Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education

0:00I'm going to spend my next 20 years on education. My view is it's the best time in history to be a five-year-old. Like literally think of a product person going in and saying, I want to reinvent school from first principles. What would it look like? That's the voice of Joe Limont, a Stanford dropout turned software billionaire who's now shaking up education. As co-founder and principal of AlphaSchool, he's built an AI-powered, hyper-personalized model where kids learn twice as much in just two hours a day. Now he's ready to share his extraordinary vision for the future of learning. This is Mike Maples Jr.

0:40of Floodgate, and it's Go Time with Joe Limon. This is Mike Maples Jr., and welcome to the Pattern Breakers podcast, where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together, we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal, and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable.

1:23Joe Leemont and I go way back. We were college roommates for two years at Stanford before he dropped out to start Trilogy and became the youngest member of the Forbes 400 almost 30 years ago. Joe throws himself fully into whatever he does, and now he's dedicating the next 20 years to what he sees as the biggest challenge of our time, education. With Alpha School, he's proven that AI and learning science together can radically transform how kids learn. But that's just the beginning. His vision reaches far beyond, aiming to change education for over a billion people. This is an episode I'm especially excited about.

2:05I've been waiting for the day that Joe might share these breakthrough ideas. And now the moment has arrived. Let's dive in.

2:22Joe Limont, welcome to the podcast. Glad to be here. Good to be talking to you. Yeah, it's funny how things go full circle. You don't go on a lot of podcasts and you haven't been on a lot of press tours or anything like that for a very long time. So why are you talking about Alpha School right now? Two reasons. One, family. I sort of went off the radar because my last podcast was 20 years ago, which was coincidentally the year I got married. I wanted my kids to have a more normal life as you could. My youngest is now a senior. And then second, sort of alpha is I'm going to spend my next 20 years on education that I believe that we can totally transform education.

3:04My view is it's the best time in history to be a five year old. The co-founder of Alpha McKinsey says that and I've sort of adopted that is for the next 20 years, I have to go work really hard to make that true. And the number one reason I'm out on the podcast is just like schools, our schools educate kids. We have to educate parents because parents view of education is actually the biggest impediment to changing it. Because every parent wants to educate the kids the way they were educated. And we need to educate parents of this great new way and what's coming and what they should expect instead of what they went through themselves.

3:42So then, Joe, probably because you haven't really talked that much in the last 20 years, probably not a lot of people know how you got the resources to start a school in the first place and kind of what led you to decide that. So in high school, I actually wrote a paper on AI, which was a new area back then in the 80s. One of the paragraphs on it was about neural nets, and it just said this is decades away. Most of it was about expert systems. I then went to Stanford. And you may remember as my roommate that I took Professor Feigenbaum's class on expert systems. He's sort of one of the fathers of expert systems.

4:22Ended up deciding why would I go to class when Feigenbaum says that, you know, this stuff's worth millions of dollars a day if you solve it. And so I dropped out. We built what became Trilogy in the 90s, which was the first AI company to sell a billion dollars worth of product. And for people listening, I don't think many people know this, but Joe and I were roommates in college at Stanford for two years. We have a mutually assured destruction pact, not to say too much about what each other did. One thing I do remember, though, is how unlucky we were at drawing numbers. So we were, you draw, Stanford, you draw a number for your next dorm.

5:05And I think you drew for our group the first year. And I think, what was it, like 29, 22 out of 3 ,000? I think we were 2 ,999. That was the next year. Sorry, just a second. I remember, like, the next year, we draw again. and you're like okay maples do you want to draw or do you want me to draw and i was like well why don't you draw joe you can't do any worse than last year and you pull out this number it says 29.99 i think we won a trip to disneyland because we did worse we did we're the worst draw of the year so yeah so we we didn't get uh good housing at stanford actually for they might be interested uh back then you actually literally lived in a trailer was if you drew 29.99 you lived in a trailer.

