The intersection of teaching and technology proved to be the perfect convergence to launch Lane Rankin into entrepreneurship.
He stitched together Irvine-based Illuminate Education with software from a previous company of his in the Inland Empire. The software enables students, teachers, parents and administrators to make real-time, data-informed decisions to “positively impact student success.”
Illuminate Education now serves six million students in 46 states. Its revenue has grown from about $150,000 in 2009 to approximately $33 million last year.
Rankin attributes this dizzying growth to the company’s mission of promoting student and educator success.
“We’re an education company doing technology, not the other way around,” he said.
The Business Journal honored Rankin on March 8 with an Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award for his leadership at the company (see profiles of the other winners, pages 1, 8, 9 and 10).
In His Blood
His mom was a middle school teacher at Whittier Christian Schools, a ministry of Calvary Baptist Church in Whittier.
He said he broke her heart when he was 16 and presumptuously declared, “I will never become a teacher, because I want to be rich.”
Little did he know where teaching and technology would take him.
His first teaching job was at Grace Yokley Middle School in Ontario.
“From the first day, it was such a challenging thing, and I got addicted to seeing light bulbs going off for kids,” he said. “I especially enjoyed helping kids who really needed help.”
He said he tried to figure out from day one how technology could help him teach math better. Rankin developed a reputation as “the guy doing it first.” He wanted, for example, to access an early version of the internet in his classroom, so he found an unused phone line and paid a janitor to hook up the service. He was hired by Cupertino-based Apple to travel around the state and show other teachers how they could use technology in their classrooms. He said he talked the school board in his district into buying every teacher a computer and printer that they would own personally if they completed two weeks of training. It was the first district in the state to make and follow through with such an offer, he added.
Move Up
Teaching was barely paying the bills at that point. He and his wife had four children, and he said that at times they only had one car. So he would ride his bike to school, pulling a trailer with all his technology equipment.
He taught for seven years, then took an assistant principal job in Rancho Cucamonga. He also was designated as the school’s technology guru and started building websites for the school and for teachers.
Soon he got a part-time teaching job at Chapman University as an adjunct professor and started experimenting with blended teaching—a mix of in-person and online instruction. He said he couldn’t find good tools to facilitate teaching online, though, so he started creating his own.
He was then offered a job in the office of San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools to work on a big technology project. The district got a multimillion-dollar grant from NASA to develop web-based math and science curriculum and professional development using NASA’s resources. Rankin led the work, and his software-building team on the project formed the basis of his first company, Web Media Solutions. He launched the company in 1999 in San Bernardino, specializing in tracking and storing data.
One of its first big clients was the University of California system, for which it created a system to track teachers who received professional training.
Web Media Solutions and San Bernardino-based Action Learning Systems ultimately came together in a 50-50 partnership to form Achieve Data Solutions in 2002.
Achieve eventually was acquired by the company formerly known as Harcourt, which later was acquired by Houghton Mifflin, and Rankin stayed on with the Boston-based company.
To OC
When his two-year contract was up in 2009, he wanted to buy back some of the original software his team had created at Achieve. They had built newer software at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but the conglomerate wasn’t interested in it, he said.
The software was important to him, he said, because he was confident it was school districts’ “future.” The first iteration could hold only so much data, though. Rankin said it was selling well in the market and “raking in the bucks,” but the parent company wasn’t investing in it.
So he took back his team and bought back parts of the software and started all over again. This time he honored his love of surfing and started the new company, Illuminate Education, in Irvine so he could surf near his new digs in Laguna Beach. The company is now six times bigger than Achieve was when it was first sold to Harcourt, he said. It employs more than 180 in the U.S. and about 20 in the Philippines.
