Half of $4B Teacher PD Wasted — Here’s the Fix

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray talks with Ilya Zeldin, founder of Tenomi, a SaaS platform focused on self-awareness and personalized professional learning for K-12 teachers. Zeldin traces his path from immigrating to the US from Moscow at 15, through Georgetown MBA and five years at Dell, to founding several startups before landing on education technology. He explains the origin of Tenomi's name from the Greek and Latin root gnosis, meaning knowledge, and how the company unifies teacher evaluation frameworks, self-reflection, principal feedback, and vetted learning resources into one personalized system. Zeldin discusses the staggering waste in the 4 billion dollar teacher professional development market, Tenomi's partnership and AI validation badge with the Danielson Group, and how AI now helps principals write evidence-based teacher narratives in about 30 seconds while keeping humans in control of judgment. The conversation closes with a wide-ranging discussion on where AI and personalized learning are headed over the next five years, including robots assisting teachers and age-dependent models of instruction.

Tenomi founder Ilya Zeldin explains how self-awareness tech could fix billions wasted on teacher professional development.

The questions, and the answers.

Tell people a little about Tenomi, the company you're building.

Tenomi is a SaaS platform that helps people become better aware, to know thyself, focused on personalizing professional learning for teachers. We work with states and districts to provide the type of personalized learning for educators that we expect teachers to provide for students in the classroom. Treating teachers like learners is at the core of Tenomi.

You moved to the US at 15. What do you remember most about those first few months in a new country?

I was born and raised in Moscow, and my family immigrated on May 23rd, 1990. I became a sophomore in high school in Queens, New York, in a school of 3,000 kids. I remember kids my age and families pulling together, and one teacher, Ms. Cynthia Chase, who taught creative writing and helped me embrace my terrible English and be creative and brave.

Before Tenomi, you spent five years at Dell running global service providers. What did that corporate world teach you about building things?

I saw how often good people don't work out in bad teams. People think they bring certain skills, but either they're wrong or what they bring isn't aligned to what their boss or organization expects. That disconnect creates problems, usually starting in the hiring process, and attrition in the first year is four to five times the company average because of it.

You've said we ask teachers to personalize learning for students, but nobody does it for teachers. When did that disconnect first hit you?

I thought of the Tenomi concept back in 2015-16 and spent a couple of years researching it. An educator accelerator program at the University of Pennsylvania helped me focus on K-12. The industry reality is billions of dollars are spent on teacher professional development, there are about 3.5 million total teachers, and at least half of that spending is completely wasted and meaningless.

Where did the name Tenomi come from, and why does self-awareness matter so much in your approach?

It connects to the reality that there's a gap between what we think we are and what we really are. Tenomi is rooted in gnosis, Latin and Greek for knowledge, the same root behind words like acknowledge and ignorance. Awareness is always cited as step one in change management articles, but it's rarely measured because the skills involved, like pedagogy, are hard to quantify.

You won a global Reimagine Education award early on. How did that validation change things for you as a founder?

As a founder, especially in a difficult industry like education, you need little milestones and anchors to prop you up. When you ask for money, people know validation alone won't get you there, they need more tangible things, which is fair. But awards are important self-validating and credibility-building steps, one at a time.

You earned an AI validation badge from the Danielson Group. What does that mean in practice for a principal using your tool?

A principal has to write performance narratives for maybe 40 teachers, which normally takes an hour to ninety minutes each. Since Tenomi collects evidence and feedback throughout the year against the framework, the system can generate a clear, consistent, targeted narrative instead, saving that hour to ninety minutes per teacher while relying only on actual evidence, not interpretation.

How do you keep the AI narrative feature human-led rather than just an algorithm doing the thinking?

The AI only works off a specific, structured, anonymized data file with dates, authors, and quantitative measurements, so there's no other source of information feeding it. We built gatekeepers that block narrative generation if there isn't enough observational evidence. Ultimately it's always up to the principal's agency to review and validate what the AI suggests before it goes to a teacher.