Dacia Toll built and scaled a single school into a 41-school network before moving into venture, and she's known for redesigning school models from scratch by borrowing ideas from places like Summit, BASIS, and Montessori, always trying to balance strong academic standards with attention to individual kids. She was skeptical of edtech for years and only got excited about AI when she saw it could support teacher judgment and classroom discourse instead of replacing them, describing AI as being like electricity—powerful, but only useful once shaped into well-designed tools, an approach that fits her long-standing habit of spending time in schools and treating teachers and students as partners in building solutions.