The paper highlights Angelica’s journey from earning a 16 on her first ACT to ultimately receiving over $1.5 million in scholarship offers and a full scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis. What began as a personal struggle with standardized testing became the foundation for a larger mission: creating equitable access to educational opportunities for students who have historically been overlooked.
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Entrepreneurial Mindset for Business Leaders
by Kathryn Rydberg
Angelica Harris & Top Tutors for Us
Angelica Harris is the Founder and CEO of Top Tutors For Us (TTFU), a culturally competent test prep company built to close the racial gap in standardized testing. Growing up in New Orleans, she scored a 16 on her first ACT — far below what she needed to reach her goal of attending a top university. After enrolling in a traditional test prep class and feeling culturally isolated as the only Black student, she decided to build her own system from scratch. That self-designed approach eventually earned her $1.5 million in college scholarships and a full-ride to Washington University in St. Louis.
"Culturally competent test prep" is a combination of two things: who teaches and how they teach. “Who” is the more concrete piece — Angelica's model is explicitly built on matching Black and Brown students with tutors who share their racial and cultural background. The idea is that a student who has never seen someone who looks like them succeed academically may struggle with self-efficacy. A tutor who shares that identity disrupts that narrative by simply existing in the room. The “how” refers to instruction that acknowledges students; lived
experience rather than treating the classroom as a culturally neutral space. Take a conventional Kaplan-style prep course: the examples, the assumed background knowledge, and even the tone tend to reflect a particular (usually white, middle-class) context. Culturally competent instruction meets students where they are — using references, framing, and communication styles that actually resonate.
Top Tutors for Us does exactly that. The company addresses these problems by matching Black and Brown high school students with tutors who share their backgrounds and experiences, operating on the premise — backed by research — that culturally relevant instruction meaningfully improves student outcomes. The business serves two channels: families seeking private ACT/SAT prep, and schools looking for a turn-key solution to implement test prep at scale. The tutor network now exceeds 300 tutors from elite colleges and universities, and the company has established partnerships with school districts across Louisiana and Missouri.
An Effectual Entrepreneur
Angelica is about as textbook an effectuation case as you'll find. When she started TTFU, it was based on the resources she already had: a proven test prep system, a network of high-achieving diverse students at WashU eager to tutor, and a track record of producing massive score jumps for students. In fact, since the venture started while she was still in school, she had a potential contract with the St. Louis public school district before she even graduated. She always focused on what she could do with the resources that were available to her.
But, that clarity and product-market fit came after earlier struggles. Her first venture, Test Prep Toolbox, was a pure software platform — an AI-powered matching app she built as her master's thesis in computer science. There were no tutors, just an algorithm that tried to mimic
her proven strategy. Students would create accounts, open the app once, and disappear. There was no retention, no engagement, and no reason for them to come back. The way that she responded has elements of design thinking and lean startup: she surveyed users, analyzed the data, and tried to understand why it wasn't working (design thinking), and states that “sometimes you have to just fail fast and test it out” (lean). What she learned was that the biggest value proposition wasn't technology at all. It was the tutors themselves. A real person, even on a screen, creates accountability that an app simply can't replicate.
The pivot happened after she took an entrepreneurship class over the summer — which given her CS background, suggests she was actively looking for a new mental model to apply to \the problem. She had also been talking to people already working in the college admissions space, who encouraged her to turn down a job offer in California and keep going. By the time TTFU launched in 2023, she had stripped out the software ambition and built something much simpler: match students with tutors who look like them, and let the tutors do the work. It's worth
noting the context here: before all of this, Angelica had internships at JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and GE. She was on a path into finance or tech. Walking away from that — twice, essentially — took a specific kind of conviction.
A Personal Connection to the Venture
One of the more interesting things Angelica said was that she doesn't think Top Tutors for Us would be as successful as it is without her personal story, which she believes is instrumental in selling the product. I’m inclined to agree with her. She did note that at social events, it used to feel like she was always networking, and that the company had become an extension of herself. She says it's getting easier now — since they grew 4.5x last year, the company is obviously more than just her.
She's also refreshingly clear-eyed about money. TTFU is a business and even though she cares about the mission (and would burn out if not for it), she would quit and get a corporate job if it didn’t make money. But the mission matters too. It’s not just closing the racial standardized
testing gap; she shared that when she got her score up, her confidence went up. She wants to do that for other young people. That personal connection doubtless drives much of her motivation, which has led to her success.
Entrepreneurial Storytelling
Angelica's storytelling follows a classic founder arc: I had the problem, I solved it for myself, and now I'm solving it for others. What makes it effective is that the story is objective: the 16 is real, the 32 is real, the $1.5 million is real. There's no vagueness to hide behind. She
also does something smart by leading with vulnerability (a bad score) before the triumph, which makes the success feel earned rather than inevitable. She told me that the story functions differently depending on the audience: with schools, she emphasizes her own journey and the
skill-building component; with investors, the mission is still there, but the revenue potential is front and center.
My Perspective
I've known Angelica since high school, so I'll admit I came into this interview without much suspense about whether she'd built something real. She was always smart, always self-directed, and never particularly interested in following a path just because it was the obvious
one. What actually surprised me was how much building the company seemed to have sharpened her — she can code, sell, network, and talk about her venture with a kind of precision and clarity that most people spend years in corporate environments trying to develop (or never do at all). It made me think that entrepreneurship doesn't just reward well-rounded people; it might actually create them.
What also landed for me was how she's grown without outside capital. I think a lot of people — myself included — absorb this idea that you have to raise a round to grow a company. Angelica has school district contracts, 300+ tutors, and 4.5x growth, and she's done it on her own
terms. That reframed something for me. The feedback loop in customer-funded business is immediate and honest in a way that investor capital can actually obscure. If what you're building isn't working, people just stop paying you. There's something clarifying about that.
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