Maya Gat took the initial steps to found an EdTech company while on parental leave from her teaching job. With that prize, Maya began building the company she later launched with co-founder David Magier in It was time to act. The result: Total disarray. Furniture and home goods thrown every which way; nothing in its place; essential items totally lost to the storm.
Her love for building and creating was paired with an early dream of being a teacher. At 15, Maya's interest in teaching and inventing came together when she was asked to develop a tutoring program for kids facing neglect and abuse. She recruited teenagers from all over New York City to spend their Saturday mornings tutoring with her.
As tutors and mentors, Maya and the other volunteers helped students in the program — many the same age as the volunteers — with math, writing, and other assignments. Tutoring also further clarified something else: Teaching was where she found her bliss. The joy I experienced when I was teaching was the truest thing for me. Her exploration took her across the urban and rural U.
Wherever she was living, Maya always made sure to keep one foot in teaching. After graduating, she accepted a full-time role as a teacher at an elementary school in the Bronx. She was finally headed to the classroom. Instead, she was patching together information from various narrow assessment tools that the school had selected and desperately seeking more resources that would help her understand and respond to the results of those assessments.
Around the same time — in the beginning of the s — as she was struggling to find solutions, Maya noticed the way companies like Amazon and Netflix were using data to cater to consumer interests.
