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About the Authors
Mandee Heller Adler is the founder and managing partner of International College Counselors (InternationalCollegeCounselors.com) and its subsidiary Edit the Work (EditTheWork.com). International College Counselors is one of the world's largest education counseling companies, specializing in exceptionally personalized support for students and their families worldwide who seek acceptance to colleges, graduate schools, and boarding schools in the United States. Since 2004, Mandee and her team of expert college advisors have worked one‐on‐one with thousands of families to create individualized plans and to get students accepted into dream schools. Edit the Work specializes in writing support, including college admissions essays, resumes, and cover letters, particularly for college students.
Mandee is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, with honors and two degrees—one from the Wharton School and one from the College of Arts and Sciences. She also earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was selected as a Class Day Speaker. Additionally, she studied at ICADE, a premier business school located in Madrid, Spain, after receiving a fellowship from Rotary International. Her many community‐related activities include serving on the Executive Board of the Penn Fund and volunteering for 13 years as an alumni interviewer for the school. She currently serves as co‐president of the Penn Gold Coast Alumni Association.
Mandee authored two books, From Public School to the Ivy League: How to Get into a Top School Without Top Dollar Resources and International Admissions: How to Get Accepted to US Colleges. She has been featured in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television programs, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report, USA Today, Fortune, NBC News, and FOX Business News.
She is a Certified Educational Planner and a member of the Independent Educational Counselors Association (IECA), the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC), and Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA). Prior to starting International College Counselors, Mandee worked as an investment banker for Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. She later cofounded HerDollar, Inc., which she sold to Siebert Financial Corp (NASDAQ: SIEB).
Mandee is a South Florida native, and the middle of three sisters. She is the mother of two remarkable daughters, Rebecca and Sara Pearl, and the wife to an extraordinary husband, Dr. Jason Adler, who she met while playing water polo in college. When not meeting with students, visiting colleges or learning about them, she spends most of her free time reading, losing to her mother at Scrabble, and enjoying Friday night dinners with her extended family.
Please sign up for her mailing list at https://internationalcollegecounselors.com/contact‐us and follow her on social media at facebook.com/InternationalCollegeCounselors and twitter.com/College_Experts.
David Teten is CEO of Versatile Venture Capital (VersatileVC.com), a New York‐based venture capital fund. He has also advised such institutional investors as Birch Hill Equity, Goldman Sachs Special Situations Group, Icahn Enterprises, LLR Partners, Right Side Capital, and OTMT Investments.
David was formerly a managing partner with HOF Capital, an international venture capital fund backed by over 70 families and organizations across 21 countries, and a partner with ff Venture Capital. He particularly focuses on investing in financial technology, sales technology, and education technology.
David is founder of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York, the largest angel group on the East Coast. He was previously a managing director with Evalueserve, a 2,500‐person global research and analytics company, and founder and CEO of Circle of Experts, an investment research firm acquired by Evalueserve. He worked with Bear Stearns’ Investment Banking division in their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team. David holds a Harvard MBA (Second Year Honors) and a Yale BA with a double major in Economics and Psychology (with Distinction in the major). While in college, he founded an IT consulting group specializing in serving nonprofits.
David is the author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, and has published research on investment best practices in Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Private Equity, Institutional Investor, Entrepreneur.com, PE Hub, Techcrunch, and VentureBeat. David is cofounder of PEVCTech.com, an online community focused on helping private equity and venture capital funds make better investments through technology.
He is married and has four children. David grew up in Marin County, Northern California. He trains in parkour and bodyweight exercises. He speaks passable French and Hebrew but has completely lost the Portuguese he learned while working in Brazil.
He founded the “Ambassadors at Large” organization for the 2020 Biden/Harris Presidential campaign.
Please sign up for his mailing list at teten.com, where he writes about entrepreneurship, investing, and life hacks. You can also follow David on social media at:
https://goodreads.com/user/show/5576313-david-teten
Youtube: https://teten.com/youtube
1 Why We Wrote This Book
David Teten
Partway through Yale, I realized that I was surrounded by kids who had advantages I didn't. They were walking right through doors I didn't even know existed.
All my classmates seemed to have attended elite boarding schools and have parents who worked on Wall Street. Meanwhile, my mother was a choreographer, and my father left school in Paris at age 13 to apprentice in a leather goods factory. I had friends getting internships at Goldman Sachs freshman year; I thought Goldman Sachs sold ladies’ handbags.
I had aspirations to have children myself, and I started taking notes on what I was learning about how to “work the system.” I wanted my kids to have the systematic understanding that I lacked. As I advanced, I took more notes, planning to eventually publish a book, but waiting for the right time and coauthor. I finally realized
