Kim Taylor (entrepreneur)

Taylor attended college at a Marquette University in Wisconsin, during which she spent a year as an NBA dancer with the Milwaukee Bucks which went to the East conference finals.[5][6] She then transferred to Arizona State University to study journalism, during which she covered football games for The Arizona Republic. She graduated from Arizona State in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts,[7][8] and continued working with The Arizona Republic.[5]

In 2008, she was working with an online publisher in Chicago but started having interests in online education.[5] In 2012, she joined the cast of entrepreneurs in the reality television series Start-Ups: Silicon Valley where she worked as an account manager and head of sales for Ampush Media.[9] During the series, she quit Ampush and created a startup business called Shonova which focused on the fashion industry.[10] However, Shonova lasted a few weeks before she gave that up.[5]

In June 2013, Taylor joined Kaplan EdTech Accelerator, a partnership between Kaplan, Inc. and Techstars which hosts, mentors, and funds startup companies in education technology and product innovation for a three-month program in New York City.[11][12] As part of joining EdTech, she co-founded with childhood friend Cecilia Retelle the online degree company Ranku and served as the Chief Executive Officer.[13][14][15] She named it after the Japanese rending of the phrase rank. The goal of the company was to enable non-profit universities that offer online degrees to compete with the larger for-profit online degree companies such as University of Phoenix.[16] Mark Cuban was the lead investor in Ranku.[5][17] Business Insider named Taylor one of “Silicon Alley Top 100 Coolest People In New York Tech” in 2013.[18] In 2016, Ranku was acquired by John Wiley & Sons.[19]

Taylor founded the company Cluster, which aims to help job seekers in the manufacturing industry.[4]