5:51Yeah, it was temporary housing that stayed temporary for a long time. Exactly. So but you were luck, you were a little bit luckier in business than you were at drawing these numbers. And so, so trilogy was kind of one of the first I think a lot of people don't realize this, but like in the and I remember the late 80s, there was like neuron data and expert object and people were starting fact, I think john price, one of your early guys came from one of those companies and like, and And then you had this sales configurator software that would help people not have wrong orders, you know, not put the wrong disk drive or memory system in a computer when they would order it.

6:25And, you know, that was costing people a lot of money back then. Yeah, no, the first product was actually in Feigenbaum's book, where it's just like, there's a thing known as a configurator. And, you know, big companies like DAC and AT &T are losing millions of dollars a day because they're selling things that can't be manufactured. and what you really need to do is get the knowledge of the engineers and the manufacturing and put it on us to a sales rep so they didn't sell things that couldn't couldn't be built and that was when laptops were coming out and so you know we were like the killer act for laptops where you would put sales builder on it it was an expert system and transfer that knowledge out to your your sales force that was the magic you know all the computer companies loved us because they were looking for reasons to sell laptops and they thought they had a great you know killer app uh to do it so probably a lot of people don't realize that your first time right in the forbes 400 was in your late 20s right from this company from trilogy and then i guess you went through a phase probably still in it of buying up other software companies in the early 2000s to the present yeah so you know the 90s were all about you know we did the whole dropout and john lynch One of my Stanford, you know, lives in a garage.

7:38He's like, let's move to Austin because it's cheaper than Palo Alto. But then once we got to Austin, you know, took off, product worked, grew like crazy. You know, then sort of after the dot-com bust, sort of half our customers went out of business. And so there's all these companies. And so we bought a couple software companies. And we realized we're really good operators and we can run the software companies really well, too. So we sort of have Trilogy and ESW Capital, where ESW is sort of the arm that buys software companies and runs them, and then Trilogy is a software company that builds organically.

8:15And so did that for 25 years, basically. And then getting to how we got to here, Mackenzie Price, who actually is a Stanford grad, she co-founded Alpha School in Austin a decade ago. She starts the school and it actually took her two years to convince me to move over because I grew up in Catholic school and my kids are going to Catholic school. And I'm like, Mackenzie, I'm not moving my kids to your weird, janky school. It's weird. Eventually it worked because my kids did a shadow day and they loved it. And, you know, it totally blew my mind because I didn't think kids should love school. As you know, I didn't graduate discipline problem at a lot of schools for my whole life and wasn't really into it.

8:54and so kids loving school seemed like this foreign concept to me but like all educational things it can't scale right good education is you know it's based on the teacher in the room and how it's going and so i was like this is great mckenzie for austin and all the kids here but it's not scalable and then three years ago when gen ai came out i was like oh neural nets are here and this is actually a platform that we could use to transform education and get it from mckenzie's you know, school in Austin and get it out to a billion people. And so I did. I went to my founding team who've been with me for 25 years.

9:31You know, they've told me for 25 years they could run the company better than me. And so I said, we're going to see. And I turned the keys over to them and said, you're in charge. I'm going to go be a principal. And so three years ago, I became the principal of Alpha School. It was great. And so I've been doing that for three years, we're now ready to scale. Both Alpha is expanding nationwide, but also we built a platform called Timeback, which is sort of this educational platform, which we believe is going to allow this to get out to a billion kids. And that includes the ability to have entrepreneurs build their own school types.

10:07It doesn't just have to be Alpha. You can build all sorts of schools on this, as well as you can also build ed tech software on it that will be economies of scale on software, and not just the physical school stuff. And so how would you, Joe, and just in the simplest possible terms, what is alpha school? And if I walked into an alpha school tomorrow morning, what would I see that looks totally different from a traditional school? Pretty much everything. Like literally think of a product person going in and saying, I want to reinvent school from first principles. And what would it look like? Most people equate the key to good schools equals good academic teachers.

10:49You will not see that. You will go into the school and the kids have, they spend two hours a day at what you can call an AI tutor or an app-based learning, where they are going to have personalized lesson plans generated for them by the AI. And by doing so, that learning engine that we built teaches kids 10 times faster. If you think of in a normal classroom, there's 180 school days. So you're thinking an hour a day plus some homework. So let's just call it 200 hours or so for seventh grade science or whatever it is. Our students are able to go through the average kid at Alpha goes through and to a level of mastery, like getting 100 on the state standardized tests, right?

