Advisory
Via Fabri
- reads as
- builders’ way
- and as
- the way of building
An advisory practice on AI, learning, and the transformation of education.
A practice of Matthew Rascoff (opens in a new tab)
Practice
What we do
Advisory work for institutions and for the people building inside them.
Strategy for digital and AI education
Helping set new directions for startups, universities, systems, and schools.
Advising builders
Working with founders, funders, and government at high and low altitudes.
Standing up the operations, not just writing the memo
Strategy and implementation have never been more intertwined. AI has democratized the means of production, but putting it to work in the service of teams and organizations requires context and human understanding.
Clients and Projects
A few of the engagements, current and recent.
The Human Potential LAB
Advising
Pamela Cantor's venture, which takes the science of human development out of the research literature and puts it to work in the institutions where people actually learn and grow. Advisory work on strategy and on building the programs out.
- Outsmart (opens in a new tab)
Advising
A public benefit company working on the cost and reach of a degree. Through a subsidiary it acquired a graduate school, now Elmbridge University, where its first undergraduate offering is an accredited STEM certificate: credit-bearing science and math courses a student can take before applying to a four-year college. Advisory work on strategy and on assembling the academic team.
- ATS Hub (opens in a new tab)
Education R&D
Leading the postsecondary working group and serving on the technical working group of the Accelerate, Transform, Scale Hub, the IES-funded community run by Digital Promise and SRI. The work is research and development: helping teams carry evidence-based ideas from early development to something that holds up at scale.
Textbooks published as open-source projects: freely usable, continuously corrected, and improvable by any instructor who teaches from them. Begun at Stanford with Hewlett Foundation support, and now being set up to continue independently.
Anthropic
Higher education
Served on the higher education advisory board, arguing throughout for community colleges, regional public universities, and access at the scale where most students actually are.
Podcast
The Higher Education Series
A conversation series with Edtech Insiders, on whether higher education can be rebuilt from the inside.
Nobody is defending the current model. The open question is whether it can be put back together by the people inside it, or has to be challenged and changed from outside.
The guests are presidents rebuilding institutions, founders starting new ones, and a few who have done both. Around forty-five minutes, curious and provocative, no gotchas.
Homo faber suae quisque fortunae.
Each person is the maker of their own fortune.
The name
Two words of Latin
- via
- The road, the way, geographic and philosophical.
- faber
- One who works in hard material.
- fabrī
- Of the builders and makers, of building and making.
01 The claim
Homo faber
Appius Claudius Caecus left the line in his Sententiae: homo faber suae quisque fortunae. Each person is the maker of their own fortune. Fourteenth-century humanists recovered it and made it central to the Renaissance, as a claim about what a human being is. Not a knower first, but a maker, who takes material and leaves it changed.
02 The grammar
One form, two meanings
Faber is the singular, the lone builder. Fabrī is both “of the builder” and “the builders”.
So Via Fabri is at once the way of building and the community of builders.
03 The street
Crafts are made in community
Roman roads took the names of the craftsmen who plied their trades there. Workshops of one craft stood side by side, apprentices moved between them, and everyone's work was visible.
If Homo faber is a claim about individual human dignity, Via Fabri is about the shared project of building the future together.
Contact
If you are building in education, you should not have to build alone.
Menlo Park, California.