Could this be the future of K-12 education?, with Alpha School’s Joe Liemandt

0:00Starting a business comes with its share of ups and downs, which is why staying true to your vision is essential. a non-negotiable for Romeo and Milka Bregali, Capital One business customers and co-owners of Ra's plant-based restaurant in New York. Romeo and Milka took a leap of faith when starting their own restaurant, gutting an empty space and building it from the ground up. Every pipe, every wall, every detail. But building from scratch came with a heavy financial burden, which is when they turned to their Capital One business card. With the flexibility of the card's no preset spending limit, they were able to spend more and earn more rewards while bringing their vision to life.

0:36Today, Raz's success is proof that with passion and the right support, it's possible to make your dreams a reality. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash business cards. If you've spent any time building AI products or leading technical teams, you know this. Transformation doesn't fail because of ideas. It fails because teams can't move together. Enter Atlassian's Teamwork Collection. It has planning in JIRA, documentation in Confluence, video updates in Loom, and now AI agents in Rovo, which connects the dots across your work so nothing gets lost. It's one AI-powered teamwork platform designed for how modern teams actually build.

1:21Learn more at Atlassian.com slash TeamChanger. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N dot com slash TeamChanger.

1:38Hey, listeners. Today, we are featuring another onstage interview from the recent Masters of Scale Summit. It was two days of deeply human and thought-provoking conversation centered on what kind of future we want to build. My chat with Joe Lamont explores the future of K-12 education. After a long career in software development and investing, Joe is now the principal of Alpha School. It's a private school founded in Austin, Texas. Students complete their core subjects like math and English in about two hours a day with no teacher, thanks to AI. For the rest of the school day, they focus on social-emotional, project-based learning and life skills with adult guides.

2:27On stage, Joe and I were also joined by Alex Matthew, a high schooler at Alpha School, who shared his experience. It's an approach that ignites a lot of debate, to be sure. Take a listen to my conversation with Joe and Alex and see what you think about the Alpha School model.

2:48I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI. A podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:06Hi Joe, welcome to CEMICS. Thank you very much. So you are the principal of Alpha School, a bold and somewhat controversial model of education, reimagining K-12 through mastery-based learning and AI. How did that all come about? uh the background on it i became principal three years ago but the school was founded by mckenzie price over a decade ago and uh one of the things when gen ai came out stepping back the problem with most education is it's not scalable sort of appropriate to this lots of points but how do you get it out uh when gen ai came out my thought was we can use this and we can get this out to a billion kids um i'm a product guy so i was like i need to go be a principal because i got to see what happens when fifth graders get into a fight and parents yell at you.

3:53How do we get this out to everybody? Can you paint a typical day at Alpha School? And where does the AI come in? And how does this all shift the role of the educator or the teacher in this model? Sure. So the part of it, to step back on what the core values of and our commitments to the kids is, we make three commitments to the kids. The first is, you will love school, right? If we were re-envisioning school for the next decade, the core value should be if we're going to subject our kids to a dozen years of this, they should love it. And we actually ask the kids every eight weeks, would you rather go to school or go on vacation?

4:32Right? So we want a really high bar. We just finished our first session for this year. 96 % of the kids said they love school and 40 % of the kids said, I'd rather to go to school than go on vacation. It ranges between 40 and 60, depending on what the vacation is and how good their workshops is. Depends, right? Depends. So the core value is that. The second is we need to teach kids 10 times faster. You can't have kids love school if it's six hours a day and homework, and we subject them to that to a dozen years. So back to Gen AI and learning science, we've known for 40 years how to teach kids how to learn two, five, 10 times faster.

5:10It just couldn't be implemented in a teacher in front of a classroom model. So we took all those 10 ,000 learning science papers, embedded it in this AI tutor, where kids come into the school and they spend two hours a day with the AI tutor. And during that two hours, they learn more than twice as much as students who live in classrooms for six hours and homework. Our schools are the best academic schools in the country on basically any measure. And then what happens after these two hours? I don't want my son back home after the two hours. I don't know about you all. You can't send them home, I promise.

