I’m sitting a few feet from one of the nicest billionaires I’ve ever met. He wants to change how every kid in America learns.
Joe Liemandt is wearing a black ALPHA baseball cap and an expensive yet understated polo. He’s smiling, confident, and warm. The type of guy you actually want to be a billionaire and controlling the world.
My heart is racing. I’ve been rehearsing something to say to him in my head for 20 minutes. I always get nervous during a Q&A and I hate to be confrontational, but I have to ask.
“Joe, how spicy can I be with my question?”
He grins. “Bring it on. Make it real spicy.”
So I ask him: Success Academy and Eva Moskowitz were supposed to be the future of education 20 years ago. They promised great outcomes for students, had big wealthy backers, and got tons of press.
And yet they never changed the system. Not truly.
What makes Alpha School something more than the 2026 version of Success Academy?
The room gets quiet. My heart is doing that thing again.
Nick’s Note
I almost married a charter school teacher. She worked at KIPP in Harlem, one of the original “schools that would change everything.” I watched her come home wrecked from the grind, the burnout, and the political fights that had nothing to do with kids. She believed in it completely. And still the system wore her down.
Then in 2018, I sat in a beautiful office in New York City while WeWork pitched their school called WeGrow. They had a $47 billion company behind them, world-class architects designing the classrooms, and Gwyneth Paltrow promoting it. There was a grand vision to reinvent childhood learning.
WeGrow shut down a year later when the whole company imploded.
So yeah, I’ve been burned before.
And now I’m sitting in the second row, pulse up, watching another billionaire tell me he’s going to fix education.
But then Joe explains why he thinks the entire charter school model is broken.
The Charter Trap
Eva Moskowitz opened the first Success Academy charter school in New York City in 2006 with 157 students. Her Harlem kids crushed the state tests.
In 2014, she promised to have 100 schools online within 10 years. There were 32 at the time.
Now it is 2026 and Success Academy only has 59. Almost all of them are in New York City.
Last year, Ken Griffin of Citadel gave her $50 million to open Success Academy in Miami.
I wonder if that’s an admission that the NYC growth story is over.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz
I read Eva’s memoir a few years ago. So much of it was about fighting. Fighting unions. Fighting the Department of Education. And fighting politicians.
One story stuck with me. She couldn’t even get access to a library in her own building. The Robin Hood Foundation had built these million-dollar school libraries, and the public school turned theirs into a teachers’ lounge. Eva had to threaten to call Robin Hood just to let her kids use it. I liked this part:
“Excellence is the accumulation of hundreds of minute decisions; it is execution at the most granular level. Once you accept the idea that you should give in to things that make no sense because other people do those things and you want to appear reasonable, you are on a path towards mediocrity. To achieve excellence, one must fight such compromises with every fiber of one’s being.”
She fought everything. But I think so much of that energy went into political warfare and not towards building new schools.
Eva posted a Charles Osgood poem called “Pretty Good” in her teachers’ work room that I like. It is about a pretty good student who grows up and discovers that pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Joe Liemandt’s Answer
Here’s what Joe said to my question about why Alpha School will have a different outcome from Success Academy:
“Success Academy wins because they do eight hours. Fundamentally, they grind the kids for eight hours a day. The problem with good high-achievement charter schools is if you look at their enrollment trends, they crush K through 5, because at K through 5 kids wake up every day and say ‘How do I make mom and dad happy?’ As soon as you hit adolescence, you start to say ‘I don’t really care about mom and dad anymore, I care about my friends. I care about social acceptance.’ And all of a sudden doing well academically falls off a cliff. But we’re not going to be hamstrung by charter. When kids can learn in two hours a day instead of eight, you can rebuild the school day around the life skills and things that kids really care about.”
His bigger point is structural. Charters are now in what he called “a really weird zone.” ISDs can veto you. Rules and regulations are everywhere. But ESAs (Education Savings Accounts) let you operate as a private company and skip all of that.
Eva spent 20 years fighting within the system. Now Joe and Alpha School are going around it.
What Alpha Actually Does
Alpha School takes a different approach. Kids do academics in just two hours using AI-powered personalized learning. The rest of the day is life skills: leadership, entrepreneurship, public speaking, relationship building.
90-something percent of Alpha kids say “I love school.”
43% said they’d rather go to school than go on vacation.
That sounds fake. But every Alpha parent I’ve talked to in Austin backs it up.
The AI figures out what your kid knows, generates a personalized lesson plan at their level, and keeps them in a zone where they’re getting 80-85% of questions right. Every video game developer knows this sweet spot. So Alpha hired some of the best game developers to build their software.
