Synthesis founder: AI tutors could let kids learn 20-30x faster — and school should shrink to a couple hours a day

hey good to see you guys welcome to the show yeah welcome to the show uh it's great to have you Chrisman uh I I don't know why I messaged you yesterday or it was maybe the day before but I was just like you you got to come on uh John and I are dad's You're Building Products that uh our children will imately use I don't know if they're quite old enough yet but um I've got a bunch of buddies that that are on synthesis uh for their kids and have said great things so I wanted to have you on let's start with just a high level intro who you are what your company does uh set us up for the viewers and then we'll just ask a bunch of questions yeah yeah I think by the way it was like 9 or 10 pm uh La last night that you messaged me so yeah definitely thanks for the advance notice um but yeah H happy to come on um I was maybe you know in in a similar uh position uh to you guys like five years ago my oldest son was two I went down to visit the uh school at SpaceX that Elon had created uh for his own kids um he hired a teacher out of the fancy private school in LA and started his own school at SpaceX and the guy he hired Josh Dawn is uh you know became a friend of mine and um we ended up starting a company together to kind of scale up the best uh parts of that school uh so we started during covid uh the initial product was um this this thing that really captured my imagination I went to the school which you know I was at a company education company called Class Dojo uh which went from you know zero to a billion dollars I was the first employee there and um you know the the what they did at the SpaceX School looked a lot like what we were doing to build that company uh the kids were just working together to solve problems in the form of games and so we took that approach uh put that on the internet we signed up kids from all around the world you know it kind of took off uh so that was was our initial product and uh now you know I we're we have built an AI math tutor that uh I think is uh is taken off pretty well and I think it's going to be a major part of of every kid's education in the future um yeah companies Sy and yeah that's where we are yeah so right now you have the subscription what what does synthesis look like longterm starting digital makes a lot of sense but over time is their you know desire to kind of almost verticalized and and go into the real world or what does that look like I I don't know about going into the real world I think it's there've been some you know Silicon Valley startups that have been really well funded that tried to do the software piece and the real world piece at the same time I think it's really hard to pull off both like if you're going into the real world for schools you're doing like a real estate play essentially um and and you know I think when it comes to learning you know math science engineering the fundamentals these are this is information and so information can be transmitted uh through computers um in in a lot of ways you know better than than a human can do it and so I think if we want to reach a billion kids then you know it makes sense to go vertical but within you know software like things that can be delivered purely software Never Say Never because it is attractive to uh you know the idea of like opening up physical Anders schools if we did something like that we'd probably do something like an academy uh like the iire the European soccer clubs what they do is they'll have an academy attached to all their professional teams and they'll bring kids in at like age six or eight there's a guy who's a star now for barcel Luna that they brought in at eight years old and now he's like 18 and he's just he's amazing I think if you really want like incredible performance then you should do that kind of like focus on the elite so we might do one of those in like every city the kids with the most um potential yeah we talked about a teal Fellowship for middle schoolers you know just like you just go further further Downstream get the middle like you you could basically be that guy getting the middle schooler to like drop out of their like regular you know or Elementary School and be like come to the synthesis uh institution Academy and that's exactly uh what if we if we do go in person that's what we're going to do I think it's it's uh that that'll just make a lot of people uh upset but I think it's actually the right thing to do like I think you can identify kids who have potential like engineering Talent pretty early and if you develop that this is it's like this is what they do for sports and so like if if we're looking at people can actually Advance civilization you know we should have something that's at least as serious as what we do for sports yeah um what is what is 10 years from now what is sort of K through 12 going to look like my my sort of personal experience with School uh was interesting I I started at Waldorf School that was like my earliest memories of school I think I benefited a lot from it uh but they didn't really teach me to read until I was in the third grade and I was like conscious enough to tell complain to my parents and be like Mom and Dad like I want to learn to read like the other kids like you know so I ended up going to a regular elementary school and then by High School my my father was actually a math teacher at my high school um and I hated high school so much that I like graduated early so like my my and then and then by college I was just like focused on Startup stuff so my I didn't feel like I had a great experience um with my education uh how much better can it be and and sort of what's your broader Vision obviously since is can be a big part of uh a child uh and a kid's education but you know what does the full stack look like in the future yeah yeah that's funny I I also had a bad experience with my education and it's uh you know it's I got like scoped into uh you know devoting the rest of my life to changing the whole system because I hated it uh so much uh so so so maybe similar to you in that regard I I think the big problem is you you start with this original Elite Education is is with one-on-one tutors and I I don't know but I don't think it was like eight hours a day plus homework with with one-on-one tutors I think you can learn a lot more efficiently than that uh then you had like the one room School houses which again like kids are like working on the farm and then they come to the schoolhouse you know a couple hours a day maybe a couple times a week and that's it and then all the parents go to work and the the school day expands and instead of just sticking to that like well we'll teach a little bit and then we'll kind of have fun for the rest of the day they just expanded the teaching to make it it somehow Encompass all the hours from like 8: to 3: 8:00 a.

