Jason Hoekstra

I've spent 25 years at the intersection of technology and public service — building systems that help governments, schools, and nonprofits work better with data. Celerity is the product of everything I've learned along the way.

The thread that runs through my career is simple: technology should serve the mission, not the other way around. That belief took me from building campaign tools for Obama for America to personnel systems at the U.S. White House, where I developed systems to manage the presidential transition. From there, I joined the U.S. Department of Education, co-authoring the IT Modernization Plan, building national platforms like TEACH.org and Data.ED.gov, leading cross-agency platform sharing initiatives, and leading teams to deliver open-source tools like the Data Visualization Wizard.

Education data became my focus at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where I led developer engagement for the Shared Learning Collaborative — building a community of 500+ developers and producing the SxSWEdu 2013 launch with 24 vendor integrations.

I went on to co-found Learning Tapestry, securing over $2M in contracts for open-source education tools and partnering with organizations like Khan Academy, the Smithsonian, and New Mexico Public Education Department. That work led to founding School Stacks on a Dell Foundation grant — building a data migration toolset that proved successful enough to get me recruited by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and to lead software development for tools at the Ed-Fi Alliance to bring it in-house.

At Ed-Fi, I spent seven years as Senior Program Manager — leading teams of developers (both on-shore and near-shore), managing a $1.3M annual budget, and shipping the core applications that hundreds of school districts rely on today: Admin API, Data Import, API Publisher, and more. I saw firsthand how powerful Ed-Fi and enterprise-grade open-source is when it works — and how inaccessible it remains for the education agencies that need it most.

That's why I built Celerity.

The schools doing the hardest work — small districts, rural ESCs, under-resourced networks — deserve the same infrastructure as the well-funded ones. Celerity delivers enterprise-grade data infrastructure that deploys in days instead of months, at a fraction of the cost. No consultants required.