Hi, I'm Avneesh.

I spent a decade building inside the education system for 600+ schools. Now I'm taking those insights into agency and leverage with Permissionless Academy.

For many years I thought that our schools are broken and need fixing. I’ve since realized that isn't the case: schools aren’t failing—they are still successfully producing the same outcomes they were built for. The problem is that the world they were built for no longer exists.

The real constraint on change is a double-lock of misaligned incentives. Internally, schools are incentivized to remain stable and familiar. Externally, the economic contract that once justified that stability, the promise that a degree equals ultimate leverage, has expired. This understanding serves as the core compass for my current work, but it took me a decade inside the machine to see it.

In 2016, I started Schoolze to improve parent communication, workflows, and fundraising across K–12. We worked with 600+ schools and later expanded into 21st-century skills, trying to measure and develop real-world capabilities that rarely make it into the core system.

The lesson was clear: Product adoption isn't driven by features or best practices but by incentives. Schools prioritize efficiency over innovation, with state mandates demanding compliance via rigid dashboards. This bottom-up stagnation exists because the system is optimized for risk minimization and reporting. While entrepreneurs can find success by streamlining difficult processes, true systemic change rarely happens from within.

COVID created a forced pause that clarified what years of building had not. It made two things obvious. First, education does not change through better content or better tools. It changes only when incentives are aligned with outcomes that actually matter. When incentives remain misaligned, even strong ideas stall. Second, change cannot depend on the system being reformed. Systems of this scale do not shift bottom-up. Meaningful change happens from the outside in, when stronger incentives exist beyond the system itself.

The modern K–16 system was built around a simple bargain: do school, earn a degree, get a job, build a life. For a long time, that external payoff aligned incentives across the system. When degrees reliably led to opportunity, institutional stability made sense.

That bargain has since broken. Degrees no longer guarantee outcomes, but the system continues to optimize for the same internal signals because institutions are still rewarded for them.

Permissionless Academy is my attempt to operate outside that constraint. Rather than trying to change how schools are incentivized internally, it targets the incentive that once gave the system legitimacy in the first place: credible pathways to agency and economic leverage. Change what is rewarded at the top, and alignment follows. That is how systems shift—by creating a new equilibrium that does not depend on institutional reform.

I believe AI, applied with first principles in mind, can be what brings education back to relevance: collapsing the cost of feedback, mentorship, and iteration so real-world skill building becomes what learners are rewarded for, not credentials.

Along the way I've built side projects—Hellodesk, EditorMode.ai, GhostCMO.ai, Monterey AI Labs and a few others. I keep building because it's the fastest way I know to stay honest about reality and to know what is working.

If you're working on education, systems, or AI—I'd be glad to hear from you. Send me a text or email.