Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!
In the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy chats with Jess Brondo Davidoff, Founder & CEO of Admittedly, a company that gamifies the college admission process for high school students — not only providing lessons and tools to help them understand the admissions process and keep them on track, but also helping to match them with the best colleges and universities for them.
Like many entrepreneurs, Jess has embraced risk throughout her career. In 2005, she founded The Edge in College Preparation, a wildly successful test prep company. At the company’s peak, Jess was making $15,000 per student for college admissions counseling, and up to $500 an hour for test prep. She opened offices all over the world and grew revenue a whopping 500% in just five years. After seven years of growth, Jess wanted to have a larger impact in the education space, and realized she could not achieve this goal working one-on-one with only elite high school students. So she took a leap of faith and founded Admittedly, hoping to help a wider range of high schoolers looking for information on the perfect colleges and universities for them.
Download this week’s episode to hear Jess share what it was like to walk away from her first very successful business in order to follow her passion, lessons from splitting with a co-founder, and her experience growing her company in two accelerators.