Aditya Kaddu

Growing up in small-town Utah, Aditya Kaddu was drawn to aerospace, and his childhood career ambition was to design airplanes. Midway through college, however, a summer spent teaching middle school students changed his mind.

For six hot weeks in Fort Worth, Texas, Kaddu taught science to tweens through Breakthrough Collaborative, a nonprofit that runs academic summer and year-round programs for middle school students who are often the first in their families hoping to attend college. “The experience fundamentally shifted the whole trajectory of my career path and life,” Kaddu says.

After graduating from Rice University with degrees in engineering and math, he turned down job offers in oil and gas, management consulting, and banking to complete a three-year commitment to teach high school calculus with Teach For America. His time in the classroom sparked a lasting passion for improving the U.S. education system and ensuring students don’t fall through the cracks.

When Kaddu later enrolled in Stanford’s joint MBA/MA in Education program, he came in knowing he wanted to build something that could impact schools and students at scale, but not knowing exactly what that would be. Then, during his final quarter at Stanford, he did an independent study inspired by two courses cross-listed in the business and education schools. “The courses really made me curious about what financial decision-making in schools looks like,” Kaddu says. His project examined the complex trade-offs public school leaders face and how they make decisions about limited resources.

As Kaddu dug deeper, he moved away from the crowded math-app space. Instead, he refined his independent study into a broader startup vision. Today, Kaddu is the CEO and founder of Edstruments, a software platform that helps leaders in education, nonprofits, and other impact-driven organizations use their money more wisely by making budgets clearer and automating manual tasks.

How did your college experience volunteering at an education nonprofit pique your interest in the field?

I was teaching in Fort Worth, Texas, working with students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. I asked them why they were giving up their summer to come to summer school, and the answer I got from so many was: “We learn more here at Breakthrough than we do in an entire school year.” That planted the seed and the spark for my career journey, as I only then began to wrestle with the realities of what education looks like for many kids in this country.

Then you turned down several corporate job offers to continue teaching. How did you arrive at that decision?

My senior year of college, I was super conflicted about what was next for me. I applied to dozens of jobs and ultimately got wildly different offers in terms of the type of company, job, and compensation. It was a really tough decision.

As a first-generation Indian American immigrant, a real concern was how do I justify a decision to go into teaching to my parents, who’d sacrificed so much for me to get this engineering degree. It was certainly not my parents’ expectation that I would go halfway across the country to study engineering but not become an engineer.

But I kept thinking that the corporate internship I did the summer after I taught didn’t light the same spark in me as teaching had. With teaching, I was going to bed and waking up thinking about how I could better serve my students each day. Ultimately, I chose to follow what felt like a calling over what felt like the “rational” pathway.

What was your Teach For America experience like, and how did it solidify your decision to build an education-focused career?

I loved working with high schoolers. It’s such a special time as they think about those big questions of what am I doing next in life and who do I want to be. It was such an honor and a privilege to get to play a small part in that season of their lives.

The student body at our school was almost entirely Hispanic immigrants who were first-generation college-bound. I saw firsthand how many structural challenges exist in the public education system today in the U.S. For example, some kids walked into my pre-calculus classroom without a consistent ability to multiply or divide proficiently. When that underlying foundation is missing, it makes it very difficult for kids to succeed at higher-level skills. There were a lot of cases where, despite spending a lot of extra time and effort with students, some gaps couldn’t be closed in just one year.

But in the end, you chose not to remain as a full-time teacher.

I wanted to see kids have meaningful opportunities for their future. But I didn’t think being a career classroom educator or school administrator was the way I wanted to achieve those goals. I was really interested in what I could build or create to have a much more widespread impact and serve schools, students, and educators at scale. That was something I really believed I had to leave the classroom to figure out.

How have Stanford GSB and your education degree helped in laying the foundation for your startup?

Stanford was my dream school. Its rich history of the joint degree in business and education stood out to me. It’s a cliché answer, but the highlight of my time was the people and relationships. From early days of meeting my classmates, I was awed and amazed by these accomplished, down-to-earth people from every continent who thought deeply about things and cared about transforming the world around them. It expanded my horizons of what I believed was possible in my own journey.

Those years at Stanford allowed me to do a lot of important work on myself to be someone who can show up more effectively, build influence and relationships more successfully, communicate with greater empathy, and listen well. Those are so important to leading and leadership. Stanford classmates and professors have backed Edstruments as early angel investors and advisors, too.

Tell us more about your independent study project that laid the groundwork for Edstruments.

I reached out to anyone in the education leadership world who would take a 30-minute call with me. I asked questions like: “How do you keep track of your school’s money?” and “What rules are there around spending?” By the end of the quarter, the groundwork for Edstruments was laid.

That said, I wasn’t one of those members of my class who jumped right into doing a startup before school ended or straight out of graduation — I wasn’t brave enough. So, I went back into the world of management consulting at McKinsey for a year and a half. I launched Edstruments after leaving that role.

How is Edstruments helping schools and nonprofits?

We work with leaders from schools and nonprofits ranging from $400,000 to $400,000,000 in annual budgets. Our original product helps them understand what they’ve spent money on, and how they’re going to spend what’s left in their budget based on their priorities and goals.

Over time, we’ve grown our suite of products to also help organizations build next year’s budget, streamline the procurement process, automate accounts payable flows, and modernize employee reimbursements and corporate cards. One of the big things we do for the schools and nonprofits we serve is cut down on manual work and effort.

Our platform collectively saves organizations hundreds of thousands of hours a year in time spent on manual tasks. We’ve helped organizations improve financial clarity, digitize paper-based processes, and strengthen vendor relationships. We also hear from organizations that we’re improving employee satisfaction and engagement — when you give leaders and budget owners more discretion over the choices that they make, they feel a greater sense of ownership and influence in their organizations.

How do you see your company helping to alleviate the problem you set out to solve: gaps in the public education system?

Edstruments plays a supporting role, one that empowers organizational leaders — whether it’s a school district superintendent, principal, or nonprofit executive director — to figure out how to best put their finite pool of funding to work in service of their mission, stakeholders, and communities. By helping schools and nonprofits align their resources to impact and automate manual tasks, we’re helping them work more effectively and efficiently to achieve their goals. Our work allows these leaders to spend more time, money, and effort on carrying out their mission, which is what they do best.

What’s your hope for public schools 10 or 20 years from now?

The American Dream has always communicated the promise that any kid should be able to achieve whatever life outcome they want if they study and work hard. The public school system is supposed to be the foundation of that promise, but it’s not living up to that role for all young people today.

Ten or 20 years from now, I hope every learner in our schools is truly given the opportunity to maximize their potential and become everything they want to be. I also hope we have more parents of means investing in their local public schools, whether that’s with service time, advocacy, or financial resources. If our society invests in all kids being well educated, I believe we’ll see meaningful returns across economic and social dimensions.

When you look back at your path so far — and ahead to what’s next — how do you view the arc of your career?

I care deeply about mission-oriented work. For the last several years, that’s looked like supporting schools, nonprofits, and public agencies, but who knows where the years ahead take me? I’m fortunate to be young and hopefully have many years of life ahead.

My goal is that my career path always enables me to create real, positive impact on others. GSB’s tagline of “change lives, change organizations, change the world” is inspiring because there are so many different ways to go about that.

I have focused on the education and nonprofit sectors over the last dozen years, and likely will for at least the medium-term future. The world is constantly changing in such dynamic ways, so I imagine that in a decade there will be new ways to create impact that don’t even exist today. I feel energized and excited for the journey ahead, and optimistic that there will always be important ways for me to show up and make a positive difference.

Photos by SF Photo