Max Ventilla
CEO Altschool
Discussion
M
ventilla
@ventilla · CEO, AltSchool, PBC
Hey all, I'm Max. I founded of AltSchool after running the cross-Google personalization team. I'm driven by creating the most personalized school experience for my own two young kids with an approach that can scale to empower all kids. I have been building companies since the late 1990s and feel incredibly lucky to be in Silicon Valley at a time when we can use technology to truly reshape our world. I'm looking forward to your questions about any topic...
The last 7 books I've read are The Martian, Seven Eves, Flash Boys, Super Intelligence, No-Drama Discipline, Lightless, and Sapiens.
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Hang Zhao
@sgzhaohang
Hi Max, I'm interested to know how do you see the future of education industry in 5-10 years and how do you compare online vs offline for education.
@sgzhaohang The truth is that things move very slowly in the education space. Even in 10 years, I would expect that the majority of American schools will look pretty similar to today. I hope that by then we will at least have working broadband internet and wi-fi in essentially all schools. On that backbone, I hope that we will see learning materials that represent increasingly more than a textbook transplanted to a screen. When I look 15 to 20 years out, I think we have the potential for greater transformation in the education space. Students in that era should be able to really pursue a personalized education that better bridges what they are doing in the classroom with what they are interested in (and how they learn) outside of the classroom.
Sydney Liu
@sydney_liu_sl · Co-Founder of Commaful
Hi Max!
Really love what you're doing in the education space with Alt School. As a college student who used to work at a K-7 summer camp, have thought a lot about education from the early stages all the way through college.
Most people say that building in education is one of the most difficult spaces period. What are the top 3 things that are on your mind right now that we as a community can do to support your amazing cause?
Best,
Sydney
@sydney_liu_sl Our success is entirely dependent on attracting great talent (educators, engineers, and operators primarily); so that's the number 1 thing by far. #2, We are growing quickly so it's critical for us to get the word out to families that are looking for a school like AltSchool for their kids. #3, For our sake and the sake of the broader education sector, it's essential that politicians make improving education a top priority. I went to a panel yesterday where Arne Duncan made the point that we can't continue to let it be ok for our representatives in government to preside over schools that they wouldn't want to send their own kids to. It's our role as citizens to keep pressure on the people we elect and consider for election.
Chandra Kalle
@chandrakalle · Maker @orangecaffeine.com
Can a tablet replace a physical school as the primary means of delivering education?
@chandrakalle If you ask parents how much time they want their kids learning in front of a screen, they will pretty much always answer "as little as possible." On screen learning as a substitute for school is a hack to personalize learning in a rigorous and transparent way. Said differently, I think that until we have general AI, a computer can never adequately substitute for the relationship driven, real-world learning that takes place in a great classroom. That said, as we look to VR and AR; as we look to being able to connect to experts from anywhere and access great content on any topic that is available at the level and pace of learning appropriate for a child -- there's enormous potential to lift the baseline of learning opportunities available and to complement what a professional teacher can provide to students on their own.
Alphonso Morris
@youngfonz · Sr. Visual Designer
@ventilla @chandrakalle When you think of teaching kids in a remote part of the world or even in urban America it might be easier to get screens there than actual teachers. Logistics may end up being a contributing factor as well.
@youngfonz @chandrakalle That's part of what I mean about raising the baseline of quality that any child can experience in their elementary education.
The Project
@solimanedu
Hi Max. Love what you're doing and the amazing mission you believe in.
I think it's time to redefine what education is especially for younger generations. I also believe these kids are lucky to find someone to teach them critical thinking and reasoning skills at such an early age. My question is: when you started Altschool, what was your customer acquisition strategy like? I'm curious because I'd imagine it was hard to convince parents to pay such tuition fees for such an unorthodox school. How did you manage to do that?
@solimanedu When we started in the summer of 2013, we were looking for a dozen or so families to join a pilot program that started that Fall. As such, we weren't appealing to parents in the normal admissions cycle. All the parents who became interested had an alternate school option that they ultimately were less satisfied with than being part of AltSchool. As to what drove the appeal for AltSchool, we started with a totally unsustainable level of support that first year behind incredibly talented, child-centered educators. That alone, made the program worthy of consideration to a lot of people that we attracted through online ads. Ultimately, there were a lot of families who were looking to be more involved in defining the school experience for their children and we gave the opportunity to do just that.
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
Max, it's great to have you here!
