The Exchanges

Q How do you teach the life skills? Are you doing anything different there than we would think?

A You would, you would think these great project-based workshops in the afternoon to teach these skills. So we're like, okay, how do we teach one percent better? How do we teach atomic average? Like, okay, let's have them run a, you know, five K. Uh, you know, we teach financial literacy. It really is like our fifth and sixth graders launching food trucks, running Airbnbs, right? And so you can teach them when you have all afternoon, you have all this time to teach them. Now, the biggest thing we do versus probably most others is we try to quantify everything. Like, a lot of life skills are very soft, right? And that, I, I can't run a scalable system if everything's, hey, you know, maybe it works. So like, we talk, grit. Everybody wants their kid to, you know, have grit, right? You can't read, like, Angela Duckworth's book and, ok, grit, right? That doesn't mean anything. So every third grader in our school can do a Rubik's cube. Every kindergartner can do a hundred piece puzzle. And so we, right, every eighth grader Has passed a teamwork grit test, which is they all run a Tough Mudder, if you know what the numbers are. Tough Mudder and pass cross the finish line at the same time.

AI assessment note: “the biggest thing we do versus probably most others is we try to quantify everything”

Q And then you ended up buying it back. I want to hear the story about that. And then what changed your mind about being public with Trilogy?

A Uh, the PCOrder.com. The story helped me realize I didn't want to be public. So PC order was, um, actually one of the trilogy co-founders, Christie. You know, had this idea of, okay, I'm going to build PC order, um, which was online selling computers online back in.com days and, you know, built it up super successful, had all the biggest resellers aboard. Um, and then she went public and then basically Dell put her customer base out of business. And so then she, she, her business went terrible. And so the stock went from 50 to five or something. I can't exactly remembers, but you know, down 90 90 plus percent. So it went public, uh, you know, ran up in all the hype and then imploded, uh, and then we bought it back and just, you know, said, okay. Um, and you know, for me, uh, so I've kept Trilogy private, you know, to this day, it's still private. And a lot of it is just, um, I prefer just to be a hundred percent in control.

AI assessment note: “The story helped me realize I didn't want to be public.”

Q And then they're probably like, why are you pressuring him? Why are you?

A Why are you pressuring Johnny to learn two X? And I'm like, well, I, okay, got it. And it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it. Now, 10% of the market does. 10% of the market totally cares about great academics, right? And so those guys, they demand it. Like, they don't like two hour learning because it's not enough learning. But we switched. So that was my, our big product market fit. If you had to say the biggest pivot, you know, from a marketing point of view that unlocked, you know, sort of all the, all the stuff around alpha was, and I was slow, but hundreds of meetings in, I'm like, I'm going to change this message. And I'd have mom, dad, same Johnny, same mama, dad, look, I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours so we can do all the cool stuff the rest of the day. Trying to get him out of here. And you know, he skips the videos. And if you just watch him, he'd be done in two hours. And then mom's like, Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here? Right? People want to get out of the learning, right? They want to get out of the academics. And when it's only two hours, then everybody's a board. Um, and now we still teach two X and two hours, right? We just emphasize the two hour part. It's just how you position it. No, we literally took, it was two X and two hours, and I'm like, let's just drop it and call it two …

AI assessment note: “it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it”

Q Well, let's talk about Alpha School. What is Alpha School?

A So Alpha School is a, uh, High-end private school, um, expanding nationwide. We'll have, uh, 25 campuses around the country, uh, this year, and the way to think about Alpha School is, if you could revisit And just say, we need to build an educational system that's going to be ready for when AI comes, you know, when, when this, whatever world's going to be here in a decade, right? What would you do? Just ground up, rewrite, ignore everything you and I went through, right? Yeah. Six hours a day in class and homework and all that, and just rewrite it of what are the skills the kids need? How should they spend the day? How do you do that? What would it be? And so that's what we're doing at Alpha School. The other part we do is we also say, We definitely took off budget constraints. It's a high end private school. We're like, if, if money's no object, which is gives us a sort of our high end design. Now we're going to get the cost down and drive it down. But for the first version, this alpha school, it's, it's, it's the high end. And so we, we, we have built a school that is totally different than ever the school out there. Um, and the principles that we underlie that underlie it, um, you know, first, You know, we said if, look, if you're going to redo school, and we're going to put our kids in this for a decade, the number one rule is kids must love school. They must love school, r…

AI assessment note: “So Alpha School is a, uh, High-end private school, um, expanding nationwide.”

