ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 1:00 pm-1:30 pm | Sponsored Partner Programming
Speakers
- Mackenzie, Alpha School
- Austin, Gauntlet AI
Key Takeaways
- Mackenzie (Alpha School founder) and Austin (Gauntlet AI founder) described two radical approaches to education built from first principles.
- Alpha School compresses a full day of academics into 2 hours of AI-assisted mastery-based learning, with afternoons dedicated to project-based life skills (entrepreneurship, financial literacy, community service, Tough Mudders).
- A 7-year-old doing algebra sits next to a peer doing basic math facts.
- Austin described Gauntlet AI's 10-week immersive bootcamp where students go 100-hour weeks (8am-midnight Monday-Saturday, noon-midnight Sunday), with curriculum completely rewritten between cohorts because AI changes that fast.
- The hiring model is inverted: employers pay upfront before meeting students, and some graduates command near-$1M salaries.
- Both founders emphasized that traditional institutions can't keep pace.
Notable Quotes
"Kids should love school. And when I say love school, I mean rather go to school than go on vacation. Because when that is possible, we're enabling kids to do really hard things."
— Mackenzie (Alpha School)
"By the time our students are getting toward graduation at the end of their 10 weeks, if you asked them to use AI as it was on the day they joined Gauntlet, they're like, I can't even imagine going back to that ancient history. And that's 10 weeks."
— Austin (Gauntlet AI)
"We work with companies on the corporate training side and they come in with a six-week roadmap on Monday and we finish it on Tuesday."
— Austin (Gauntlet AI)
"We have a great 16-year-old girl who on her 16th birthday got her first customer from an agent she had built. She had started this business idea two weeks before."
— Mackenzie (Alpha School)
"Most of the people in Gauntlet are going to work highly paid jobs that do not exist right now."
— Austin (Gauntlet AI)
Full Transcript
I am so excited to be here with Austin and Mackenzie because I feel like you all, I mean, just before I even met you all, have heard about the work that you all are doing, and have listened to interviews and podcasts with you all, so very excited to hear more about how you all are thinking about broken systems today, especially in education. You all are both tackling it, but kind of different ends of it. Mackenzie, you started as a frustrated parent. Austin, you're more so focused on post-secondary pipelines.
But I want to start with a question that everyone asks when they hear your names. What were you all so frustrated with that you decided that the answer wasn't necessarily reform, but rather building something completely new? Well, you hit it right on the head. I was a frustrated mom.
When it was time for my girls to go to school, we sent them to our local public school district, which is considered one of the very best in Texas. And very quickly, we were hit with the realization that it is impossible, no matter how devoted, no matter how well-trained the teacher is, you cannot meet the needs of 18, 20, or even more kids in a class who are at wildly different levels. And I would try from within that system to say, hey, can we do a little bit of personalization? Can we have some independent study?
And I will say, hitting that question to the school system with a 6-year-old and 7-year-old, they were kind of like, just go away for right now. And I just realized that trying to build within the system was going to be an impossible task. So I looked around. I realized it wasn't about moving to private school.
It was really a model issue. The teacher in front of the classroom in a time-based system where everyone moves up according to age is the issue. And so we decided to really reinvent school from the ground up with a first principal's vision. And given doing that, what would school look like if we really could just abandon the traditional system?
And it starts with the fundamental premise that kids should love school. And when I say love school, I mean, like, rather go to school than go on vacation. Because when that is possible, we're enabling kids to do really hard things. When they show up excited and love to do that.
And then we're leveraging AI technology to finally provide that one-to-one mastery-based tutoring experience that has been impossible to do in a traditional classroom until now. And of course, that saves so much time in the day. Our kids can learn twice as much in only a couple hours. And that really leads to what I think is probably the most interesting question is, what do you do with the rest of the school day?
And for us at Alpha, the answer is help students develop the life skills that they're going to need to be successful in this world. Yeah, before I get into Gauntlet, which I think is also an interesting rethink of existing models, what does a day at Alpha school look like? Tangibly, like, what does that student experience look like? We get a lot of misconceptions, and some of you may have them in the room, of this robot, dystopian, isolated thing with kids locked in, you know, computer rooms.
