A Life Dedicated to Learning — Alumni Profile, Boris Bulayev ’07

It is easy to forget that we spend our entire lives learning. Boris Bulayev ’07, however, has spent his life embracing this never-ending project — in ways that he himself could never have foreseen. 

As a kid, he saw his future laid out under the arena floodlights and cheering crowds of an NBA game. Today, he is approaching his seventeenth year with Educate!, a social enterprise working towards education reform that has impacted hundreds of thousands of youth

The Baltic States & Basketball

Bulayev was born in Jūrmala, Latvia. In 1992, when Bulayev was only seven years old, his family fled Latvia for the U.S. He would spend the remainder of his childhood in San Francisco, over 5,000 miles away from his first home. “I grew up in a blue-collar, first- or second-generation immigrant community,” he said. “We lived on welfare for a while when we got [to America].”

Bulayev was fortunate enough to secure a spot in a good public school track. He, however, would credit some of the most valuable lessons of his youth not to academics but rather to one of the Golden State’s most iconic sports: basketball. He first began to pay attention to the sport following his arrival in the States, and it quickly came to dominate the passions of adolescent life. 

Bulayev recalled a daily practice he took away from a book by Bill Bradley, a two-time NBA champion and former U.S. Senator: “He wrote that he played three hours a day, so that summer after middle school I started playing three hours a day. I was [5-foot-9] and was not particularly athletic,” he said. “But I wanted to be really good, and so I committed to it.”

The lessons he acquired stick with him to this day. “In many ways, basketball paid off in terms of my growth. I still talk about it very often,” he said. “It helped me excel when I would not necessarily be expected to excel. It taught me to show up every day and try to get better. I’m continuously learning — it’s what I’m best at.” Perhaps the most influential gift basketball would provide, however, was that of failure.

No Rebounds, No Rings

By the end of high school, basketball had become the axis around which Bulayev’s life revolved. It was an ironic twist of fate that the basketball court, which had borne his dreams for most of his adolescent life in the U.S., would witness them come crashing down. There were four games left in his senior season when Bulayev went up for a layup, landed wrong, and tore his ACL. His season was over. “I was devastated,” he said. 

He refused to give up the sport, despite the disastrous fall. Typical recovery from an ACL reconstruction ranges from nine to 12 months. Bulayev recovered in five. This was due to a combination of his dedication to the rehabilitation process and the expertise of a physical therapist from a Division I college basketball team. This, Bulayev noted, became a pattern: “I’ve been very lucky. Lots of people have helped me out in my life.”

The work Bulayev put into recovering was, in large part, driven by his desire to make the team at Amherst, which was — in the midst of all this — where he had chosen to go to college. He started practicing with the team immediately after arriving. The results of tryouts, however, would deliver a second round of devastating news. He had been cut from the team. 

After an intense rehabilitation process that had rescued far more than his knee, Bulayev described the news from the coach as a “loss of self.” Basketball had provided the purpose to which his life had thus far been dedicated. It was how he had understood his identity, made his friends, and envisioned his future.

Looking back, however, Bulayev expressed deep gratitude for the guidance the series of events had ultimately gifted him. “It forced me to find myself at an early age,” he reflected. “It’s my [belief] that my life’s biggest failures have always been my greatest opportunities.”

New Beginnings

Bulayev, through the remainder of his freshman year and the beginning of his sophomore year, was left with the daunting task of starting from scratch — socially, academically, and professionally. He danced through a whirlwind of Amherst’s offerings. He tried joining student government, volunteering at a local after-school program, and DJ’ing for the radio. 

Searching for what was next, Bulayev would chance upon a friendship that would alter the trajectory of his life. Bulayev was in the same room group as Eric Glustrom ’07 during his sophomore year. Glustrom had traveled to the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Uganda while in high school, where he befriended a young man named Benson Olivier. 

Olivier, who had been forced to flee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, shaped Glustrom’s aspirations. He pointed out to Glustrom that the means of achieving a true positive impact was to help him and others in similar situations gain access to an education in order to gain the agency to solve the problems facing their communities.

Glustrom, as a result, had begun to raise money to send Olivier and a few other Congolese refugees to high school in Uganda. Bulayev joined in these efforts not too long afterward. In the past, they have both credited the other with reaching out. “We have mixed narratives of who asked who,” Bulayev chuckled. “When I met [Glustrom], he was sponsoring four students. I liked that it felt very tangible, so we started a club.” The club operated as a scholarship program that aimed to help foster leadership through education in Uganda, establishing the foundations of the organization known today as “Educate!”

