Team

Robert J. Hutter

Managing Partner

Robert J. Hutter is a Managing Partner of Learn Capital. Rob is chairman of Edmodo, a leading social learning network for K12, and he also serves on the boards of several Learn Capital portfolio companies including Schooltube, BloomBoard, MobLab, and LearnZillion. Rob was co-founder of Edusoft (acquired by Houghton-Mifflin), one of the most widely used assessment management platforms in US public education. Rob is a patent holder in games-based adaptive learning and is the founder of a tax credits partnership administered by the U.S. Treasury focusing on high performance schools.

In addition to his background in education, Rob was co-founder of Gazillion, a developer of massively multiplayer online videogames featuring Marvel Entertainment franchises, and was co-founder of SmartDrive, a developer of life saving solutions for fleet vehicle operators that was recently named to the Wall Street Journal Top 50 Venture-Backed Startup List. Earlier in his career, Rob worked at Fundamental Capital and was instrumental in the founding stages of Silicon Spice which sold to Broadcom for $1.2 billion. He is a graduate of Harvard University.

Greg Mauro

Managing Partner

Greg Mauro is a Managing Partner of Learn Capital. He serves on the boards of Bridge International Academies, Edmodo, Blue Duck Education, as well as Nextivity. Greg was a member of the inaugural foundation board at High Tech High schools in San Diego and is a co-founder of RCV, a facilities financing fund for high achieving schools. As an entrepreneur and investor, Greg has been on the founding team of five ventures that have received over $500M in venture capital. He was founder and CEO of Nextivity, a breakthrough indoor coverage provider with customers including Vodafone and T-Mobile. Nextivity was the 2009 CONNECT Most Innovative Product Award winner and is a Fierce Wireless Top 15 company. He was also founder and President of SmartDrive, a provider of onboard vehicle risk management and a Wall Street Journal Top 50 Startup. Prior to SmartDrive, Greg was founding Vice President of Business Development at Entropic, where he authored the original business plan and led strategic investment efforts. Now public, Entropic (ENTR) includes Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, and DIRECTV as investors and Entropic technology powers the in-home video networking for each.

Tom Vander Ark

Managing Partner

Tom Vander Ark is a Managing Partner of Learn Capital. Tom represents Learn Capital’s interests in Open Education Solutions, AdvancePath Academics and Lafafa Kids Education. Previously, he served as President of the X PRIZE Foundation and Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent for one of Washington State’s larger school districts that has been recognized for narrowing achievement gaps and reducing administrative costs. Tom also has extensive experience in the private sector serving as a senior executive for retail start up PACE Membership Warehouse that achieved $5 billion in revenue and was sold to K-Mart.

Tom is director of the International Association of K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and advises a number of education reform groups. He’s the author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World and blogs at GettingSmart.com.

Elliott Bisnow

Venture Partner

Elliott Bisnow is a Venture Partner at Learn Capital, and represents Summit Series within the general partnership.  As Founder and CEO of SummitSeries, Elliott oversees their annual gatherings, which Forbes called “The Davos of Generation Y,” and President Clinton called “A gift to the United States and the world.” Elliott also oversees their Action Fund, which made 10 startup investments 2011, including Zaarly, Warby Parker, EcoMom, Scribd and Uber.  Elliott is the Co-Founder of The Get Well Soon Tour, which brings world famous musicians to perform in hospitals for sick children. At each Get Well Soon Tour stop, children in hospitals across America are surprised by their idols and this year met Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Maroon 5, Bruno Mars, Pitbull and Mandy Moore; Elliott serves as a founding board member of the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council. Elliott is also the Co-Founder of Bisnow Media Corporation with his dad, Mark, which is the largest publisher of commercial real estate news in America and one of the largest business conference producers in America. Elliott grew up in Washington DC and is an avid tennis player and skier.

Wade Davis

Venture Partner

Wade Davis is a Partner of Learn Capital. Wade represents Learn Capital’s interests in City Prep Academies and AdvancePath Academics, which he co-founded. Wade was also instrumental in the creation of America’s Choice and oversaw its transition to a for-profit enterprise as its EVP of Operations (America’s Choice was sold to Pearson in 2010). Wade is currently Executive Vice President of Strategy & Corporate Development of Viacom Inc. In this role, Wade is responsible for strategic planning and business development, as well as identifying, assessing and executing acquisitions and other strategic transactions. Previously, Wade was an investment banker in the technology, media and education sectors at ThinkEquity, Lazard Freres & Co and Wasserstein Perella & Co for more than a decade.

Wade represents Viacom’s interests on the Board of Directors of Viacom18 (India) and Rhapsody International and serves on the Board of the March of Dimes. Wade holds degrees with distinction and honors in both philosophy and economics from Williams College.