11:38Top 1 % academically. They're able to get there in about 20 to 22 hours. McKenzie's principles when she started are first is kids must love school. Do they want to go to school or go on vacation? And we literally survey the kids every eight weeks. You know, they were like, would you rather go to school or vacation? And it does, you know, 50 to 60 percent. It depends on the vacation that they have. It depends on what workshops they were working on, how the school went that week. Pretty much. But that's the standard we hold. The high schoolers, two thirds of them sent me an email and said, hey, Mr.

12:17LeMond, can we keep the school open this summer? Because we want to keep going. We don't we don't want summer break. That's crazy talk to me. Um, the core part is you have a bunch of kids who literally love school. And so you find that you can build a school that kids really love. Um, and so that would be the most crazy part about it. The second thing is we say you only spend two hours a day on academics, but you'll still learn twice as much as being in standard school. And that's powered by this engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And so, and kind of back to first principles, I guess this is kind of what is embodied and what I've heard you describe as learning science, right?

12:56It's not just some cool app that does reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in AI, right? There's kind of a scientific method behind it. There's 40 years of papers that have been written on learning science, you know, sort of for 200 years, there's been the industrial model and a teacher in front of a classroom model. And that was built because it's the most cost-effective way to teach. And that's why the poorest school district in, you know, India has a teacher in front of the classroom. The$75 ,000 private school in New York City has a nicer building, but the same model. So papers were written actually back when I was in high school, a seminal paper like 1983 or so was Bloom's Two Sigma, where he's like, literally we get Two Sigma better performance, which is what we're seeing at our schools, where literally kids are able to learn at rates that no one's ever done before.

13:46And there's concepts of, you know, individualized tutoring and mastery and spaced reposition and cognitive load theory and zone of proximal development. But if you talk to a learning science expert, Stanford, you know, Dean Schwartz at Stanford is, you know, one of the best. He'll say, yeah, we've known that teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way, but we didn't have an alternative. AI is that alternative. Yeah, AI lets every student have access to a custom learning science approach, right, to their own learning. Yeah, I mean, the number one thing, I mean, there's, you know, you look at effect size, which ones really matter.

14:26So the first, if you take just the first one is age grade and knowledge grade are two different things, except in a teacher in front of a classroom model, they are the same. I'm a sixth grade teacher and I'm giving sixth grade work because that's what I do. And I have to give everybody in my class sixth grade work. Let's say I have some holes and I don't have no some fourth and fifth grade material. Too bad for you. Or if I'm a GT kid, I'm ready for seventh grade work. Still too bad for you. Give kids lessons at their capability. You know, hundreds of kids came on to Alpha in the last couple of weeks as we as we from across the country.

15:00You know, a lot of 40, 50 thousand dollar private school kids, you know, transferring over. And so we have to give them our assessment test of, you know, where are you? you know these are kids transferring in high-end private schools and they have an a on their transcripts that means everything from one year ahead to three years behind right so we have kids coming in where they're a seventh grader and if you give them a fourth grade assessment they miss a significant number of problems if you get a b on average kids are from three years behind to seven years behind. And what's really interesting, though, as a principal that I've learned is parents really want to trust that high inflated grade.

15:48What do you mean that standardized test must be wrong? Because my private school was giving my kid an A. The magic of alpha is I was like, don't worry, we can catch them up in no time. It's only 20 hours for grade level you know you'd be three grade levels behind and you're like oh my gosh that's 60 hours and okay we do two hours a day but do an extra hour of homework and you're 60 days away from catching up because we say parents don't trust us don't let us self-grade and say we're an a like yeah these other schools we give kids these standardized tests and you know exactly where you rank nationally right now the alpha kids you know after you've been to school for a couple years, you're all going to be top 1%.

