Ramit Varma, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, has been a teacher his whole life. He started as a tutor in high school and college, as a master trainer for The Princeton Review and as founder of Revolution Prep. Ramit has consistently looked for ways to make learning more effective by making teachers more effective. After selling Revolution Prep to Apax Partners in 2021, Ramit ran for mayor of Los Angeles, narrowly losing the primary. He received 2,500 votes. The winners received more than 400,000 each.At Breakout Learning, Ramit has found the opportunity to bring his decades of ed tech experience to bear on the education ecosystem during one of the greatest times of change we may ever see. AI is already changing the game and it is Breakout's mission to use this transformative technology to empower instructors and inspire students.

Steven Walters, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-founder, is an award-winning writer, director, producer, entrepreneur and educator. Steven is a co-founder of Second Thought Theatre, as well as an emeritus company member of the Tony Award-winning Dallas Theater Center. As an actor, Steven is perhaps best known for his role on NBC's "Friday Night Lights" as guidance counselor Glenn Reed. As a screenwriter, Steven's films have played at SXSW, BFI London and more. As a podcaster, he is the executive producer of multiple critically acclaimed series including "American Election: Wicked Game," "Business Movers," "History Daily" and more. Steven is also the co-creator and head writer of "1865," which The A.V. Club called "...the best audio fiction podcast of all time."

Raised by teachers, Steven has a deep passion for education. His first job out of college was serving as the director of educational outreach at a theater in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. At Breakout, Steven is excited to bring together two of his greatest passions: stories and curriculum.

Joshua Oster-Morris, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, has been writing software since the age of six and has been at the forefront of most technological revolutions for the past 40 years. His efforts have spanned disciplines, from mobile and web software development in the 1990s to the implementation of recurrent neural networks for natural language processing in the 2010s, to more recently devising “Internet of Things” gadgets and energy-efficient genomic data search methods.

Joshua believes there has never been a more exciting time to build new technologies impacting the future of humanity and there is no better fulcrum to leverage than education.

Olav Sorenson is Faculty Director for the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he also holds the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies.

A member of the UCLA Anderson faculty since 2020, Sorenson is renowned for his research in economic geography, particularly the impact of entrepreneurship on regional growth and competitiveness.

With a previous term at UCLA from 1999 to 2005 and teaching positions at other prestigious institutions, including Yale, the University of Toronto, and London Business School, he has published over 100 papers in leading journals. Notably, he received the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.

Kelly Goldsmith is the E. Bronson Ingram Chair, Professor of Marketing at Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt. She received both the Research Productivity Award (2021) and the Dean’s Award for Teaching (2020), in addition to being recognized as a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow.

Goldsmith’s research is highly interdisciplinary in nature, drawing upon theories and methods from a variety of areas, including anthropology, cognitive and social psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and marketing. Her work has appeared in several top marketing and psychology journals and has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including the BBC, Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many more. She has been recognized as one of the “Top 40 Most Outstanding Business School Professors in the World Under 40” (Poets& Quants) and one of “Eight Young Business School Professors on the Rise” (Fortune Magazine).

Myles Shaver is Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management where he holds the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Corporate Strategy.

Shaver’s research about corporate expansion is published in leading scholarly journals and he is invited to present at conferences and universities around the world. 

He is recipient of the Irwin Outstanding Educator Award – the most prestigious international teaching award in Strategic Management and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business Distinguished PhD Alumni Award. Poets and Quants profiles Shaver in their compilation of the “World’s 50 Best Business School Professors.”

Shaver is a Fellow and President-Elect of the Strategic Management Society.