Nat Eliason - The High School That Guarantees You'll Make $1 Million (Ep. 325)

Summary

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Infinite Loops Ep. 325: Nat Eliason – The High School That Guarantees You'll Make $1 Million

Main Theme / Purpose

This episode features Nat Eliason, co-founder of Founders School, in conversation with guest host Jimmy Stoney (filling in for Jim O’Shaughnessy). They explore a radically new educational model: an elite high school for teenage entrepreneurs that guarantees students will earn $1 million in gross profit before graduation—or the $600,000 tuition (over four years) is refunded. The conversation dives deep into education innovation, Nat’s entrepreneurial journey, the philosophy behind Founders School, and how Founders School is aiming to change perceptions around what teenagers can achieve.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

How the Founders School Guarantee Works

• The Audacious Promise: If a student doesn’t earn $1M by graduation, the $600k tuition is refunded ([00:00], [51:03], [54:27]).
• Calculation Details: The metric isn’t revenue or net profit (“…we ended up on this kind of gross profit calculation”—Nat, [55:36]) to avoid perverse incentives and encourage real business-building, not financial engineering.

Evolution of Friendships and Networks in the Internet Age

• Contemporary Friendships: Online friend networks (e.g., via Twitter/X) now rival and sometimes surpass “locker proximity” friendships from school days ([01:08]–[04:13]).
• The Startup Story: Nat and Jimmy share how their own friendship (originated on the Internet) points to a new paradigm of discovering and supporting like-minded peers.

Nat’s Unconventional Education & Entrepreneurial Journey

• Nat’s Path: Dropped from business to philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, hacked college by designing his own major and getting credit for independent study/startup work ([05:20]–[09:02]).
• Failures and Turning Points: First startup felt like “playing startup”—no customers, all pitch ([09:04]–[11:39]). Turning to freelance content writing provided his first real entrepreneurial wins.
• Learning from Experience: “It was the classic problem... I did not actually learn how to start a business.” – Nat ([09:04]).

On Quitting, Commitment, and Shiny Objects

• Strategy of Moving On: Nat explains his history of intense but brief obsessions, launching projects that worked but sometimes lacked follow-through ([20:29]–[23:09]).
• Shift to Long-term Focus: “I want to do something bigger that has a meaningful risk of failure...It's time to really focus and commit.” – Nat ([25:07]).

Genesis of Founders School

• Alpha School Connection: Already a fan, Nat was invited to run an AI workshop at Alpha’s high school program, sparking his involvement ([27:13]–[28:29]).
• From Side Project to Co-Founder: Initially advising, Nat realized: “Oh, I need to talk about this with my wife... It just immediately was like, this has to happen.” ([31:24]–[32:01]).

Why Founders School in NYC?

• Demand Shift: Higher immediate demand from entrepreneurial families in NYC than in Austin ([36:00]).
• Elite High School Competition: The target competitive set is top private schools (e.g., Horace Mann, Exeter) ([36:00]), but with a radically different value proposition.

Founders School vs. Alpha School

• Compressed Academics: Core Alpha method uses AI tutors to deliver advanced academics in a fraction of the school day ([39:53]).
• Afternoon Focus: Alpha’s afternoons = enrichment/mastery projects (e.g., rock climbing for kindergartners) ([41:18]).
• Founders School Distinction: Longer day (until 5pm), significantly more focus and intensity on entrepreneurship ([46:24]).
• Personalized Mentorship: Access to top-tier mentors and practitioners on-demand ([47:48]–[48:13]).

The Guarantee: Risks and Structure

• Why $1M, Why Gross Profit?: Attribution and incentive design—avoid incentivizing vanity metrics; ensure real business learning ([54:47]).
  • “We realized the problem with net profit was that we would create other adverse incentives where we were telling the students not to reinvest in their business... We want the most aligned structure possible for everybody.” – Nat ([55:34])
• Parental Concerns: Some families opt out of the guarantee to avoid unnecessary pressure ([53:31]).

Student Selection & Curriculum

• Admissions: No transcripts required; cognitive aptitude test and a two-week entrepreneurial challenge replace standard tests ([67:05]–[70:38]).

  • “You have to go through a baby version of the process... come up with an unintuitive position on something... try to sell it to at least 20 people who are not your friends...” ([67:05]–[69:33])
  • “That tells us everything. Cause it's like, okay, cool, this isn't the right program for you. But then other students just… blow us away.” ([68:34])

• Curriculum Design

  • Morning: Core academics guided by AI tutors ([57:56]).
  • Afternoon: 70% self-directed business work, monthly skill workshops (e.g., AI, sales, copywriting), weekly guest founders, book discussions ([71:16]–[73:05]).
  • First Step: Every student must develop real mastery in a subject before launching; entrepreneurial “shiny objects” come later ([59:18]–[60:31]).
  • “If you don’t have a somewhat unconventional point of view on this topic, it’s going to be hard for you to carve out a real competitive advantage in almost any business…” – Nat ([60:31])

• Summers: Continued access to school campus/resources, but without academics—students keep building ([71:16]).

What Kind of Businesses?

• Prefer Solo or Lean Teams: Early focus on businesses that can reach $1M with minimal headcount, thanks to AI leverage ([65:25]–[66:07]).
• Legal Wrinkles: Students are minors, so parents are involved on paperwork ([66:07]).

The Psychology and Philosophy of Taking Teens Seriously

• Serious Expectations: Drawing from Montessori and anthropological traditions, the school treats early teens as capable of real-world mastery and responsibility ([86:20]–[89:35]).
  • “Take teenagers seriously... If somebody shows the ability to be treated like an adult, to be taken seriously, we should figure out how to take them seriously.” – Nat ([86:20])
• Giving Agency: Cites “Hunt, Gather, Parent”—let kids try, even if they fail or slow things down. Developed “agency” is essential for long-term success ([90:44]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Guarantee:

  • “We're launching a school for entrepreneurs and if your kid doesn't make a million dollars by graduation, we are going to refund you the tuition.” – Nat ([00:00])

• On Hacking Education:

  • “College is far more hackable than people think it is. There are no rules.” – Jimmy ([07:02])
  • “Once you graduate, no one's going to really care what grades you got or most of the classes you took… The bimodal approach is the way to do it.” – Nat ([07:41])

• On Mini-Entrepreneurship:

  • “You don't think of freelance writing as entrepreneurial, but it was a very entrepreneurial thing to do… develop this skill, I'm going to sell it, I'm going to figure out my rough P and L…” – Nat ([11:39])

• On Commitment:

  • “I want to do something bigger that has a meaningful risk of failure” – Nat ([23:05])

• On Agency & Rules:

  • “There was some point when I realized that there wasn't really such a thing as rules... like, it's an idea outside of very few things.” – Nat ([93:10])

• On Taking Teens Seriously:

  • “If somebody shows the ability to be treated like an adult, to be taken seriously, we should figure out how to take them seriously.” – Nat ([86:20])

• On Education’s Perennial Blindspot:

  • “We've infantilized teenagers for a long time, right? … Sometimes you just have to get out of their way and tell them, like, I believe in you, and give them just the right little nudge…” ([75:44])

• On Entrepreneurial Mindset:

  • “What you're giving these... students... is the gift of that entrepreneurial cast of mind, the same one that would have led you to think ‘I can do Thailand and $150 an article for Zapier and make it work.’” – Jimmy ([80:54])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–01:08 – Nat announces the school's $1M guarantee and what this risk means for educators.
• 05:20–13:38 – Nat’s educational journey and early entrepreneurial failures and pivots.
• 20:12–25:47 – His approach to not “over-committing” to projects and his recent shift to focus on bigger, longer-term ventures.
• 27:13–31:23 – How a DM led to his involvement with Alpha School and Founders School’s origin.
• 36:00–37:44 – Why Founders School’s flagship opens in NYC rather than Austin.
• 39:53–44:53 – Alpha’s model: compressed academics, mastery, and why kids love it.
• 53:25–55:39 – The guarantee, incentives, and pressure on parents/kids.
• 57:56–66:07 – Curriculum design, typical day, selection process, and legal/parental challenges.
• 86:20–89:35 – The "take teenagers seriously" ethos and its roots in Montessori and developmental psychology.
• 93:10–95:27 – The world is more malleable than you think; young people can get real results.

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Final Reflections: Two Ideas to Incept in the World

1. Take Teenagers Seriously: “If somebody shows the ability to be treated like an adult, to be taken seriously, we should figure out how to take them seriously.” ([86:20])
2. The World is Malleable: Rules are often just suggestions; agency and initiative can fundamentally reshape what’s possible, even for young people. ([93:10])

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Tone Note: Throughout, Nat is earnest and energetic, Jimmy is both probing and affirming; the conversation is naturally curious, optimistic, and laced with humor and the shared sense of being “Internet friends turned real friends.”

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This summary captures the episode’s key content and can serve as an in-depth guide for those who haven’t yet listened, while emphasizing timestamps for those who want to jump to particular sections.

Transcript

[A]

We're launching a school for entrepreneurs and if your kid doesn't make a million dollars by graduation, we are going to refund you the tuition. Tuition is 150k a year. So, you know, we're saying that we're going to give you back 600k at the end of 4 years if we don't get your student to this outcome. It's putting the pressure on us to actually figure this out, to actually make sure that we are delivering on these outcomes and not playing startup like I was when I was in college, trying to learn this for myself.

[B]

Hello and welcome to Infinite Loops. I am Jimmy Stoney. I am filling in for Jim o'. Shaughnessy. Today's guest is a repeat guest, Nataliason. He is the co founder of Founders School. He's building a new model for education and a new model for educating young entrepreneurs who are in high school. All right, Natalia, thank you for coming on Infinite Loops.

[A]

Good to be here. Last time I did this with Jim. Right now I got to do with Jimmy. There you go.

[B]

Yeah, we're just gonna continue rotating in people. Jim, Jimmy.

[A]

There you go. Have a cast of characters.

[B]

You know, one of the things that I have this theory of the case of friendship that is like a contemporary case or contemporary theory of the case of friendship, which is before the Internet, it was basically like there's like a less than 1% likelihood you and I would have ever have become friends.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because we grew up in different places. Like, it would have been unlikely. Not impossible, just highly unlikely. And now what happens is you can have all these people who are Internet friends who become in real life friends. Right. And so it's this fascinating thing because before you would sort your friendships based on like, how close my locker was to yours.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Did we grow up playing on the same, like little league team or something? And fast forward, you and I connected. I believe it was on Twitter or when it was.

[A]

No, you emailed me. That's right, yeah. The podcast back in 2017.

[B]

18.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then you sort of evolve from there and you follow friends projects and you support them along the way. And so it's a real pleasure to do this because it actually shows you, I think, like, what's different about friendship now. That would have been impossible 50 years ago or highly unlikely 50 years ago.

