Nat Eliason joins guest host Jimmy Soni to discuss Founders School, a new high school for entrepreneurs that guarantees students will generate $1 million in gross profit by graduation or get their tuition refunded.
We explore how AI is changing what teenagers can build, why traditional entrepreneurship education falls short, and what happens when we take young people seriously.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
$1 million in gross profit, or your money back
Jimmy Soni: And so the audacious bet — the bet you started our conversation with — is you will make a million dollars in revenue by the end of your four years, or —
Nat Eliason: Gross profit.
Jimmy Soni: Gross profit, not revenue.
Nat Eliason: Not revenue.
Jimmy Soni: Wow. Even more audacious. So how does — without giving away state secrets, or anything privileged you can’t share — what was the thinking around that particular set of numbers, that bet, that promise? Because that’s the thing that’s been getting headlined.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, this was something Joe came up with when he came up with the idea for the school […]
Jimmy Soni: A million dollars in profit, or your money back.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. But he knew the same thing I said at the top of the conversation — there are no good entrepreneurship programs out there.
Jimmy Soni: Right, right.
Nat Eliason: There’s no undergraduate entrepreneurship degree that’s worth it, no graduate one that’s that good either. There are people who go to these schools and become successful entrepreneurs, but there’s really none of these schools that reliably drive outcomes in entrepreneurship. If you just said, “We’re launching a high school for entrepreneurs,” it’s kind of like, okay, right, there’s a lot of places for entrepreneurs — there’s FBLA, there’s all these things that say they’ll teach you entrepreneurship, and everybody kind of knows they’re not going to do that good a job. But if you say, “We’re launching a school for entrepreneurs, and if your kid doesn’t make a million dollars by graduation, we’ll refund you the tuition” — tuition is $150,000 a year, so we’re saying we’ll give you back $600,000 at the end of four years if we don’t get your student to that outcome. There are caveats — we’re assessing students each year, if a student comes in sophomore year they’re not on the guarantee, there’s all the edge cases. But that’s the core promise of the school, and it’s putting the pressure on us to actually figure this out, to make sure we’re delivering on these outcomes, and not playing startup like I was in college, trying to learn this for myself. It’s this incredible forcing function, and it’s the only reason anybody’s talking about this — because we have to be insanely committed to creating the best education experience possible on this topic, one that’s never existed before, that nobody’s made this kind of commitment to before. That’s where all our mental energy is going — we know this is possible, we just have to fine-tune it as we work with the students.
The perks of quitting early
Jimmy Soni: How did you deal with the feeling you described — you’re a year in and you realize it’s not going to work? Did it feel like the sky was falling? Because even at that age, even if you’re not building a business, you’re generally dealing with the challenge of what am I going to do with my earthly time — those are challenges for people who are just going to class every day. You’re building a business and watching it fail. What was your thought process, if you can think back?
Nat Eliason: I usually don’t stay in that headspace very long. I’ll have those feelings occasionally, but it very quickly shifts to: okay, well, there is something to do here. So I’ve never had long periods of wallowing, or being stuck in fear, because I very quickly click into, okay, we need a new plan — what is the plan, let’s focus on that. It shifted very quickly. I literally remember writing this on a whiteboard in my room — I wrote “$2,000,” because it was: okay, this startup is dead, I’m not working on this anymore, these illusions of raising $500,000 and going big — that’s not happening anymore. So what’s the thing I can focus on next? How do I get to this number by this date? That was the new plan. It felt like a very quick shift from focused on the startup to, oh wow, no, this is dead. I think it had probably been bubbling up for a couple of months, what was really going on. I must have spent some time making sure I wasn’t just having a momentary freak-out, because you don’t want to go that route either. But I remember it being a pretty quick and pretty adamant realization and decision.
For better or worse, I think I am good at that — okay, this feels like it’s hit a wall, but there’s this other vector that does have potential, I’m going to go on that one. That’s worked out very well for me. It’s also definitely had the downside of quitting things too quickly, or killing things too quickly, and it can be tough to find that balance sometimes.
Jimmy Soni: When you think back on that — because you’ve written publicly about quitting and talked a lot about it — do you have, sitting here in 2026, any updated thoughts on sort of knowing when to fold ‘em and knowing when to hold ‘em? Any new heuristics, or ways you’re thinking about it?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I think ultimately — “quitting early” is the wrong term, but I’ve always had this bias toward being willing to kill something and move on to a better opportunity. The issue with that is it’s led to a lot of shiny-object syndrome. Most people, I think, go through a period of that, where they do this thing, then this thing, then this thing, and don’t get anywhere, and they realize, oh, I shouldn’t do that, I should pick something and focus on it. The issue for me is that it’s worked.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: Right. And I don’t mean this in a braggadocious way — it’s just, I’ve gotten away with it. I’ve been able to get super interested and fascinated in things, go hard on them for a year, launch these little businesses off my X account or my newsletter, and then they go really well. It’s like, okay, I can just become obsessed with something, dig into it for six months, then launch a course or a product, and it makes a few hundred grand in the span of a couple of months. Great — costs are covered for the next period of getting obsessed about things. That’s a cool ability to have. It’s incredibly powerful, incredibly useful, and I’m very grateful I’ve been able to do that.
But it does lead to not fully committing to things, not seeing where they can go, not living up to my full potential in a lot of those areas — because these breakthrough moments will happen, and instead of saying, okay, the excitement is over, now for the long slow slog to 10x this, it’s, well, I could just goof off for six months and then do this again. That’s been fun, that’s been satisfying. And then, really, last fall, I sat down — I ended up having this conversation with my wife, too — where I was like, I don’t think I should keep doing this. Even though it’s working, even though it’s provided a lot of the sustenance for our life, it feels like I’ve been playing this game a little too long. I really want to focus on something bigger, something serious, that has a meaningful risk of failure — because I think part of it comes from a fear of failure, a fear of trying something big and it not working and being embarrassed, because that means I’m not smart, I’m not capable. But as long as I’m doing these little things, there’s no risk of feeling that way.
Jimmy Soni: Because six months later, something else comes down the road and you figure that out.
Nat Eliason: Something’s going to happen.
Edited Transcript
Jimmy Soni: All right, Nat Eliason, thank you for coming on Infinite Loops.
Nat Eliason: Good to be here. Last time I did this with Jim. Now I got to do it with Jimmy. There you go.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, we’re just going to continue rotating in people. Jim, Jimmy.
Nat Eliason: There you go. Have a cast of characters.
Jimmy Soni: One of the things that I have — this theory of the case of friendship that is like a contemporary case, or contemporary theory of the case of friendship — before the Internet, it was basically like, there’s less than a 1% likelihood you and I would have ever become friends. Because we grew up in different places. It would have been unlikely. Not impossible, just highly unlikely. And now what happens is you can have all these people who are Internet friends who become in-real-life friends. And so it’s this fascinating thing, because before, you would sort your friendships based on how close my locker was to yours.
Nat Eliason: Right.
Jimmy Soni: Did we grow up playing on the same little league team or something? And fast forward, you and I connected — I believe it was on Twitter, or when it was —
Nat Eliason: No, you emailed me. For the podcast, back in 2017, ‘18. Yeah.
Jimmy Soni: And then you sort of evolve from there, and you follow friends’ projects and you support them along the way. And so it’s a real pleasure to do this, because it actually shows you, I think, what’s different about friendship now — that would have been impossible 50 years ago, or highly unlikely 50 years ago.
Nat Eliason: Even 10, 15 years ago, I feel like a lot has changed. I certainly grew up in the era where “don’t talk to strangers on the Internet” was my parents’ number one concern with me getting on it, for decent reasons. And now at least half of my friends, if not more, I meet online first. I have this very vivid memory of 2018 — my wife, my now-wife, and I had just moved into our first house in Austin, and I invited a friend and his girlfriend over for dinner. About an hour before he showed up, she was like, “Oh, by the way, how do you know Adam?” And I said, “Oh, we know each other through Twitter.” And she was like, “What — you’ve never met this person in real life? Who are you bringing into our house?” And it was great. Adam and I are good friends now. But even then, that was odd — and she was totally fair to have that reaction. Now it’s just like, “Oh yeah, of course, that’s another person we met.”
Jimmy Soni: And it’s funny, because I think you accelerate a lot of friendships that way, right? Because you do feel like you’re kind of in each other’s heads in some way — you vaguely know the projects the other person’s interested in. Whereas with, call it, locker proximity, that still requires a fair amount of investment in a friendship before you know if you’re even interested in the same things. But with online or digital friendships that convert into real-life friendship, you’re like, I already know all the stuff you like. We like all the same stuff.
Nat Eliason: We follow all the same people. Our feeds are the same.
Jimmy Soni: It’s like you were already hanging out with them.
Nat Eliason: Yes. Although it does create these funny circles, where I have a much harder time being friends with Instagram guys than Twitter guys, because I just don’t know what’s in their feed. It’s almost like a relationship strategic thing — Cosette knows what’s going on in a lot of our friends’ lives that I don’t know, because I’m not on Instagram, and I know stuff going on in other friends’ lives that she doesn’t know, because she’s not on X as much.
Jimmy Soni: That’s really funny.
Nat Eliason: It’s strategic, almost.
Jimmy Soni: Do you get a little bit of — I don’t know if you have this — the six degrees of Chris Williamson? Or the problem of everybody consuming the same information?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, right.
Jimmy Soni: A little bit.
Nat Eliason: That’s definitely true.
