Joe Liemandt - Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education - [Invest Like the Best, EP.439]
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The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere. Brilliant people getting buried in expense management busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work. Modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Joe Lamott. Joe is the principal at Alpha School and the founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital. Became the youngest member of the Forbes 400 in the nineteen nineties before vanishing from public view for two decades, only to emerge with a $1,000,000,000 bet that he can make kids learn 10 times faster using AI. Joe has built an AI tutoring system so effective that students at his Alpha school literally beg not to take summer breaks, achieving two times learning outcomes in just two hours with standardized test results that compete with the very best schools in the world.
Alpha School, it's a high end private school. It's expanding across the country but at its core is redefining what school can be for kids and what makes a great school. I'm a product guy. Looking at it from product aspect, how can you rebuild school and make it awesome? And so the core of it, we look at five things of like how do you build a great school? And the first is kids must love school. That's just a crazy thought that most people do not believe you. And our standard is we wanna build it so the kids wanna go to school instead of going on vacation. A highlight is I've been principal now
Sounds impossible, but I agree.
Right? And I was one of those kids who definitely did not like school. I dropped out of college and then high school I got in trouble because I skipped school all the time. And so this is a different world for me. Second part of it is just on learning. Kids need to learn 10 times faster. And so we built an engine, learning engine, all the talk about AI and learning science where kids can learn 10 times faster. In our school, kids go in, spend two hours a day with the AI tutor with screen time and all the things around that. We obviously consider very good screen time and they learn 10 times fa
The first thing you ever said to me was something like educating kids is the single most important thing we do as a society and it hasn't changed in two hundred years. Yeah. And let me just dig into that a little bit more as to how it began and why it hasn't changed because it's been the same way for so long that radical approaches like this one, we're open to radical approaches in everything in the world like the pace of technology. Everyone's excited about the pace of technology change but education's one place that I think parents, myself included, are scared because it feels like the ultim
And to that point you make, every parent wants to educate the kid the way they were. I didn't start the school. McKenzie started the school ten yea
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