Why K-12 Education Is Broken for High Achieving Kids | Niels Hoven (Mentava)

built this new tool you know it's going to help kids learn I remember one response where a teacher said oh that's really cool but won't some kids then learn faster than others they're like this is a non-starter if this tool is going to allow some kids to learn faster than others then we can't use it the idea that you should take kids and give them material based on their ability it's just a nonstarter with some of the most powerful educational organizations in the world the craziest thing about this is that when you implement all these programs when you basically Nerf the public school system and say okay we're going to ensure that this school system does not give opportunities to high achieving kids then who is really bearing the price of that like who are you hurting the most because the rich families they're the ones who can afford these after school programs they can send their kids to private schools they can afford private tutors it is the families without those financial resources who are dependent on those Public School Systems to create those opportunities for their kids to level up that are being penalized by this I think very narrow sided perspective all right welcome everyone my guest today is uh Hoven Neo is the founder of manava an education startup that's teaching twoyear olds to read at a second grade level and more I'm excited to talk to him about why he thinks K2 education is broken for high achieving kids and how he's building a software to en personalized learning and also we'll close of discussion about AI welcome Neils thanks so much for having me here Peter it's a pleasure yeah thanks so much so you're a parent and

I'm a parent too when don't we start this like what do you think is the problem with K12 education policy in this country I guess what's good about it and also what's problematic about it yeah so I think this is something that a lot of parents just don't realize until you actually have your own child in the school system and you get to see it for yourself and the thing is that modern education policy particularly here in the US is not focused around helping every kid reach their potential it's just not the goal of modern education policy is closing the gaps between High achievers and low Achievers and of course that's an important goal it's a note noteworthy goal and it's absolutely something we should be working towards but when that is the only goal that you're optimizing for what you see in practice is that the way schools try to close that goal is by making sure that high achieving students don't have the opportunity to succeed and I mean it sounds C to think about that but you go look at districts like San Francisco for example where you are literally just not allowed as a teacher to teach material above grade level lots of schools all around the country are getting rid of their accelerated programs in math and science trying to close the gap between High Achievers and struggling students by limiting opportunities for those High achieving students to succeed and I think it's just going in completely the wrong direction so they're actually do closing the Gap by limiting the high Achievers instead of bringing up the low Achievers that's kind of hard yes it's so frustrating to see because it means that there's this whole you know audience there's this whole segment of high achieving kids who want to be learning more like who actually want to be going to school and learning more and their learning needs are not being met and what are some of the most provoking or like craziest examples you've seen of this action like you mentioned San Francisco yeah give any other examples

yeah I mean I think the one that was most visible was probably the fight for eighth grade Algebra in San Francisco and now Statewide in California where about a decade ago San Francisco said okay so it used to be the case that if you were a seventh grader who was ready to take out most kids would take algebra in nth grade if you were a seventh yeah I maybe most kids took algebra in eighth grade if you were a seventh grader who was ready you could sort of go a year up and you could take algebra a year early but basically because some kids were failing algebra in eighth grade they said okay across the board now everybody is going to take algebra in ninth grade you know those kids who used to be able to take it in eighth grade sorry you're going to take in ninth grade the kids who used to be able to take in seventh grade sorry you have to wait until ninth grade I took algebra in fourth grade but sorry they would have said you have to wait until nth grade and this was you know San Francisco there there's a all this drama about it where San Francisco basically lied through their teeth and created all this false evidence that this was actually a good program and it got to the point where it actually almost went Statewide so California was rolling out their new state math curriculum and they wanted to adopt the San Francisco policy of getting rid of middle school algebra Statewide and it was only by like a sustained sort of activism pushed by college professors mathematicians everybody saying this is a bad idea that actually we should be allowing kids to learn math that not end up going Statewide and the crazy thing about some of this is that these are not unpopular policies the idea of allowing children to read is not an unpopular policy it's just that these essentially these anti- Excellence activists have become ensconced in education policymaking and they are pushing these very unpopular policies in San Francisco they actually had to do essentially a Citywide referendum there was a public vote that was required to say look Schoolboard we actually believe that you need to allow our middle schoolers to allow algebra to be taught algebra again and a pass with you know an 80% approval rating like these are overwhelmingly popular policies of supporting kids learning needs being driven by you know essentially activist policy makers I wonder what are the incentives like driving some of these policy makers like you know in a company you have people trying to game promotions and stuff but like maybe they have