Sorta Same Job in Nearly a New Place

I officially left Art of Problem Solving on January 1. After over 7 years of full-time employment, and over 8 years total when I include contract work and my summer internship, I have my second post-college employer: Inflection Point Learning. The upshot is that AoPS partially own IPL, and nearly every person in our small Institutional Sales department moved with me. My job title is the same, my immediate boss and one direct report haven’t changed, but the new context gives some sparkle and flavor to this second phase in my career that I’m beginning just shy of thirty years old.

A Refined Mission

Consider these two company mission statements.

Art of Problem Solving: To discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation.

Inflection Point Learning: To help teachers and schools unlock math excellence and problem solving skills for their students, enabled by joyful learning and genuine challenge.¹

Don’t worry about how polished each one is, and focus instead on their sentiment and specificity. AoPS has a broad mission with a generational focus. It’s ambitious and somewhat general, but has clear, distinct actions: discover, inspire, and train. Those first two verbs are newer additions that emphasize the organization’s realization that making something great isn’t good enough. If you feel strongly that it’ll provide a positive impact, you have to actively work to find those people. That’s both generally true in business—companies don’t typically survive without some attempt at marketing and active customer acquisition—but also speaks to the inequities within our education system. Students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds are less likely to be identified as candidates for advanced educational programs, and once they miss the initial screening, it creates a negative feedback loop where they are not getting the resources or attention that other students get, making it even more difficult to access those higher-level educational opportunities.

AoPS also uses the blanket term “problem solvers” that mirrors the company’s name and internal philosophy that those who can solve problems are useful in every discipline. Because the founder, Richard Rusczyk, was a math contest kid and was passionate about math, that was the avenue for teaching problem solving. But you can also teach problem solving in programming, or basic sciences, or literature. These are all options. But AoPS began with math, and that continues to be their focus. They are a problem solving company that teaches math, and know they must walk that line between strong values about problem solving being the end goal for which math is a convenient training tool, and the realities of the credit- and standards-based world of education that demands students gain and retain certain topical knowledge and skills. It’s a wonderful mission statement to which everyone who works there, or formerly worked there, was deeply connected.

IPL is different. It’s a startup that has a focused (and somewhat shrinking) audience for which they have a clear product vision. It must live and breathe in the traditional education, legal, and operational context because there are significant barriers to schools and districts adopting a math curriculum while also creating a meaningfully different curriculum from the legacy players and savvy newcomers alike. IPL is also registering as a Public Benefit Corporation, meaning it is legally beholden both to its (private) shareholders and to dutifully following its mission.

The upshot for the Sales team is that we are no longer the side project within a company that has a broader vision and a business foundation that dramatically differs from our own. IPL is focused on schools, and schools are all we sell to. That’s what the kids call synergy.

It’s a beneficial change in my role because there are fewer stakeholders with competing incentives, sometimes opposed incentives, plus there’s that bit of edge that comes with working at a startup. While we have a lengthy financial runway, we must show we’re on pace to achieve our predefined targets. Everyone is motivated to make that happen, and already, only a couple of weeks in, it’s clear how tight-knit this company is. It’s reminiscent of when I started at AoPS, but with a sharper focus.

A Redefined Role

This narrower focus and small startup context have forced me to rethink my role and priorities. I have to maintain the work my team is used to receiving from me while taking on additional responsibilities that come as part of being in a small company; with each person taking a slightly larger share of the available workload, they must be decisive about which projects to pursue. So far, I’ve been balancing temporary transition miscellany with essential process and content work for the new product our team gets to sell. It also means balancing the short-term view I’ve safely molded for years with a broader, more thoughtful approach that requires committed thinking in addition to the doing I have on my plate.

These are all shifting sands. Or perhaps it’s an uncanny valley where, on the surface, at a quick glimpse, nothing has really changed. It’s all recognizable as work I’ve done, but there’s a shimmer and twist to it that, if I think about it too much, makes me slightly uncomfortable and unsure.

Is it more the work, or is it me? I’ve felt impostor syndrome in waves over my years at AoPS. I was not the brightest math mind among the curriculum developers, not even close. Then, I was responsible for more than I thought I should have been at a young age while managing projects. And now I’m being asked insightful and incisive questions, providing opinions that will shape our strategy and nudge our company’s future in some (hopefully successful) direction.

I keep returning to our purpose and mission. When I’m foundering and flailing for a handhold on my work, I have to gather the willpower for some self-directed brusqueness: Is what you’re doing now interesting, or is it interesting and valuable? Will this improve the outcomes for our teams and, more importantly, the students we serve? That helps me slice through the self-doubt and worries because if I believe I can stay committed to our goals and make tangible progress to achieve them, there’s no reason to worry that someone else might be better suited. The reality is that there is someone better at my job than me, hundreds and hundreds of them, but they aren’t here, and they might not be interested in the work. Their existence doesn’t reduce my value, but they do abstractly encourage me to improve myself so I can do better work. That also requires balance, but it wasn’t something I thought about at all until a couple of years ago.

An Undefined Future

Compared to the steady growth of AoPS over the years, profitable for as long as anyone cares to remember and making its step-function improvements in core products every few years, my time at IPL will be characterized by nagging questions and uncertainty over the coming years.

I spent these first eight years of my career focused on improving whatever I touched and making sure I didn’t break it in the process. Nobody wants to be the person who disassembles their toaster to clean it out and fix it up, only to put it back together and destroy the heating element somehow. Now we’re building something new and bringing it to the world. We have explicit goals—not “feel good” goals that help drive us forward, but “the company won’t continue unless…” goals. Those aren’t imminent, I don’t believe I’m looking at them via a sideview mirror, but we do need to keep them in mind so we don’t chase shiny ideas that lead nowhere in particular.

It’s an exciting time, and the right time in my life for this change. Despite occasional self-doubt, I’m confident that I’m the right person, working with amazing teams, to make something incredibly impactful for young students. That’s what we’re here for. Although the future is less certain for me than it was a few weeks ago, I can make it even brighter than before.