Jimmy Soni: I think that’s true of all communities, but I think it might be particularly true of friends who are based on Twitter, X.
Nat Eliason: I have a group chat of guys who are also terminally online on X, and I swear, two-thirds of the time someone posts something funny in the chat, I’ve already seen it.
Jimmy Soni: Already seen it.
Nat Eliason: And it’s a weird experience — this world is big, and it’s really, really small.
Jimmy Soni: Well, we’re here to talk about your world expanding a bit and changing a bit. A lot has changed. But just for listeners who aren’t familiar with your particular path — can you sketch out... I think of you as like the Dos Equis guy of the Internet. You’ve had some of the most interesting career shifts, transitions, experiments you’ve run. Can you walk us through briefly — take me from your education at Choate to now, kind of bullet points, so people have a sense of who you are?
Nat Eliason: Yes. So, I guess the way I describe it is that I’ve been very fortunate to have made a career out of getting super fascinated and obsessed by things and diving down these different rabbit holes that have thin relations but not very thick ones. That’s been this fun journey over the last 12, 14 years. I went to high school at Choate Rosemary Hall up in Connecticut, and while I was there I thought I was going to go into physics. Then in the same year I took microeconomics and read Atlas Shrugged and got immediately red-pilled on entrepreneurship and business. So I kind of hard-pivoted — decided entrepreneurship and business was what I wanted to do, applied to really just the top ten business schools for college, went down that list, and then went to the best one I got into, which was Carnegie Mellon.
One year into business school at Carnegie, I realized it wasn’t going to teach me anything useful about entrepreneurship. It was great for learning finance and stuff that would be useful in a management consulting career, things like that — but really not much. There’s not much value in the entrepreneurship degree at almost any college or grad school. I dropped out of that into the philosophy program, because I still had that literary interest, but that was also the lowest-requirement major, so it gave me the most freedom to do whatever I wanted with my college degree. I ended up dropping out for a year to work on a startup, and convinced the business school and the philosophy school to give me credit — kind of independent-study credit — for working on my business, which allowed me to still graduate on time. So I got to hack the system that way.
Jimmy Soni: Which, by the way — just to pause here for a second, because there are either young people listening or parents of young people listening — one of the things I say when I’m speaking, because I did roughly the same thing: I designed my own degree at Duke. Basically, starting sophomore year, I was able to choose all of my classes through senior year. I designed it so I got to do exactly what I wanted, with who I wanted, and then just did a bunch of independent studies to fill in the gaps. I tend to think college — you’re in this business too — is far more hackable than people think it is. There are no rules. There’s nothing they actually have to do. You can make it up as you go along, and, by the way, get money to do it.
Nat Eliason: And once you graduate, no one’s really going to care what grades you got or most of the classes you took. So you either use it to get an extremely deep education on a challenging subject you couldn’t realistically get anywhere else — if you can study physics at MIT or something, you have the potential to get an education you can’t get anywhere else — or you do the bare minimum, get the piece of paper, meet everybody, because those are going to be your friends, possibly your wife or husband, your future business partners, all of that, and then focus on other stuff. I think the bimodal approach is the way to do it.
I ended up getting a lot of value in the sense that I spent that whole year off campus in downtown Pittsburgh, working on my startup with other adults. I went through a startup accelerator downtown — so it was me, the 20-year-old who couldn’t go out to the happy hours, and then all these other adults working on their startups. I was off campus during the day, learning business skills, interacting with people much older and further along in their careers, but then at night I went back to campus, stayed in my fraternity, threw parties, did all the fun aspects of college. That was the best year of college, by far. Best of both worlds.
Jimmy Soni: Did you — how did that business go?
Nat Eliason: Oh, terribly. I mean, it was the classic problem: one, I was a 20-year-old who’d gotten into good schools without herculean effort, and I knew I was smart, so I felt like I knew what I was doing. I’d read a couple of books, like The Lean Startup, and there was nobody around me saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” So I just assumed I did. I was able to raise a small amount of money, but I don’t think in that year we got a single paying customer. I was really good at making pitch decks —
Jimmy Soni: Which is a skill.
Nat Eliason: Which is a skill. It’s a skill. I was good at going to networking events, I was good at playing startup, but I did not actually learn how to start a business. About a year in — it must have been a book I read, because it wasn’t somebody who told me — there was this moment of cascading dread, when it all hit me at once: oh my gosh, I’m a fraud, this isn’t working at all, this is making no money, there is no product-market fit here, and I’ve just spent a year on this, and I could have figured this out probably eleven months ago. Very useful.
Thankfully, when I realized that, I very quickly went to: I need to shut this down, and I need to get my act together, because I’m graduating in eight months and I’ve been shirking a philosophy degree. So I have no job prospects that way — my startup has failed, so that’s not going to pay me — and I have about eight months to figure out how to make money or get hired, or else I’m moving back. I didn’t have a fallback plan. I was like, I’m just going to figure it out. And thankfully, I did. That was when I got really into content marketing and writing, because the question I asked myself was: okay, I want to get into startups, I don’t have any useful skills for that right now — I don’t know how to code, I don’t know how to design, I don’t know how to market, I don’t know how to do sales — what is the skill that would be useful to a startup that I’m closest to knowing how to do? I picked marketing, specifically content marketing, because I was a philosophy major, I was writing a lot. I figured, okay, I can figure out how to write good articles for a company blog, a startup blog, and that will get me my first jobs and internships.
So I started my blog, started writing articles on it just to demonstrate I could do content marketing, from what I could piece together from blogs that were out at the time. There wasn’t really — there wasn’t YouTube back then in the educational sense we have it today.
Jimmy Soni: Back in the stone age.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, exactly. There were no Twitter accounts I could follow — people were just posting about pooping on Twitter, there was no real network. But Zapier and Buffer were the two big future-of-content-marketing companies at the time. So I started my blog, posted on it for two months, felt like I was getting good, and then I just cold-emailed both of them and said, “Hey, will you take me on as a freelance writer?” I didn’t say internship, didn’t say college student — I was just trying to pitch them to hire me as a freelance writer. Buffer said no, but Zapier said yes. So by December — this is a two- or three-month period — I’d gone from nothing to: okay, I have my first freelance writing gig with this company I have a lot of respect for. It was $150 an article. I did the math and said, okay, if I do 12 to 14 articles a month, call it three a week, that gets me enough that I could afford to live somewhere like Argentina or Thailand. So now I know I can go do that when I graduate if I need to — I don’t need to take any job I don’t want to take, I can keep focusing on entrepreneurship skills, and I have this as the backstop.
That was really the first — you don’t think of freelance writing as entrepreneurial, but it was a very entrepreneurial thing to do. It was like, okay, I’m going to develop this skill, sell it, figure out my rough P&L to run that business, and go from there. I ended up taking a job for about eight or nine months that didn’t work out very well, but then started a marketing agency right after it, and it all started with making that decision senior year of college. That marketing agency ended up doing a few million a year — I stepped out of it, had another CEO take over, and she ran it for a few years before it was eventually acquired. That was my first entrepreneurial thing that did very well, and it all stemmed from that decision.
Jimmy Soni: Just out of curiosity — did your family, were they nervous? Were there any tough conversations? Because that’s usually the part of the story people leave out, right? One, one has to drop out of college — but the more complicated thing is usually not dropping out, it’s the phone call to the parents to let them know what your plans are. You didn’t drop out, but did they have any concerns — you’ve gone to Choate, you’ve gone to Carnegie Mellon, you’ve been in these worlds that are indisputably prestigious, and now you’re going to go write freelance articles and maybe move to Thailand?
Nat Eliason: Yeah. By that point they’d been warmed up to it from me doing that year off — that was the hardest of those conversations. I don’t think my mom was ever worried — she was like, “He’s going to be fine, he’s going to figure it out.” My dad is much more academic — he went to Harvard Law School, he’s a professor, it’s like, college is important. I think he was very worried I wasn’t going to get a degree. I think he knew, rightly, that as soon as I got a taste of not being in college, I’d never want to go back. It’s sort of a fluke that I ended up graduating, in the sense that if I hadn’t gotten all that extra credit, and if I hadn’t had so many APs from high school, I wouldn’t have finished — there’s no way. But after I shut down the startup and papered out the math with my advisor, we realized we could jam one semester full of kind of BS classes to get me to the finish line and still get the piece of paper. I think if we hadn’t been able to work that out, it wouldn’t have happened. But that satisfied him, at least, that I got the degree.
I think it was clear to them at that point that even if the startup hadn’t worked, I had started something, hired people, raised some amount of money — I was on some path. And I think if I’d said, “After I graduate, I’m going to figure out how to make money doing freelance writing,” that would have been one thing. But going to them and saying, “I’m already doing it, I’m already making it” — that helps a lot. It’s like, okay, clearly there’s a plan here, he’s on some sort of trajectory. Sometimes kids in high school or college reach out to me. They used to more when I was younger —
Jimmy Soni: You’re over the hill now.
Nat Eliason: No, well — I feel like when I was in my mid-20s I was more vocal about the college-alternative-path thing, so I’d get more of that inbound. I don’t get as much of it anymore. But I’d always say: make some money online first, then tell your parents, because they’ll be a lot more amenable to the idea if you have proof of success instead of just hoping it’ll work out.