m. to 3 p. m.

and homework and I think what we're going to see I think AI tutors are going to drive this um I think you could actually learn 20 to 30X faster I don't think there's going to be need a need for any homework I think kids are just going to use AI tutors to learn the fundamentals and hopefully you know a lot beyond that what their interests are my hope is the rest of the day is spent in ways that we can't imagine like there's just like in your life there's an infinite number of things you can do and ways you can spend your time and and the same is true of kids so we should spend a little bit of time teaching them the fundamentals so that they can have good ideas and find what they're interested in and then I don't know what they should be doing my my kids go to like a charter school two days a week where they they build Bridges they do school plays they do all these kind of things that you're not going to do with it's not just software and like it's not just reading and so I'd love to see a lot more of that our goal is like be the partner with every in-person school that does that and you know hopefully there's a lot of just local creativity um in exploration right because kids have a tough job you know they have to figure out what they want to do in life and that that's it's a hard problem in the modern world you it's hard to say like I just I want to be a doctor or I want to be you know something specific like that because careers get more and more creative and so uh I think it's important for kids to have that time to explore can you take me on a little tour of of where the government's doing things that are great for education of the Next Generation where things could be improved um how Charter Schools fit into that how Public Funding fits into that just kind of like what's your world model for um you know public private partnership in educating the Next Generation there's some really exciting stuff going on now which um I don't know if you guys had Ryan Del from primary on but he's done some work in like kind of lobbying uh governments in Florida for increased school choice which just like so I think a lot of people don't know um in California for example it costs like $20,000 a year uh to put a kid through through the public school system which is just like an extreme amount of money and uh that's a little bit higher than the national average but not by much and so what a lot of states are trying to do is say you can take that money with you and go choose a different school and so that creates like the government whether usually like a local government collecting taxes paying for the education but then there's this Fierce competition right like somebody can open up a school right next door bad schools can fail Bad Teachers bad principles can go out of business and there's going to be a lot more uh creativity in in that regard um I I think that's maybe one of the most exciting things that government can do because I think you know then then you would be as well served by education as people are served by like grocery stores and they'll just be you know kind of wild like Cutthroat competition and people trying to do interesting things to to attract students and and get results uh so I think that's that's one place where the government can do something really great just by letting the you know bringing this like kind of consumer mentality into what's typically been a Government monopoly so schools could get you know you'd be as well served as grocery stores as opposed to what it is now which is like the DMV right sure yeah makes sense uh does all uh K through 12 education over time start to look more and more uh like a video game because like one one concern I have right now is that uh kids when they're out of school they're doing Roblox they're watching Tik toks and then you put them in a classroom or you give them homework that's sort of built around that sort of uh old style philosophy around learning which is like you know writing things down and and you know here's this you know textbook and and we're going to read a chapter out of it or things like that to me it seems like kind of an impossible uphill battle to try to get a kid to pay attention to that when outside of class or even on their phone in the classroom they have this sort of consistent really intense stimulation so in order to compete does education need to start looking more like what's on their phone in their sort of leisure time or how do you think about that I think those are I I know this like on people's minds I think they're less related uh than people think I think you know Tik Tok and these things are addicting um but also school is just terrible like it was terrible when we were kids and we didn't have Tik Tok uh right so I I think I think regardless of what's going on in the rest of the world um you want to make the tools for learning as effective and as engaging as possible it's a really tight balance that you have to strike When You're Building Products like for us there's you know there's things like du lingo which famously you know it's may be really good at getting their early retention and engagement but but you know hardly anybody knows someone who's learned a language from du lingo so they kind of focus all the way on the engagement and gamification and and not so much on the effectiveness and then you know you you can go the other way where it's like well theoretically if if kids would spend a lot of time on this they would learn but they won't do it and I think the right