Wendy Kopp secured seven executive meetings by cold-writing to CEOs
Wendy Kopp · Teach For America: Wendy Kopp · Oct 9, 2017 · at 9:16
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America, describes pitching corporate executives during her senior year at Princeton in 1989 to raise initial seed funding.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So I wrote letters to everyone quoted in the article. And a few others, by the way, I would pick out like, you know, Delta Airlines and write to the CEO. I mean, this is, you know, the advantage of inexperience. But believe it or not, I got seven meetings off those letters, not with the CEOs, but with people who they would pass the letters down to, and one was the head of the Business Roundtable who was the CEO of Union Carbide.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp: Educational inequity cannot be solved by classroom teaching alone
“We have here a deeply entrenched and systemic issue that cannot be solved from within classrooms alone, right? This is, no amount of teaching is going to solve this. We need incredible teachers, but we also need some of those people who understand what you und…”
Wendy Kopp: D.C. schools went from lowest-performing to fastest-improving urban district
“When we started placing teachers in Washington, D.C., it was the lowest performing of all the major urban districts. Its kids were two years behind the kids in Harlem. And, you know, now it's the fastest improving urban school system in the country.”
Kopp: Social entrepreneurs must invent their own funding sources to survive
“I think it's kind of the definition of social entrepreneurship, like, you know, there aren't natural funding sources, so you almost have to create them, and ultimately, by your existence, help shape them, and until that's happened, it's just excruciating to ma…”
Kopp: When TFA entered DC, its students lagged two years behind Harlem
“When we started placing teachers in Washington, D.C., it was the lowest performing of all the major urban districts. Its kids were two years behind the kids in Harlem.”
Wendy Kopp: The United States is not a place of equal opportunity
“Our country that claims to be and really aspires to be a place of equal opportunity really isn't one.”
Wendy Kopp: National service programs need 500 members for national significance
“I had looked at the origin of the Peace Corps, and there's this incredible paper, and the paper was this beautiful analysis that concluded that it had to start with 500 Core members. That That was the smallest possible number that would seem nationally importa…”