Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent Flywheel | Joe Liemandt, Alpha School

Jason Scharf (0:00): When the snow day happened and, we would call for two days and my oldest was like, I'm upset I'm not going to school. And I was like, what have you what have you done to him?

Joe Liemandt (0:07): It is we have the opportunity now to reinvent education. It's been the same for a hundred years. Everything we've gone through, our parents have gone through. But now is the chance to actually reinvent it going forward. We're innovating it.

Joe Liemandt (0:20): The kids are learning 10 times faster. We're the only system in the world rolling this out. In the world of education, we have the most innovation in the world. We have more start up schools. There's more micro schools here with Trilogy, my old company, we're in the front of 2,000 Ivy League kids and jump started and brought a lot of talent into Austin, that ended up being significant.

Joe Liemandt (0:40): I believe today, schools in Austin are bringing in the families who are the talent that are the next 10 and 12 years old.

Jason Scharf (0:55): Austin will go through kind of a rebirth. Most advanced technology in the world, and if you can't actually build it or ship it, then what's the point?

Unknown Speaker (1:13): You need storytellers who are able to paint the picture of what's happening at the frontiers of technology. The US needs to get back more to that and less, like, lawyer ish and more we're building stuff.

Unknown Speaker (1:32): The frontier isn't just a place. It's forged in the fire. Welcome to Austin Next. Joe, welcome to Austin Next. Great to be here.

Unknown Speaker (1:44): Thank you.

Jason Scharf (1:44): Okay. So we're gonna start. I'm gonna put everything out in there. We're gonna talk obviously a lot about Alpha School in Austin. My, oldest goes to Alpha Middle School.

Jason Scharf (1:54): My middle child's about to start there. So I'm clearly a biased participant in this, but I think what will be fun also is I get to put you on the hot seat as a parent. Can't wait. Can't wait. So first, wanna start off with if people have or haven't heard about Alpha, give us the top level, what it is and what you're building.

Joe Liemandt (2:15): Sure. So Alpha is a network of high end private schools. Our view is we have the opportunity now to reinvent education. It's been the same for a hundred years, everything we've gone through, our parents have gone through. But now is the chance to actually reinvent it going forward and make it 10 times better than what we experienced.

Joe Liemandt (2:36): We make three commitments to every kid. The first is you will love school. And, you know, when we we hold this to a high standard. Of, you know, 90 some percent of our kids say they love school. We actually ask a follow-up question, which is, do you love school more than vacation?

Joe Liemandt (2:55): And would you rather actually, the question is, would you rather go to school instead of vacation? I was DMing you and giving

Jason Scharf (3:01): you crap, like, when the snow day happened and we were off for two days and my oldest was like, you know, I I wanna go to school. I'm upset I'm not going to school. And I was like, what have you what have you

Joe Liemandt (3:11): done to him? Forty three percent of our kids Yeah. Said I'd rather go to school than go on vacation. And we worked to keep getting that up, and that is that's just a crazy standard. Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (3:22): And that's part of the free framing. We lived in a world where it's sorta like school sorta sucked, right? And you just put it up on your kids, that's just part of the game. And there's just no reason. If we're putting kids in school for twelve years, right?

Joe Liemandt (3:34): And we're gonna put them through this. Every parent should just realize you could put your kid in a school that they love. Love. And so we really want to make that just normalized. And it's interesting even talking to parents, I talk to a lot of business executives, you know, who, you know, they have tens of thousands of employees and they're like, I work to make my company the best place to work.

Joe Liemandt (3:52): I want people to come love, love coming to work, right? I'm the employer of choice. And they're like yeah my kid should hate school for twelve years. And you're like right, it's something that's in our brain that we need to just swap out. And once you're in the system, right, and once you realize it, it becomes Yeah.

Joe Liemandt (4:10): A big thing. So love school more than you know, kids must love school. The second is they need to learn 10 times faster, which is that because of advances advances in learning science and AI, and we'll talk about how you drive that, kids can learn 10 times faster. There were papers published when I was in high school about how kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. There's a whole field of learning science where the schools of education at the Stanfords and Harvard's and Oxfords have known this.

Joe Liemandt (4:40): The only problem is it doesn't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model. And so given that, what what can you do? That was the only way we could do it. Obviously, because of AI and all this new stuff, you could actually now build a system where kids learn 10 times faster.

Jason Scharf (4:53): Question. The teacher in front of the classroom then, is it the one to 30, or is it like like if you had the one on one tutor kind of the, you know, Aristotle to Alexander the Great, I'd assume that would still work 10 times faster.

Joe Liemandt (5:06): It would work almost 10 times. So actually the paper that was written had two parts. It's if you give every human, every student an individualized tutor, a human next to them, and they actually can learn one sigma better. But they the human has to enforce mastery. Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (5:23): A mastery standard, which no school system in America Right. Enforces. Which you have to do both to get them. And this is where when you get into, we use ed tech, you know, it doesn't work, all of this. Right?

Joe Liemandt (5:35): Ed tech has failed for twenty five years. You know, what's different this time? Mhmm. This time the real the call is, it's not as much the LLMs matter, but it's the learning science and things like mastery in the zones of proximal development and making sure the app is enforcing that and enabling the kids to thrive that way that get our crazy accelerated learning. Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (5:55): If you want 10 times faster. You can get, you know, two, three times faster with a personal tutor. This is why everybody hires tutors after school. Right. But even if you hire a tutor after school, those code kids don't get up to the levels we do at Alpha because tutors generally don't enforce mastery.

Jason Scharf (6:09): Let's just jump straight at the AI component for a second because the biggest thing I've seen on excellent things is like, okay, well screen time's bad and all this. So what's the Yeah. So I know

Joe Liemandt (6:20): I actually so this is a I wish it was a simple answer, but it's a complicated answer, which is there is bad screen time and there is bad AI. If you take a chatbot, you know, the standard here's ChatGPT, and you put it into a school. Chatbots are cheap bots. Mhmm. 90% of kids are using it to cheat.

Joe Liemandt (6:39): They are not learning. It is terrible. I completely when I hear we're gonna ban, you know, ChatGP from our school, right, no screen time, great idea. We obviously believe very differently. We believe there's a good screen time and good AI used very differently.

Joe Liemandt (6:54): And so talking about how we do it is, first of all, it's only two hours a day. And when we talk about what the rest of the day is, that's the trade off parents have to make, which is I totally understand there are no screen time people, but when you hear my kid's gonna love school and they get to do all these great workshops and life skills and team based environments when we talk about that, you're like, okay, that trade off might be worth it. Really, if the kid's learning 10 times faster from the screen, maybe it's worth it. And that's where we have a lot of no screen time parents who when they come to Alpha, we're like, okay, I get why. Right.

Joe Liemandt (7:24): Why I would do it this way. But the core of what the AI is doing is it's not a chat bot. We've tried, and even in our environment, kids use it to cheat. So we turn off chat functionality in the morning, which is when they're doing the academic learning. And instead what you're doing is you're creating personalized lesson plans for every kid.

Joe Liemandt (7:44): Yep. Which is, you know, age grade and knowledge grade are two different things in every human. They're the same thing, unfortunately, in a teacher in front of a classroom model. So you can think about this, which is, you know, if you're a eighth grader, but because of COVID or however happened, you're really in fourth grade knowledge, or third grade. You know, you're bottom 25%, you know, and if you're in an eighth grade class, can't read.

Joe Liemandt (8:11): They're gonna hand out eighth grade material and there's no chance you can learn. They're giving you algebra and you're like, I don't know, four times eight. And so what you need to do in that case is not give eighth grade material to the age grade eighth year old. You need to give them fourth grade material and a third grade phonics lesson or multiplication tables. And that's where the individualized tutor, right?

Joe Liemandt (8:34): The AI tutor's perfect because this is sitting there, he's like, oh, it can figure out what you know and don't know very easily. And it's just like, oh, okay, I'm gonna give you a fourth grade lesson. And what's crazy about this whole thing is if you do that and you give kids lessons at the right difficulty, not too hard, not too easy, There's zone of proximal development, which is 80 to 85%. If you're at 99%, you already know it. You're just regurgitating.

Joe Liemandt (8:57): At 66%, you get massive disengagement. If they're only If they get it, it's too hard, then they disengage. Every game developer.

Unknown Speaker (9:04): Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (9:05): Right? We can talk about that later. Every game developer will tell you this is the right zone to keep them engaged. So our apps are giving you an unending stream of lessons and difficulty right where you need it. Those kids who can come in years behind can catch up.

