About Eleven Learning

Eleven Learning builds tools that enable the academic community to make college textbooks that are more relevant, more up-to-date, and less expensive. Our first offering, currently in beta, is a new reading interface for online textbooks. For more information about our product plans, please refer to our page for authors. Eleven Learning is a privately held corporation. It was founded in 2009 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Team

Andrew Bender, President Andrew is responsible for strategy, marketing, and overall operations of Eleven Learning. He held a similar role as general manager of Alloy Inc’s Sconex business unit. There he ran SugarLoot, a social network with around 1 million registered users. He has also worked at BrassRing (now Kenexa), RealNetworks, SureBridge (now Navisite), and KPMG Peat Marwick. Andrew received his AB from Dartmouth and his MBA from Kellogg.

Dev Purkayastha, Director of Technology Dev is in charge of the development and ongoing operation of Eleven Learning’s website and technical infrastructure. He held a similar position at Sconex, where he led the team that built SugarLoot from the ground up. Dev has also worked for numerous startups, including Auburn Quad (now Grassroots Giving Group) and BzzAgent. Dev has an AB from Harvard.

Stephen Solomon, Director of Community Stephen supports the author and professor community at Eleven Learning. Previously he worked at SAP Press, where he was active in their online community. Stephen has fifteen years of academic publishing experience at firms such as Pearson (Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley), Cengage (Course Technology), and Jones & Bartlett. He has held positions in acquisitions, editorial management, development, sales, and marketing. Stephen has a BA from the University of Massachusetts.

Advisor

Bob Woodbury
Bob recently began the Digital Sources Project, an open-source effort to make historical documents more easily available to student researchers. A leader in academic publishing for decades, he served as Publisher at Course Technology (now Cengage), Editor-in-Chief at McGraw-Hill Technology Education, VP of Computer and Engineering Education at Addison-Wesley (Pearson), and Publisher for Behavioral and Social Science at CBS College Publishing. Bob was also Publisher at the Learning Network, a web start-up created to aggregate learning solutions for children, college students, and working adults. As a volunteer, Bob writes grants for Spare Change News, a street newspaper published by the Homeless Empowerment Project of Cambridge, and is a graduate of the University of Kansas.