[A]

Even, even 10, 15 years ago. I feel like a lot has changed. Right. We. I certainly grew up in the era of don't talk to strangers on the Internet. Was my parents number one concern with me getting on the. For, you know, for decent reasons. And now at least half of my friends, if not more, I meet online first. Right. And I have this very Vivid memory of 20, 2018. My wife, my now wife and I had just moved into our first house in Austin and I invited a friend and his girlfriend over for dinner. And I think like an hour before he showed up, she was like, oh, by the way, how do you know Adam? And I said, oh, we know each other through Twitter. Right. And she was like, what, you've never met this person in real life? Who are you bringing into our house? And it was great. Admire good friends now. And even then that was odd. And she was totally fair to have that reaction. And now it's just like, oh, yeah, of course. That's another person we met three times.

[B]

And it's funny because you accelerate. I think you accelerate a lot of friendships that way. Yeah, right. Like you. Because you do feel like you're. You're kind of in each other's heads in some way, you know, vaguely the projects you're interested in.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Whereas like, with, like, call it like locker proximity. Locker proximity still requires a fair amount of investment in a friendship to know if you're even interested in the same things. Yeah, but like online or digital friendships that convert into real life friendship, you're like, I already know all the stuff you like. We like all the same.

[A]

We follow all the same people. Our feeds are the same. Right.

[B]

Hanging out with people.

[A]

Yes, I saw it. Although it does create these funny circles where, like, I have a much harder time being friends with Instagram guys than Twitter guys because I just like, I don't know what's in their feed. Right.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

It's almost like a relationship strategic thing where it's like, Cosette knows what's going on in a lot of our friends lives that I don't know because I'm not on Instagram and I know stuff that's going on in our other friends lives that she doesn't know because she's not on X as much.

[B]

That's really funny.

[A]

It's strategic almost.

[B]

You do get a little bit of, I don't know if you have these of like the six degrees of Chris Williamson. Right. Or like the problem of, like, everybody also just then consuming the same information.

[A]

Yeah, right. That's definitely true.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's true of all communities, but I think it might be particularly true of, like, your friends who are based on Twitter.

[A]

X. I have a group chat of guys who are also, you know, terminally online on X and I swear two thirds of the time when somebody posts something funny in the chat, I've already seen it.

[B]

Already seen it.

[A]

And it's a weird experience of, oh, okay, like this world is big and it's really, really small. Really, really small.

[B]

Well, we're here to talk about your world expanding a bit and changing a bit. But just for people who, who don't. Who aren't familiar, who are listeners who aren't familiar with your particular path. Can you, you kind of sketch out because you, you have one of the like, I think of like, you as like the Dos Equis guy of the Internet.

[A]

Like, it's like you've had some of

[B]

the most interesting career shifts transitions experiments you've run. Can you just walk us through briefly? Like, take me from like your education at Choate to now, like kind of bullet points so that people have a sense of who you are.

[A]

Yes. So I guess the way I'd describe it is that I've been very fortunate to have made a career out of just getting super fascinated and obsessed by things and diving down these different rabbit holes that have these thin relations but not very thick ones. And that's been kind of this very fun journey over the last 12, 14 years now. So, you know, I went to high school at Children's Mary hall up in Connecticut. And while I was there got, I thought that I was going to go into physics. And then in the same year I took microeconomics and red Atlas Shrugged and got immediately red pill on entrepreneurship and business. And so I kind of like hard pivoted there, decided that, you know, entrepreneurship, business, what I wanted to do, applied to really just the top 10 business schools for college, just went down that list and then went to the best one that I got into, which was Carnegie Mellon. And one year into business school at Carnegie, realized that it wasn't going to teach me anything useful about entrepreneurship. It was, you know, great for learning, you know, finance and stuff that would be useful in a management consulting career, things like that. But really not much. There's not much value in like the entrepreneurship degree really, I'd say at almost any college or grad school. Dropped out of that into the philosophy program because I still had that kind of literary interest, but that also was the lowest requirement major. And so it gave me the most freedom to do whatever I wanted with my college degree. And I ended up dropping out for a year to work on a startup and convinced the business school and the philosophy school to give me credits of like, work experience, like, you know, Kind of like independent study credits to work on my business, which allowed me to still graduate on time. So kind of got to like hack the system that way.

[B]

Which, by the way, I actually just to pause here for a second because there are either young people listening or parents of young people listening. One of my ways that I, when I'm speaking, because I did roughly the same thing. So I designed my own degree at Duke and it basically let me, as a, as a start of my sophomore year, I was able to choose all of my classes through senior year. But I basically designed it so that I got to do exactly what I wanted with who I wanted and then just did a bunch of independent studies to fill in the gaps. And I tend to think college is. You're in this business, but college is far more hackable than people think it is.

[A]

There are no rules.

[B]

Right. There's nothing they actually have to do. You can make it up as you go along and by the way, get money to do it.

[A]

And once you graduate, no one's going to really care what grades you got or most of the classes you took. And so you either should use it to get a extremely deep education on a challenging subject that you could not realistically get anywhere else. If you can study physics at MIT or something that is, you have the potential to get a degree of education that you cannot get anywhere else. I really think you either go that way or you kind of do the bare minimum, get the piece of paper, meet everybody, because those are gonna be your friends, possibly your wife or husband, your future business partners, all of that, and then focus on other stuff and learn other things, like kind of, I think like the bimodal approach is the way to do it. And I ended up getting a lot of value in that sense of. I spent that whole year off campus in downtown Pittsburgh working on my startup with other adults. I went through a startup accelerator that was downtown. And so it was me, the 20 year old who couldn't go out to the happy hours, and then all these other adults who were working on their startups. And so I was off campus during the day learning all these business skills and interacting with people much older and further in their career. But then at night I went back to campus and I got to stay in my fraternity and I got to throw parties and I got to do all the fun aspects of college. And that was the best year of college by far. Right? Because I was. Yeah, it was the best of both worlds. It was awesome.

[B]

Did you. How did that business go in?

[A]

Oh, terribly. I mean, it was the classic problem of, you know, one, I was a 20 year old, had gotten into good schools without herculean efforts and you know, like I was smart, right? And I knew I was smart and so I felt like I knew what I was doing. And you know, I'd read a couple of books like Lean Startup and stuff and there was nobody around around me saying, you don't know what you're doing. And so I just assumed that I did and I was able to raise a small amount of money. But I mean, I don't think in that year we got a single paying customer, right? I was really good at making pitch decks, right? I was really good at.

[B]

Which is a skill.

[A]

Which is a good thing. Which is a skill. It's a skill, it's a skill. You know, I was good at going to networking events and I was good at playing startup, but I did not actually learn how to start a business. And about a year into must have been a book I read because it wasn't somebody who told me. There was just this moment of cascading dread when it kind of all hit me at once of, oh my gosh, I'm a fraud. This isn't working at all. This is making no money. There is no product market fit here. And I've just spent a year on this and I could have figured this out probably 11 months ago. Very useful. And thankfully when I realized that, I then very quickly went to I need to shut this down and I need to get my act together because I am graduating in eight months and I have been shirking a philosophy degree and so I have no job prospects that way. Like my startup has failed so that's not going to pay me a job. And so I have about eight months to figure out how to make money or how to get hired or else. Like I'm moving back. Like, I don't, I didn't know what. I didn't really have a fallback plan. I was like, I'm just going to figure it out. And thankfully I did. And that was when I got really into content marketing and writing. Because the question that I asked myself was, okay, I want to get into startups. I don't have any useful skills for that right now. I don't know how to code, I don't know how to design, I don't know how to market, I don't know how to do sales. What is the skill that would be useful to a startup that I am the closest to knowing how to do? And so I picked marketing specifically Content marketing. Because I was a philosophy major, I was writing a lot. I figured, okay, I can figure out how to write good articles for a company blog for startup blog, and then that will get me my first jobs and internships. So I started my blog, started writing articles on it just to kind of demonstrate that I could do content marketing from what I could piece together from, you know, blogs really that were out at the time. There wasn't really, there wasn't like YouTube back then in the educational sense that we have it today.

[B]

It's back in the stone age.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. There was no, like, there were no Twitter accounts I could follow. Like people were just posting about pooping on Twitter network. But Zapier and Buffer were the two big future of content as marketing companies at the time. And so I started my blog, posted on for two months, felt like I was getting good, and then I just cold emailed both of them and said, hey, will you take me on as a freelance writer? And I didn't say internship, I didn't say like college student or whatever. I was just trying to pitch them to hire me as a freelance writer. And Buffer said no, but Zapier said yes. And so by like December, I think this is a two or three month period, I'd gone from, you know, nothing to okay, I have my first freelance writing gig with this company that I have a lot of respect for. And it was $150 an article. And so I kind of like did the math and I said, okay, well If I do 12, 14 articles a month, so call it three per week, then that gets me enough that I could afford to pay for my cost of living somewhere like Argentina or Thailand. And so now I know that I can go do that when I graduate if I need to. I don't need to look for any job that I don't want to take. I can keep focusing on the entrepreneurship skills. And I kind of like have this as the backstop. And that was really the first. You don't think of like freelance writing as entrepreneurial, but it was a very entrepreneurial thing to do. Right? It was like, okay, I'm going to develop this skill, I'm going to sell it, I'm going to figure out my rough P and L to run that business and go from there. And I ended up taking a job for about eight, nine months that didn't work out very well, but then started a marketing agency right after it. And it kind of all started with making that decision that senior year of college. And then that marketing agency Ended up doing a few million a year. I stepped out of it, had another CEO take over. She ran it for a few years before it was eventually acquired. But that was like my first entrepreneurial business thing that did very well and kind of all stemmed from that decision. Senior year, did you, just out of

[B]

curiosity, did your family, were they nervous or like, were there any tough conversations? Because that's like, that's, that's usually the part of the story that people leave out, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

One, one has to drop out of college. But the more complicated thing is usually not dropping out. It's the phone call to the parents to let them know what your plans are. Right. In your case, you didn't drop out, but did they have any concerns about, you've gone to Choate and you've gone to Carnegie Mellon. You've like been in these worlds that are like indisputably prestigious, and now you're going to go write freelance articles and maybe move to Thailand.

[A]

Yeah, they, I mean, by that point they had been warmed up to it from me doing that year off. Right. And, you know, that was the hardest of those conversations. Right. And I think more so. I don't think my mom was ever worried. She was like, he's going to be fine. He's going to figure it out. My dad is like much more academic. Right. Like, he went to Harvard Law School. He's a professor. He was, you know, it's like college is important. And so I think he was very worried that I wasn't going to get a degree. I think he knew, rightly that as soon as I got a taste of not being in college, I would never want to go back, never be okay going back. And it's sort of a fluke, I think, that I ended up graduating in the sense of if I hadn't gotten all that extra credit and if I hadn't had so many APs from high school, I wouldn't have finished. There's. There's no way. But after, after I shut down the startup and I kind of papered out the math and talked to my advisor, we realized that we could jam one semester full of kind of BS classes to get me to the finish line and still get the piece of paper. And I think if we hadn't been able to work that it wouldn't have happened. But that satisfied him at least that I got the degree. But I think that clear to them at that point that okay, even if that startup hadn't worked, I had started something, I had hired people, I had raised Some amount of money. I was on some path. And I think if I had said, oh, after I graduate, I'm going to figure out how to make money doing freelance writing, that would have been one thing. But going to them and saying, I'm already doing it, I'm already making it, that helps a lot. It's like, okay, clearly there's a plan here. He's on some sort of path and trajectory. And so actually sometimes kids in high school or college will reach out to me. They used to more when I was younger, but. Younger now.