5:45No, the name of the product is actually Time Back. Give kids their time back, right? Which actually motivates them to do the two hours, you know, engaged in the apps. And then during the four hours... TikTok? The rest? No, we don't do TikTok. We can talk about that. No, it is how do we engage them in project-based workshops, right? Run by adults, right? That teach the life skills that we think are critical, right? When we think of the future world that's coming, what are those skills that matter? So our current set of workshops and life skills are teamwork and leadership, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, storytelling and public speaking, relationship building and socialization, grit and hard work.

6:29So they're in these great, super fun, project-based workshops all afternoon because we have to fill the four hours up. You know, I do want to double-click on that. a lot of the attention that goes to Alpha School is basically the fact that you're doing these couple of hours of AI tutoring. But arguably, one of the most powerful things about this model is your focus on the mindset and specifically how to help kids reshape and rethink their kind of connection to learning and how to unlock their potential. And this really resonates with me. In my own family, we've been doing, you know, we're very passionate about our passions, if you like.

7:04We're lifelong learners. We've been doing goal setting since my kids were really little. We vision board every year. Please don't judge us. But yeah, I'm curious, how do you engage students and have them think about their agency and their love of learning and all these really awesome curiosity? Correct. So that's a critical part when you think about, you know, developing a child. And so even in kindergarten, we actually literally start with growth mindset as a core value of what we teach about. When their days start, they actually come in for limitless launches. And you could think of it as Tony Robbins for kids about you guys can do anything, right?

7:44We want to get them thinking that from the start. When you get up and you mentioned TikTok and we talk about that, by the time you get to middle school, right, what you're trying to do, kids are awesome. They want to do awesome things. and our school system today sort of drives them to dysfunctional behavior where they do scroll TikTok. How we solve it in high school is we do have them do vision boards. We have them do, you know, the first workshop coming, if you transfer into alpha middle school is you do a vision board, right? You do who are your values, right? What are your values? Who, who do you see yourself are, is, see yourself as?

8:19Then second, you do a Japanese Ikigai, right? What are you great at, right? What do you love to do? What's the world need, right? What do you get paid for? And they do those two projects, right, of here are my passions. But then we make them do the 168-hour project. This is where they track every hour of the week, right, of you are what you do. And then this is where that TikTok reality comes in because they come up to me and they're like, Mr. Leamont, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller, right? And they don't want Kids, when they wake up, don't want to sit and be consumers all day and addicted to TikTok or just playing video games.

8:59They want to be creators. And what the school has to do is help them there, right? And that is what our projects do all afternoon is we're going to transition you from wherever you are here, and we're going to show you how you can be a builder and be a creator. They want to build video games. They want to be able to create things.

9:23We'll be back after a short break.

9:51and whether public transportation should be free. Go ahead, listen to Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

10:03Talk a little bit about this changing role of the teacher in the room or the educator in the room. Because you don't even call them teachers, you call them guides, right? We call them guides and coaches on it because they don't do academic teaching, right? And so of all the sacred cows in education, a teacher in front of a classroom is the anchor of everything. And we are breaking that. But we view, and if you talk to the, call them the teachers at our school, there are adults. They are, some are ex-teachers, and they love it. Which is, teachers didn't become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes.

10:44They didn't. they became teachers to transform kids' lives, right? Everybody has one or two teachers who transformed your life. And it wasn't the test markup that did it. It's because they saw you, they convinced you you could do so much more and inspired you on that greatness. That's what our teachers, guides, and coaches do all day, right? The AI actually does teach the seventh grade, the seventh grade science quiz faster and better than the teacher does. Instead, the teachers spend their days connecting with kids. During the two hours, right, when the kids are on the apps, the teachers take the kids out one by one, right, to do one-on-ones with them.

11:27How was your weekend? How'd the softball tournament go, right? Are you really excited about this project? How do we engage you? And so they build those relationships and spend their whole days doing that. Amazing. So you actually have one of your students here, And I'm so excited to welcome to our stage Alex Matthew, who is a senior at Alpha School. Come on in. We need to find you a seat, though. It's coming up. Okay, great. Amazing. Welcome, Alex. Good to see you guys. So tell us a little bit about what you've built. Yeah. So by the way, hey, everyone, I'm Alex. I'm a 17-year-old senior at Alpha High School, and I only transferred into Alpha High School last year.