some sort of like metric to try to optimize for or maybe just this why I want to be equal like do you have any inside to that yeah I mean I think that's basically it there's sort of two perspectives on what is the role of education and some I think most people look at say that the role of education is to provide opportunity to everybody and other people look at education and say education is supposed to be an equalizer right that a successful educational program will essentially optimize for equal outcomes and unfortunately that is essentially the dominant perspective among policy makers who are setting these educational goals and they're evaluated on how good job they do of closing this gap between High Achievers and struggling students and is it is pervasive I mean I think I wasn't exposed to how strongly people feel this opinion that school should be an equalizer until I was at class dojo and I started having conversations with teachers or District leaders and I would say you know hey we're at class dojo we built this new tool you know it's going to help kids learn and the I a teacher I remember one response where a teacher said oh like that's really cool but won't some kids then learn faster than others as they're like this is a non-starter if this tool is going to allow some kids to learn faster than others then we can't use it you can go to the National Council of teachers in MA in mathematics this is the world's largest like math education organization and you can go to their website and read State position statements from like their president talking about how bad the idea of ability grouping is like the idea that you should take kids and like give them material based on their ability and allow them to progress is just it's just a nonstarter with some of these Mo some of the most powerful educational organizations in the world that's crazy because 's in the Bara you know where I live like we like I know that all the parents are like going crazy trying to send their kids to after school programs like try trying to get ahead so in reality you just basically making the parents spend more money to try to get their kids ahead because the school system is not suppor this right like the craziest thing about this is that you know when you implement all these programs when you basically Nerf the public school system and say okay we're going to ensure that this school system does not give opportunities to high achieving kids then who is really bearing the price of that like who are you hurting the most because the rich families the wealthy families the families with other options they're the ones who can afford these after school programs they can send their kids to private schools they can afford private tutors they can leave the bay are and find a better school system it's the families without those financial resources who are dependent on those Public School Systems to create those opportunities for their kids to level up that are being penalized by this you know I think very Narrows sited perspective yeah you're basically lowering the bar for everybody and yeah like you know I have money to spend to send my kids to these after school programs but yeah if I've you know this stuff cost like hundreds thousands of dollars every month and if you don't have money then you're kind of screwed yeah so and yeah I think if you are one of those unfortunate families who has you know a high achieving kid but you don't have you know money to dump on them then you're dependent on the public school system that serve that kid and currently it is not doing that personally you know I being like I think the math education in this country is especially lacking for some reason you know like I only took grade one in China but in China like I already knew like I think in grade one they always started teaching at Al algebra and I have a six-year-old and I try to introduce some algebra Concepts to her like you know three plus xal 5 what is X right and it's like it's actually pretty simple to groc for kids I don't think it's that complicated so does have to be exposed to it is and I think if you go back and you look at the common core standards essentially the math standards in the United States they are they sort of make sense if you think of them as like a minimum bar that like we expect our kids every kid to get over the this level the this hump but instead of becoming a minimum bar floor it has become everybody has been pulled down to that floor this is the expectation for every kid and we don't want to allow you to move faster so what are the expectations what are the Common Core Curriculum standards for kindergarten it's basically count to 20 and what are the common core standards for you know first grade it's like add the numbers one to 10 being able to add the numbers up to 20 maybe doing some subtraction so you probably know like if you're hanging out with smart families with smart kids you probably know three to 5year olds who are well through first grade math standards and they going to go to school and they will not be taught any more math for the next two years they will be assumed they'll just sit in the class and be bored out of their minds and that's what they're going to think that school is that's crazy so

if you're a parent of one of these like high achieving kids like what do you think is the unlock here like do you just have to keep sending your kids to ask school education or like what can you do I mean it's so hard because it's like what is the unlock during the school day there's only so much you can do to affect what your child is being taught in school I think the biggest takeaway that I can give parents is that you should never be ashamed of advocating for your own child if you have a child who is capable of more who needs more opportuni whose learning needs are not being met in school if they are bored in school the only way that they're going to get those opportunities is if you advocate for them and the crazy thing is this is not just private schools I mean Public Schools like these attitudes infiltrate private schools as well I have a friend who is a hedge fund manager in New York so essentially like money is not you know money is not an issue they can afford anything they want