Alex Selkirk

Alex Selkirk has been embedded at Uncommon Schools for over a decade, helping them realize the vision of real-time data-driven education. Before that, he spent 15 years in Silicon Valley and Seattle, at startups and Microsoft learning how to balance the push for scale with maintaining standards and meeting needs. This set him up well to *ignore* the startup mantra of “Move Fast, Break Things” when building systems for teachers and students. He left Microsoft and spent several years spec'ing out the Common Data Project (a governed entity that facilitates accountable data sharing), which is one direction the internet could have gone, but didn’t. He then spent several years wandering the desert of EdTech looking for an organization that appreciated how hard it is to deliver data-driven education in a meaningful way. He holds a BA in Political Science from Yale where he also did a lot of engineering, mostly in the form of building things that needed to withstand the Laws of Physics, before ending up in software, which mostly needs to withstand the Laws of Murphy.