Charlotte Trudgill is the CEO and Co-founder of Jackett. Before Jackett, she was a Partner at Meta's APAC Emerging Markets team.

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

In today's classroom, an average level is taught because teachers don't have the time/tools to adapt and personalize.

Children are left behind and demotivated or learning loss is unaddressed. We're building infrastructure that helps educators become more efficient and improve learning outcomes for their students.

We want to empower educators with tech to enable personalized education at scale.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I meditate and do breathe work throughout the day to manage cognitive load. It helps me conserve energy to focus on the 20% as I'm context switching.

If our team shares complex problems we need to solve, I'll close my eyes and meditate whilst listening and reasoning with the problem, weed out context, and visualize potential solutions.

I've been building the muscle of visualizing solutions, which helps steer our analysis to take action versus inertia, both require energy, but one makes the boat go faster.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Feedback that we have received from teachers because it's a testimony to the net positive impact we're making with our product.

For example, when they stopped using pen and paper or shared their deep gratitude for our app, which frees up their time to do more of what they love, teach.

When I met a teacher in Delhi for a usability test, he said, "Of course I'm always happy to give Jackett feedback. The app is making my life better".

It validates our commitment, the effort of transforming behavior and evangelizing a new way of doing things. It makes it worth it. I've been extremely lucky to find that the solution we're building is fundamentally good for the world.

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

Embedded finance infrastructure enablers or providers that help digital platforms/businesses offer financial products/services by providing their tech and acting as an interface between financial institutions.

They're democratizing financial services and expanding the market. I've been tracking this space because there are similar needs for tech infrastructure and enablement in education, to be more scalable and flexible.

By 2030, the number of university enrolments will double and 50%+ of learners will be non-traditional, meaning they'll require flexible pathways to complete their studies, e.g., remote/hybrid learning, adapted to individual needs.

Technology will play a role in not only transforming the education system to become more flexible and scalable but also democratizing those capabilities, creating a new category of enablement infrastructure in education.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

'Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. You have to do lots of things you don't like.' - Elon.

Be honest with yourself. Building a startup, whether it's in education or another industry, is a continuous grind to solve that problem 10X better than the status quo or your competitor.

It can be brutal — my advice is to love the journey and your mission. It helps to build that resilience.

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Technological innovation that makes humans and the world better. I'm part of an amazing community of founders, and these are topics we're exchanging thoughts and ideas about daily.

I love hopping onto 15min chats once in a while to exchange ideas and brainstorm! Definitely a dopamine boost.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Lost Cities with Albert Lin. He's using LiDAR to understand human history!

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

The classic wall's vanilla ice cream. I'm a purist!