Meet the employee - Lukas Kemp

Lukas Kemp describes himself as naturally intense and curious - someone who, from a young age, needed to understand how something worked before he could feel satisfied. It's a trait that has served him well as a Product Manager at MyEdSpace.

A Cambridge Natural Sciences graduate, Lukas left university with a strong analytical foundation but also a creative streak, and found himself uncertain which direction to take. "It's a course that starts very broad and then narrows. It was tough, but it teaches you a lot," he says. With that mix of technical ability and a desire to apply it somewhere meaningful, he was drawn toward roles where those things could coexist.

In the meantime, almost by accident, Lukas fell into teaching Maths at his old school. Calling on a whim, he learned that, like many schools, they were desperately short of Maths teachers. He ended up staying a full year. It was unplanned, but a telling window into some of the pressures facing education.

Lukas’ background goes some way to explaining his eventual path. His father was a teacher before becoming a vicar; his mother was a clinical psychologist and now a counsellor, so big questions were always going on around the house.

"I've always been drawn to the bigger problems facing society and thinking about what might actually help," he remarks, before adding that he's well aware that he had a privileged education and a stable home life, and there's a genuine motivation to put that to good use - which is part of what drew him to MyEdSpace.

Lukas joined MyEdSpace just over two years ago as a Founders Analyst Intern, and his role has grown considerably since. Early on it covered a lot of ground, including marketing, copywriting, and design, before going on to be involved in managing and scaling both the design and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) teams. A year in, he was proud to see MyEdSpace named one of the fastest-growing companies in Ed-Tech by organic search traffic. "I didn't know what SEO stood for when I arrived," he laughs, "so that felt pretty good."

As his understanding of the company deepened, Lukas began developing ideas for how the platform and student experience could be improved. Despite being relatively new, he felt trusted enough to bring those ideas to the table and then given the room to act on them. He worked on the live streaming experience, the student journey more broadly, and MyResources, MyEdSpace's free library of revision notes and videos.

Lukas also found himself drawn to the bigger structural questions. "To the business, a product can mean many things; the marketing, the teaching, the underlying systems," he explains. "But to the student, the company is the product. That's their entire experience of what you are, and getting that right is what matters."

That thinking led him toward the core of how MyEdSpace is built. Having grown quickly on the back of its Maths offering, the company needed to revisit some of its foundational systems, including; commerce, access, and user management, all of which had been built for an earlier version of the business. Lukas has been central to that work, tackling questions as fundamental as what a "course" actually is. 

"It can be painstaking sitting with a really precise definition for an afternoon," he admits. "But I find that kind of detail genuinely satisfying. Having real ownership over something this central to the business isn't something you'd take for granted at a bigger company."

That sense of ownership, alongside a deeper motivation, keeps him going. The curiosity and the instinct to apply his skills somewhere that actually matters were what drew Lukas to MyEdSpace in the first place - and they're what keep him there. "When you hear from students who've felt the benefit, or parents who've seen their children flourish," he says, "it makes the harder days worthwhile."