their kids were in one of the best schools in Manhattan and his you know kid was not being supported in math and he went to the school to advocate for his kid and the school basically said look there we have a whole wiing list of people who would be dying to take your kids place in our school so if you don't like the way that we teach math you are welcome to like clear out and we'll find someone else to take your spot and that's what he ended up having to do so like this person for who money is ESS not an option is now homeschooling his kids because like there was no price that could buy them acceptable education that's crazy yeah it is CRA now I think that there is essentially the needle that we're trying to thread that I hope we can thread with mava is independent study and this is actually How I Learned math as a kid and so when I was a kid I was a year ahead of math in you know in elementary school and like you know K through third grade and that worked fine in like in second grade I would just go to the third grade classroom and I would learn and math there and then in third grade my school didn't have a fourth grade it only went up to third grade so they didn't have a classroom for me to go to and so that year during math class for an hour I would just go to the back of the classroom I would study out of a book and then at the end of the class then I would rejoin my class my peers for the rest of the day and it was fantastic I got to go to a public school with friends from my community with kids my own age uh I got to study at my own pace I didn't have homework I essentially did that for the next four years until I rejoined a regular class in seventh grade for pre-calculus and so like that is a way that kids can basically it to me what I think about it is the unbundling of school so school is a bundle of Child Care Plus academics lots of companies that come into this space try and replace that entire bundle which is very hard it's very expensive childcare is very hard and labor intensive to replace so let's not replace that piece let's just replace some of the academics piece-wise by allowing kids to do some independent study and ensuring that they can meet their own learning needs and so really from the beginning that has been our goal with mava to essentially build this track where kids can support their own learning needs if they are not in a place to have a school or a teacher or even a parent who is able to support those learning needs for them yeah because you know like going back to the you know what can the parents do like you know if I ask the school to like hey you know let my kids go to the third grade classroom to learn math or something or just go to third grade General like that could affect uh her Social Development right like all of a sudden like a bunch of big kids yeah I mean I would say so I'm not personally a huge fan of like skipping grades whether it's for one class or like you know for classes in general just moving up to the next grade but on the other hand there's a lot of research behind it that says it's not that bad and a lot of kids really like it so like I don't know about the Social Development but the problem the real problem is that it doesn't actually solve the problem because the problem is not that they're like a year up in math the problem is that for a lot of these kids they can learn two or three years of math in a single year like they want to learn faster they're hungry to learn you've seen kids who are like learning to walk they fall down to get up again they fall down they get up they're so hungry to make that progress and for a lot of kids they have that in school also and so it doesn't matter if you go to the next year up because that class is still learning one year of math year it's still really boring and so how do you compensate for a kid who just wants to be learning more faster got it

that makes sense going back to the mava story let's go back to the pandemic for a second right so I believe you and your wife were in a one bed apartment and you had three kids and the kids were pretty young right they're like so you know we were in a 600 foot apartment in San Francisco I with three kids I think they were like you know a newborn age AG basically zero2 and four in the pandemic H and you know people we used to say oh the thing that makes our apartment life work is because during the week our kids are in daycare and dur on the weekend we spent all weekends in the playground and they and then the pandemic and they closed down the daycares playgrounds and so it's hard to maintain sanity yeah exactly how do you stay sane during that period and you actually like to you actually taught your kids to learn right or like to learn them themselves how did you do that yeah so you know my wife and I were still both were we were working full-time jobs like and we kind of like shifts during the day so I would do like you know calisthenics with the kids in the apartment in the morning to try like burn off a little bit of steam but then like they're hungry they want to learn so what do we do I have you know I had two kids who are hungry to learn at the same time I can't teach both of them the same time we're also taking care of the newborn while also you know doing my own work and so the only way to essentially make that work is to give them the skills to teach themselves and it turns out that kids can build those skills a lot faster than you would think especially with the new tools that we have with software and one thesis that we've always had from the beginning for matava is that the hard part of learning soling education is not actually the teaching it's not the curriculum it's like we know how to teach reading it's phonics math we've been teaching math for hundreds of years the hard part is just keeping the kids interest and keeping them motivated during the period of time that you need them to focus unfortunately that is also a solved problem in gaming right you go walk through a casino walk through the slot machine is and look at all the people just pulling those handles over and over again and tell me that we haven't solved motivation we have solved human motivation so the hard part is basically how do you put those two together and solve