[B]

You're over the hill?

[A]

No, Well, I feel like when I was. When I was like, he wasn't even

[B]

alive when YouTube was.

[A]

No, I feel like when I was in my mid-20s, I was more vocal about the, like, college alternative path. And so I'd get more of this inbound. I don't get as much of it anymore, but I would always say, like, make some money online first and then tell your parents, because they're going to be a lot more amenable to this idea if you have some proof of success instead of, like, hope to work out. Exactly.

[B]

Did. Did you. When you were raising money at 20 years old, how did you communicate with investors? Like, what were those conversations? Like, raising money is something that even adults obviously struggle with mightily. Right?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, it was a lot easier for me because it was from a local startup accelerator in Pittsburgh and I was a Carnegie Mellon student. And so, you know, and like, these guys are wonderful. I don't mean this as a criticism. They gave me a lot of benefit of the doubt because I went to Carnegie and I think that was really what, like, got it. There was like, I went to Carnegie and I had just won the Startup Weekend in Pittsburgh with this idea. And so I had that kind of, like, charisma, and there was a bit of that local excitement around what I was doing. And so it was kind of a natural fit in that sense. But I think looking back, if I had gone out to Silicon Valley or something and tried to pitch YC or tried to get in front of a 16Z or one of those people, I think they might have said, you have no idea what you're doing. You have nothing here. That might have been very helpful. Even when I raised the follow on money, it was from the same parent fund, which was a Pittsburgh Innovation Fund to support job creation and innovation within or a Pennsylvania Innovation Fund to support job creation and stuff within the state. And so again, it was like, I wasn't going. I wasn't Playing in, like, the hardest leagues. And I think that they did give me more trust because I went to Carnegie.

[B]

Yeah. How did you. How did you deal with the feeling you described of, like, this? You're a year in and you realize it's not going to work. Right. Did it. Did it feel like the sky was falling down? Like. Because, look, even at that age, even if you're not building a business, you are generally dealing with the challenge of what am I going to do with my earthly time? Right. And those are challenges for people who are just going to class every day. Right. You're building a business and watching it fail. If you can think back, what was your thought process like?

[A]

I usually don't stay in that headspace very long. I'll have those feelings occasionally. But it very quickly shifts to, okay, well, there is something to do here. And so there's. I've never had long periods of, like, wallowing, I don't think, or this being stuck in the fear because I just naturally, very quickly click into like, okay, well, we need a new plan here. Like, what is the plan? Right? And let's just focus on that. And so it very quickly shifted to. I literally remember writing this on. I had a whiteboard in my room. I remember writing $2,000, like, on the whiteboard because it was, okay, I'm scrap, you know, the startup is dead. I'm not working on this anymore. These illusions of raising 500 grand and going big and going on like, that's not happening anymore. So what is, like, the thing that I can focus on next? And, like, this number is it, like, how do I get to this number by this date? And that was just the new plan. And so it felt like a very quick shift from, you know, focused on the startup to, oh, wow, no, this is like, not it. This is dead. And I think I must have spent some time making sure that I wasn't just having a momentary freakout because you don't want to go in that route either. But I remember it being a pretty quick and pretty adamant realization and decision. And it was probably bubbling up for a couple of months, just really what was going on. And then, yeah, I was just like, okay, this is the thing that I focus on now. And for better or worse, I think I am good at that. Of, okay, like, this feels like it's hit a wall or there's an issue here. And, like, but there's this other vector that does have potential. I'm going to go on that one. And that has worked out very well for me. And it has definitely had the downside, the negative side of, like, quitting things too quickly or killing things too quickly. And it can be tough to find that balance sometimes.

[B]

Yeah. When you think back on that, because you've written publicly about quitting and talked a lot about it, but do you. Do you have in 2026, where we sit now, do you have any updated thoughts on, like, when, like, sort of knowing when to fold them and knowing when to hold them? Like, is there. Do you have any new heuristics or, like, ways you're thinking about it?

[A]

Yeah, I think that ultimately, you know, I have always had this bias towards quitting early is the wrong term, but, like, being willing to kill something and move on to a better opportunity. The issue with that is that it has led to a lot of shiny object syndrome. And most people, I think, go through a period of that where they do this thing and then this thing and then this thing and then this thing, and they don't get anywhere. And so they realize, like, oh, I shouldn't do that. I should pick something and focus on it. The issue for me is that it's worked.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Right. In, like, and I don't know, whatever, I don't mean this in, like a braggadocious way. It's just like, I've gotten away with it, you know, Like, I've been able to get super interested and fascinated in things and go hard on them for a year and launch these little businesses off of my X account or my newsletter. And then they go super well, right? And it's like, okay, I can just become obsessed about something and dig into it for six months and then launch a course or do a product and it makes like a few hundred grand in the span of a couple of months. And it's like, great. Like, costs are covered for this next period of getting obsessed about things. And that's a cool ability to have. That's a really. I mean, it's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly useful. I'm very grateful that I've been able to do that. And it does lead to not fully committing to things, not seeing where they can go, not, I think, like, living up to my full potential or those ideas. Full potential in a lot of those areas because these moments will happen, right? I'll have these breakthrough periods and then instead of saying, like, okay, cool, the excitement is over. Now for the long, slow slog. Slog to 10x this or something. It's. Well, I could just goof off for six months and then I could just do this Again. And like, and that, that has been fun, that has been satisfying. And then really last fall, I actually sat down and I ended up having this conversation with my wife too, where I was like, I don't think I should keep doing this. Like, even though it's working and even though it has, you know, provided a lot of the sustenance and stuff for our life, it feels like I've been playing this game a little bit too long. Like, I should. I really need to. I want to focus on something. Like, I want to do something bigger that's like, serious, that has a meaningful risk of failure. Because I think part of it comes from a fear of failure, a fear of trying something big and it not working and being embarrassed, because that means I'm not smart, that means I'm not capable. But as long as I'm doing these little things, there's no risk feeling that way.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Six months later, something else will come down the road and you figure that out.

[A]

Something's going to happen.

[B]

Why did you that. Why last fall? Like, was there something going on that occasioned that kind of, hey, maybe I. I need to stick with one thing for a while.

[A]

I think it was. It was a combination of things. One, I been doing this sci fi writing for a year and a half and, you know, it was clear that that wasn't going to pay the bills. While that had been going on, I'd been super deep in building with AI and learning how to use these AI tools. And I had launched a course on learning how to Vibe code before Vibe code was even a term. Yeah, yeah, nobody had used that word yet. Andre hadn't coined it. It was basically the first big Vibe coding educational thing out there. And I launched it. It did like 250 grand of sales in a weekend. Went on to do half a million over the course of the year with like, basically no ongoing work after that first set of recordings, then an update in October. So, like, breakout success. And I had seen a lot of people who came in after me, some of them even, who took my course and then actually committed to doing something with those skills and building a product or building a bigger education business. And realizing that I had been so early, I had established myself in that topic area and then had just completely let that opportunity go. And, like, maybe there would never be another opportunity like that in my life. You know, I don't actually believe that, but it's a. It's a consideration. Right? And so looking at that, that was hard, right? It was like, wow, you know, I Like, I nailed this time. I mean, that was like. And then I just did nothing with it. I just, like, let it go. Right. And that felt like a mistake. I felt like, you know, this, and I think being a parent contributes to it a lot. Right. Where it's like, would I tell my kids to treat opportunities that way? Like, definitely not. Right. If they came to me and said, what should I do with this? I would say, like, obviously, you should keep going. Right?

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And so it's like, okay, well, why wasn't I doing that? And it just, it made me want to do something bigger or, like, fully commit to something. And that kind of like started that thought process last fall. And then I spent the next, like four or five, six months figuring out what that could be.

[B]

Yeah, well, so that kind of, you know, we'll cover some of the other. The other topics from your. From the early part of your adventures. But it brings us to what you are doing now, which is one of the most interesting things that I've seen in your career evolution. And you're just like the portfolio of stuff you work on. But tell us a little bit about the result of that soul searching last fall and what you are up to today.

[A]

Yeah, so I had that decision, basically made this decision last fall. Like, okay, I'm going to put the book work on hold. I'm going to take something from this interest in technology and really just go all in on it. And so started spending really all of my time at that point going, even going deeper than I had before on the building with AI, using AI, like, what is interesting here? And had started working on one product, led it to another and another, and was kind of going down that path. And then there was this like, tiny trickle of a side quest where Cameron Sorsby was working at Alpha School and he had DM'd me on Twitter and he had said, hey, all roads lead back to all roads. Exactly. All good things. All good things come from X. And So he had DM'd me on X. And he had said, hey, I work at Alpha School. I'm working on this new high school program for entrepreneurs. I want to help the kids level up their AI skills. Would you be down to come in and do a workshop for them? And I already knew about Alpha School at that point. It was. I was already. I. Kind of part of why I liked being in Austin was knowing that I could send my kids to Alpha School because to me it was and still is the most interesting thing happening in education. It's the one school that I would most want to send my kids to. And I liked being there. And it was actually, you know, literally one of the first thoughts going through my head was like, oh, this is how I get my kids into Alpha school.

[B]

Like, maybe they'll discount the tuition.

[A]

Just exactly. Like, I get in the good graces now and then when I apply next year for my kindergartner, like, I'll get through the application process because I'm already like on the end. Right. Like, I was literally thinking that, you know, it wasn't completely self motivated. There was like a bit of that, There was a bit of like, oh, yeah, this sounds super fun, this sounds super exciting. Like, of course I want to come do an AI workshop for these high schoolers. In part because I was curious to see what is an Alpha school high schooler, like, from everything I knew about the school. So I went and I did kind of a modified version of my building with AI course for these high schoolers and was just blown away because they were, they were super sharp. A lot of them had already started working on business ideas or had already built audiences. A couple of them, like over a million followers on TikTok. Right. They were, they were really sharp. They were asking better questions than a lot of adults that I had done some of this stuff with. And they could take feedback extremely well, which maybe stood out the most. Where I think there's a natural fear when working with students that you gotta, you kind of have to put on kid gloves. But they were very eager to hear, like, this part of your landing page is ugly. You can change the copy like this, you know, this is broken. You need to go harder here. They were super receptive to it. And so it was this really just. I loved doing the workshop.

[B]

Yeah. And then how long was that workshop was like a couple hours, a half day. What was the.

