A few weeks ago, hardly anyone had heard of Mentava, an education technology startup I founded in 2021. We were two years out from our seed fundraise, and more than a year away from our planned launch. With only five employees, we had been quietly building a minimum viable product and planned to iterate as we acquired users. Classic zero-to-one startup grind. But then, a single individual came into our orbit and radically accelerated our timeline overnight. Because of her, we acquired more customers than we could onboard within a week, launched our first product a year early, and are now watching two-year-olds learn to read using our software. Here’s the story of Mentava’s best marketer, and how she singlehandedly drove massive growth for our company.

Emily Mills is an extremely online progressive agitator and vocal left-wing conspiracy theorist who describes herself as a “random mom” and lives in San Francisco. She frequently posts about the city’s tech leaders, and holds one-sided grudges against people like venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan and Pirate Wires’ own Mike Solana. I had no idea who Emily was until April 2 — a Tuesday — when one of her tweets appeared on my timeline: a post with screenshots from our 2022 fundraising deck, where she criticized our plan to teach Algebra I and II to 4th graders.

I had met plenty of people who opposed the idea of kids learning quickly. Whether it’s the elimination of middle-school algebra, the cancellation of honors classes, or the end of merit-based admissions, out-of-touch policymakers have been waging war on excellence in our schools. Mentava’s mission is to fight back against anti-merit activists with a software-based tutor to support high-achieving kids whose learning needs aren’t being met at school.