In 2026, this take needs to die. PLEASE

I founded Brisk Teaching in late 2022. Here's the story of how it happened: I left the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2022 and got excited about LLMs right before ChatGPT launched. I saw the potential immediately. After working side by side with educators for many years, I knew how AI could to scale their instructional impact. Over winter break, while taking care of my brother after his rhinoplasty, I built a web app to leverage AI for teacher workflows. But talking with teachers made me quickly realize this web version was missing the mark. A traditional platform wasn't going to cut it in the era of AI. I kept asking myself: How can AI streamline workflows that are already happening across over 100 different applications? So I started from scratch with a Chrome extension. First, my bank account was nearing zero and I needed capital to actually build this dream into a product. Most investors didn't believe teachers were early adopters. "Teachers are behind the times," they'd say. (Not accurate, BTW) Teachers innovate constantly out of necessity. They rarely get tools designed specifically for them. I convinced enough investors to build what we needed, and we launched in spring 2023. A few hundred teachers started using it, posting about it on Facebook and Reddit. Summer 2023, I couldn't afford a booth at ISTE (the Super Bowl of edtech conferences). So instead I walked around handing out Brisk iced tea to build awareness. Met our earliest users there! Entered fall 2023 with momentum and new features and we started to scale fast. Those same people we met at ISTE remain huge fans today. They've watched as everything we talked about back then has come to life. Now we have 1 in 5 teachers in the US using Brisk. We're still scrappy, but we have the resources to accomplish what we set out to do. An amazing culmination of years of work and educator support.