The Elite Private High School Where Students Earn A Million Dollars: [Nat Eliason of Founder School

Nobody really doubts that a Stanford software dropout could start a multi-million dollar or a billion dollar business. What is it that they're getting there that gives people the confidence that they could go do that? One part of it is just the selection effect of getting into Stanford, right? Like they're of a certain intellectual caliber. Another is the co-founders are the other people there around like being in that community. Another part is the mentor network, the speakers who come to Stanford and talk to the students and show them what's possible. Right? Like there's basically no reason that you can't reproduce those reasons in a high school, especially if the goal is just to make a million dollar company. If we can recreate the network effects of being around incredibly competent peers, if we can bring in amazing mentors to show the students what's possible and help coach them, if we can give them like the right bits of education to help shortcut the learning process, then yeah, obviously teenagers can do this, too. Especially when you add AI into the mix. — My friend Nat Eliason is back on the podcast with some big news and an incredible story. He just joined Alpha School specifically to help launch Founder School, which is a new high school with an absolutely wild promise. Students have to build a million dollar business by graduation or get their full tuition refunded. He's moving his whole family from Austin to New York to pursue this. I know there's been a lot of talk about Alpha School, rightfully so, and the founders have been on a podcast tear, but Founder School, I think is the frontier and will end up being one of the crown jewels of Alpha. I think this is a really fascinating movement in education and the results of this school and Alpha generally will define education for our next century. There's something really important about how we educate our kids and I think everyone has a sort of dawning realization that we're maybe a little outdated um and that this is a system that is sort of defying accountability in some really tragic ways and one that's really important to fix. So I just think it's really interesting to explore this and hopefully this is one of many experiments that can help get us moving in the right direction again. In this conversation, we talk about the failings of traditional schools uh in particular for these really ambitious high-potential kids. We talk about how AI tutors can compress the academic day into just a few hours while not just maintaining quality, but improving it. This personalized AI tutor is an absolute revelation. It's something that we've been theorizing about for a long time that is all over sci-fi tropes and the technology is really here and the results are starting to show in particular how some of these kids are able to make huge strides in short periods of time. It's unbelievable. And finally, what happens when teenagers get to spend most of their day doing real work and building real businesses um instead of sort of killing time moving their way through the system. So

I think this is a fascinating conversation. Uh there's a lot to learn from that. I'm really excited to follow along with him and with Founder School. Please enjoy the episode. So as not to bury the lead, Nat's made some very big life decisions, which is really the center of the conversation today. And I'm I like this is actually our first time like getting deep into it. I know the headline, but this will be an exciting thing to unpack cuz it's something I'm very passionate about and I know that you are on an absolute tear and like turning your life inside out to chase something incredibly new and exciting. So, let's have it. — Let's do it. Here we are. — What are you chasing? Where are you going? — Well, yeah, that was going to ask you. Sorry. —

— Yeah, so [clears throat] after 10 years of entrepreneurship, I've taken my first job in a decade. I joined Alpha School, which some people might be familiar with, some people might not. We'll get into all of that pretty quick, but we're opening a new high school specifically for aspiring entrepreneurs with the promise that they'll make a million dollars by graduation or get their whole tuition refunded. — That's so sick. — It's pretty sick. It's crazy. — Is there any like anything similar that's like ever existed?

existed? — No. No, there there's really nothing else out there like this, which is very exciting and obviously very challenging because we can only model so much off of other things out there, but much more of what we're modeling it off of are studies in how entrepreneurs became entrepreneurs, right? And, you know, it'd be great if I could like talk to somebody who had studied that, like how the greats, you know, got so great. — Cuz David said that. — I was talking about you, dude. It's like I've seen a couple books I can give these kids on how they can think more of, you know, like people like Elon. — No, because you think about like the other models out there, right? Y Combinator would obviously be like a huge one, but they only get kids for not kids, they only get founders for 3 months. And they get a lot done during that period, but they're getting people for about 3 months. They're accelerating somebody who has already done the hardest part of figuring out how to started, and they're getting people later in life, right? And then you have undergraduate entrepreneurship programs, which, you know, no disrespect to the people who work on them, but they're kind of a joke, right? Like, the great entrepreneurs out of a college are usually the dropouts who are figuring it out on their own. They might have a couple classes that really help them, but it's not like they're doing a four-year entrepreneurship degree and then going out and starting a business. And then you have some of these other programs or funds. You have 1517, obviously you have Thiel Fellows. But again, nobody is doing this combination of four years of hands-on development, training, coaching, mentorship, everything that we believe we can give to a teenager to set them up as much as possible for success, combined with the social environment of being around other people like them who are motivated by this goal. And then creating like a central place in the country, like planting a flag and saying, "If you're an entrepreneur who wants to give back to the next generation, come by Founder School. Come talk. Like, come take someone on as a mentee uh because we're going to go find these students and we're going to give them the first place in the world where we're removing every bottleneck and barrier possible to their success and letting them cook. " — And what about the whole world? I don't know anything about this world of like elite private high schools, boarding schools, or otherwise? — Yeah, so I went to I went to one of them actually. So, I I went to Choate Rosemary Hall, which is, you know, usually at the, you know, towards the end of the sentence when you talk about like Exeter andover and like that whole cadre of the New England boarding schools. And you know, that was actually where I discovered that I was really interested in entrepreneurship because my AP micro professor was so incredible. And taking AP micro was what made me realize that business was just fascinating and I wanted to go deeper on it. And unfortunately, that was kind of where it capped out. There wasn't really anything else there. There was an entrepreneurship class, but you know, again, no offense to my teacher because he was phenomenal. I loved him, but he just wasn't like an experienced entrepreneur. And the class wasn't structured around actually helping you start a business. It was more about teaching you some of the concepts and doing like school projects that were entrepreneurial. And then we had an FBLA, Future Business Leaders of America club on campus, which is like, you know, a popular high school organization for kids interested in it. But it's, you know, FBLA and DECA, they're kind of like playing entrepreneurship. You're doing these competitions, and these business plans and stuff. You're not really like starting a business. And there wasn't, again, anybody really there who was teaching it. So, we kind of had to like figure bits and pieces out on our own. And I just ended up not really making any progress on it in high school, despite being, you know, in one of the most prestigious, most funded, like best high schools in the world. There just wasn't that kind of support there for it. — And so, what's the vision? Like, how different is what you're going to work on now? Is it It's called Founders Academy? — Founder School. So. — Got a sick domain, founders. school. And you know, so there's a couple things here where it's like, one, this wouldn't be possible without Alpha School and what Alpha School has figured

