Assertion Partly supported
Liemandt: Trilogy cohorts were told to bet a month's salary on roulette
“At the end of our trilogy university, a hundred days, you know, if enough of the teams that hit their goals, we would take everybody to Vegas and then we would get everybody around a roulette wheel. And we'd say, you have to bet one month's salary. On the numb…”
Insight
Liemandt: Nonprofits in education cannot scale with better product quality
“Historically, everything in education has been nonprofit. And the problem with nonprofits is nonprofits are non-scalable, which is the better your product, the faster your donations go away, right?”
Opinion
Liemandt: Education Is a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Market with No Competitors
“I'm going to show this is the single best market. If you're an entrepreneur to enter, it's a multi-trillion dollar market with no competitors.”
Assertion Supported
Liemandt: Alpha School requires second graders to run a 5K
“Our second graders gotta run a five K. Our eighth graders have to do a tough mudder, or they also all have to cross the finish line at the same time.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Alpha School outpaces 100k-student district in perfect STAAR scores
“And, you know, we have a building with a few hundred people in Austin, Who get more hundreds on the Texas car than a school district of a 100,000.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: 46% of Alpha School students prefer school over vacation
“Four weeks ago when we surveyed all our kids, 46% of our students said, I would rather go to school than go on vacation.”
Disclosure
Joe Liemandt invested $1 billion of software wealth into Alpha School
“I put in a billion dollars for my software company as the first payment.”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2046
Liemandt: In 20 years, 90% of parents will still use physical schools
“In 20 years, parents are going to drop their kids off at a building. 90% of parents, you have homeschool little stuff, but it's a niche. Nine percent of parents are going to drop their kids off at a building. And in that building are other kids and adults”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Twelve billionaire philanthropists warned Liemandt not to invest in education
“Before I did this and put my billion dollars in, I talked to a dozen billionaires who'd all spent over, had all spent over a billion dollars on education. And to a person, every single person said, don't do it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Software buyout firm saw $20B pipeline of distressed SaaS deals
“I saw twenty billion dollars of pipeline companies that were, they were looking at about splitting the cash flows buying for a dollar.”
Assertion Contradicted
Liemandt: Trilogy Was the First AI Product to Sell $1 Billion
“And then we built Trilogy and our claim to fame actually in the nineties, it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Trilogy Won 70% of College Recruiting Battles Against Microsoft
“Microsoft would win 90% of college graduates back then. And we against them won 70%.”
Assertion Contradicted
Liemandt: Trilogy ran an exchange program with the Navy SEALs
“We actually trilogy university, you know, there's Harvard business, you know, case studies on it and you can read about it, but we literally had a swap program with the Navy seals. Literally the Navy seals are like, okay, you know, we're going to send a couple…”
Insight
Liemandt: Fairly beating parents in competition is the greatest student motivator
“Like there is nothing that motivates a student more and a kid more than them being able to go head to head with their parent and winning like fair, not where the parent tanked it.”
Disclosure
Alpha School bans kindergarten parents from reading 'The Self-Driven Child'
“The books, once you get to middle school at Alpha, you have to read 10 to 25. There's another book, Self-Driven Child, that we do not allow kindergarten moms to read, because it talks about your kid being independent, and at kindergarten is the last thing you …”
Insight
Core values are useless unless the exact opposite is also viable
“Which is if you can't say the opposite of it, right? Then it's not on the list. Like, so when we were doing the core values of trilogy in the nineties, I was like, well, we obviously have to have integrity on the list. And he's like, Joe, is there ever a compa…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2026
Liemandt: Alpha will launch a free-to-learn educational game this year
“We have some of the world's best video game developers, right? Building and they're spending two years building a video game on this, these concepts. And it will be free to learn, you know, think free to play free to learn for five hundred million kids and it'…”
Assertion Open · timeframe May 2029
Alpha high schooler will publish as lead researcher in Nature journal
“We have a student who's going to be published in nature. She will be the first school student as a lead researcher published in nature.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Trilogy was the most expensive software in the 1990s
“We were the most expensive software you could buy in the nineties because we also had super high pricing because we're like, they're not going to buy from us unless they have to.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Liemandt: Bill Gates Flew to Austin Over Trilogy's Recruiting Wins
“Bill Gates literally flew down to Austin. To figure out why we were getting the best graduates.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Ballmer, Gates, and Maples Called Shared Job Candidates
“Whether it was Balmer Gates or Mike Maple, the other third in the office of the president. Those three would call all our candidates, and we would just continue to fight, and it would escalate, right?”
Insight
Liemandt: Long strategy docs fail because employees cherry-pick alignment
“He's like, the problem with the 20 page strategy document is every single employee takes the one sentence That they can attach to and say, see unaligned, right? And when they're really not, and then that's, you just lose, right? You diffuse all your focus.”
Assertion Partly supported
Liemandt: Trilogy Has Acquired Hundreds of Companies Since Dot-Com Bust
“So we bought hundreds of companies since then, but it was nothing. This strategy was just like, oh, wow, some companies are really cheap. Why don't we buy some?”
Insight
Liemandt: LLMs handle DOK 1-3, but humans still drive DOK 4 novel knowledge
“And LLMs are very good at helping you do DOK one, two, and three. And reasoning around that. And then the part that the humans still do really well is DOK four creating new knowledge.”
