The Exchanges

Q Does this radically change how you compensate people? I think in the context of schooling, people always say teachers are under compensated and the salaries are like, is this a different salary band?

A So our, so we pay minimum of a 100,000 dollars, uh, at our schools, um, for the guides. And you know, that allows us one, we get the best teachers. Cause you know, back in, if there's a whole different thing of like, what's the future of teachers, teachers became teachers to transform kids lives and your best teacher. She was great because she found you and convinced you you could do awesome stuff, right? And she wasn't, the reason it, they didn't become teachers to grade that seventh grade science quiz. And they weren't, you didn't think they were great because they marked your paper up really well, right? It was, it's because of the motivational, emotional support. So we go hire them and say, this is what you get to do all day. You know, during the two hour blocks, we do 25 minute Pomodoros of, you know, math, science, language reading, and they take a kid out. During the 25 minutes, and like, okay, you're not doing math today, you know, come talk to me, and hey, how's your weekend, and you're winning the softball tournament, and what's going on, and you're having trouble on engagement, right? And they get to know the kids at a level that no teacher can. You know, I was just up at the San Francisco campus last night, and one of the parents, it's been open 23 days, and the parent's like, in 23 days, this guy knows more than the teachers did in years, you know, in the prior wor…

AI assessment note: “we pay minimum of a 100,000 dollars, uh, at our schools”

Q How universal do you think this is? Because, like, let's just say, like, I have a couple kids, they have different temperaments, right? Some of them are sports-oriented, they have more natural resilience, some are less so, you know, some people are more motivated about learning, less so. Like, how do you, how do you handle that as alpha school for a particular type of kid?

A Our job is to get this to a billion kids, so we're working to make it available to everybody, uh, both price point as well as personality type. And a lot of it is when we talk about love of school, it helps you design your product, which is, you know, I get all the guides we've opened besides alpha. Uh, we opened up different schools, branded schools for different afternoons. So I have a sports academy where you play sports all afternoon. I have a gifted, talented school. Where in the afternoon you do academic enrichment, robotics, math Olympia, write a book. And a lot of it is when we, when we ask the guides, we're like, okay, we only had 40% of the kids love school instead of vacation. How do we juice that to 75? You know, the GT guides are like, more academics. They want a third power hour. Yeah. You know, and what are we going to do? And that's what fires them up. My oldest daughter is like that. Like, she read calculus books in high school and, you know, she's a, Uh, double major at Stanford now, and she literally is like, these STEM boys can't write, and so she wrote an English writing class that's equation-based writing to help teach them, right? And so if she can do academics all day, she loves it. My younger daughter, who's still in high school, Wakes up every day. And while academically does great and, you know, uh, just took the SAT, hopefully has as good scores as h…

AI assessment note: “we're working to make it available to everybody, uh, both price point as well as personality type”

Q Can you make that, um, like, uh, easy to picture for parents or builders listening here? Like, I am a new fifth grader at an alpha school. Like, what does my day look like?

A Your day looks like this. You come in, you do limitless launch. Think Tony Robbins for kids, right? And it's all about growth mindset. You're going to be able to do this, right? Our view, kids are limitless. They're awesome. And we need to create an environment that helps unleash them. So you jump into that. Uh, then you literally sit down at your app, and so you're gonna have a AI tutor that's gonna be there for two hours that's going to give you personalized lessons, right, based on your, right, your level. Age grade and knowledge grade are two totally different things, right? The number of people in the average sixth grade class in this country who actually needs sixth grade content is very small. And so this is why all the test scores keep going down is A sixth grade teacher's job is to deliver sixth grade content. Her audience, right, her students actually aren't ready for it. That just to give you, like, we just had hundreds of kids join the last, you know, couple weeks as we started across the country. And, you know, my message to the parents, you know, my first academic talk to them was, I, I hate to tell you this, it sounds extreme, but your 50,000 dollar private school that you were at for however many years has been lying to you.

AI assessment note: “You come in, you do limitless launch... then you literally sit down at your app”

Q What data in particular? Like academic performance data you have.

A Well, not a, my end's not big enough, right? Let's go get a million kids. Right. And let's do, let, why don't we do pharmaceutical grade randomized control trials for education? We don't do that at all. Right. We, any latest fad is like, oh, this is what we're doing in schools these days. Right. And I'm like, no, let's actually sit here and have the government sit and do, you know, studies where we're going to be able to say this works. Right. The learning science is there, right. Where you could build products, run them through a test. Right. And then be able to say, we should adopt this wholesale. There's been a lot of things that have been adopted in the last 25 years that are terrible.

AI assessment note: “Well, not a, my end's not big enough, right? Let's go get a million kids.”

Q And so what, what specifically are they referring to?

A And, and so on this one, they're just like the academic part. I don't, if you want me to love school and you're just gonna put me in class for six hours a day, I'm not gonna love school. And so I, we negotiated basically. I was like two hours. Right. If would you, cause you know, there's ed tech that's been deployed forever, but you know, ed tech's deployed and test scores keep going down. So it's not working. And the issue is just engagement that, you know, you could, if you use dream box, you know, even 10 years ago, it would work, but you know, there's a lot of studies that like between five and 10% of people are the people who actually engage with con.

AI assessment note: “they're just like the academic part. I don't, if you want me to love school”

Q Are you most looking for engineers? Are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale? Are you looking for all of them?

A So we're releasing time back, which is going to be a platform that you can build schools on. So literally you don't have to know You know, all the learning science, it's going to be all packaged, right? And then you basically do the afternoon, right? And so that's what this Texas Sports Academy is. It's literally, it's coaches, you know, in a thousand school districts around Texas. So there's that, that aspect. There are set of coders and builders, which is once you start, most of ed tech does not use learning science, right? Which is one of the biggest issues. And once you say, I'm going to build an app From the ground up based on learning science, right? You all of a sudden can say kids can learn in 20 hours. Like, Math Academy is like the best math app that's out there, right? And that's a great, awesome team who, you know, if you want to learn about it, just go research all their stuff. But we need that for every subject, right? And so we need builders, and parents will pay. Like, one of, I'll give you one aspect on top of Time Back that's being done is there's a triple-A video game team, right, who is building a video game on top of it. And this video game is going to be both free to learn for everybody on the planet, but they also believe it will be the most profitable video game ever built, right? That there's just easily, you know, just in America alone, there's ten mil…

AI assessment note: “There are set of coders and builders... And so we need builders”