12:13So I used to go to a public magnet school. It was ranked top 30 in the nation, and I had eight-hour school days. I would do homework from, you know, three to four hours after school, so that's 12 hours of schoolwork. And then I'd try to cram in all the things I really loved doing after that period of time. And so that led to, first of all, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I also was getting very little sleep. It was pretty bad lifestyle. And so I knew I needed to change. And so when I entered in Alpha High School, we did the Ikigai Project, the 168-hour week. And what I really found my passion was, was the combination of artificial intelligence, this super big, really cool technology, but also mental health.

12:54Because I, as a kid, when I was eight, used to go to therapy when my parents got divorced. I was an eight-year-old and my therapist was 50 years older than me. I don't know if you know eight-year-olds, but we don't really get along with old people. And so I had a hard time connecting with her. She would give me advice that was like very disconnected from me. And on the off chance, she would give me good advice. You know, it was only, I only got to see her once every couple of weeks. And so I had a hard time staying accountable to that advice. And so I saw the struggles of my friends and myself in my old school.

13:26I came in, I knew I wanted to solve this crisis. So I interviewed like hundreds of teens, probably close to 500 teens and psychologists. And I came up with Barry, which is an AI powered stuffed animal you can talk to about your mental health problems. I love it. That's awesome. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what the process was like to build. I mean, it's really interesting because I came in and I told my teachers, you know, I want to build an AI stuffed animal. And they were like, what? And I was like, yeah, I want to build an AI stuffed animal. My goal is to be the next Build-A-Bear.

14:02They were talking about Lububus earlier. I'm trying to be the next Lububu. And so, you know, it's pretty hard because it's a hardware product, right? It's not just an app that you have to make. And so I learned coding. We did a hackathon one weekend. And so I coded up a little prototype of the app. I'm still working on it myself. I got the first version up. I went through like probably 10 different iterations of the prototype. And I'm now testing with 100 teens. And I'm on my way to figuring out distribution. So my distribution strategy is really cool, guys. In Alpha School, we have to come up with this super big ambitious goal.

14:34My goal is to reach 100 million people by 2035. And most people would look at you, you know, I tell my teacher this and they'd be like, what does this kid think he's doing? But I tell my guide and they're like, okay, how do we do this? And so my goal right now is to partner with influencers, you know, make Barry have their own voice, have their own personality. There can be different versions of Barry. And then in the future, everyone will be able to customize their own Barry. So it has their own voice or their parents' voice or whatever voice they want, their own personality. You know, my therapist was much older than me.

15:07I wanted someone that I resonated with more. And so that's the intention. We want to make someone that's relatable but will also be real with you and give you the advice that you need. Are you raising money? I am. Okay. There's a lot of investors in the audience. Help me out guys, please. I've raised around$40 ,000 in grant funding, so non-diluted funding, but I'm now raising up to a$400 ,000 pre-seed round and just have my first investor meeting, and he's going to sign a term sheet soon. So that's exciting. I love it. Woo!

15:38I imagine you had to learn a lot of skills and just acquire a lot of background knowledge to make this happen. What was the hardest or most intimidating thing you had to learn to get very off the ground? Oh, that's a hard question. You know, I think the most important life skill in high school is receiving feedback. So we have a level, we have a series of workshops on receiving feedback. Level one is, can you receive critical feedback, maybe from Joe, without crying?

16:10And, you know, we're kind of scared of him. And some of us didn't pass that. But the next level is, don't worry, I did. Don't worry. The next level is called rejection training. And so our campus is in the middle of downtown Austin. I think we all need to do that. This one's really fun, guys. So it's in the middle of downtown Austin. We have to go out into, you know, different stores or whatever, and we have to ask to get free pizza or a sandwich named after us. So my friend's named Ruben, we had to get a Ruben sandwich named after him and jump on the mattresses to see what the springability is like.

16:45And so that's the next level of receiving feedback. Can you like get rejected? But then the final kind of tier is, do you have a series of experts who are giving you feedback on your product? What are your users saying about your product? And I mean, I love my berry. I love the like the format, whatever, whatever it is. And when I got feedback, I used to get super defensive. I was like, what do you mean? I have the best product out there. And so you have to really understand you to lower your ego and get critical feedback or else you're not going to make progress. It's so important. Yeah. Is this cool or what?

