Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the education category.
When Mike Teng entered the workforce in 2004, he never thought he would start a company, let alone one about education.
After getting a bachelor’s in computer science, he worked in Silicon Valley for six years as a software engineer. Though he said he was happy in his career, Teng wanted more.
After listening to a “This American Life” story on NPR about the Harlem Children’s Zone — a New York City nonprofit that helps underprivileged children as well the adults in their lives — Teng said he was inspired to shift his career. In 2010, he became director of technology solutions for Rocketship Education, a Redwood City-based company that operates public charter elementary schools.
“One of the things that ended up being a challenge was finding a good experience to substitute teachers who were coming to campus,” Teng said. “I ended up reconnecting with a couple of high school friends, and we started the company together. We saw how much bigger of a problem it was.”
The company Teng is talking about is Swing Education Inc., which looks to tackle the ongoing substitute teacher shortage. Redwood City-based Swing works by bringing substitute teachers into the “gig economy.” Everyone applying to be a Swing sub must meet the requirements of the state where they work. Once they’re on Swing’s platform, they can search for teaching opportunities.
Teng and his classmates from Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto — Asha Visweswaran, the company’s chief operating officer, and Osbert Feng, Swing’s chief technology officer — went in different collegiate directions. Teng went to UCLA while Visweswaran and Feng attended UC Berkeley, where they studied electrical engineering and computer science. The trio stayed in touch, and all made the leap to launch Swing.
“It was fun to be able to start something that was really meaningful to a personal mission tied to K-12, public education and education generally,” Teng said. “And then getting to work with such close friends that I’ve known for so long, it’s just an incredible ride.”
The shortage of substitute teachers was made more of an issue by the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of short-term substitute teachers nationally dropped 32% compared with pre-pandemic 2019.
“There’s just this additional kind of chaos that gets thrown into a school building when you either don’t have enough adults on campus relative to the number of kids and students, or those adults aren’t doing what they need to be doing. The breadth of the problems is huge,” Teng said.
During the last academic year, Swing said it filled 1 million instructional hours through the use of subs. The company, which has raised more than $75 million in funding, operates in Arizona, California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Washington, D.C., with 4,000 substitute teachers on the platform.
“I left my previous career in software engineering because I’d wake up in the morning and not jump out of bed to go do my job because it wasn’t that interesting to me,” Teng said. “When I work in education, I feel like there’s a problem to be solved that helps the country, it helps kids. And it’s amazing.
