2015 as a side hustle while working a full-time job. With the initial capital of only $5,000 dollars and inspiration from another enterpreneur, he grew it from zero to over $500k revenue. Listen to the exciting story of Ryan.