An interview on Adrian Tan's blog covering the founding of UpLevel, Jackie's edtech venture aimed at closing the gap between data science coursework and what companies actually need from a data hire.
UpLevel's approach: co-designed projects with hiring companies that double as both training and a pipeline — candidates work on real data problems the company needs solved, which doubles as evaluation. The interview traces this back to Jackie's own path — after fundMyLife's exit, he taught Python and data science at a coding academy as an instructor and later Chief Academic Officer, and kept running into the same gap between what students learned and what employers actually needed.