Jimmy Soni: When you were raising money at 20 years old, how did you communicate with investors? What were those conversations like? Raising money is something even adults obviously struggle with mightily.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. Honestly, it was a lot easier for me, because it was from a local startup accelerator in Pittsburgh, and I was a Carnegie Mellon student. These guys are wonderful — I don’t mean this as a criticism — but they gave me a lot of benefit of the doubt because I went to Carnegie, and I’d just won the Startup Weekend in Pittsburgh with this idea. So I had that kind of charisma, and there was a bit of local excitement around what I was doing. It was kind of a natural fit in that sense. But looking back, if I’d gone out to Silicon Valley and tried to pitch YC, or tried to get in front of an a16z, I think they might have said, “You have no idea what you’re doing, you have nothing here.” That might have been very helpful, honestly. Even when I raised the follow-on money, it was from the same parent fund — a Pennsylvania innovation fund to support job creation within the state. So again, I wasn’t playing in the hardest leagues, and I think they gave me more trust because I went to Carnegie.
Jimmy Soni: How did you deal with the feeling you described — you’re a year in and you realize it’s not going to work? Did it feel like the sky was falling? Because even at that age, even if you’re not building a business, you’re generally dealing with the challenge of what am I going to do with my earthly time — those are challenges for people who are just going to class every day. You’re building a business and watching it fail. What was your thought process, if you can think back?
Nat Eliason: I usually don’t stay in that headspace very long. I’ll have those feelings occasionally, but it very quickly shifts to: okay, well, there is something to do here. So I’ve never had long periods of wallowing, or being stuck in fear, because I very quickly click into, okay, we need a new plan — what is the plan, let’s focus on that. It shifted very quickly. I literally remember writing this on a whiteboard in my room — I wrote “$2,000,” because it was: okay, this startup is dead, I’m not working on this anymore, these illusions of raising $500,000 and going big — that’s not happening anymore. So what’s the thing I can focus on next? How do I get to this number by this date? That was the new plan. It felt like a very quick shift from focused on the startup to, oh wow, no, this is dead. I think it had probably been bubbling up for a couple of months, what was really going on. I must have spent some time making sure I wasn’t just having a momentary freak-out, because you don’t want to go that route either. But I remember it being a pretty quick and pretty adamant realization and decision.
For better or worse, I think I am good at that — okay, this feels like it’s hit a wall, but there’s this other vector that does have potential, I’m going to go on that one. That’s worked out very well for me. It’s also definitely had the downside of quitting things too quickly, or killing things too quickly, and it can be tough to find that balance sometimes.
Jimmy Soni: When you think back on that — because you’ve written publicly about quitting and talked a lot about it — do you have, sitting here in 2026, any updated thoughts on sort of knowing when to fold ‘em and knowing when to hold ‘em? Any new heuristics, or ways you’re thinking about it?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I think ultimately — “quitting early” is the wrong term, but I’ve always had this bias toward being willing to kill something and move on to a better opportunity. The issue with that is it’s led to a lot of shiny-object syndrome. Most people, I think, go through a period of that, where they do this thing, then this thing, then this thing, and don’t get anywhere, and they realize, oh, I shouldn’t do that, I should pick something and focus on it. The issue for me is that it’s worked.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: Right. And I don’t mean this in a braggadocious way — it’s just, I’ve gotten away with it. I’ve been able to get super interested and fascinated in things, go hard on them for a year, launch these little businesses off my X account or my newsletter, and then they go really well. It’s like, okay, I can just become obsessed with something, dig into it for six months, then launch a course or a product, and it makes a few hundred grand in the span of a couple of months. Great — costs are covered for the next period of getting obsessed about things. That’s a cool ability to have. It’s incredibly powerful, incredibly useful, and I’m very grateful I’ve been able to do that.
But it does lead to not fully committing to things, not seeing where they can go, not living up to my full potential in a lot of those areas — because these breakthrough moments will happen, and instead of saying, okay, the excitement is over, now for the long slow slog to 10x this, it’s, well, I could just goof off for six months and then do this again. That’s been fun, that’s been satisfying. And then, really, last fall, I sat down — I ended up having this conversation with my wife, too — where I was like, I don’t think I should keep doing this. Even though it’s working, even though it’s provided a lot of the sustenance for our life, it feels like I’ve been playing this game a little too long. I really want to focus on something bigger, something serious, that has a meaningful risk of failure — because I think part of it comes from a fear of failure, a fear of trying something big and it not working and being embarrassed, because that means I’m not smart, I’m not capable. But as long as I’m doing these little things, there’s no risk of feeling that way.
Jimmy Soni: Because six months later, something else comes down the road and you figure that out.
Nat Eliason: Something’s going to happen.
Jimmy Soni: Why last fall? Was there something going on that occasioned that “maybe I need to stick with one thing for a while”?
Nat Eliason: I think it was a combination of things. One, I’d been doing sci-fi writing for a year and a half, and it was clear that wasn’t going to pay the bills. While that had been going on, I’d been super deep in building with AI, learning how to use these tools, and I launched a course on learning how to vibe code before “vibe code” was even a term — nobody had used that word yet, Andrej hadn’t coined it. It was basically the first big vibe-coding educational thing out there. It did about $250,000 in sales in a weekend, went on to do half a million over the course of the year, with basically no ongoing work after that first set of recordings, plus an update in October — a breakout success. And I’d seen a lot of people who came in after me, some of whom took my course and then actually committed to doing something with those skills, building a product, building a bigger education business — and I realized I’d been so early, I’d established myself in that topic area, and then had just completely let that opportunity go. Maybe there’d never be another opportunity like that in my life — I don’t actually believe that, but it’s a consideration. Looking at that was hard. It was like, wow, I nailed this timing, and then I just did nothing with it, I just let it go. That felt like a mistake.
I think being a parent contributes a lot to it, too — would I tell my kids to treat opportunities that way? Definitely not. If they came to me and said, “What should I do with this?” I’d say, obviously you should keep going.
Jimmy Soni: That’s right.
Nat Eliason: So it’s like, okay, well, why wasn’t I doing that? It made me want to do something bigger, or fully commit to something. That started that thought process last fall, and then I spent the next four, five, six months figuring out what that could be.
Jimmy Soni: Well, we’ll cover some of the other topics from earlier in your adventures, but that brings us to what you’re doing now — which is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in your career evolution, just the portfolio of stuff you work on. Tell us a little about the result of that soul-searching last fall, and what you’re up to today.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, so I’d basically made this decision last fall — okay, I’m going to put the book work on hold, take something from this interest in technology, and really just go all in on it. So I started spending all of my time going even deeper than I had before on building with AI, using AI — what is interesting here — and had started working on one product, which led to another and another, and was kind of going down that path.
Then there was this tiny trickle of a side quest, where Cameron Sorsby was working at Alpha School and he’d DM’d me on Twitter — all roads lead back to X, all good things come from X — and he said, “Hey, I work at Alpha School, I’m working on this new high school program for entrepreneurs, I want to help the kids level up their AI skills, would you be down to come in and do a workshop for them?” I already knew about Alpha School at that point — part of why I liked being in Austin was knowing I could send my kids to Alpha School. To me, it was, and still is, the most interesting thing happening in education. It’s the one school I’d most want to send my kids to, and I liked being there. Honestly, one of the first thoughts through my head was, oh, this is how I get my kids into Alpha School —
Jimmy Soni: They’ll discount the tuition.
Nat Eliason: Exactly — I get in the good graces now, and then when I apply next year for my kindergartner, I’ll get through the application process because I’m already on the inside. I was literally thinking that. It wasn’t completely selfishly motivated — there was a bit of that, but there was also a bit of, oh, this sounds super fun, super exciting, of course I want to come do an AI workshop for these high schoolers, in part because I was curious to see what an Alpha School high schooler is like, from everything I knew about the school.
So I went and did a modified version of my “building with AI” course for these high schoolers, and was just blown away — they were super sharp. A lot of them had already started working on business ideas or had already built audiences — a couple had over a million followers on TikTok. They were asking better questions than a lot of adults I’d done this stuff with, and they could take feedback extremely well, which maybe stood out the most. There’s a natural fear when working with students that you have to put on kid gloves, but they were very eager to hear, “This part of your landing page is ugly, you can change the copy like this, this is broken, you need to go harder here” — they were super receptive to it. I loved doing the workshop.
Jimmy Soni: And how long was the workshop — a couple hours, a half day?
Nat Eliason: Like a half day, four hours — a little bit of talking, then independent work sessions, then coming back together, then independent work again, so it’s flowing back and forth over the course of an afternoon. After we did that, Cameron and I were hanging out and talking more, and he told me more about what he’d joined Alpha School to do — this new high school for entrepreneurs, what’s now called Founders School — where they’d promise that students would make a million dollars by graduation or get all their tuition refunded. My immediate reaction was, that is the worst business idea I’ve ever heard — do you realize what you’re committing to here? But then I thought about it some more, thought about what I’d seen with the students, and — obviously I was super deep in building with AI, had seen what a lot of other teens out there were doing with AI, what teens were doing starting businesses without this kind of support — and I very quickly got to the point of, oh, this is actually doable.
It sounds insane, but you combine what Alpha’s done with academics, being able to compress the whole high school day to about three hours, which gives you four to five hours of hands-on workshops, instruction, mentorship, and support specifically on entrepreneurship in the afternoon — you take that out across four years, add in what AI lets a teenager do — and you fit all those pieces together, and you realize, oh, this actually makes all the sense in the world, especially if you get the right people in the room to help them, because it can go the wrong way if they have the wrong support, wrong mentors, wrong guidance. But get the right people in there, and this could work.