And it's the opposite. And Austin can probably attest to that because he's got two kids who also go to Alpha school. But it is enabling kids to have so much time to connect not only with their classmates, but also with the adults that are in our building. We don't call them teachers.
And the reason we don't call them teachers is because I think it would be unfair to say they're teachers when they're not teaching academic core subjects. We call them guides. And so in the morning, kids come together for what we call a limitless launch. It's a chance to do something that gets them excited and connected and kind of ready to take on their day, incorporate growth mindset strategies.
And then they go into their two-hour learning core time. At that point, you can have a bunch of kids sitting right next to each other. One seven-year-old is working on algebra while the seven-year-old next to him is working on his fast math. And that is kind of one of the beautiful things that you get to see in this model.
During that time, our guides are supporting our kids. They're motivating them and connecting with them and teaching them that skill of learning how to learn. And then by lunchtime, academics are done. And the afternoon is where we do these life skills workshops.
So kids are doing everything from connecting with senior citizens at a senior citizen home to planting gardens, growing food and then selling that at a local farmers market and donating proceeds to, you know, food banks to running Tough Mudders and bike races and building businesses and really getting to explore their interests and build the skills that you need, leadership and teamwork and relationship building, financial literacy, all of that. So it's still a full school day and there's so much to do. But I think fundamentally what we're what we're doing in this model, and you see this no matter what school you go to of ours, we're giving kids our most valuable resource, which is time to go do the things in the afternoon that get them really excited to put in the work in the morning to crush their academics. Yeah.
So, you know, you almost saw a school in kind of first principles manner with Gauntlet. Have you thought about this attainment of skills from first principles? Yeah. So we're in a very interesting space, which is AI.
And, you know, Mackenzie started her conversation with how she went to public schools. We started out going to universities, but it was such a nonstarter. We said, what what's missing from the experience of learning AI? And we're talking to a couple of university presidents and they said, we're we can't even change curriculum in less than three years if we're really trying to.
And we're not necessarily trying to. And the reality for us is the curriculum of AI changes so dramatically. Right now we run four cohorts a year. They're each 10 weeks.
We will completely rewrite the curriculum from one cohort to the next cohort because AI changes that dramatically. So, you know, everything we do is very project based. You're building stuff. But, you know, we we use a lot of AI to build our curriculum because we have to.
We're just in a landscape that's changing so dramatically fast that if you, you know, by the time our students are getting toward graduation at the end of their 10 weeks, if you were to ask them what they would do if they had to use AI and the models and the tools as they were on the day they joined Gauntlet, they're like, oh, I can't even imagine going back into that ancient history. And that's 10 weeks. So, yeah, everything that we do has to be built to, like Mackenzie mentioned, learn to learn. But also everything is adapting on the fly every day.
We have to spend probably on average per student up to an hour a day just disseminating and understanding and wrapping our minds around the knowledge that came out in the past 24 hours. And that's never, to my knowledge, been true in education before. So it's a very different challenge. Yeah.
How I mean, as people in charge of teaching this next generation, how do you balance learning how to learn and, you know, core actual knowledge itself? It sounds like, you know, you all have been able to compress that into two hour learning. I think, you know, I have seen criticism around, you know, are we actually able to distill everything we want to teach to a kid in that two hour block? Or even, you know, in Gauntlet's case, how do you actually think about this balance between disseminating knowledge itself, but also cultivating those critical skills?
Having knowledge in your brain is, I think, more important than ever. This is not the time to outsource knowledge and say, hey, AI knows it. In order to be a great critical thinker and to develop the skills that are going to be so important in this world, which is communication and creativity and collaboration, you have to have knowledge to draw upon. And people find it surprising to think there's no way you can get academics done in two hours a day.
But just remember the classroom that you stood in when you were a kid or that you might be in now and realize just how wildly inefficient the time is used in a traditional classroom. And so when our students are able to go in and get exactly the level and pace of learning that meets them where they're at, it is so much faster. And we've known this for 40 years, that kids can learn two, five, ten times faster with that. And so, you know, we believe that table stakes are the core academic knowledge that kids can have.