[A]

It was like a half day. Like four hours.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Because it was a little bit of talking and then independent work sessions and then coming back together and then independent work. So it's kind of like flowing back and forth over the course of an afternoon. And then after we did that, Cameron and I were hanging out and talking more. And then he told me more about what he had joined Alpha School to do, which was this new high school for entrepreneurs, what's now called founder school, where they would promise that the students would make $1 million by graduation or get all of their tuition refunded. And yeah, my immediate reaction was like, that is the worst business idea I've ever heard. Realize what you're committing to here, right? But then I thought about it some more and I thought about what I'd seen with the students and obviously I was super deep in building with AI and had seen what a lot of other teens out there were doing with AI, what teens were doing, starting businesses without this kind of support, and very quickly got to the point of, oh, this is actually doable, right? Like, it sounds insane, but you combine what Alpha's done with academics and being able to compress the whole high school day to about three hours, which gives you four to five hours of hands on workshops, instruction, mentorship, support, specifically on entrepreneurship in the afternoon. And you take that out across four years and then you add in what AI lets a teenager do and it all, you know, you fit all those pieces together and you realize like, oh, this is actually. Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world, especially if you get the right people in the room to help them or because it can go the wrong way if they have the wrong support, wrong mentors, wrong guidance, it's not going to work. But you get the right people in there, this could work, you know, so he just asked, like, would you be down to, like, chat with me occasionally as I, as I plan this out? I was like, yeah, this sounds awesome. You know, I'd love to come in and talk to the students, be a mentor, whatever. And so we were just talking about it for the next two, three months while I was working on all these other AI projects. And after a few months of us talking about it, I had kind of found something that was really taking off with the AI products. It was stuff related to OpenClaw and agents and side conversation, and basically was in the middle of launching that when Cameron and I hung out again. And he said, I think that for this school to work, I need somebody who is super entrepreneurial, super AI driven, good at quickly getting things from 0 to 1 to B on the ground, like working with the students, designing the curriculum and whatnot, alongside me. Because Cameron's like, I mean, one, he's great educator. He's been building college alternative programs for the last 10 years where he knows all that stuff. He's not as deep on the AI side or the like, hacky solopreneur side as I am. And so he was basically like, do you know anyone who'd be good to come do this with me?

[B]

You're looking at it.

[A]

And it was literally, it was one of the strangest moments of my life because I had not thought about it at all before. That moment, there was no part of me that was like, oh, I'm going to drop everything and come, like, be a co founder on a high school. Right. But then as soon as he asked that and, you know, as soon as he kind of put that seed of somebody needs to come do this with him, it was like, oh, like, it's me. I was like, oh, I need to talk about this with my wife. And I think I just went silent for a minute.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was kind of staring at him as I was processing all of this. And I think what I said was, I was like, it's not a no. Right. And then I could see him being like, wait, what? Like, this is an option. Yeah. And I went home and told Goet this is happening. And she was like, you have to do this. Right. And it would. It just immediately was like, this has to happen. And I think I. I think this was a Friday. And then I showed up Monday and just started working and didn't get officially hired for another month because, like, you know, it's a big company. You have to go through hr, you have to do other interviews and, like, negotiate comp, and do all the, like, big company stuff. But I was like, I don't care. Like, I'm just gonna show up and gonna start doing this with you and, like, we're gonna make this happen. And that's. And then I had to kind of shut off everything else. I didn't have to. And there was an evolution to the school that we might get into. Or at first I thought I was going to, like, I'll still do some of my side stuff.

[B]

I was going to ask that, like, did you see yourself doing this as another side hustle?

[A]

It started that way because in the beginning, this was going to be a program for the students in Austin.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then students who were already at Alpha School. Yeah, the Alpha High School in Austin. And then it very quickly evolved into, this should be like a dedicated high school program.

[B]

And can you walk us through that evolution? Because this. When I first heard about this, I was like, oh, Nat's going to be running programs for Alpha School. And then it was like, no, no, no. There's like a thousand person high school that the ambition is to build a thousand person high school in the middle of New York City. And then I texted you and you were like, I live in New York now.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

You really burned the boats there.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, we. We had that conversation where I decided to join beginning of February. And then we were kind of planning out the. The programming for it over the next six weeks. And like, what would it look like as part of the high school? You know, what would we teach? Who are the mentors that we want involved? You know, like, kind of like the program level structure. And then I did a workshop for the Austin students on using OpenClaw, which was, you know, for anybody who doesn't know, it's this way of using an AI agent that kind of unlocks it and gives it superpowers in a way that you don't get access to. If you're using Claude Cowork or even Claude Code or the Codex Codex desktop app or Perplexity Computer, all these other things that are agentic. They have, you know, a certain amount of agent abilities to act on your behalf. This is like the next step beyond in terms of what it allows you to do. It brings a lot of risks to it because you're giving it a lot of kind of unfettered access to things. But you build it right and it is the closest thing to having a human working alongside you. And I'd ended up adopting it pretty early, had kind of again, gotten away with very quickly building a ton of. Just by being excited about it, just by talking about it, like, not in a malicious way. I was just so obsessed with this and posting about it on X constantly. And then the students started asking like, hey, can we do a workshop on this? I was like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. Did a couple of workshops for openclaw with the Alpha students. And then the Alpha parents in other cities heard about it and they were like, wait, can you come do this with us? And so beginning of April, we come out to the New York campus to do the openclaw workshop with the New York students and their parents. And while we're doing the workshop, me and Cameron start just casually talking about Founder's School with these parents. And they're all like, that is the most incredible idea ever. Like, you gotta come do it here. And they started, you know, mentioning people they knew whose kids would be a good fit. It was like there was this immediate excitement and interest and possible, like, students who were a fit for it that we hadn't run into yet in Austin.

[B]

That's surprising. Did that surprise you at all? I mean, it did it first, yeah. Cause I would have thought you would have had to ship out to San Francisco or a stay in Austin as opposed to New York City.

[A]

It surprised me at first, but then the reason it ended up making sense is that that demand is absolutely there in Austin. In five to ten years. Austin is a young entrepreneurial city. Like, people are moving there earlier in their family's lives. And so the pre K, first grade, second grade, third grade demand for Alpha is overwhelming. But there aren't as many people who come from this entrepreneurial background or this ultra high net worth, high net worth background with teenagers who have come to Austin who are looking for this. And so that demand, there's a bit more of that here. And when you look at the elite high schools that we are competing with, the Horsemans, the Exeters, those much more of those are on the east coast than they are in Austin. And, and so that it was kind of like that drove the thinking, the parent excitement drove the thinking. And then it was just, it kind of became clear that, like, okay, if we're getting this started, we're going to have more demand for these students in New York City initially than we are in Austin. But Cameron was living in Austin, I was living in Austin with my three kids. You know, Joe, our principal, is in Austin and the New York campus is new. You know, New York only started last year. But the New York team was really excited about it. But it was kind of this funny thing where I think everybody arrived at the we need to do this in New York conclusion at the same time independently, but nobody wanted to bring it up first immediately. So there was like this little like dance that we were doing for about a week and then we all kind of said it at once and it was just like, oh, yeah, obviously that's what we're going to do. And that was mid April and June 1st. I moved in here.

[B]

All right, so we are, we are in Media res. Yeah, we're in the middle of this.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

So what is it? What? How is founder school going to be distinct from Alpha school?

[A]

Yeah. So I mean, the core premise of Alpha is that, well, one, students should love school. Right. Which sounds obvious kind of, but it's not a given at all. Right. And a lot of parents have just kind of accepted that their kid is going to be bored in school. And that's just part of life. Right. And so you say that. Oh, no, the, the primary, the number one mission of this school is that kids will love it. Right. That it says something. Right. And one of the main ways that you allow kids to love school is if you give them a good reason to get the academics done besides. I told you to. Right. Because normally, you know, you're getting academics done because otherwise you're going to get in trouble at school or get in trouble with your parents, right? And like, maybe your parents give you some money for getting A's in your report card. But Alpha kind of takes it to the max where we say, like, we want to make it as rewarding as possible to get your academics done. And first we're going to compress it to 2 hours a day in K through 8, 3 hours in high school. And we do that through an AI tutor that knows exactly where you are in reading, math, writing, science. Everything gives you the exact next thing you need to learn to progress to towards mastery for your age. And you're never sitting in a lecture, being bored, waiting for somebody to catch up. You're never slowed down from going ahead. If you're interested in a subject, you're getting kind of like the exact right challenge for where you are. And that lets you do the whole day in two hours. But, you know, you'll have people who say, like, oh, well, then they're in front of screens and they're working with AI, right? And it's. I understand why people are concerned about that. But then you talk to the students, right? And you hear them and you ask them, would you rather. And the test scores are better, right. Like, we have absolute, objectively, Alpha, you could argue that it's the highest performing private school in the country. Right. For a lot of these measures, especially. Especially on K through 8. And you ask the kids, like, okay, well, would you rather sit in classes all day or would you rather do these two hours on your laptop computer in the morning? And every single one of them says that, oh, I'd rather do that. You know, we used to survey our students and say, do you love school? And that was like one of our most important surveys at the end of each session each semester. But we stopped doing it because 90, 95%, 98% would say, yes, I love school. So it stopped being a useful measure. And so now we ask them, do you like school more than vacation? And 54% of students say, I would rather go to Alpha school than go on vacation.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And that's an insane.

[B]

That's an NPS that any business would

[A]

be proud to have. Yeah. But the way that that happens is that the compressed academics are one part of it, but the reward, the incentive, the benefit of that is that you're doing awesome stuff in the rest of the day. So it's still a full school day. It's still 9 to 3:30, but the academics are done by 11, 11:30. And then you have three or four hours to do other awesome stuff. And those change throughout the year. They change by grade level, but they're focused on some kind of life skills workshop where the students are doing something fun while building some important life skill. And they're often pretty ambitious for their age group. So, for example, one of the ones that the kindergartners do is they have a two month session where they climb a 40 foot rock wall.

[B]

Wow. Wow.

[A]

And so they go to a local climbing gym, they harness up, and day one, they go one step up the wall and they're all cheering for each other because they got on the wall. The next day they go two steps up, three steps up. You do that over two months and by the end of it, they're going 35, 40ft up this wall while their friends are cheering them on. The parents are terrified.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Of course, right. The parents are like, oh my gosh, what is this? But then they see how proud their kid is. They did it. They see their peers cheering them on and like, that's what they're spending most of their day on instead of sitting in a lecture hall. And so you ask a kid, right, like, would you rather sit in a lecture for most of the day or would you rather get your academics done and then go rock climbing the rest of the day?

[B]

Right. Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting, my. When I think about Alpha School, which I'm a huge fan of and I hope my daughter enrolls at some point. She's taking a different tack, at least through middle school, but then we'll see what happens with high school. I think some people think it's a bet on the reinvention of education. I think that's one part of it. I think the more accurate statement is it's actually a much safer bet on how kids already are wired. My daughter's creating things all the time. It just doesn't happen within the four walls of her school and at her school. And this is not a knock on them. This is their model. In some ways, it's actively penalized. Right. The things she wants to do to get ahead, the things she wants to do to break the rules a little bit, are not encouraged. It feels like what Alpha's doing is actually just in some ways catering to the inborn instincts of children.

