Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 1)

EdTech is notoriously difficult to build at venture scale. Hanmei is doing it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Hanmei Wu: Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me today.

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. My parents were immigrants from China and Taiwan. I have one older sister, and I was raised in a family of doctors and PhDs, but clearly, I didn’t go down that track. I had more of a business mindset and really went from there.

Sramana Mitra: And what did you do for your studies?

Hanmei Wu: I attended UC Berkeley, where I got a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. And when was that? When did you come out of school?

Hanmei Wu: I graduated in 2014. It’s funny because I’m the least educated person in my entire family. They all have MDs and PhDs. I only have an undergraduate degree.

Sramana Mitra: It doesn’t matter.

Hanmei Wu: I really knew I didn’t want to go into medicine, actually. I was always afraid of blood, so that wouldn’t have worked out.

Sramana Mitra: Me too. That’s one thing I knew I was not going to do. So, what did you do when you came out of Berkeley?

Hanmei Wu: Yes, I was a bit at a crossroads when I graduated. I had the opportunity to go down a more traditional path. A lot of the other business majors were looking into investment banking or consulting. I’d done an internship at Goldman Sachs, but then I really felt drawn towards education.

It was just something I was very passionate about. I had tutored, mentored, and taught as an extracurricular since I was in middle school. So I ended up actually doing Teach for America, and I taught high school math. Then I was also at a nonprofit called Minds Matter, where their mission was to support underserved communities in the college application process. So, I started out as a college graduate immersed in education.

Sramana Mitra: And how long did you do that?

Hanmei Wu: I did that for a couple of years, actually. Then I decided to do some college counseling on my own because I was getting requests from family friends to look over essays, or creating college lists, or with extracurriculars. I really enjoyed doing it. It actually reminded me of being a high school student myself, because I remembered feeling very overwhelmed by the process.

I remembered attending a high school where there weren’t a lot of college counseling resources because it was just such a large school, and there weren’t many college counselors. Remembering that pain point and seeing it also in the students in Teach for America, seeing it in the people reaching out to me for help, it was just a pain point that I felt like I really wanted to help address.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu
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