Joe applies different thinking to hiring teachers too:
“The reason schools can’t scale is teachers are a hard spec to fill. You have to be a world expert in seventh-grade science, you have to teach it well, you have to connect with kids, you have to deal with parents and administrators. Those five skills are all different. So in America, we solved that problem by underpaying them. And we’re like, ‘Oh my god, no one applies for the job! It’s crazy!’ Every head of HR can solve this problem: Simplify the spec and pay more money.“
Alpha took out the subject-matter expertise requirement. The AI handles content mastery. But you have to motivate and connect and engage with kids better than anybody. They pay a minimum of $100,000 for their teachers.
Alpha School by the numbers
- 50 campuses on track this year
- 100,000+ parents registered for Texas Sports Academy when it launched January 1st
- Top 1% achievement and growth on standardized tests
For-Profit is the Point
Joe gave the most unapologetic defense of for-profit education I’ve ever heard. He told the audience about a talk he gave at Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale conference:
“I was told when I got involved four years ago: Everything has to be non-profit. Can’t do for-profit. For-profit’s evil. For-profit education is especially evil. For-profit education driven by billionaires is the evilest thing on the world. And lots of the world still believes that.”
He continues:
“Non-profit equals non-scale. Let’s say that I have my big package of donations and I build the world’s greatest product. It goes away really fast. And then I’m stuck. There are tons of charter schools in this country who are awesome. They have 3,000 person waitlists. I ask why they don’t add another campus. They say, ‘We’re waiting on a $40 million donation.’ Meanwhile I had a thousand people at my info session in New York City. I promise you everybody will give me as much capital as I want to open more schools. Capitalism will provide capital for education.”
Education is a $7 trillion global industry. Joe’s point is that there’s plenty of money, just not good products.
Before Alpha School, Joe Liemandt was basically invisible. He ran Trilogy Software for decades, paid people $150,000 to move to Austin in the 90s, and drove an old Toyota even when he was already wealthy. You couldn’t find photos of him online.
Now he’s put $1 billion of his own money into education and he’s out front talking about it. I like that.
Will It Actually Work?
I don’t have kids yet. But I left New York City for a lot of the same reasons that Eva’s story frustrated me. I wanted to be somewhere that was open to different thinking.
Every generation gets a school that promises to change everything. Success Academy was the last one. If you haven’t heard it before, the pitch to re-imagine education always sounds this good. You can’t help but get swept up in the excitement.
Here’s what’s different this time around: Eva needed political permission to open every school. Every charter school in Harlem needed a co-location approval from a school board that didn’t want her there. New York State has a cap on how many charters can exist.
Joe doesn’t need any of that. ESAs are rolling out across the country. Texas allocated a billion dollars for its Education Freedom Accounts program launching this year. The federal Educational Choice for Children Act kicks in 2027 with billions more in tax-credit scholarships as states opt in.
When the money follows the parent instead of the institution, you don’t have to fight the system.
You just have to build something parents want.
BE ADVISED
Alpha isn’t cheap. The flagship school costs around $40,000 a year. A billionaire-backed private school has advantages most schools don’t. And with ESA vouchers covering more accessible options like Texas Sports Academy, the model starts to reach a lot more families. The real test is whether it works for kids who aren’t starting with those advantages.
Conclusion
I think about all the time I wasted in middle school and high school. Hours of sitting and waiting and doing pointless memorization tasks. And I wish I had something like this.
When the talk is over, I walk up to Joe to shake his hand and take a few pictures. I thank him for what he’s doing. He’s super gracious about it.
On the drive home, I text my wife Lauren. I tell her I think Alpha School might actually be the real deal and that I’m excited about the future.
I’ve been burned by KIPP. Burned by WeGrow. Burned by the promises that someone was finally going to fix our outdated system of education.
And yet I’ve talked to enough Alpha parents and students in Austin to know that something is working here. A friend told me about his son who was voluntarily waking up at 6 a.m. to hit his test scores so he could go on a field trip. That’s not a kid who hates school.
Every generation gets a school that promises to change everything.
And now I think this one just might do it.
More Resources
- The Education of Eva Moskowitz by Eva Moskowitz
- “Pretty Good” by Charles Osgood the poem Eva posted in her teachers’ work room
- The Lottery documentary about Success Academy’s admissions lottery
- What Happened to WeWork’s School, WeGrow?
Thanks to Arena Hall
This talk was hosted by my friend Evan Baehr at Arena Hall in Austin. Evan is building Arena Hall as a gathering place for people working on the most ambitious projects in Central Texas. Defense, transportation, AI, healthcare, space, education. Thanks to Evan for putting this together and letting me ask Joe my spicy question during Q&A.
I followed you through Tokyo. so pleased you met and married Lauren! 3 of our 4 kids graduated from UT Austin. We have 5 Texas Grands ages 8 to 1. I have a teacher’s heart and my husband thinks AI learning could be very good and useful. We will check out your resources and look forward to more information!