Reinventing K-12 Education Using AI with Alpha School Principal Joe Liemandt

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're here with Joe Liemandt, the founder of the legendary technology company Trilogy and now the principal of Alpha School. He wants to educate a billion kids differently and also recruit a generation of builders to work in education. Joe, thanks so much for doing this with us.

**Joe Liemandt** (0:24)
Yeah, good to see you. Great. Thank you. I appreciate this.

**Sarah Guo** (0:26)
So you have an amazing story as a technology entrepreneur. Trilogy is a legend of a company. Can you just talk a little bit about how you went from that to being principal of a school?

**Joe Liemandt** (0:38)
Absolutely. Rolling back on background, in high school, I actually wrote a paper on AI. And it literally had a paragraph on neural nets that said, this is decades away. And back then, it was all expert systems, ontologies and all that. And I went to Stanford and actually was in a class with Ed Feigenbaum, the father of expert systems, ended up dropping out to build a AI company. You couldn't call it back then because AI was bad back then. And it was the first product in the 90s to sell a billion dollars of AI. So we built a software company and did that for 25 years.

**Sarah Guo** (1:14)
That helped with sales configuration and many things.

**Joe Liemandt** (1:16)
Yeah, sales configuration and all of that. And so think just classic SaaS enterprise software, both organic build and acquisitions. But then 10 years ago and sort of how we got to the school is Mackenzie Price, who's a Stanford grad who I had hired into Trilogy back in the 90s. She started a school, started Alpha, very different school. And we can talk about how I got. But for two years, I was just saying, I'm not going to go to your weird school. And eventually, though my kids went. And then three years ago, when Gen. AI came out, I was like, wow, neural nets are finally here and now we can scale this. The problem with all education is it's not scalable. There's lots of point good education systems. And what my view was, wow, this is finally a technology that can get this to a billion kids and take the magic of Alpha, which was great for Austin kids and my kids, and get it out to everybody.
And so, I'm a product guy and I said, I guess I have to be principal to go figure this out. And what happens when fifth graders get in a fight and what do parents yell at you about? And how do you design a product from the ground up? If you just did, let's start with, parents are gonna drop their kids off at a school, at a building, and there's gonna be other kids in the building and there's gonna be adults in the building. What would you do to sort of unleash human potential if you had 12 years to re-envision it?

**Sarah Guo** (2:45)
So what was your original thinking about your kids going to Mackenzie School? What was the resistance and what was the reason they eventually went?

**Joe Liemandt** (2:52)
Lots. I mean, every parent basically wants their kid educated the way they were. That's what you've experienced. We've all experienced the same model for a couple hundred years. I went to Catholic school. I didn't even like it, but my kids were going to it. And so they're in the local school and Mackenzie is giving this other weirdness. And I'm just like, no.
What was weird about it? Well, they were using apps in the morning, right? And it was a mix. It wasn't what we are today, but it was the formation of it. And you're like, a kid's going to learn really with an app and no teacher? Seriously, like everybody knows good school equals good teacher, good teacher equals good school. And you're like, no, this app, Dreambox back then, was the app. And I'm like, that's better in math. And so you just have that hang up. And that's true today, right? That, you know, when we look to open a new location, basically everybody wants to go to an Alpha once there's a hundred kids in the school. No one wants to go when you're the first 20 Like, are you, it takes somebody like a McKinsey who's like, I want to be a founding family because the, you know, the bundle that is education, part of what she loved was, I get to go find the other kids that I want to surround my kids with. Right? And so it took her two years, but eventually she got, you know, and my, our daughters are all now best friends and have been for a decade.