out. And because this whole thing is built on the Alpha School model, where, you know, Alpha School is basically a new take on K-12 education, where we're using the best of learning science, going to kind of like the fundamentals of what we understand about how people learn best, which we've known for a long time, and are just not used in the school system because they it doesn't work for a mass market public or even private school system because far and above the best way to learn is direct instruction one-on-one with a tutor who knows exactly where you are in the learning process on the subject and can tailor the exercises, the material, and everything to exactly what you need to learn next in order to advance, you know, through the mastery of the curriculum. A teacher in front of a room of 25 can't do that. They have to teach to the middle or often to the bottom. And anybody who's kind of ahead of that or wants to go further, they just don't have really any way to support those students. This is why people will often, you know, exceptional students will get bored, they might become disruptive, you know, parents get told they're problematic because they're just not being stimulated at all in the class. And so what Alpha has developed is an AI-based tutoring system where the students do all of their academics in 2 hours in the morning for K through 8, 3 high school, and it's one-on-one with an AI tutor covering all the subjects that you're studying. And that tutor knows exactly where you need to go next, what you're deficient in, like which gaps in your knowledge of math or history or science need to be filled in, and can serve you exactly the bits of curriculum you need at that moment to get you closer to mastery. And what's crazy about that is you can have something like fourth or fifth grade math, which can actually be mastered in call it 30 hours of this kind of instruction. So, instead of a whole year of one to two hour lectures every day on math, it's 30 hours with this tutor. And so, if that's all you're doing for your your work session for a few weeks, that you're getting 10 hours a week, so it's like 3 weeks and you're done with math for that grade level. — It's just so much more efficient. Yeah, yeah. And so, we have that and that allows us to take the normal high school day and compress it to 3 hours. And so the kids can start at 8:30, be done with academics by 11:30, and then the question is like, well, what do we do for the rest of the day? And in the current high school model, the students get a lot of freedom to pick a passion project that they are excited about and then go work on that. So we have students who are putting on a Broadway play. We have a student who's like an incredible social media marketer. He works with Al Pacino on his films. We have a student who's getting published in nature. You know, like this is this whole mix of what kids are going after, but a lot of them were really interested in entrepreneurship. And that was where this idea came from is they told Joe, our principal, like we want a more dedicated entrepreneurship program. And then he kind of like took that to the next level and said, well, what if there was a whole school and the whole promise of the school was this is where you come if you were a teenager who wants to do entrepreneurship and we're going to move heaven and earth to help you succeed as fast as possible. And again, it is like wouldn't be possible except that we get five hours every afternoon to work on it with them, which is a thousand plus hours over the course of a year, and that only works because we've compressed the rest of the academic day so much. — There's something really cool about this that I think is part of the meta that isn't talked about that often. Like I've been I've read everything I can find on Alpha School and I recommend if people aren't familiar with it, go check out like Joe has done really good interviews with both Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Shane Parrish. I find both of those like extremely compelling great episodes. And

McKenzie Price, who's the co-founder founder co-founder um with did one with Chris Williamson. She's done a ton of press, but like the interview with Chris Williamson is the one that I listened to. And all of those I find this whole sort of theory incredibly or process incredibly compelling and it reveals something that I think is very obvious historically that we've all forgotten about which is like people some people start to become outrageously productive or powerful, capable at like age 13. — Yeah. — Or sometimes younger, like — Yeah. — the amount of people who could be what we now consider precocious if they were just given the context to do more is so high, so high. Like we have some of our most energy in our whole lives when we're teenagers. — Oh, yeah. — And apprentices started in trades when they were, you know, 13 years old historically and like there's just so many ways that environments like this I think can like give kids space to do incredible, incredible stuff. — Yeah, but most cultures have their like right of adulthood or their right of initiation into adulthood around that age of 13, 14 for a reason. Because that was when you could start giving back as a member of the community, when you could start that transition into adulthood. And I think that we're really wired for that. I think that that's where a lot of the angst, frustration, misbehavior, anger that happens in those teenage years comes from. Is that a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old knows they are capable of quite a bit. You know, they hopefully have the humility to understand that they're not a 45-year-old with all the experience, but they know that they could be going after something more challenging and more demanding of them. But instead they're told that they have to sit down and just do algebra and then like do nothing else, right? That no, you're still a kid. You don't get to go work on like these other things that you want to work on. You can do that in 10 years, right? Yeah, and some students love the school system, right? They love academics. Some students aren't quite ready to take on that responsibility yet. I'm not taking away from any of that, but for the students who are, like they should be able to do that. They should have those opportunities and there's just not enough organizations taking them seriously right now. — Yeah, so Alpha school is this what is this like platform, right? That allow Alpha School is a kind of like confusing thing. There's two things going on. One