products is going to be you know just just a balance uh of those kind of things and I think if you get it right you know something a lot of people missed is kids they want to learn when you really learn something you you rock a new idea it makes you more powerful and you can feel that and I think it's especially true in math but I think it's true in all subjects if you want them to learn something it's because you're trying to make them more powerful I think what a lot of teachers do is say well this will become you know useful to get to the next level of school and that's not terribly motivating what we try to do is just show you these ideas make you a more powerful thinker in the moment and I think kids are pretty motivated uh they're pretty motivated by that um so yeah yeah that makes sense uh last question I really have today and would love to have you back on in the future uh just as you know this sort of uh industry uh develops but uh we had talked before when the Humane AI pin came out I think everybody that was intelligent in the tech industry generally looked at it and said this is not going to replace my phone because it does a lot of the same things it doesn't necessarily do them better but our reaction at the time was that this is not going to replace my phone but maybe this is a solution that my kid would use where like I want like location tracking and I want you know them to be able to easily call me but I don't want them to be on a screen have you thought and so as like all these AI pins sort of involved there was the rabbit there was Humane there was some others my immediate thought was maybe they're focused on the wrong user type maybe there's a market for this with kids who if you gave them something that they could ask any question in the world to and was sort of like this sort of companion maybe that could be cool uh have you guys thought at all about sort of Hardware experiences I know you're very focused on delivering these sort of digital experiences but is that you know ever been even a conversation we we haven't talked about it at all I mean like my my kids have like the um it's not Apple watch but it's like a knockoff like watch brand that like tracks it yeah they can talk to you and that kind of stuff and I I assume you know they'll be able to connect to the internet and use the use AI for for questions and that kind of thing I think um I I I think that for learning screens are like extraordinarily powerful like you can simulate almost anything on a screen and uh that's like underrated you know I think people like don't realize how amazing that is there's a lot of Lites and who are like you know there's just something about learning on paper like reading a book on paper and like I just don't agree with any of that at all I just think it's like information um the information kind of flows you know you can kind of do anything on a screen so yeah you know we we haven't uh we haven't talked about doing uh doing anything in in Hardware yet one one kind of crazy idea I have is because a lot of a lot of people do homeschooling now a lot of uh you know uh have become uh you know close with some people who are you know fairly prominent who who do homeschooling and uh I like the idea for my kids as well having like a booth with like a screen and speakers and just something to like isolate the outside world where you've got the computer in it and you're going to go in there you're GNA go in this booth which seems kind of dystopian it's gonna be for like an hour and a half a day right like turn everything else yeah yeah yeah it should have like a time lock on it of course um yeah you have to complete the lesson to get get out well well last last question for me let me flip that around um I I I know a lot of parents are obviously you know they want their kids to be accelerated in in stem and math but uh there is the other side of like socialization and there's a big question like you know Tyler cow's written about this how maybe in the future intelligence is too cheap to meet or the real values and connections being we like to joke that we're we're we're trying to be golden retrievers be very friendly uh attractive and dumb because intelligence is going to be too cheap to met her the AI can do the rocket science for me but you know if I'm a friend that you want to hang out with and you want to you know chop it up with we're going to have a great time so I me but I mean seriously as a as a parent like I think a lot of parents do even worry even more about their kids like like hey it's okay if you're falling behind in math just a little bit as long as you're getting socialized and and becoming like an upstanding member of society and so do you see AI Tutors or AI calibration being able to communicate with a child and understand hey they're being a little antisocial or something like that in a way that a teacher could or maybe just an augmented or an additional layer there to to see hey this this kid is you know actually engaging at a very you know mature level which is great these are good signs we want to continue this pattern of behavior yeah I mean that that's a great question I think parents are correct to uh worry more about social skills especially from a young age how how old are you guys kids or they they're like uh 24 and then I have I have twin boys who are six months yeah oh okay three and eight months yep okay cool so yeah you're in that age now where like the social skills matter I think up up to like age seven uh it's like close relationships with the