Millie

We help international school students around the world find their academic path with confidence.

08/22/2026

Year 3 of MILLIE: Recognition and Validation

"We were recognized by Forbes and I got to speak next to the Coursera CEO.

In Year 3, we got our first real taste of external validation: Forbes, being on the stage next to the Coursera CEO, the kind of things that make you listen up. I don't believe every external validation means something, but this one did, because for the past almost three years it had been just me and my team, heads down, unnoticed. And even then, the speaking invitations that started coming in weren't about MILLIE; they were about my old life: data science, AI Reserach, and JP Morgan.

By Year 3, we'd been named to the Forbes Next 1000, their list of entrepreneurial leaders changing the world. And we were recognized in the education sector. Not long after, we were invited to LEAP in Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest ed-tech conferences in the world, to talk about our vision for education. Standing on that stage talking about MILLIE was surreal in a way none of my past speaking engagements had been.

My speech was scheduled right before the Coursera CEO's. The second I walked off stage, I was busy beating myself up over everything I thought I'd said wrong. And then found myself surrounded by a group of Saudi women who, on paper, had nothing in common with me, telling me how inspired they were through my presentation.
Fast forward, and we hosted our three-year anniversary party at CSL. We invited our friends, family, and investors to celebrate us nearly turning three. I think that's the year we started feeling like a real, proper business."

08/21/2026

Year 2: We kept showing up to meetings uninvited.

We got an office of our own. Columbia University runs a space in Soho for its founders called the Columbia Startup Lab, and we grabbed a desk there. It wasn't really the resources that mattered. It was knowing there were seventy-odd of us in that building, all dreamers, all showing up every day to build something none of us knew would work out.

We kept pitching any chance we got, and we won second place at the Columbia Venture Competition — a $5,000 grant we were so proud of, we blasted it all over social media. But if you ask me for my single clearest memory of Year 2, it's walking into a counselor's office in Doha where we had absolutely no meeting scheduled.

We flew to Doha, Qatar, on a "business trip" with maybe one or two actual school meetings on the calendar. Our move at the end of every meeting was always the same: ask the counselor if they'd recommend us to their friends at other schools.

One day, with hours to kill, we walked into a very prominent international school in Doha completely uninvited. It's one of those embassy-adjacent schools where they check your passport at the entrance. We walked in and told the guards we had a meeting with the head of the counseling office. We looked the part in suits and all, so they didn't question us. We sat in the counselor's office, panicking inside, until someone came out, realized we weren't actually on anyone's calendar, and walked us back out. Kindly. But out.

It's a memory I still laugh at, mostly because neither my co-founder nor I had any real sales experience going in. I'd come from engineering and data science, and worked at Fortune 100 companies my whole corporate career. I had never worked a day in a service industry in my life. The idea of selling, of hearing no, was brand new to me. Looking back, it's one of the most valuable skills I've ever built, and I wish I'd been braver about hearing no sooner.

Meanwhile, our first graduating class got into Cornell, USC, and NYU. Not bad, huh?

08/20/2026

🍰 MILLIE turns 7 in 7 days. 🥳 7️⃣

Taking the time machine back Year 1, Jenna J. Ahn shares with us how MILLIE came to be.

"Anywhere we sat down was our office.

Columbia's library. Cafés around New York City. Airbnbs booked for personal or work related trips. The back row of MBA classrooms, laptop open, half-listening to the lecture. It was a lucky day if we managed to book a meeting room at Columbia, or found a café with just the right amount of foot traffic so that nobody looked twice at us for camping out for three or four hours.

I quit my job at JP Morgan in February 2019 and started MILLIE full-time. I built our first website on Squarespace and launched it that April. I started our first Instagram account and did everything myself: the captions, the post designs, the photos, the following, all of it. I was the host of our first webinars, where nobody showed up and we ran them anyway, because you have to create the content and fake the traction before any of them becomes real. I hand-drew every slide and every poster in a notebook. I still have a dozen of them.

We incorporated MILLIE in August 2019 and did everything ourselves. We taught our first students. We recruited our friends as speakers. We pitched to anyone and any chance we got, and invited ourselves to meetings nobody asked us to attend. Call it hustling if you want. Because that's exactly what it was. Hard, hard hustling."

Stay tuned tomorrow for Year 2 of MILLIE!

08/18/2026

NOW is the perfect time to get ahead on your uni applications.

Join our co-founders Jenna Ahn and Ariel Lau this Saturday for a back-to-school Instagram Live (save the countdown in our highlights), where they'll share practical advice on tracking deadlines, building your extracurricular profile, and balancing schoolwork with your personal statement. Come with your questions or submit them anonymously (link in bio)!

📌 Save the countdown so you don't miss it — 'IG Live' story highlights

See you Saturday! 👋🏼

08/17/2026

Just one of the opportunities behavioural science can lead you to. ⚽️

08/15/2026

What are students looking for when choosing a university these days?

08/13/2026

Do you think we're rational beings? 🤔

08/11/2026

We predict which study destination is the next big thing!

08/10/2026

Just one of the opportunities behavioural science can lead you to 😎⚽️

08/07/2026

See the world while receive a first class education! Who ever said you’d have to commit to one country for 3-4 years?

These undergrad programs allow you to study in multiple countries.

Address

New York, NY

Telephone

+13475878689

Website

http://milliegroup.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Millie posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Featured

Franco Spoto Vocal Studio
520 8th Avenue, 17th Floor

Want your school to be the top-listed School/college in New York?