| Keith Schacht | |
| Birth Date: | 1979 12, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | United States |
| Alma Mater: | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
| Known For: | Mystery Science TED Conference |
| Spouse: | Pari Schacht |
Keith Schacht (born 9 December 1979) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor.[1] He is the CEO and co-founder of Mystery Science and is on the board of directors of eSpark Learning.[2] Schacht is a named inventor on 9 patents.[3] Early in his career he was named one of the top 20 entrepreneurs under 25 by BusinessWeek.[4] He has been a speaker at the TED Conference and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal,[5] Forbes,[6] Fortune,[7] and Wired.[8]
Schacht's first company, founded while in college, was Lever Works, a custom software development shop. It was co-founded with Brian Witlin and Zach Kaplan. In December 2001 Lever Works was sold to Leo Media for an undisclosed sum.[9]
In 2002, Schacht co-founded Inventables, a company that educates companies about new materials and technologies. The company was featured in numerous publications including Forbes in 2006[6] and Wired in 2007. He also gave a talk on "Toys from the Future"[10] at the TED Conference in 2005
In 2007, Schacht founded Crafted Fun, an early company building applications on the Facebook platform. Crafted Fun raised funding from Apex Ventures and Naval Ravikant.[11] The company developed a range of Facebook applications including Grow-a-Gift which was cited as a top application used by millions of people.[12]
In 2010, Schacht joined Facebook as a product manager and launched an updated version of News Feed in 2011.[13] [14] [15] He left the company in 2012. During his time at Facebook he was a named inventor on 9 patents.[3]
In 2013, Schacht co-founded Mystery Science with Doug Peltz. Mystery Science creates open-and-go lessons for elementary teachers and helps them teach science without requiring a background in science.[16] A couple notable interviews with Y Combinator, one their investors, detailed an unconventional business model in which the company sold to schools and districts across the United States without a sales team.[17] [18] Mystery Science has grown to be the most widely used science resource in American elementary schools; tt is used by more than 50% of elementary schools reaching more than four million children each month.[19] In 2020 Mystery Science was acquired by Discovery Education for $140 million.[20] Schacht is listed as the majority shareholder at the time of acquisition[21] bringing his total net worth up to at least $70 million.
Schacht is an investor in at least 25 private companies and numerous public companies. Notable investments include investing in Boom, Credit Karma, Canva, Epic!, Angellist, OpenGov, Square (pre-IPO), Tesla (pre-IPO), and Facebook (pre-IPO).[22]