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.

  • Product Lead at Outschool

    I'm excited to work alongside a fantastic 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.

  • 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