[A]

Right.

[B]

As opposed to actually reinventing. They're reinventing the system that adults created. Right. But actually, kids are very naturally wired for these kinds of environments.

[A]

Kids are natural learners. They're naturally curious. And this was a really long way of me answering the question.

[B]

You started with Want to be?

[A]

Well, no, but like you, you segued it back perfectly. Because part of Alpha's, you know, ethos is that every kid is naturally motivated by something. There's something that they are just wired for, right? And this is kind of like there's this great Slate Star Codex article, the Parable of the talents, right? Where it's not so much that everybody is born with some innate talent for piano or for running or for writing or whatever, but we often are born with a fascination, something that we just naturally gravitate towards. And by gravitating towards something, you want to do more of it. It's kind of self rewarding. Most things in your life won't be right, but that's why you get paid to work and do all these other things. And so if you can find what it is a kid is just naturally drawn to do and you can free up their day to get to do a lot more of that, they will get through the academics way more efficiently and with much deeper mastery than they do in the normal system. And so Alpha School has created all of these different schools to cater towards different students fascinations. So Alpha is the one that most people know of the best, right? Like it's the most well known. It's kind of like the elite private school. And Alpha's afternoons are focused on these workshops. And then when you get to middle school and high school, you get to pick a big passion project that you want to dedicate that time to. But we have other schools like the Texas Sports Academies where you get your academics done in the two hours in the morning and then you spend the whole day playing sports. And for a lot of kids, that is what makes them perform, that is how they get through their academics. Because it's like, oh, you just got to get your two hours of math and reading done and then you can play basketball or volleyball or baseball for six hours. It's like, yeah, I'm going to get it done.

[B]

So when was, when did the thinking evolve to the point that Founders School was going to be its own entity and not like simply like a track that you could do within Alpha School? Because you're going to be admitting students who know they're going to Founders School. Right? Is that correct?

[A]

Yes, yes. So it kind of evolved from this model that Alpha had started at K through 8 of. Okay, it's like Sports Academy is for sports, right. Waypoint, the kids are horseback riding and doing archery and rucking and doing like outdoor activities activities GT School. It's hardcore on more Academics in the afternoon. And so we'd started this model at the younger ages and we said, okay, what are the high schools that should exist? Exactly. So Alpha School. Alpha High is the one where you can explore anything that you are passionate about and super interested in. It's very open ended. We have a student who is going for the Olympics in rowing. We have students who are writing novels, we have a student putting on a Broadway play. We have students who are starting businesses. And it was actually partially their idea to do Founder school. Because the thinking with Founder's school is okay, if you are really serious about building a business in high school and you want to be held to even higher expectations on that, but get even more deeper, crazy support to go after it, this is the school for you. And so it's kind of like it's stepping up the expectations. Obviously we have a longer school day. Right.

[B]

So it's longer than the usual Alpha School days.

[A]

Yeah. So it ends at 5 instead of 3. 30.

[B]

Why that choice? That's an interesting choice or design choice.

[A]

Get more time. Right. So it's kind of like we are saying that it's basically like if you were going into an apprenticeship in the preschool era, you're deciding at 14, 15, 16 that you're going to become a master blacksmith. And nobody should be able to say like, oh no, you have to go do these other things before you become a blacksmith if you know that's what you want to do. And obviously our students are still being held to very high academic standards. We're still doing all the academics, they're still going to be in excellent shape for college. But if they know that entrepreneurship is what lights them up and that's what they're going to be doing when they go home anyway after school, they can just stay with us longer. Because the great thing about how we've designed Founder's School is that there is programming and curriculum and structure, but it's also very heavily tailored to provide the exact support the student needs at where they are in their business. So instead of a month or two months or a semester where we're doing tons of classes on Facebook ads, if we see that a student is at the point where they might start experimenting with meta ads and that is something that they want to explore, we're getting them one on one support with an expert who is a practitioner in the field, somebody who's like running an ads agency or something, who we are buying a certain amount of time from each week to work with our students, to train them, mentor them Audit their process and help them learn that specific skill right at the time when they need it. And so they're getting this incredible amount of support for anything they might run into in their business, along with the, like, coaching, emotional support, encouragement that is kind of like standard for Alpha across both the academics and the extracurriculars.

[B]

Got it. And so the. The audacious bet, right. Is the bet that you started our conversation with, which is you will make a million dollars in revenue by the end of your four years or we will gross profit. Gross profit.

[A]

Not revenue, not revenue.

[B]

Wow. And even more audacious.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So how does that mean, you know, without giving away states, secrets or anything privileged or something you can't share, what was the thinking around that particular set of numbers, the bet, that kind of promise? Because that's. That is, among other things, the thing that's been getting headlined.

[A]

Yeah, so this was something that Joe came up with when he came up with the idea for the school. Because remember what I said at the beginning of the conversation, you say just

[B]

a little bit about Joe, so people have context of who he is, and there are people who are gonna be learning about Alpha School for the first time.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. So Joe Lamont joined, kind of came in as the second co founder for Alpha School about five years ago. Alpha was originally started by Mackenzie Price in 2014. She ran it as a school in Austin using all these same principles of kind of direct instruction, one on one mentorship, spending most of the day on activities, and pioneered the overall structure for the school with incredible success. Success. Joe founded a software company in the 90s called Trilogy. It's grown. And he's the sole owner of it now. Deca. Billion dollar company. Massive successful tech entrepreneur. And his daughter ended up going to Alpha in Austin. And so he kind of found out about it that way and he fell in love with the model. Was just amazed by what McKinsey had figured out about teaching students this way. And then he was actually. He sold one of the first pieces of software that was called like, AI. It was back in the 90s. It was like Salesforce. Before Salesforce would be like a way you could describe it. So he's been obsessed with the potential of AI for 30 years now. And so when generative AI came on the scene, he basically went to McKinsey and said, this is how we take what you have figured out and bring it to a billion students.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Because with AI, we can. This is how we scale it. And so that is the, like, core mission of everything that we are doing at Alpha is how do we bring the best education possible to a billion students around the world? And it's kind of like this Tesla model, right? Like we were starting with the Model S with the Roadster, the, you know, we need the expensive one first and then we're able to bring it down market to broader and broader audiences. And so he brought in the software side, invested a significant amount of his capital, and started building out the Alpha that more people have heard of today. And so he's obviously an incredibly successful tech entrepreneur. He saw the students in Alpha who are really entrepreneurial and between them and he, they came up with this idea for the founder school. Right, the school for entrepreneurs.

[B]

Make a million dollars in profit or your money back.

[A]

Exactly. But he, he knew the same thing that I said at the top of the conversation, which was that there are no good entrepreneurship programs out there.

[B]

Right, Right, right.

[A]

Like, you know, there's no undergraduate entrepreneurship degree that's worth it. There's really no graduate one that's that good either. There are people who go to these schools and then become successful entrepreneurs, but there are really none of these schools that reliably drive outcomes in entrepreneurship. And so if you just said we're launching a high school for entrepreneurs, it's kind of like, okay, right. Like there's a lot of places that are for entrepreneurs, right? There's fbla, there's all these things that say they're going to teach you entrepreneurship. And everybody kind of knows that they're not or they're not going to do that good of a job. But then if you say we're launching a school for entrepreneurs and if your kid doesn't make a million dollars by graduation, we are going to refund you the tuition. Tuition is 150k a year. So, you know, we're saying that we're going to give you back 600k at the end of 4 years if we don't get your student to this outcome. And obviously there's like caveats to this, right? Like, you know, we're assessing the students each year, right. If a student comes in sophomore year, then they're not on the guarantee, right. Like there's all the edge cases and guarantee and things like that, but that is the core promise of the school. And really that's a pressure or that's. It's putting the pressure on us to actually figure this out. Right. To actually make sure that we are delivering on these outcomes and not playing startup like I was when I was in college, trying to learn this for Myself. And so it's this incredible forcing function and it's the only reason that anybody's talking about this. Right. Because we have to be insanely committed to creating the best education experience possible on this topic. One that has never existed before and that nobody has made this kind of commitment before. And that is where all of our mental energy is going is like, we know this is possible and we just have to really fine tune that as we work with the students.

[B]

How do you avoid the undue pressure? I mean, you're early innings in this. Right. So it's like, it's actually fun to talk about it while it's still being figured out. How have you thought about not putting that pressure on the student themselves for that kind of gross profit or money back burden?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've actually had a couple of parents who have said that they don't want to do the guarantee.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[A]

Okay. Because of that reason? For that exact reason.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Right. They're like, I don't want my student to feel like you're my kid. I always say student because it's like kids don't like being called kids. But yeah, I don't want my kid to feel like they have to hit this or I'm going to be right. And it's like, yeah, obviously. Right. Like we don't want that either. Right. It's first and foremost an offer to the parents. Right. It's like it is the most expensive high school in the country. Aside from IMG maybe, but that's how much we're investing in the students. Like there's no other school that is going to get your kid on the phone with like a top tier meta ads expert the next day when they have trouble with their ADS account. Right. Like, but it's a, it's a huge investment. And so we're saying like this is what we are willing to commit to. Right. But we don't want to create, you know, unpleasant pressure on the students. But it's also it, it factored into how we ended up at the like gross profit calculate or decision to. Well, so it's kind of like, okay, we, we want the most aligned structure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Without while creating minimum adverse incentives. Right. And so. Okay, if we do, we can't do valuation.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because. Oh, I raised.

[B]

Right, you can. Valuations can be.

[A]

Yeah, I sold. They're made up every day 1% to my company for. Exactly. Right. It's like, okay, we're not going to do that because then they might not learn anything.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. Like, because Part of this is how do we make sure they learn the most? Right. And so, okay, then revenue. Don't really want to just do revenue either, because then they could just be, like, incredibly unprofitable. And they, like, they have made money and they've, like, built some business, but it's not necessarily, like, a good business. And so we went from that to, okay, well, net profit then. Right. Like, it'll be net profit because we want them to not just, like, spend infinite money on ads or something and then, you know, spend 10 million on ads to get a million in revenue because, you know, mom and dad funded or something. Like, we don't want that. But then we realized the problem with net revenue or net profit was that we would. We would create other adverse incentives where we were telling the students not to reinvest in their business.

[B]

Oh, that's fascinating.

[A]

Right. And we're like, well, shoot, we don't want that either.

[B]

Take money out in order to avoid the exact. Their parents get back the 600K.