Marshall Roslyn

Principal

Marshall Roslyn is a Principal with Learn Capital. Marshall opened the firm’s Beijing office and led its investment in Lafafa Kids Education. Marshall began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he was part of a strategy group that worked with senior management to develop and execute firmwide revenue opportunities with Goldman’s most significant clients. He has also been engaged with an investment advisory firm focused on cross-border private equity investment into China.

Marshall was an early adopter at Room to Read, the world’s leading non-profit organization providing literacy in the developing world. He also established the first Net Impact chapter in all of Mainland China. Marshall received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for International and Public Policy, was a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Shanghai, and completed his MBA at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, where he was a Tsinghua University Scholar.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Principal

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal with Learn Capital. Nathaniel was previously the founder of the Center for Global Engagement, a multi-disciplinary center at Northwestern University that designs programs for students interested in global development, philanthropy, and social entrepreneurship. The CGE currently runs programs in Uganda, India, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and South Africa, and it’s approach to experiential global education has been held up as a model by institutions such as the Clinton Global Initiative University program. Nathaniel writes regularly about education, business and social innovation for publications including GOOD, Inc, and Fast Company. He was the founding editor of the Social Entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, which he grew from launch to the most read website about the topic. He serves as an advisor and evangelist for a number of nonprofits and startups, including Assetmap – a platform for accelerating professional serendipity – which he co-founded. He graduated Cum Laude with honors in History from Northwestern University.

Steve Haraguchi

Fellow

Steve Haraguchi is a second-year MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Steve has served as Co-Organizer of the MIT Sloan EdTech Case Competition and is a Term-time Associate at Consulting Services for Education, where his work focuses on a learning games industry map and an edtech market survey. In addition, Steve has worked with TenMarks Education and Lot18, a venture-backed e-commerce website offering food, wine, and travel.

Prior to attending MIT, Steve was a high school math teacher in Waianae, HI and served as the Technology Operations Director at Teach For America’s summer training institute in Atlanta. He holds a Master of Education in Teaching from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research from Columbia University.

Vicki Peng

Fellow

Originally from Arizona, Vicki Peng is a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in political science. In addition to being a LearnCapital Fellow, Vicki is a Junior Associate with Hyde Park Angels, the leading angel venture capital association in Chicago and interned with True Ventures in San Francisco last summer. On campus, she is the president of the University of Chicago Entrepreneurship Society, and is a research assistant at the Chicago Booth School of Business where she works at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship promoting entrepreneurial education and researching tech transfers . She also co-founded Startup Weekend Chicago Ideas Week which was held at Excelerate Labs, and was selected as a ThinkChicago Innovation Fellow by the City of Chicago Mayor’s Office.

Previously, Vicki served on the Board of Directors of YouthService America, an international nonprofit focused on promoting youth service and civic engagement, and the State Farm Youth Advisory Board where she distributed $5 million per year for service-learning.

Zak Schwarzman

Fellow

Zak Schwarzman is an M.B.A. candidate at Columbia Business School, where he is concentrating on entrepreneurship and venture capital. In addition to serving as a LearnCapital Fellow, Zak is also an intern at AOL Ventures and a Fellow with InSITE, a program that brings together a select group of graduate students to advise technology startups pursuing venture capital.

Prior to Columbia Business School, Zak spent six years launching and raising institutional funding for international and economic development ventures. Most recently, Zak worked as a senior associate with Seedco, designing and raising over $25 million for job training and small business lending programming, with an emphasis on the green economy. Previously, Zak worked as the Central and South America Regional Field Director for the Obama campaign, designing and executing a pilot initiative to organize American voters living abroad in Latin America. In 2007-2008, he co-founded a community development site for the international development organization Manna Project International, whose board of directors he now chairs. He earned a B.A. In Political Economy with a minor in Business from Tulane University in 2005.

Jonathan Steiman

Fellow

Jonathan is a Director, Planning & Analysis at Teach For America. In this role, Jonathan is responsible for developing short- and long-term resource plans with a special focus on real estate and technology. Prior to TFA, Jonathan was an analyst at Datamonitor, where he specialized on financial services technology. Jonathan worked closely with technology vendors, most notably Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft, as well as financial services companies like New York Life and Travelers. In terms of entrepreneurial endeavors, Jonathan launched a biodiesel business for a NYC non-profit. Within less than one year, Jonathan turned a ten page business into a fully operational division that had 250 customers generating over 1 million gallons of waste cooking oil. Additionally, Jonathan co-founded a pre-revenue healthcare retailer called Auricle Hearing Enhancement Centers. Auricle won $20,000 in 2005 NYU Stern Business Plan competition and went onto raise an additional $300,000 during an angel round.

Jonathan received his BS in Finance from Northeastern University. Jonathan is currently working towards an MBA from New York University Stern School of Business, where he specializes in Finance and Strategy.