Friday, December 16, 2016

Meet The Gates Foundation’s New Deputy Director in Higher Education - Betsy Corcoran & Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

Heather Hiles towers above most other edtech entrepreneurs. Truly. She played basketball in high school but picked academics over sports and wound up graduating from UC Berkeley, with support of a Pell grant. She began a long career in education, which included cofounding two social enterprise organizations (one of which helped get 4,000 women off welfare), serving as a Commissioner of San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education and starting two edtech companies. She’s played called big shots in edtech, too, becoming one of the rare African American women to raise venture capital funding. Hiles raised $12 million between 2011 and 2015 for her company, Pathbrite, which she sold to Cengage Learning in October 2015. This past October, Hiles quietly signed on at the Gates Foundation as deputy director of postsecondary success. http://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-12-15-meet-the-gates-foundation-s-new-deputy-director-in-higher-education