The 50 richest families in America are betting on this trend

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
I'm gonna read you the most Alpha sentence possible here. Kindergarteners must climb a 40-foot rock wall and receive critical feedback without crying test.

**Joe Liemandt** (0:09)
Right, this is the best time in history to be a five-year-old.

**Shaan Puri** (0:13)
Explain.

**Joe Liemandt** (0:13)
There you go.

**Shaan Puri** (0:24)
Well, I'm gonna flatter you for a second. So the easiest one is, I wish there was Alpha School near me, so I could send my kids to it. I actually have a kindergartner, so that would be perfect. But you have this really amazing story. It's kind of the story that me and Sam like to tell on this podcast, because it sounds like a movie.
Here you've got this sort of secretive billionaire, right? This guy who in his 20s drops out of college, figures things out. You're on the cover of Forbes magazine when you're 27 years old. And you built multiple huge companies, multi-billion dollar companies, and then you disappear for like 20 years. Nobody hears about you. You stay out of the public limelight. You're not out there like us, talking on podcasts and saying how great you are. And then you take a billion dollars of your own money and you use it to try to reinvent education. Now you're back.

**Joe Liemandt** (1:09)
Yeah. So in 2005, I got married, which was also the first year of podcasting. I did a podcast actually at Stanford. That was my last one. And then I went and signed for 20 years. And then now my youngest daughter is about to go to college. And so now I'm back on the road, right? I'm back in the limelight and I hopefully, at Alpha, will be doing it for the next 20 years to fix education.

**Shaan Puri** (1:33)
Why don't we start at the start there? So you have this idea for trilogy and you drop out of college.

**Joe Liemandt** (1:37)
Actually, in high school, I wrote a paper about AI. And so really in high school, I was writing a paper on AI. One of the paragraphs said, Neural maps are decades away. I then went to Stanford and I was in a class with the father of expert systems at AI, Professor Feigebom. So my buddies and I were like, we can't sit in Spanish class anymore. So we dropped out.
Back then, it was rare. And so the parents are not excited. My dad famously said, you're a moron. And then we built trilogy and our claim to fame, actually in the 90s, it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.

**Shaan Puri** (2:13)
Did you have the idea when you dropped out or you drop out and say, let's come up with a whiteboard, let's come up with the idea?

**Joe Liemandt** (2:19)
No, we had the idea which was you could build this product called a configurator, which was expert systems had a range of things that they could solve. Configurator was one of the domains that they've been trying to solve since the late 70s basically. And by the late 80s, I was like, oh, we can totally do this.

**Sam Parr** (2:37)
I tried to figure out what trilogy did because at one point, you guys owned so many different products. I think you owned a bunch of different companies. And I was trying to figure it out and I was like, is it sort of like if an airline needs to like buy parts to build an airplane, you built software that would help them decide how many bits and pieces for each, like how many seats they need, therefore what they should order from the manufacturer? Was that right?

**Joe Liemandt** (2:59)
The first product we had that started the company was a configurator. Just think of a configurator on like, you know, a car website or Dell computer where you're configuring your computer. Now just imagine it if it's a million times more complicated, which is a room size phone switch or a Boeing airplane or you know, back then, main brain computers, you know, big manufacturing systems that the problem back then is, reps would be out in the field selling these complicated products. And then what would happen is they get to the manufacturing line and the manufacturing line didn't build that. It was an unbuildable configuration. And so being able to take that knowledge of how, what is a correct configuration, put it in your thousands of sales reps hands so they would sell accurate configurations, would save millions of dollars a day to the Fortune 500 So we just found all the Fortune 500 name manufacturing companies and said, we can take what all this huge problem is costing you just $8,000,000, put it in this sales builder, which your sales reps would be able to build correct configurations. And then you'd pay us millions and millions of dollars for it. And so that was our first product. And that's what launched the company. And that was the first one that drove the billion dollars revenue.