Meet Nectir’s New Head of People - Eric!

We believe that true innovation happens when passionate people come together to collaborate, share ideas, and challenge the status quo of education technology. Our team is growing, and the people we're adding say a lot about where we're headed.

We're excited to welcome Eric Spirko to the team as our new Head of People. He looks after how Nectir hires, retains, and grows its people, work he came to through People and recruiting roles at a series of early-stage technology companies. Eric also brings a real curiosity about attention, sleep, and how minds actually learn, and those interests sit closer to Nectir's mission than they might first appear.

Meet Eric!

1. Can you share a brief introduction to who you are, your background, and your role at Nectir?

I’m Eric, and I’m the Head of People at Nectir. My background is in recruiting and People work, primarily at early-stage technology companies. I spent a few years at Google after the acquisition of Neverware, where I had been Head of People, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with companies at a number of different stages of growth.

At Nectir, I’m focused on building the people side of the company, from how we hire, retain, and grow the most important part of our business: our people. I’m also excited to be contributing to a much bigger question that sits at the heart of what we’re building: How can we create better environments for people to learn, grow, and flourish?

2. What were you like as a student? Was there a key moment in your educational journey that shaped how you think about learning?

I was recently joking with my manager that I developed a case of senioritis during my senior year of high school that somehow persisted for about ten years, well into adulthood. While I was a solid student prior to that, I became much more interested in sports and my social life than I was in giving school the attention it probably deserved as I moved into college.

It was years later that I became fascinated by questions about how attention works, what happens in our minds when we sleep, why we dream, and whether we can become more intentional about these different states of consciousness. Suddenly, I wanted to read everything I could find. I would follow questions down rabbit holes, experiment, take notes, and try to understand things for myself.

That experience has probably shaped how I think about learning more than any particular class I took: the importance of intrinsic motivation and personal experience as keys to learning.

3. What pulled you toward edtech specifically, and what made Nectir the right place for you?

I’ve always been interested in mission-driven organizations, and fixing something like our education system, which is built on an antiquated and outdated model, was something that really got me excited about Nectir.

It is clear that the revolution AI is bringing to how we do EVERYTHING will be especially impactful— good or bad — on how young people and students more broadly learn, and doing it the right way is critical. Technology has let down previous generations (looking at you, Meta), and I am excited to contribute to an organization that strives to leverage powerful technologies in the right way, helping rather than harming, and prioritizing people (students) over profit.

I was on board with the mission, but then I met Kavitta, and she encouraged me to bring my interest in meditation, sleep, and dreams into the broader work around people. It felt like the perfect opportunity to blend my professional experience with my side work and really do something great.

4. What's a problem in education you're genuinely excited to help solve?

I'm really interested in the problem of attention.

We have more access to information than any generation in history, and we also have more access to distractions. We live in a world that is exceptionally good at capturing our attention, and often not particularly good at helping us direct it intentionally. Every app, notification, headline, and algorithm is competing for a little piece of our attention. My teacher calls our smartphones weapons of mass distraction, which they absolutely are.

So I'm excited about how modern science has shown that attention can be trained, and that tools that have existed for centuries, like meditation, can be leveraged to protect ourselves from these invasive, distracting forces in order to have the foundation in place to learn.

Because frankly, if we can’t pay attention, we can’t learn.

If education is fundamentally about helping people become more capable, then helping people understand and direct their own attention seems like a pretty important place to start.

5. What topic are you showing up to a PowerPoint party with?

“Dream on and be weird”

We'd start with the basics: What is actually happening in the brain during REM sleep? And why, 20 years after graduation, do you still dream about forgetting that you were enrolled in that class, only to suddenly find yourself sitting down for a final that you’re TOTALLY unprepared for?

Then we'd get into lucid dreaming: the experience of becoming aware that you're dreaming while you're still dreaming and, with practice, the ability to influence your actions and the dream itself. How this, and simply paying attention to your dreams, can be a meditative practice in and of itself. It is another (oft-forgotten) way of exploring consciousness, attention, and the mind when many of our ordinary waking assumptions have temporarily loosened their grip.

I believe most of us, even the people who are really invested in sleep as a way to optimize their productivity or recovery, are still overlooking a critical mode of cognition simply because it’s not “real.” We’re missing critical insights and creative ideas simply because we’re not encouraged to pay attention!

So the key question my PowerPoint would address is: What if we thought of sleep and dreaming not simply as time when we're offline, but as another valuable state of mind that we could learn to explore?

Come work with us

Eric joined Nectir because he wanted to help build something that uses powerful technology to support people rather than exploit their attention. The mission drew him in first, and then came the rare chance to bring his own interests in meditation, sleep, and attention into the everyday work of building a team. Eric is tackling the question of how to create environments where people can actually learn and grow, both internally and externally. If that sounds like you, we're hiring.

We're helping schools adopt and use AI safely, and we're growing.

Check out our open positions, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest.