About

I'm Prannoy. Most mornings I'm writing before I'm anything else: essays on education, technology, work, and the philosophy running under all three, plus whatever music has my attention that month. Poems too, published here and there, slowly collecting into a book.

None of that is a career plan so much as a habit I picked up early. My first job out of college was teaching pre-algebra to 7th graders in Baltimore through Teach for America, getting my education degree from Johns Hopkins on nights and weekends. Twelve-year-olds don't hand over their attention because a title says teacher. It gets earned in the first two weeks or the whole year is spent losing it, and a room of thirty only moves in one direction when the thing they're moving toward matters more than any single kid in it. I've been trying to build that same thing ever since, whether it's a product, a poem, or a company: attention earned, then pointed somewhere worth going.

The building came out of the same instinct. I founded a K-12 learning company, grew it to a million in revenue, and sold it; since then I've built learning products inside bigger companies, the kind used by millions of people who'll never know my name. I advise founders, and I back a handful with my own money, mostly in education and healthcare, because I know what the work actually costs and I'd rather be useful than sit in the stands.

I can't keep the poems and the products in separate rooms. The same standard runs under both: made well, honest about what it is, and worth the time of whoever's on the far end. This site is what happens when I stop pretending those are separate concerns.