Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That’s a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key and often overlooked part of education for students: building an active community of peers to share knowledge with. Hear how she took her dissatisfaction with an inadequate system and turned that into the motivation to build a venture-scale business outside of it on this week’s episode of Found.
We talked to Amanda about her path to entrepreneurship, which is not your typical founder story, despite her experience living and teaching in the Bay Area. Amanda shares how her considerable experience in education, both in terms of her own education, as well as her job as a teacher, led her to the frustrating realization that while tech had a lot to offer kids in school, the system just wasn’t set up to support that or make it happen. Building a company that focused on a particularly underserved aspect of remote learning ended up being the best path forward — and it just so happened that the market Fiveable entered would accelerate dramatically shortly after the company’s founding due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We loved our time chatting with Amanda, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com, or leave us a voicemail at (510) 936-1618. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.