motivation in a piece of software that is also doing a legitimate job of teaching and then like get that to a kid and so I went out looking and tried to find some pieces of software that actually did this and it turns out that you know most education software is actually pretty terrible it's more designed for edutainment it's babysitting without guilt but we found a couple pieces of software that I thought were pretty good at the time one of them was Headsprout which is a phonics which was a phonics based essentially learn to read piece of software it wasn't great but it was good enough you could see the direction where it needed to go and it was good enough to essentially get my kids learning and then after Headsprout we moved into dream boox which is still alive it's a pretty good piece of sort of gamified math learning software I think it's got some issues but like it was also good enough for my kid and I liked both of those and they were super effective so you just gave them like two separate iPads and then like load the soft software so I only had one of whom was old enough to read so the oldest one got the iPad and essentially learned to read on that and then once he was able to read then I migrated him into math at which point my next youngest daughter was like I want to play all these games also and I said you know she was two at the time and I said oh you know you're far too young to learn how to read but you know we have this software so let's try it and then she learned to read so yeah it worked out really well yeah I mean the iPad is like you know the iPad like parents you know like TR voice screen time but I think it's not iPad problem I think is the stuff that's on iPad right like if you just let your kids watch YouTube like they e go down the wrong directory so exactly right you know I think you YouTube is like it's like brain candy it's you know it's junk food for the brain and you know when we say that junk food is bad we don't ban all food we just ban the bad food and the problem is like I see why parents come to this conclusion because you look at essentially you know if the iPad if the screen is a grocery store basically 99. 9% of everything that's available to it is junk food so you look at it and you're like okay this is all junk food let's B it entirely but if you look for it there is there are examples of really high quality software and we're trying to make that better understood I think there's a big difference essentially between passive consumption and active learning you know act Active Learning on a screen tends to be self-limiting the kids will your brain gets tired you're done after you know for a young kid 15 20 minutes like that's all the learning you're going to do at that sitting and then you're done with the screen yeah I had to like delete YouTube and like you know they have YouTube kids but I had to like limit to like five channels that I approve yeah they I watch that yeah it's fun actually because with our customers the parents who are strictest about screen time are the ones whose kids tend to do the best in mataba because they're not used to essentially like this brain rod on YouTube it's not like our vegetables are no longer competing with candy the kids are like oh I can do screen time this is amazing let me just learn how to read super fast and they have a great time got it that makes a lot of sense

yeah so let's talk about Bava so what is the software like what does the software do and like why did you want to focus on the early age for the first version I guess yeah yes I don't know if this is something that I've talked about that much but when I started mava what I actually wanted to teach and still want to teach is actually math what I really math and computer science because that's where I see the bigest opportunity to essentially accelerate kids far beyond what's possible in schools but in order for kids to be able to teach themselves math first they have to be able to read and so during the early Pilots of manaba I actually was doing both of these at the same time I said I wanted to focus on math and I said okay if you have a three-year-old who's able to read or you have a four-year-old just uh come to me and we'll focus on math and if they're not able to read yet like well okay we'll figure out how to get them reading and then it turned out nobody had three-year-olds and four-year-olds who were able to read and I was like what my three-year-olds and foury olds they're all reading why is nobody else teaching their kids to read and so if we wanted to accelerate math it turned out that we needed to teach kids to read first and so that's what we've started doing and like a very tactical thing to learn how to read like you have a book like on this right but learning the ABCs doesn't actually help you learn how to read right I think I've sort of become less dogmatic about this lately but it is something that I still believe that if you have an early reader learning the names of the letters is not helpful you know if you're sounding Out the word cat you know the names of the letters c a t like that does not help you sound out that word like the sounds are c a t and so if you it's very confusing to teach a kid that this letter is you know the letter R but don't say R you know when you read it say you know my daughter we were learning the word rat she was learning the word the sound r at home and then she went to school they taught her that you know this is an r and then she came home and started reading R rat so I actually had to unte her what they were teaching her in school and it's very frustrating yeah they need to have like a the ABC song except it's saw phonic it's not like the actual l or yeah you know I think I don't know if I don't have book we actually you know we actually built a book to do exactly that you know the alphabet book based on fic because there's like there's 44 sounds in the English language you there's only 26 letters so most of the Sounds in English are actually written with more than one letter and at the early ages what's important to learn is the sounds not the letters and so we built an alphabet book based around the sounds it's actually available on our website you can download the E ebook for free at