From the Founders – Thoughts on our work in 2014

We hope you had a productive 2014, and that 2015 offers an even more rewarding trajectory for you and your organization. Since launching our firm in June 2010, we have been infrequent communicators regarding the scope and success of our team’s efforts. Our New Year’s resolution is to change that, and we’re excited to share information about where we’ve been in the last year.

Team Expansion
We added six new professionals in 2014 across our Boston and Stamford (CT) offices, deepening all aspects of our consulting, investment banking, and operations capabilities. They have brought a wealth of experience from leading organizations, and you will learn more about them with our new website launch. Based on our plans for 2015, we’ll continue to be on the lookout for talented professionals at all levels of our platform.

Active Across the Global Knowledge Sector
Our consulting and investment banking teams were engaged across all markets – preK–12, postsecondary, corporate, professional, and consumer – in 2014, working with a diverse array of emergent and established companies, non-profit organizations and institutions, investors, and foundations.

The investment banking practice experienced its most prolific year since inception, completing multiple sell-side engagements and providing specialized advisory services in conjunction with buy-side transactional work for large private equity firms.

Our capital markets advisory work and clientele in 2014 spanned institutional clients ranging from hedge funds, venture capital firms, and private equity funds to large family offices, foundations conducting program-related investments, and high-net-worth individuals, in addition to our work with companies and emerging growth players in the global knowledge sector.

We are entering 2015 with a robust roster of active sell-side engagements, primarily representing private, high-growth businesses. Additionally, we are conducting several buy-side representations of large, publicly traded education companies and highly scaled software and publishing players. Finally, we have broadened our international focus and will see continued expansion of our cross-border efforts.

Postsecondary Capital Flows and Demand-Side Market Analysis Work within our consulting practice with two national foundations enabled us to engage in deep investigation of several topics, including:

• Capital flows into the postsecondary market from both for-profit (e.g., venture, growth, private equity) and non-profit (e.g., foundations, government) investors from 2010-2014. A brief snapshot of this analysis is included in the Tools section of our site, and we plan to share more on this – and our K–12 capital flows analysis – across the year.
• Digital courseware adoption dynamics drawn from a national sample of approximately 2,700 college and university faculty and academic administrators. A brief snapshot of our findings is available in the Tools section. We will be releasing several publications based on analysis of this data beginning in February; sign up for our newsletter, Tyton Insights to stay up to date with our publications.
• Technology-enabled instructional materials trends within adult-education settings. This analysis draws on a national sample of nearly 1,100 program directors and instructors across the K–12, postsecondary, and workforce landscapes, and highlights the opportunities and challenges facing suppliers of digital materials. Several publications derived from this analysis will be available across the first half of 2015, and we will also be speaking at SXSWedu regarding this work.

Reflecting on the year passed and thanks to the market-moving work of our clients, we can see that there is much to be hopeful for in the ongoing transformation of education