is like — Yeah, there's a lot of things going on. — There's at least two very distinct things going on, which is like there's the academic the software that drives the academic platform that you're talking about, which like gets through the academics to an unbelievable degree of mastery. You know, there all these students are top 1% I think in the nation using this tutoring platform or something like that. — last batch of MAP tests the students were all top one or two percent across every subject and every grade level, which is wild. — For two in two hours a day, yeah, thanks to this like AI eight-hour tutoring platform and a bunch of clever sort of structures and incentives around how they do it. And so that platform is going to be applied to a bunch of different things, right? There's people who are kind of taking this platform and building like academic institutions on it. There's people who are building athletic institutions. Founders School is one of these that is like focused on entrepreneurship, which is like what we're kind of going deep on the beginning of and what Nat's joining. But there's there's infinite capacity, right? You could imagine like a musical version of this, an artistic version of this, you know, an environmental like nature-focused version of this, a travel-focused version of it. There's just so many like you can imagine a religious one. Like whatever, anything you can do with those other like, you know, five, six hours a day that kids are interested in that wants to form a community around it. — Yeah, the core thesis is that our software, which is called Timeback because we give the kids their time back, that only works if the kids have a reason to focus during those two hours and to stay locked in. It doesn't work as well if you just give it to a student without the rest of what comes with Alpha or these other programs accompanying it because, you know, in I if if there's no kind of like reward for being very focused and getting those two hours of work done, students will, you know, they'll look at distracted and they'll because like in school your reward for getting your school work done is usually just more school work or sitting in the back of the class or like getting in trouble because you read ahead, right? — Mhm. — And so all of our models are basically based on this idea that every student has something that they are more motivated by than studying math, right? And I think we can be honest about that, right? Like most kids don't jump out of bed excited to do math and that's fine, right? Like they don't have to be and we have a school for the kids who are. We have GT school where it's like, no, if you want to finish high school by eighth grade, like we will get you there. Like you can cook. But for most students they would rather do other things. So for Alpha we have all of these really cool workshops in the afternoon where they're learning life skills through these hands-on activities and often kind of crazy ones that the parents don't really believe the kids can do until they do that. So my daughter's starting kindergarten in the fall and one of the kindergarten workshops is that they climb a 40-ft rock wall. Which sounds wild, right? Like you have like five and six-year-olds going to the climbing gym every day after school and you know, getting more comfortable climbing and like being in a harness and doing all of that, but they're all cheering each other on and like that's one of the workshops that they do throughout the year. And so that's kind of like the Alpha model. You're going to get to do these really cool things after you get your school work done. We also have sports academy where you do your two hours in the morning and then you get to go to basketball court, volleyball court, baseball field and you just play sports all afternoon. But in order for you to unlock your five hours of sports a day, you have to get your school work done. And that model is really incredible because you have these kids and most of them are in much lower income areas. That's a it's a much less expensive school than the like normal Alpha school is. And so these are kids who are in some of the poorest parts of Texas and they don't have a good public school near them, but they're getting an Alpha level education remotely, but they're getting it done because they get to go play basketball in the afternoon with their coach. And you know, for them, they might be in seventh grade coming in at like a third grade reading level, but they're getting caught up really quickly through the software because they have that really strong motivation in the afternoon. You mentioned nature like we actually have a nature school. — Oh, I didn't know that. — Yeah, it's called Waypoint. It's here south of Austin. And yeah, the kids get their academics done in the morning and then they get to do archery and horseback riding and hiking and stuff in the afternoons and like that's their motivation to get the school work done. And so for us, we're saying, "Hey, you're not motivated by school like that's okay. We're still going to get you elite academics. You're going to crush your SAT and you're going to get a ton of AP credits like top 1% high school education, but the thing that is going to motivate you to get that done is that you get to do all the entrepreneurship stuff in the afternoon. We're going to be bringing in these crazy mentors, you know, Eric Jorgenson's going to do a book club, right? Like you're going to get this kind of like access and support that you could never get on your own. But you still got to get your academics done, right? And that part is still really important part of this. — Yeah. So, what's the status of Founder School now? Is like it's a baby, it's nascent, it's emerging. Okay. Are you joining like I mean it's it feels like close to day zero, right? You're this is this project was just kind of emerged. Did you join Alpha School for this or and then this emerged and your role kind of changed? — I joined for this — Okay. — and but sort of when I joined it was smaller. So, basically they had this idea last fall. And then when Joe had this idea, he looked to hire someone to lead it. He hired my business partner on all of this stuff, Cameron, who previously ran a company called Praxis, which is like a college alternative program that you know, helped people who didn't want to go to college develop life skills, work skills, professional skills to go straight into the workforce. And he led that for 10 years and then you know, stepped away from that and joined Alpha to start this school. And so, he was He had reached out to me early on. This was like last December because he was looking for somebody who was very deep in AI and entrepreneurship to come do some workshops for the current high school students to just like help them level up with like building with AI stuff in particular. And he brought me in to do that. He started telling me more about this program that he was working on and we were just talking about it for a couple of months until he said that he was trying to hire somebody who was like me, you know, this like AI native entrepreneur to help him build the program who could really lead more of the like curriculum and development and okay, how do we actually build a program that can deliver these outcomes at scale? And as soon as he asked that question, it just it felt like a lightbulb went off, right? Where I've been trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I've been planning to go after something like a lot bigger, not do the solopreneur thing anymore. And then this opportunity showed up and it was just immediately like, oh, I have to come do this. Like this is just so cool. And the more we started talking to Joe and kind of building up our idea for what this could be, it very quickly went from this will be a program at the current high school to this will be its own a high school in New York City that we want to grow to 1,000 students that is like the hub for aspiring entrepreneurs in the world. And just again, like, you know, nothing like this has ever existed before, but we believe that it can happen now in a big part thanks to AI and technology and we're going to go build it. So, it was very fun like feeling that evolve as we just like kept thinking about it and kept talking about it and now where it is today, it yeah, it just feels like the most exciting thing in the world I could be working on right now. — Yeah, and you keep kind of pushing on that ceiling and find out that it keeps going up. It keeps going up and you're like, oh, yeah, there's so much to do. That is really cool. So, what is the vision for it? Expanded a lot, You know, so now thousand students in New York City. How do you go about like starting a school? It feels like kind of a unique and interesting challenge as far as businesses to get started. — Yeah, I mean, thankfully we have so much of Alpha's expertise around starting a school to lean on, right? I mean, it nobody I don't think anybody else could really go after something like this right now just given how much Alpha has already invested in learning how to open a school, how to operationalize a school, the time back software itself, right? Like all of that is what makes this possible because we have most of the base layer figured out and now we just need to figure out, okay, how do we do this entrepreneurial layer on top of it. And so that that's like a really cool position to be in because on the one hand, it feels like we're starting a startup, right? It feels like, you know, right now he and I are the two like main people on the team and we have one engineer that we work with for a lot of like building out some of the initial tooling, but it's kind of like just the three of us, right? And so in that sense it feels like we're this little like team starting something, but on the other hand, we have all these other incredible people within Alpha who we get to work with as we figure this out. Just amazing admissions people, an amazing ecosystem guy, fantastic engineers and we get to kind of like draw on their knowledge or bring them in for bits and pieces of what we're working on and that's just like such a neat position to be in because Alpha somehow manages to be a school which like if you were going to pick an institution that's the opposite of a startup, like number one would probably be a government and then number two I think would be a school, right? Like those things just don't feel like they go together, but Alpha's kind of figured it out. Like we're going to open another we have 25 some schools open right now. We're going to have more than 50 in the next year because we've like figured out how to go into cities and open schools that start as micro schools of 25 to 50 kids and then can grow them from there as a demand grows. And there's like there's no other school doing that. — Mhm. — Right? Like Exeter isn't opening 20 Exeter's a year. And it would seem insane for them to try to do that. But we have this model decently figured out now that we can. And so we get to like lean on that as we figure this out. So thankfully I don't have to spend a ton of time on you know, like teacher accreditation or things like that you would have to think about if you were just completely opening a high school from scratch. We just get to focus on delivering the best entrepreneurship education possible.

