Essays

The era of being a part of someone else's machine is finally over. It is time to build your own.

I spent years trying to fix education from the inside. I built tools, I talked to deans, and I tried to find the "hero teachers" who could change things. But the system has an immune system. Every tim …Read more→

We are moving from a world of "learning to build" to a world of "building to learn."

For a century, education has been treated like a separate phase of life. We were told that we had to spend our first twenty years in a "waiting room," accumulating facts and skills just in case we mig …Read more→

One person with a clear goal can now outbuild an entire 20th-century company.

In 2023, I realized that trying to fix education from the inside was a losing game. The system has an "immune system" that turns every new idea into a standardized checkbox. I decided the only way for …Read more→

The degree is a lagging indicator of compliance. The artifact is a leading indicator of agency.

We are witnessing the largest destruction of human capital in history. The four year degree has become a $200,000 receipt for a map of a world that no longer exists. For a century, the degree served a …Read more→

AI does not respect the boundaries of a syllabus.

By the spring of 2025, the energy at the AI Hub in Monterey had shifted. Every Wednesday night, our brainstorms moved away from the novelty of "chatting with data" toward the structural reality of age …Read more→

The future belongs to those who know when to unbundle and when to kill to evolve.

In November 2024, I started a community at Hellodesk called the Founders Club . It wasn't intended to be a grand movement; it was a simple gathering of local Monterey founders who met every Wednesday …Read more→

Real growth happens when you move from passive consumption to active creation.

Most of what we call "education" is actually just a sophisticated form of hoarding. In the professional world, this usually manifests around the five-to-seven-year mark. You have collected the degree, …Read more→

Transitioning to a solo-self model requires automation.

The last several months have been a period of deep technical restructuring. Since moving away from the cohort model and operating without a core team at the end of 2023, I decided to go solo. My prima …Read more→

True scale in education requires architecting autonomous systems, not managing more people..

Permissionless Academy is changing. After running two cohorts, we have decided to move away from the fixed-date, synchronized model. We are transitioning to a mixed community mode that combines a cont …Read more→

We don't control when it "rains" luck, but we do control how much of it we catch.

Note: This essay covers the core concepts we discussed during the second week of our current Permissionless Academy cohort. We’ve all heard the saying, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opp …Read more→

Today is May 14, and the air is thick with anticipation. Tomorrow, we kick off the first cohort of Permissionless Academy, and the excitement is palpable. When we first conceptualized this academy, th …Read more→

We are finally hiring the core team that will carry the Permissionless Academy vision forward.

The realization that quietly rewired my understanding of education is now moving from the page to the pavement. Since founding Schoolze in 2016, I have watched the education system remain stuck in a t …Read more→

After years trying to fix schools, I realized the answer is outside them.

Today is the first day of 2023, and I am sitting with a realization that has quietly rewired my entire understanding of education, work, and leverage. I spent years trying to change education from wit …Read more→

Curriculum is an operational forcing function for standardization. The system is optimized for credentials, not skills.

I spent years thinking curriculum was the problem. I believed that if we could just teach the right things in the right way, education would improve. But after seeing our 21CS skills platform collect …Read more→

Better tools only amplify the system you already have. Transformation needs to be approached from first principles.

Let’s hop in the time machine and rewind to March 2020. I was all set to pitch our groundbreaking product, "21st Century Skills in Schools," to a school district in Utah.. This was the culmination of …Read more→

A teacher can change a classroom, but a classroom cannot change a district. Here is why.

For the past several years, as we were building Schoolze and later 21CS, I believed in a specific kind of magic.. I believed that if we could just find enough "Hero Teachers," we could change educatio …Read more→

Real change cannot grow inside a system whose survival depends on the old model.

Most people believe that big crises lead to big changes. We think that when a system is shocked, it will finally be forced to fix its long rooted problems. When the world stopped in early 2020, I was …Read more→

Real change cannot be funded or sustained by the very system it seeks to disrupt.

For the past several years, as we have been thinking a lot about 21t century skills and how a school should transition from academic focus to skill focus, a realization has dawned on me. Maybe the way …Read more→

If we fail to measure the right things, we will land up growing and making the wrong thing better.

If you hear someone say out loud “School Success,” what comes to your mind? Maybe a picture of a hustling and bustling school corridor where a bunch of students are walking around in neatly tucked sch …Read more→

Future won’t reward obedience and conformity. But schools still teach for it.

As we reach the middle of 2020, it is clear the world has changed forever. The pandemic has left a mark on how we live, how we work, and how we teach our children. For years, we told students that if …Read more→

Technology doesn't change systems; the rules of the game do. Here is why the "immune system" of education absorbs every innovation.

Most people believe that if you give a school better tools, you get a better school. We often hope that a new app or a better curriculum will be the key to helping children learn more. But after build …Read more→

We screwed up UX for years. A Bay Area product event opened us to pixie dust moments.

I had a hard realization recently: for years, we've been screwing up the user experience without even realizing it. This hit me at a product event in the Bay Area. A notable product expert was talking …Read more→

A deep dive into how Schoolze's current mission evolved over past 4 years!

Why am I writing this? Few months ago, I wrote about how a product demo to a group of international customers transformed Schoolze’s mission into a K-12 School Success Platform . Since then, I’ve been …Read more→

How I presented a Schoolze demo to a chain of preschools - a dream come true opportunity and a not so dreamy outcome.

A while back, I got invited to demo Schoolze to an international chain of preschools. One of those rare moments that, at the time, just feels exciting, but later you realize it quietly changed everyth …Read more→

A real classroom moment in 2016 reshaped how Schoolze approaches inclusive, accessible communication for every family.

Strong family school communication is one of the most important predictors of student success. Yet in many classrooms, well-intentioned messages never fully reach home, not because parents don’t care, …Read more→