the family and just try to spend as much time with them as you can makes sense and be around and like reading faces I actually think it's a mistake we we don't like actively recruit customers below age seven uh because if you think about how much processing it takes to um you know learn how to operate in the social world and read faces I think you just want to leave kids brains like open into basically spending all their resources doing that because if you get it it's like speaking a language you get that by like age you know four to seven uh then then in some ways you know you're set for life because you're you're going to be able to like fit in with groups and I think that's that's extraordinarily important uh we kind of and when it comes to education I I think it's I I I don't see that the AI are going to be able to do our thinking for us I mean that's like a totally different world it doesn't look to me like we're on the path uh to getting that I think LMS are really cool I think you're going to want your kids to be smart and knowledgeable and and able to think as an individual and also have those social skills to work with other people and solve problems together which is which is human Humanity's way of super intelligence right is like being able to work together in groups so this is actually mirrors the structure of the company now the AI tutor is like the Leading Edge of the product but then we have synthesis teams where we put kids and teams uh small groups to work together in solving problems they're like video games but they're not shooters or race games they're like complex problems where you have to argue and decide what action you want to take under conditions of uncertainty figure out what you got wrong and make the course Corrections and it's like meta problem solving skills so it's I think if you you want like these uh outgoing uh like uh you know sociable Engineers people who can do both sides of their brain I think we can do that right I think of course people lean one way or the other but I think we can get people up to like a really good standard on both of those and then that's just going to make us able to solve more problems and Advance the civilization so that's how i' look at it if I was a parent anyway work social SK first that's a fantastic uh vision for the future I'm very optimistic I have one last last question uh Miss Rachel on YouTube very popular little controversial uh do you have any under the radar creators on YouTube that just make uh I my wife is very good about having like extremely limited just like TV screen time we don't do iPads in public or at home uh planes are are maybe the one condition so if I'm taking uh my kids on a plane is there is there a YouTube creator that you recommend or you just like now put them on put them on uh give them their AI tutor and uh that's that no I mean at your kids's age I think uh the Daniel the Tiger like PBS series is is really good you guys know that one um Alpha I I don't know this is Alpha yeah this is the real Al that one's great that it like teaches them little it's like I think it's like the uh successor to Rogers thing is like made made by like the same people so they got like little lessons and it's animated it's okay for them to watch your kids watch bluee oh yeah have you ever seen blue BL is great so that's what we would do when they were on planes and little kids like that I would I haven't se I've got four of my own and just having seen the um I I think YouTube YouTube is quite bad and it seems to push them into the YouTube shorts which are just terrible even my like 5-year-old recognizes like this is bad I shouldn't be watching this what's up yeah short form is like slop and you know you should avoid it at all cost no matter what age you are basically except ours except ours you should definitely watch clips of this because we will be clipping this interview and posting it out and you should definitely watch these shorts because they're educational but short clips on on on X are are great yeah different different yeah um but I'm sure if you swipe up on this on X you're gonna get some really stuff anyway this was an awesome interview thank you so much we'll have to have you this is fantastic very helpful thanks thanks for having me appreciate have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon talk soon all right cheers guys that's hilarious um uh the uh the how much screen time thing is a great question I don't know if you saw Peter teal got in asked this at like Sun Valley and really yeah because they were say oh you're the found you're the board member of uh you know Facebook like how much Facebook do you think kids should use or basically screen time and he was like 90 minutes a week and so I was just like yeah that seems like a good number to Benchmark against but then I was I was trying to think like how can I make this got to get your 90s son get your 90 in Mr Mr teal yeah said said get get your 90 yeah you got to get those numbers up uh but no but then I wanted to make it like you know can I can I make it even easier to keep that number lower because you want to basically keep the number as low as possible uh and I realized you just have to create a really brutal economy in your house so we have a whole economy going now where you get stars for brushing your teeth doing all these different things and all of a sudden it turned something the sticker economy is big and so all of a sudden it turned from like oh yeah like it's a Friday I can watch this to like I am grinding