The Future of
Education Is Bright

Ramit Varma, chief executive officer and co-founder, has been a teacher his whole life. He started as a tutor in high school and college, as a master trainer for The Princeton Review and as founder of Revolution Prep. Ramit has consistently looked for ways to make learning more effective by making teachers more effective. After selling Revolution Prep to Apax Partners in 2021, Ramit ran for mayor of Los Angeles, narrowly losing the primary. He received 2,500 votes. The winners received more than 400,000 each.

Ramit has found the opportunity to bring his decades of ed tech experience to bear on the education ecosystem during one of the greatest times of change we may ever see. AI is already changing the game and it is Breakout's mission to use this transformative technology to empower instructors and inspire students.

Steven Walters, chief content officer and co-founder, is an award-winning writer, director, producer, entrepreneur and educator. Steven is a co-founder of Second Thought Theatre, as well as an emeritus company member of the Tony Award-winning Dallas Theater Center. As an actor, Steven is perhaps best known for his role on NBC's "Friday Night Lights" as guidance counselor Glenn Reed. As a screenwriter, Steven's films have played at SXSW, BFI London and more. As a podcaster, he is the executive producer of multiple critically acclaimed series including "American Election: Wicked Game," "Business Movers," "History Daily" and more. Steven is also the co-creator and head writer of "1865," which The A.V. Club called "...the best audio fiction podcast of all time."

Raised by teachers, Steven has a deep passion for education. His first job out of college was serving as the director of educational outreach at a theater in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. At Breakout, Steven is excited to bring together two of his greatest passions: stories and curriculum.

Joshua Oster-Morris, chief technology officer and co-founder, has been writing software since the age of six and has been at the forefront of most technological revolutions for the past 40 years. His efforts have spanned disciplines, from mobile and web software development in the 1990s to the implementation of recurrent neural networks for natural language processing in the 2010s, to more recently devising “Internet of Things” gadgets and energy-efficient genomic data search methods.

Joshua believes there has never been a more exciting time to build new technologies impacting the future of humanity and there is no better fulcrum to leverage than education.

Will Minton, chief marketing officer, has more than 25 years of marketing and communications experience in the consumer goods, foodservice, and entertainment industries. He led the communications and business development teams at Advantage Solutions, the No. 1 Promotion and Experiential Marketing Agency Network in the United States for 10 consecutive years, according to Ad Age. He also spearheaded key marketing initiatives at Taco Bell, such as creating Mountain Dew Baja Blast, the first chain-exclusive soft drink in the quick-service restaurant industry, and expanding the brand into breakfast.

Micah Chambers-Goldberg, executive creative director, has been creating memorable images for decades. His broad and varied career has led him to design toys, illustrate children’s books and direct animation. Whether making a music video for Eric Clapton or an advertisement for Coca-Cola, his visual language speaks with imagination and emotional connection. He also served as executive creative director at Revolution Prep where he helped develop a math adventure program for grade school kids.

Micah is excited to use visual storytelling and dynamic design to create engaging and impactful learning experiences for students at Breakout Learning.

Jon Small, general manager of business school programs, became a teacher by accident when he was working as a classical music composer in New York City. A friend referred him to Kaplan Inc. to earn some extra income beyond the king’s ransom he was getting for writing avant-garde orchestral music as a graduate student at NYU. Jon discovered a new love that led him to executive roles in program management and business development at Kaplan and several startups in the graduate preparation space including Veritas Tutors focused on MBA applicants. Jon received his own MBA from UCLA Anderson and became an active member of several alumni incubator projects, one of which became his full-time appointment at Breakout Learning. He also sits on the board of for-profit and nonprofit firms bridging the academic gap among socioeconomic populations in K12.

Olav Sorenson is Faculty Director for the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he also holds the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies.

A member of the UCLA Anderson faculty since 2020, Sorenson is renowned for his research in economic geography, particularly the impact of entrepreneurship on regional growth and competitiveness.

With a previous term at UCLA from 1999 to 2005 and teaching positions at other prestigious institutions, including Yale, the University of Toronto, and London Business School, he has published over 100 papers in leading journals. Notably, he received the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.

Noah Askin is Assistant Professor of Teaching Organization and Management at UC-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business

Askin is an award-winning teacher and case writer, who is trained as a computational social scientist and sociologist. His research includes social and cultural networks, the causes and consequences of creativity (particularly in the music industry), the production and consumption of culture, and the dynamics of organizational and individual status.

Corinne Bendersky is Professor and Area Chair of Management and Organizations at UCLA Anderson School of Management. An expert in workplace conflict, status, justice, and diversity and inclusion in teams and organizations, her research contributes to both academic knowledge and organizational practice. 

Bendersky’s recent projects include developing interventions to reduce gender bias, advancing conflict measurement methods in teams, and using machine learning to analyze conflict expressions and women's representation in media.

As Faculty Director of the UCLA human resources roundtable (HARRT), she collaborates with HR executives to share knowledge on cutting-edge HR topics. Additionally, she is the founder of Morpho Leadership Development, consulting on conflict management and diversity and inclusion.

Daylian Cain is a Senior Lecturer in Negotiations, Leadership, and Ethics at Yale School of Management.

Cain's research focuses on "judgment and decision-making" and "behavioral business ethics." In other words, he studies the reasons why smart people do dumb things. Cain is a leading expert on conflicts of interest, especially the "perverse effects of disclosing conflicts of interest," and how to turn altruism on and off. Notably, Cain’s research has been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Forbes, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, USA Today, the New York Times and other top media outlets such as NPR.

Cain has won national teaching awards and has also appeared as a commentator on National Geographic’s popular TV show, Brain Games.

Gus Cooney is a Senior Lecturer in the Operations, Information and Decisions Department of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches its #1 ranked negotiations course.

Cooney has been the recipient of many awards, including a full-tuition Cardinal Medeiros Scholarship at Boston University, the prestigious dissertation award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Cooney’s research and writing have been published in distinguished academic outlets, including Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Annual Review of Psychology, and the Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th Edition – and has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, BBC, Time, The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review.

Kelly Goldsmith is the E. Bronson Ingram Chair, Professor of Marketing at Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt. She received both the Research Productivity Award (2021) and the Dean’s Award for Teaching (2020), in addition to being recognized as a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow.

Goldsmith’s research is highly interdisciplinary in nature, drawing upon theories and methods from a variety of areas, including anthropology, cognitive and social psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and marketing. Her work has appeared in several top marketing and psychology journals and has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including the BBC, Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many more. She has been recognized as one of the “Top 40 Most Outstanding Business School Professors in the World Under 40” (Poets& Quants) and one of “Eight Young Business School Professors on the Rise” (Fortune Magazine).

Lindred (Lindy) Greer is a world-renowned thought-leader on how to create high-performing teams. She is currently a Professor for Management & Organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and the Faculty Director of its Sanger Leadership Center.

Greer’s research focuses on how to lead high-performing teams. Her research has won awards from organizations such as the Academy of Management and American Psychological Association, has been cited over 10,000 times, and has made impact in practice via her articles in outlets like Harvard Business Review and her executive education work with clients around the world, such as Amazon, Google and ExxonMobil.

Myles Shaver is Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management where he holds the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Corporate Strategy.

Shaver’s research about corporate expansion is published in leading scholarly journals and he is invited to present at conferences and universities around the world. 

He is recipient of the Irwin Outstanding Educator Award – the most prestigious international teaching award in Strategic Management and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business Distinguished PhD Alumni Award. Poets and Quants profiles Shaver in their compilation of the “World’s 50 Best Business School Professors.”

Shaver is a Fellow and President-Elect of the Strategic Management Society.