My next startup: The Schools of Entrepreneuring

May 20, 2024

For updates on launch dates and locations for the School of Entrepreneuring, sign up for my newsletter here.

📣 🔥 Announcing my next startup

But first, let’s talk about Ellwood P. Cubberley

Who?!!

Cubberley was founding dean of Stanford University’s School of Education

And here is how he described the purpose of schools:

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life

That sound absolutely terrible to you too?

Schools should NOT exist to train children to be compliant and conforming employees and consumers.

Instead, schools should help develop students into explorers, adventurers and leaders.

And that is what I’m working on

Along with a few others, we’re building a new education system comprised of hundreds of 6th to 12th grade Schools of Entrepreneuring.

This is an education system that is in the game of leadership development. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle to enable this.

At scale, the schools will graduate tens of thousands of students per year who create businesses that do what businesses do – solve problems on behalf of others

Today, I wanted to share:

My ‘wet clay’ thoughts on our approach/philosophy
A loose curriculum outline

If what you read below gets you fired up, please sign up for updates here and share this far & wide.

Our early ambitions and philosophy

These would be physical, in-person schools. Our focus will be on creating multiple schools in the largest school districts in the USA (NYC/NJ, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami-Dade, Houston, Dallas-FW, etc). The first campus will be in the NY Metro area (NY, NJ, CT, eastern PA). We are evaluating ‘campus’ options and strategies now.
Graduates would receive $100-$200k of seed funding upon graduation to start or continue building their companies. Think of a scaled Thiel Fellowship.
In line with our core philosophy of learning by doing vs learning by listening, students will build, operate and even acquire 3-6 businesses during their time at the school. Many of these ideas will fail and that is expected & healthy. Our education system stigmatizes failure too much. Failure is where learning and growth comes from. And it is undoubtedly better to fail and recover when young than when older.
We are looking to recruit formidable young people. Interestingly, the type of formidable student who might excel at this school is more likely to have started and grown a lawn mowing business or built a YouTube channel w/ 10k subscribers than aced a standardized test.
The school will NOT be focused on college prep. With the backing we provide upon graduation, our intention is to help students “go pro in business” out of our schools. Of course, they can choose to go to college as an entrepreneuring education will equip them to be remarkably successful anywhere. But our focus is not on AP credits, SAT/ACT prep, contrived leadership experiences and illusory community service to pad college applications, etc.
Experiential- and project-based learning. You don’t learn by consuming, thinking or reading. You learn by doing. This means students will learn how to build valuable products/services and market/sell those to real customers. It also means our instructional methods will focus on not putting kids to sleep as we’ve done for the last 1000 years.
We want to create better thinkers. Our goal is not to teach students what to think but how to think. This will be embodied in the curriculum, the types of guides we bring on, and our single-minded focus on creating smarter and more capable young people.
We will launch the 1st campus in Fall 2026. I built a successful technology company and am now also becoming a Montessori teacher to understand adolescent education at a more first principles level.

If you have a child entering 6th-8th grade or later in 2026 or later, I’d encourage you to sign up below for updates. We’ve got some big ones coming soon.

Entrepreneuring Curriculum

Critical Thinking & Decision-Making Skills

Cognitive Agility: Processing new information to adapt perspectives
Critical Thinking: Evaluating information systematically
Decision Making: Choosing among alternatives under uncertainty
Probability & Statistics: Managing and understanding risk & upside

Leadership & Communication

Persuasion: Influencing others effectively
Spontaneous vs. Public Speaking: Mastering different speaking contexts
Storytelling and Writing: Engaging and convincing through narrative
Digital Literacy: Navigating digital tools and platforms effectively
Leadership: Identifying opportunities and guiding team strategies
Motivation: Inspiring team commitment and performance

Problem Solving and Innovation

Problem Solving: Developing solutions to complex challenges
Improvisation & Adaptability: Adapting creatively to on-the-spot scenarios
Deductive vs. Inductive Thinking: Approaching problems with different reasoning strategies
Curiosity: Pursuing continual learning & understanding

Negotiation & Conflict Resolution

Negotiation: Reaching agreements between parties
Debate: Engaging in structured argumentation

Personal Development, Resilience and Character

Risk-Taking: Embracing & managing failure and uncertainty
Resilience: Maintaining effectiveness in the face of discomfort
Consistency and Dedication: Cultivating habits that lead to success
Accountability: Showing up & taking responsibility for actions
Community Improvement: Making decisions that consider impacts on local and broader community
Physical Toughness: Enhancing health/endurance

We’re recruiting

The main types of people we want to meet right now are the absolute best teachers, athletic coaches and others who’ve directly been involved in youth development.

We call them guides.

A few notes:

We are looking for guides or coaches more than teachers or lecturers. The “sage-on-a-stage” method of teaching via transmission of facts has been proven to be ineffective and so role of a teacher aka guide will look quite different in these schools.
Individuals with athletic coaching experience are an amazing fit especially.
We’re looking for guides who are formidable, entrepreneurial and who think big.

Please reach out if this is you or share with exceptional folks in your network that might be a fit.

If you love this idea, share it with a friend and sign up for updates here.

Heck – if you hate this idea, share it with an enemy.

And, of course, if any questions, ask away.

If you read this far, some related essays you’ll also like:

Video at start of this created using Veed.io and Google NotebookLM (h/t Sumaer Jolly).

If you’ve read this far and like the philosophy of The Schools of Entrepreneuring, please sign up for my newsletter to learn about our launch dates and our thinking on how we can un-f^ck education in the USA.