— Okay, so that's the focus now. When do you know like when it opens yet? Do you have a campus locked down? What's the what's kind of the go forward? — So we're recording this in May of 2026 and we're going to be starting the first class in September. So the goal for the first class is like 20 students. And we have people in the admissions process right now. We're working on getting just the getting the news out there more that this is available. And like obviously it's late in the admission cycle, right? So a lot of students have figured out where they're going to high school, but for the right students this is such a awesome exciting opportunity that they're going to just like say no to the high school they were planning on going to and want to come do this. But we also don't want like a massive freshman class to start. We want to keep it pretty small targeted. That allows me to be really hands-on with them and to really just like iron out this curriculum and this program so that I can then teach it to the other, you know, we're calling them EIRs or fellows or guides who are going to come on and help run the process as we have it established and as we scale it up to more students. But the cool thing with Alpha is that we do take students throughout the year. So even in the high school here, students will transfer in like October or January or March and we're not going to prohibit that with founders either. I think like being the first student at a new school is a scary thing. — Yeah. — Right? Because it's new. And obviously like Alpha's not new, right? So there there's some establishment there, but Founder School is new and we haven't gotten any kids to the million-dollar outcome yet. Like nobody knows from the outside if this is going to work. We're obviously super confident. We feel great about it, but people are going to want to see some of that those initial proof points and so our goal is to find those initial students and families who are the most aligned and the most excited about it, bring them in, and then just like absolutely crush it for them and get to share those stories and I think that the students are going to do so much more than parents expect and they're going to be capable of so much more than parents expect that as we start sharing these stories then it's going to be like, oh wow, okay, yeah, this is real and that's going to drive even more of the interest going into next year. So it's cool and it's exciting because like we get to build this really focused initial class and then we're going to be putting a ton into like content and media with the school because kind of like you said, Joe does these podcasts and that's a big part of our marketing. McKinsey does all this media and that's a big part of our marketing and we get to do that too with Founder School. And it's a benefit of these students' businesses as well because they're not like completely figuring it out on their own. If one of these students build something cool, like I'm going to be posting about it on X. Joe's it. Like we're going to be making videos. We're going to be helping them as much as possible to get these things going. And so just, you know, going back to again why we think this is possible, like they're going to kind of have this marketing arm supporting them. They're not completely starting from scratch. And it's just going to be a ton of fun. Like I'm super excited to like get that part of it going. — Let alone like the rest of their cohort, right? To be able to like I feel like so many people to spend their high school, especially people who would be most excited about a program like this, spend most of their high school years like wishing there were people who shared the same interest around them or trying to find them or find and finding them outside school in most cases. Or spending a tiny fraction of their time on the thing that they're like most passionate about. Like, you know, yeah, 2 hours a week I get to go to robotics club where like all my people are and the rest of the time I'm just kind of like muddling along like with all the academics being told doing what I'm told. And this is just the inverse of that.

that. — Yeah, one thing Joe likes to say is cuz he went to Stanford and he dropped out after his sophomore year. And nobody really doubts that a Stanford sophomore dropout could start a multi-million dollar or a billion-dollar business. Like that just feels like, oh yeah, that that's totally possible. So, what is it that they're getting there that gives people the confidence that they could go do that? One part of it is just the selection effect of getting into Stanford, right? Like they're of a certain intellectual caliber. Another is the co-founders, right? The other people there around, like being in that community. Another part is the mentor network, the speakers who come to Stanford and talk to the students and show them what's possible, right? Like when Joe was there, like Steve Jobs came and spoke. Bill Gates came and spoke. He was getting some access to those people. And then another part of it is just that there is like a little bit of the learning in classes. There are a couple of classes that do actually help students get some like technical foundations or business foundations to have the confidence to go do it. But you break it out like that. You think about that list of reasons and there's basically no reason that you can't reproduce those reasons in a high school. And especially if the goal is just to make a million-dollar company, right? Like we're not talking about launching a billion-dollar company. I would love that. I mean, that would be incredible, right? — But it's like if we can recreate the network effects of being around incredibly competent peers, if we can bring in amazing mentors to show the students what's possible and help coach them, if we can give them like the right bits of education to help shortcut the learning process, then yeah, obviously teenagers can do this, too. Especially when you add AI into the mix, right? Like you don't have to spend 2 years learning programming anymore. You can whip up an MVP so much faster, and you can do that for a lot of these skill stack that goes into the base of starting a business now. It's just so much more possible. — And you have like there's a few interesting things happening here. Like you would absolutely imagine somebody like Mr. Beast who like knew who he wanted to be with like great intensity even when he was 13 years old, right? Like he basically started his grind there, and he was just lost for many years trying to kind of — Yeah. — find his people and find the learning curve and you know, make it out of where he was to the culture and figure out enough of the playbook to kind of get his initial traction. That took a really long time in his case. But the combination of a global market like that, which I'm sure a lot of these business models kind of will accidentally be or inherently be because these kids grew up on the internet. And the other is like the sort of competitive differentiation of like there's just not that many businesses started by high schoolers. And so like — Totally. — if that's if you have a unique perspective as an entrepreneur in the market or unique offering that like by the time somebody's starting a company at 25, they wouldn't start, wouldn't care about, wouldn't have that perspective, wouldn't see, wouldn't be able to reach the market. Like I think some of these businesses are going to be like very surprising quick takeoffs would be my guess. — Yeah, I think that's totally right. I mean, one of the things that we've thought about or that I thought about a lot and that I'll often tell people and I know you'll all this cuz this is like straight out of poor Charlie's Almanac is like, okay, you know, let's just invert it, right? Like why wouldn't a teenager make a million dollars by graduation? And it's like the number one thing that comes to mind is what you just mentioned of the years of fumbling around in the dark without somebody to tell you, hey, you're wasting time on this thing or hey, you need to go like talk to a customer, right? You need to actually try to sell this. You can't keep hacking on it in the dark. Or somebody to say like this strategy isn't going to work, but you can, you know, move 5% this direction and this is going to work a lot better or at least like go try this. And that alone can shave years off the entrepreneurial learning process. Like I think about when I was trying to figure it out and I didn't have any good mentors to rely on at the beginning. I didn't have any good programs to enroll in. I didn't have any peers around me who had done it. And so I was trying to piece it together from books and blog posts. And I was trying to hack on it in my free time outside of school. Or so I didn't have that much time and I didn't have good resources to learn. And that really quickly stretched into like three years before something got any kind of traction, right? And so like you can compress that to a few months very quickly just by having them in the right room with the right people to give them feedback and with the time to like test things out, right? And then [snorts] another one is like, okay, so we can think of a lot of reasons that they would fail, but like what are the reasons they would succeed? And you mentioned a really great one which is like they are aware of markets and interests that many older people are not, right? Like they're seeing the culture in a way many of us aren't seeing it. And so that, especially if we can get them out of the like selling to their peers mindset, but thinking a little bit outside the school walls, that's going to reveal a lot of opportunities. They're also fearless in a way adults are not. And this was a really incredible experience for me uh working with the current high school students where once I gave a couple of them a little push to start getting in front of people and trying to like sell what they were doing instead of just working on it in the dark, they were completely unafraid of just like continually ratcheting up their prices until they found a resistance point. Right? Like once they had that permission to ask for money, they were just off to the races. It was just like they were so confident. Or we went to an event here in Austin for like open class stuff. And we had a couple of students who were just again very fearlessly going up to all these like it's very established adults, people from like IBM and Northrop Grumman and just like crazy institutions and pitching them on hiring them to help them with AI implementation work. And you know, I I'm not embarrassed to say like I would still be very nervous about that. I'd be like, "Oh, I can't do that. Like that's inappropriate to do here. " But they're just like full steam ahead and it led to a lot of cool opportunities, right? And so they do bring a lot of advantages to the table that are easy to miss when you just focus on the reasons that it won't work. And you can you know, you can kind of like you can it's a lot easier to take somebody who's like overzealous with sales and pull them back a little bit than to take somebody who is completely afraid of doing sales and like push them to make that first call or something. — Yeah. It's actually interesting thinking back of like how many things would the average high schooler have been dead right about that would have made a ton of money over the last like 10 years, 20 years? Like YouTube, e-sports, Roblox, crypto. I'm sure I'm missing like big whole categories. — No, ga- gaming was definitely the big one for me. Like I was just so into it. And I was in sixth grade or seventh grade and I was making custom maps for Warcraft 3 — Yeah. — in my free time. And I mean, that's a huge market now, right? Like I was a few years too early for making Minecraft servers and monetizing them. Now people are making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Roblox and Fortnite custom maps and stuff. It's like that's a huge business. Streaming is a huge business. But, you know, I was told that video games were bad and a waste of time and I should feel bad about spending so much time on them. And so, that like interest never really got fostered, right? And I never even considered that was a career opportunity, right? I was told I had to kind of give that up to go do real work. And, you know, now that is real work. And so, there's going to be a lot of other things like that, too, coming down the pipe that'll be easy to miss from our our old people perspectives. — Yeah. I think in my era, there was like MySpace skins. You know, people were like selling like whateverlife. com. That woman made She's from where I grew up. She made a ton I see She sold that company for like tens of millions of dollars just like making HTML skins for MySpace pages. — That's awesome. — Yeah. There's just so much cool opportunity. And it'll be a really fun seat for you to set to like see all these things coming. Okay, so So, what is the like curriculum design exercise look like? Like, how do you go into not knowing, you know, you've got 20 kids coming in the fall? You don't know exactly what companies they're going to start yet, necessarily. And you're like, "Okay, how do I increase the odds of success for 20 13-year-olds? " Are they all freshmen coming in? — Ideally, we'll take sophomores and stuff, too. You know, we can't do the guarantee for sophomores cuz we have less time with them. — Okay. — But, there won't be like a freshman year, sophomore year, junior year curriculum. — Yeah. — There'll basically be like the year one curriculum, which is whatever year you come in, and then there's the stuff