Joe Liemandt (9:19): It takes our students on average between twenty and thirty hours to catch up one subject one grade level. So fourth grade math is twenty two hours. Fifth grade math, right, is like twenty six hours. And so when you hear I'm a couple years behind, you're like, you're like fifty hours behind. Once you do

Jason Scharf (9:36): an hour of homework and you're all suddenly catch up. I will say it is one of the I had heard this before. It is one of the psychological things as a parent to get over because when my so we've only been in this this our first year, right? My son would get nineties on the mat. So very good student in that stuff and then did the diagnostic.

Jason Scharf (9:58): And I literally emailed the guys like, Something broke. Something's wrong. No, this isn't was something very low in like Matt. I was like, Does this make any sense? And it's been funny because he's in We were saying this all He's in sixth grade, came in at, you know, again, like consistently 99s in the map, came in something very low in the map.

Jason Scharf (10:20): Clearly it was one thing. You've got the Swiss cheese on a thing. And like now he's in ninth grade math. And he's even said now, it's gotten hard. He's now hit and he's like algebra and this integrated math, it's hard.

Jason Scharf (10:35): And I get it. And he's at that zone where he's kind of pushing, but it's like you first seem to be like, no no, it's fine. What are you Your test is wrong.

Joe Liemandt (10:44): So that Crazy stuff. A lot of my job I've learned in the last four years as principal, I became principal, is figuring out how to message this to parents. Because we all have just an old framework.

Unknown Speaker (10:54): Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (10:55): And you know, our our we look at it as our our guides educate kids. You know, our marketing and what my job is is our job is to educate parents to this point. I I gave I give a talk second week of school every year to all the parents. I'm like, look, you're about to get the reports. Your kid's gonna be behind.

Joe Liemandt (11:12): The average kid who transferred in from a high end private school who had a's at their high end private school was 2.2 grade levels behind. And so I give that news and then obviously as a parent you're like that can't be true, oh my gosh. I'm like don't It's worry,

Unknown Speaker (11:27): true for other kids, not mine.

Joe Liemandt (11:28): Exactly. And you catch them up, And then we accelerate them forward, is the second thing that you can do is, you know, what parents don't understand, and a phrase they have is, especially if you have a gifted student, you're like, I know standard school is holding my kid back. You don't realize how much. Right? You just don't realize how much it's holding him back.

Joe Liemandt (11:51): And so there's a first catch up phase, but then all of a sudden your kid was accelerating. So this is literally in one year where you came in and you're like, woah, wait, why is he behind? Right. Oh, wait, wait, he's way ahead. Yeah.

Joe Liemandt (12:02): And that that acceleration happens to all the, not all kids, but lots of the students, and that is just the big breakthrough of how much your kids can learn and how fast it is, because it really is twenty to thirty hours per grade level per subject. And that's, we think 200. Right? Because there's 180 school days and we did homework. So in your head, you're like, I'm three years behind.

Joe Liemandt (12:23): You're like, that's like a lifetime, I'll never catch up. This is like hour of homework, few months, you're gonna be caught up before Christmas. No problems. So that's the breakup of why, and as alpha parents, that once you get in it and you start to realize this, you're just like okay, is gonna, it actually gets to the next question, which is I'll take our third commitment. Once you realize, my kid could learn 10 times faster.

Joe Liemandt (12:49): One of the things you say is, I don't actually wanna put 10 times more academic knowledge in. I don't want him just sitting there all day doing it. I actually want him or her to learn all the life skills. Right? Which is what the third commitment is, which is we're going to teach you all the life skills that are going to let you thrive in the real world.

Joe Liemandt (13:06): So leadership and teamwork, right? Entrepreneurship and financial literacy, storytelling and public speaking, relationship building and socialization, grit and hard work. And then you're gonna have these afternoon where there is no screen time, right, where instead you're gonna be doing these project based workshops with your team. There's gonna be, right, the adults in charge. Right?

Joe Liemandt (13:26): We call them guides and coaches. And you're gonna be doing these things that are super fun, super challenging. Right? But teaching you all those life skills. And and so when I look at it is that when you look at alpha, those three commitments, which is your kid what's gonna be different about school?

Joe Liemandt (13:41): You're gonna be like, they're gonna love it. Right? They're gonna crush their academics very quickly, couple hours a day. And then third, they're gonna be doing these great projects and engaging life skills, which will get them ready for this AI world that's coming. And so that's the that's our commitment.

Joe Liemandt (13:56): And so we've been building that school. I've been principal four years. The first few years were all, you know, basically product design. How do we get this?

Unknown Speaker (14:02): Yep.

Joe Liemandt (14:02): And now we're scaling it.

Jason Scharf (14:04): Is there a motivational honeymoon? And then also as you're seeing the first where like one or two classes have graduated and the real world isn't quite set up the same. So is it almost a motivational crash? How are we kind of seeing that extended?

Joe Liemandt (14:20): So two parts. No. The motivation, they love school. Right? And, you know, my highlight was last May as principal was last May, our two thirds of our high schoolers who've been here for a while sent me an email and said, will you keep the school open this summer?

Unknown Speaker (14:36): Because we don't wanna take a summer break. Which I was like, I did not like school. It's like so insane. We have unleashed a monster. Right?

Joe Liemandt (14:43): It's great. And the reason is, if kids are working on challenging projects with each other, with their peers that they love that is very challenging, hard projects, they wanna keep working on it. That's why they wanna stay instead of vacation, because they're doing things that they consider significant, right, and meaningful, and that doesn't change even as they've been there, they just take on harder challenges, right? That team is trying to build an app that will convince a 100,000,000 teens the key to their happiness is contributing to their community. Right?

Joe Liemandt (15:16): And they're just like, this is the most awesome, and they get to work with some influencers, right, that they want to. And so they have all this all wrapped together, and these kids are like, what else do I wanna do instead of this is awesome. So that part on motivation actually where we do see it is there is a honeymoon period, just to talk. The honeymoon period is when parents come in their first year, we ask them to rate the workshops in the afternoon. What do you think about the workshops?

Joe Liemandt (15:46): And the workshops, if you're a first year parent, are like, this is the most transformational thing I've ever seen in my life. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Oh my god. Because you're comparing to their old school. Right.

Joe Liemandt (15:57): Year two, you are gonna have a different judgment. You're gonna be like, well, this workshop this year, you know, remember last year when they went to Poland to train the thousand Ukrainian refugees? Well, this year, we didn't do that. And so relative to last year, the workshop didn't measure up.

Jason Scharf (16:10): I I hate to tell you, it hit for us like session two. Session one, we were like, this is our session two is, you know, but that's what's for like, by the but, like, right now, they're doing a a AI debate. So they're, like, a national debate and then building a rocket. Those are two things that so, like, this and it's funny how it becomes motivational. Like, my son always says that the Monday of the fur of the new session is his favorite day

Unknown Speaker (16:33): Yeah.

Jason Scharf (16:33): Because he finds out what the what the workshops are.

Joe Liemandt (16:36): This is actually interesting when we when we talk about like what's important, like about Alpha is the parent feedback, I mean student feedback, we drive everything on Making a School Kids Love. But the parents are really critical too, which is part of this is what are the life skills that we all want? And we're sort of codeveloping it, which is, you know, what is the real answer as we you know, as as this world changes and how how this workshop work? So, you know, sometimes we're we're like, I I don't know if this workshop's gonna work. We talk to the parents about it.

Joe Liemandt (17:04): We're like, okay, let's go and let's see. And then eight weeks later, we sit and say, was this a home run? Or was it too hard for the kids? Or the kids didn't love it as much as we thought. What's the feedback around doing this?

Jason Scharf (17:15): Yeah. How do you think about the workshops from the perspective of there's the public speaking leadership, those kinds of things versus hard skills that aren't gonna be teaching the academic situation, with a coding robotics engine, whatever those kinds of things were like, yeah, these are probably valuable to have. So how do you think about building

Joe Liemandt (17:32): We think there's two sets of skills, right? There's sort of core skills, and we would talk about receiving feedback, right? Uplifting your classmates, right? The core things that you want, which are in the long term, the ones that matter, right? Becoming a self driven learner, right?

Joe Liemandt (17:47): Those things are the ones that really matter long term. There's shorter term vocational like skills, which is, okay, I can vibe code. Right? So we have workshops where the kids are all learning Open Claw. Is Open Claw the thing they're gonna be using ten years from now?

Joe Liemandt (18:00): Probably not. No. It's awesome.

Unknown Speaker (18:02): For too much longer, even the anthropics trying to, like, cutting

Unknown Speaker (18:05): it

Unknown Speaker (18:05): off.

Joe Liemandt (18:05): All these different things. But right now, right, the kids love it. They're building all of it. It's a super valuable skill, and you're trying to learn it. Now our students are using it, and they've actually I don't know if you've seen some of this.

Unknown Speaker (18:16): Yeah.

