What we learned from an Alpaca customer willing to travel 2,800 miles to spend a week with our team
June 29, 2026 | Team Letter
June 29, 2026
Happy Monday, Alpaca!
It’s been a few weeks since our last Team Letter — it’s been a crazy-busy time with TWO new hiring classes and so many new faces; The Little Wins Workshop; our very first School Culture Report; and ummm… 52 deals this quarter!? Let’s go! But keeping track of all these milestones is the whole reason behind Team Letter, so we are back at it!
(If you’re brand new here, I started writing a letter to our team early on in the company. We use it to celebrate milestones, talk about the WHY behind what we’re building, honor team anniversaries, and stay aligned as a team.)
So with no further ado, let’s jump in!
Earlier this year, we asked our customer, Eric Filardi, a principal in Juneau Public Schools, if he’d consider speaking at the Little Wins Workshop and participating in our customer training for our new team members. Without hesitation, Eric agreed, saying “I’ll be there and I’m bringing my whole family.”
I’m sorry, but do you know that Juneau, Alaska is 2,799 miles from Alpaca’s headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska?
I still honestly can’t believe the gift Eric’s visit was for our team. It was an opportunity to host a customer and dream big, to co-design product, and to build ideas for the future. It was a chance for our newest team members to learn from an exceptional educator and hear his extraordinary story firsthand.
Most importantly, it was a moment for every team member to see and know exactly who’s on the other side of the phone call they’re making, the product they’re building, or the story they’re telling.
Eric’s path in education is unlike any I’ve heard. He grew up on Long Island, and quite contrary to what his family was expecting, decided to pursue teaching, earning a triple major in English, secondary education, and theater (plus a Spanish minor) at SUNY Geneseo. He graduated in 2006 and landed a tenure-track English job back on Long Island, only to be among the first let go when the housing market collapsed. That setback became a launch point for an incredibly adventurous career.
Eric had been doing international volunteer work with the UN, and when he sent his résumé out into the world, he was recruited by the government of Abu Dhabi, where he spent about five years building curriculum and coaching teachers.
It was there that he met his future wife, traveled the world (70 countries!), and continued to build a perspective on global education that would guide his whole career.
At Alpaca, we talk about this question often:
“What if education was among the most desirable and competitive career paths in the world? What could that look like?”
Eric’s life is what it looks like when someone chooses education not as a fallback, but as the most adventurous, meaningful life they can imagine.
The great adventure eventually carried him to Alaska, where his first job was in Nenana, a village of about 300 in the middle of the state, at a K-12 school with a boarding facility for kids from remote villages across Alaska. He was hired to teach English, he said yes to nearly everything: he became the engineering teacher too, then STEM director, offered college dual-credit, taught as a university adjunct, and earned his pilot’s license.
It was there that Eric and his wife bought a foreclosed property and lived for three years in a 13-by-17-foot dry cabin with no running water while rebuilding the main house with his students as a hands-on engineering project, geothermal heating and all, picking up a solar-installer certification along the way.
He was a runner-up for Alaska Teacher of the Year in 2017, helped land a roughly $1 million grant from Amazon to build a computer science program, and was then tapped to be the principal in the Denali Borough — signing his contract in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic arrived. He spent three hard years seeing a tiny school community through the pandemic before the math of rural Alaska (there were just eight students left) sent him looking for somewhere new.
Eric then became the principal of a pre-K-5 Title I elementary school — the eighth principal there in ten years. His first year was brutal: a budget issue created a major shortfall and schools were consolidated, classrooms sat without teachers, and Eric personally substitute-taught about 80 days of a single school year.
Eric was, in his own words, deeply burned out and genuinely close to leaving public education for good. What helped pull him back was a combination of things he’s refreshingly honest about — therapy, running, rebuilding habits — and, somewhere in that mix, Alpaca. He’d found Pulse at a principals’ conference in Nashville, and rather than drowning in the hard early feedback (he jokingly describes that early feedback as “this sucks, you suck”), he and his team used the data to decide together which parts of their story to nurture, where to invest their time and energy, and how to come together as a team.
In their second year of using Alpaca, Eric’s team’s Positivity Pulse climbed from around 52% into the 80s, and they closed this past year at 91% — among the highest of any school we work with. Eric is careful to say that’s not just Alpaca’s impact, and he’s right. But to go from his level of burnout as a principal to where he is today is a remarkable story. He’s now the longest-tenured principal his school has had in nearly two decades, he says he walks in to work smiling, and he flew 2,800 miles with his whole family to tell our newest teammates about it.
When you start building a company, you don’t think about opportunities like this, or at least I didn’t. Here’s an extraordinary educator and professional living thousands of miles away, whose story we wouldn’t have heard if Kimberly hadn’t struck up a conversation with him at a conference, if Alpaca didn’t have a product that resonated with his team, and if we hadn’t built the relationship by staying in touch and watching his story evolve over the past 3 years.
Now, we get to have this extraordinary Alaska-to-Nebraska connection, and our team gets to hear the real stories of educators building extraordinary careers.
Alpaca, let’s stay curious about every educator we get the opportunity to talk to on the phone or in person as we start looking forward to the second half of the year — you never know what amazing educator journeys we’re going to hear!
Let’s go, Alpaca!
KB
PS: If you haven’t gotten enough of this story, check outEric’s Little Wins Podcast episode!