by Matt Noble  on Thu 16 Dec - 0 Comments
Categories: Education, SEC Featured Member of the Month, Start-up

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Matt Noble (HBS 2012)

Executive Director at Revolution Prep

Hometown: East Greenwich, RI

Undergraduate College: Harvard College

Major: Government

What did you do before you started at HBS?

I was the Executive Director at Revolution Prep, a for-profit educational software and services company with a strong social mission to expand access to crucial resources, and ultimately college, for students in underserved communities.

Our social mission was pursued largely in three ways:

1. Offering financial aid and scholarships to students participating in our college prep programs ($1.6 million in 2009);
2. Engaging our growing full- and part-time workforce in volunteer activities at schools and other educational non-profits; and
3. Partnering with philanthropic foundations, public institutions, national scholarship organizations, and private donors to provide free and/or extremely low-cost college access programs to students in underserved communities.

Why did you decide to start it?

I chose to join Revolution when it had only 10 employees (it now has 150+ full-time and about 1000 part-time) because the founders weren’t afraid to dream big when it came to transforming education, and because a major part of Revolution’s DNA was the drive to spread that transformation to ALL students.

What characteristics do you think are most important for starting a social enterprise? On a day-to-day basis, what are the kinds of skills you use?

I think the most important characteristic for starting a social enterprise, particularly within a for-profit context, is authenticity. If you don’t truly believe in what you are doing and make decisions based on that conviction, your customers/constituents and partners will see that, as will your internal team. I also think you have to update that authenticity by constantly testing your assumptions.

Revolution Prep started as an SAT and ACT prep organization, so as you might expect, we’re pretty data obsessed. Measurement is hugely important, both for our own purposes and as our partners measure return on their investment of time, energy, and/or money. So you have to build and use processes to collect and express your results.

But we also became obsessed with stories about individual successes, and documenting them however we could. The data on impact is necessary, but seeing students’ faces is what kept the whole company bought into the social programs, and brought in new partners to help them grow.

Broadly, I don’t think the skills you use in a social enterprise differ greatly from those you use in any enterprise (and you use them all, especially at the start). Since your “customers” and partners are often not traditional “business” entities, you may need to spend more time working with them to understand and adapt to the uniqueness of their perspectives and mental models. Really smart people with advanced degrees can tend to assume everyone else operates within the same frameworks.

What is your best story from the experience (e.g. scary experience, something you were shocked by, etc.)?

Spending much of my time on high school campuses, I was consistently shocked by three things:

1. The incredible lack of resources for many inner city students compared to those where I went to high school;
2. The fact that 99% of classrooms look just about the same as they would have 70 years ago, despite everything we know about how students learn and the technology we have to aid that process; and
3. The transformational impact that one motivated and dedicated teacher can have on a whole community.

What is your favorite success story from working in a social enterprise?

We partnered with the mayor’s office to work with one of the lowest-performing high schools in Los Angeles to help a group of students prepare to take the SAT and complete their college applications. It was a challenge to navigate the bureaucracy and logistics issues, but our teachers showed up every day and worked incredibly hard.  

Students in our programs completed their applications and raised their SAT scores on official tests by an average of over 230 points, which can nearly double their chances of getting into a state institution in CA. More importantly, they felt empowered. At a quarterly meeting primarily focused on sales and profit, we showed this video. After it finished, nobody spoke for about 5 minutes. Then everybody cheered.

If you could start any social enterprise, what would it be?

 Tough question. There are so many areas of social need that are ripe for innovation and transformation. I think there’s a huge opportunity to impact the development of health care systems in China and India right now….

What advice would you give someone that wants to make the switch into social enterprise?

Do it. But before you do it, try it – there are so many opportunities to get involved while you are at HBS.

What's next for you post-HBS?

If anybody has the answer to this, please get in touch with me…

What will you be famous/infamous for at your HBS 10 year reunion?

Not sure how to answer this without sounding tremendously arrogant or tremendously underachieving. I hope whatever I end up doing, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, it has a real visible impact and inspires my HBS classmates and others to get involved.