Welcoming Amy Nelson to the Rethink Education Team
By Matt Greenfield, Founder and Managing Partner, and Amy Nelson, Managing Partner
I am delighted and honored to share that Amy Nelson is taking a full-time role with Rethink Education, joining Dre Bennin and me as our third managing partner.
When Amy joined Rethink Capital Partners as chief strategy officer three years ago, the first things I noticed were her wisdom, her gravitas, and her alert, swift-moving, penetrating intelligence. She has a deep understanding of human motivation and character. Amy is continually noticing things about people that I myself had not seen. She is a great thought partner and has cultivated deep relationships with our investors and portfolio.
Soon after her arrival, Amy’s natural gifts as a leader and manager became apparent. She immediately started to build teams and to deliver new solutions across the Rethink Capital Partners platform. Amy is simultaneously catalytic, inspirational, far-seeing, disciplined and organized, and anti-entropic. I found myself going to her with my challenges, strategizing and brainstorming with her, and asking her to hold me accountable. She has helped me elevate my own performance.
I will let Amy introduce herself to our community and share more about her background, which I believe equips her extremely well for Rethink Education’s mission.
After more than three years of collaborating with Matt, Michael, Tammy, Dre, Bridget, and Monique, I am thrilled to be transitioning to a full-time role with the Rethink Education team. This feels like the culmination of a career spent expanding access to education and opportunity, primarily through the tools of entrepreneurship and venture capital. I look forward to working with our community to advance our goals of serving the most vulnerable by providing the tools needed for high quality education and opportunity creation.
As a Managing Partner, I will be leading Rethink Education’s operations as well as taking an active role in our investments. My purview will include management of our junior investment team and collaborating with them on everything from pipeline and portfolio management to thesis development and partnerships. I will continue to work with Matt and Dre on fundraising and investor relations, as well as joining them on the investment committee (‘IC’).
Since I joined Rethink Capital Partners more than three years ago, I have taken an active role in Rethink Education’s portfolio and operations. I have been an observer on the IC and a board director for Vivvi, Rethink Education’s largest investment to date. I also sit on the IC for Rethink Food and have been a strategic partner on Rethink Community. The work of Rethink Education has always been particularly dear to my heart, which is why I have served as a mentor for Techstars’ Economic Mobility Accelerator and Techstars’ Workforce Development Accelerator. I am also a board member for the Impact Capital Managers Institute and have been a frequent speaker at impact investing and edtech events.
As I move forward, I’m excited to dig in more deeply to themes like expanding access to higher education, supporting the justice-involved, investing in opportunities for rural communities, and advancing opportunity for women, especially single mothers. Given my lived experience with each of these areas, I hope to bring an informed perspective to our related investments.
A bit about me: I grew up in the rural Midwest, was raised by a single mother, and attended Claremont McKenna College as a first-generation student and Pell Grant recipient. I spent the first six years of my career in international development, in education-focused roles that included rolling out IT centers in former Soviet States through the State Department and directing schools for street children in Cambodia. At 28, I read Jacqueline Novogratz’s The Blue Sweater and my eyes were opened to the possibilities of impact investing. I decided then I wanted to use the tools of capitalism to alleviate poverty. So, I packed up my two kids and moved to New York, where I completed an MBA at the Stern School of Business. While there, I joined the B Lab Team and helped launch the Global Impact Rating System. Eventually, I found my way to Venture For America (‘VFA’), which was focused on attracting high-quality talent to cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and New Orleans to build businesses and contribute to economic development. After four years leading growth and operations for VFA, I was elevated to CEO when the founder departed.
The VFA model centered around a highly selective fellowship program for recent college graduates, placing them in startups and growth companies in cities that struggled to attract and retain top talent. After VFA’s Training Camp, which included both high caliber hard and soft skills training and an emphasis on immediately applying skills through team-based challenges with real world consequences (building a website for a local small business, designing an MVP to solve an IDEO-developed ”how might we…” statement related to mobility, community development, or experimental design), Fellows spent two years apprenticed to an experienced entrepreneur, learning how decisions get made and how businesses grow and sometimes fail. We selected fellows for entrepreneurial aptitude and well over a third decided to start a company or meaningful project after the program. We hosted a competitive accelerator for our alumni and invested directly in the most promising startups they generated. VFA made money through revenue from job placement, philanthropy, and income from investments.
In my seven years with VFA, we helped more than 1,200 recent college graduates launch entrepreneurial careers, directly supported the launch of 120+ businesses, and made direct investments into 40+ pre-seed startups. I managed our venture fund, partnering with investors like Josh Kopelman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Dan Gilbert, Graham Weston, and Reid Hoffman, many of whom made follow-on investments in those companies. To date, VFA Alumni have raised nearly $1 billion in venture financing and created thousands of jobs. We helped grow category-defining businesses like Banza, NaturAll, and Rebundle and experienced outcomes like Clyde’s sale to Cover Genius and Slope’s acquisition by Smartsheet. I also led the organization’s strategic investment in becoming an onramp to entrepreneurship for historically excluded communities, garnering support from sponsors like UBS and Uber.
While I already know much of the Rethink Education community, I would be delighted to connect with any and all of you upcoming. I look forward to working together to make education a joyful, personalized experience that allows individuals, families, and communities to thrive.
“Amy’s commitment to Rethink Education is a boost for the entire education innovation ecosystem, and I look forward to what this next chapter holds. We will be a more resilient organization, equipped to see around corners and focus relentlessly on building and supporting a portfolio of best-in-class startups. She will ensure that economic mobility and human flourishing remain our guiding light, and she will nurture the talent within our own organization and portfolio to ensure we are all stronger together.”
Matt Greenfield, Founder and Managing Partner, Rethink Education
Together, we are excited about the future and the opportunities that lie ahead. Thank you for your continued support and dedication to our mission as we embark on this new chapter.