And then where it gets interesting is helping our students develop that skill, because there's this is such an exciting time in the world with the acquisition and development of knowledge that you really do need kids to learn and the guides to be able to show them, hey, we may not know something, but let's go figure it out together. Let's become experts on whatever subject that we're interested in doing. And gone are the days when we should expect young people to just be consumers who sit back and wait for someone to feed information to them. We have to help people learn to go rabidly after new information because it really is amazing that something that we didn't know about last week or technology couldn't do last week that it can now that will be obsolete a week from now.
That is the most important skill. And we give kids the opportunity, literally starting in kindergarten, to develop that skill. Yeah. As you both have this unique window into how people are being funneled into the workforce or their future careers, is the future project based?
Like, how do we prepare people for this future? Oh, man, that's a really good and big question. So from from our vantage there, the reason that we exist is because there is a need for people with a skill set that are not available. It's not normally if you talk to an employer and you say, OK, if you want to hire somebody who does X, the answer is, well, go.
find someone who has done X for 15 years and they probably studied X in college.
For us, that fundamentally does not exist. It has to be created for the employers. And so our model is it's completely free for the students. We cover all food, housing, travel.
We fly you into Austin. We have apartments for you. We feed you three times a day. We have people do your laundry and clean your room just so we can be purely focused on building with AI.
And the employers that come to us say, this is literally the only place we can find this because it's difficult for an engineer to take 10 weeks off. And we'd go 100 hour weeks quite literally where 8 a.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday and then noon to midnight on Sunday. So kids are very, very intensely learning. And it's to a point now where the model providers come to us and ask what's happening because nobody knows.
It's just a very fundamental unknown. But if you understand these tools and how to use them, I think it's the greatest force multiplier for human talent that there has ever been to where we work with companies on the corporate training side and they come in with a six week roadmap on Monday and we finish it on Tuesday. So it's a completely different way of thinking about how to build, about what the world looks like. It's just wildly, wildly different and really, really exciting.
On that question though, as you think about scaling this, it sounds like it's worked for the cohort of people you currently serve. What does success at scale look like from a price point, from a scaling point? How do you expand beyond the existing model that you already have? We have very lofty goals.
Right now, Alpha is known as being the high end, expensive private school and it absolutely is. And there is a group of families around the country that have been craving this kind of education but in order to truly become scalable, you have to add access and we realize that's critical and I think what 26 is gonna be known for with us is really rolling that model out and in our home state of Texas, when ESAs were made possible last year, that opened up an ability for us to take our Texas Sports Academy where students are getting the same Alpha time back platform that Alpha students get in in-person schools and combining it with their interest in sports and we've had several thousand people sign up for our Texas Sports Academy that will begin this fall and given the success and the popularity of the vouchers, all of the families that receive those vouchers will be coming from incomes of less than $65,000 a year. The school will be free for them and so this is gonna be the opportunity where we're able to provide that same academic experience with the motivation model for students free of charge and we are hopeful that this will serve as a blueprint and a model for what is possible across the country. Austin, on your end, do you have, I mean it sounds like there is massive demand for this but do you have ambitions to scale beyond, yeah.
Yeah, that's the question that keeps me up at night right now. We have more demand from our hiring partners than we have students right now and part of that is because we are so selective and we make our hiring partners pay up front so you have to pay us money before you can walk in the door and meet the students and interview people so it's not a small commitment on the hiring partner side but the big thing that we're thinking about in terms of expansion right now is non-engineering fields and that's obviously a really big and abstract bucket but there are, not only engineers can do a lot more with AI, every field, every line of work, every person within a company can do a lot more if they're using or utilizing AI correctly. We're trying to figure out the right way to approach that whether it's by vertical, by vertical or whether it's abstract non-engineering training. We don't quite know the answer to that yet but that's the thing that eats at me at night so we're figuring it out.