that's after that. So, like, the year one curriculum is basically like all of the establishing the foundational skills that we think you need to have some familiarity of in order to be set up for success with like getting your first thing going. So, the whole first 2 months is on sales. And it's basically just on like sales and basic financial management for business. And the reason we're doing that is that far and above, like, the main bottleneck we have seen with all of the aspiring teenage entrepreneurs we talked to is just this desire to, like, build things in the dark and not put them in front of customers. And so, by getting them extremely comfortable doing sales face-to-face sales, right? So, I think, like, week one we're probably going to take them out to the pier in New York City and have them, like, sell water bottles and candy and stuff and just get completely fearless with all of that because then it's going to be so much easier to sell something that you actually care about to a real customer and not, like, a stranger. Right? But we really want to dial that in early, as well as dial in some of that, like, initial financial management and responsibility where they're going to have a fixed budget and a basket of goods that they can use that budget to, like, purchase items from to go sell and then they're going to have to track their P& L and their margins on everything and do those reports every week. And actually kind of have, like, leaderboards and shared knowledge amongst the class on what's working and what's not so they can keep iterating on what they're doing through those early days and start to, like, get in that habit of tracking everything, measuring what's working, what's not, trying new things, iterating quickly, but in a, like, much more sandboxed environment. Start to, like, get those reps in. From there, we're moving into a lot of the basic digital skills we want to make sure they have. And so, that's, like, one, the building with AI, right? Like, whatever idea you think you have, how do you build the basic version of it? That And that could just be as simple as, like, a landing page for something that's coming soon that you can actually start to go get validation from. And once you've built something, the way we'll probably do it during this period is, like, you'll get two weeks to, like, hack on something, but then after those two weeks it'll be locked and you can't touch it for the next six weeks. And then the whole next six weeks you have to work on distribution or direct outreach or earned media or like anything to try to get traffic and interest to what you made to see if anybody is interested in what you've built. And then coming out of that, we start to get into these like validation loops where you're coming up with an idea or identifying an opportunity, you're building a way to test the like interest in that idea as quickly as possible, and then getting out and trying to validate whether or not you should invest more time in it as quickly as possible to start to get them into those loops because once they get really dialed in on that, they could be testing something every I mean, it could be a couple days, weeks. It becomes a pretty quick process where we feel very confident that as they get better and better at that, by the end of freshman year, they will have found something where they're starting to see some traction that they can feel more confident going all in on. And then kind of like running in parallel to that, there is this element of it's hard to build a business when you don't like understand a topic area when you don't really like know what the opportunities are. And so Alpha already does this very good job of teaching expertise building. Right? So, helping them and like letting them be honest about, you know, if you love video games or if you love BMX photography, like we're not going to say, "No, that's a dumb topic area. Like you need to be interested in HVAC maintenance. " Right? Like — pick something, right? Like pick something you're actually going to keep studying and then become an expert on it, create content around it, build an audience like in that topic area because the deeper you develop expertise in this area you were interested in and the more you get enmeshed in that community outside of the school walls, but like with other adults, with professionals, that is where you're going to find these opportunities. And so there is going to be this like expertise building, content creation, writing, social media layer going on throughout all of this because that is what's really going to help them find these things that are worth going after instead of just getting on X and saying like oh, like this app type is going viral this week. Like I'm just going to make a reskin of that app and see if I can, you know, get it to 10K a month. Like we don't really want to encourage that type of just like kind of extraction entrepreneurship. It's like no, no. Figure out the topic areas that you're passionate about and then find the best opportunity to build a business that you can build in that area. And I think like with those things combined — Mhm. — the odds are exceptionally high that we will get them to something by the end of freshman year where they have real traction and a real opportunity. And then the education becomes much more targeted. — Yeah. — Where the role of the EIR, the guide, me is working with them, you know, weekly, daily to figure out what the bottlenecks are in their business and then coordinate the resources within our network to help them get through it. So we're going to have basically like experts in any problem they could be running into, right? Like if this is a cash flow management issue for an agency, like we're going to have people who can work with them on that. If this is like an ads optimization thing, a factory production issue, right? Like we can get experts to work with the students on whatever issue they are running into and make the education very targeted to whatever problems they're hitting in their business at that time and then give them the rest of the time to just like keep working and keep learning and keep pushing forward until they hit like the next problem that we can help them on. — This is super interesting. And I mean, if you can get people on a good track, I think a million dollars, earning a million dollars by graduation seems like this crazy goal, but like four years is a long time if you are compounding on a good track, right? Like it you know, to earn bottom line a quarter million dollars a year on average out of a business like that thing stacks in very interesting ways, especially if the institution has skin in the game, right? Like that's one of the things that you know, I have always felt as a student is like this school, whether it's a public school or a private school or a college, like does not actually give a [ __ ] whether I'm successful or not. Like they can say that they're putting the resources in front of me, but like there's zero not just accountability. There's no accountability for a downside, but there's also no incentive for an upside. And — No, that's really true. — I think like to be, you know, one of a handful of kids in a situation where there's like real financial skin in the game from the institution's point of view to be like you are going to have to give me back hundreds of thousands of dollars if we don't collectively figure this out and help me get over this incredibly high bar that will change, you know, my and potentially my family's life. Like that is a very unique animal. — Yeah, I don't I don't think there's any other school or just educational institution that has this kind of skin in the game. I guess the closest would be Gauntlet AI, which is like out alpha affiliated as well. — Right. — Yeah, because they're, you know, they need to get the engineers good enough at programming to get hired by their hiring partners at the end of it. — Which is much more like a trade school kind of model for software programming and AI programming. — Exactly. — Also a really cool model. Like I encourage people to check that out. Austen Allred is a genius. But like this is just a different level of sort of involvement and in a younger focus for kids. — Yeah, and on top of that we need to get them good SAT scores. — Right? It's like and we're doing the academics too, right? And I feel like I do have to continually mention that in interviews and stuff because it's easy to lose sight of the fact that this is also a high school, right? where we are also trying to deliver like top 1% academic outcomes. And again, feel very confident that we can do it, but yeah, like it's it we're just super aligned. And like, you know, I want every week, you know, basically like every week I'm going to want to look at what every single student is doing, right? And like what problems they're running into. And we're developing these incredible internal AI tools to help us do that, to maintain like these micro-level views of what every student is doing and what problems they're hitting, so that me and the other people in my team can help coordinate the best resources possible to get them through whatever challenge they're running into. — Yeah, I want — And going back to what you said about like having that support, I mean, there's like all these things like when I was running my agency, it took me so long to learn about like cash flow management and about like hiring and just like the internal resource allocation and pricing and all of these things because like there was nobody looking at my books every week and saying, "Hey, you should really think about this. " And there are lessons that took me a year or more to learn that I could have learned in a month if I'd had somebody providing that support for me. So, again, it's like I don't really know any other organization that is taking like this long of a time frame on aiding in development of entrepreneurs. I don't think it's been done before. And so that that's why again, just going back to like feeling very confident that we can actually do this, that we can get these kids to build a million-dollar business by graduation. Like the you remove those bottlenecks faster and things can just go a lot quicker than you expect. — Yeah, it's a very interesting I wonder if there'll be like a common framework you end up sort of aligning on for kids who like manage their scorecards so that it can kind of ladder up into like a green, yellow, red sort of operating system or anything like that. — I dude, the data that we're going to have and the like knowledge base we're going to build on building businesses, there's not going to be anything like that in the world. We're going to have more insight into what works and what doesn't for learning entrepreneurship and starting out as an entrepreneur than anybody else has ever had. — Yeah. Okay, so very unfortunately, my audience is probably more parents than 13-year-olds. So So, what is the What do you think Have you I'm sure you started to have conversations with some of the parents and families sort of coming toward this or evaluating What are those conversations like?

