Brett van Zuiden

My goal is to help people become more thoughtful, happy, and complete versions of themselves.

I love creating mission-driven teams where diverse, talented people can excel individually and work together to change industries. I enjoy encouraging my peers and direct reports to stretch into new challenges and realize how talented they are. And I thrive working in education, where I can dedicate my career to helping children realize their full potential.

Outside of work, I cook, surf, hack on a number of side projects, and play soccer and guitar. I currently live in Oakland.

  • Head of Product at Once

    Once helps every child learn to read. Students using Once receive 15 minutes of 1-on-1 literacy instruction every day from an in-person, caring adult, leading to life-changing results: last year, the typical student on Once accelerated from the 38th percentile to the 67th percentile on reading ability.

    At Once, I lead all core product functions, including engineering, product management, design, and data.

  • CIO at Summit Public Schools

    Summit Public Schools is a leading network of public schools that prepares a diverse student population for success in a four-year college and to be thoughtful, contributing members of society.

    As CIO, I led a team of analysts and data engineers to support our schools with systems and insights to better serve students:

    • Reimagined and redesigned core operational workflows using technology across attendance, enrollment, assessment, state reporting, teaching coaching, and more, eliminating tasks from school leaders while improving quality and compliance.
    • Led organization-wide change management in the adoption of a new Learning Management System, including assembling an evaluation & selection team, managing buildout and customization, and coordinating training and rollout across our 12 schools and 3500+ students and families.
    • Managed team through significant restructuring, reducing cost by 50% but noticeably improving team velocity and impact through investments in automation.
    • Founded Marshall Data Partners, a new innovation initiative within Summit to provide data engineering and operations to partner organizations, including fundraising seed grants and landing initial customers.
    • Designed and implemented performance management framework for the team, as well as designed and led Home Office professional development.
    • Partnered with our executive team and school leaders to help them leverage technology and data to improve their team's performance, including our annual goal setting and progress monitoring.
  • Product Lead at Outschool

    I had an amazing time working with a team of PMs, researchers, designers, and engineers to help kids and teens love learning.

    I started at Outschool in 2020 as one of the first PMs, where I helped craft the product team culture along with leading our learner-focused products. Building products for kids was a blast - some particular highlights out of the things I worked on:

    • Founded the initial Learner Product Group, growing it from single pod of 5 to a team of 20, including hiring and managing two PMs
    • Launched learner-led class discovery, generating over $4M in bookings/year
    • Proposed and launched Outschool Groups, interest-based social networks for kids aged 8-15, and Outschool's first mobile app.
    • Collaborated closely with Trust & Safety and Legal teams to ensure learners were safe on Outschool, including introducing content moderation & administering our 100k+ account Zoom infrastructure
    • Led weekly PM team training and created PM leveling rubric
  • PM Lead at Clever

    I was very fortunate to spend over 5 years working alongside a talented and thoughtful team to build software that helps students learn and teachers teach.

    • Built the Discovery team, a new line of business for Clever, from a 2 person experimental initiative into a 18 person cross-functional team, initial revenue, and top-level company priority.
    • As part of the Discovery team work, built the Clever Library, the #1 place for teachers to find and adopt edtech, used by over 10% of US teachers.
    • Previously led Clever's school-facing product work, growing our active users from 100,000 to 4.5M over 18 months.
    • Built, launched, and scaled Clever Badges, Clever's highest NPS product, now used by 20% of U.S. K-2 students.
    • Mentored, hired, and managed entry level and mid-career product managers.
    • Taught "Freshman Seminar," a six week training program for new hires to learn about the K12 education ecosystem.
  • Head of Product Management at IFTTT

    I worked with a team of 12 fantastic engineers and designers to build and grow IFTTT’s consumer products on iOS, Android, and the web. I headed up IFTTT's product roadmap, growth, metrics & user research, and day-to-day process.

    As the first product manager, I established the role of product management at IFTTT, and built out the initial team.

    • Built out a flagship product (Do) from initial conception to public launch.
    • Increased success rate of the web onboarding flow by 43%.
    • Coordinated a major brand update and simultaneous launch of 8 new apps across iOS and Android.
    • Doubled the clickthrough rate and halved the unsubscribe rate of our email engagement efforts.
  • Founder and CEO at Filepicker.io

    As the CEO, I drove the product, business, and technical direction of the company; as a founder, I did everything from UX design, fundraising, and hiring to coding the iOS product, content marketing, and customer support.

    • Grew the company to 13 people and an AMR of $600,000 with over 1,000 customers.
    • Participated in the YCombinator batch of Summer 2012.
    • Raised $1.8mn from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors.
    • Reached profitability in 18 months.
    • Sold to Xenon Ventures in spring of 2014.
  • S.B. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT

    GPA: 5.0/5.0. Minors in Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics.

    • McGovern Award for significant impact on entrepreneurship - MIT, 2012
    • Top 5 Graduating MIT computer scientists - ThePhenomList, 2012
    • Whitelaw Prize for Originality of Design - MIT, 2010