Patrick
Marcotte

I'm Patrick Marcotte, co-founder and CEO of Lessi, an AI company for special education teams in St. Paul, Minnesota. Before Lessi, I was president of Learning A-Z and Voyager Sopris Learning at Cambium Learning Group, was part of the team behind two acquisitions there, and served as COO of Really Great Reading through its acquisition by The Vistria Group. Implementation runs through all of that work: getting education programs adopted, used well, and renewed across large school districts.

After college I worked as an overnight and school-day tech at a state psychiatric hospital in Maine while studying for the LSAT. I got so into the work that I dropped the LSAT, took the GRE, and moved to Chicago for an MA in Behavior Analysis at The Chicago School. While there, I worked as a paraprofessional serving children with autism and provided in-home support. I did a practicum under T.V. Joe Layng, the founder of Headsprout, and that's where my education technology career started.

Yes, they should. But the reality of schools fights it. Between a district signing a contract and students benefiting, there's training, scheduling, data, coaching, and the politics of dozens of buildings. Good products stall in that gap all the time. Closing it is implementation, and I've built the teams that do it for some of the largest districts in the country.

I started at Headsprout as a graduate intern earning practicum hours. My assignment was gathering user feedback on the new Headsprout Reading Comprehension product in Chicago Public Schools. From there I moved into implementing Headsprout's adaptive early reading software in large school districts across the U.S., and I led the business through its acquisition by Cambium Learning Group in December 2013.

At Learning A-Z, I went from consultant to senior director of implementation to VP of R&D to president. I led pilot implementations in several of the largest U.S. districts and built the professional services approach that served our growing international customer base. In R&D, we built what implementation taught us back into the products. As president, I led Cambium's largest division, serving more than 5 million students in over 170 countries, as annual bookings grew past $80 million.

Four reasons. First, Bob Holl, Learning A-Z's co-founder, understood educator sensibilities better than anyone I've ever met. Second, winning awards is a skill of its own, and our product marketing team got very good at it. Third, our editorial and design teams paid close attention to detail in everything they made. Fourth, we turned implementation insights into better products, at a time when that was rare in educational publishing and technology.

Between 2016 and 2019, Raz-Plus, Headsprout, and Science A-Z won 18 BESSIE Awards, three SIIA CODiE Awards (one for Best Solution for Special Needs Students), a Tech & Learning Award of Excellence, and an EdTech Cool Tool Award.

As president of Voyager Sopris Learning, I worked with the team to focus the business on LETRS, its science of reading professional development for teachers. We had around 300 other products, all good and some great. But the much bigger opportunity was district and state investment in teacher professional development, so that's where we put the most energy.

It was a gamble, and it paid off for the business and for educators. LETRS grew into the teacher-training standard in 23 states, with statewide initiatives in places like Ohio, Mississippi, and Alabama.

I helped Headsprout through three acquisitions: by Newell Rubbermaid in 2011, by Skyview Capital in 2013, and by Cambium Learning Group later that year. At Cambium I worked on the other side, helping buy Time4Learning in 2018 and the assessment division of the American Institutes for Research the next year, which became Cambium Assessment. In between, Veritas Capital acquired Cambium itself, and I was on the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance team through that process. Most recently, I worked with the founders of Really Great Reading through its acquisition by The Vistria Group in 2022.

Really Great Reading's founders brought me in as a consultant in 2021 and later asked me to stay on as chief operating officer. Working alongside them, I focused on technical compliance, product management, product strategy, large district implementation, and the due diligence behind the company's acquisition by The Vistria Group in December 2022.

I left Cambium in 2019, grateful for a run that took me from graduate intern at a small reading startup to leading its two largest business units. My daughter was born and COVID hit right after. I needed work I could do from home, so I started an advisory practice that became Dirigo Insights. It grew to two employees and seven contractors and worked with more than 30 education companies, school groups, and investors on what schools need, what to build or buy, and how to make it work in classrooms. Along the way, I served as COO of Really Great Reading through its acquisition.

Looking for the right problem to work on in K-12, I went back to my roots, serving students with disabilities, and co-founded Lessi. As Lessi grew, I wound down the practice to focus on it, while keeping time for direct advisory work with founders and education leaders.

Lessi turns district guidance and student IEPs into instruction, progress, and growth. Districts use it to manage special education caseloads, timelines, and documentation. Teachers use it to plan instruction tied directly to each student's goals. That way, what a district expects shows up in classrooms instead of getting lost between the IEP meeting and the lesson.

I started it by posting an ad asking special educators what they needed, then making it for them by hand before we wrote any software. I co-founded the company with Greg Brewer.

Maybe. Alongside Lessi, I take on one or two fractional or advisory clients at a time, working on product, sales and marketing, implementation, AI, and acquisitions. Email me with the problem you're trying to solve, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person.