[A]

Exactly. Right. We didn't want to be going to the stage students and saying, like, no, don't run ads. Don't do another production run, don't hire an employee, because we need to make this number happen. Right. And so that's how we ended up on this kind of, like, gross profit calculation where it's like, okay, you know, we're going to factor in a certain amount of cost of goods sold. And, like, you probably wouldn't normally put, like, advertising and stuff in there, but we're going to put that in there, too. But we're not, you know, we're not going to try to disincentivize you from, like, growing your team or reinvesting in the business or doing any of that, because, like, there might be a student who builds a $10 million business. And like, I. That sounds insane sometimes when you say it in front of parents, but I think that's fully possible in four years. Just seeing some of the students who are applying who are already making progress. Some of the students who. I mean, Zach Yadigari. What? He's 19 and he sold Calai for $50 million. Wow. Like, and he was going to a normal school. He had to figure this all out on his own.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

And so it's like, this is possible. But no, that was like, it's. And the reason that we have to put so much thought into it is that we want the best structure possible for everybody. It's not like trying to get out of something it's like the thing we care most about is providing the best entrepreneurial education for these students. Something that has never existed before, that they would be, they would not need to go to any of these graduate entrepreneurship programs afterwards. Like actually one of my, like personal KPIs that they could teach a class at places when they graduate. Right. Like, if they can't teach a class at hbs, then like I have failed. And so like that's what we're aiming for and this is how it kind of gets out there.

[B]

Yeah. So what is the. So, you know, I understand the part of Alpha School that is about compressing an ordinary school day into the two to three hours that makes all the sense in the world. Like there's so many things about that that it's almost table stakes at this point. Right. That because, because of Alpha School success, by the way, that's not a knock, it's a, they did it, they proved it. You kind of accept it. And if you don't accept it, you're just not looking at the math, you're not looking at the numbers. Right. What is the program design? And I know you're still early with this. What is the program design like for founder school? Specifically after you've, you've checked the boxes on the things that need to be checked with your academics in the morning.

[A]

So academics are done in the morning and then we have the students from basically 12 to 5 for the entrepreneurial section. About 70% of the week is independent work time or if they're working with another student as kind of like co founders working together, that is, they're working on whatever stage in their business they're in. And one of the things that we realized really early on and really quickly was that just as Alpha School cannot rely on being able to find incredible second grade math teachers in every location, like the software needs to provide excellent support. We too at founders need to create and are creating like the best software to support an early entrepreneur wherever they are in their journey. So a lot of it comes, it starts with this three kind of these three axes that we think are the most important for them to figure out to get started. The first is developing expertise. And this is another fun like tie in for me because I spent years as like a personal knowledge management influencer, went very deep on this topic. You know, how do you teach yourself things, how do you learn things? And now AI has both given us superpowers in that sense, but it's also given us this incredible crutch. People will just like Sling slop. Right, right. And they might make a document about a topic. Yeah. And then you ask them a question about it.

[B]

They have no idea what they're in there.

[A]

They have no idea what's in it. And so the thing that we start every student with is like, I know you want to go build a business. I know you want to go work on a business. Right? Now, you don't get to do that until you show that you have demonstrated that you've developed some meaningful knowledge and expertise in a subject area so that you can actually build a business here. Because the number one thing that we see with students starting businesses is they start things related to school, which sometimes is a good idea. Right. Sometimes like a good ed tech. Right. Like that's a good business. A lot of the times it's not. Or they start businesses for other teens who don't have money.

[B]

Don't have money.

[A]

Like, just not the right market that you want to go after. So the first thing that we do and the first thing that we're pushing them towards is, okay, start just thinking of topics that you're just interested in and go through this process of building expertise, building deeper knowledge and teaching yourself being able to explain what you are learning and just see where that leads you. Because if you don't have a somewhat unconventional point of view on this topic, it's going to be hard for you to carve out a real competitive advantage in almost any business that you would want to go into. So we start them there.

[B]

And what does that look like? Do they read? Do they talk to people? Do they mix of both? What does that time look like where they're developing expertise?

[A]

So it's a mix.

[B]

What do you say? What do you want it to look like?

[A]

Because you're still building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've actually got. This is the tool that we've gone the farthest on because it's the foundational element. And it looks like a mix of reading and talking to people, but then doing their own research and kind of like annealing, you know, like sharpening a samurai sword. Right. Like consolidating their opinions based on these sources into defensible positions on these topics. So a little bit like what you might do in thesis research in like a PhD program, but with the support of good technology that uses AI to challenge you and help with your research and expose you to new ideas and new directions without doing the work for you. And so you can almost imagine there's aspects of, like, Readwise and like, Roman obsidian, but in this kind of like narrow context, like pushing them towards focusing on this one area so they're not just like sprawling out into tons of directions. So that, that's one part of it. Another part is the like audience and network building. Because the, the second big challenge of becoming an entrepreneur in, in high school is that not only do you not have any expertise and experience, you don't know anyone, you don't know anyone, you don't know anybody. Right? Like you have no connections. Yeah, you might have some family connections, you have the alpha connections, but that's of kind, kind of it. And so we're pushing them to in a healthy way get online, right? Predominantly X because that's where we just see the most ROI. Like or LinkedIn. Right. But really X and find the people who are the experts here who know this subject area really well, follow them, engage with them, see what they're talking about and try to thoughtfully engage with them while building a bit of that. Offer audience yourself by sharing your thoughts. And one of the most honest, you know, measures of if you are developing interesting thoughts on this topic area is if you start getting responses, if you start getting engagement, right? And not like engagement in a negative viral kind of way, but if other smart adults are thoughtfully replying to you, you're getting somewhere. Right? And so we're helping them build expertise and build actual like industry establishment through things that teenagers never had access to before or like AI and the Internet and then social media, but being used in a good pro education, pro learning way, not a slop and you know, TikTok doom scrolling way and then so that you know, it kind of starts there and we're going to start them all there and they're going to be pissed at me because they want to you know, vibe code and happen to say like, you know, like you can do a little bit of that in your free time but if you don't start here, then that stuff is never going to work. Right. Like start here. So we do that and then they move into our co founder tool basically which working with a mix of that and our guides, our entrepreneurs and residents, our mentor network, all of them, it's like, okay, you know, I've developed these like points of view, I've started to make some of these connections and I've talked to these people in the industry and gotten their perspective. These are some of the things that I think are interesting ideas, right? And kind of exploring as many of those as possible at first and being challenged on them by the tool but also by us and by the people who they've made connections with in the field. And we have kind of strong opinions on this, a lot of it influenced by Joe because, you know, I've had the privilege of getting to spend a lot of time with him and learn from him how he thinks about business and you know, technology and opportunities. And we've actually built a lot of that into the product. Right. And so the students are almost getting this direct support from him through the tools and from him actually like coming to the school and working with them as they start to like form these ideas. And so it just kind of helps them move through this process of getting to the validation phase of oh, you came up with something that was a good idea, that is a good plan to get to a reasonable scale in a reasonable amount of time. And you have validated it, you have made some kind of mvp, some basic version, you've charged money for it. Right. And now you are set up to do the flywheel. Right. Of like, okay, now you're going to try something and see if it works. You're going to hit a bottleneck and you're going to ask us for help of getting through that. And we're going to be checking in with you every single day during our standups, during your internal reporting to figure out where those challenges are and get you the exact support you need for whatever that next step in your business is.

[B]

Got it? Is it businesses in general? When you think about the model, are you thinking about businesses where they are

[A]

going to have to hire people eventually?

[B]

Eventually.

[A]

I mean, I love that idea. Like, I mean, yeah, if we have a 16 year old who has a team of 10 people who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, oh my gosh, that'd be incredible.

[B]

But I mean, I mean it's seriously like, are you anticipating that? I guess at the beginning you're saying a lot of these businesses theoretically are things that could be run with small

[A]

teams or one person. Yeah, I would prefer, prefer that their ideas allow them to get to that million dollar mark without hiring anybody. So ideally they're clever use of AI, good pricing strategy, good market opportunity that's completely reasonable these days. And so that's what we would nudge them towards. I wouldn't want them to try to do a, a dog like waste pickup service where you need to hire a bunch of people at minimum wage and kind of like monitor them one for the legal logistics. Because they're minors.

[B]

They're minors.

[A]

Right. Which does introduce a lot of real challenges. I mean they, you know, they can't open bank accounts, they can't like sign legal forms. Right. And so it's a conversation we have to have with the parents too, of, you know, hey, you're cool, cool with this. Right. Because they're going to be building a business and your name is going to have to be on it as well. And they're all cool with it. Right. But it does create these weird bottlenecks where, yeah, you do kind of have to bias towards software, certain tech, like E commerce, some things where it's a little bit easier to get some of that initial scale than if you have to go immediately. Because also a lot of people in their 30s probably don't want to work for a 16 year old.

[B]

Of course not.

[A]

Right. Yeah. I mean, occasionally you'll meet maybe not, you know, it's.

[B]

Yeah. I think we're also in a brave new world of that. I think you could see a universe in which that's okay. One question I have, I mean, among other questions is are you screening? How are you doing the screening and selection process? I mean, this is actively happening now. So how do you admit a class of people that you think are going to thrive in an environment like this?

[A]

Yeah, you know, it's, it's something that one we had to put a good, a lot of thought into and are obviously going to keep refining. And for this first class, we set the max at 20, I think it'll probably be 10 to 12 because we're being one, obviously very selective with it and we wanted it to be a small enough initial cohort that we could all be really hands on with every student while we run this first year of it. And so the first thing that surprises people is we don't ask for a transcript because it doesn't matter that much what your grades were because basically every student who comes into Alpha, no matter what great school they went to, they're anywhere from one to, gosh, five years behind on reading or math or these core subjects and not fully behind, but they have kind of holes in their knowledge that we need to fill in. And so it doesn't tell us that much. It gives us some idea of how gritty you are, what your grades were. But even for that, it's not a great measure for that. What we have is our challenge. And so there's a first round of the application which kind of just gets you in the door, short answers on why you want to do this, what you've done, entrepreneurship, you know, hardest thing you've ever done, those kinds of things. But then you get a challenge where over the course of two weeks, you have to go through a baby version of the process I've just described. You have to come up with an unintuitive position on something you have to put together, like an MVP of. You know how you would do that. You have to go try to sell it to at least 20 people who are not your friends and who are not related to you. And then you have to make a video and do a write up on everything you did and everything you learned and send us all the links so that we can go look at it. And they don't. Now, I think more people know that this is the challenge, but for everybody in the process right now, they didn't know this, so they didn't really have time to prepare for it. And so you learn a lot about a candidate when they have that two week deadline to go do this. And some people just disappear at that point in the application. And that tells us everything. Cause it's like, okay, cool, this isn't the right program for you. But then other students just, I mean, blow us away, right? Like, we had one student who enrolled and he was having a lot of trouble getting sales during the sales part of the process. And so he ended up getting the D list for his entire school and emailed everyone, like, pitching his app to them. And he got in trouble, go to the dean's office. But then he's telling me, and I'm like, that's amazing.

[B]

That's amazing.

