Entrepreneur and Educator
San Francisco, CA
David Ciulla is an entrepreneur and educator. After working in Chemical Bank’s Middle Market group in New York, David co-founded Sports Basement, a San Francisco-based retail company. More recently, he co-founded ReadWorks, an award-winning, nonprofit, educational technology platform created to address the U.S. reading comprehension crisis.
Earlier in his career, David founded “The Anything-for-a-buck Paint Crew,” where he built and managed a team of four of his mostly unskilled and unmotivated friends during college summer breaks. He taught and coached in public and private middle schools for five years, and was an original advisor to the Founder of the Native American Community Academy charter school, in Albuquerque, NM. David was a pro bono consultant (and barista) for the owner of a coffee shop & trading company in the Navajo Nation, and was a strategic consultant during the planning stages of a micro-hydroelectric project for a community in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil.
He earned a BA in Political Science and English at Stanford, and an MA in International Relations at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with concentrations in International Development and International Economics.
David is an avid outdoorsman and sports fan, a former third baseman for the Polisportiva Padule baseball team in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy, and a mediocre drummer. He enjoys garden work, cooking, and photography, and is the co-founder and President of the Viola Club San Francisco, an official supporters club of the Italian Serie A soccer team Fiorentina.
DCI Fellow: K. Jabal