Erica Key

Entrepreneur-in-Residence Erica Key is the Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Learning Seeds, an organization that works side-by-side with children to practice and develop social skills during unstructured play. After 25 years of successful real world, social emotional teaching, Erica founded Learning Seeds to scale the tremendous social and emotional growth she was seeing with their coaching methods. Erica has a degree from the University of Chicago and has done post graduate work at Northwestern University.

You can ask me about…

• Building purpose-driven companies
• Transitioning from practitioner to entrepreneur
• Combining technology with education
• Values-based hiring and team building
• Making social impact financially sustainable
• Finding patterns that scale
• Creating inclusive products and services

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Play, Purpose, and Profit: How Erica Key is Revolutionizing Early Childhood Education

After 25 years of working directly with young children, Erica Key saw an opportunity to scale the transformative power of play. As the founder of Learning Seeds, a Massachusetts-based social benefit corporation, she’s now combining innovative technology with proven educational methods to make inclusion and play accessible to all young learners.

“We’re preparing children right now in a world that changes very quickly,” Key explains. “The children we’re training today are getting ready for jobs that don’t exist yet.”

This reality drives Learning Seeds’ mission to go beyond traditional educational approaches, focusing on building essential social skills and community connections through play.

Key’s transition from educator to entrepreneur wasn’t planned. “As a teacher, it was not in my plans to become an entrepreneur, but I saw a problem that needed to be solved,” she reflects. Through Learning Seeds, she’s developed “Enlightened Shadowing,” a coaching method that helps scaffold social and emotional learning in early childhood settings.

What sets Learning Seeds apart is its commitment to keeping educators at the heart of both product development and company leadership. “We really feel that there should be nothing about us without us,” Key emphasizes. This stands in contrast to many educational technology companies that only bring in teacher input at the final stages of product development. Instead, Learning Seeds starts by asking teachers what problems they want solved and what successful practices they want to see replicated.

One of Key’s most innovative approaches to handling rejection early in her entrepreneurial journey was establishing what she calls “Dog Food Days” – a concept borrowed from Google’s practice of testing their own products. When potential mentors or partners rejected her ideas, she would specifically set aside time to learn from their criticism, asking them to explain in detail why they thought her idea wouldn’t work.

“I ask people for good feedback. I ask them to tell me with radical candor,” she shares.

One particularly poignant piece of feedback came from a mentor who told her, “Erica, you care so much about each individual child, you’re never going to be comfortable with a product that fails even 1% of your customers.” This insight helped her define acceptable parameters for failure and success, guiding product design and pilot programs.

For aspiring social entrepreneurs, Key offers a refreshing perspective on the relationship between profit and purpose: “Money is never our reason for existing, and it is never the destination we want to end up in on our journey, but it is our fuel.” She advocates for being intentional about creating replicable processes that can attract funding while staying true to the mission.

Her practical advice for scaling social impact?

“Look for patterns everywhere,” she suggests. “Think about what is reproducible because there’s only one you.”

Key emphasizes the importance of documenting these patterns from the beginning, making it easier to build a team and grow the impact sustainably.

When it comes to fostering innovation across diverse expertise, Learning Seeds takes a unique approach. Rather than relying on traditional round-robin discussions, which Key notes can favor extroverts and lead to parallel speech-making, the company employs a focused problem-solving method. They identify the most crucial question and discuss it until it’s resolved, guided by core values of assuming goodwill and disagreeing with ideas rather than people.

At the heart of it all is Key’s enduring passion for early childhood education. “The most magical moment for me is when a child has their first experience pretending,” she shares. “Your computer cannot imagine how you’re feeling, and your computer cannot pretend to be an astronaut with you inside a cardboard box. Seeing pretending happen is the most joyful, complicated, quirky human thing we do.”

As Key continues to bridge the worlds of education and technology, she remains focused on creating systemic change. “Every country has an educational system, every town in our country has an educational system,” she notes. “So when you make an impact, you can make a systemic impact even in the pilot that you pursue for young children.”