Letter from Joe: MajorClarity by Paper

Dear Partner,

We launched MajorClarity with our first partner almost exactly 6 years ago. At the time, I had three big goals:

1. Lower the opportunity cost for students to authentically explore careers through interactive content,
   
   
2. Help students make better academic choices based on that exploration, and
   
   
3. Do it in a way that’s equitable. Put simply: engaging for all students and affordable to all school districts.

Many industry insiders thought they were not scalable goals, but we’ve pursued them relentlessly. We’ve made it our mission to not only provide a comprehensive CCR platform but also a customer success team that specializes in building staff champions and student engagement.

As a result, we’ve grown our partnership network to more than 625 school districts across ~35 states. We shattered the CCR industry’s average benchmark of 15-25% student activation; last year, our top half of district partners achieved an average 70% activation rate across all students (both middle school and high school—not just cherrypicked by grade).

As we’ve grown (and largely due to our student outcomes), countless investment firms and strategic partners have reached out wanting to work with MajorClarity, but we never pursued those opportunities. The student outcomes we’ve achieved have been made possible through many counterintuitive investments we’ve made (e.g. over-staffing customer success, designing our own curriculum) and none of these potential partners truly understood what we were building. We couldn’t be certain they would serve our students and schools in the same ways we would.

So, we’ve done this work as a small and nimble team, which at times has meant making hard decisions to prioritize product features or support resources.

And while we’ve always made those decisions with student outcomes in mind, we see the potential to do so much more.

A year ago, I started building a slow-but-steady relationship with a leadership team that finally understood what we were building and why this students-first approach mattered so much.

It’s with that in mind that we’ve taken a big leap: I’m excited to announce we have now joined forces with Paper™, a leading education company that focuses on providing equitable access to unlimited academic support for districts and students.

Unlike other potential partners, Paper not only demonstrated the same long-term vision for student success (including our contrarian bets), but also the ability and commitment to accelerate our collective impact.

I always said that my only goal with MajorClarity was to do what was best for our (1) students/schools, (2) employees, and (3) stakeholders.

Through getting to know Paper and realizing the possibilities, I’m confident this is the best thing I can do for all of the above groups.

This partnership not only puts us in a place to invest even more deeply in MajorClarity; it also brings about incredible opportunities from the power of combining Academic Support with Career & College Readiness.

You can read more about the combined vision—which I’m so excited to be part of—from Paper’s CEO Phil Cutler here.

There are too many people to name individually, but there are so many of you that we could not have gotten here without.

I want to thank all of our K-12 district partners (especially our earliest believers who trusted us before we had proven ourselves), all of my team members who do the daily work to bring MajorClarity to life, and our investors. Without your belief in me (before even having much traction), we never would have had the resources to make all this possible.

It's because of your trust and hard work that we are currently impacting thousands of schools and millions of students everyday... and thanks to this partnership, we will be helping millions more. We’re just getting started and we have so much work to accomplish!

Gratefully,

  Joe Belsterling