16:29But coming in, right, here's where you are, and we'll catch up. But trust the third party test, don't trust what we tell you. And that's how we measure twice as fast in two hours. So our second commitment is in two hours, you learn twice as much as sitting in class for six. And so they can measure it because the average kid will go five points in a year. And we're like, okay, well, if you go to alpha, I'll go up at least 10. Three things that we teach parents, you know, that they don't believe that they have to believe here. The first is your kid has to love school and more than vacation. Number two, your kid can crush their academics in only two hours a day.

17:05I mean, crush them. 1550 plus SAT, five on APs, you know, great academics, top 1 % performance. And then third, and this actually probably is the most controversial of the three things we say, and it's about our culture of our school. The key to your child's happiness is high standards. Kids want to go do awesome stuff. Kids want to be awesome. They are awesome. Parents naturally don't want to see their kids struggle. But if you put them in an environment where they can try hard things supported by a caring adult, kids love it. And that you can't get the love of school if they're not doing hard things that they think are awesome.

17:44You have these kids who love school. They're doing all this crazy stuff. They freed up their whole day to do cool stuff because they only need two hours for the academics. So what does happen? What happens in the rest of the day then after those two hours of academics? Well, you're there all day. And so the four hours are all around life skills. Like we have a life skills curriculum, you know, leadership, teamwork, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, storytelling, public speaking, relationship building, socialization, grit, hard work. we have kids who for teamwork and grit our eighth graders ran a tough mudder if you know that where you're like that hardcore is so brutal had to cross the finish line at the same time you know the teamwork part and bring everybody together you know when you get you know there were some moms who were like you know my my daughter's a little she's not going to be crawling through the mud 12 weeks later at the end you know at the finish line everybody's coming across just you know, together covered in mud, right?

18:46And it was the hardest thing some of these kids had ever done in their life, back to challenges. But the energy and the excitement and the teamwork and the camaraderie, it's just awesome. That's the kind of stuff these kids are doing in the afternoons. And, you know, you can start, you know, we have crazy stories at every age level. I mean, kindergartners climbing 40-foot rock walls. Our second graders all ran a 5K. This is a good one, back to my roles principal, Faye, who's the second grade teacher, guide, coach, whatever, you know, she's like, we're going to teach them atomic habits. And I'm like, the book?

19:21And she's like, yeah. And she's like, look, 25 year olds, most people read it after college. I did. But those concepts, all my second graders can understand 1 % better. And what a better life skill to teach kids about trying hard, really impossible things by doing it 1 % of the time. and she's like we should teach all the second graders that life skill and you know they went out to the track and she just they walked it the first day and then at the end she's like okay so we all know we're going to finish the race right we all could walk it and then the next time they they ran a quarter lap walk the rest next time half a lap walk the rest and from august to december they did one percent better and by december they ran the jingle 5k and you know 35 five minutes, you know, they're crossing the finish line.

20:05And those kind of life skills, right? You're like, the sooner you learn that, the better. And because we keep kids in class for six hours a day and bore the crap on them, there's no time for this, right? But once you only need two hours for the academics, you're like, let's spend all afternoon teaching a atomic habits. Why not? And so the role of grit in this, right? Like, I guess, high standards are one thing. How do you define what grit is and how do you try to, you know, imbue it in people? One of the things about life skills and back to measuring it is the same way on standardized tasks. We're like, don't let us self-grade.

20:44Don't let us say, hey, your kid has grit or your kid's really good on teamwork or leadership. You need what we call an external test to pass. And all our workshops don't have these, but we try to have as many as we can because I need to know my second graders in New York are going to have the same ones in Austin. And I need one where parents are like, oh, okay, I get what they need. So when you start talking about grit, you know, kindergartners, they can do a hundred piece puzzle. Our second graders can run a 5K. All our second and third graders can do a Rubik's Cube. And so we just keep building them up where we have these tests to pass for received feedback.

21:24Our eighth graders know that the key to getting better is actually getting critical feedback, right? Constructive but critical feedback to make yourself better. All our fourth graders can pass the Wharton leadership teamwork simulation. So Wharton has a simulation of going up Mount Everest and, you know, how do you work on teamwork? Something like 40 or 50 percent of MBA students do it. But to advance at Alpha, every fourth grader has to pass it. Do you have anything like that elevator story that we had in a, well, you may remember it different than I did, but I guess it's kind of about grit. I remember one year, first year roommates were living in this place called Oak Creek.