Q crushing everybody else. Look here. We should all be doing this. So why aren't more public schools reaching into this and going like, we should be experimenting with this even in one subject. If we don't do it for everything, maybe math class looks like synthesis or math academy or something like that, where you're using an AI based learning system instead of a teacher. Why don't they do that?

A Um, it's really hard to change the system, right? Which is the first off. First off, nobody believes, right? You, so the first thing you do when you look at alpha, right, and see our results is you're like selection effects. It's only rich kids and that's it. Um, and so you, you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it. Um, but even in places that do, there's a lot of high end private schools who their largest donors are like, I want my kid to have this two hour learning, go take a meeting. Right. So I, I spend my time like there. I definitely do. I've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the top schools in this country, private schools who charge, you know, 50, 75,000 dollars. And they really struggle to sort of believe that this works because fundamentally learning science, this concept learning science, they're not trained in it. They haven't read the 10,000 papers. They haven't built and seen it. They don't Know the world's, they don't have a team like we do of seven of the 10 best learning scientists in the country working on it, right, who have all these unlocks, and they definitely don't have the data loop that we have. Like, we know, because we measure every single thing, how long the kid took to do it, and what the scores are, and what are the results, and, you know, that whole closed loop. And so there's just massive skepticism, you know, around it, and…

AI assessment note: “it's really hard to change the system, right? Which is the first off.”

Q when it shut down, and we all get to peer inside what's going on in the classroom, I'm like, oh my god, like, A hundred percent agree with my kids. You know, this is crazy. Is this what you're doing all day? Like, is this what they're learning and how they're learning? And, um, but before we get to all of what you're doing different, like what are the results?

A Yeah. So let's talk about the results. So the alpha school, um, you know, one, our, our kids love school. It's just, they're phenomenal results. Uh, when you talk about academically, we're the best academic performing school in the country, just bar none. So you can measure us on, we, we are big believers in standardized tests because no one, when you hear about the whole, how alpha works, nobody believes it'll work. And so even, you know, a lot of parents don't believe in standardized tests when they come in and I'm like, okay, your kid's only doing two hours a day. And they're like, well, how do I know they're learning? I'm like, trust me. They're like, no, I don't trust you.

AI assessment note: “we're the best academic performing school in the country, just bar none.”

Q It sounds like guides and teachers are very different. What makes for a good guide?

A Yeah. So teach, you know, when I think of a spec, you know, there's a huge teacher problem, right? Teachers are burned out. They can't hire enough. You know, it's just, it's, it's tough, right? Um, you know, and it just, once again, me coming from the outside, right? General HR, you know, HR one-on-one, if I'm a business person, you know, okay, you can't hire a spec, you know, what's the problem, right? Either the specs too hard, you're not paying enough, whatever, you're targeting the wrong one. So there's five things, really, if you're going to be a teacher in a standard school, right, standard teacher in front of a classroom model to do well. First, you have to be your domain expert in seventh grade science. Second, you actually have to be good at teaching. Like, what are the effects of teaching? We all know researchers who know a lot, but they're really bad teachers, right? Third, you have to connect and motivate with kids. Fourth, you have to deal with parents. And then fifth, in a lot of our schools, you have a lot of administration and, you know, uh, school systems. And those are five hard things to be good at, right? And so when you have a hard spec, then we go and say, okay, let's underpay them. And you're like, and it's a surprise that no one applies for the jobs, right? And that's why there's huge default and all that stuff. And so in our world, I'm like, okay, well,…

AI assessment note: “They became teachers to connect and transform kids' lives.”