Joe Liemandt (18:16): We have kids making tens of thousands of dollars, right, in ten days, right, from getting on OpenClaw and building agents that go make money. They're presenting at South by the founder of OpenClaw is literally retweeting them. Yeah. And so while that's vocational, you know, and that it's not a long term skill, it's a great one to teach skills. It drives motivation.

Joe Liemandt (18:36): Our balance on the afternoon workshops a lot are, you know, do the kids really love it? Right? Is this something they and what's the skill they're gonna learn at the same time? But yeah, learning how to build an agent, a swarm based agent, you know, or a swarm of agents is super valuable. Right.

Unknown Speaker (18:53): And so we would do that. And we balance those. The same thing. It's, you know, in the old world, schools had this same thing. It was called shop class.

Joe Liemandt (18:59): Right. Right? And there is We've

Jason Scharf (19:01): actually brought back shop class finally.

Joe Liemandt (19:03): We brought back shop class. When you know, and when we talk about expansion, you know, we're looking at true vocational schools where you're like, these people are gonna be able to get a job in a robot you know, in an advanced manufacturing facility out of As we talk with some of the the public school system of how do we make sure people are job ready. Yep. Those afternoons can be used for that.

Jason Scharf (19:21): Yeah. I do think the when we talk about, agency creativity, like, those are autonomy. Those are the superpowers. And it is interesting the that's been unlocked in my son, and now he he uses the AIs to teach him about things. So he's learning he's he's coding.

Jason Scharf (19:39): He's deciding to, he wants to go after bug bounties for open AI. So he's using quad and then he downloaded, he was telling the open source models. I was like, can you tell me next time? He was like, I got llama deepseq. I like, no, delete deepseq right now.

Jason Scharf (19:54): It's like, you just gotta tell me before you do this, but then wanting to like go after get the context window of open AI using prompt injections and then submit that for bug bounty. Was like, awesome. I understood all that. The next sentence you say, I don't have any idea what you're saying.

Joe Liemandt (20:10): Well, and that's back to this of when you teach kids, how to be Becoming a self driven learner is actually the core of what you have to do. And it's the core of what for our academics to work in the morning, they have to, right? We have to teach them how to be a self driven learner. And by the time you get to our high school, right, we say, you know, eight through eight, back to our life skills stack of how we test it, it's you can learn anything academic on your own. Any eighth grader who's been through our whole stack for a while, you know, embedded in the Alpha system can say, I can get a five on any AP that I pick.

Joe Liemandt (20:43): I can pick one of the random APs. Learn it on my own. Every middle schooler knows everything you wanna learn is on YouTube. They will figure out how to learn it to mastery. Yep.

Joe Liemandt (20:52): Take the test and get a five. Now in middle school, don't get credit for the APs, however that works, but they can do that. When you go to high school, we're like, take that skill of being a self driven learner academically and apply it to the real world, which is what their big afternoon projects are. Their alpha x projects are doing something that's not academic that, but they, you know, we a student who's, she's launching the first Broadway musical, There's Teen no guide at Alpha who knows how to put out a Broadway musical. She had to take her academics, right?

Joe Liemandt (21:21): Her, I know how to learn anything to go say, okay, I'm gonna have to go learn how to put on and produce a musical. And oh my God, I gotta learn about music rights and all those things.

Jason Scharf (21:31): How are you thinking about when the recruiting of the guides and getting the right people? Because on one hand, talked about last year, like you're obviously paying them very well, but there is like a huge, I hear other schools, even like high end schools are having recruitment issues. What is like the profile? Mean, are there ones, I know that there are at least some that are former teachers

Joe Liemandt (21:47): or are standard teachers, but are there other, like what's the profile gonna look like? The unlock for us is, you know, the reason that there's a teacher shortage, right, that occurs is the teacher spec's complicated. You have to be a domain expert in seventh grade science. You have to not just know it, you have to be able to teach it. You then also have to be able to connect and motivate students.

Unknown Speaker (22:09): Right.

Joe Liemandt (22:09): Right? And then fourth, have to deal with parents. And then fifth, you have administration. So there's these five specs and which is any HR director, you know, will tell you that's a complicated spec. And then in America, we underpay them and then wonder why no one applies for the job.

Joe Liemandt (22:24): Mhmm. And so back to my I'm I'm sort of new to education. I saw that. I'm like, well, every HR person I had said simplify the spec, pay more money. So that's how we solve the problem, which is so in Austin, we pay, you know, a minimum of a $100,000 for our guides on up, which is I think AISD is like 56 or something like that is sort of their average.

Joe Liemandt (22:44): And then second, you don't need to be the seventh grade science expert because the AI does it. And second, you don't have to read the 10,000 learning science papers of how to teach kids most effectively. The third element, connect and motivate kids, you need to be the world's best. And so we had 80,000 applications for our guide roles. Everybody wants this job.

Joe Liemandt (23:06): Some are, probably 40% are ex teachers, the best teachers in the world, teacher of the year all over, they're coming into our system. But others are not. We have ex athletes, ex coaches, right? If you can, the ex head of Cirque du Soleil training, you know, if you can connect and motivate students, right, hold high standards and high support, then we're gonna bring you in. And so that's really the And then actually the deal with parents, that part we also took out.

Joe Liemandt (23:36): We created a new role that most schools don't have called the dean of parents to deal with that because when I Because we're annoying? Well actually, it was actually interesting, when I came in and I was learning the system, they're like, look, this guy, she's great with kids, not great, is great with parents, don't promote. This one over here, he's not as good with the kids, but he's really great with parents, promote. That schools promote the people who can deal with the customer. And I was like, oh my god, I never want that.

Joe Liemandt (24:04): I want the person who is the world's best with kids. And I'll hire a totally separate role who can deal with parents. And we have to educate our parents on a lot of things, so it's an important role. But the core of what our guides are, are you the world's best with an eight year old? I don't care how you are with a 38 year old.

Joe Liemandt (24:21): And so that's the guide role is can you connect and motivate students? You know, and when you think about this, because this is one of the controversial things of our school, obviously of, oh, AI robot terminators and you know, all this. And every alpha parent will say, no, the guides are the most important part because they are. And when you think back to every we actually survey all the parents, you know, and the kids, which is every to all the kids we ask in middle school kindergarten, we're like, do you love your guide? In middle school, we're like, every adult had one or two teachers who transform their life.

Unknown Speaker (24:53): Is your guide that for you?

Jason Scharf (24:54): That was one of the things that ended up driving part of driving us to make the switch, right? Is so my fourth grade teacher and then my bio and chem teachers in high school. A thousand percent. Through, we're in a very good school district, that's why we moved there. And we're like, not one of the teachers that we can point to, some were fine, but none that were like that for any of my kids.

Jason Scharf (25:20): And it's like, what's going on here?

Joe Liemandt (25:23): And the issue is, if we think back, when you think back about the role, it wasn't because they graded your seventh grade science quiz so well, and oh, look how I marked up your paper. It was because they connected with you, saw that you could do awesomeness, and they motivated you to go do it. Teachers became teachers to transform kids' lives, not grade seven, grade science quizzes. So when you talk about our system, everybody's like, my god, you need a teacher in front of a classroom. I'm teachers want to connect with the kids.

Joe Liemandt (25:51): Like all the, right? We don't have turnover on our guide staff, we call them guides and coaches. We don't have turnover because they're doing their life's mission, connecting and motivating kids, right? And they're like, oh my God, I don't have to go home and grade my stack of papers. Right?

Joe Liemandt (26:06): And so this is why the role, while it's scary that it's changing and it's different wording, it is exactly what teachers want to do and the best ones, right? Who transformed our lives, this is what our guides do every day. And we say that's what you're going to do, we go get the world's best because of that. Pay them enough so we can pull them in.

Jason Scharf (26:26): Okay, so the other big knock on alpha is selection effect. I I was telling you before, like, I think there is a selection effect, but not the one that everyone attacks.

Joe Liemandt (26:34): Yeah. There's I'm gonna do a bunch of selection effects on this because I I I obviously get this a lot. First off, just to be clear on selection effects, if you're high in private school, there are selection effects. Now that said, Paris to other high end private schools. Our academics just crush them.

Joe Liemandt (26:52): I'll take my top five grads. I have the smallest class among a St. Stephen's or St. Andrews or any of the private schools around here. I'll take my five, top five seniors and what colleges they got into against their top five, even though their class is 10 times bigger than And right, we just academically outperform everybody.

Joe Liemandt (27:14): So would be one answer to selection effects. There's a second one which is we, I'm a product guy. And I absolutely design my product for the customer. I select the customer and then design the product for them. And so when we talk about some of these other things, you know there's a view in education that if you design and have a school it has to serve all people, all types, all at once.

