About
Hi, I’m Dr. Monica Rysavy.
I’ve been a high school teacher, a professor, a COO, and a Chief AI Officer. I’ve also earned a few degrees along the way. Now I help founder-led businesses sort out what a human should decide and what AI can support.
Where it started
My brain has always solved problems sideways. It finds the door nobody else tried, because it genuinely doesn’t occur to me that I’m not supposed to.
I grew up on my family’s farm in Delaware, and I was a terrible student in high school. I talked too fast, couldn’t sit still, and couldn’t make myself care about things that didn’t interest me.
So I asked my school district to let me take college business courses at Delaware Tech and count them toward my remaining high school requirements. They said no. I told them the other local public school would let me do it if they wouldn’t. They changed their minds. When I walked across the graduation stage, I was already halfway through my associate’s degree.
Teacher first
I started teaching high school business, and later web design, at 21, through Delaware’s alternate route to certification. Over nine years I chaired the IT Academy, wrote curriculum, taught adult education, and designed online professional development courses for teachers across Delaware. While I taught, I earned my Ed.D. in Educational Leadership. My dissertation was about helping teachers bring technology into their classrooms.
Getting a whole college to change how it works
Then I went after a Ph.D. at Penn State, which I assumed was near Philadelphia. It was not near Philadelphia. I drove three and a half hours each way and stayed three or four nights a week, for three years. It was the best academic experience of my life and also completely unhinged, and I regret nothing.
At Goldey-Beacom College I became an assistant professor and then director of institutional research and training. My job was getting faculty to adopt new tools, and then measuring whether they did. I published more than 30 articles, chapters, and books, and I edited a technology column for the Journal of Library Administration for more than four years. In March 2020, I moved every course at the college online in under a week.
Three jobs at Forte Labs
In 2021 I left higher ed for Forte Labs, the online education company behind Building a Second Brain, as its first full-time operations hire. I came in as Director of Course Operations. Within three years I was COO, General Manager, and Controller at the same time. I built systems because there was one of me and three jobs’ worth of work.
Those systems ran the live cohorts, the books, the membership, and an in-person summit. The biggest one was a customer database that pulled student records from about two dozen tools into one place.
“She’s really a leader of people and was my right-hand person throughout this period in terms of being really a senior leader of the entire team.”
Tiago Forte, founder of Forte Labs
Julia Saxena and I worked on about a dozen launches together at Forte Labs.
“Basically, Monica helped us make sense of all the data in the business so we could know how we were doing, what’s working, what’s not working, and how we could improve.”
Julia Saxena, General Manager, Forte Labs
Law school at 42
Law school had been a dream since I was a kid. I kept running into contracts, compliance, and copyright questions I didn’t feel equipped to handle, so in fall 2023 I started law school. I earned my JD in intellectual property law from UNH Franklin Pierce in August 2026. I’m now working on an LL.M. there and preparing for the bar exam.
Why I talk about ADHD now
I have ADHD. For the first twenty years of my career, I didn’t talk about it publicly. My qualifications made me feel extra pressure to keep quiet about the things I struggled with.
When I started talking about it, people told me that hearing me share helped them feel more comfortable talking to someone in their own lives. That’s stayed with me. I’m writing a book about it now. The working title is Masked & Medicated. It’s about what it’s like to live and work with a brain that works differently, in a world that expects everyone’s to work the same way.
Why I build AI systems
Because a person has to stay responsible. I’ve spent my career studying how people take on new technology, and my research covered information literacy and data privacy. Law school added intellectual property. So I care about whose information goes into an AI tool, what we can and can’t conclude from what comes back, and who is responsible for the decision. That person is the one using the AI.
Because I needed it myself. I’ve spent my whole career building systems for other people’s work. Then my own work grew, and it got harder to hold every thread in my head at once: client projects, law school, and my own business. So I built myself an AI chief of staff. I call it Max. Each morning Max brings back what needs my attention, and before a meeting it puts the earlier context in front of me. When something needs a decision, Max brings me the context and I make the call.
Because new technology should work for everyone. I care about inclusivity and access with emerging technology, and right now I’m exploring that with small business owners. I have ADHD, and I know firsthand that the standard tools assume a brain that isn’t mine. So I build AI around how people really think, on good days and on hard weeks.
Because I want to be fully present. When I’m with a client, the preparation is already done, so I can spend our time on their work instead of catching up.
Because I’m a teacher first. When I build these systems with other people, I want them to understand what they’ve built, know how to check it, and keep developing it after our work together ends. I decide what Max can see, what it can do, and when it has to stop and ask me, and I help clients make those same decisions about their own work.
Peter Rysavy
Peter and I were college sweethearts. We met at Goldey-Beacom College, we’ve been together twenty-five years, and in June 2026 we renewed our vows in Sedona on our twentieth wedding anniversary.
Peter spent thirty years in higher-ed technology, most recently as a college CIO running tech support, networks, security, web applications, AI and cloud services. He started in customer service on a restaurant floor, and that is still the part he leads with. Now he’s the Chief Experience Officer at Systematic You. I design and guide the builds. Peter owns the experience: the questions I didn’t think to ask, and how the finished system feels to the person who has to use it.
Degrees and research
- JD, Intellectual Property Law, UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law, August 2026
- Ph.D., Learning, Design, and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, 2015
- Ed.D., Educational Leadership, Wilmington University, 2008
- MBA, Marketing Management and Financial Management, Goldey-Beacom College, 2003
- B.S., Business Administration, Goldey-Beacom College, 2001
- A.A.S., Business Marketing Management, Delaware Technical Community College, 2000
- More than 30 publications, cited more than 500 times (Google Scholar)
My books and articles are on the Writing page →
Follow along
I write one idea a week on ADHD, systems, and the business you built anyway.