22:08We both get in the elevator, go to our floor and you say, push four. And being the stubborn person I am, I'm like, well, you don't tell me what to do. You push four. And you're like, well, you don't tell me what to do. You push four and we're both just sitting there waiting for the other to press four i remember like somebody gets in the elevator and i'm like god i hope they push four they're looking at both of us like what are you guys doing just sitting at this elevator right and he pushes like three and he gets off and he looks at us and the door is closed we're sitting there like on the third floor right just sitting there in the elevator just like waiting for the other guy to push four Absolutely.

22:46And that story. So we have that on will to win where this is so mindlessly stupid, but it's pure, just a battle of there's no skill. A lot of a lot of will to win and competitions are, well, who's better? This takes out any element of skill. And so I want to tell you, I hadn't thought of that in years. Our high school group. So I have my own guide group. So I have about a dozen high school kids who I'm their guide teacher coach. And I was relaying this, you know, besides them thinking, okay, this is really why you are so weird. You guys are both insane. What is wrong with you guys? I'm like, don't you guys want to do this?

23:32And I was like, we can run this like a Mr. Beast contest. and you just pair off and just have a tournament bracket. And so they are designing for next month. What is my will to win? How long would I sit there in an elevator, mindlessly sitting there? And they're like, you can't bring your phone or, you know, you just sit there and accept the boredom in order to beat somebody else. So I'm stealing that one from our college career. And our high schoolers are going to run that. I'll send you what the output of the tournament is. So then, you know, we only touched on this, but haven't really drilled down on it much.

24:12The teachers at Alpha, right? You do in those two hours, there are teachers, but they're of a different sort than normal teachers. So I think it'd be useful to talk about that some. So this is super important. And, you know, as soon as I say there's no academic teachers, everybody gets this concept of robot terminators. And this is the worst thing in the world. And first of all, it's not online. It's a physical building. Kids need caring, loving adults to help them, right? And coach and guide them. If you're a kidder mom dropping your kid off at Alpha, you want to meet Mallory or Charity who's going to wrap your kid in love, right?

24:47At middle school, we have way more students per guide and coach because they're like, Mr. LeMond, I'm an adolescent. Like, I don't need the hovering. But they want somebody. and so we hire like we have x nba assistant coaches x nfl players x olympians take a middle school boy who generally maybe when he transfers in played a little too much video game more consumer type and you get this impressive role model that is going to be like dude i'm going to motivate you to the world to greatness those kids all of a sudden want to be creators not consumers they want to do all this great stuff and we we try not to call them teachers because it makes people think they're doing academics.

25:30What they are great at is their responsibility is motivational and emotional support. If you think back to that teacher who changed your life, it wasn't because they really did a great job grading that fifth grade spelling test. It was because they met you, they helped you see greatness in you. Maybe they pushed you hard, kicked you in the ass a little bit to get there. And that's what our guides do. We pay more our school, right? We're a high and private school. We pay$100 ,000 minimum for our guides. So we get all the world's best teachers plus non-teachers who want to do this role. And, you know, even the old, the teachers are like, this is so much better than going home and, you know, grading quizzes.

26:16Let the AI do that. Let the personalized learning do that. Let me spend my day connecting with the kids and motivating and supporting them. You know, back to our thing, you want high standards and high support. So most parents are either high standards, low support, good luck, son, or the opposite, low standards, high support. I never want them to struggle or fail. You need high standards and high support. And so that's what our teachers do all day, high standards, high support, motivating and emotionally supporting your kid, you know, through their journey. During when the kids are at the apps, you know, for the two hours, they do them in 25 minute Pomodoros.

26:55What the guide will do, they pull out the kids for a one on one. How was your weekend? Did you win the softball tournament? You know how to go? You know what's going on? You know, let's talk about your goals. And, you know, our guides know these kids deeply and they know what motivates them. They know what their goals are and they're their partner helping the kid reach those goals. And are you finding that there is a certain type of person background that's lent itself well to being a really good guide? You know, one, there's a whole set of teachers where when you take the top teachers, they all are great at it.