Exploring Life & Business with Miriam Altman-Reyes of Brass Ring Ventures

Today we’d like to introduce you to Miriam Altman-Reyes.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

Today, I am founder and CEO of Brass Ring Ventures, a Startup Studio and Fund supporting global education and workforce tech companies. But, my current chapter is just the latest in a more than 15-year career. I started my professional journey in 2008 as a high school history teacher in a public school in New York City through a program called Teach For America. It was a life-changing experience through which I witnessed many of the challenges affecting youth, families, and school systems. The most foundational problem that I noticed was student absenteeism.

As they say, “80 percent of life is showing up,” and the research proves that when students miss just two days of school per month, without intervention, 65 percent of chronically absent kindergarteners will lag in literacy skills by third grade, while about 60% of chronically absent freshmen are likely to become dropouts. Chronic absenteeism disproportionately impacts students living in poverty and students of color across the country.

But, as I learned in the classroom, we can solve absenteeism through more readily available access to data and by bridging communication gaps between school and home. When I left the classroom to pursue a Master’s Degree in Public Service at New York University, I had the opportunity to launch my first business, Kinvolved, as the winning entry into a public policy competition. Over the next nine years, we grew to become the leading education technology company in student attendance improvement across the United States.

As CEO and Co-Founder, I led the business from inception in 2013 through our 2022 exit to PowerSchool, the largest publicly traded education SaaS company in North America. At PowerSchool, once the integration of Kinvolved into the broader company ecosystem was largely complete, I moved into a new role as Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Partnerships for the New Solutions Group. In this role, I led the launch of five new education and workforce technology products and several related channels, content, and research partnerships.

As an entrepreneur and a CEO, I attribute much of my leadership development, and my resulting success in effectively growing teams and businesses, to the access that I have had to knowledgeable, impact-driven, and committed advisors, board members, investors, and colleagues. They have helped me grow into becoming the leader that I was at every stage of Kinvolved’s life cycle, and the leader that I am today at Brass Ring Ventures.

As I began meeting with more fellow entrepreneurs after Kinvolved’s acquisition, I realized that many lacked access to these critical relationships and needed support, capacity, and investment to work through common challenges related to fundraising, go-to-market, financial management, and product development. I also realized that I had critical experience and access to a network that could help founders increase their likelihood of success and accelerate their impact. So last year, I launched my second enterprise, Brass Ring Ventures, which set out to do just that.

At Brass Ring Ventures, we support mission-driven founders who are leveraging technology to increase access to educational, workforce, and economic opportunities for all. Through our dual Startup Studio and Investment Fund model, our team of experienced, exited industry operators and investors roll up our sleeves to support our selective global portfolio of companies. For our Pre-Seed and early Seed-stage ventures, we focus on establishing and executing business strategy fundamentals.

And, for our late Seed through Series A-stage ventures, we help to strategize and execute business transformation initiatives. In our first year, we have been able to grow our portfolio to more than 15 companies led by more than 25 underrepresented founders worldwide. It has been an incredibly exciting and high-impact endeavor to date, and we are eager to continue to expand our team, portfolio, and offerings.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I think that persistence, humility, self-awareness, and the ability to quickly pivot and execute have been my most critical leadership traits and tools to overcome challenges along my journey. When starting Kinvolved 12 years ago, I had a deep passion for solving absenteeism in schools, a critical problem, and a market that I knew very well. However, I had no experience with fundraising, sales, or technology development, all of which were critical to launching and scaling the business.

At first, I would meet with any investor who would take a meeting with me, but almost all of them said that they would not invest, at least not until we had reached some level of growth. Though our initial goal was to raise $750K in our Pre-Seed round, we closed under goal at $250K and pivoted toward winning grants and executing with what we had raised on a shoestring budget.

By pitching our social mission to tech developers who provided services at a discount, we were able to finance the first version of the product’s development. And, we started to generate early sales by writing and leveraging a case study from our pilot school customer among other schools in the same community, West Harlem, New York. We kept pushing, through a bit of trial and error, but also listening to the market and leveraging peer and advisor experiences, to keep building the momentum.

Fast forward, nine years later to the point of our acquisition, we had raised four rounds of financing, built a multi-product technology platform, sold to school systems nationally, including to the top three largest systems in the country, and achieved profitability. Despite the normal bumps along the road and the stress of the pandemic on the business, our overall ability to work as a team to keep growing the company made us a great target for acquisition at a time when we were empowered to make a choice about selling the business from a position of strength.

While we were fortunate to achieve a positive outcome for all stakeholders — customers, team, investors, and founders — which is not a guarantee in every acquisition scenario, the diligence process was grueling and the post-acquisition transition was challenging. Our acquisition diligence took only eight weeks from the letter of intent to close, an incredibly fast timeline, particularly over the holiday season when it took place.

Because of the nature of the deal, with support from our leadership team and Board of Directors, I directly negotiated the deal and oversaw the diligence process on our end. This meant I often worked 18 hours a day, through the winter holidays, and, inconveniently, when I had COVID-19. It was an incredible learning experience, but I felt like a machine and had to compartmentalize the emotions of selling the business at that time in an effort to focus on getting the deal done.

Then, suddenly, we were on the other side. I was no longer a CEO, no longer responsible for the trajectory of the business, but instead, an employee in a 3,000-person public company. Our team had been spread out across the new business from day one, and I had a boss for the first time in almost 10 years.

While in hindsight, I am grateful for the incredible learning opportunities and many of the strong relationships I made with colleagues during my time at PowerSchool, I, like many founders, definitely felt a loss of the business, my identity, and my autonomy that took until I left to start my next venture to really recover from. Staying in touch with other exited founders, my former team members, and trusted advisors during the transition was critical to helping me stay grounded and eventually discover my next chapter with Brass Ring Ventures.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Brass Ring Ventures is unique in our unparalleled operator experience, dual studio and investment model, unique program delivery, and founder-friendly structure. We were named one of the Education and Workforce Tech Studios to Watch in 2024 by EdTech Insider.

Our partners and advisors have founded and led companies from inception through acquisition, so we have been in our founders’ shoes and understand what it takes to achieve success. We apply this experience through our hands-on support to our portfolio companies, whether in preparing for their first funding round, establishing their go-to-market strategy, navigating leadership transitions, working toward profitability, or preparing for acquisition.

We are one of the first Startup Studios in the education and workforce fields, applying successful Studio models from other industries to this context. Unlike traditional accelerators, we have developed our programs to enable us to evolve our involvement with our companies over time.

We can roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches with leadership teams, and then modify our support later on to allow us to stay as involved as needed. And, unlike traditional funds, we have deep industry experience and work closely with founders, providing us with a unique perspective to deeply assess risk before making an investment.

In 2024, we are continuing to grow our portfolio and team, refine our offerings, build investor relationships, and prove success by going deep with select companies we believe in and with founders, we think we can support. We encourage founders to apply and prospective partners and co-investors to reach out via our website.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Outside of my work with Brass Ring, which I truly love, spending time with family and long-time friends, traveling, biking, walking, and going to the beach make me happy. I also enjoy seeking out opportunities to make new connections and be inspired by the amazing women in my community and network, including through the Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade, my favorite local nonprofit for which I sit on the Board.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brassring.vc/
• Instagram: @maltmanreyes and https://www.instagram.com/brassringventures/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-altman-reyes/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/brass-ring-ventures

Image Credits
Jordan Goff, Southern Skull Media, and Robert Grima