How Ed Tech Founder Sue Khim Endured Sexism and Racism To Build Her $50 Million Startup

Sue Khim, a 32-12 months-old Korean immigrant and University of Chicago dropout, runs a developing San Francisco ed-tech company, Brilliant. She has raised $27 million in assignment funding at a $50 million valuation and expects annual routine revenue to exceed $10 million this year. In 2012, Forbes stated her promise, putting her on the 30 Under 30 list when turning 25. The organization released that yr.

Brilliant offers 40 online science, era, engineering, and math guides. The guides don’t confer any academic credit score. Still, humans prepare them with a range of STEM topics, including Ph. With the aid of industry specialists who paint as engineers at corporations like Google and Microsoft who contract with Brilliant, D.S. Materials include quick animated films, hassle units, and coding challenges.

As a scholar, Khim saw how many humans used the Internet to get help with their STEM studies. She founded Brilliant to improve the best of online services. “We desired to create a single logo you could agree with,” she says. For free, users can sign up and get the right of entry to the primary portion of each course and get automated comments on their tries to solve daily math and computing issues. For a $ hundred and twenty yearly subscription rate, they have got limitless access to every course and resource at the site.

Courses take 10 to 40 hours to finish and vary from mathematical basics to quantum computing. Brilliant’s 7 million users encompass college students who want to assist because their excessive faculties did not train simple fractions and activity seekers hoping to land a facts technology function at Facebook.

Khim has built a promising commercial enterprise with a constant boom in the crowded international of ed-tech startups. But like many girl founders, mainly women of color, when she set out to elevate cash, she had to undergo sexist and racist put-downs still recurring within the white male-dominated task capital network.
As she told me her tale on the packed ASU GSV ed-tech conference in San Diego ultimate week, she didn’t start by recounting that mission. But when I asked her if it becomes difficult to raise money.

She right away stated sure. I pressed her for information, and she shared a half dozen situations however declined to name names. “I don’t think dragging those men thru the mud is going to trade them,” she says. “If something, it will make them much less probable to fund ladies due to the perceived liability of doing so.” As a woman in tech, she says, “I need to stroll on eggshells.

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