Joe Liemandt
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a16z · Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani &…
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What Does Founders School Guarantee Its Students?
Joe Liemandt says Founders School, Alpha School's high school for students who spend those years building businesses, guarantees a student will start a business that earns a million dollars of profit before graduation or the school returns the tuition. He treats entrepreneurship as a set of skills, not a bolt of lightning, and the stack starts in kindergarten with earning, saving, spending, investing, and donating.
The school opened in August. The work is scaffolded from a hundred dollars through a thousand, ten thousand, and a hundred thousand dollars on the way to that million. A couple of months in, he expects freshmen to reach it in the first year, and he says he is already out of curri
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Why Does Motivation Matter More Than the College Lecture?
Gagan Biyani says learning is about 90 percent motivation, so college should be driven by what moves an 18-year-old: building things people will use, earning revenue, and getting a job. He did not learn much in a format he disliked. On campuses he visits, including Stanford, students are not finding the old format workable. He remembers classes about half full twenty years ago, when maybe 20 percent of students shared that view, and he hears attendance is now way under 10 percent.
The Horowitz and Andreessen Academy, in his view, is focused on rebuilding that format so motivation is what pulls students into the work. A lecture they sit through without buying in does not create the learning.
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What Is the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy?
Gagan Biyani says the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy is a college-age school built by redesigning education for the AI era, with Alpha School as the model rather than a schedule copied from K-12. He wants a stronger network, students more likely to become positive-sum people, and practice at hard things, and he says earlier grades, high school, and college each need a different design. Most university leaders, in his account, spend about 90 percent of their time on the adults around the institution, so the student is not the job.
Joe Liemandt says university has to be reinvented the way he has tried to reinvent K-12, and he does not think everyone should skip college. He wants a next step
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What Do Alpha School Students Do After Two Hours of Academics?
Joe Liemandt says the rest of the Alpha School day is for life skills, not more class time and not an early dismissal. Parents, in his view, would hate a school that sent children home after the academic block. The students want to stay, and he thinks those hours are the point once a traditional curriculum can move much faster.
He sorts the work into leadership and teamwork, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, socialization and relationship building, storytelling and public speaking, and grit. Students spend the afternoon on group projects with their friends and an adult who writes the work. Once families accept that core academics can fit in two hours, his claim is that schools will h
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How Fast Does AI Let Students Learn?
Joe Liemandt says AI lets students fill their heads with knowledge 10 times faster, so the expertise part of school no longer takes long. A student can cover the equivalent of a master's in a year and become a domain expert while still in high school.
High school students are already rebuilding the Timeback software stack he wrote and learning science that used to sit out of reach. AI also gives them the power to build. At Alpha High, students are not gloomy about the future. They tell adults the adults are cooked and the students are coming, because the students have superpowers. Two years from now, most learning software will be written by students, and most students will learn from softw
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What Did Joe Liemandt's Dad Say About Dropping Out?
Joe Liemandt's dad called him a moron in Forbes for dropping out of Stanford, then reversed himself two years later and called the dropout the greatest thing ever. During K-12 he was always in trouble, skipped school, and did the minimum to get into Stanford. After he left, his dad was not happy, and the line that reached Forbes left out what came next.
He dropped out, started his company, and was soon working 100 hours a week and sleeping under the desks. Two years later his dad admitted he had worried his son would stay a lazy little shit, matching the old academic record, and as a dad he was terrified he had done poorly. Once his son was doing what he loved and fully engaged, his dad wis
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Do Families Regret Skipping Alpha School?
Joe Liemandt says families who skipped Alpha now regret the choice. They thought the traditional path was the safe path, and it was not. Alpha kids are thriving, while parents who once called Alpha crazy look at a kid who stayed on the old path and wish they had switched.
He has lived the choice at the K-12 level for four years. The move follows an adoption curve, and only a set of families has to go first. Some parents already see the current system is not there. Others feel the pull and still need to be moved over. Both of his daughters were told in eighth grade they would not get into college if they went to Alpha and later had to enter a traditional school. Across families who chose Alp
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How Does Alpha School Make Kids Love School?
Joe Liemandt says Alpha School redesigns the school day so kids love school more than vacation, and the key to a child's happiness is high standards. Kids want to do hard things with their friends. Playing video games all day is something they can already do at home.
Every third grader is mic'd up and thrown into an escape room. AI analyzes the transcript. Less than 20% of the language is uplifting. The rest is fighting, pushing, and my idea. An eight-week workshop keeps sending them back until 85% of their language is team behavior, which they need to pass the class. They also finish the escape room three times faster in a team environment.
In fourth and fifth grade, students must pass th
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How Much Do Alpha School Kids Learn in Two Hours?
Joe Liemandt says kids at Alpha School learn twice as much in two hours a day as sitting in class for six hours and doing homework. Cognitive science, learning science, and LLMs make it possible to build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster than a teacher in front of a classroom. Instructional design and delivery has not changed for 100 years.
Alpha makes three commitments to the kids. The first is love of school. Surveys returned last week show 90-some percent of the kids say they love school. 50% of the kids at the school would rather go to school than go on vacation, and one campus is at 65%. A school has to stay lovable across 12 years.
The second commitment is the acade