So he just asked, would I be down to chat with him occasionally as he planned this out. I said, yeah, this sounds awesome, I’d love to come in and talk to the students, be a mentor or whatever. We were just talking about it for the next two, three months, while I was working on all these other AI projects. After a few months, I’d found something that was really taking off with the AI products — stuff related to OpenClaw and agents — and side conversation, and I was basically in the middle of launching that when Cameron and I hung out again. He said, “I think for this school to work, I need somebody who is super entrepreneurial, super AI-driven, good at quickly getting things from zero to one to B, on the ground, working with the students, designing the curriculum, alongside me.” Cameron’s a great educator — he’s been building college-alternative programs for the last ten years, knows all that stuff — but he’s not as deep on the AI side or the hacky-solopreneur side as I am. So he was basically like, “Do you know anyone who’d be good to come do this with me?” And I said, “You’re looking at him.”
It was one of the strangest moments of my life, because I had not thought about it at all before that moment — there was no part of me that was like, oh, I’m going to drop everything and be a co-founder on a high school. But as soon as he asked that, and put that seed of “somebody needs to come do this with him” — it was like, oh, it’s me. I said, “I need to talk about this with my wife.” I think I just went silent for a minute, kind of staring at him as I processed it all. What I said was, “It’s not a no.” And I could see him go, “Wait — what, this is an option?” I went home and told Cosette, “This is happening,” and she said, “You have to do this.” It immediately was like, this has to happen. I think this was a Friday, and I showed up Monday and just started working — didn’t get officially hired for another month, because, you know, it’s a big company, you have to go through HR, other interviews, negotiate comp, do all the big-company stuff. I was like, I don’t care, I’m just going to show up and start doing this with you, we’re going to make this happen. And then I had to shut off everything else.
There was an evolution to the school that we might get into, where at first I thought I’d still do some of my side stuff —
Jimmy Soni: I was going to ask that — did you see yourself doing this as another side hustle?
Nat Eliason: It started that way, because in the beginning this was going to be a program for students in Austin — for students who were already at Alpha School, the Alpha High School in Austin — and then it very quickly evolved into, this should be its own dedicated high school program.
Jimmy Soni: Can you walk us through that evolution? Because when I first heard about this, I thought, oh, Nat’s going to be running programs for Alpha School — and then it was, no, no, there’s a thousand-person high school, the ambition is to build a thousand-person high school in the middle of New York City. And then I texted you and you were like, “I live in New York now.”
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah.
Jimmy Soni: You really burned the boats there.
Nat Eliason: Oh, yeah. We had that conversation where I decided to join, beginning of February, and then we were planning out the programming for it over the next six weeks — what would it look like as part of the high school, what would we teach, who are the mentors we want involved — kind of the program-level structure. Then I did a workshop for the Austin students on using OpenClaw — for anybody who doesn’t know, it’s a way of using an AI agent that unlocks it and gives it superpowers in a way you don’t get if you’re using Claude Cowork, or even Claude Code, or the Codex desktop app, or Perplexity Comet — all these other agentic things have a certain amount of ability to act on your behalf, but this is the next step beyond, in terms of what it allows you to do. It brings a lot of risk with it, because you’re giving it a lot of unfettered access to things, but if you build it right, it’s the closest thing to having a human working alongside you. I’d ended up adopting it pretty early, again kind of gotten away with very quickly building a ton of following, just by being excited about it, posting about it on X constantly — not in a malicious way, I was just obsessed with this. The students started asking, “Hey, can we do a workshop on this?” I said, sure, that sounds great. Did a couple of workshops on OpenClaw with the Alpha students, then the Alpha parents in other cities heard about it and said, “Wait, can you come do this with us?” So, beginning of April, we come out to the New York campus to do the OpenClaw workshop with the New York students and their parents.
While we’re doing the workshop, Cameron and I start casually talking about Founders School with the parents, and they’re all like, that’s the most incredible idea ever, you have to come do it here. They started mentioning people they knew whose kids would be a good fit — there was this immediate excitement, interest, and possible students who were a fit for it that we hadn’t run into yet in Austin.
Jimmy Soni: Did that surprise you at all? I would have thought you’d have had to ship out to San Francisco, or stay in Austin —
Nat Eliason: It surprised me at first. But then the reason it ended up making sense is that demand is absolutely there in Austin in five to ten years — Austin is a young, entrepreneurial city, people are moving there earlier in their family’s lives. So the pre-K, first-grade, second-grade, third-grade demand for Alpha is overwhelming. But there aren’t as many people who come from this entrepreneurial background, or ultra-high-net-worth background, with teenagers, who’ve come to Austin looking for this. So there’s a bit more of that demand here. And when you look at the elite high schools we’re competing with — the Horace Manns, the Exeters — much more of those are on the East Coast than in Austin.
That kind of drove the thinking, along with the parent excitement — it became clear that we’re going to have more demand for these students in New York City, initially, than in Austin. But Cameron was living in Austin, I was living in Austin with my three kids, Joe, our principal, is in Austin, and the New York campus is new — New York only started last year, but the New York team was really excited about it. It was this funny thing where I think everybody arrived at the “we need to do this in New York” conclusion at the same time, independently, but nobody wanted to bring it up first. So there was this little dance for about a week, and then we all kind of said it at once, and it was like, oh yeah, obviously that’s what we’re going to do. That was mid-April, and June 1st, I moved here.
Jimmy Soni: All right, so we are in medias res — we’re in the middle of this.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah.
Jimmy Soni: So what is it — how is Founders School going to be distinct from Alpha School?
Nat Eliason: Yeah. The core premise of Alpha is that, one, students should love school, which sounds obvious, but it’s not a given at all — a lot of parents have just accepted that their kid is going to be bored in school and that’s part of life. So we say, no, the number one mission of this school is that kids will love it. One of the main ways you let kids love school is if you give them a good reason to get the academics done besides “I told you to” — because normally you get academics done because otherwise you get in trouble at school, or with your parents, or maybe your parents give you some money for good grades on your report card.
Alpha takes it to the max, where we say we want to make it as rewarding as possible to get your academics done. First, we compress it to two hours a day in K through 8, three hours in high school, through an AI tutor that knows exactly where you are in reading, math, writing, science — everything — and gives you the exact next thing you need to learn to progress toward mastery for your age. You’re never sitting in a lecture, bored, waiting for somebody to catch up. You’re never slowed down if you’re interested in a subject — you’re getting the exact right challenge for where you are. That lets you do the whole day in two hours.
You’ll have people say, “Well, then they’re in front of screens, working with AI” — I understand why people are concerned about that. But then you talk to the students, ask them, and the test scores are better — you could argue it’s the highest-performing private school in the country, for a lot of these measures, especially K through 8. You ask the kids, would you rather sit in classes all day, or do these two hours on your laptop in the morning? Every single one says they’d rather do that. We used to survey our students, “Do you love school?” — that was one of our most important surveys at the end of each session. But we stopped, because 90, 95, 98% would say yes, I love school — it stopped being a useful measure. So now we ask, “Do you like school more than vacation?” And 54% of students say they’d rather go to Alpha School than go on vacation.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: That’s an insane metric.
Jimmy Soni: That’s an NPS any business would be proud to have.
Nat Eliason: Right. But the way that happens is the compressed academics are one part of it — the reward, the benefit of that, is that you’re doing awesome stuff the rest of the day. It’s still a full school day, 9 to 3:30, but the academics are done by 11:30, and then you have three or four hours to do other awesome stuff. Those change throughout the year, and by grade level, but they’re focused on some kind of life-skills workshop where students are doing something fun while building an important life skill — often pretty ambitious for their age group. For example, one of the ones kindergartners do is a two-month session where they climb a 40-foot rock wall.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: They go to a local climbing gym, harness up, and day one they go one step up the wall and they’re all cheering for each other because they got on the wall. The next day, two steps, three steps — you do that over two months, and by the end they’re going 35, 40 feet up this wall, while their friends cheer them on. The parents are terrified, but then they see how proud their kid is, they see their peers cheering them on, and that’s what they’re spending most of their day on instead of sitting in a lecture hall. So you ask a kid — would you rather sit in a lecture for most of the day, or get your academics done and then go rock climbing the rest of the day?
Jimmy Soni: Right. My take on Alpha School — which I’m a huge fan of, I hope my daughter enrolls at some point, she’s taking a different tack at least through middle school, we’ll see what happens with high school — is that some people think it’s a bet on the reinvention of education. I don’t. I think the more accurate statement is it’s a much safer bet on how kids already are wired. My daughter’s creating things all the time — it just doesn’t happen within the four walls of her school. This isn’t a knock on them, it’s their model, but in some ways it’s actively penalized — the things she wants to do to get ahead, to break the rules a little, aren’t encouraged. It feels like what Alpha’s doing is catering to the inborn instincts of children —
Nat Eliason: Right.
Jimmy Soni: — as opposed to reinventing. They’re reinventing the system adults created, but kids are actually very naturally wired for these kinds of environments.
Nat Eliason: Kids are natural learners, they’re naturally curious. This was a really long way of me answering the question you started with —
Jimmy Soni: No, you segued it back perfectly.
Nat Eliason: Because part of Alpha’s ethos is that every kid is naturally motivated by something — there’s something they’re just wired for. There’s this great Slate Star Codex article, “The Parable of the Talents,” where it’s not so much that everybody is born with some innate talent for piano, or running, or writing, but we’re often born with a fascination — something we naturally gravitate toward. And by gravitating toward something you want to do more of, it’s kind of self-rewarding. Most things in your life won’t be that way — that’s why you get paid to work and do all these other things. So if you can find what a kid is naturally drawn to do, and free up their day to do a lot more of that, they’ll get through the academics way more efficiently, with much deeper mastery, than in the normal system.
