In March 2020, Beth Sanders faced an impossible situation. The veteran educator was a part of a group that had just launched Ed Farm, a grassroots professional development organization dedicated to transforming teacher training through high-touch, face-to-face programs. Three weeks later, COVID-19 forced every school in America into virtual learning, rendering her carefully designed in-person curriculum obsolete overnight.

Like educators everywhere, Sanders scrambled to piece together virtual solutions. But unlike many who saw technology as a temporary bandage, she recognized a market opportunity. “I kept thinking, if I just had a platform that I could customize, then I could provide high-quality, personalized, competency-based professional learning for our teachers,” Sanders recalls. “It wouldn’t be the same as person-to-person interaction, but it could be so much better than everything else out there.”

Fast-forward to 2025, and that vision became Modiv EDU, a professional development platform that addresses one of education’s most persistent challenges: the disconnect between what teachers need to learn and what traditional professional development delivers. In just over a year, Sightglass would help Sanders build a tech company from the inside, achieving what typically requires years and millions in venture funding.

The Education Crisis No One Discusses

While media attention focuses on teacher shortages and student achievement gaps, Sanders identified a more fundamental problem: the broken system of teacher professional development.

“You cannot have high-quality student learning until you have high-quality teacher learning,” Sanders explains, articulating a belief shaped by decades in public education. Yet the current system forces teachers into a Kafkaesque nightmare of irrelevant training. “You’re sitting in a room for eight hours, your principal or district has chosen the topic, and you’re a PE (Physical Education) teacher learning about reading interventions. Teachers are doing three things at once, completely disengaged.”

The numbers tell the story. In each state, teachers must earn professional development hours to maintain certification. Multiply this across millions of educators nationwide, and the scale of wasted time and opportunity becomes staggering. Meanwhile, principals consistently report they can afford quality training for only a handful of teachers, leaving the majority with substandard options.

When Sanders’ board chair challenged her to solve this problem at scale, she faced a harsh reality. “I don’t know how to develop. I don’t know UX, I don’t know UI,” she admitted. “I know that what I do, I do well. But I also believe firmly that the smartest person in the room is the room.”

Enter Sightglass.

Unlike the large consulting firms that had pitched Ed Farm, Sightglass brought something different to the table: product and technology experience that could transform the nonprofit’s domain expertise into a tech company in record time. “There was this immediate spark of humanity,” Sanders remembers of her first meeting with founders John Jarosz and Matthew Tobiasz, along with Head of Growth, Brandt Roberts. “They didn’t care about securing us as a customer. They listened.”

Building a Tech Company from the Inside: The Grow, Lead, Build Approach

The Sightglass approach to developing Modiv EDU reflected a fundamental philosophy: empowerment over replacement. Rather than swooping in with prepackaged solutions, the team worked to establish fundamental capabilities and transfer ownership while building. To do this, the Sightglass applied all three of its service categories:

Grow (Growth Mapping): Sigthglass’ Growth Mapping exercise wasn’t simply academic strategy work. In four weeks, Sightglass validated the market opportunity Sanders had identified, sharpened the business model, and identified a path to realize it. Because the Growth Map is action-oriented, the report focused on the most consequential questions, empowering the team to tackle them as quickly as possible. This would typically take months of market research and strategy consulting.

“John’s ability to ask questions is unprecedented,” Sanders reflects. “Really great teachers ask really great questions, and what I kept realizing is I’m leaving each of these meetings feeling like we’ve achieved something but also feeling like I’ve learned so much.”

Build (Solution Design and Product Realization): Without waiting to hire a technology lead or technical team—positions that would cost $300K+ annually and take months to fill—Sightglass immediately began conceptualizing the new product by collaborating directly with educators. They drafted the platform architecture, designed the user experience, and developed the Micro-Credential framework that would become Modiv’s key product differentiator.

This parallel execution is what venture capitalists pay millions to achieve but rarely see. While most startups would still be hiring, Modiv was already building.

