Miriam Altman-Reyes, founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, discusses her path from public school teacher to entrepreneur to venture capitalist, and how each chapter informs her current work leading a seed fund and growth studio focused on the future of work and learning. Drawing on her experience co-founding and selling Kinvolved to PowerSchool, Miriam explains how her team of exited operators supports early-stage founders across four investment themes: early success systems, operational efficiency, social capital development, and workforce upskilling and reskilling. The conversation explores how private capital can play a distinctive role in scaling AI-driven solutions for learners and workers, and why the defensibility of technology matters more than ever as larger players enter the education and workforce space. Miriam shares examples from her current portfolio and offers practical guidance for leaders navigating labor market shifts, emphasizing adaptability, mission alignment, and the enduring importance of human skills that AI cannot replace. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Kaitlin LeMoine: In our recent Work Forces episodes, we've looked at the future of work through different lenses, from the technical infrastructure of credentials to the institutional shifts happening at community colleges and national nonprofits. And today, we're continuing our focus on the innovators who are driving these changes by looking specifically at the role of investment in the work and learning ecosystem. Julian Alssid: While we often talk about policy and systemic shifts, it's equally important to understand how private capital and exited operators—or founders who have successfully built and sold their own companies—are identifying and scaling the next generation of solutions, particularly as artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally reshape how we prepare the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: And our guest today brings a unique perspective as both a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Miriam Altman-Reyes is the founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, an exited operator-led seed fund and growth studio. Miriam and her team focus on investing in AI-driven solutions that prepare learners and workers for a rapidly evolving labor market. Julian Alssid: Miriam is an expert in the industry who's experienced the full life cycle of a social impact startup. She was the co-founder and CEO of Kinvolved, which she led from its inception to a successful acquisition by PowerSchool in 2022. Her leadership has been recognized by many, including Forbes 30 Under 30 and the New York Times, and she maintains a deep commitment to driving economic mobility for underrepresented populations. Kaitlin LeMoine: Miriam, your path from being a public school teacher in New York City to leading a venture fund gives you an incredible perspective on how to best support innovators and solve for the challenges ahead across learning, work, and economic mobility. We are very excited to have you with us. Welcome to this podcast. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Thank you. I'm really thrilled to be here. Appreciate you having me. Julian Alssid: Yes, Miriam, welcome. And so we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your journey—the path that led you to found and lead Brass Ring Ventures. Miriam Altman-Reyes: So, I moved to New York right out of college, almost 20 years ago—amazing to say, hard to believe—to initially start a career in education. I moved to the city to teach in a public high school through a program called Teach For America, where I witnessed firsthand many different challenges facing our education system. But the one that really stuck with me because it was just so foundational was student absenteeism. You know, kids who would miss school for a variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, you know, as, uh, as I think we all know, if, you know, you don't show up, it's very hard to be successful, um, in whatever it is you're trying to achieve. And I think of my time in the classroom as really kind of trying to understand some of the underlying challenges behind student absenteeism and the opportunities to solve for it. And I found, from an operational perspective, that there were really two parts of the challenge that I felt that eventually technology could help solve. One was that educators, administrators, parents, and students themselves didn't have access to data to really help understand what's going on and therefore inform interventions to solve the problems. And then, two, that those stakeholder groups were really not able to be in close and regular communication to help, ideally, even prevent absenteeism from happening in the first place, um, because of just a really broken communication sort of system between school and home. So I left the classroom having sort of thought of the challenge—I certainly witnessed the challenge, um, thought of some of the solution possibilities. I actually left the classroom thinking I was going to start a school as I entered into my graduate degree at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. And in the first two weeks of the program ended up pivoting to starting an education technology company. And eventually that, uh, company offered a platform of multiple tools that did just what I just described, you know, providing more real-time access to data and facilitating two-way communication between school and home, really heavily focused on underserved populations where student absenteeism tends to be most profound. And so I led as one of the co-founders and the CEO of the business over the course of about eight years from, of course, idea through eventually our exit, as you mentioned, uh, in your earlier comments. Many different chapters along the way, but, um, you know, and lots of highs and lows, as with any entrepreneurial business. But maybe some of the highlights are that we, first of all, from an efficacy perspective, achieved positive results from three third-party efficacy studies that really showed that our solution did, in fact, work at reducing absenteeism, which therefore had impacts on short- and long-term academic gains, including graduation. Also, we became a profitable business, even though we did raise financing over the years from a number of different sources—from venture capital to debt financing to strategic sources, um, you know, grants and others. We did become profitable, um, before we were acquired. And we were a business that sold our software to arguably one of the hardest, uh, you know, buyers that exists, that's K-12 schools and districts across the US. And at the time of our acquisition, we had customers from small rural districts to New York City public schools across about half of US states. So it was a really great run, um, and super proud of the work that we did. I then stayed on at PowerSchool, who had acquired us, which then had recently gone public. We were their second acquisition as a publicly traded company, as primarily in the role of Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Partnerships for their New Solutions Group, which essentially was spun up around the time of our own company's acquisition, with the goal being to help develop more, um, sort of organic growth to help offset a lot of the acquisition-related growth that PowerSchool, um, had become famous for over, you know, many years. Uh, and so I reported to the Chief Product Officer and worked on launching four products across the entire ecosystem of PowerSchool's, I think, maybe 25 to 30 products in total. So really got that much broader perspective after having been so specifically focused on building my own business and my own problem set for many years. And that was certainly, by, um, opportunity and also by design. But ultimately, I decided that I really wanted to be closer to the early stage, closer to the ground, and closer to the impact. And also had, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit in some ways never dies, and so I knew I wanted to start something, uh, new again. And so I left PowerSchool just about three years ago to start Brass Ring Ventures with the initial idea being that as a founder, you know, I had incredible mentors, advisors, and board members who were exited founders and operators in their own right, and they knew exactly the right time to provide support, how to provide support, how to push, um, and also how to let me sort of like lead and learn, um, as a first-time, uh, CEO. And I realized in talking with dozens of other founders that were earlier in their journey that that experience that I'd had was particularly unique. And I also was really fortunate that I had a team of exited operators and founders in my last business's executive team that wanted to work together again. And so we came back together as partners in Brass Ring Ventures, both the studio and now in the fund. Um, I'm sure we'll go into more, but that is a little bit of how I got to where I am today. Kaitlin LeMoine: What a cool and amazing story, and certainl
