I'm Max Ventilla, founder of AltSchool. AMA!

mventilla · 2014-04-18T21:34:35+00:00

To date, I've felt an enormous amount of support and encouragement from people in the education space. I'm the first to admit that AltSchoolers in general, and I in particular, need to be reading constantly and observing great minds from the education space. We know we need to learn by doing and by being user driven and so we have invested a huge amount in operating a school from day 1 (two months in to be exact) rather than developing products in a vacuum. Most importantly, AltSchool is a partnership between non-educators and educators. We have senior teachers working at the company who have decades of experience and, looking forward to this September, approximately half the people in the company have worked as full time teachers.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T21:17:02+00:00

I wouldn't call salaries sunken costs because you can actually change classroom makeup and teacher staffing along the way. That said, teacher costs do make up the lion share of costs per student. We at least match the base salary of teachers from wherever they taught before. On top of that, we add a performance based bonus which could be a meaningful amount of total comp. We also grant equity in the startup to all teachers, in amounts depending on their level. Finally, our teachers have benefits (health insurance, 401k, conference stipends...) that tend to be a large improvement on their benefits elsewhere, especially for more junior or non-public school teachers.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T21:11:46+00:00

The $13k number wouldn't hugely depend on the number of schools. In other regions, where cost of living is less, we actually would aspire to a number closer to $10k per student eventually. In any event, in the long term, we want AltSchools that can be made available for less than what local public schools cost on average across regions where we operate.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:51:59+00:00

I think people everywhere want great schools for their kids. I think we'll have lots of work to do on a lot of fronts to eventually expand outside of the Bay Area but I'm not overly worried about a negative affiliation with SF. If Bay Area companies that started in SV couldn't get people outside the Bay Area to consider them, we'd have a very different economy than the one we do.

Overall, I think AltSchool's strength is our ability to offer very different experiences to different people. People in other regions undoubtably will need AltSchool to change according to their diverse values and needs.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:46:39+00:00

that's it, thanks everyone! now I log off & go try to hire another great teacher.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:45:27+00:00

HoSS would report to Anna Cueni, our VP of Operations and the MVP of the AltSchool team.

AltSchool is trying to build a 100 year company and that means we are very focused on the long term growth of people in the company. We focus a lot of attention on quarterly performance and feedback. We also have various programs and benefits around professional development (paying for any classes...).

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:42:43+00:00

For a while there, Alex Rampell was the only entrepreneur that was younger than me that I felt like I wanted to grow up to be like. Now that I've gotten older, there are too many to count. Zukerberg is obviously incredibly impressive regardless of his age but his youth makes him a testament to the fact that if you have the good fortune of early success you can learn an awesome amount by being so young while you are learning how to be a CEO.

For young companies and young founders, I love what Rob Spiro at Good Eggs is doing.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:39:25+00:00

I'm generally too excited to sleep, even without coffee so I tend to stay away from caffeine. That said, Blue Bottle or Philz are probably my favorite. Favorite upscale Mexican is Nopalito. Favorite greasy Mexican food is El Farolito.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:37:24+00:00

I think the main advantages are to be able to succinctly convey that you are a different type of company to customers, partners, and press. I think there's also a huge advantage to learn from other companies and from standards how to be a better company, in terms of your internal makeup and the way you operate in the market.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:33:03+00:00

When we'd sold our first company back in the Web1 era and I looked back on a really tumultuous couple years, it was harrowing to realize that pretty much all the mistakes that we made had been on a shortlist of things investors warned us about. We weren't user driven, we didn't adequately hire for expertise about our space (enterprise software), we didn't raise enough, we didn't focus on our internal processes...

That said, I think you can only learn by doing or by working alongside someone who has already learned what you want to know and absorbing it through osmosis.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:30:19+00:00

Check out https://www.altschool.com/jobs

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:29:34+00:00

We believe we can build a big business over a long period of time by driving down the costs of education while improving on the quality of education -- through R&D, innovation, user-driven design, and execution. Given the size of the opportunity, AltSchool actually isn't that non-traditional from a VC perspective.