Bulayev has fond memories from the program’s early years. He recounts hosting multiple fundraising events, including dodgeball tournaments and a school-wide game of assassins that hundreds of students participated in. “I still have memories of being chased through Keefe [Campus Center],” he laughed. Their club also benefited from the collective capital of the student body. “People [reached out] to friends and family, and [we] built the base from that,” Bulayev said. Their efforts were met with much success. During Bulayev’s senior year, the club raised over $50,000.

Goodhart’s Law

During Bulayev’s time at Amherst, his future direction remained an unanswered question. He remembers his life as split between two paths. “I was on this dual impact versus money track,” he said. He had come to envision life after college with a timeline that would allow him to pursue both, following a finance track for the first decades after college before returning to impact work.

His early experiences with finance would prove salutary. The summer after his junior year he interned at Goldman Sachs. He found no fulfillment in the work, and, following the end of the summer, he had decided he had no interest in returning. The roadblocks he encountered in finance set him on a course to change his life yet again.

A few months after his graduation, Bulayev was introduced to Loeb Enterprises. Loeb Enterprises, today Loeb.nyc, was a startup incubator helping to mold organizations from the ground up. Bulayev credits the work he did at Loeb as a chance to come to know his passions and reorient his aspirations. “It was an incredible learning journey,” he said. “I learned that I love figuring out and building organizations — I liked [starting] from scratch. I also learned that I [could] care less about the money. Money doesn’t make you happy.”

Bulayev referenced a concept known as Goodhart’s Law that he had just recently read an article about. Goodhart’s Law posits that when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. He connected it to his and other college students’ pursuit of money, identifying common issues with students’ understanding of financial gain as it relates to their long-term aspirations. 

“Money often becomes a proxy for a happy life, and it’s easy to lose sight [of the fact] that it’s just a proxy,” he said. “These [so-called] success metrics are really just proxy metrics for [the desire] to be happy and fulfilled. I think it’s very easy to get stuck in pursuit of what you think is success and [end up] not actually achieving [what] you want to.”

Dream Chasing

Even if we are lucky enough to know our passions, they are often difficult to pursue. In part, Bulayev credited his education at Amherst to his ability to do just that. “I can’t think of anywhere else where I learned how to generate a thesis around some view of the future of the world that has relevance and [that] you can place a bet on,” he said.

Though his financial career did not land, Bulayev continued to work on perfecting the scholarship program for students in Uganda during his final year at Amherst. He chose not to write a thesis in order to focus on transforming the program into something more substantial. “The way we ran our scholarship program was fairly poor,” he acknowledged. “I [wanted] to figure out how it [was] going to be more than just a college project.”

The task would require a trip halfway around the world. The summer immediately after their graduation, Bulayev and Glustrom traveled to Uganda to meet with a variety of educational experts in order to define the direction of the program. Their primary objective was to determine the best way to empower young leaders and entrepreneurs.

From the wealth of advice they received, they identified a throughline. “[We] stumbled on the message that it’d be much more impactful to address the mismatch between education and life after school, rather than simply putting more kids in school,” Bulayev said.

The modern-day Ugandan school system remains deeply disrupted by long-standing British colonial practices in the classroom. Long-standing flaws are prevalent in the national educational designs, including a prioritization of rote memorization, Eurocentric curricula, and a failure to provide students with practical or entrepreneurial skills. Bulayev recounted being confronted with many of these complex structural challenges during the trip. “There wasn’t a bridge,” he said. “Done well, school should be a launchpad for life after school.”

From the advice of educational experts from across Uganda, Bulayev and Glustrom gained a new perspective and a pointed purpose. As Bulayev put it, “we [wanted to] create a space that was [that] bridge.”

In for a Penny

Following the return from this trip, Bulayev began his work at the startup incubator, Loeb Enterprises. The seed of possibility, however, had been planted. “I [realized that] it could have a chance,” he said. “I [wanted to] see if it could become something.”

It began to gain traction. Bulayev expressed his appreciation for his co-founder, Glustrom, who jumped in and started working full time. For Bulayev, however, that was not feasible. “I didn’t have the resources, and I wasn’t ready,” he said. Instead, he decided to dedicate 10 hours a week to the program for the 15 months he worked at Loeb Enterprises. 

A year and a half later, in November of 2008, when the economy was in the midst of a terrible tailspin, Bulayev made the choice to quit his job. “It wasn’t right for me anymore,” he explained. 

