One year after John Yoo took over as CEO of Teachers pay Teachers from its founder Paul Edelman, the teacher resource marketplace shuffles its leadership again.
Adam Freed, who joined TpT’s board of directors in May as part of its venture round, takes over as CEO. Yoo will go back to his roots as former head of product and focus on mobile strategy and classroom initiatives.
Freed was COO at Etsy between August 2010 to December 2012. Given the similarities between Etsy and Teachers pay Teachers his appointment as new CEO makes a lot of sense. Like TpT, Etsy is powered through a group of highly motivated and creative people who sell their handcrafted goods on a global marketplace.
The values and dynamics that are shared by the community are probably fairly similar which means that Freed will be able to implement quite some of his experiences from Etsy’s marketplace into the TpT community.
Freed also has extensive experience leading global teams and initiatives at Google which should be beneficial for TpT’s international growth plans. UK-based TES Global just recently announced that the next version of its TES Resources platform will introduce paid downloads, making it a direct competitor of TpT.
According to TechCrunch, TpT paid out over $86 million to teachers since its launch in 2006, $45 million worth of content was sold in 2013 alone. All in all 22 million pieces of content were traded. Teachers either pay for the material out of their own pocket or from discretionary funds dedicated to school supplies.
For comparison, TES Resources sees 4.5 million downloads of its free classroom materials every week and teachers have created a catalog of over 1 million resources. But only a small fraction of the nearly 6 million TES Resources members creates material whereas TpT has 40.000 active sellers compared to 800.000 buyers.
Further Reading
- TpT Welcomes Our New CEO, Adam Freed | TpT Blog
- Following Its May Financing, Teachers Pay Teachers Names Former Etsy Exec As CEO | TechCrunch
Related Links
- HEDLINE: Teachers Pay Teachers raises from Spectrum Equity, Tiger Global and True Ventures | EDUKWEST
- Next Version of TES Resources will introduce Paid Downloads | EDUKWEST Europe
- TES Global acquires Digital Lesson Platform Blendspace | EDUKWEST