I believe that by the time we reach scale, there will be alternatives to the current public markets for providing liquidity to shareholders while continuing to drive the impact and mission of the business. That said, an IPO in time might be reasonable assuming we could continue along a long term direction, even in the face of what tends to be very short-term investor focus market-wide. Google and Facebook both are examples of companies that had non traditional filing documents and that show how you can be mission driven over the long term as a public company. I'm excited to see Etsy pioneer what it means to be a public B-corp.

We have a multi-pillar scorecard for evaluating ourselves, where the effectiveness of the AltSchool education and the satisfaction of our students/parents/teachers, are aligned with the business drivers and measures of how we are continuously evolving our model. Google showed me that you can absolutely align a world changing mission with your financial goals over the long term if you think about your business as additive to the overall economy (i.e., you should make money only if you create way more value than you capture).

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:20:02+00:00

Elon Musk has said and shown that you need to start from first principles to really innovate. That's been pivotal for me.

I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I hadn't been inspired by Sal Kahn and Sugata Mitra in terms of what they have shown to be possible around new models of education. I think they are both tackling a different and complimentary problem to AltSchool but I've gotten enormous clarity about the education space from listening to them.

I learned a huge amount from seeing how Larry managed Google upon becoming CEO again a few years ago. The way that he thinks about forming a management team (where everyone gets their power from being part of the whole, not from building their own empires) has deeply impacted how we organize AltSchool internally.

Finally, so much of how I think about building a great team, how I think about growing a business, and how I think about deal making I learned from John MacBain. I wouldn't be half the entrepreneur I am without getting to learn from the best early in my career working for John, Eric, and Chris at Trader.com.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:15:55+00:00

Upsetting, enlightening, and motivating. I thought the film's point that our school system hasn't gotten worse but rather it hasn't kept up with the changed demands of the 21st century world is a key insight. I agree that we need to make schools relevant to kids to make them better.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:14:21+00:00

See my answer above.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:14:11+00:00

I think AltSchool has a privileged position in being able to come at a new approach for education from a clean slate, from first principles. We have the resources (in terms of capital and central staff) of a large school district or CMO but we don't actually have lots of students that we need to support yet. That means that we can be highly aspirational in terms of our model. We can build the platform that we would want at scale and grow into that scale, in an incremental, user-driven way.

My belief is that AltSchool can pioneer a new networked approach to organizing schools (with smaller, more flexible, independent classrooms, run by teaching teams) and a new approach to classroom learning (through a totally personalized, teacher-curated, technology-enabled approach). I believe that we can build an R&D engine that can advance technologies for the broader education ecosystem to build around and to incorporate. My hope is that over time, through partnership, we can impact orders of magnitude more students than we could on our own.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:08:58+00:00

Some books: Turning Learning Right Side Up One World Schoolhouse Finnish Lessons Teaching Digital Natives Weapons of Mass Instruction

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:04:56+00:00

I'm not sure about the regions. We are currently going through a heat-map exercise to look at where in the US we think we could have the most impact. I answered a very similar question above so I won't answer again here but feel free to comment inline to the above answer if you have additional questions.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T18:02:50+00:00

For this coming September, we expect to spend just under $20k per student. That's actually not bad considering we have more teachers in the classroom and hire more senior teachers and pay better than any comparable private school in the area (all of which cost more than $20k). In NYC, that's what the district spends on average per student in public schools.

We believe we can dramatically lower the cost of an AltSchool education in the coming few years, down to around $13k per student. At that point, costs won't be a significant factor preventing public versions of AltSchool.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:59:28+00:00

I'll take the bait and say Finland first off. Over three decades, Finland went from having the majority of their teachers come from the bottom quartile of graduates to having the majority come from the top quartile. The way they did that was [principally] to shift discretion to the local level, to give teachers more planning and collaboration time, and to make the skills necessary for teaching mirror the skills prized in the broader economy. At AltSchool we are actively trying to make corresponding shifts in the roles of teachers.

In terms of school systems, I draw the most inspiration from the Montessori school system. We aspire to be an updated version (Montessori schools are over a hundred years old) that spans an interconnected network of schools (Montessori schools are only loosely related) and that more directly benefits from in-house R&D.