— I mean, I think the biggest thing that I haven't touched on too much, but that's really important to say, is that we don't want to just create like TikTok entrepreneur hustle bros, right? — If we get to freshman year and all of our seniors are like posing on Lamborghinis and like wearing massive watches and stuff, then we have kind of failed as an institution, right? Like And this is why the philosophical side, the reading side, the like holistic education is such an important part of what we're trying to do here, right? Freshman year has an incredibly aggressive reading list because we think it's really important for them to understand why building businesses is good. Like this isn't just about you making a million dollars. This is about you making the world better, solving problems for other people, like enriching other people's lives, and business is one of, if not, the best ways to do that. And so, we really want to try to instill that as much as possible in these students because like we're trying to create we're trying to help foster the types of founders who go out and change the world and make it better, not just like sit on a bunch of cash and, you know, go party on yachts. And so, that I think is like one of the things that, you know, I as a parent would be concerned about, right? Like is my kid still going to be a good kid after this program? All right, like are they going to be a good person or are they just going to be like completely money obsessed? And we would really feel like we had failed if they were just like completely money obsessed. And you know, I think to like the 13-year-old who's super motivated about this kind of program, the like we're going to instill an appreciation for philosophy and writing and thinking in you is like a less sexy hook than the we're going to make you we're going to help you make a million dollars, but we think it's like it's just as important. Because also like learning how to think and learning how to like move beyond your immediate surroundings or what's like immediately salient on social media and whatnot, that's how you find [snorts] these really big opportunities, right? Like I know you talk about this in Book of Elon and in Naval Ravikant, like you have to learn to think at these both higher and deeper layers to understand where the real opportunities are in the world and just how much change you can actually create. And it's kind of like, you know, it's easier to do a big thing than a small thing in some ways. They're just like all of these aspects to it that they're going to be really important and like we have a writing program as part of the school. Like every week the students are going to be writing essays. And they're going to have to do it without ChatGPT. like I'm going to let them use Microsoft Word or Google Docs in the beginning, but I probably have one of the best noses for AI writing of almost anybody out there. And so if there's like the tiniest hint that they're using AI, like they're going to be writing longhand, right? They're going to get pencil and paper because it's like if you learn how to write really well, think better. If you learn how to like take ideas from books you're reading and explain how they're relevant to what you care about and what you're working on or just explain them so that other people can understand them and benefit from them, you're working on those muscles that are going to make you a lot more effective at again just like thinking about problems at a broader scale and not just what's going to make me the most money in the shortest time frame. And on the one hand it's like scary to take time away from the entrepreneurship to like do all of that stuff because we have this promise, right? We have this goal. But it's also I think just like extremely important again going back to like it's a high school. It's still a high school with this crazy amazing goal attached to it and we need to help foster like amazing students going into adulthood as well. — Yeah. That kind of like captain's log would be so interesting of like you know a 13-year-old starting off on this journey and then being able to look back at that at 15 and at 17. If you if it is an honest reflection of their thinking at the time. Like it's an incredible opportunity to see reflect on your own growth and how quickly you know you change over those years. — Oh, totally. And I you know and we'll let them pick if they want to keep it as like a personal reflection thing or an audience building thing. I love the idea of a bunch of these students having Substack where they're talking about these industries that they are really passionate about and it's going to be a an insane amount of work for me. It's going to be more work than almost anything else but like reading those every week and giving them feedback and helping them sharpen their thinking and writing. It's like that is very meaningful to me and very exciting. And I'm going to have to figure out tooling to help with that and stuff down the line but — you already solved the word maximum rather than school's normal word minimum. — Yeah, word minimum exactly, right? Like if you can't explain it in 250 words then you don't really understand it. I'll I'll figure it out but I'm legitimately excited about that part of the program too on top of all the entrepreneurship stuff. — Yeah, that'd be very cool. I wonder what the um I'm thinking about like other extremely accomplished teenagers, right? Like you know every Olympics it feels like there's somebody whose story is you know doing two-a-day practices and achieves