mav. com but we're very close to having the print version ready hopefully within the next couple weeks that's awesome yeah I'll definitely buy that so I got to try mena you give me access to try it with my kid and so you know just describing the software or maybe has changed recently but like when I tried it was like a bunch of farm animals pretty cute and a lot of it was you know like teaching the phonics kind of repeating The Sounds playing different kinds of games to try to kind of get the kid to internalize stuff right is that what it's like yeah this it basically comes back to our philosophy that the real problem that we're solving for is motivation so teaching kids to read is not rocket science you know it's phonics so essentially it's you these letters make these sounds you memorize all of them and then you learn to blend them together that's basically the entire process of learning to read and then you know English has some tough sounds so it takes a while and there's a bunch of side words you have to learn but basically learn the letter sounds and learn to blend them together and you know like I said there's about 50 letter sounds in English so you know given hour to memorize each one maybe two hours so about a 100 hours to learn to read Is What It Takes and so it's just okay how do you keep a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old engaged and like actively focused on learning for a 100 hours and the answer to that is you know animated farm animals and also a lot of ux a big focus on how do you make this usable and intuitive for a two-year-old who doesn't know how to read yet got it and like you have a lot of like success stories on your website like what has been some like really awesome success stories like are kids learning how to read like after a month so I think so we are just having the first wave of customers essentially complete our curriculum and which gets right we're aiming for a second grade level I think right now we I would say we built up to about mid first grade we're very close to like getting to second grade but we had the parent of a three-year-old WR in and say I think it took about three months for their three-year-old to make it through our curriculum and you essentially get to this mid first grade reading level now you know I will say like I will candidly say like that is an outlier like not all three-year-olds are going to learn to read at a first grade level in three months and that particular three-year-old had some practice before but at the same time essentially like this is a business for outliers we are building this for those outlier students whose learning needs are not being supported you know in schools that are aimed at the average you know to you know below average student does the parents still have to like make the kids use this software or the kids like hey Mommy I want to use this now like so i' say we have a mix I would say that the if you were a parent coming in I would say we want to set the expectation that you will probably be have to encourage enourage your kid to stay on task now I think we have a lot of we do have a lot of families especially the families whose kids have no other exposures to screens who say like their kids love it and they just want to do it every single day but I would say the expectation going in would be that the software is going to do the teaching and you as the parent are going to be encouraging the kid to stay on task for you know the the 20 to 30 minutes a day that they'll be practicing yeah makes sense yeah I think is like I totally agree with you I think like learning how to read is like step number one cuz once they learn how to read then can really explore their curiosity and do you know read whatever hell they want you know yeah that's kind of yeah it's so cool you know kids are so curious about the world around them and especially when you take a little kid it's and give them the ability to read it's like unlocking this secret key where all of a sudden like you know the secret language that was in the menus and the signs and the trucks all around them now they can understand what this world is that they exist in and it's so delightful and what is the

math equivalent of that right because like a lot of math education is just like doing a bunch of exercises like 3 plus 5 and know like how do you make curious about math yeah so I mean we've been so focused on reading that we haven't dug into math that much yet but I can give you my philosophy which is that basically the big difference between reading and math is that reading is very much about memorization which sort of makes it easy for us to test okay has this kid memorized this sound where math becomes more about foundational understanding and so I think the real challenge for any piece of math software is to be able to test a kid and figure out has this kid memorized this or do they actually have the fundamental understanding that they need in order to essentially build the Le next layer of math on top of that now at the same time there has been a push back in math against memorization and I think you also need that you know especially for basic facts you need to be able to you know seven time 8 as fast as 1 plus one but that comes at you get the foundational understanding first and then essentially that memorization is sort of like building fluent in Reading you need to build that fluency so that you can start you know building on top of that so maybe it's like making a kid realize the Everyday Use cases of math like you know if you know subtraction or multiplication like you can count your money your payy back or something like yeah I think that's an interesting question that's question is sort of about like the I guess in games we say is the transition from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation so if you play any game like Candy Crush when you first start like they shower you with all these Sparkles and fireworks Like Everything You Touch lights up the screen and you're like oh this is so delightful like my brain needs more of this dopamine and then eventually as time goes on you you develop the intrinsic satisfaction of solving the letters of solving the levels and then some of that dopamine can be