Ken Eisner

Ken Eisner has decades of senior executive experience guiding edtech startups, nonprofits, and inside the Fortune 5, including founding and scaling Amazon’s most successful education-to-work offering AWS Educate and guiding VarsityBooks.com to an IPO. Inside these companies, he has led large, matrixed, global teams composed of both technical and non-technical talent and is skilled at entering new markets and creating large-scale partnerships. He has also worked with governments around the world, including federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. and country-level governments internationally. Ken also advises multiple entities in the higher education and workforce space.

Ken’s experience includes a decade at Amazon, in both their Amazon Web Services (AWS) division and in their corporate learning division. At AWS, Ken was the Director, Worldwide Education Programs. He founded AWS Educate, Amazon's global initiative to accelerate cloud learning and prepare students for a cloud-enabled workforce. AWS Educate members include 1.5 million students, tens of thousands of educators, and over 4,000 institutions from 200 countries and territories around the world. Innovations include: 2016's launch of Cloud Competency Framework (CCF),  a disruptive education-to-employment taxonomy, along with online learning pathways, micro-credentials, job board, and an Interview Accelerator and AWS’ first no credit card-required account; 2017's offering for secondary school students; and 2018's launch of "Cloud Degree" offerings based on the CCF, beginning with vocational institutions and community colleges. In 2019 and 2020, governors from Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, and Utah announced statewide implementations of AWS Educate's Cloud Degree across their community college system and in select universities and high school districts, and Ken also led international country and region-wide consortiums with the governments of Bahrain, Columbia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the UK. Ken received the AWS Public Sector "Impact Person of the Year" in 2018, he and his AWS Educate team received the AWS Public Sector "MVP" award in Q3 2018, and AWS’s Educate's collaboration on an associate's-to-bachelor's degree pathway in Virginia received Education Dive's Higher Ed "Partnership of the Year" award in 2019. Ken also was AWS first press-certified speaker for education, able to engage with all types of media, and he helped to guide AWS Educate’s overwhelmingly positive and outsized impact on Amazon’s media persona.

Ken also led business development for Amazon's confidential, machine learning-powered internal learning system. In addition to scaling the product internally by 4x, he also led an in-depth analysis to assess the viability of bringing this learning system into the higher education and corporate learning business segments, and he is an expert on the learning systems and competitive field for learning and corporate training.

Ken's prior roles included: SVP, Business Development and Marketing for One Economy, where he helped guide one of the largest public private partnerships in digital education; VP of Marketing for e-commerce textbook provider VarsityBooks, where he contributed to its IPO and launched its marketing services division; and strategic advisor to Sprint Nextel. In 2014, Ken was appointed to the D.C. Mayor's Innovation and Technology Inclusion Council, where he chaired Education and Workforce Development committees. He also is a Senior Advisor to New Markets Venture Partners, Special Partner for outsourced corporate development and M&A firm Good Harbor, sits on the edX customer advisory board and  the Council for Graduate Schools advisory board, advises various educational institutions, and participated  on transition or advisory committees for President Biden and Gov-Elect Wes Moore (D-MD). Ken holds an MBA from Georgetown University, an MPP from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and a BA from Cornell University.