this like world-class level of excellence. And I imagine these will be something like Olympian level entrepreneurs by the end, if not by the beginning. And I'm curious kind of what the expected lifestyle is. Like, are these going to be like do you think these will be maniac schedules who are like, you know, answering emails at 5:00 a. m. and then like working 12-hour days because they're so passionate about it? Or are they like normal kids who are building incredible businesses in the 5 hours a day that they're at school? — Yeah, I mean, my it it's tricky because I we certainly won't require them to be doing 12-hour days and 12-hour weekends, right? Because I mean, one, that'd be unsustainable. I think that would be bad for them, it'd be bad for us. We we're actually thinking that we might have everybody like wear a Whoop. And you need to get like a good sleep score in order to like do your entrepreneurship for the day. You can't be like staying up until 4:00 a. m. every night. You got to take care of your body so that you can like do good work. But at the same time, if you know, some of the like most impassioned periods of my life have been when I was on those schedules, right? Where I was just so lit up about what I was doing that was all that I wanted to do. And so, we don't want to necessarily take that away, either. But I think it is important to encourage the students to find balance, right? Like, we can't have sports teams, obviously, cuz we have 20 kids. But we can set up like a local padel league or like something for the students to do that is not business-related outside of school. Or, you know, ways for them to get together in the evenings or on the weekends. We really do want to encourage that because again, going back to like, it's a high school. Right? Like, we want to give them as much of the social experience as possible while understanding that this will also be like pretty demanding um time-wise. I mean, the one big benefit we have is that there's no homework. Like all of the learning happens during those 3 hours in the morning. So, like when I was in high school, I was spending a few hours a night on homework. I was spending a lot of time on homework on the weekends and studying for tests and things like that. And we don't have any of that. So, that gives them a lot of time back for academics and other things. That definitely helps with keeping this more balanced even if the academic day is longer. But, even if like they only work during those 5 hours 5 days a week, I think you could still get pretty incredible outcomes cuz that I mean, that's 1,000 hours a year. Like that's a lot of time. — Yeah. — Especially if you have AI cooking up some stuff outside of that time period. — So, it's still very early. I mean

you just opened up the very first admissions process. But, what is I'm curious what the like who's showing up for this? Who's kind of first in line? Are these like iconic entrepreneur families? Are these like people with, you know, normal families with kids who sort of show proclivities towards starting businesses early in their life? Like what's the mix so far? — So far, it's mostly people who are already interested in the Alpha ecosystem. — Okay. — And they're hearing about this through that ecosystem because you know, if you're coming in completely cold, it's a lot to get bought in on. — Right. — It's like — you know, the the doing the whole high school academics in 3 hours a day, that already sounds pretty insane to somebody who doesn't have some familiarity with Alpha School. And that's almost like a footnote in our program. It's like, well, yeah, well, obviously we get the academics done in 3 hours and then they're going to make a million dollars by graduation, right? Like that is just bananas. — Yeah, yeah. And if you don't have that If you don't keep that I'm glad you do keep pointing that out because it is very easy to just like hear the headline and be like, oh, oh wait, so my kid's going to be like a rich idiot? — Yeah, like they're going to get a GED, like we don't care about the academic or it's like, no, no, no, they're probably going to do like 10 or 15 APs and they're going to get like a 1450 plus on their SAT, like they're going to get excellent academics. — And they might be able to do all this business stuff. — Like they're Yeah, they're going to still go I mean, these kids are going to have incredible resumes for college, right? Like that that's all still on the table, but so yeah, somebody coming in cold, if somebody knew nothing about Alpha and they just heard this podcast, like that would be a pretty challenging sell, I think, for them to encourage their kid to I mean, now, granted, if you want to do that, do not let me stop you. Like I would love to hear from you, right? Like, please. I just I understand that is a big ask. leap. And so a lot of the people who are reaching out are people who are already in Alpha or have already been exploring Alpha um for high school and now they've heard about this and they're like, oh, that is like that is the model that would be best for my kid. And so you know, and some of them, the kids have already started doing some entrepreneurship stuff or they've just expressed a lot of interest and their middle school or their parents don't really know how to direct them on it. And I think like you know, to my parents, I think this would have been kind of resonant because it was like always clear that I was smart, right? Like I could do the work when I needed to. I was just completely unmotivated by anything in school. And especially after I had a little bit of that exposure to entrepreneurs, which I didn't have at home, you know, like this isn't a criticism of my parents. They were just both lawyers, right? Like they weren't entrepreneurs. And so I didn't grow up in that. But if you have I mean, if you're kind of entrepreneurial and your son or daughter grew up in that and you can see bits of yourself in them and you remember how just like sad you were in the normal school system and you had kind of accepted that like your kid was going to have to go through that same like suffering for lack of a better word that you did and then they'll get to like have fun and be free later. And then you get presented with this and it's like no no. Like they could actually enjoy high school. They could have a great time, right? They could actually get to do all the things that you didn't get to do because these options weren't available. I think that's a really compelling pitch. Like that would be super compelling for me. And we're just trying to find all those families right now. — Yeah. It especially in the New York area, that's going to be the first campus, right? It like Manhattan. — Yeah. — Okay. — And then we'll probably open SF next year because that's the other like most obvious city to have this in. And then there's Miami is the other like really big one. There's a lot of demand for Alpha in general, but also just like alternative schools in Miami, too. — Okay. So, if you're in San Francisco, don't move to New York for this school. Like they might be in New York soon. — Okay. Oh, yeah. Interesting. — Yeah. Yeah. So, I so actually I should mention that, too. Like you know, if you're living in Kentucky and you think your kid would be a great fit for this, like we actually have boarding figured set up for it. And so, like you're then it's with another school in New York. And so, your kid can be in their boarding program, but come to school with us because yeah, we don't want location to be a barrier for this. And we have scholarships available, too. So, it's like we're just looking for the most ambitious teenagers in the country who are really lit up about the idea of getting to start entrepreneurship now. And we want to do everything we can to help them come do this program because we're just excited about seeing them succeed more than anything.

