Eric Oemig (co-founder)
Chairman & CTO
While serving in the Washington State Senate, Senator Oemig was the Vice Chairman of the Education Committee, served on the Quality Education Council, and Oemig was a key leader in passing landmark education reform in the state in 2009. Before joining the Senate, Senator Oemig was a Performance Manager at Microsoft, ensuring teams shipped quality, useful products. He served on the boards of First Robotics Washington and Technically Learning (now part of Code.org) helping to ignite passion in math, science and engineering for school kids. (Excerpt taken from https://wow.boomlearning.com/blog)
Mary Heuett Oemig (co-founder)
General Counsel & COO
Mary is a lifelong learner who studied cognitive science in education before becoming a technology lawyer. At Boom Learning she indulges her loves of science, technology, research, and education. With Montessori early childhood education certification, and experience running a co-operative school for gifted and talented kids 3 to 9 years olds, Mary understands classroom limitations. Before founding Boom Learning, Mary’s legal practice focused on complex copyright and trade secret issues for large and small companies. Her passion is improving education through research and evidence- based interventions. (Excerpt taken from https://blog.boomlearning.com/author/maryoemig/)
“These task cards are bite-size alternatives to worksheets for helping students practice and master new skills. Each card presents a question the student must answer or an activity they must complete before moving on to the next card in the deck. Already a go-to resource for many teachers in paper form, task cards in digital form are even handier because they are interactive. Each deck of digital Boom Cards is essentially a mini-app that automatically grades each student’s performance, providing students and teachers alike with immediate feedback and an easy way to track progress.”
The Oemigs are co-founders of Boom Learning, a Kirkland educational technology company that provides teachers an online platform to create, buy and sell digital task cards. From their combined experiences, both Eric and Mary saw the need for a product to support teachers, save time, and engage with kids; that’s when they decided to found the bootstrapped company, Boom Learning, in 2012 They are great examples of hard-working entrepreneurs, as Boom Learning failed in its first attempt to build its platform, but Eric and Mary didn’t give up. “When I first started the engineering on it, we kind of crashed and burned because the tools we needed didn’t exist,” said Eric, chairman and chief technology officer. Thanks to their perseverance and the continuously evolving technology, when Eric went back to the drawing board in 2015, the barriers he faced before no longer stood in the way.
This leadership duo inspires me; they prove that successful entrepreneurship is attained through hard work, perseverance, and a desire to create disruptive change. Both Eric and Mary saw a need within the educational community and made it their mission to fill that gap and help meet teachers’ needs.
Sources:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/05/prweb15453477.htm
I admit, at first I questioned the role-model-value of The Oemigs for a new ventureist. Eric comes from a position of existing power— having held a political role as well as a management position in Microsoft. I have an easier time relating with Mary’s origin story, at least.
However, the fact that Boom Learning failed on its first attempt is inspiring. Entrepreneurs must be comfortable with failure, or the fear of it will prevent them from getting any venture off the ground. These two showed that patience and persistence are the true qualifiers for success. Than you for sharing!
*Thank* you