backed off and you can enjoy just the process of essentially making progress and so that's you know I'd say that is our goal you know in the beginning we're going to shower the kid with dopamine and try and get them hooked but long term the only way that's works in the long term is if they start to appreciate the you intrinsic Joy of learning and progressing yeah it's inter think about how some of this gaming free toplay mechanics like some of like quote unquote dark patterns can actually be used for good just try to incentivize the right thing yeah it's very dark I mean I spent almost a decade in mobile games first Facebook games and then mobile games building very casual you know addictive re-engagement mechanisms and towards the end of it I did you I think the reason I left the industry was I was starting to feel like a digital drug dealer you know I was building these products that I personally didn't love that I didn't really believe in want to use myself or want my own kids to use and you know I think I can certainly make a case for why it is not as bad as I am framing it and I think there are a lot of good things that can be said about gaming but I would say for me on a personal level it didn't resonate and I I'm very happy to have essentially like found a direction where I can take those yeah those skills that I develop which were super fun and interesting and applied to something that I am more personally you know passionate about yeah you can use the dark side of the Force for good yeah it's you know with great power comes great responsibility so we're doing our best to be responsible with it but it is a fun challenge okay so now let's talk

about AI a little bit so have you exposed your kids to any of AI tools or not so much a little bit we've used you know chat GPT a little bit there you know there's one time when I was hoping to help them like start a t-shirt business and so they were like you know design teacher designs on chat GPT but yeah they know it basically they know that it exists right now because if you think about it like you know just like talking to AI or like interacting with AI like it can become a really awesome personalized coach right if you if there's some guard rails to it I think there I think there's so much potential there so in our software right now we're not really using much Ai and that's because my belief is that essentially that the core learning pathway you whether it's reading or math is pretty linear and pretty predictable so you can kind of just build that out and optimize it by hand for me the real power of AI is in its adaptability and so what I see as the main use for AI is essentially having this very core optimized learning pathway that is probably somewhat deterministic not AI based but then when someone gets confused and falls off of it then you have the AI teacher essentially you know performing like a coach to essentially catch you in that safety net and guide you back under that optimized learning pathway yeah that makes a lot of sense to me yeah because the AI is like really patient it's available anytime so if you don't understand like geometry or something like you can try to get to explain it to yeah now I mean I may be sort of underselling AI like may maybe there is a world that might not be too far off where you don't even have to optimize that core learning pathway because the AI is just so good at it'll do it anyway but at least for now that's what we were planning on sort of an unoptimized core learning pathway with AI is a safety net and let's talk about like older kids for a second yeah so how old is your oldest kid now my oldest kid is n now okay so you're not quite at the high school like trying to get in a college station yeah like what do

you think like by the time your oldest kid grows up or by time my kids grow up do you think gain to like the Ia league is still gonna be a thing or you think it's gonna be different or like what's your I hope it won't be but I think it probably will be like they're very entrenched institution I think of them as the college credentialing cartel like if you if you've done any Research into college you know that the main value of college is not the learning that happens there it's the credentialing and so I think it's actually really interesting question to ask why is this happening why have these institutions that charge half million dollars for this empty credential why are they able to persist and my belief there is that it's actually an artifact of this K through2 system which is trying to essentially optimize for equal outcomes so basically you have this K through2 system which is trying to ensure that kids come out of the system as indistinguishable as possible and then you have employers who want to say okay I don't want just any kid I want the top kids I want the very high Achievers who are motivated in a high agency and very smart and but they can't find this and so colleges essentially become the middleman they're like the talent scouts they're like okay we are going to go out we're going to look at SATs grades we're going to do the heavy lifting of figuring out who the talented kids are and then we're going to be essentially the king makers we're going to stamp them with credentials we're going to charge them an arm and leg for that and then we're gonna you know feed them off to the employers and so I think it's really interesting to ask what happens in a world where you start allowing the those kids in K12 to actually distinguish themselves and show what they are fully capable of and I think what that starts to look like is it starts to look more like sports we can in sports we don't have this idea that every kid has to look the same we say okay if you're LeBron James you should you know achieve your fullest potential and you know you should play in the farsy league not the JB league and what happens there well LeBron James did not have to go to college because he was able to Showcase his potential while he was still in high school and all the employers the NBA said that kid is incredibly talented he does not need to go to college we want to hire him right now and yeah maybe that won't get rid of colleges entirely but I think what it will do is it'll mean that Elite College