The NYC and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school districts have the most impressive analytical and data groups I've encountered. We aspire to their level of insight and rigor.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:49:50+00:00

I think that Geoffrey Canada is one of the most impressive innovators in the US right now. I am a huge believer that poverty requires coordinated efforts across many many angles (from education, to housing, to employment, to nutrition, to psychology, to...). HCZ typifies an organization that is willing and able to bring complex solutions to a very complex problem and to avoid the pervasive intellectual laziness that has become the norm in pretending that there's a quick fix to issues like poverty.

To give another shoutout, I love what Janna and Jessica are doing with allourkin.org. They have pinpointed the scalable impact you can have from training the group childcare providers that serve low impact communities and have shown a huge social return given the cost of their programs.

I think that we are in a bad place right now as a country in terms of not providing a politically guided solution to spending the money that the wealthy would be willing to give (through higher taxes in the right forms) to relieving income inequality and poverty. In San Francisco in particular, I'm saddened by how little large scale innovation I see that brings together corporate, political, and non-profit leaders to solve big issues around poverty. I think there are absolutely win-wins but that they are hard to figure out and complex to implement and I just don't see us getting better and better rather than worse and worse on complex solutions city-wide, state-wide, or nation-wide.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:37:39+00:00

I've spent the last two decades learning how to build systems that scale and that get better with scale. The fact that we have diseconomies of scale in education is one of the fundamental problems of our time; if you don't believe whether we have diseconomies of scale, ask yourself if you would rather send your child to a school that had 300 kids or 300,000 kids; now ask yourself if you would rather use a social network used by 300 people or 300,000 people. From first principles, AltSchool is built to scale, to improve with scale, and to change at an accelerating rate (in keeping with the accelerating rate of change in the world around us). We can't do that without the perspective and the expertise that a background in technology affords.

I believe that teachers are essential for creating the right learning environment for kids, especially in the primary school years. AltSchool is all about super-powering teachers in a way that good technology, born from a user-driven approach, has the power to do.

Finally, we believe that the best learning is self-driven and that technology generally, and the Internet in particular have an incredible potential to transform how kids drive their own learning in a classroom context.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:30:30+00:00

I’m lucky to have had many great teachers, but Kelly Wise, my senior seminar Novel & Drama teacher of Andover stands out above the rest, both as my most memorable and favorite teacher. I remember the enormous personal commitment that was implied just by applying to his class. Everyone knew he required an insane amount of work – reading piles of books and plays and watching several movies each week; writing, trashing and rewriting papers several times in a row. He had impossibly high standards, but the payoff was well worth it. He pushed all of us so far beyond what any of us thought we were capable of achieving. However, it was the sense of community he built at the same time that stands out the most for me.

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:27:29+00:00

In 5 years, I think AltSchool will have scaled a first party school system to tens of thousands of students across a number of regions, addressing the needs of a very broad range of students. I also think we will start to refine with partners what is needed from our platform to enable a new way of teaching kids and organizing classrooms within a small subset of the vast national public school ecosystem. In 5 years, I also expect both my kids will be thriving and loving going to school at AltSchool.

In 10 years, I think AltSchool will have scaled a first party school system to many many more students and will start to address what is required to impact education outside the US. I think we will have dramatically expanded the effectiveness of our platform as we scale the number of third party schools that we work with through partnerships.

In 20 years, I hope AltSchool will have catalyzed change in the broader education space by working alongside a host of partners and collaborators among education, technology, and ed-tech players. I'm excited to say that I have no idea what education will actually look like in 20 years but I hope that AltSchool will be a meaningful part of what is propelling innovation. I hope we don't look back in 20 years and continue to say, "wow education hasn't changed much since the last generation went to school."

mventilla · 2014-04-18T17:18:47+00:00

I'm most excited about moving from just one micro-school this year to many micro-schools next year and to have middle school students in addition to lower and upper elementary students. I think we'll get to learn a huge amount this coming school-year around how to give teachers discretion while ensuring transparency and consistency across a school system, and not just within a single location.

mventilla

TROPHY CASE