Bulayev proceeded to devote more of his time and energy to the educational program throughout 2008 but still had yet to commit to working full-time for the organization. In March, 2009, the first model of Educate! officially launched. It was the culmination of seven long years of effort, input, and vision from countless individuals. 

The next year, Bulayev returned to Amherst for reunion. In what would become a fateful Sunday morning, Bulayev, Glustrom, and John McDermott ’62 — a teacher and musician who served as a mentor for Bulayev and Glustrom — sat down for breakfast in a booth at Black Sheep. Bulayev, at the time, was planning to backpack in South America for six months. These plans were soon to change. At that very breakfast, he made the choice to join Educate! full-time. “I officially started on November 1, 2009,” he said. “Now [I’m] coming up on 17 years.”

Educate!

“We launched with around 24 schools and 300 students,” he said, reflecting on the early years of Educate!. Today, Educate! has impacted upwards of 850,000 youth. 

Educate! locates the power to change the world in the empowerment of youth. It is East Africa’s largest youth employment and skills provider, introducing leadership, entrepreneurship, and employment-focused lessons to students of all backgrounds. It currently serves four countries — Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Bulayev touched on some of the proven impacts of Educate! For students who encounter Educate! and its educational model, the positive effects are numerous, including higher secondary school graduation rates, increased university enrollment, reduced teen pregnancy, fewer reported incidents of inter-partner violence, reduced rates of depression, increased business ownership, higher incomes, and higher employment rates. 

Bulayev also spoke to some of the aspects of the organization that are harder to gauge using numerical metrics. “We [aim to] introduce an experience that gives [students] space to practice and build skills and think about what [they] want to do after [school],” he said. “We [hope to] build confidence so [if students] intend to work in the formal economy, [then] they can create something for [themselves]. ”

Educate!, from its founding through the present day, rests on and encourages community. Bulayev spoke to the high retention rate of both staff and students of Educate!: “[One of our] program manager[s] is a graduate, and three of our top leaders started at the entry level [around] 15 years ago.”

In many other respects, Educate! is constantly changing. “I think every five years, there’s been a [point] where we plateau and our growth potential [opens up],” Bulayev said. “The question [becomes]: How do we make this more impactful? What I’m most interested in is translating the practices of the highest performing companies into an impact organization [because] I believe impact work deserves the same rigor and practice of the most valuable companies in the world.”

Bulayev recognized a similar pattern of growth in the scale of Educate!’s aspirations. The organization has worked for years to implement its model in partnership with national governments. In fact, many cite Educate! as the first organization in the world to incorporate its social entrepreneurship curriculum into a national education system.

“The first dream was to [accomplish] it ourselves in Uganda,” Bulayev said. “The second dream was to accomplish it within a small-scale [national] system. [With] a lot of luck, we got the third dream, which was to accomplish [it in] a big country. [Last year,] Tanzania launched a new business study subject for everyone in high school based [on] our model.”

Bulayev reflected on his past 17 years with the organization before turning his gaze to the future. “I’m very grateful and I feel lucky to have been on [this] journey,” he said. “[I’m always] asking what we have to do to grow [Educate!] to the next phase. I’m constantly [looking to] what's next on the horizon and asking what I have to learn [or] how I [can] change myself to lead well. It’s a journey [that] never ends.” 

Holding Hope

Looking back, Bulayev returned to gratitude for the chances he’s had to create change. “[My] education and graduat[ing] from a place like Amherst help[ed] me [to] move from being an immigrant on welfare to having the privilege of power and opportunit[y],” he said.

Such privileges, however, are far from commonplace. This fact is what continues to motivate his efforts to equalize opportunity — in tandem with the countless individuals of Educate!. “The bubble of privilege is inherently random and that randomness [holds an] unfairness,” Bulayev said. “There [is a] quote I use to talk about what I internalized at Amherst [and] why I went on to Educate!. It [goes], ‘Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.’ Trying to equalize opportunity [is] how I connect my own experience to why I do [what I do].”

Towards the end of the interview, Bulayev offered up some words of advice for students. Youth, he suggested, holds a privilege of its own — that of potential. Bulayev’s story attests to this fact; after all, he has dedicated his life to the world’s youth. 

“When you’re young, time is your biggest asset. The worst thing [to do] is [to] wait,” he said. “When you leave Amherst, find [what] that you want to learn about [and] aspir[e] to, and find [this] at the intersection of what will grow you for the future. Everything else will come.”