Kira is thrilled to welcome Brad Winters as our new Head of Operations! With a background spanning analytics, finance, and operations leadership, Brad brings a fresh perspective on AI in education and a drive to help Kira scale effectively while supporting its mission to empower educators and learners alike. His passion for innovation and operational excellence will be key as we continue to grow and make an impact in EdTech.
We sat down with Brad to discuss the future of AI in education and how he plans to build on Kira’s mission.
Kira: Brad, welcome to the team!
Brad Winters: Thanks! I’m so excited to be here!
Kira: You’ve had a successful career in operations. This is your second role in EdTech. What initially brought you into the education space?
BW: To be honest, I got connected to Quizlet through a friend. I didn’t initially go seeking an EdTech company. But I've stayed in the industry in large part because the people really rock. You’ve got this intersection of tech and start-ups, which are cool and exciting, and education, where things are very mission-driven and everyone hopes to make a real difference. A lot of the people in edtech come from education themselves, so it becomes this really great combination of passion and being really action-oriented about doing the work.
Kira: What specifically drew you to Kira?
The main thing is, schools need AI more than ever. One thing I've observed at Quizlet is that a lot of teachers are leaving the profession. So you've got a shortage of labor. You've got new teachers coming in who haven’t been fully ramped up. They need as much resourcing as they can to increase their bandwidth. There's so much potential there.
Schools are now adopting AI because they want to have it. They're adopting new technology because so much is changing about what students are learning. A lot of teachers are teaching new subjects, and AI is helping teach it at a much higher level.
Kira: Coming from Quizlet, you’ve seen firsthand how AI is transforming education. What excites you most about its potential in the classroom?
BW: It feels like we’re in one of those quantum leap moments technologically. And schools know it’s important to be a part of that. The way I think about it, we need for teachers to increase their bandwidth and their capacity. With the constraints we talked about in terms of teacher shortages, there needs to be a way for teachers to do more on a per-teacher basis without burning them out.
On the student side, you have massive disparities in learning outcomes. AI can be so much more dynamic in understanding where you’re at and how we get you up the learning curve of mastery. I think that’s so powerful.
Kira: Kira is growing fast. What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in scaling an EdTech platform from an operational perspective?
BW: Quizlet is direct-to-consumer. That consumer is mostly Gen-Z students who tend to have a pretty high technical aptitude. With that comes a relatively high tolerance for things within an app or a product changing quickly. They can roll with it.
What will be important as we scale Kira is keeping that speed and innovation without overwhelming the user, who is a teacher dealing with a hundred other things at any given time. The LMS is the most important piece of software a school has, so we want to move quickly to create the best possible product, but not so quickly that things ever become confusing or cause unintended issues in the classroom.
Kira: Looking ahead, what impact do you hope to make at Kira?
BW: I view my role as everything that isn’t Product, Engineering, Sales, or Marketing. So what exactly is that massive catch-all bucket? To me, it’s building the infrastructure that allows those teams to do their best work. It’s setting the foundation to scale all of those functions. The biggest and most important impact I can have is enabling the company to grow and remove bottlenecks to that growth wherever possible.
