HI I’M MOHANNAD ARBAJI
my friends call me Mo & I'm building in tech.
ABOUT ME
Talent is universal but access to opportunity is not, and education is the world's greatest equalizer. It changed my life, so I dedicated my professional career to building technology that widens global access to opportunity.
GREW UP IN JORDAN
I won the family lottery by being born to the best parents in a humble Amman household. I have two amazing sisters who weren't as afraid of the bulky 90s cameras as much as I was.
In Jordan, I attended 7 different schools ending with the Jubilee School for Gifted Students.
HIGH SCHOOL IN NEW MEXICO
When I was 16, I got accepted into United World College on a full scholarship. My school had 200 students from 112 countries, all scholarship students.
I arrived in the US alone and was greeted by my roommate, Celani from Swaziland. He taught me my first word in SiSwati, Ixoxo, which meant frog. I learned it because each "x" was a clicking sound and I thought it sounded so cool.
COLLEGE IN RHODE ISLAND
After UWC, I received a full ride to Brown University. I was a Davis Scholar and graduated with Bachelors degrees in Economics, Business (COE), Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering.
At Brown, I invented a device that converts solar, wind & mechanical energy into electricity for remote households. I also received the Karen T. Romer Research Award where I co-authored EO100, the first triple-bottom-line standard for oil & gas extraction, currently implemented in several oil fields in the Americas.
FIRST EDUCATION COMPANY
While in college, I authored & published textbooks on SAT and ACT prep for ELL students and another book on US college admissions.
The following summer, I went door-to-door in an affluent Amman neighborhood and convinced 16 students to let me tutor them on the SATs. Each student improved 300+ points in 6 weeks.
By the time I graduated college, I bootstrapped this project from $300 to a company with offices in 3 countries.
BIG DATA SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
My first job was in PwC (M&A, restructuring, divestiture and capital events), then Ernst & Young (Transaction Advisory), then consulting.
Next I worked in software engineering. I built software that mined data from different hospital systems—such as patient, billing, labs & pharmacy—and generated business intelligence recommendations.
I remember thinking: when people learn they're producing tons of data too, can we leverage that data to help them learn better?
BUILDING A MOOC
I learned that in 2015 more people signed up for MOOCs (self-paced online courses) than they did in the first three years of the “modern” MOOC movement (which started in late 2011—when the first Stanford MOOCs took off).
So I built a MOOC for English and math. The average "course completion rate" for MOOCs is ~3.5%, but our completion rate was 8%. It felt like a vanity metric, I knew we could do better so we went back to the drawing board.
FOUNDING CHALKTALK
In order to understand how to better enable learning, I knew I had to immerse myself in the classroom experience. So I got approval from East Boston High School to teach a class and shadow other teachers, where I spent hundreds of hours observing & modeling classrooms.
My goal was to build something that fit teachers' workflow vs other edtech solutions at the time which asked teachers to change how they teach. We bought the domain chalktalk.com in 2019 and launched in 2020.
SCALING IMPACT
Since then, we've established district-wide partnerships across the US, from Florida to Hawaii, including several of the largest 100 school district systems in the nation.
PROBLEMS I THINK ABOUT
A few I keep coming back to, where learning, technology, and opportunity overlap.
A lot of my work is some attempt at an answer.
ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITY
Talent is spread evenly across the world; opportunity is not. Economists call the ones we lose the “lost Einsteins”: a child born in the top 1% is ten times likelier to become an inventor than one below the median, the same gift, a different zip code.
For most of history, building took rare skills and gatekeepers. AI is dissolving that gate. As the cost of building falls toward zero, things like judgment, taste, and distribution have become the scarcities, and far more people get to be architects. The question I sit with is how we build a harness strong enough for everyone to walk through.
INSTITUTIONS VS. NETWORKS
Institutions are top-down hierarchies, the old power structure; networks are lateral webs, the new one. America was built institution-first; then the internet arrived, a network anyone could plug into.
That same shift, from institution to network, is now happening twice: for individuals, a global network of learners; for enterprises, institutional memory rebuilt as a network of agents, a second brain that improves itself in a loop. Two forms, one human, one artificial. What I keep turning over is what each becomes when they meet.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Benjamin Bloom’s “2 sigma problem”: a child tutored one-to-one outperforms 98% of a normal classroom. Personalized learning has chased that number for forty years and kept failing the same way, by asking teachers to teach differently.
I’m interested in the opposite: technology that disappears into a teacher’s craft and raises the floor without rewriting the structure of the room. Can a machine close the 2 sigma gap without removing the human who made it worth closing?
MITIGATING HOMEWORK
The evidence is awkward: in the early grades homework’s link to achievement is near zero, and later it’s modest, while the cost to sleep, family, and a child’s mental health is real (Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth). We’ve confused load with rigor.
I think about designs that capture the learning without the nightly tax, mastery built in the room, not re-litigated at the kitchen table. What would school look like if we optimized for a child’s whole day instead of a single test? Recommended reading.
CONTACT
Brooklyn, NY
mohannad@chalktalk.com
