My Bio: Here’s who I am
Lou Pugliese is an innovator, thought leader, and successful venture-growth entrepreneur with a life-long passion to seek and engage new ways to disrupt, displace and advance business models.
His career spans two decades working with founders to re-engineer, restructure, and rethink strategy to accelerate growth and effectively address new competitive realities.
From Technology to Education to Social Impact, Lou brings his strengths as an Activator, Maximizer, and Relator to create mutualistic opportunities and synergy with Analytic Discipline and Futuristic Adaptability.
As a successful change lever, Lou’s deep experience has resulted in effective transitions with business leaders faced with making meaningful changes their growth opportunity enterprises.
Professional Experience
Over the past twenty years, Pugliese has developed a strong track record managing growth stage businesses and acquiring and developing a number of education organizations.
Pugliese is currently Senior Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University and Managing Director of the Teaching and Learning Action Lab.
Lou was recently former Chairman and CEO of Moodlerooms, the largest global provider of open source software and services for eLearning for the K to Workforce markets which was acquired by Blackboard.
Prior to Moodlerooms, Pugliese was President of Learning Diagnostics Inc., an education a consulting practice providing strategic planning in Business Intelligence in academic and administrative information architecture.
He was recently vice president of corporate development and company director at Educational Testing Service (ETS). In this capacity, Pugliese led corporate strategy and growth and strategic alliances for the secondary, post secondary, workforce and international education markets. Prior to his appointment in corporate development, Pugliese served as the vice president of market development, which included marketing, sales, market research, and business development.
Prior to this post, he was the CEO of ETS Pulliam, LLC, an ETS K12 subsidiary, and vice president of elementary and secondary education products and services where he led ETS’s elementary and secondary education product development and customer facing activities. These included professional development, technology products and services and assessments.
Prior to ETS, Pugliese was an entrepreneur in residence at Novak Biddle Venture Partners, an equity financing firm established in 1997 to provide assistance to the management of young, information technology businesses. There he shaped the strategy for private equity investments in early stage educational technology companies.
While working with Novak Biddle, Pugliese was named CEO of AnswerLogic, a software company that delivers online question‐answering solutions for business through its innovative natural language processing technology.
Pugliese’s affiliation with Novak Biddle began with the firm’s early stage lead position in Blackboard, Inc., where he was founding CEO. Under Pugliese’s leadership, Blackboard experienced 500 percent annual revenue growth rates, international customer expansion to more than three million individuals teaching and learning on Blackboard, the roll out of multiple products and services and attainment over $50 million in private financing.
Pugliese served as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of ETC, a subsidiary of Denver based Telecommunications Inc. (TCI).
Prior to joining ETC, he was Director of Marketing and Sales with Scholastic New Media in New York, and Vice President of Turner Educational Services in Atlanta where he successfully launched CNN Newsroom and a variety of other educational ventures.
Summary of Qualifications
Deep experience in working in developing countries through social impact work in education, community development, student health and nutrition, teacher professional development and primary grade young female student retention in Jacmel Haiti through the Community Coalition for Haiti. This body of work represents a career shift from successful private sector entrepreneur and leveraging business skills as a social impact innovator.
Development and execution of an early stage business plan for mobile education in Ghana. Conducted research and negotiations with Africa based government, social impact funds and private foundations funding social impact enterprises in East and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Visiting Faculty University of Pennsylvania-Graduate School of Education Education Entrepreneurship capstone program
Board Member Educate Global Fund
Extensive experience in early to mid stage venture financing and excellent working knowledge of the explosive growth of Impact Investing asset class.
Twenty-five years in K-16 education in global education content, technology and assessment. Substantive experience in working with grant making institutions, public sector, Ministries of Education and Impact and Venture equity.
Twenty years + operating in a C-level capacity with strong P&L control.