It is interesting to think about, because your kids are doing financial literacy and entrepreneurship in middle school and then Austin, it sounds like you all are running internships for Stanford, MIT kids who apparently need skills that they're not getting at these institutions. Do your models eventually converge or are you solving fundamentally different problems? Well, I think there's a big question happening right now which is what is the point of higher education and our answer is we want our students to be prepared to go off and do whatever it is that they want to do. So if they wanna go to a four-year degree and experience college, they should be ready to do that and if they're ready to go launch their business or their Broadway musical, whatever interest they have, they should have the skills that help them to be successful and I think Austin gives such a great point.
We've had our high school students flying around the country teaching adults how to use OpenClaw, teaching them how to build an agent that gives business and we have a great 16-year-old girl who on her 16th birthday, she got her first customer from an agent that she had built to help provide service business and she's like, what a great birthday present. She had started this business idea two weeks before and so the pace of innovation that we're seeing our students be able to build out just by being able to be AI first and combine it with critical thinking skills that they've developed and the other life skills they've had, going out and being okay with rejection training and receiving feedback, those skills are helping our students be successful and so we are seeing so far, really great response from both universities as well as the job market saying, we like the kind of kids that you guys are developing because they really do have these skills that are gonna be important. Yeah, Austin. Yeah, I mean for us, it's really our core focus is getting people to the cutting edge of AI and letting them ride that wave because right now, it is vertical and we've seen people exit Gauntlet after 10 weeks with salaries of almost a million dollars.
That's not the norm and that's not the media and that's not what I'm saying but I think we have a greater opportunity to apply human leverage right now than we ever have and there's not, I think we might be one of the very few schools that get you to the cutting edge but my mind all day every day is about how do you get as many people to the cutting edge of AI because if you can get there, it's gonna change again in six months. I'm not smart enough to predict what it will all look like in two years. I wouldn't have predicted where we are now a year ago but if we can teach you the skills and get you there and keep you adapting and staying on that wave, then that's a very, very good place to be in any economy. On that note, I know you mentioned you can't predict even beyond two years but there is a lot of anxiety about when we enter this AGI world and there are no jobs and what do we prepare people for?
As parents, as people who have young children or a lot of people in this audience who interface with a lot of young 22-year-olds who are just graduating or even people mid-careers worried about what's next for them, what do you think they should do differently in this moment and what have you learned from what you're building that influences this advice? For us, it is all about helping students find their passion and their motivation because in already our traditional world, if a kid's not motivated, they're kind of up the creek and that's only going to become more true and so it is critical that schools provide opportunities for students to find out what makes them tick, what gets them excited every day to get up and go and build or develop or create something and I think if we could focus everything we do around motivating students, which our model is doing on a very small scale by transforming that role of the teacher, that is going to help make people who are successful and can bring skills long into the future. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting because the people who I've seen adapt to this moment extremely well have been those who have been highly agentic. They've taken agency over this moment and if anything, it's kind of all those skills that you are cultivating at a school like Elf School where in many ways, everyone is becoming a mini-entrepreneur and so to be able to cultivate that at middle school, you know, when they graduate from university, just ways that AI can unlock that within them is extremely exciting.
Austin, what are you seeing? Yeah, my mental model is that most of the people that are in Gauntlet are going to work highly paid jobs that do not exist right now in the near future. So, you know, again, repeating the mantra of, I mean, first of all, if you know someone who's in that scenario, they should apply to Gauntlet AI. We need more applicants.
But what we're seeing on a kind of macroeconomic sense is the people that are able to use AI are able to get a lot more done and the fear becomes, okay, if somebody can get a lot more done, maybe there's a need for far fewer of those people. We've seen the inverse. We've seen that as people are able to do a lot more with AI, obviously you want to hire more and more of those people to do more with AI. So I don't know what happens when, you know, if AGI is smarter than all of us and there's no more jobs anymore.
That's a separate conversation. But until then, I think there's plenty of opportunity for people who are, like you said, agentic and independent thinking and able to wrap their minds around the fact that your career is not going to look like one 40-year-long skill set anymore. And if you can learn and adapt as AI advances, you'll be in a very powerful position. Yeah.
I mean, if anything, in this moment, you all have created spaces for it, but truly, in this moment, it is you can just build things, so join me in thanking Mackenzie and Austin for a fantastic conversation. Excited to see what else you all build.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.