[A]

What is that? Exactly, Exactly. And so those are, you know, those are the kinds of things we're looking for. It's like, are you fully committed to this? And then in lieu of the transcript, we have what's called a ccat, which is a cognitive aptitude test. And so a lot of people don't know this. Alpha makes every employee take this same test. And if you are below the 85th percentile, you are not eligible for any role at the company. So every single person at Alpha, the guides, the admin, everyone has to be in the top 15% on this cognitive aptitude test. And that's actually, it's incredibly reassuring for an education institution. You know that every single person interacting with your kids is at this level. It's great for working there because you know that everybody passed this. And so we just used the same thing for the students. One, because we were doing admissions kind of last minute. We opened it in May or September. And so I didn't want to make them go like, do an SSAT and it's only 15 minutes.

[B]

Okay. Oh, wow. It's a 15 minute test.

[A]

It's a 15 minute test.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So it's, you know, it's quick, but it's 50 questions. And you know, it's a mix of math, reading, kind of like spatial awareness, like similar ish questions to like an IQ or workplace competency test. And so we have them take that in lieu of looking at like transcripts or other standardized tests.

[B]

Got it. You know, we're gonna, we could talk about this for a couple more hours. I wanna be respectful of your time. What do you, how do you treat summers? Cause this is a. You're, you're enrolling kids into a four year program, presumably. Right. And so what are you doing with the. Like a business doesn't stop, just the summer starts, right? Yeah. How have you thought about that?

[A]

We'll keep school hours during the summer for them to come in and work on campus, and we'll just not do the academic portion. Right. So. And Austin actually keeps their school open all summer too. This was, this was the student's idea because they loved going in and hanging out with their friends. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we'll do the same thing here. Well, we'll say, yeah, like we encourage you to keep working on this over the summer. We'll be here to provide all the same resources and support. Oh, but I didn't even finish talking about what the rest of their day looks like. Yeah, yeah, it's that 70% working where they are in their business with us and the apps and the tools. But then we're going to have workshops each month on different themes. So we'll do a month of leveling up everybody's AI skills. Right. A month of leveling up everyone's sales skills. A month of copywriting. Right. Like some of these core business concepts will do probably like two. Yeah, it'll be two workshops a week of about like one and a half to two hours of going deep on this one skill for this month with kind of an adaptive structure so that you're not having to learn beginner material if you're a little bit more advanced. But it creates like more community time. Right. Interact, you know, working with each other instead of like just working alone in your business. And it gets, it lets us like help them develop these skills they might not get as much exposure to until they need it. And then the last part of the week is pretty much every week we'll either have a, you know, elite S tier top entrepreneur, founder, executive coming in and Speaking to the students, especially about their early journey, like their early days, how they got started, you know, what they learned, what they did, doing lunch with a few of them, you know, looking at their businesses, giving them feedback, giving them some of that exposure as well. Or it'll be like a roundtable discussion on a book or something. Right? So we'll probably have them read the founders.

[B]

I was gonna say sign me up, because a lot of it's funny you're talking, and a lot of what I went deep on in that book were the high school years of the people that I was writing about. So it was Reid Hoffman, it was Elon Musk, it was Peter Thiel, it was Max Levchin, it was David Sacks. I would go and I would start my discussions with them way before PayPal ever started. Like, the first conversations were usually around high school and college because you find that in many cases they are living their version of founder school. Right? They all. Exactly, yeah. They cobbled it together, often at great personal risk and in the face of a lot of parental pressure and stuff. There was one person. You're telling a story that reminded me of a gentleman that I interviewed who is, I think, like the fifth or sixth employee at PayPal. And he was on the engineering team, and his name was Tom Pytel. And he was like this famously, this, like, vagabond with. With very dubious footwear. Like, his shoes were like, ratty. But he was genius level coder. And he didn't, you know, it was sort of. It was interesting and somewhat like, you know, you would admire people who dropped out of college. He actually dropped out of high school, and he decided he was just going to take it, take the show on the road. He was writing code, I think, for video games, and he dropped out of high school and started working right then and just continued that. Found his way to PayPal, had no interest in being an employee, but somehow, you know, the team kind of coaxed him into it, and that was how he got his start. And he was the ultimate example of what you're talking about without any of the support or the structure or anything.

[A]

I mean, again, going back to why we believe this is possible is that people have been hacking versions of this together with way less support. Nobody really doubts that a Stanford sophomore could drop out and start what becomes a billion dollar business. So it's like, what are they getting at Stanford? One, there's the stage selection effects. Two, it's some amount of network, right, that you get from, like, being there and meeting the people who are coming to visit campus and maybe a couple of the classes. But a lot of it is just that, like, oh, okay, like a 20 year old can do this, a 19 year old can do this. So a 16 year old can definitely start a million dollar business, right? It's eminently reasonable. It's just no one's tried before, right?

[B]

Well, no one, I think, has sort of set. I think one of the things that AlphaSchool has made possible is you've just expanded the Overton window on what is possible in education. Right? A lot of it is like you just, you've asked the unreasonable question, you have said, well, what if this could be true? And then it becomes true as a result of simply asking and then selecting the students and building the programming. Like a lot of it I think is, is pushing the boundaries on what it seems crazy, but it's actually not all that crazy.

[A]

No, I think that people generally dramatically underestimate, especially teenagers, right? Because we have infantilized teenagers for a long time, right? You have to go to this place and follow this bell schedule and do what we tell you to do. And then now you have to stay close to home. You don't get to travel out very much in most places. We've gotten afraid of all these things. And then you go to college and there you have to follow these rules too. And so we think of a 14, 15, 16 year old as less capable than they are. And obviously they're still children, right? And like, they still need support and they need encouragement, they need a certain amount of guardrails. But also sometimes you just have to like, get out of their way and tell them that, like, I believe in you and give them like just the right little nudge to get them started. And then they just do these incredible things. There was one student at Alpha High when I was doing the OpenCloud workshop, and I just, I kind of asked them, I asked the group at one point, I was like, where do you think you fall nationally on AI competence? Like, are you top 10%? Are you top 1%? Are you top 20%? You know, where do you, where do you all think you fall? And the consensus was like, top 10%. And this was towards the end of the Open Cloud workshop. And so I was like, no, guys, you don't understand. You're like top 0.01%. People will pay a lot of money for you to help them, like implement this stuff and do it. And, and I could tell some of them didn't believe me. Some of them believed me. But then I put it out there. I was like, if you want, you know, if you want to, like, test me on this, like, I will intro you to somebody who would probably pay you to help them with that. And one student took me up on it, and I introed him to somebody who was like, trying to learn how to do open claw and AI stuff. And he made 250 bucks for, like a two hour call with him. And he was to the moon. You know, he'd never made money doing something like this before, and he was obsessed with the tech. And so it was like, oh, my gosh, I can make money doing something that I really like. And then we were debriefing. We were debriefing afterwards. I was like, awesome. Like, you know, super happy for you. Super glad. I was like, next time you do that, try charging four times as much. You could just like, you know, his eyes, like, seriously, that's amazing. And then he did, and they were just like, yeah, sure, right? And so they paid him 1000 bucks the next time he did it, right? And it was just like, it was. And after that, he just started getting referrals and his business was kind of like. And I did nothing after that, right? And I think he made like north of 10 grand off of doing this over the course of that spring. And all I had to do was, like, one little nudge and, you know, one intro and then kind of like get out of the way, right? It's like it just kind of like got to give him the opportunity, I think.

[B]

Yeah. I think the other. The thing you made me reflect on is something you said at the very start of our conversation, which is the difference between being entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial and doing entrepreneurship. Because you had this line where you talked about you were entrepreneurial in deciding that you could, like, make $250 an article or $150 an article and use geographic arbitrage to go live somewhere where that would actually allow you to live a life. And that was. That required an entrepreneurial frame of mind, even if it wasn't like big E entrepreneurship in the conventional sense. And I think that, like, as I think back to my own high school years, my first businesses were I built custom built computers for people, right? And I had. I was doing the other parts of, like, a traditional academic life, right? Getting the grades, went to Duke, all of that stuff, right? Did well in the SATs. But what I realized was that actually it was in building businesses and just hacking things together that I actually use those same techniques to hack my education, right? Whether it was designing my own major or this is totally random, but I became obsessed with how you could hack the satisfaction. So at one point, what I did was I did like a super deep dive on all these obscure forums, like online, about different ways people attack the sat. One of the things that you discover is, at least in my stone age era, when you had to fill it in by hand and you were circling the bubbles. If you put one black mark through the middle of the letter, it counts for that answer. Instead of shading the circle, that can seem like a really small thing. Except when you shade a circle, it takes like three to four seconds to shade the circle. If you do the single black vertical line through, like multiple choice answer A, you get that's one second. So the difference between one and, say five seconds or one and four seconds is like three to four seconds total. But you multiply that across the entire test and you have gained back minutes like, that you can actually use to like do the test faster. Because the only reason the SAT is hard is the time pressure. Given infinite time, everybody would be able to get a perfect score theoretically. Right. But the time pressure is what matters. And so once I figured that out, I was like, well, I'll just do the vertical line thing, gain back two to four minutes per section, and that gives me all the time I need to then, like, check answers or go back and do whatever. And it was. But I don't think I would have had that ability if I hadn't been also just trying to hack things together on the side, whether it was on the Internet or in real life with computers. And it seems to me that what you're giving these, I hate to say, kids, students. Right. Is the gift of that entrepreneurial cast of mind, the same one that would have led you to be like, I can do Thailand and $150 an article for Zapier and make it work.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I think that some people are certainly wired this way. And, you know, we. I actually don't know the answer of if this is something that, like, develops or if it's something that you're born with. But either way, find out. Yeah, I know, I know. Right? There's a lot of students who think this way and feel this way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they feel like the world and the education system is against them because they're being told that they're bad or whatever if they're not following these set of rules. And this is the one thing I didn't expect, but it has ended up being incredibly rewarding. And meaningful from doing this even at this early stage is talking to some of these students and these parents and then them kind of saying, like, we never thought that there could be a school that said, like, this is okay. Wow. Right? That, like, you know, we're like, you're like, you're a good kid. Right. Like, you're not. You fit in here. Right. Like, this is a space for you. Yeah. And that's been really cool to see too, because it's like, I didn't have that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I think a lot of kids don't have that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think even just like, getting a lot of students like that in one room together.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Is going to be pretty incredible. So excited.

[B]

You uprooted your whole life for this. And in some ways you went from. You made the same transition I did, which is I never thought I would have a job, and then I decided to run a book publisher. Right. What's it been like just transitioning back to you? What's it been like moving from Austin to New York, but then also deciding like, no, I'm going to be a part of someone else's ecosystem for a while and. And develop this and design this, but it is bigger than me. I mean, this gets back to the question of commitment, but does this. How has that been for you?