— Incredible. Where do you see this going? I don't know how far out you want to look. 10 years? 20 years? Like give us the big picture vision. — I mean, our 10-year plan is 10 campuses. 10 campuses with 1,000 students each. And so, I can't give you the exact cities, right? Like we know the first few that we want to target, but I think that, you know, the you know, when we really dial this in, when we feel, you know, when we're 100% confident saying that like, "Yes, if your student comes here and does the work, they will build a successful business by graduation. They won't have to go to college if they don't want to cuz they can keep cooking or they can go and they can come back to business after, they go straight into industry, they can keep working on their business, and like yes, it's expensive, but you're setting your student up for that financial independence at like 18. I mean, that's a very strong pitch for a school. So, if you think about what parents spend right now on private school and college and tutoring and like all the things that go into it, right? There's a lot of families in New York City who spend 75k on high school and then another 50 to 75k on tutoring. Which to me is kind of insane cuz it's like, "What is the school doing? " — Right? Like, forget the school, just hire the tutor, right? Like and and so okay, if you could spend that same amount and not have to deal with the tutoring and your kid gets to like build a business in the afternoon and make a million dollars by graduation, like that's a very strong pitch. And so I I think, you know, one, we want to expand the you know, the Elite Founder's School to every market that wants it because we believe that this is going to be one of the best high school models in the world, right? This is going to just unlock so much human potential at a young age and we want to figure out what are the more productized, software-driven versions of this that work at much lower price tiers, right? Because obviously, if we wanted to figure out a $10,000 a year software-driven version of this, we can't have these elite entrepreneurs like on staff supporting with everything, but we can probably build software and AI tools that teach a lot of the same skills and give feedback that require a lot more self-motivation and would require more like decentralized networks to build community and things like that, but that would provide options for people who, you know, don't live in Manhattan or who can't afford send their kids to the school or who don't, you know, qualify for scholarships or something like that. Like we don't want this to just be education that is like gated to the rich people, right? Like we want to bring the education down market and it's kind of like the Tesla model, right? Like build the Roadster first, build the top market first, really figure it out there, and then we can figure out how to bring it to more accessible layers after. — Okay, so the tuition for this to start with is high. — Yeah. Tuition is 150k a year. — 150k a year, but you get that back if you're if you don't make 100 make a million dollars by graduation. — Exactly. So, it's a 600k for a million dollars. — Yeah, fair enough. Okay. — Or you get the four years of school for free, which pretty good deal, too. — Also a good deal. What is the where does that go? Like what is that That's a very expensive, right? Like if the other high-end most high-end schools in the world are, you know, or in New York are 50k to 75k a year, like where are you spending all of that the kids are going to see value? — Yeah, yeah. I mean, so to be clear, it's not like — I don't Nobody else would start this business. Like we're spending all of that. Uh-huh. And it's really just on the like the teachers and the resources and the education and everything that we want to like give to these students. I mean, like token budget is part of it because we're going to teach these students how to be like the most AI native people in the world, not just the most AI native teenagers, but they're going to be able to go into a Fortune 500 business at graduation and teach those executives how to use AI better. They're going to be some of the best in the world at it. And that requires a decent amount of investment in software and tools on our part. If a student's hitting some supply chain issue and we want to hire like an executive from Amazon to come in and work with them for a week, like we're going to do that. Right? We're trying to give them the best resources in the world to figure this out. And then the staff that is going to be in there with the students are going to be paid more than really any other teachers in the world because we're trying to hire people who have that entrepreneurial experience, who could be out building businesses of their own, but are down to come do this for a couple of years to help accelerate the next generation. And so it's it it's a very expensive program to run. And again, going back to probably like why no one else has done this, like it's a lot to marshal those resources. It's very exciting and it works out at scale, but we're really we're taking all of that tuition and more and putting it right back into the students and the program. And what we're not putting it into is like facilities and flashy stuff, right? Like there's no $100 aquatic center. There's no 200-acre campus. There's none of that like bloat that the tuition is funding. It's all going back into the education to make it as valuable as possible for them. — Which it it's kind of an interesting like you're almost bundling you a lot of what you paid in tuition will come back in the form of value added to the businesses, right? So whether that's like tokens that you're spending in order to like learn AI or build a product, whether it's like an expert that you're bringing in, a consultant, you know, something like that. You know, you're bundling like these kind of like the capital, the advisory, the you know, some of the vendor spend, like a lot of this stuff will come back to that business or that student — through the school. — Yeah, exactly. And you could you could almost think of it as like trusting us as the best capital allocators for getting their businesses started and getting their educate you know, with the addition of the great education. Because it's so easy to burn much more money than that trying to figure out entrepreneurship on your own, right? Or you compare it to like an undergraduate business degree, which now would probably run you like 300 grand at least. And — And beef. — None of that's going back into your business. It's only going to be lectures. — Yeah, lectures, administration. Yeah, like just to yeah, the undergrad business programs at least outside of a few highly specialized ones I think are absolute catastrophes. — Yeah, in terms of like ROI on tuition into the direct like business support. Yeah, there's nothing that's anywhere comparable to how we're doing

it. — Yeah. Amazing. Where should people go to like learn more, follow along, get smart? Aside from obviously like if you're not familiar with Alpha, definitely get a fundamental understanding of Alpha through some of those Joe podcasts. I'll link them in the show notes, but like highly recommend as a 101. I would call this a 201. Yeah, it kind of builds on top of that as fundamental knowledge. — Like you said, his interview on Invest Like the Best or a Knowledge Project are both fantastic places to start. If you want to learn more about Founder School, it's just founders. school or honestly just email me directly. I'm just nat. eliason@alpha. school. And you know, I'm honestly happy to talk about this with anybody who's been listening to it, answer any questions. And yeah, admissions are open right now for fall 26, but if you have a seventh-grader or a sixth-grader, you're interested in talking about '27, '28, like love to chat with you, too. So, we're just getting the word out there, sharing what's going on. I mean, I love talking about it, so — Yeah, I'm glad we get to do this. I've been a huge advocate for Alpha School among like the friends and families that I know. Kansas City is now kind of on this like it's opened up for indications of interest. So, if we get a critical mass like we'll come out and they'll do a shadow day. So, I've been taking over some dinner parties with this conversation and I will continue to, but no matter where you are you can sort of go check it out and indicate interest. And at least start poking your nose into it. I think this Alpha and Founders both kind of fit they like clicked into a thing that has felt obvious to me for like 10 or 15 years, which is like sooner or later there'll be a tipping point around AI and personalized tutors and the quality of the potential quality of education of like every human being on Earth can — Yeah. — 100X basically and I think this is the organization and the technology and the system that is doing that is going to be this is going to take over the world over the next hopefully decade, but it might take 30 or 40 years depending on how quickly we can get rid of some bad ideas and install some new ones. — Yeah. — So, you know, please new ideas are hard and change is uncomfortable, but like rip some Band-Aids and go read up on this stuff. — Yeah, and you know, there it's like there are bad ways to use AI, but we're trying to use it in the best and most responsible way possible to create the best education outcomes possible to you know, fill kids heads with knowledge and turn them into these philosopher builders and give them everything they need to really succeed in whatever the world is turning into. It feels like it moves at a mile a minute and it's feels like it's changing every few months and it kind of feels like we're the only school that's agile enough to stay on top of it and we're just like doing our best to build what that program is going to look like to help all these kids succeed no matter like where they are and what they want to go do after. So, it's exciting to be a part of it. — Love it. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for like upending your life to go build something so cool. I'm very confident it'll put a dent in the world and accelerate a lot of people who will all like put even bigger dents in the world. It's going to be awesome. — Appreciate you, man. Excited to be You know, we're doing this together, all right? Like — Yes, we are. I will be there. — I will be there and I hope you'll come back and update us as you get more stories and things unfold. This is going to be really cool thing to track. — Absolutely. Thanks, Eric. — All right. Cheers.