Where It Started
The Product Vision
What We Found
The Team
Third Road began in 2023 as focused product discovery on a problem I had been circling for years: there was no system built to serve individuals navigating the transition from education to career. Tools existed for institutions and employers, but almost nothing centered on the person making the decisions.
We set out to build an AI-powered advising platform for students and families facing education and career choices. The work was substantial: more than 100 stakeholder interviews, extensive competitive and academic research, learning design and competency frameworks, system architecture, data modeling and working prototypes. We built and tested an AI agent for financial aid analysis in a limited beta.
Screenshots: Prototype screens from Third Road's education-to-career advising platform, 2023–2024.
Through that discovery work, a larger pattern emerged. The structural problem we were solving for education decisions was not unique to education. Across many consequential domains, individuals face the same conditions: complex decisions, fragmented and asymmetric information, institutions on the other side of the decision that benefit from that opacity and expert guidance that is either unaffordable or unavailable. The need for a different kind of support has grown more acute as these domains have become harder to manage alone, and AI has made it possible to respond at consumer scale for the first time.
I recognized this as a category, not just a product. I called it Intelligent Advising Systems. The design is domain-independent. Any consequential decision where individuals face information asymmetry, institutional complexity and scarce expert guidance is a potential vertical.
Career navigation was the right place to prove the category first. The demand is enormous, the existing options are inadequate and the conditions that make career decisions difficult - information asymmetry, labor market volatility, institutional systems built around employer needs - are well documented and acute. Career Strong is the first Intelligent Advising System, built to support people navigating career decisions. I built it with Teri Rousseau, whose career advising expertise and 6A's Framework support the evidence-based methodology at the core of the program.
Third Road's early work was built by a group of people who contributed their time and expertise because they believed in what we were building.
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Co-Founder and CTO Tom Leddy
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Product and Marketing Ron Levi and Melissa Oldrin
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Product Strategy Dan Rapaport and Harim Lee
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Advisors Gene Wade, Teri Rousseau and Sara Leoni
Their contributions shaped the product vision, the research, the prototypes and the thinking that ultimately produced the IAS category. I am grateful to every one of them.