Essays

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 time you introduce a new idea, the institution finds a way to turn it into a standa...more

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 might need them later. This is what I call Intellectual Debt. You borrow time from...more

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 forward was to build a new path outside the system and I called this initiative goa...more

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 as the ultimate Signal. It was a way for a student to tell a company that they co...more

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 agentic workflows. We stopped viewing AI as a conversationalist and started viewing...more

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 to talk shop. At first, the conversations were about the typical 2010s-era SaaS...more

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, the initial job titles, and a decent resume. But then, a plateau hits. To overc...more

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 primary goal was to see if a single founder could maintain the velocity of a full tea...more

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 continuous learning environment with periodic live sessions. This is the natural evo...more

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 opportunity.” It sounds smart, but it’s missing a huge piece of the puzzle. We usua...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, the aim was straightforward: empower young adults aged 18-24 to achieve financial...more

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 time warp. We built the tools for the future—focused on 21st-century skills—but t...more

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 within. I built tools, I designed programs, and I sought "Hero Teachers." But the s...more

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 digital dust while our fundraising tools thrived, I realized a deeper truth: cur...more

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 everything I had written about previously. The 6 Core Tenets, the pursuit of fin...more

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 education from the bottom up. I thought that if we gave the most innovative educators th...more

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 one of those believers. I thought the pandemic was the "great reset" for educati...more

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 we have been thinking about solving the problem isn’t all as easy as it looks....more

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 school uniforms? Or a school lobby where an authoritative adult is walking with pri...more

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 they follow the rules and get good grades, they will be successful. But as we lo...more

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 building tools for hundreds of schools over the last three years, I have found a mism...more

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 about microinteractions, those tiny moments in a user's journey that make or br...more

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 sleeping, eating, drinking, and dreaming about one question: What actually make...more

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 everything (even thought it didn't have a happy outcome back then). April 2016 The asso...more

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, but because the format or language creates invisible barriers. Over the years,...more