Evan Claudeanos

Early in my career, I intended to become an academic. I was in graduate school pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy when I started writing algorithms to help institutions connect their faculty to funding. This was before ChatGPT, but we were using natural language processing models to look at faculty member research papers and proposals, then distill their key skills and interest areas into a profile that could connect them to targeted grants and other funding opportunities.

It started as a way to help institutions and faculty find the best-fit funding opportunities. But I began to form an understanding of and expertise around building products tailored to the higher ed industry. Pretty soon I ended up building a whole platform while working closely with the Office of Research at Notre Dame and the University’s incubator, the IDEA Center. The resulting platform became Amaforge, which had quite a bit of success in helping institutions target the right opportunities for their faculty.

I was able to pair my academic background with my technical skills to get a well-rounded view of higher education from the inside. That standpoint was valuable in creating products that made sense for the individual institution. That’s how I caught the entrepreneurial bug and got into leading teams that build great products.

At the tail-end of my time with Amaforge, I spent a little time as a founder in residence at the Berkeley SkyDeck. There, I had the opportunity to work with Ellucian, who was hiring for someone to lead the company’s incubator arm. They were looking for someone to help them think more like a startup about the products they were building. I became the founding director of that department and grew the team around the concept of commercializing high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

While I was at Ellucian, we saw a rapid growth of students who, for whatever reason, weren’t in the right place for or were even skeptical of pursuing traditional education. There was competition between various platforms like Coursera and Udemy to capture those students’ attention.

Due to these findings, we put focus on alternative education opportunities and using artificial intelligence to create personalized student skillset profiles and connect them to specific, relevant educational outcomes. We ended up building a marketplace for institutions to showcase their continuing education offerings while also connecting students with the right educational opportunities given their background and career goals.

There are a lot of similarities across the work I’ve done, but all of it has been heavily engaged with building more nuanced applications of AI to create different personalization systems within higher education.

I was excited to join Nelnet because it had a major initiative, Project Horizon, currently in flight, that could benefit from the vision of someone with a background of innovation within the edtech startup space. I saw it as an opportunity to help build the vision around a new product, a product that wasn’t already set in stone or going through the motions to get across the finish line. Something where I could help drive the vision and direction behind the product, to get people inspired to build great things.

While I’ve been involved in product development for years, this is the first time I’ve focused on the financial side of the edtech market. So I’m looking forward to seeing the wide scope of products and services currently in use and making an impact in that space.

A huge part of what I think as effective leadership is bringing people more toward the product-led philosophy you see at a startup, where it’s really all about making the best product possible for customers. I see that in contrast to a more distribution-led mindset, where you cross-sell and upsell existing customers with incrementally new products and features. Being product-first means the only lever you have to be successful is how good your product is, not how good your sales and marketing teams are. It all depends on whether you can deliver an amazing product.

I try to restore the balance and bring a lot more attention to the product, the customer, and delivering the best possible user experience. To do that, as a leader, I try to inspire and rally people around the products they’re building, allowing them to have ownership and freedom to take things to exciting places. On a more functional level, that involves unblocking them if there’s anything preventing bold new thinking—like how can I make sure they have the tools and resources to make those bold moves a reality?

At Nelnet, there’s this sort of tension between the fact that our buyers are administrators at institutions, but oftentimes our end users are students. Sometimes we forget that in order to build truly great products, we need to spend a ton of time speaking to students and parents as well. Often there’s not enough emphasis placed on engaging with students as end users. It’s critical to me that our product managers engage closely with institutions but also have research teams getting direct feedback from students.

Throughout my career, I’ve emphasized design partnerships with the institutions, finding those people in higher ed who are innovative thinkers, who get excited by novel ideas and bold concepts, and are looking to be part of the design process. In my conversations with institutions I’m always looking to identify and form relationships with the people we can work with to really advance a product and take it to the next level.

Project Horizon is the design of a modern, beautiful program that simplifies work for its users by delivering the key information they need in order to get things done for both administrators and students or payers. Part of that includes powerful methods of personalization that help each student make the right decisions at the right time. We’re building in milestone-based gamification and other elements borrowed from modern banking and financial apps that help motivate users to make good decisions and stay on track in a fun, interesting way.

For many people, the financial aspects of their lives tend to cause some level of stress or discomfort as opposed to joy. I don’t know if we can make those moments joyous for them, necessarily, but we can certainly remove some of the stress. Especially in terms of the way we build and design our products, as well as visualize the information through colors and flow.

There’s a strong need for institutions to be able to surface relevant information about students, both individually and in aggregate, in a much more fluid way. This is where AI can help query and retrieve targeted information based on individualized use cases and deliver a refined reporting interface.

This is a space that often gets very complicated very quickly. You typically have complex dashboards with lots of potential information that might be useful, but no intuitive guidance on what actually matters. Through Project Horizon, we’re delivering a more effective experience around those moments. Helping users grab and understand the data that’s needed to better inform planning and strategy.

Nelnet has traditionally been focused on the transactional aspect of campus life. We’re known as the solid, dependable company in the financial space. It’s an awesome foundation to work from. Our customers are happy with the reliability of our platform and robust suite of tools and services it offers. We’re going to continue improving the transactional piece like we’ve always done—that is, with integrity and robust capabilities.

As we look to the future, we’re moving beyond our foundation into a more relational role with students, payers, and institutions. We’re focused on more than running the payment. We want to help students make sound financial decisions. We want to be the financial wellness platform for those students, helping them get payments done on time, find a payment plan that works for them, and make decisions that ensure they’ll complete their education.

A lot of retention challenges center around financial stress. We think there’s a lot of work to be done to be more effective stewards of the student financial experience. And that’s the direction we’re headed in with Project Horizon. So I’m very excited about the platform’s role in moving the market forward in that space while helping institutions stay financially stable.

My family is front and center for everything I do. I have three kids, and we do a lot of outdoor activities together: mountain biking, camping, and hiking. Those are fundamental parts of my life and keep me inspired. I also enjoy rock climbing. I like music, and play a little banjo myself on the side. I also just love building things. Even in my spare time, I’m often vibe coding on side projects and keeping up with what’s new in the industry. All these things ground me and help keep me inspired and curious.

I’m a heavy user of AI agents, primarily Codex for coding. I also like Claude and Gemini for chat. Sometimes you’re trying to solve a problem with one tool and you just can’t. Then you put the same problem into a different tool and it solves it instantly. It’s really interesting to see how each of them “thinks,” so to speak, and how a problem that’s intractable in one system can be simple in another. They’re kind of like humans in that way. We think about problems in different ways. What’s difficult to one person is not at all to another.

I really like several. There’s Lenny’s Podcast. He brings on a wide range of people from the product world, particularly around product management and product leadership. The conversations are interesting from both a practical and visionary standpoint. I also listen to some of the more broadly popular shows, like the Lex Fridman Podcast.