Alpha School has created all these different schools to cater to different students’ fascinations. Alpha is the one most people know best — it’s the most well-known, kind of the elite private school, and Alpha’s afternoons are focused on these workshops, and when you get to middle school and high school, you get to pick a big passion project to dedicate that time to. But we have other schools, like the Texas Sports Academies, where you get your academics done in the two hours in the morning and then spend the whole day playing sports. For a lot of kids, that’s what makes them perform — it’s like, oh, you just have to get your two hours of math and reading done and then you can play basketball, volleyball, or baseball for six hours.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: It’s like, yeah, I’m going to get it done.
Jimmy Soni: So when did the thinking evolve to the point that Founders School was going to be its own entity, rather than simply a track within Alpha School — because you’re going to be admitting students who know they’re going to Founders School, right? Is that correct?
Nat Eliason: Yes, yes. It evolved from this model Alpha had started at K through 8 — Sports Academy is for kids who are into sports, Waypoint is where kids are horseback riding and doing archery and rucking and outdoor activities, GT School is hardcore, more academics in the afternoon. We’d started this model at the younger ages, and we said, okay, what are the high schools that should exist? Alpha High is the one where you can explore anything you’re passionate about — it’s very open-ended. We have a student going for the Olympics in rowing, students writing novels, a student putting on a Broadway play, students starting businesses — and it was actually partially their idea to do Founders School, because the thinking was: okay, if you’re really serious about building a business in high school and want to be held to even higher expectations, but get even more crazy support to go after it — this is the school for you.
So it’s stepping up the expectations — obviously we have a longer school day.
Jimmy Soni: So it’s longer than the usual Alpha School day.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, it ends at 5 instead of 3:30.
Jimmy Soni: Why that choice? That’s an interesting design choice.
Nat Eliason: More time. It’s kind of like — if you were going into an apprenticeship in the pre-school era, you’re deciding at 14, 15, 16 that you’re going to become a master blacksmith, and nobody should be able to say, “No, you have to go do these other things before you become a blacksmith,” if you know that’s what you want to do. Obviously our students are still held to very high academic standards — we’re still doing all the academics, they’ll still be in excellent shape for college — but if they know entrepreneurship is what lights them up, and that’s what they’re going to be doing when they go home anyway after school, they can just stay with us longer.
Because the great thing about how we’ve designed Founders School is there’s programming, curriculum, and structure, but it’s also very heavily tailored to provide the exact support the student needs at wherever they are in their business. So instead of a month or two, or a semester, of tons of classes on Facebook ads, if we see a student is at the point where they might start experimenting with Meta ads, and that’s something they want to explore, we get them one-on-one support with an expert who’s a practitioner in the field — somebody running an ads agency or something — whose time we’re buying each week to work with our students, train them, mentor them, audit their process, and help them learn that specific skill right when they need it. So they’re getting this incredible amount of support for anything they might run into in their business, along with the coaching, emotional support, and encouragement that’s standard for Alpha across both academics and extracurriculars.
Jimmy Soni: Got it. And so the audacious bet — the bet you started our conversation with — is you will make a million dollars in revenue by the end of your four years, or —
Nat Eliason: Gross profit.
Jimmy Soni: Gross profit, not revenue.
Nat Eliason: Not revenue.
Jimmy Soni: Wow. Even more audacious. So how does — without giving away state secrets, or anything privileged you can’t share — what was the thinking around that particular set of numbers, that bet, that promise? Because that’s the thing that’s been getting headlined.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, this was something Joe came up with when he came up with the idea for the school. Remember what I said at the beginning of the conversation —
Jimmy Soni: Can you say a little bit about Joe, so people have context on who he is — there are people learning about Alpha School for the first time.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, okay. Joe Liemandt joined, came in as the second co-founder for Alpha School about five years ago. Alpha was originally started by MacKenzie Price in 2014 — she ran it as a school in Austin using these principles of direct instruction, one-on-one mentorship, spending most of the day on activities, and pioneered the overall structure for the school, with incredible success. Joe founded a software company in the ‘90s called Trilogy — it’s grown, and he’s the sole owner of it now, a multi-billion-dollar company, massive successful tech entrepreneur. His daughter ended up going to Alpha in Austin, and that’s how he found out about it — he fell in love with the model, was amazed by what MacKenzie had figured out about teaching students this way. He’d actually sold one of the first pieces of software that was, like — it was Salesforce before Salesforce, is a way you could describe it, back in the ‘90s — so he’s been obsessed with the potential of AI for 30 years now. When generative AI came on the scene, he basically went to MacKenzie and said, this is how we take what you’ve figured out and bring it to a billion students. That’s the core mission of everything we’re doing at Alpha — how do we bring the best education possible to a billion students around the world? It’s kind of like the Tesla model — we’re starting with the Model S, the Roadster, we need the expensive one first, and then we’re able to bring it down-market to broader audiences. So he brought in the software side, invested a significant amount of his own capital, and started building out the Alpha that more people have heard of today.
He’s obviously an incredibly successful tech entrepreneur — he saw the students at Alpha who are really entrepreneurial, and between the two of them, they came up with this idea for Founders School — the school for entrepreneurs.
Jimmy Soni: A million dollars in profit, or your money back.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. But he knew the same thing I said at the top of the conversation — there are no good entrepreneurship programs out there.
Jimmy Soni: Right, right.
Nat Eliason: There’s no undergraduate entrepreneurship degree that’s worth it, no graduate one that’s that good either. There are people who go to these schools and become successful entrepreneurs, but there’s really none of these schools that reliably drive outcomes in entrepreneurship. If you just said, “We’re launching a high school for entrepreneurs,” it’s kind of like, okay, right, there’s a lot of places for entrepreneurs — there’s FBLA, there’s all these things that say they’ll teach you entrepreneurship, and everybody kind of knows they’re not going to do that good a job. But if you say, “We’re launching a school for entrepreneurs, and if your kid doesn’t make a million dollars by graduation, we’ll refund you the tuition” — tuition is $150,000 a year, so we’re saying we’ll give you back $600,000 at the end of four years if we don’t get your student to that outcome. There are caveats — we’re assessing students each year, if a student comes in sophomore year they’re not on the guarantee, there’s all the edge cases. But that’s the core promise of the school, and it’s putting the pressure on us to actually figure this out, to make sure we’re delivering on these outcomes, and not playing startup like I was in college, trying to learn this for myself. It’s this incredible forcing function, and it’s the only reason anybody’s talking about this — because we have to be insanely committed to creating the best education experience possible on this topic, one that’s never existed before, that nobody’s made this kind of commitment to before. That’s where all our mental energy is going — we know this is possible, we just have to fine-tune it as we work with the students.
Jimmy Soni: How do you avoid the undue pressure? You’re in the early innings of this — it’s actually fun to talk about while it’s still being figured out. How have you thought about not putting that pressure on the students themselves, for that gross-profit-or-money-back burden?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, okay. We’ve actually had a couple of parents say they don’t want to do the guarantee.
Jimmy Soni: Oh, wow.
Nat Eliason: Right, for that exact reason —
Jimmy Soni: Okay.
Nat Eliason: They’re like, I don’t want my — I always say “student,” because kids don’t like being called kids — I don’t want my kid to feel like they have to hit this or I’m going to be —
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: It’s like, yeah, obviously, we don’t want that either. It’s first and foremost an offer to the parents — it is the most expensive high school in the country, aside from IMG maybe. That’s how much we’re investing in the students — there’s no other school that’s going to get your kid on the phone with a top-tier Meta ads expert the next day when they have trouble with their ads account. It’s a huge investment, and we’re saying, this is what we’re willing to commit to. But we don’t want to create unpleasant pressure on the students — and it factored into how we ended up at the gross-profit calculation. We want the most aligned structure —
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Nat Eliason: — while creating minimum adverse incentives. So, okay — we can’t do valuation.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: Because,
Jimmy Soni: Right, valuations can be made up every day.
Nat Eliason: “Oh, I sold 1% of my company for— Exactly. We’re not going to do that, because then they might not learn anything —
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Nat Eliason: — because part of this is how do we make sure they learn the most. So then, revenue — we don’t really want to just do revenue either, because then they could be incredibly unprofitable, they’ve made money, they’ve built some business, but it’s not necessarily a good business. So we went from that to, okay, net profit then — because we want them to not just spend infinite money on ads, spend $10 million on ads to get a million in revenue because mom and dad funded it. We don’t want that. But then we realized the problem with net profit was that we’d create other adverse incentives, where we’d be telling students not to reinvest in their business.
Jimmy Soni: Oh, that’s fascinating.
Nat Eliason: Right — we were like, well, shoot, we don’t want that either.