Lead (Advisory and Leadership Development): Recognizing that sustainable success required internal product leadership, Sightglass didn’t just build and leave. They actively participated in recruiting a VP of Product. John Jarosz built the interview process, helped shape the job description, screened candidates, and ultimately recommended David Preece for the role – a level of involvement that demonstrated Sightglass’s commitment to long-term client success.

“I never felt less than because I’m a teacher by trade in the tech market,” Sanders emphasizes. “My notes from those early meetings are insane. I’m learning terms, understanding business models, grasping technology concepts – but I always felt supported, never diminished.”

The Setup for Sustainable Success

When Preece joined as VP of Product, not only had Sightglass helped facilitate his hiring, but they had also completed significant market research, defined a revenue and business model specific to the education space, and completed design work for a solid first product release in record time.

“I wasn’t sure what it would be like,” Preece admits about joining a project already in progress. “But once I got to understand John and the team, it was pretty smooth to say, we’re midstream, we’re cranking, it’s not broken. Let’s go.”

What Preece discovered was that Sightglass had not only conducted thorough market research and MVP design but had also documented its decision-making process so clearly that onboarding was seamless. 

“John had the foresight to say, ‘At the end of the day, we’re giving this to David. We’re not here forever,’” Preece explains. “That collaboration from the jump was really smooth because I believe that was his mindset.”

An Innovative Product Model

Under Sightglass’s guidance, Modiv EDU developed three key innovations that differentiated it from the crowded edtech market:

1. Micro-Credentials with Human Assessment Unlike simple digital badges, Modiv EDU’s Micro-Credentials require teachers to demonstrate actual classroom application. Each submission receives personalized feedback from human assessors—not AI-generated responses. This 9-month design sprint produced Micro-Credentials aligned with state certification requirements, making them immediately valuable to both teachers and school districts.
2. Flexible Learning Chunks Recognizing teachers’ time constraints, the platform breaks learning into manageable segments that can be completed between classes or during planning periods. “Teachers would commit more to smaller chunks of learning on topics they were interested in,” Sanders discovered.
3. Choice Within Structure The platform allows both district-mandated training and teacher-selected topics to coexist. A school might require classroom management modules while individual teachers pursue technology integration training—both earning valid professional development hours.

Rapid Iteration and Establishing Confidence

The partnership’s agility proved crucial at critical moments. Two weeks before Sanders’ soft launch keynote in June, she realized they lacked a landing page. “John’s like, ‘I’ve got you,’ and in one day, there’s the proposal, really simple to get approval. I know exactly what I’m getting, and they follow through.”

This responsiveness extended beyond technical deliverables. “John knows our work so well that he could go pitch it for me,” Sanders marvels. “That’s the boutique nature of it. That’s what I know works as well.”

By treating Sanders not as a client but as a partner in innovation, Sightglass achieved something rare in professional services: true knowledge transfer. Because Sightglass operates as a studio, it can provide more actionable collaboration than a typical consultancy, which allowed Sanders to evolve from a self-described technology novice to a confident edtech founder who can articulate complex product strategies to investors and customers alike.

For Preece, the relationship provided something equally valuable: instant productivity. “Instead of needing to pivot, it was the opposite. It was a question of how to empower more. How do I work closely with them?”

The platform itself has begun addressing the massive inefficiency in teacher professional development. Early adoption demonstrates that teachers complete more training hours in less time, with measurably better classroom application rates than traditional professional development.

The Broader Learnings

The Modiv EDU story validates the hypothesis that the gap between strategy and execution isn’t primarily technical—it’s translational. Organizations don’t fail at digital transformation because they lack access to technology or even technical talent. They fail because they can’t bridge the chasm between domain expertise and technical possibility.

As Modiv EDU scales, the partnership continues to evolve. Sightglass remains involved but increasingly in an advisory capacity, available for specific opportunities while Preece and his team drive day-to-day development.

Sanders, once intimidated by the tech world, now speaks its language more fluently while maintaining her educator’s heart. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” she insists. But now she’s a teacher who code-switches effortlessly between pedagogy and product experience, between classroom management and customer acquisition costs.