Simple question. How many people do you know who went from teaching in a public school system to leading cloud software teams? Well, I met one. Her name is Sejin Mong, a teacher once and lifelong student now, who traveled from Ann Arbor to Cambridge on a winding road from education to startups to build a career in the world of growing technology companies.
Sejin & her brother were born in the Midwest to first generation Korean immigrant parents who held education in the highest regard. The family moved to Ann Arbor before settling in Bloomington where her parents completed their respective PhDs. Today, both are professors at Montclair State University in New Jersey and still stay up late planning their lessons and building a great educational experience for their students year after year. That type of worth ethic rubs off.
Sejin went to Cornell where she majored in Industrial Labor Relations. She first learned about the program in high school from a flier she received in the mail. It ended up being a really useful area of study because it taught her about labor economics, collective bargaining, human resources & organizational behavior. This led her to intern for Teach For America on their admissions team one summer.
She applied for the Teach for America full time program her senior year, was accepted, and then placed in the Indianapolis Public School system for a two year tour of duty. Not too far from Bloomington too. That first year of teaching was an incredibly eye opening experience. Sejin had 56 high school students for 40 desks in her classrooms so she couldn’t assign them seats. She had to think on her feet every day balancing lessons, school supplies, and even space planning. Not to mention she was living alone in Indianapolis building a career and discovering adulthood while also trying to make friends on the weekends and balance a long distance relationship with her boyfriend (now husband).
Sejin was the only TFA member in the school and the only female teacher teaching math or science. Oh and she’d barely touched math since high school. Like any person in that position, teaching students just a few years younger than her on a subject she didn’t feel like an expert in, Sejin “kind of freaked out”. What got her through that first year is she felt like she was able to ask questions to better understand her students and figure out how to meet them where they were. She was also able to build relationships with other teachers in the building and TFA corps to learn from experts, receive feedback on her teaching, and continue to learn by doing.
But in many ways she wished she could have helped these students earlier. So, in her second year, she transitioned to an Indianapolis middle school to teach 6th graders. She really enjoyed the age group and liked being in a K-8 school where she could see a broader age range and get feedback from teachers who had had her students previously. They had enough desks too! At the completion of the program, Sejin moved to Boston to be closer to her partner who had just begun his PhD program at MIT.
This was her first experience living in the Boston area and Sejin moved into her first apartment sight unseen. The broker who rented the place to the couple commented that “she had a lot of trust” to give him that sort of responsibility. But it was on the edge of Beacon Hill so it worked out pretty well! Sejin finds Boston to be a great “big little city”. It feels familiar now that she’s learned most of the neighborhoods by now. She loves to walk around the 10 block radius of their current home in Cambridge with her son to hit local establishments like La Saison, High Rise Bakery, and Formaggio to name a few favorites.
Now for the career part. Sejin was at a crossroads of trying to figure out whether she should continue to teach in Boston, transition to something else in education, or shift her career entirely. There were a lot of unknowns but she wasn’t quite ready to leave education at the time. She ended up taking a role in the Boston Public School district office, the oldest public school district in the country. Her team sat in the data & accountability office helping other teachers use data to improve their teaching throughout the school system. It presented a great opportunity to go back to teaching later too if she felt the pull.
Their analytical work was funded through a federal grant consisting of facilitators who went out to various Boston area schools to utilize & understand classroom data in order to help improve their classroom best practices. In a way, before Sejin knew what startups were, this was her first startup experience. There wasn’t a pre-existing format to rely on, they weren’t attached to any individual school, and Sejin was the only team member who hadn’t worked in the Boston school system. A lot of firsts! The program began with a one week bootcamp at the Harvard School of Ed to learn some data modeling, how best to work with the schools, and procure the data they needed for their analysis. With limited training, a very startup-like experience indeed!
There wasn’t a blueprint and things were a bit confusing at the onset. At least with teaching there was a blueprint. There was a lot of travel involved meeting with teachers, principals, and superintendents. Luckily Sejin reaped the benefit of being introduced to her new city and its neighborhoods traveling to different schools every day.
Working with the Boston Public School district was a tremendous experience but Sejin felt called to do something slightly different. There were certain skills she wanted to better utilize and she felt insulated as an administrator of sorts. It was during this period of introspection that Sejin first caught wind of Panorama Education’s software tools during one of her school visits.
Panorama, an EdTech company founded out of Boston, offered a survey product with a much more holistic look at students and their reach was impressive. They happened to have an opening for a “Professional Services Manager” and, when she looked at the job description, Sejin’s husband called out that those were all the things she loved doing – being task oriented, analytical, communicative, working well with other people, etc. Sejin applied on a whim to join the small & scrappy Panorama team, serendipitously bumping into a Panorama employee who also taught at the Harvard Grad School of Ed she had previously overlapped with at BPD during her interview process.