Jimmy Soni: Them to take money out in order to avoid — for their parents to get back the $600K.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. We didn’t want to be going to the students and saying, “No, don’t run ads, don’t do another production run, don’t hire an employee, because we need to make this number happen.” So that’s how we ended up on this gross-profit calculation — we’re going to factor in a certain amount of cost of goods sold, and — you probably wouldn’t normally put advertising and stuff in there, but we’re going to put that in too — but we’re not going to try to disincentivize you from growing your team or reinvesting in the business, because there might be a student who builds a $10 million business, and — I mean, that sounds insane sometimes when you say it in front of parents, but I think that’s fully possible in four years, just seeing some of the students who are applying, who are already making progress. Zach Yadegari — he’s 19, and he sold Cal AI for fifty million dollars.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: And he was going to a normal school — he had to figure this all out on his own. It’s like, this is possible. The reason we have to put so much thought into it is that we want the best structure possible for everybody — it’s not about trying to get out of something, it’s the thing we care most about, providing the best entrepreneurial education for these students, something that’s never existed before, that they wouldn’t need to go to any of these graduate entrepreneurship programs afterward. One of my personal KPIs is that they could teach a class at places like HBS when they graduate — if they can’t teach a class at HBS, I’ve failed. That’s what we’re aiming for.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. So — I understand the part of Alpha School that’s about compressing an ordinary school day into two to three hours, that makes all the sense in the world, it’s almost table stakes at this point, because of Alpha School’s success — by the way, that’s not a knock, they did it, they proved it, you kind of accept it, and if you don’t accept it you’re just not looking at the numbers. What’s the program design like for Founders School specifically, after you’ve checked the boxes on academics in the morning?
Nat Eliason: So academics are done in the morning, and then we have the students from basically 12 to 5 for the entrepreneurial section. About 70% of the week is independent work time — or, if they’re working with another student as kind of co-founders, working together — on whatever stage they’re at in their business. One of the things we realized really early and really quickly was that just as Alpha School can’t rely on finding incredible second-grade math teachers in every location — the software needs to provide excellent support — we too, at Founders, need to create the best software to support an early entrepreneur wherever they are in their journey.
A lot of it starts with three axes we think are most important for them to figure out to get started. The first is developing expertise — a fun tie-in for me, because I spent years as a personal-knowledge-management writer, went very deep on this topic, how do you teach yourself things, how do you learn things. Now AI has both given us superpowers in that sense, but it’s also given us this incredible crutch — people will just sling slop.
Jimmy Soni: That’s right.
Nat Eliason: Right — they’ll make a document about a topic and then you ask them a question about it —
Jimmy Soni: And they have no idea what they are talking about.
Nat Eliason: They have no idea what’s in it. So the thing we start every student with is: I know you want to go build a business, I know you want to go work on a business — but you don’t get to do that until you’ve demonstrated you’ve developed some meaningful knowledge and expertise in a subject area, so you can actually build a business there. Because the number-one thing we see with students starting businesses is they start things related to school — sometimes that’s a good idea, sometimes it’s good ed tech, that’s a good business — a lot of times it’s not. Or they start businesses for other teens who don’t have money — just not the right market to go after.
So the first thing we do, the first thing we’re pushing them toward, is: start just thinking of topics you’re interested in, and go through this process of building expertise, building deeper knowledge, teaching yourself, being able to explain what you’re learning, and see where that leads you. Because if you don’t have a somewhat unconventional point of view on a topic, it’s going to be hard to carve out a real competitive advantage in almost any business you’d want to go into. So we start them there.
Jimmy Soni: And what does that look like — do they read, do they talk to people, a mix of both? What does that time look like where they’re developing expertise?
Nat Eliason: So it’s a mix of —
Jimmy Soni: Or what do you want it to look like, since you’re still building it?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah. So this is the tool we’ve gone the farthest on, because it’s the foundational element, and it looks like a mix of reading and talking to people, but then doing their own research and kind of annealing — like sharpening a samurai sword — consolidating their opinions based on these sources into defensible positions on these topics. A little bit like what you might do in thesis research in a PhD program, but with the support of good technology that uses AI to challenge you, help with your research, expose you to new ideas and directions, without doing the work for you. You can almost imagine there’s aspects of Readwise, and of Roam and Obsidian, but in this kind of narrow context — pushing them to focus on one area, so they’re not just sprawling in tons of directions.
Another part is audience and network building, because the second big challenge of becoming an entrepreneur in high school is that not only do you not have any expertise or experience, you don’t know anyone. You might have some family connections, the Alpha connections, but that’s kind of it. So we’re pushing them, in a healthy way, to get online — predominantly X, because that’s where we see the most ROI, or LinkedIn — and find the people who are the experts in this subject area, follow them, engage with them, see what they’re talking about, and try to thoughtfully engage with them while building a bit of an audience themselves by sharing their thoughts. One of the most honest measures of whether you’re developing interesting thoughts on a topic is if you start getting responses — not engagement in a negative, viral way, but if other smart adults are thoughtfully replying, you’re getting somewhere.
So we’re helping them build expertise and actual industry establishment through things teenagers never had access to before — AI, the Internet, social media — but being used in a good, pro-education, pro-learning way, not a slop-and-doom-scrolling way. It starts there, and they’re going to be pissed at me, because they want to vibe-code and I’m gonna say you can do a little of that in your free time, but if you don’t start here, that stuff is never going to work. Start here.
We do that, and then they move into our co-founder tool, basically — working with a mix of that, our guides, our entrepreneurs-in-residence, our mentor network — okay, I’ve developed these points of view, started to make some connections, talked to people in the industry and gotten their perspective, these are some of the ideas I think are interesting. Exploring as many of those as possible at first, being challenged on them by the tool, but also by us and by the people they’ve connected with in the field. We have strong opinions on this, a lot of it influenced by Joe — I’ve had the privilege of spending a lot of time with him, learning how he thinks about business, technology, and opportunities, and we’ve built a lot of that into the product. So the students are almost getting direct support from him through the tools, and from him actually coming to the school and working with them as they form these ideas. It helps them move through this process of getting to the validation phase — you came up with something that’s a good idea, a good plan to get to a reasonable scale in a reasonable amount of time, you’ve validated it, made some kind of MVP, some basic version, you’ve charged money for it, and now you’re set up to do the flywheel — try something, see if it works, hit a bottleneck, ask us for help getting through that, and we’re checking in with you every day, during standups, internal reporting, to figure out where those challenges are and get you the exact support you need for whatever’s next.
Jimmy Soni: Got it. Is it businesses in general — are you thinking about businesses where they’re going to have to hire people eventually?
Nat Eliason: I mean, I love that idea — if we have a 16-year-old with a team of ten people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, oh my gosh, that’d be incredible.
Jimmy Soni: But seriously — are you anticipating that? I guess at the beginning you’re saying a lot of these businesses could theoretically be run with small teams, or one person.
Nat Eliason: Yes. I’d prefer their ideas allow them to get to that million-dollar mark without hiring anybody — ideally clever use of AI, good pricing strategy, good market opportunity, that’s completely reasonable these days. That’s what we’d nudge them toward. I wouldn’t want them to try to do, say, a dog-waste pickup service where you need to hire a bunch of people at minimum wage and monitor them — one, for the legal logistics, because they’re minors —
Jimmy Soni: They’re minors.
Nat Eliason: Which does introduce a lot of real challenges — they can’t open bank accounts, can’t sign legal forms. It’s a conversation we have to have with the parents too — hey, you’re cool with this, right, because they’re going to be building a business and your name has to be on it as well. They’re all cool with it, but it does create these weird bottlenecks, where you do kind of have to bias toward software, certain tech, e-commerce — things where it’s a little easier to get some of that initial scale, than if you have to immediately hire. Also, a lot of people in their 30s probably don’t want to work for a 16-year-old.
Jimmy Soni: Of course not.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, occasionally you’ll meet one, maybe.
Jimmy Soni: I think we’re also in a brave new world, though — you could see a universe where that’s okay.
Nat Eliason: Yeah.
Jimmy Soni: One question I have, among others — are you screening, how are you doing the screening and selection process? This is actively happening now. How do you admit a class of people you think are going to thrive in an environment like this?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, it’s something we had to put a lot of thought into, and are obviously going to keep refining. For this first class, we set the max at 20 — I think it’ll probably be 10 to 12, because we’re being very selective, and we wanted it to be a small enough initial cohort that we could be really hands-on with every student while we run this first year.
The first thing that surprises people is we don’t ask for a transcript, because it doesn’t matter that much what your grades were — basically every student who comes into Alpha, no matter what great school they went to, is anywhere from one to, gosh, five years behind on reading or math or these core subjects — not fully behind, but they have holes in their knowledge we need to fill in. So it doesn’t tell us that much. It gives us some idea of how gritty you are, but even for that it’s not a great measure. What we have is our challenge. There’s a first round of the application that just gets you in the door — short answers on why you want to do this, what you’ve done, entrepreneurship, hardest thing you’ve ever done. Then you get a challenge, where over two weeks you have to go through a baby version of the process I just described — come up with an unintuitive position on something, put together an MVP of how you’d do that, try to sell it to at least 20 people who aren’t your friends or related to you, then make a video and write-up on everything you did and learned, and send us the links so we can go look at it.
Now more people know this is the challenge, but for everybody in the process right now, they didn’t know this, so they didn’t have time to prepare for it. You learn a lot about a candidate with that two-week deadline. Some people just disappear at that point of the application — that tells us everything, it’s like, okay, this isn’t the right program for you. But other students blow us away. We had one student who was having a lot of trouble getting sales during the sales part of the process, and he ended up getting the D list for his entire school, and emailed everyone pitching his app to them. He got in trouble, got sent to the dean’s office. But he’s telling me this, and I’m like —
Jimmy Soni: And you’d like that’s amazing, that’s incredible.