credential is going to be worth a lot less money they won't be able to justify the same price tag that they can justify right now and to me that would be a huge win yeah like one of the so you know I've been working at tech companies for a while and one of the schools that really stands out is water in Canada yeah and you know they stand out because all the kids who go there like by the time they graduate they have like eight internships at different companies so then you know like my thinking is like why don't you get the high schooler to actually just like start a company or like try to fail a little bit instead of like trying to like get perfect grades or like you know do the stuff that doesn't actually matter in the real world it's true I totally agree I mean I think you're starting to see that more in the real world where essentially I would say that colleges are beginning to sort of dilute their own credential you they haven't diluted them so much that they're worthless but for example being hired by Facebook is now a stronger signal it's a better credential than say a Stanford degree right so there are now better credentials out there than a college degree and you can find ways to get those credentials earlier and so I think there's some story where Facebook hired you know some 16year old or something who had built an app that had gotten to number one on the App Store and so there are credentials that you can get on your own for free or even make money while doing it that are going to be worth more than that you know sort of standard path credential of going to Stanford and so with my own kids I really want to find that essentially credential path without having to go play the elite College admissions game yeah I really strongly believe this too because like that kid who built app actually know like Michael was he's building skills that actually matter to right like if doesn't get a Facebook he actually build another app I just like get some real customers but people who are playing the game aren't building real skills man they're like yeah I've told my kids that I don't care about their grades I don't want them to be stressing out over good College admissions if they find a way to be excellent and like make into an amazing college that's great but if they can't then we will find a way to work around the system like there those doors are open you know everybody when I wanted to become a product manager for the first time everybody told me you know this was back in you know the mid 2000s you cannot be a product manager without going to you know business school and getting an MBA and by that point you know I had gone through grad school I dropped out of my PhD I was like I am not going back to school again I will find a way to do this without going back for an MBA and I did the same thing I built an app and that was enough to talk me through the interview process and get into my first PM role and then you know I was kind of off after that so like there are back doors we will find them yeah you know the funny thing is if you have an NBA right now like and try to become a product manager is actually kind of frown upon like yeah the pendulum swings back and forth and yeah now it's like you can't be a product manager if you haven't spent time at a Fang well you know there there's a back door for that also so do

you have any like closing words of advice for parents you know I don't know obviously check out manava like do you have any other closing words advice yeah I mean I think the biggest thing for parents of high achieving kids to understand is that school is not set up to support your kids you know the goal of school is to close the gap between High achieving students and struggling students and so your child will not have their learning needs supported they will not be supported in learning at their own pace they will not be encouraged to reach their potential and so that is your Role you will have to advocate for them if you want them to have those opportunities and your school will try to make you feel bad or guilty about doing that they will say that other kids you know have all these other needs too but this is your child you are their parent it is your responsibility to them to advocate for them and never let anybody make you feel bad about doing that got it so you want to advocate for them in the school system itself maybe you want to do some extracurricular stuff but also like I also think the third thing is just like actually spend time with your own kid and teaching them yourself CU like a lot of parents that I see like they send their kids to like four different classes on the weekends but they don't actually like spend time teaching them themselves yeah I think yeah I think that's when I say advocate for them it doesn't necessarily mean you know push them inside the public school system maybe that means go to private school maybe that means find a tutor maybe that means teaching yourselves I mean I think I'm not sure who my H would be here if I'm talking to the tiger parent then I would also say don't push your kids too hard like kids should have a if you look at homeschoolers they spend something like 2 hours a day doing academics and then the rest of the time you're like you know like off playing in the woods hanging out with friends right it doesn't take that much time to kind of support your child's academic potential and so yeah don't stress them out let them enjoy their childhood spend a little bit of time each day supporting their academic needs and then other than that have a lot of fun I love that and what can people learn more about Mana or like is the software available to everybody now or yeah we are fully live go to uh mav. com to check us out we have our ebook that you can download to teach your if your child is not yet ready to read with our software yet you can download our ebook and start teaching them some pheic awareness and the sounds of English we have a 7-Day free trial if you want to try out our software so you know give it a shot and see if it's a good fit for you and your kid awesome all right thanks so much NE it was such a pleasure ranting about education with a fellow parent thanks so much this is a really fun conversation for me too