Joe Liemandt (27:42): And the answer is there is no, that is the worst product design in the world. You're like everything to everybody is not a product design. And those always fail. So, you know, sort of traditional education is don't select, but fail the kids. We're like, no, select but succeed.

Joe Liemandt (27:58): So for example, when we talk about our sports academy, I select for kids who love sports. And if you don't love sports, that school's going to fail for you. Right? We have a different school, which is our gifted school. Right?

Joe Liemandt (28:09): Those are ones when you say, what would make you love school? They're like more academics. That's like one in 20 kids. That 5%? Right.

Joe Liemandt (28:16): We have built a school for them. Right? They don't do two hours. They get math Olympiad in the workshops. So when you think about if you wanna build a school that kids love, right, more than vacation, you have to design it for them.

Joe Liemandt (28:27): Right? And thus select for them. Right? Now the other part that you have to have that we select super for is parents. That, you know, if you're in k through six, right, and people are like, oh, who succeeds?

Joe Liemandt (28:42): I'm like, well, let me talk to the parents and I'll let you know. 50% of the admissions is, are you aligned? Yeah. Right? Because K through six, right, the parent alignment that we're selecting for parents who say things like, well, no, I understand screen time or AI.

Joe Liemandt (28:59): I understand this is gonna be new. Right? We're looking for parents who say, we call them when we open a new school, the founding families, no one wants to be first, right? Okay, when the school's been around for a decade and you've had thousands of graduates and it's proven proven proven, right? There's that set of parents.

Joe Liemandt (29:18): We need the parents, right? The day you open, you don't have that. Yeah. Right? We need the parents who are like, no, I understand when I look at the future of what the world's gonna be like, we need to educate kids differently.

Joe Liemandt (29:29): The old status quo will not succeed.

Jason Scharf (29:31): And we've noticed it's lot of entrepreneurs, it's the people who are a little more contrarian at nature and be like, yeah, I'm willing to take a bet, even if it's literally taking a bet on your kid's future. But at the same time, I remember when we signed them up, we were like, so if we don't like it, we can drop that. We kind of figured out this whole thing like, we're experimenting. He's he's being the guinea pig.

Joe Liemandt (29:53): Yeah. No. That that that's actually one, which is the guinea pig's a great one. Which is there's, you know, oh my god, they're using kids as guinea pigs. There's, thank god my kid is gonna be able to experiment in a new system.

Joe Liemandt (30:06): It's the same thing which way you you see it as, and we obviously need the parents of the former. We just even like our apps, we roll out our new apps. Right? And we roll out a new version. And it's the first time this has been rolled out to humanity.

Joe Liemandt (30:19): Right? This isn't right? Because we're innovating it. The kids are learning 10 times faster. Yeah.

Joe Liemandt (30:23): We're the only system in the world rolling this out. And, you know, and it and it does mean that you understand. You know, our students, like I have I have a dozen kids. I've sparred a group at at Alpha High. You know?

Joe Liemandt (30:33): And these are the kids who like I'm like, if you're gonna be in Sparta group, you are I'm gonna come up with crazy ideas and you are the test bed. Right? We're gonna figure out, you know, what really happens here. And, you know, those kids like, you know, we have been generating static AI, right, to a lesson and then have human review because the AI wasn't good enough to do dynamic. Right?

Joe Liemandt (30:52): Too many too many errors. But I'm like to those guys, I'm like, we're gonna give you the dynamic. You know? And they're gonna take screenshots and be like, look at what AI said today. And and so there is that element, you know, of where you wanna be on if you are super happy, if you're a kindergartener mom and you're like, I look at the educational system that I went through and that if my kid could just replicate that exactly Mhmm.

Joe Liemandt (31:15): And that's totally going to get him ready for the world in a dozen years, then we definitely aren't the right school back to selecting. You should go to the traditional school who will do the same thing they've done for a hundred years, right? And put your kid into that hundred year old system. If you instead say, I'm looking forward twelve years and it seems like the world's going to be different, and I need to get my kid ready for that, and I want them surrounded by other kids doing that, and I want to be in a parent group who thinks that same thing, Like that we have this opportunity where kids could love it and learn 10 times faster and all that. If you buy into that, then we're the perfect place.

Joe Liemandt (31:50): And yes, we select for that.

Jason Scharf (31:51): One of things I wanna bring up, so you are fast and like a startup. And to your point, it has pros and cons, right? Like I have found very responsive and iterative that there was an issue that we had, like one of the workshops, it wasn't clear what the test to pass was all this kind of stuff. And after I made a little bit of noise and other people had agreed. And then now we have a Zoom meeting at the beginning of every session saying, here's exactly what's going on in the workshops, here's that.

Jason Scharf (32:20): So like at that, at the same time, I will say, and this is the one piece that my son wanted to bring out. So like Alpha Rite, he's like, it definitely had an update recently because it was not great in the beginning. And so there was times that he was very challenged with that app because it wasn't what it needed to be. And so how we, how do think This about that

Joe Liemandt (32:38): is perfect. This is great. Because we struggle with this constantly, right, and back to parent feedback, right, it's moderated by the feedback from kids and adults, which is how aggressively can you turn the knob. And so for example, on workshops, we very much are where it's an eight week loop, right, where we try them and you know, we basically get the parents aboard and then say, okay, we're gonna do it and then we see if it works. And if it works, then we'll use it all the time.

Joe Liemandt (33:05): To give you an example, eighteen months ago, Faith, our second grade guide, she's like, okay, we're gonna have all the second graders run a five k. And I I rolled. I was like, oh, the parents are not gonna like that. I right. I are you sure?

Joe Liemandt (33:22): Right? She was UT athlete. So I'm like, really? Are are you really sure? And she's like, no, we're gonna teach atomic habits.

Joe Liemandt (33:29): It's a perfect workshop, you know, where they're gonna learn this great life skill. And we don't they'll declare it's impossible, and then they'll all do it. Oh my god, they're all gonna do it. Right? Anyway, that whole thing where we go through that debate.

Joe Liemandt (33:42): Right? And all the parents and all the kids said, this is an impossible workshop. Yep. And she's like, this is gonna be don't worry. And so we're like, okay, let's go Faith.

Joe Liemandt (33:50): And so you know she gets everybody out to the track and they all have declared this is impossible. And then they walk the track. All of them can walk. She's like I've signed you guys all up for the jingle five k in Maine, And looks like you're all gonna finish because we can all just walk the race. And then the next time, you know, they came up the next time, they ran quarter lap and walked the rest.

Joe Liemandt (34:15): And from August to December, right? And then they want half a lap and then a full lap and by the jingle five k, those kids are running thirty, thirty five minute five ks. Jesus. And they cross the finish line and they're just like, mom, dad, I can do anything because I know 1% better. And this is the part when we talk about life skills, why this is such a great example.

Joe Liemandt (34:33): We all read everybody reads the Atomic Habits post college in their twenties or thirties, and they're like, wow, this is a huge insight. Like, I should you know, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time or a journey one step at a time? We just teach kids 1% better. When you're trying something that's really hard, just right, take it on. Second graders can understand that.

Joe Liemandt (34:52): And once you teach them that skill, then they sat down with their dad, they're like, I can do 50 pushups. I'll do one today and two tomorrow. That is a life skill that we should teach every second grader in this country. Right? It just is.

Joe Liemandt (35:04): And then down on this, where they thought it was impossible, you showed them that they could do things that were hard and then have this life skill that's completely done. Now that one worked. And so everybody's like, yay. It's happiness. To your point, sometimes they don't work as well.

Joe Liemandt (35:18): Now it's only eight weeks. Right? We have five sessions of them. You you figure it out and it's not the end of the world. And the kids, after they do them, you know, after you've been an alpha a while, you're like, okay.

Joe Liemandt (35:28): Yeah. This workshop's not working. Like four weeks in, they'll sit and, you know, our experienced, you know, students will be telling the guys, they're like, this is not gonna end well. But it is that level of innovation where that's why you need the right culture. Right?

Joe Liemandt (35:42): You need the right families. Right? If you don't believe in this, like, and you just hear this thing, you're like, this just seems like a really weird school that I don't want my kid in. I want just the traditional. You're not gonna like that experience.

Unknown Speaker (35:53): Now how do think about the software side?

Unknown Speaker (35:55): And then we'll talk about the software. So that's the life skill side. Now let's talk about AlphaRite. Mhmm. So AlphaRite was there's two things this year, that were the the the big changes.

Joe Liemandt (36:04): So in August, when I sat in front of all the parents at the beginning, I said there's two things we're rolling out this year. The first is a whole new math curriculum, which is gonna teach kids 20%. It's gonna teach them more in 20% less time. Because, right, we measure everything. We know exactly how long it is.

Joe Liemandt (36:19): It's it's a huge improvement. We're already the best math. It's getting even better. Back to the results, say, that your son's getting, it's because of this new math program. But when we rolled it out, it hadn't been tested.

Joe Liemandt (36:30): It was new. We tested it internally and stuff, but we never really know until everybody's using it. Eight weeks later, I got in front of the parents, and I'm like, okay. If you're in fourth through twelfth grade, thumbs up. System's working great.

Joe Liemandt (36:40): We're crushing it. We're above 20%. Right? We're exceeding our expectations. If you're in k through three, mm-mm.

Joe Liemandt (36:47): It's not working. The kids have too much freedom. We need to constrain it, so we're gonna roll out changes so that we can get them back on it. And now the commitment we make to parents is your kid will learn twice as much in two hours a day as if they sat in class for six and did homework. Right?

Joe Liemandt (37:05): That's our academic commitment. And so when we roll something out new on the app side, we have margin of error on that. Mhmm. And so we know that even if we make a mistake, we can recover and still deliver that each year Mhmm. To the kids.

Joe Liemandt (37:19): So eight weeks in, on k through three, we're like, oh, this is not working. Let's and but we have the data. We know exactly why it wasn't working. And then we fix it, and then we roll out the new changes. And so for us, basically what we tell parents is we're gonna deliver the two x in two hours.

Joe Liemandt (37:37): And sometimes we say oh look, this is improved to 20%. Right. Which actually frees up more time to do things like alpha write, etcetera. And now let's take alpha write. So math was one of these great examples where really good fourth through twelfth, wasn't good, now both are on track.

Joe Liemandt (37:52): The second alpha right is a great one. Writing is like the most important thing. And when standard school, this it's a fiasco. Right? Kids now are just chatty biting other papers, and parents have no idea, which is until your kid writes an FRQ on an AP test or their college application essay, that's really as a parent the first time you read and realize, you know, oh my gosh, my kid can't write.

Joe Liemandt (38:15): And he's been chatty biting or she's been chatty biting everything. And so this is where kids are the farthest behind. So all these transfers in. You know, I've freshmen in our high school who transferred in from a $50,000 private school who cannot write a grammatically correct third and fourth grade sentence. And so AlphaRite is our solution to that.

Joe Liemandt (38:35): So in August, we were like, it is this is a hard one because it's leading edge of AI. Mhmm. Right? It is going through and help forcing you to learn how to write sentences, and then sentences to paragraphs and paragraphs to outlines to essays. And it's using the generative part.

Joe Liemandt (38:52): It's not static, so it's right at the edge of what the the models could do. And we're like, there's gonna be some hiccups, but writing is so important. Right? We gotta do it. And we rolled it out, and it was too strict.

Joe Liemandt (39:05): I'm I'm sure his issue was if he was at the third and fourth and fifth grade stuff going, he's like, it is nitpicky. It is too strict. It is not. It should say that's okay.

Unknown Speaker (39:14): Yeah. And so I said that when you

Joe Liemandt (39:16): I don't think stuff. Parents too. So and so we had to tweak it. Right? And we had to sit here and figure out, okay, where is it to go?

Joe Liemandt (39:24): And for us, though, we were just like, the value of it is worth the pain. We do sit and consciously think this through, and we make our best estimate, we get the feedback. Now, our language and grammar scores from August to January were record hot. Mhmm. And it's all because of AlphaRite.

Joe Liemandt (39:43): And so while it was a little harder for the kids, right, the return in that test period, right, where they're really learning grammar well, right, they're learning how to write, is phenomenal. And now it's dramatically better. There's still some new some things we still have to improve on it. But on that curve, you know, it's very much because we have this community, right, of parents and students where we're like, look, it's two hours a day. You know, there's gonna be a painful ten minutes.

Unknown Speaker (40:12): You know, let's go figure it out. That is that's part of the

Jason Scharf (40:15): balance. It is also the one place that I feel like when I've seen he showed me the apps and different things he's doing. That it it is the the 100% promise of what we talk about AI because he put it like, what do you wanna write about? And he's like, I would wanna write about Legend of Zelda. And so he's like literally writing sentences like that.

Jason Scharf (40:30): Okay, great. At least that'll keep you more engaged than like random talk about. Because the first time he did it, he was like food. That was when we saw him getting so nitpicky on some of these things. But the whole point was, it was like, not that.

Unknown Speaker (40:41): And then as soon as he said like, let me do Legend of Zelda.

Unknown Speaker (40:44): Like, well,

Jason Scharf (40:44): it's at least more entertaining.

Joe Liemandt (40:46): Being able to write about what you love. Right? All of a sudden, you have more tolerance than when you're writing about so food was a bad word for pick because he didn't care. Getting allowing kids to write about what they love allows them to be like, okay. I want this to be great.

Joe Liemandt (41:01): You tell a bunch of middle school boys, you're gonna have a debate about what the best video game is, and you're gonna go write about it, and you have to convince the rest of your class. Those kids who chat will write forever Mhmm. A very persuasive essay. They will learn how to write a persuasive essay in order to convince their classmates. They won't know what that's what they're doing, but that's what they're they're in.

Joe Liemandt (41:22): So that is part of it, which AI right at the edge, you know what allows it? We have a reading one, teach tales, where you can take a third grade boy who's like, I hate books. And you're like, oh, what's your favorite movie? The Avengers. Okay, who are your soccer buddies?

Joe Liemandt (41:35): And then you do a choose your own adventure at his lexile level. Mhmm. Which is dynamics, right, right there, you know, within 10% of their difficulty level. He will sit here from, I don't I hate books too, I will sit there for an hour, right? Where I'm saving the world with my buddies.

Joe Liemandt (41:52): And that is only able to be done with Gen AI. Right? And so there's the worry about what AI can be, and I believe when it's chatbots and stuff, it can be bad. But as you see in things like Alpharite and all these new apps we're getting, and how fast kids are learning, it's also magic. Right?

Joe Liemandt (42:10): Unlocks letting kids learn 10 times faster is just something we should, parents, really want for our kids.

Jason Scharf (42:16): One of the things I've noticed also in the kind of the iteration is the motivational models, right? And you've changed it a couple times, different things from like weekly XPs to daily, and a lot of things are going. How are you thinking about the like, carrot versus stick when creating those motivational and then also, how do you get the feedback to say like, oh, yeah, that that we're gonna versus no. We're gonna have a we're gonna have a revolt on our hands.

Joe Liemandt (42:42): This is a 100% what our guides own that. Mhmm. So our guides job is motivating and supporting kids. And one step back on the guides. Doctor.

Joe Liemandt (42:54): Jaeger, right, from UT, he's written a book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Kids. Every parent should read it, it's really awesome. Anyway, he's the one who helped design our guide training and what it is. And he has a mentor mindset, which is, and every development expert will say, kids need high standards and high support. And that's what our guides do.

Joe Liemandt (43:15): And so to your question on carrot and stickets, we hold high standards for them. Right? But we're gonna give them high support. Most parents, by the way, are one or the other. Most parents are either high standards, low support, just throw them in, figure it out, kid.

Joe Liemandt (43:29): Or they're the opposite, which is really high support, low standards. I never want my kid to struggle. Both of those are bad. You need high standards and high support. And so that's the environment we have.

Joe Liemandt (43:40): And so what our guide's job on motivating them and supporting them is what does motivate the student? And because they know all their kids, right, and that's where they spend their time, they know the motivational model. And they they make up ones constantly. Right? It's actually not as much app based as guides will do both level based.

Joe Liemandt (43:59): Right? They'll do individuals for the kids. You know, that kid wants a sticker, a sticker. Right? You know, we had one third grader who would not engage in the apps, right, no matter what the app XP was.

Joe Liemandt (44:11): And the the guide was like, I know you love bird watching. So, Nick, we're gonna do a workshop where we go to Home Depot and build a bird feeder, put it out on the green belt, and I'm gonna put binoculars on my desk. And as soon as you finish your apps, you can go out on the deck. And this is a student whose parents were like, oh, my kid can't do twenty five minutes is, you know, the twenty five minute can't do it. This kid's finishing him in twelve minutes.

Joe Liemandt (44:36): So if he would free up the time to go do it. And you're like, see, it's it's just a motivation issue. And that's what our guides do all day is figuring out what they are. They design them for their levels. Right?

Unknown Speaker (44:45): We

Joe Liemandt (44:45): have what is an epic day or there's things like mobile squad, which is, you know, depend and they're all age different. Right? Yeah. Kindergarten is different than a middle schooler than our high schoolers. It gets harder as they get older, believe it or not.

Joe Liemandt (44:56): But, like, mobile squad's one kids love, which is, oh my god. I get to go on this trip if I hit this. And, you know, the guides will design whatever that is. And some kids are motivated by lots of different things, and different kids have different we have 25% of the kids who are just pure challenge Mhmm. Competitive.

Joe Liemandt (45:13): They're like, put up a leaderboard and I'm gonna beat everybody on the leaderboard. But 25% of the kids, that's magic. Yeah, that's upside down. Other kids are not. Other kids are like, you know what?

Joe Liemandt (45:24): If you have a team challenge, I definitely, that will motivate me because I want to be part of the team and I will never let my team down. You have some students who are just completion oriented, right? And so you have those kind. So we literally tailor all these different motivational models. We believe, back to product design, there's two things every educator says you need to educate a kid.

Joe Liemandt (45:46): The first is a motivated student, and the second is put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. That second is what ed tech does really well. It'll figure out what you know and don't know, and give you lessons at that level. That is 10% of the solution. The reason ed tech has failed is because you pretend it's 100% when 90 it's really percent is motivating the student.

Joe Liemandt (46:07): So this is our whole, our product name is Time Back. And the single biggest motivator, if you want to motivate a student, is give them their time back to do stuff they want to do, right, stuff they love. And that's what our school design is, right, which is there's the two hours, and they will engage in the app because they get to do all the other stuff the rest of the day. And so that's what our guides do, that's how we look at all these motivations. When you talk about carrots and sticks, it's holding high standards and earning privileges.

Joe Liemandt (46:34): You don't grant privileges, you have to earn them. Yeah. And that's how the world works, and you kids learn that very quickly. And in that environment, they learn to unlock them.

Jason Scharf (46:44): Once we think about the stress environment, like the ability to fail and learn from failure and that being like, I'd heard stories about like, oh, kids don't earn the trip or whatever. And there was a camping trip that he didn't earn. Was more or less, we said there was a little bit of confusion. Devastated him not being able go. I think it was like maybe quarter didn't go or something like that.

Jason Scharf (47:06): There is a year end trip. I've never seen him more motivated. He's like, I gotta finish this one to do it and like the fire that was under him to make sure and hit that one.

Joe Liemandt (47:14): This is a great one because this is a great example, which is kids fail. Right? You know, and in, you know, first grade, we're gonna have a failure button, you know, the like the easy button where failure is fuel. And when they fail, they hit the button, they get cheered to show people that's failure is learning, right? And you have to have a culture where failure is celebrated.

Joe Liemandt (47:37): But to this one, our guide's job when students fail is to support them through the failure. This is where you're not leaving them the deep end, right? One of the things that we always talk about with our guides is, the child development experts will say the key to development, the key to self confidence, the key to resilience is that kids struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult. And that is our guide loop, that's what we just loop on all day long. And whether it's done via academics or workshops, that's their job.

Joe Liemandt (48:11): I add in as principal after I learned this, I'm like, kids struggle and fail, sometimes cry, on their road to success supported by a caring adult. Our guide's job is to make sure that if that cry happens, it happens in the school, and we don't send it home. Right? We can't be a school where we're like, oh, here you go, right? We have to be able to support the kid through that whole loop where they realize it is disappointing in the moment, but the long term is is great.

Joe Liemandt (48:39): And if you fail most workshops, your tripped ones are are different. But if you fail most workshops, the during break week, the week after the next session, you can make up the ones. Like the first time we made all the third graders do a Rubik's cube, everybody except two kids passed the test to pass, you know, within the session, which was another one parents thought were impossible. Oh my God, third graders can't do a Rubik's cube. Two who I can't do a Rubik's cube.

Joe Liemandt (49:04): The two who didn't did it the first week back. And everybody was like, okay, it's fine. And so that whole concept of how do you build a culture, right, where kids can fail, It's always disappointing to fail, but that is just part of life and then how Make sure it provides motivation going forward.

Jason Scharf (49:20): I wanna step out of Alpha for a minute into kinda like Alpha and Austin. Yeah. I'm assuming the origin of Alpha being in Austin is because, I don't know Mackenzie or whatever, like, I want something else for my kids, I'm going go create it and I live here in Austin, so we're going to create it here. One, correct me if that's right or wrong. Then the second okay.

Jason Scharf (49:40): And then the second piece then is Alpha is not the only kind of education experimentation innovation that you wouldn't know that coming in. I was like many people I moved here in 2020, we moved to Austin for Austin and then it was like, Oh, there's a lot of interesting experiments that are all kinda happening here. It's something in in the water. Like, one, why do you think what is it about Austin that's kind of driving that?

Joe Liemandt (50:01): I think that's a great point. So McKinsey started it, you know, whatever twelve years ago because she wanted something for her kids. But Austin is the center of education. Right? In in the world of education, we have the most innovation in the world in Austin, Texas.

Joe Liemandt (50:14): We have more startup schools. There's more microschools here. Right? You have things. You have the acting academies.

Joe Liemandt (50:20): You have the UATXs. You have just full Socratic experience. You have so many great educators, right? You have so many great learning scientists, right? You have all of this.

Joe Liemandt (50:33): And then most importantly, getting back to why I think it is, is you have the parents who want something different. That if you really want the old way, there's a 100,000 schools you can send your kid to. If you want innovation and education, there actually aren't lots of places that are great new opportunities. The number of people who move to Austin to send their kids to these new places, whether it's Alpha or some of these other ones, right, is huge. Some of my schools have 30% of people who move to the city because their city doesn't have anything.

Joe Liemandt (51:07): So Austin is, you know, I believe because of the parents who in 2000, and maybe it was COVID when we had all the remote workers come in, everybody relocate here, they're all like I need new schools. And they're like, okay, well it's all messed up anyway, and Zoom school and all this craziness. Let me try these new ones. Oh wow, look, this is awesome. Let me keep going.

Joe Liemandt (51:29): For parents to try, no one actually wants their kid to be this guinea pig when it's completely untrusted, just craziness, right? Reckless guinea pig, no one wants that. Actually to move schools, you need two things. You need a reference from a parent you trust. Who's like, this is crushing it for my kid.

Joe Liemandt (51:53): Right? You want that, you need that reference. And then the second thing is you need to see a kid at school do something your kid can't do Mhmm. That you value. Whether if they love school or oh, wait, the academics, the life skills, whatever you care about.

Joe Liemandt (52:07): Those if you have those two things, you're like, oh, I will try this. And in Austin, we just have so many parents who've done it. They're like, oh, I tried that school. It was really awesome, and here's why. And so I believe that is the key.

Joe Liemandt (52:19): And because you have those parents, that attracts the other educational innovators because that is the gate. If you go into a community and everybody's like, well, call me back after ten years and 5,000 kids of proof, no educational innovator can do anything.

Jason Scharf (52:34): Did we have this sense of the education experimentation pre 2020? A lot of it mean, obviously, Alpha was before that, but a lot of it is you're saying like is okay, we have a founder class, you don't see this so much in SF. But to your point, a lot of it was like, I'm frustrated with the system, whatever the system is, and that's why I moved to Austin. And I'll just do it myself. Right?

Jason Scharf (52:58): Like, lot of people kind of went that direction.

Joe Liemandt (53:00): Correct. And you have things, you know, who've been for a lot like Acton is a great one here in Austin that's been around forever. Mhmm. Right? And 300 schools that I that they've done because of the innovation that's here.

Joe Liemandt (53:13): So how I don't know how it got started in Austin. Okay. So, yes, it did. Right. But then sort of in the 2000 time frame when everybody came in, there was already enough of these different schools that people did it, that people tried, that they had enough references, that everything exploded.

Joe Liemandt (53:29): And then once it exploded, it's attracting the whole next wave. Yep. Right? The number of startup schools in Austin today and innovation education today, it just keeps going up every year. Right?

Joe Liemandt (53:40): We Alpha is starting all these different schools, right? And we have the Texas Sports Academy and the Gifted School. We have the world's best Montessori educator who's building Montessori. It's because you can do that because we have enough ecosystem, Right? We have Waypoint, the wilderness school.

Joe Liemandt (53:55): Right? That you need those families and we have enough. So if you're sitting here saying, I wanna start a new school, the second question is, can I find enough parents who will do it? And the answer is the best place in the world to do that is Austin, Texas. I just

Jason Scharf (54:08): find amazing passions. I heard you that stat before by, like, the amount of people moving to Austin to send their kids here. And obviously, that's a high agency. I guess a different kind of person that's like, I'm just gonna find the best school of where I am versus, no. We're gonna move.

Jason Scharf (54:19): And so two questions on that. So one is, what do you think that does to like the talent level in Austin? Because these are obviously people who can really do things and change things. And the second, you succeed Alpha, you have schools all around. Is this a temporary kind of arbitrage where they're gonna come here versus like, no, I can stay in New York, I can stay in Miami, can stay in Chicago or whatever because I've got the school there.

Joe Liemandt (54:43): I believe, you know, in the nineties with Trilogy, my old company, we brought in 2,000 Ivy League kids and jump started and brought a lot of talent into Austin that ended up being significant. I believe today the schools in Austin are bringing in the families who are the talent that are the next ten and twenty years of Austin talent. Like this is it. Which is there is nothing parents care about more than raising their kids. Just being in this market now forever.

Joe Liemandt (55:14): Mean, they literally will pack up and move across the world to be able to do this. Also don't screw it up because they get very upset if you do.

Jason Scharf (55:23): Well, the final straw for us, where we looked at Austin for a number of years and hadn't made the move, and it was the schools were closed in California and they were open here. We're like, that's it. We're we're leaving.

Joe Liemandt (55:32): Yeah, it's just the most important thing for a family or a society is raising the next generation, right? It is the most important thing to do. There is no higher purpose, and Austin's the best place in the world for it, and I believe that does just keep this positive cycle of attracting the best who then are in this environment. And I do believe, I'm a huge fan of school choice, which is back to selection effect. There is no one school for everybody, right?

Joe Liemandt (55:58): Parents are gonna be in a system where they're like, you know what, my first kid, my oldest is going love that school, my youngest is going to love that school. Like, we only had Alpha, I have two daughters, right? And now as I look at the ecosystem, I'd be like, oh, Kate would have loved Alpha GT, right, and my youngest daughter never would have wanted to go to that school. Right? And so I believe this whole concept of we're gonna build this great ecosystem in Austin, we already have it, it's just so it's not a short term arbitrage.

Joe Liemandt (56:27): This is gonna be, Austin is gonna be the center of education in America, probably the world. And I believe it's gonna come because we are the ones on the positive cycle. That we have all those network effects already building. Where you have the families, you have the schools, that pulls in more educators. I can go get, I was literally, I talked to the world's best learning scientists.

Joe Liemandt (56:51): Our team has the best learning scientists. And all the other learning scientists from around the world are like, I was talking to a couple who's over in London. And they're like, I guess we're moving to Austin because we need to be in this. Right? We need to be in this for our kids.

Joe Liemandt (57:07): You know, we have the world's best video game designers. Right? And they're like, I guess we have to move to Austin because that's the center is we're gonna build the world's best educational video games, and we need to have our kids in these schools. So I believe all of that is happening, and I believe, you know, there is if you're going to build, right, a world leading city, it is built on education. That is the right?

Joe Liemandt (57:32): It is the most important. It's we have UT, right? We are gonna have an educational k through 12, right, which is the world's best.

Jason Scharf (57:40): I wanna kind of go back to Trilogy and you brought in a whole ton of young talent. And I just recorded another episode yesterday, I don't know which one's gonna come out first. But one of the issues that we feel like in Austin is if you are 30 and above with a family, this is fantastic. This is the place you should be coming in tech and that kind of thing. We're not necessarily getting the 25 year olds, I'm gonna go grind in New York or SF kind of thing.

Jason Scharf (58:11): And even the case we're talking about like these parents booth, that exact thing. And obviously you try to deal with that. It sounds like it's been a problem for a while, which is what you tried to fix when you were Trilogy. And so one of the questions I have when you have new school, like both UT, UATX, I know that the entrepreneurship school you guys are starting. I mean, is this something that's going to be fueled?

Jason Scharf (58:32): Like it's going to be solved over the next ten years because some of this is coming in, we just have to figure out the bridge of how do we get that 25 year old software engineer to come here instead of New York and like we just need to bridge that? Or how do you think about that? I think about the entrepreneurship school as well. What does college look like now? It's kind of changing.

Unknown Speaker (58:48): Right?

Joe Liemandt (58:48): Sure. So that that that's a whole a whole set of things, but let's let's talk about it, which is, one is, yes, the reason that college towns, whether it was Silicon Valley because of Stanford, right, Harvard and MIT for Boston, right, those became systems because of the school foundation. Right? And I believe with what we're building in the k through 12, especially because what is college gonna be coming? We'll talk about that.

Joe Liemandt (59:10): The k through 12 system with what kids can do, right, is just remarkable. That they can do so much more than we expected. You don't have to go to college and drop out, as an example.

Unknown Speaker (59:22): Someone in this room may have done that. You know? And

Joe Liemandt (59:25): well, it's actually as as a program, there's a couple different dimensions that we'll go through. One is so we're starting an entrepreneur school where, you know, in America, we believe if you're a sophomore or junior, you know, at Stanford, you can drop out and create a billion dollar company. And if you said, you know, it's not likely, right, it's hard, it's rare, but it's totally doable. You're like, oh, okay, that's something. That wasn't when I did it, that was a little You were in the early wave.

Joe Liemandt (59:56): I was in the early wave. But now everybody's like, oh, okay, yeah, of course. Well, what happens, what is Stanford giving in those couple years? What are they giving you as part of that experience that makes that a normalized? And can we take that and put it into our high school at Alpha High?

Joe Liemandt (1:00:13): And so we're gonna be announcing, it's not announced yet officially, we're but gonna be announcing an entrepreneur program where

Unknown Speaker (1:00:19): You could just put on an X.

Joe Liemandt (1:00:20): Well, was actually a recruiting where they're looking. Yeah. They're they're pulling about there's there's actually it'll have to be a more official one. But yes. So the program will be can be a millionaire in high school.

Joe Liemandt (1:00:31): We totally believe we have millionaires at Alpha, kids who made a million dollars, and we believe we can productize that in a replicable way. We're not committing to billionaires. We're picking

Unknown Speaker (1:00:42): this Yes,

Joe Liemandt (1:00:43): we're starting here. But just that that capability, which is, you know, we fundamentally believe, and when you look at school from our framing, you know, and once you get in it, you start thinking of, well, the kids are learning 10 times faster and doing all these things, they can just do things that used to be adults did, but they're doing it in high school. Right? All the hype around Alpha High is these things these kids are doing that's just crazy. It's not other kids get their kids, you know, into Ivy Leagues like we do and you know, the best schools in the world, but they don't do what our kids do, which is we're gonna have a student published in Nature, right?

Joe Liemandt (1:01:15): The research journal, that is PhD level work. No high school kid has ever been able to do that before. And now, you know, we're going to be the first one, but I have a bunch of students right behind her who are like, oh, sometime in the next couple of years, I'm going to do the same thing. That something that was PhD level work, right, and very rare is gonna be normalized in high school. On the millionaire side, we literally are gonna normalize, yes, you know, high school kids can do this.

Joe Liemandt (1:01:39): And so we believe a lot of things get pulled down because AI gives kids superpowers. Mhmm. When you build an environment that's high standards and high support, they learn 10 times faster. You're like, well, what do they do all day? Yeah.

Joe Liemandt (1:01:51): And they go do amazing things. Right? And and and so I absolutely believe that. And so then when you say what happens to your talent ecosystem in Austin, they're gonna be like, well, you can run the equivalent of Y Combinator for four years in Alpha High. So instead of being one hundred and twenty days, we have four years.

Joe Liemandt (1:02:11): Like part of our big discussion with when we were putting together this program, this founder program, we're like, what's their token budget? Because that's actually gonna be a determining factor, right, and if you're gonna be AI driven and build an AI first company.

Jason Scharf (1:02:25): Yeah, my son and I share an account and constantly No, need to follow-up.

Joe Liemandt (1:02:28): And you fight over the tokens. You fight over the tokens. And it starts to be one of these things you have to manage as an entrepreneur. Back to I told you we have kids who make tens of thousands of dollars. We have one student who made $50,000 they spent $16,000 of tokens.

Joe Liemandt (1:02:43): Now, dumb me, it was on my school account, and so I paid it. And I'm like, dude, no, seriously, that's COGS for you. You're paying those now. Right? It's all new things, right?

Joe Liemandt (1:02:53): It's all new, it's new innovative. But I believe these students who are gonna be coming out of high school are gonna have the capabilities that used to be required to be a 25 year old startup founder, except you can do it here.

Jason Scharf (1:03:05): Well, to be companies, it's this I pick many of them to do the billion dollar as their second company. And you pulled it in because I remember like, I think it was at the end of last year, went to like the pitch day for the Alpha High. And there was a really funny moment because my response to most of them was like, yeah, most of them were focused on loneliness, these feel really much like high school teenage, that's the product they're looking for. My son of course goes, finally somebody's building important products. I was like, okay, if that's your point is

Unknown Speaker (1:03:36): like You let them build what they love first and then learn the market's not as big as they do something else.

Jason Scharf (1:03:41): Well, then but they're not gonna be like, I'm doing self like the kinds of questions that are gonna be these billion dollar things, they're just not exposed to those issues kind of yet. But if you think about like, I think was Elon's first was like Zip2, and then it was PayPal, and then it was like, you have these. But if you can pull that down into high school, and you're like, oh, I had the startup pain this first, and then they kind of like, oh, it's

Unknown Speaker (1:04:03): not The the next one. And that's let's talk about college. So I actually don't think college is completely going away like some

Unknown Speaker (1:04:08): people

Joe Liemandt (1:04:08): do, which is I have two daughters, and they're both gonna be, right, at Stanford. The point is they need it's too bad this is people at Austin are gonna hear this. Right? They need some more time. They need more maturity.

Joe Liemandt (1:04:19): Mhmm. Like they need to cook some more. Right? They're not done yet. And being in a social environment with other kids, right?

Joe Liemandt (1:04:25): My older daughter's in a sorority, and you know, you want that, you want them to grow up a little more versus go start your career immediately. I don't feel they're quite ready for that. And I believe there's a lot of parents who are like, okay, my kid may need a little more time. Now, the current college, I'm like, this is a train wreck, and it needs to completely change. And so we have a 100 students coming to Austin this summer.

Joe Liemandt (1:04:47): We have MIT, they're from MIT and Stanford, NUT and UATX, and we're putting them all together all summer at Alpha to say, let's reinvent college. And what is this program really gonna be? They all wanna come because they're like, these colleges aren't doing what I want. And so what should the future of college be? And I believe we can absolutely design one.

Joe Liemandt (1:05:10): We believe it's gonna look a lot like Alpha High on steroids. Right? Where you're doing these great projects with, right, like minded individuals on challenging projects. You'll be able to speed run, you know, all your academics very quickly. It's the same thing.

Joe Liemandt (1:05:26): Like, they're you know, our average freshman SAT this year is, like, fourteen seventy and, you know, we have kids over 1,500 freshman year. And they're like, okay. I think we can get kids through the MCAT. Right? Or the GMAT in one year.

Joe Liemandt (1:05:42): You know? So then you can have all time to do all these other great projects. So they're they're gonna design it. It's all summer. They're all coming in.

Joe Liemandt (1:05:49): And what is it? But what what you really wanna think of a school's a bundle of things. Yeah. Visualization matters. Right?

Joe Liemandt (1:05:56): That's my part with my my daughters. I don't need more academics. They're self driven learners. They can learn whatever they want, right? The part is I want them to be I want them exposed to different groups.

Joe Liemandt (1:06:07): At Stanford, when I was there, IE two seventy three was like the class where it was the venture capital class, where you had to write a business plan, and every guest was every leader. And Steve Jobs came in.

Jason Scharf (1:06:20): Yeah, we were having dinner last night with some other Alpha parents, and it was the first time all of us were talking about like, do our kids need to go to college? I don't know the answer, we've got some for more years. Because one the parents went to Stanford and if you break it down, it was like, we just had the network effect. Okay, that's kind of happening now here. And so they can be exposed to amazing people and these kind things.

Jason Scharf (1:06:41): You have the learning, well, okay, if they spend all this time and like, I mean, one of the challenges I'm concerned with is my son's, he did a calculus, he thinks he's gonna be done with calculus in like freshman year or ninth grade. And I was like, okay, so what's the rep? Because you don't need to go into the crazy levels of that, unless he wants to And kind of then it's the socialization. So this kind of question of like, okay, your three quarters of the bundle or two thirds of the bundle is gone. You don't need that anymore.

Jason Scharf (1:07:08): So it's kind of a, we're in a very interesting time.

Joe Liemandt (1:07:11): No. And I totally agree with that. Exactly what you're saying is we're pulling these things down. Now we think we're gonna be able to create a university experience where you're like, I don't need all this other academic you know, enrichment side because I crushed through it. But there was all the socialization or skills building or projects I worked on with other people.

Joe Liemandt (1:07:34): Right? You found your cofounders at Stanford, and so you're like, let's make sure we find our cofounders. You find them in high school, great. You know, you aggregate a bigger group usually at a university. And so you you get cofounders, and then just the the scale of your ambition goes up and capability.

Joe Liemandt (1:07:48): And so you're like, no. I'm not gonna do the teen angst apps. I'm gonna do the significant billion dollar change the world businesses. That's sort of what we believe the transition will be here. And so we'll see.

Joe Liemandt (1:07:59): We'll see if that, you know, it's a new area, but those things when you talk about what is valuable to the kids, you do realize our old frame is gone. Yeah. And we need to throw it out and start over and figure out what they can do. And, you know, obviously all the alpha families believe my kid can do so much more than I ever expected and can do it much younger than I ever expected. And it's an optimistic view of what AI Yes.

Joe Liemandt (1:08:26): Is gonna do to the world. Right? There's, you know, we and just talking about school and what we think is important. You know, there's AI, we believe in rational optimism. We believe you should not take a 10 year old and try to doom them and tell them they're doomed and tell them the world's doomed.

Joe Liemandt (1:08:42): We we we just don't see how that's productive with a 10 year old. We believe you need rational optimism, not unfounded. Right? A rational optimistic framework. And our students, you know, when you think about if you're an Uber driver in Austin, right, and got the robo taxis and Waymo's and everything else, it's not gonna be good.

Joe Liemandt (1:08:59): Right? It's not gonna be good for you. You're gonna have to go through transition. Our students at Alpha are very much that you parents, you guys may be cooked, but we're going to crush it. That AI enables us to do things that you guys couldn't do, you still can't do.

Joe Liemandt (1:09:14): Right. Right? That you guys couldn't do this, and we can, and so we're ready to take on the world. And that's the magic. I have Austin Way, who's one of my juniors, and he's like, how much do you spend on time back, Mr.

Joe Liemandt (1:09:29): Limont? Because I'm gonna write one better.

Unknown Speaker (1:09:30): Oh I saw that happen.

Joe Liemandt (1:09:31): And I'm gonna be million, no he is, and No, actually it was really interesting because yesterday we were debating something, and I was like, you're wrong, Austin. He's like, I'm gonna prove you wrong. And I'm like, one of us is gonna learn something, and I hope it's me. I do hope it's me, right, on this stuff. And this is the kind of thing that these kids when you give them, equip them, it doesn't have to be this negative spiral, right?

Joe Liemandt (1:09:53): And as a parent, Mackenzie's phrase is, it's the best time in history to be a five year old. And we very much believe that. And we believe that the Austin educational system is going to prove that to the rest of the world, right? The reason the Governor's Association, the National Governor's Association comes out, right? The Secretary of Education, right?

Joe Liemandt (1:10:11): You know, at the White House, right? You know, McKinsey was presenting to dozens of first ladies around the world, right? They're all coming to Austin, right, to see what is going on here because in this time of change with AI, the solution is all in the kids. Yeah. Right?

Joe Liemandt (1:10:28): And we are we are in Austin.

Jason Scharf (1:10:30): We are owning that and dominating that. We're proving that they get superpowers, not this like, get rid of all the data centers because you're gonna destroy all this. No, it's the future is not like AI generally, think they have a messaging problem because it's like, keep the kids super like, they can do more than I can do And

Unknown Speaker (1:10:47): it's well how we started it. There is bad AI and bad screen, don't let them do screen time. But there is a right way to do it, and back to we just need to educate all the parents, and they need to see it, and you're like, do it the right way and look at the magic. And when your kid's thriving, everything else works a lot better.

Jason Scharf (1:11:02): Yes. Alright. So we definitely keep on going, but, yeah, nobody time. Can I end with the same question? He's like, you know, you're looking ahead, like, what's the what's the next hinge point experiment?

Jason Scharf (1:11:13): Like, the thing that you're looking at that's gonna be, you know, critical going forward.

Joe Liemandt (1:11:17): Yeah. Well, for me, it's education in Austin, which is that, you know, if we're gonna build, right, the city, right, I've been here since '92, and it's, you know, been blowing and going since the beginning, I believe the acceleration of the curve, in my view, is all going to be around education because this is your talent pipeline for the next twenty years. It's the capability, and these kids are the ones who are gonna be accelerating it. Right? This is your talent pipeline for existing companies, but all these new companies, all these new ideas, what is the structure of the future?

Joe Liemandt (1:11:51): Right? What's the company of the future? How are they gonna be built? I'm telling you, Austin Way has a better has a better chance of figuring out what is the future company that's gonna be built Mhmm. Than I would than some venture capitalist in some other city trying to figure it out there.

Joe Liemandt (1:12:05): And one last thing is make sure, hold us to high standards. We ever drop the ball never promise we won't drop the ball. We drop the ball, we'll be on it all over it.

Jason Scharf (1:12:15): I a 100% will do that. Thank you.