You've packed a lot of professional accomplishments into your young life. Thus far, which 2-3 have most profoundly changed you and how you think about the world?
@melissajoykong We tend to only learn by doing or by seeing someone else doing. To that end, starting companies in the late 90s and then again in the late 2000s provided an invaluable learning experience for me. Equally important though was getting to work very closely with two CEOs (John MacBain of Trader Classified Media in my 20s and then Larry Page in my 30s) that represented the kind of leader that I hoped to become.
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
Education is considered by many to being the critical key to a better future world. But there are currently so many things broken about the American education system.
(1) What do you think is the most deleterious thing about the current way of teaching kids that you're hoping to solve with AltSchool?
(2) What are a few things parents can do to nurture their children's development if they don't have the ability or access to send their kids to a place like AltSchool?
@melissajoykong 1) I think the increasing segregation of our public and private schools is the most destructive trend in education today. I also think the lack of public pressure on policy makers to improve education (measured by long term life outcomes not just test scores) creates an absence of incentives for the people in power to actually invest in our future educational performance.
2) Reading to your children all the time and celebrating your children's efforts (not outcomes) are the two of the biggest things a parent can do. Also, systematically working on social emotional learning (grit, perseverance, optimism, curiosity...) is fundamentally important. Recognizing that your behavior sets the primary example for your young children is key alongside finding ways to spend consistent quality time. Related to some of these topics, I've found the book No Drama Discipline to be totally game changing for my perspective as a parent.
Kathy Sacks
@kathysacks · Fearless Ventures
@ventilla @melissajoykong You'll love Positive Discpline also to be gamechanging.
Melissa Joy Kong
@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt
This is such a thoughtful, useful response. Thanks so much, @ventilla!
Alphonso Morris
@youngfonz · Sr. Visual Designer
Hey Max with prices like this "Monthly tuition is $2890 for Lower School and $2970 for Middle School, with a 10-month minimum per year. " I think we know who can afford this. Don't you think the underprivileged and impoverished need better schools not the 1%?
Kyra Deprez
@kyradeprez
@youngfonz Great question. I see the struggles of a Title 1 school on a daily basis and would like to see education for all not just the 1%.
Alphonso Morris
@youngfonz · Sr. Visual Designer
@kyradeprez @ventilla are you going to answer this question?
@youngfonz I think that we need better schools and better school models across the spectrum of American education. We want to create a model that can scale to huge numbers of students but we want to be able to break with the model of the last 100 years. Private schools were a much easier place for us to start than public schools. Also, we are focused on building technology products that could have broad usage and to do that we needed to raise venture capital to pay our engineers. To do that, we needed to be a for profit, albeit a mission driven B-corp. For-profit companies running public schools are not very welcome in the broader ecosystem so that seemed like a bad place to start. We have built 7 schools in the last 2.5 years and learned an enormous amount about how we might contribute to the broader space. I think we would still be working on our first public school if we started there but we are working on this for the very long term (like decades) and look to be judged on that timescale. Finally, not to be defensive, but the solutions to the huge problems we have in education need to come from many places. Saying that someone is ignorant to the issues of the privileged as a knee jerk response actually keeps a lot of people from innovating in comparably easier parts of the education space which, in the long run, cuts off major avenues for progress.
Alejo Rivera
@alejoriveralara
Hi Max! I'm a Software Developer and Head of school at an alternative school in Houston. I think I have great software that other schools could start using, but it's been hard to reach beyond my personal network. What would be your advise for reaching alternative schools all over the US, and in the world in general?
@alejoriveralara Right now there's enormous fragmentation in the education space and any kind of top down distribution of education software is practically impossible for smaller players to accomplish. That leaves using the natural virality of educators as the primary resort. When you look at successful software products in the ed space (like EdModo, Clever, Remind101, ClassDojo), they all spread largely by word of mouth and educators familiar with the product going to new schools and telling others. To aid in that discovery, there are also some directories of available products (like https://www.graphite.org/) that can be essential to help people finding you.
Alejo Rivera
@alejoriveralara
And a more philosophical question – What do you think is the purpose of education?
@alejoriveralara I think that education is a basic human right first and foremost. I also think that education is a very high ROI avenue for countries and individual families. In other contexts (like worker retraining), I think that education can function as a very necessary form of insurance. That's my way of saying that there isn't a single easy answer for how we should think of education from a policy standpoint. That said, from every angle, it seems like we aren't focusing nearly enough on education as a national priority.