Sejin describes her experience at Panorama as “some of the best years that she’s had in her career. I felt like I was really authentically myself at work.” She put in a lot of time at the office, built some really close relationships, and was really fulfilled by the experience of what they built in those early days. She learned to stretch herself in ways she hadn’t done before. It was her first true technology role working side by side with engineers, iterating on things for the first time, and even working with a Marketing team for the first time. She didn’t even know what a Product Manager was until they hired their first one! Panorama provided a great mix of learning new things every day where Sejin also felt like she could provide a lot of value.
After Sejin returned from maternity leave after the birth of her first child, she was ready to take on a bigger challenge and stretch herself further. She had helped create a team, grow the company, travel, and expand into hundreds of school districts at Panorama.
Starburst Data reached out looking for a Customer Success leader to help them grow their team. Starburst is a cloud software company that helps create a “single point of access” to query your company’s data wherever it lives. They were looking for a leader who could help them with the mission to come in at a leadership level and build the team to an Enterprise level. Sejin was also really impressed by Niall Fitzpatrick, Starburst’s Senior Vice President of Customer Value Solutions. Naill wasn’t Sejin’s first mentor but he was someone who loved building and gave Sejin the opportunity to hone her Customer Success leadership skills and learn in the presence of an experienced executive.
Starburst was a whole different beast than what Sejin had previously experienced. There were team members who had been working in tech for 20 years while Sejin was an educator who stumbled into startups. Her colleagues seemed to have all the answers whereas Sejin seemingly had way more questions than answers during her onboarding. It was intimidating.
Sejin had to ask questions to bring herself up to speed. Every meeting she would prepare & get her list ready to figure out what problem to solve. Then she began setting up meetings to navigate the org and ask people “who do you think I should be talking to?” Recurring meetings with subject matter experts were also critical to upskilling herself to be able to serve her team over that first year. She sat in a ton of meetings, listened a ton, and was rigorous with her follow ups.
She gained the respect of her colleagues not through her rapid knowledge ascent but by taking pride in ownership, humility, and reliability building with her cross functional partners in Sales, Product, etc. Ownership and Humility are two of Starburst’s company values she tries to emulate daily.
The team has changed a lot over the last couple years. Initially, Starburst and Sejin’s Customer Success team was in a “do everything” phase. Today they have a Professional Services team, Onboarding team, Technical Account Managers, and other specializations across their international team. Sejin’s team in particular manages their Customer Success team of Technical Account managers helping to scale account coverage while notching efficiencies across their coverage base. An essential element of responsible scaling.
Here are three insights Sejin shared with me that have informed her work and career:
Working With People You Like & Respect – Startups are hard and it’s really important to work with people and for people you like & respect, Sejin tells me. At both Panorama, Starburst, and her previous career in education she’s learned that to survive best in stressful environments you need to be at companies where both the mission and the people are ones you like & respect: “I was interviewed by the CEO of both Starburst and Panorama. The thing about startups is that things get hard all of the time. You can have a mission that really speaks to you, but if you don’t respect or are learning from the people you work with and work for it’s hard to survive in that environment. It’s always better to have fun when you’re at work!”
Knowing Yourself – Sejin has learned that to know herself well is to know when she’s on the right path or still searching for the right fit. She described herself as a continuous learner that attempts to stretch herself by building on what she knows but also extending that into new things: “I’m usually not super satisfied if I’m not learning. Will this company and this team allow me to learn?” She didn’t realize at the time the risks of making jumps from a classroom to a tech company to a true hard tech company. But she gets a lot of joy from making these changes because they allow her to continue to learn and know herself better.
Building Connections – Over her career, Sejin has learned to look for and build connections from the various lessons she’s learned from her experiences and the people she’s learned from in her different roles: “At first glance you might think that Industrial Labor Relations or teaching have no connection to tech startups but I’d argue that they’re all related. Great Customer Success is all about great enablement and education. Great management is about building structure and empowering your people. There’s no perfect leap between different jobs unless you make those connections yourself.”
Eventually, Sejin would like to be a VP of Customer Success at a growing startup later in her career. There are many different Customer Success functions – account management, professional services, etc. that she hasn’t had the chance to oversee yet. In the meantime, she’s enjoying her maternity leave following the birth of her second son. Parents everywhere know that’s enough to juggle! There will be a lot of ten block trips around Cambridge over the coming months no doubt.
For more about Sejin, feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll learn something from her. I know I did. Thanks so much for sharing. Can’t wait to see what new role, company & industry you may happen to teach yourself next!