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My academic credentials — and I share these not because I find them particularly interesting but because I understand you need to put something in a file — include a doctorate in Education Technology, a Master's from Harvard, a second Master's in Learning Innovation from Michigan, and a MicroMasters in Data Science from MIT. My doctoral thesis focused on AI-enhanced curriculum development for performance improvement, which is a very clinical way of describing the question that actually kept me up at night: Can you systematize the thing my brother did for me with five hundred dollars and no formal training whatsoever?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. But it required borrowing from computational linguistics, behavioral psychology, and instructional design — and ignoring approximately forty percent of what each field considers orthodoxy. The remaining sixty percent, properly integrated, is what became the 7 Teachings.

I mention the rigor because I know what this room needs to hear. But I want to be honest about something: the research gave me the framework. My brother gave me the question. And in my experience, the person with the right question will always outperform the person with the right methodology. I was fortunate enough to end up with both.

I should tell you what I do for a living, because context matters and I've been talking about my brother for ten minutes without mentioning that I actually have a day job.

I'm an educator. That's the short version. The longer version involves Harvard, and Google, and a decade of building learning programs at companies whose names you'd recognize, and completion rates that made my colleagues mildly suspicious that I was somehow cheating.

But I didn't start COE because of any of that. The résumé is a tool — a useful one, the way a good lockpick is useful — but it's not the reason.

The reason is a man who had a brain injury and five hundred dollars and decided my future mattered more than his groceries. Everything I learned at Harvard and Google and SAP — the instructional design, the behavioral frameworks, the data science — all of it exists in service of one question: Can I build, at scale, what Tolik did for me in a dormitory with an empty wallet?

The credentials help me build it well. The promise is why I build it at all.

If you need the list — and I understand that you do, because trust is built on evidence and I have no quarrel with that — here it is:

Harvard, Master's in Management. University of Michigan, Master's in Learning Innovation. A doctorate in Education Technology. MIT MicroMasters in Data Science. Thirty-five certifications across instructional design, artificial intelligence, and product management, which sounds excessive and probably is, but I've never been able to resist a well-structured course — occupational hazard of being an educator.

Ten years across Google, SAP, Polygon Labs, and TAL Education. Curriculum that reached, collectively, north of ten million learners. Completion rates that tripled industry benchmarks — not once, but consistently, across radically different populations and contexts.

All of which means exactly one thing for the purposes of this conversation: I know how to build learning systems that people actually finish. And I know how to do it at a scale that matters.

The reason I do it — that's a different list entirely. That list has one item on it, and his name was Tolik.