17:17No. Like, so cool. And when you talk about this, rather than sitting in class and just learning sort of the core curriculum that we all learned, right, having these workshops where you're learning the life skills, right, that are going to be really valuable, right, outside of the classroom, that's what we get to spend four hours a day on, right, giving the kids the time back to work on this. You know, when you talk about scaling a lot, there's been lots of educational reform. The problem with educational reform is if you keep it where the kid has to sit in class for six hours and homework, there's no time to do anything else.

17:51There's just no time. And you always try to say when we read those life skills, there's lots of schools are like, oh, how do I put that in? But there's just no time. And so that's the core part. When we look at scaling this, you know, we have a few different ones, but one is by making it tech enabled, right, you do have scale. This software, right, is going to go out to a billion kids, and it is going to be able to teach them what you'd learn in class 10 times faster, right? If they engage and motivate, which is a different topic, we can talk about how we're doing that, it will educate them much, much faster.

18:28But I want to challenge you a little bit because, in a way, the AI piece is the easiest to scale. 100%. The rest of it, which is the one-on-one tutoring and the guide, that's really hard to scale. And for now, I know you're expanding very rapidly as a model, but for now, it's a private school system. How do you make this more accessible? Yeah. So one of the things, and if we want to be spicy in the talk, I'll say one of the... We can be spicy. Great. One of the things back to scale when we look at education, what are some of the beliefs of education that you need to break if you want to scale?

19:02The first is teacher in front of a classroom. Teachers are great. Teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way to teach kids. The second one is selection effects, right? In education, selection effects are considered an insult, that it's bad. There's a view that if you can't serve all kids, no matter what, on day one, you should serve nobody. Right? And if you talk about Alpha, right, we're a high-end private school, the number one criticism is selection effects. We look at the world completely differently, which is we believe selection effects are the power to get to scale. And so we actually, our motto is select, but don't fail the kids.

19:46And so, for example, we're opening next year Sports Academy. So it's going to be$15 ,000, so dramatically cheaper pricing. With the vouchers in Texas, it'll be Texas Sports Academy. It'll be a$400 parent pay, right? $400 a month, so dramatically cheaper. But it will only select for kids who love sports, right? And because they love sports, we can design the day where they're going to love the day. And as part of that, they will engage in the two hours in the apps, right, and then play sports in the afternoon. More after a quick break. Stay with us.

20:31Meet Nicole Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-owner of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York that got its start from a need for unity. The inspiration, it was born from the desire to create a space that felt like home, where we can connect community culture, good food, and come together with family and friends. That's how we birthed aunts and uncles. Nicole and her husband, Mike, were fulfilling their dream of bringing people together out of their home kitchen. But they soon learned that the demand for community was greater than they knew.

21:02It became overwhelming and we were like, we need home, but not in our actual home. We realized that there was also a need in our community for something bigger in our neighborhood. So we had to find a place. Moving from a home operation into a storefront was a huge next step. But Nicole and Mike were able to take it on with the help of Capital One Business. It's not for the weak as a small business. Finding resources is super important because that's the way you'll be able to manage and scale. We would have never done that without having Capital One to be able to help us along the way. The cashback rewards are very helpful.

21:37So, you know, it just gave us that runway to be able to breathe a little bit. Then you get to focus on the cooking of the food and making the experience great. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

21:54What I love about this is you're bringing a very business mindset to how we're building this. Because as you know, there's a lot of founders in the room. We always apply this product market fit. We're not going to be a product for everybody in the world. but being clear on your audience and your target market. Nobody would get funded if you said, I will not ship until it works for everybody at every price point globally. Right. But that is usually a requirement if you're in education. It also goes, if you want another spicy one, that is, and a lot of that comes because most of education is driven by non-profit.

22:28Right? And we have another phrase, which is non-profit is non-scalable. And so if you're trying to scale, you have to break that, which is the problem with nonprofit is the better and more successful you are, the faster you run out of your donations, right? The number of very successful charter schools, when you talk to them, have great academic outcomes. Kids love it. They have a 3 ,000 person wait list. And you're like, well, why don't you open a new campus? They're like, I'm waiting for a$40 million donation, right? Capitalism actually solves that. If I have a 3 ,000, if a for-profit company has a 3 ,000 person wait list and everybody loving it, you're going to be able to open as many locations as you want.