Venture Philanthropists: The New Schools Fund

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TeachScape CEO Mark Atkinson, a former network-TV producer, launches into his pitch. Teacher training is critical to improving education, he tells the dozen partners sitting around the conference table. Teachers need to update their skills constantly. "It's a $12 billion market," he says, "but the current state of play is awful: ad hoc on-site visits with no follow-up."

This is the kind of opportunity perfectly suited to the transformational power of the Internet, he explains. These days teachers travel an average of 25 miles for training. TeachScape will be a Web-based teacher-development system that allows them to train from home.

As Atkinson gets to the meat of his pitch--pricing, revenue assumptions and sustainability--Doerr asks, "How will we, or a third party, measure how this works?" Soon there is a fusillade of questions. Can you judge the teacher's work by the students' progress? How do you get the bandwidth to make this a high-quality experience, say, with lessons on video? If teachers are accessing the site from home, won't that tie up their phone lines?

With the TeachScape crew gone, the partners mull the firm's prospects. Is this really where they want to put their millions? Or are other philanthropic start-ups more deserving, better prepared, addressing a more urgent need? Doerr and the others decide to study TeachScape further with a view eventually to providing some funding. They break for coffee. And wait for the next pitch.

--By Karl Taro Greenfeld and David S. Jackson