Washington, D.C.-based edtech startup Interfolio has hired Andrew Rosen, best known as one of the co-founders of Blackboard, as CEO. Rosen will replace Steve Goldenberg, the founder of Interfolio, who will switch to being Chief Product Officer and stay on the board of directors, which also includes Blackboard alum Ching-Ho Fung. Interfolio developed a platform that acts as an aggregator and management system for people looking for careers in higher education as well as providing strategic decision-making for colleges and universities to use in their talent hunts. Now Rosen has been brought on to expand and improve the reach of that effort.
"Nobody else is really helping universities in how they make these decisions," Rosen said. "Faculty searches are becoming a mess. They need an organized system."
Rosen has a long history of involvement in education and technology startups in the D.C. area. After leaving Blackboard in 2004, he helped co-found Presidium, another edtech company that eventually was sold to Blackboard. He also co-founded Jewish edtech company ShalomLearning and worked recently as an executive at the Education Advisory Board and Microstrategy.
CEO shuffles can often be attributed to dissatisfaction by investors and a board of directors, but that doesn't seem to be quite what's happened at Interfolio. Goldenberg said that if anything, the impetus for going after Rosen came directly from him.
"I was excited to recruit him for the job," Goldenberg said. "It feels like a slam dunk."
As for why Rosen wanted to come on board, a lot of it had to do with wanting to get back into helping grow another company around the size of Interfolio, which currently serves around a million individuals, 6,000 committees and more than 300 institutions including the University of Virginia, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Dartmouth among other high-profile schools. But it's also the mission of Interfolio that made Rosen willing to sign on.
"It really offers a new way of doing things that makes the whole process easier," Rosen said. "It's not just universities either. We have hospitals and healthcare organizations as clients too. There are so many places to take the platform, it's really exciting."
"It's the next untouched frontier"
Interfolio raised $926.3K in a funding round a little over two years ago. Rosen said that there are plans in the works to raise another funding round in the near future although he couldn't speak as to any particular details. But he said that the kind of services that Interfolio can offer should draw in plenty of interest from investors and clients as he charts the company's next course.
"It's the next untouched frontier," Rosen said. "We're answering the need for intelligent decision-making in a way no one else can match."
