Kevin Johnson grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota. He holds a Master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Civil Engineering and worked at an environmental consulting company in the first half of the 1990s. Kevin made a career change toward the end of that decade in which he became a technical instructor at a software company. The catalyst for this change included a year-and-a-half sojourn when he and his wife became high school teachers at a small international school in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. Discovering a love of teaching, Kevin found a way to keep that passion alive by working at four different software companies over the past 20 years, most recently at Salesforce, a provider of application performance management software.


Kevin on growth:

Growing up on a farm I was surrounded by growth (or the absence of it). Nature has always captured my attention. For me, growth mirrors the insight of author Robert Fulghum’s observation when he wrote, “Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.” The growth is a result of what the kindergarten student does, certainly, but it is also a result of something far beyond what the students or teachers or anyone else might be able to do.