for like weeks for like a movie night which was like it was just free before but he doesn't mind it that all of a sudden I've just created this you know Kafkaesque economy around it that he has to work like weeks to get like a single episode a single like eight8 minute episode blue but but it's worked fantastically the new econ he feels the reward it's fantastic I highly recommend it create a really a really Arcane economy in your household for whatever your kids want to do it's great anyway uh speaking of Arcane Kafkaesque economies let's move over to venture capital uh will manius posts Paul Ferry founder of M Matrix Partners there's a little interview in this book uh question do we have 20 minutes what do we have and he says no I'm done I have to quit but again if you want to call me next week or continue on we can do it by phone let me just finish the point so why is this the best business one you can make a lot of money if you're in it for a long time it's not a business that you can get rich next year or the following year or five years it's changed a little bit with some of these mango solo GP funds it may be 10 years it may be 15 years but if you continue to be successful at it it's amazingly rewarding but more importantly you're dealing with interesting people all the time they're innovators that are people that are changing lifestyles in the world you're dealing for the most part with people who have no net worth and you're helpful to them in building net worth for themselves and net worth for their employees and you can be in the venture your business and be relevant for a very long period of time if you're good at it more so than if you start a tech company the people who started strata super computer or Apollo computer were relevant and important people in the 80s but nobody knows who they are today whereas people that were in the Venture business to be relevant for 40 30 35 years later you're at the Leading Edge of product development or technology or capability there's no other business like that you're not collecting the receivables for the hundredth time you're not laying off employees you're dealing with interesting personel so it's the best business sorry we had to cut it short but something came up and I have to attend this I love it great uh fantastic quote the only the only the only push back here that some GPS would give you is the uh downside of having you know uh 20 to 100 LPS who are your customers in many ways and can call you at any hour of the day 365 days a year uh to uh you know well that's the most interesting thing is that like there's this bifurcation right now where a lot of funds are trying to do less LPS higher GP commits yeah and then simultaneously there's the opposite which is like let's go public let's have any retailer retail investor be able to yell at us when the stock goes down because we had a Miss yeah uh but you know yeah I've got a I've got a buddy who raises first fund it's $20 million fund 100K is like the average check size so that means there's people that are way less than that there people that are way more than that but you do the math it's a lot of people I wonder how I I mean if if if General Catalyst and Andre and Horwitz get out in the public markets I wonder what the smallest fund to go public would be in like five years you think someone would take like a hundred million doll fund public are there are there any just raise just raise a fund spack it sell your entire GP stake deploy it all yeah I mean I don't know stranger things have happened who knows uh silly anyway there's not let's move on to near cyan Big Friend of the show uh they're hiring for a social media influencer marketing lead this seems like a dream job seems really fun uh we released V1 of RN last week and the response has been amazing if you'd like to lead our marketing team for the uh for an app that has already been redefining the relationship between humanity and AI please apply DM near is super smart I got early access to the app I've used it and uh it's very cool it's built on uh built on Claude uh but but uh near is super opinionated and uh the the little a little lore here we talked about this before but for anybody that doesn't know near developed some notoriety for creating an Nvidia only fund that's right I think two years ago at this point turned out uh you just can't sell it yeah for 10 years whole point is that it's a 10e lockup that's really fun and cool thing far so far so good and uh yeah I mean we we've featured New Year's posts many times a lot of bangers yeah and this is just an underrated role in Tech because there's the historical social media manager role that was like you have your little SAS tools and you know your scheduling posts out weeks in advance and that's just not the way that social media we talked about this with the PF die guys yeah it's it's like it's like can you make a crazy Vibe re can you post a banger can you be truly in the conversation get a bunch of fans be doing Frontline customer support almost getting you know uh executive communication from the founders get the founders posting more you know it's just it's just 360 now anyway I wanted to move on to a little historical size gong uh because I want to have uh Connor zwick on the show from uh from speak do we have our guest in here okay we'll we we'll do this one after let's bring in Michael he's here I I I got so excited with the seis gong I was going to I was going to hit it but I can't hit the size gong for Michael welcome to the show Welcome Michael uh