[A]

It's been. I mean, it's been great, actually. You know, I've always been interested in this topic in education. The very. One of the first entrepreneurial things I did after college was a podcast for kids who, like, didn't fit in in the normal college education system and trying to, like, tell their stories and connect with them. And I, you know, one, I'd sort of just assumed I would never do anything in education and, like, it had never felt like something that I actively wanted to go after but had always been interested in and was hopeful that somebody would. And so now, you know, if I were going to say, like, oh, I want to make a school for entrepreneurs, or like, obviously it should be part of alpha, really, it just makes so much sense. And to the extent that I had, you know, admonitions about joining a big company, it's really. I mean, it's like a startup. I mean, the pace that it moves at is incredible. Right. We were. We had 25 schools last year. We're going to have at least 40 this year and, you know, a lot more next year. Those growing like crazy. And then, you know, we. At founder school, like me and Cameron, it just feels like we're co founders on a Startup that, you know, thankfully is well funded and has a lot of support around it. But we, you know, we, we get to control our hiring pipeline and design our application process and our curriculum and like, it has to fit the alpha ethos and everything. But we have a lot of freedom to be very entrepreneurial with it. You know, we're not like, clocking in, so to speak. Right. Like, it's, it's, it wouldn't work if you were. Exactly. So, like, I think all the things that I was afraid at about, like taking a job. Yeah, yeah. Just like, haven't, haven't realized. And instead it's just been like, incredibly fun and going back to the, you know, the thing that I was talking about the very beginning of, like, wanting to work on something big and something long term and, you know, really fully commit to something. Like, you know, I thought that that had to be something 100% my own. But, you know, maybe that was also, at least for this phase of life, for where I was like the thing that was holding me back in some sense where, like, I'm learning so much from being in a bigger organization like this, from not having some of the immediate, like, profitability pressure that I would have had on my own solopreneurship things, from being. Getting to work with Joe and see how he thinks about business and learning from him. It's like I, it makes me feel like I was, it was actually a big limiting belief for me to think that I have to always work for myself. Like, I have to do this alone. And like, I'm just, I'm super glad that like, I'm doing this because, I mean, it's just the interest has been incredible and like, seeing these students applying and, you know, it's like, it's so much fun. I'm having such a great time with it.

[B]

Yeah. So, well, I, I wanted to talk to you about many, many other things, but also this conversation has been utterly riveting in this sense. And I think we ought to actually try to have your students on Infinite Loops coming up in the year ahead. So as they are going through the process, I think it would be a lot of fun to see what they're building, how they're building it, how the school is maturing and evolving. And I hope we can, we can do that. As, you know, having been a repeat guest, you know, we ask a question at the end of every episode. You've got, you can't. You've got the ability to basically incept an idea into everybody's two ideas. Into everybody's minds, right? Two thoughts, whatever they are, you can't use it for violence. You can't overthrow governments. I mean, unless you might. Yeah, I think we could actually sanction that one. But you basically get to be emperor for a day and do this, and everybody will wake up the next morning with these two ideas in their head, right? And now it's an interesting question for you as a guest because you actually are like molding young minds, right? But what are off the top of your head? What are the two ideas that you would incept in everyone's mind or two thoughts, quotes, anything.

[A]

Obviously it's naturally going to be topical because this is what I keep thinking about with so much of this is based on. But the first one that I do think of is what I said earlier. It's like, take teenagers seriously. I talked about this with Chris Powers when I was on his podcast a couple of months ago. But the more that I have thought about this and explored this idea, the more it actually does feel like there might be way more problems than we expect that stem from expanding childhood as far as we have. So if we go way back, something like founder's school, you actually find versions of it in Maria Montessori's writing because she talked about, okay, the childhood school. School is this kind of like core life skills, you know, the cleaning and the cooking and the things like everybody should know how to do to like operate as an adult and the manners and whatnot. But then she never got to realize this because of challenges with how society was changing at the time and her resources. But her vision of later stage education was this Erdkinder, where you were doing a bit of academics, but then you were working on a farm or in some kind of apprenticeship and you were getting these like hands on skills because she didn't think that teenagers should be stuck in a classroom. And you look at basically every society pre modern age had these significant moments where like you transition into adulthood in a sense around like 14, right? You know, you think about like a bat mitzvah and a bar mitzvah, right? Like it's around that age. A confirmation is around that age. You visit tribes and in Kenya, in the Maasai Mara, and guess when they're like adulthood, you are now a contributing member of this tribe is it's around that 14h, right. And I actually think that a lot of the kind of things that we assume are going to be bad about childhood might be because kids hate school. And some things that we assume might be bad about Having teenagers might be because they're capable of doing more adult things, being more of adults, but then being heavily constrained by their environment. And so they are naturally going to lash out against the things doing, the constraining. Right. The school and the parents and society. And so Alpha has done a good job of this question of like, what if we took students, and especially teenagers seriously and gave them this freedom? And now we're kind of like taken to the extreme here where it's like, no, what if we trusted you as much as like a 30 year old to do a business? And I feel like there's a lot of unexplored opportunity there. And you know, we take it a step further. These are different things to be really clear. But people who, you know, people getting married much later, people starting families much later, the like aging population, the. I think that we've just like kind of extended childhood further than we should in. And it can sound dangerous sometimes to say that because you don't want to force kids to grow up too fast. I'm not advocating for that either, but I am advocating for if somebody shows the ability to be treated like an adult, to be taken seriously, we should figure out how to take them seriously. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I'm excited to see where that goes.

[B]

Yeah. And actually it's interesting. When I was prepping for this, I was looking back at some of the things that Marina Montessori was writing and thinking about. I think of her as like far. Even though the brand Montessori is as well as well known as it known as it is a lot of her ideas and thinking and her as a person, she's vastly underrated compared to other.

[A]

Like, she's so cool.

[B]

And she was, I mean, my favorite, one of my favorite stories is like she was one of the first women admitted to study medical school in Italy. And they wanted to wash her out. They wanted her to quit so they would make her carve cadavers alone where the male students all got to be with each other. Like she had to actually do that on her own because they thought it would scare her off of medical school. And it did the exact opposite. Right. She was burned in effigy in different countries because people thought her ideas were too heretical. And now like everybody and their brother pays gobs of money to get the kids into. Into Montessori or Montessori type environments. And a lot of her ideas are being validated by science in 2026 in a way they weren't, you know, even 50, 75 years ago. Yeah, and so I take that with a lot. I take that very, what you said very seriously because it is the case. Like a lot of her, I think there are echoes in what you're trying to do and what she was trying to do.

[A]

Yeah, and there's, there's this book that got really popular a few years ago called Hunt Gather Parent that talked about kind of like tangential and similar ideas where, like the, the most enduring idea from that book that you hear parents recite most often is that how you treat a child who wants to help at early ages decides how much they contribute and feel autonomy and agency throughout a lot of the rest of their life. And so one of the main thing that the book advocates for, which is basically the same thing that Montessori says, is that if a kid thinks they can do it, you just let them do it. It doesn't matter if they're going to break the egg or if they're going to take four times longer or if they're going to fall off the ladder, assuming it's a reasonable height, like you let them do it. And the Hunt Gather parent argument was like, if you tell a kid, no, you can't help me wash the dishes when they're offering, then they will just learn that. And then Suddenly they're a 12 year old who won't help when you ask them to because they've kind of like developed that way. But she was, you know, in that book, she was going to a lot of more like traditional cultures. And that was one of the big differences she noticed was that they were letting the kids do stuff that they were bad at and were actually slowing things down, obstructing progress because they had internalized this lesson that like, if you just let them, then they will eventually figure out how to be very helpful and like these rewards will, you know, come. Exactly. It's just that is such a fascinating idea that I feel like has been lost. But going back to like raising kids in the city, it feels like we get some of that here because like, you know, my kids are riding scooters through the streets of now, through the sidewalks at least. And the other day we were at coffee or like I was at coffee with my two older girls and my wife and had taken the youngest one home, which was, you know, around the corner, so it was like around a block. And my two older girls, they're four and three, they were like, can we go see? Can we go to mommy? And I was still in the coffee shop and I was just like, sure, go Ahead. And so they scooted down the block and they did the turn and they went to the house. And I, you know, I called Cosette and I was like, hey, by the way, like, yeah, make sure that they actually show up, please. But then, you know, she texted me a minute later a picture of them at the door, and it was like, awesome, right? Like, you got that little opportunity for autonomy and independence that, I mean, I think sadly, some people probably wouldn't even let, like, their nine or ten year old do.

[B]

Right. And in areas that are more, you know, where commuting and everything happens by car, it's a little bit.

[A]

It's a lot harder. It's a lot harder because you just

[B]

can't get away with it in the same way.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What's your second idea that you would incept everybody with? Your first one was a real banger.

[A]

Oh, geez. That was great. Gosh. Yeah. The second one is a lot of pressure. I'm trying to find the right phrasing for it. Because what we were talking about earlier with doing things that are entrepreneurial, even if they aren't like, biggie entrepreneurship, right. Like, that really is agency. And I think what that comes. I think what that's downstream of is just this idea that the world is a lot more malleable than you tend to assume. This was like another just big red pill moment. I feel like for me, as a child of. I don't remember what it was, but there was some point when I realized that there wasn't really such a thing as rules. Right. Like, there's the way other people want you to do things, there's the way that you should do things to be, like a good member of society. And then there are things that you are told to do or should do or how it's done, that if you don't do it, there's literally no consequence, or if you don't do it, there's a very acceptable consequence, or that everybody's kind of like doing because everybody else is. And so kind of like whenever you encounter something, like, it could be in work or personal life, like in society or whatnot, of how something works or what you're supposed to do. I mean, it's literally a suggestion, or

[B]

like, it's an idea outside of very few things.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's like that mindset, it can obviously go in bad directions, but it's like we had a couple of fifth graders at Alpha who were super into robotics, and they're really sharp, they're Incredible. And they came up with this idea for a robotics security related startup and they emailed the FBI to pitch them on it.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And you know, it was fine. Right. Like, like nothing bad happened, obviously.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you know, if you asked anybody like, hey, can you just email the FBI like your startup pitch?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They would say no, you can't do that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you can and you can as a 10 year old.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Right. And to be clear, I'm not, you know, it's not something I would encourage our students to do, but like, there's something really admirable about that too. Right. I mean, that's going to take them far.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so I think it's so easy to get frustrated by things not being the way you want to be or feeling like trapped or like you don't have options, but like you pretty much always have way more than you think you do and you kind of have to just be willing to look for them.

[B]

And reality is malleable.

[A]

Morality is valuable. Yeah.

[B]

Well, Nat, thank you. We're going to have you and your students on over the next few years and see how this progresses and continue to develop, you know, and I'm personally very excited about it. I'm excited for you. Like, as a friend, I just want to see how this affects your life. And I, you know, I can't wait to have further conversations about this as well.

[A]

I'm super excited too. And serious offer, you know, we're, we're doing these kind of like book club things with the students.

[B]

I mean, it's a given.

[A]

Like Eric.

[B]

The book is called the Founders.

[A]

Exactly. Well, and Eric's. Eric's going to come do one for like Book of Elon. You know, you should come do one for Founders.

[B]

It's a hop across the river.

[A]

Exactly. And be super easy. That'd be a lot of fun.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

All right, thank you. Talk soon.