Our Conspiracy to Educate the World
A letter from the CEO. For your eyes only.
Background: We are a team of learning scientists from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, and engineers who built apps for millions of users. Startups that we've helped build have been backed by Sequoia, A16Z, Inovia and have raised >$1bn.
A New Age
The purpose of Astral is singular: use AI to make humans super intelligent.
Superintelligent AI is already within reach.
Our mission is to use it to educate the world.
Education, as it stands, is the single greatest bottleneck to unleashing the vast potential stored in the bright, curious minds of all children.
With education, we can unlock the smartest to solve the world's hardest problems, build a utopic society of critical thinkers, and ensure longevity of the human race.
Education makes us different from other forms of life. The pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is a profound part of our conscious experience. It is a shame that education hasn't changed for the better part of over 150 years and still follows the same factory model - where kids are treated to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that makes them despise the classroom, lose their curiosity, and become disinterested.
Socrates would be ashamed.
School was never meant to be an assembly line.
It is not the fault of our teachers. They are worn out, exhausted, and spend as much of their time as they can. The classroom sizes are large. Planning every lesson and grading ~30 kids' work takes up more of their time than actually teaching.
But for the first time… a solution emerges.
Multimodal large language models.
Intelligent machines that compress all the world's knowledge; can write, speak, draw, and listen; and given context, can explain pretty much anything. They score highly on all K-12 subjects, the SATs, the LSATs, the GRE, and the bar exam. It is obvious they will change education forever.
For teachers, they will plan every lesson, grade all work, create all teaching materials, and tutor every kid... giving every teacher the superpowers to provide each kid the deep attention they need.
Superpowers
In brief, here is our master plan:
- 1) Build the TA: wraps any curriculum with a lesson planning & grading solution.
- 2) Create the author: vertically integrate curriculum with personalized content on the fly.
- 3) Unlock the tutor: end-to-end realtime instruction for every kid.
The TA solves the hair-on-fire problem of all the work done before and after a lesson by wrapping any given curriculum - making every lesson a fun experience, and not just reading a textbook out loud.
The author unlocks custom content tailored to each kid... breaking away from the one-size-fits-all textbooks. The printing press got us to here, and AI will bring us to the next level.
The tutor is the holy grail. One-on-one personalized instruction to help explain every little bit that kids didn't quite understand to give them full mastery.
The teacher's life just became 100x easier. Their job will be to inspire curiosity, lead real-life experiences, and teach in the physical realm. The tutor will bridge any gaps… ensuring that no child is left behind.
Kryptonite
But wait...
There is one final obstacle to total disruptive change.
An obstacle so large that it makes all of the above virtually impossible within the confines of public education. The same reason that pushed spending to double, but left test scores to fall…
The bureaucrats.
The school administrators, the politicized school districts, the broken teacher unions, and the misguided think tanks. They are not aligned to our children's best interests. They don't get paid based on our children's achievements. They have zero incentive to make things better.
Revolution
But parents are just too stubborn. They won't give up on their kids. They love them way too much.
And when push comes to shove, they take things into their own hands.
In the most magical way, a new path reveals itself…
A path that doesn't need anyone's permission.
Homeschooling.
A true oasis sheltered away from public education.
At the end of the day, no one cares more about their kids' future than parents do.
They have the same issues that every teacher has… and they are already personalizing their kids' education.
They have all the problems that teachers face, but exist even more acutely, and are even more deeply hair-on-fire.
They are incredibly passionate, they stick together, and they even receive grant money.
A perfect recipe for a customer that wants to solve the problem with us, wants to share it with their friends, and is willing to pay for a solution. The complete opposite of the bureaucrats.
In homeschooling, we will build the TA, create the author, and unlock the tutor.
Liberation
However, not everyone will homeschool.
Parents need daycare. They are busy, they have work, they can't all stay at home.
But we know teachers want to spend time with kids and educate them.
It follows that teachers should be the ones taking care of kids. We will enable teachers to focus on exactly that, and use our software to do all the heavy lifting. And in doing so, the teachers will be the real disruptors, tearing down the system they once had to work in.
The best businesses of the century do this…
- Uber enabled drivers to become entrepreneurs, and compete with taxi companies
- Airbnb enabled hosts to become entrepreneurs, and compete with hotels
- Youtube enabled content creators to become entrepreneurs, and compete with TV
We will do this for the most important profession to have ever existed: teachers.
Astral will enable teachers to become entrepreneurs, and compete with public schools.
They will earn way more, they will have more fun, and kids will benefit the most as a result.
In a safe haven, far, far away from the poisons of bureaucracy.
Our product will evolve as follows:
- 1) Homeschool OS: enable parents to educate their kids.
- 2) Microschool OS: enable teachers to educate others' kids.
- 3) School OS: aggregate micro-schools to build institutions.
At the end of this journey, we will make parents happier, we will make teachers happier, and we will unlock the potential of all kids.
Software and AI will eat all the hard work away.
We will liberate education.
Enlist
Join our army.
I will caution you - impacting humanity's trajectory is not an easy job.
But it is the most fulfilling, interesting, and meaningful.
If your pursuits in life are intellectual, and solving crazy challenges gets you hyped… then you're one of us.
But if you want something cushy, and work is just something to do to get on to your "real life", I would ask you to respect your time, and not book a call with us.
We want to only spend time with people that are as obsessive, relentless, and curious as we are.
You are the average of the people you spend your time with, so who you work with is very important.
Mediocrity is not an option.
We want to work with people who enjoy running through walls.
Who don't take the status quo for an answer, and love to find new ways. Who understand the only rules that apply are the laws of physics.
The type of people who like to get their own hands dirty, and don't need a team of 10 just to be productive.
If you want to build products with real craftsmanship, care, and love… then enlist to work with us.
For the hustlers, the ambitious, the rebels, the fearless, and the real builders…
Join us at Astral.