Nat Eliason: Exactly, exactly. Those are the kinds of things we’re looking for — are you fully committed to this. In lieu of the transcript, we have what’s called the CCAT, a cognitive aptitude test. A lot of people don’t know this — Alpha makes every employee take this same test, and if you’re below the 85th percentile, you’re not eligible for any role at the company. So every single person at Alpha — the guides, the admin, everyone — has to be in the top 15% on this cognitive aptitude test. It’s incredibly reassuring for an education institution, knowing every single person interacting with your kids is at this level. We just used the same thing for the students, one because we were doing admissions kind of last-minute — we opened it in May for September — and I didn’t want to make them go do an SSAT. It’s only 15 minutes —
Jimmy Soni: Okay. Oh wow, a 15-minute test.
Nat Eliason: It’s a 15-minute test.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: It’s quick, but it’s 50 questions — a mix of math, reading, spatial awareness, similar-ish to an IQ or workplace-competency test. We have them take that in lieu of transcripts or other standardized tests.
Jimmy Soni: Got it. We could talk about this for a couple more hours — I want to be respectful of your time. How do you treat summers? You’re enrolling kids into a four-year program, presumably, and a business doesn’t stop just because summer starts. How have you thought about that?
Nat Eliason: We’ll keep school hours during the summer for them to come in and work on campus, just without the academic portion. Austin actually keeps their school open all summer too — this was the students’ idea, because they loved going in and hanging out with their friends.
Jimmy Soni: More than vacation.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So we’ll do the same thing here — we encourage you to keep working on this over the summer, we’ll be here to provide all the same resources and support.
Oh, I didn’t even finish talking about what the rest of their day looks like — it’s that 70% working where they are in their business with us and the apps and tools, but then we’re going to have workshops each month on different themes — a month of leveling up everybody’s AI skills, a month of leveling up sales skills, a month of copywriting, some of these core business concepts. We’ll probably do two workshops a week, about one and a half to two hours, going deep on one skill for the month, with an adaptive structure so you’re not learning beginner material if you’re more advanced. But it creates more community time, interacting, working with each other instead of just working alone in your business, and it lets us help them develop skills they might not get as much exposure to until they need it.
The last part of the week, pretty much every week, we’ll either have an elite, top-tier entrepreneur, founder, or executive come in and speak to the students, especially about their early journey — how they got started, what they learned, doing lunch with a few of them, looking at their businesses, giving feedback — or it’ll be a roundtable discussion on a book. We’ll probably have them read The Founders.
Jimmy Soni: I was going to say, sign me up — because a lot of what I went deep on in that book was the high school years of the people I was writing about. Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks — I’d start my discussions with them way before PayPal ever started. The first conversations were usually around high school and college, because you find that, in many cases, they were living their version of Founders School.
Nat Eliason: Right. Exactly, yeah.
Jimmy Soni: They cobbled it together, often at great personal risk, and in the face of a lot of parental pressure. There was one person — you’re telling a story that reminded me of a gentleman I interviewed who was, I think, the fifth or sixth employee at PayPal, on the engineering team. His name was Tom Pytel. He was this famously, this vagabond, with very dubious footwear — his shoes were ratty — but he was a genius-level coder. It was interesting, somewhat like — you’d admire people who dropped out of college, but he actually dropped out of high school. He decided he was just going to take the show on the road. He was writing code, I think, for video games, dropped out of high school, started working right then, continued that, found his way to PayPal, had no interest in being an employee, but the team kind of coaxed him into it — that was how he got his start. He was the ultimate example of what you’re talking about, without any of the support or structure.
Nat Eliason: I mean, again, going back to why we believe this is possible — people have been hacking versions of this together with way less support. Nobody really doubts that a Stanford sophomore could drop out and start what becomes a billion-dollar business. So what are they getting at Stanford? One, there’s the selection effects; two, some amount of network, from being there, meeting people who come to visit campus, maybe a couple of classes. But a lot of it is just, oh, okay, a 20-year-old can do this, a 19-year-old can do this — so a 16-year-old can definitely start a million-dollar business. It’s eminently reasonable. No one’s tried before.
Jimmy Soni: No one, I think, has sort of — I think one of the things Alpha School has made possible is you’ve just expanded the Overton window on what’s possible in education. A lot of it is you’ve asked the unreasonable question — what if this could be true — and then it becomes true as a result of asking, and then selecting the students, and building the programming. A lot of it, I think, is pushing the boundaries on what seems crazy but isn’t actually all that crazy.
Nat Eliason: No, I think people generally dramatically underestimate, especially teenagers.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Nat Eliason: Because we’ve infantilized teenagers for a long time — you have to go to this place, follow this bell schedule, do what we tell you to do, and then you have to stay close to home, you don’t get to travel much in most places, we’ve gotten afraid of all these things. Then you go to college, and there you have to follow these rules too. So we think of a 14, 15, 16-year-old as less capable than they are. Obviously they’re still children, they still need support, encouragement, a certain amount of guardrails — but also, sometimes you just have to get out of their way and tell them, I believe in you, give them just the right little nudge to get started, and then they do these incredible things.
There was one student at Alpha High, when I was doing the OpenClaw workshop — I asked the group, “Where do you think you fall nationally on AI competence — top 10%, top 1%, top 20%?” The consensus was top 10%. This was toward the end of the OpenClaw workshop. I was like, no, guys, you don’t understand, you’re top 0.01% — people will pay a lot of money for you to help them implement this stuff. I could tell some of them didn’t believe me, some did. So I put it out there — I said, if you want to test me on this, I’ll intro you to somebody who’d probably pay you to help them with that. One student took me up on it, I introduced him to somebody trying to learn OpenClaw and AI stuff, and he made $250 for a two-hour call. He was to the moon — he’d never made money doing something like this before, and he was obsessed with the tech. It was like, oh my gosh, I can make money doing something I really like. We were debriefing afterward, and I said, awesome, super happy for you — next time, try charging four times as much. You could just see — he was like, seriously? That’s amazing. And then he did, and they were like, yeah, sure — they paid him a thousand bucks the next time. After that he just started getting referrals, his business kind of took off, and I did nothing after that. I think he made north of ten grand off doing this over the course of that spring. All I had to do was one little nudge, one intro, and then kind of get out of the way. It’s like, you just have to give them the opportunity.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, I think what you made me reflect on is something you said at the very start of our conversation — the difference between being entrepreneurial and doing entrepreneurship. You had this line about being entrepreneurial in deciding you could make $250, or $150, an article, and use geographic arbitrage to go live somewhere that would let you actually live a life. That required an entrepreneurial frame of mind, even if it wasn’t big-E entrepreneurship in the conventional sense. As I think back to my own high school years, my first business was building custom-built computers for people. I was doing the other parts of a traditional academic life — getting the grades, went to Duke, did well on the SATs — but what I realized was that it was in building businesses and hacking things together that I actually used those same techniques to hack my education. Whether it was designing my own major, or — this is totally random, but I became obsessed with how you could hack the SAT. At one point I did a deep dive on all these obscure forums about ways people had hacked it. One of the things you discover is, at least in my stone-age era, when you had to fill it in by hand, circling the bubbles — if you put one black mark through the middle of the letter, it counts as that answer, instead of shading the circle. That seems like a small thing, except shading a circle takes three to four seconds, versus a single vertical line through the multiple-choice answer, which is one second. The difference between one and four seconds is three to four seconds — but multiply that across the entire test, and you’ve gained back minutes you can use to do the test faster, because the only reason the SAT is hard is the time pressure. Given infinite time, everybody could theoretically get a perfect score — but the time pressure is what matters. Once I figured that out, I’d just do the vertical-line thing, gain back two to four minutes per section, and that gave me all the time I needed to check answers or go back. But I don’t think I’d have had that ability if I hadn’t also been trying to hack things together on the side, whether on the Internet or in real life with computers. It seems to me what you’re giving these — I hate to say “kids,” students — is the gift of that entrepreneurial cast of mind, the same one that led you to say, I can do Thailand and $150 an article for Zapier and make it work.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. I think some people are certainly wired this way — I actually don’t know the answer of whether this is something that develops, or something you’re born with. Either way —
Jimmy Soni: We’ll find out.
Nat Eliason: I know, right? There are a lot of students who think and feel this way, and they feel like the world and the education system is against them, because they’re told they’re bad, or whatever, if they’re not following this set of rules. This is the one thing I didn’t expect, but it’s ended up being incredibly rewarding and meaningful even at this early stage — talking to some of these students and parents, and them saying, “We never thought there could be a school that said this is okay.”
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: That you’re — you’re a good kid, you fit in here, this is a space for you. That’s been really cool to see, because it’s like, I didn’t have that.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: And I think a lot of kids don’t have that.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Nat Eliason: I think even just getting a lot of students like that in one room together is going to be pretty incredible.
Jimmy Soni: So excited. You uprooted your whole life for this — in some ways you made the same transition I did, where I never thought I’d have a job, and then decided to run a book publisher. What’s it been like transitioning from that — moving from Austin to New York, but also deciding, no, I’m going to be part of someone else’s ecosystem for a while, and develop and design this, but it’s bigger than me? This gets back to the question of commitment — how has that been for you?
Nat Eliason: It’s been great, actually. I’ve always been interested in this topic, education — one of the first entrepreneurial things I did after college was a podcast for kids who didn’t fit in the normal college-education system, trying to tell their stories and connect with them. I’d sort of assumed I’d never do anything in education — it never felt like something I actively wanted to go after, but I was always interested in it, and hopeful somebody would do something with it. So now, if I were going to say, “I want to make a school for entrepreneurs,” obviously it should be part of Alpha — it just makes so much sense.
