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, led two acquisitions there, and served as COO of Really Great Reading through its sale to 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 took the GRE instead and moved to Chicago, where I earned an MA in Behavior Analysis from The Chicago School, worked in schools serving children with autism and provided in-home support, and did a practicum under T.V. Joe Layng, the founder of Headsprout.

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 hundreds 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 was leading the business when it was sold to Learning A-Z, part of Cambium Learning Group, in December 2013. That sale brought me to Cambium.

At Learning A-Z, I went from 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 the company relied on. In R&D, I 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 revenue grew from $33.5 million to $75.1 million.

Three 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, 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 SIIA CODiE, BESSIE, Tech & Learning, and EdTech awards, including Best Solution for Special Needs Students.

As president of Voyager Sopris Learning, I narrowed the business to focus on LETRS, its professional development for teaching reading based on the science of reading. 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, and we couldn't chase both.

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 moved to Dallas to lead Voyager Sopris full-time. We built a team and focused the business on its fast-growing LETRS suite. Then the CEO asked me to take a different role than the one I'd moved for. I said no thank you and used the moment to start something of my own.

Honestly, I'd been itching to test my ideas with the only judges who ever mattered to me: school district buyers and end users. I'm grateful for what Cambium gave me, from starting as an intern at a small reading startup to leading its two largest business units through a take-private and a major acquisition at the same time.

Four. I was leading Headsprout when it was sold to Learning A-Z in 2013. At Cambium, I led the acquisition of Time4Learning in 2018 and of the assessment division of the American Institutes for Research, which became Cambium Assessment. I also served on Cambium's Sarbanes-Oxley compliance team through its take-private by Veritas Capital. Later, as COO of Really Great Reading, I led the company's sale to The Vistria Group in 2022.

I joined Really Great Reading on a consulting agreement, became chief operating officer, and led the company's sale to The Vistria Group in December 2022. I worked alongside the founders on technical compliance, product management, product strategy, large district implementation, and due diligence for the sale.

My daughter was born and COVID hit right after I left Cambium. 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 served more than 30 education companies and investors, much of it M&A work during the science of reading boom. Along the way, I served as COO of Really Great Reading through its sale.

Looking for the right problem to go after in K-12, I was pulled back to my roots: serving students with disabilities. That became Lessi. As Lessi grew, I wound down the practice to focus on it, while keeping time for direct advisory work with founders and edtech leaders.

Lessi turns district guidance and student IEPs into instruction, progress, and growth. Districts use it to run 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.

I advise a small number of clients directly on AI, product, and go-to-market strategy in education. The largest is an international school group. I take on one or two projects at a time. Email me with the problem you're trying to solve, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person.