To the extent I had reservations about joining a big company — it’s like a startup. I mean, the pace it moves at is incredible. We had 25 schools last year, we’re going to have at least 40 this year, and a lot more next year — growing like crazy. At Founders School, me and Cameron — it feels like we’re co-founders on a startup that, thankfully, is well-funded and has a lot of support around it. But we get to control our hiring pipeline, design our application process and curriculum — it has to fit the Alpha ethos, but we have a lot of freedom to be very entrepreneurial with it. We’re not clocking in, so to speak —
Jimmy Soni: It wouldn’t work if you were.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. So all the things I was afraid of about taking a job — job, yeah — just haven’t materialized. Instead it’s been incredibly fun. Going back to the thing I was talking about at the very beginning, wanting to work on something big and long-term, really fully commit to something — I thought that had to be something 100% my own. But maybe that was also, at least for this phase of life, the thing that was holding me back in some sense — because I’m learning so much from being in a bigger organization like this, from not having some of the immediate profitability pressure I would have had on my own, from getting to work with Joe and see how he thinks about business and learn from him. It made me realize it was actually a big limiting belief for me, that I have to always work for myself, that I have to do this alone. I’m super glad I’m doing this, because the interest has been incredible, and seeing these students applying — it’s so much fun, I’m having a great time with it.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about many other things, but this conversation has been utterly riveting, and I think we ought to try to have your students on Infinite Loops in the year ahead — as they’re going through the process, I think it’d be a lot of fun to see what they’re building, how they’re building it, how the school is maturing and evolving, and I hope we can do that.
As you know, having been a repeat guest, we ask a question at the end of every episode. You get the ability to incept an idea into everybody’s mind — two thoughts, whatever they are, you can’t use it for violence, you can’t overthrow governments — I mean, unless —
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I think we could actually sanction that one.
Jimmy Soni: You basically get to be emperor for a day, and everybody wakes up the next morning with these two ideas in their head. It’s an interesting question for you as a guest, because you’re actually molding young minds — what are, off the top of your head, the two ideas you’d incept in everyone’s mind? Or two thoughts, quotes, anything.
Nat Eliason: It’s naturally going to be topical, because this is what I keep thinking about, so much of this is based on it. The first one — what I said earlier, that we take teenagers seriously. I talked about this with Chris Powers when I was on his podcast a couple of months ago. But the more I’ve thought about this and explored the idea, the more it does feel like there might be way more problems than we expect that stem from expanding childhood as far as we have. If you go way back, you actually find versions of something like Founders School in Maria Montessori’s writing — she talked about how the childhood school is this core-life-skills stage, the cleaning and cooking and things everybody should know how to do to operate as an adult, the manners and whatnot. But she never got to fully realize this, because of challenges with how society was changing at the time and her resources — her vision of later-stage education was this Erdkinder, where you were doing a bit of academics but also working on a farm or in some kind of apprenticeship, getting hands-on skills, because she didn’t think teenagers should be stuck in a classroom.
You look at basically every pre-modern society, and there are these significant moments where you transition into adulthood, around age 14 — you think about a bat mitzvah, a bar mitzvah, that’s around that age, a confirmation is around that age. You visit tribes in Kenya, the Maasai Mara, and guess when you become a contributing member of the tribe — it’s around that 14 age.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: I actually think a lot of the things we assume are bad about childhood — kids hating school — and some of what we assume is bad about having teenagers, might be because they’re capable of doing more adult things, being more adult, but then heavily constrained by their environment. So they naturally lash out against the things doing the constraining — school, parents, society. Alpha’s done a good job of asking, what if we took students, especially teenagers, seriously and gave them this freedom? And now we’re taking it to the extreme — what if we trusted you as much as a 30-year-old, to run a business? I feel there’s a lot of unexplored opportunity there. And — these are different things, to be really clear — but people getting married much later, starting families much later, the aging population — I think we’ve extended childhood further than we should. It can sound dangerous to say that, because you don’t want to force kids to grow up too fast — I’m not advocating for that either — but I am advocating that if somebody shows the ability to be treated like an adult, to be taken seriously, we should figure out how to take them seriously. I’m excited to see where that goes.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. Actually, when I was prepping for this, I was looking back at some of what Maria Montessori was writing and thinking about — I think of her as far — even though the brand Montessori is as well-known as it is, a lot of her ideas, and her as a person, are vastly underrated compared to others. She’s so cool. One of my favorite stories: she was one of the first women admitted to medical school in Italy, and they wanted to wash her out — they made her dissect cadavers alone, where the male students all got to be with each other. She had to do that on her own, because they thought it would scare her off medical school — and it did the exact opposite. She was burned in effigy in different countries, because people thought her ideas were too heretical. Now everybody and their brother pays gobs of money to get their kids into Montessori or Montessori-type environments, and a lot of her ideas are being validated by science in 2026, in a way they weren’t even 50, 75 years ago. So I take what you said very seriously, because there are echoes in what you’re trying to do and what she was trying to do.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. There’s this book that got really popular a few years ago, called Hunt, Gather, Parent, that talks about tangential, similar ideas — the most enduring idea from that book, the one you hear parents recite most often, is that how you treat a child who wants to help at an early age decides how much they contribute and feel autonomy and agency throughout a lot of the rest of their life. One of the main things the book advocates, basically the same thing Montessori says, is that if a kid thinks they can do it, you just let them do it. Doesn’t matter if they’re going to break the egg, take four times longer, or fall off the ladder, assuming it’s a reasonable height — you let them do it. The argument was, if you tell a kid, “No, you can’t help me wash the dishes” when they’re offering, they’ll just learn that, and then suddenly they’re a 12-year-old who won’t help when you ask, because they’ve internalized it that way. She was going to a lot of more traditional cultures in that book, and that was one of the big differences she noticed — they were letting kids do stuff they were bad at, that was actually slowing things down, obstructing progress, because they’d internalized the lesson that if you just let them, they’ll eventually figure out how to be very helpful, and those rewards come later.
Jimmy Soni: Exactly.
Nat Eliason: It’s such a fascinating idea that I feel has been lost. But going back to raising kids in the city — it feels like we get some of that here, because my kids are riding scooters through the streets now, through the sidewalks at least. The other day, we were at a coffee shop, and my wife had taken the youngest one home, which was around the corner — a block away. My two older girls, they’re four and three, said, “Can we go see Mommy?” I was still in the coffee shop, and I said, sure, go ahead. They scooted down the block, did the turn, went to the house. I called Cosette and said, hey, by the way, make sure they actually show up, please. She texted me a picture a minute later of them at the door, and I said, awesome. You got that little opportunity for autonomy and independence that, sadly, I think some people probably wouldn’t even let their 9- or 10-year-old have.
Jimmy Soni: And in areas where commuting and everything happens by car, it’s a lot harder —
Nat Eliason: It’s a lot harder.
Jimmy Soni: Can’t get away with it in the same way.
Nat Eliason: Yeah.
Jimmy Soni: What’s your second idea you’d incept everybody with? Your first one was a real banger.
Nat Eliason: Oh, geez. Gosh. Yeah, the second one — that’s a lot of pressure. I’m trying to find the right phrasing, because what we were talking about earlier, doing things that are entrepreneurial even if they aren’t big-E entrepreneurship — that really is agency. I think that’s downstream of this idea that the world is a lot more malleable than you tend to assume. This was another big red-pill moment for me as a kid — I don’t remember exactly when, but there was some point when I realized there wasn’t really such a thing as rules. There’s the way other people want you to do things, the way you should do things to be a good member of society, and then there are things you’re told to do, or should do, or how it’s done, that if you don’t do it, there’s literally no consequence, or a very acceptable consequence, or everybody’s kind of doing it because everybody else is. So whenever you encounter something — could be work, personal life, society, whatever — of how something works, or what you’re supposed to do, it’s literally a suggestion. It’s an idea.
Jimmy Soni: Outside of very few things.
Nat Eliason: Exactly, yeah. And, I mean, that mindset can obviously go in bad directions, but — we had a couple of fifth graders at Alpha who were super into robotics, really sharp, and they came up with this idea for a robotics-security-related startup, and they emailed the FBI to pitch them on it.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
Nat Eliason: It was fine — nothing bad happened, obviously. But if you asked anybody, “Hey, can you just email the FBI your startup pitch?” they’d say, no, you can’t do that.
Jimmy Soni: Right.
Nat Eliason: But you can. As a ten-year-old.
Jimmy Soni: Exactly.
Nat Eliason: To be clear, it’s not something I’d encourage our students to do, but there’s something really admirable about it too. That’s going to take them far.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Nat Eliason: I think it’s so easy to get frustrated by things not being the way you want, or feeling trapped, like you don’t have options — but you pretty much always have way more than you think you do. You just have to be willing to look for them.
Jimmy Soni: And reality is malleable.
Nat Eliason: Reality is malleable. There you go.
Jimmy Soni: Well, Nat, thank you. We’re going to have you and your students on over the next few years, see how this progresses and continues to develop — I’m personally very excited about it. I’m excited for you, as a friend — I want to see how this affects your life, and I can’t wait to have further conversations about it too.
Nat Eliason: I’m super excited too. And, serious offer — we’re doing these book-club things with the students —
Jimmy Soni: It’s a given.
Nat Eliason: Eric’s going to come do one for The Book of Elon — you should come do one for The Founders.
Jimmy Soni: It’s a hop across the river.
Nat Eliason: Exactly. That’d be super easy, a lot of fun.
Jimmy Soni: Amazing.
Nat Eliason: All right.
Jimmy Soni: Thank you.
Nat Eliason: Talk soon.
