BY RICHARD TAYLOR
Compare and contrast the UK’s recent 20% tax on private education with the approach of US billionaire Joe Liemandt (pictured). His new Founders School in New York, with fees of $150k/£113.25k p.a., promises parents their money back if their offspring haven’t hit $1m/£760k in profit by graduation after four years minimum and $600k in fees.
Founders School’s own FAQ is unambiguous about it: “What does making $1M actually mean? $1M in profit. Real money.” It’s a spin-off of the wider Alpha School network, and it will be led by entrepreneur and writer Nat Eliason. His title is “Head of Founder Development” and he joined Alpha to launch the initiative. Rather than coming out of a fund or the school’s own capital, the refund pool is drawn from the wider network’s capital base so if the model fails at scale, Liemandt absorbs the loss personally. The 57 year-old claims to have put $1bn of his own money into Alpha School, a tidy chunk of his $6.6bn fortune, which puts him 623rd on Forbes’ 2026 Billionaires list. He’s also Principal of Alpha School, though that was founded by MacKenzie Price and Brian Holtz back in 2014.
So how does it work? Founders School follows Alpha’s academic model: AI-accelerated, mastery-based, using Alpha’s Timeback software. Afternoons are spent at what is in effect, a startup bootcamp: building and owning businesses, working with mentor founders to launch and scale ventures. The published daily structure is:
- 8:15–11:00 – Academics (AI-accelerated, mastery-based, Timeback)
- 11:00–11:30 – Daily standup
- 11:30–12:00 – Lunch
- 12:00–5:00 – Build block (the founders bootcamp)
That’s five hours a day on the startup side. The school’s own site claims, “1,000+ hours per year of hands-on entrepreneurial experience” on top of academics; on a standard New York private school 180-day school year, five hours a day gets you to 900, so I’m not sure where the extra 100 hours fit in. With no weekend or home work, the school’s own sums don’t seem to add up.
There’s a second inconsistency: the school says the morning academic block is three hours of Learning/Daily Academics, but elsewhere on the same page insists students are “done by 11 a.m” after starting at 8:15. That’s 2h 45m, not three hours. None of this is disqualifying on its own, but for a pitch built on precise, verifiable numbers, the school (itself a startup) can’t quite get its own numbers straight.
The first cohort of 20 freshmen will face as rigorous a selection as that of any elite New York private school. The school is currently recruiting for “elite guides” (read: teachers) starting at $200k. One role, ironically Head of Media rather than anything academic, is offering $400k! Guides sit alongside “entrepreneurs in residence”. None of this is a new phenomenon, but the price tag (about the same as Le Rosey, Switzerland) and the guarantee are.
The guarantee itself is narrower than the marketing headline suggests. It only applies to students who enrol as freshmen. Sophomores and juniors admitted later aren’t covered, and the school’s FAQ notes, “some exceptions apply per the enrolment agreement” without saying what they are. Students who drop out forfeit the refund entirely. And in a nice piece of framing, the FAQ handles the question of a student being asked to leave by saying that if a student can’t keep up, “you’ll receive the refund, as it means either we made a mistake in admitting them or in providing the support they needed to succeed”, which quietly puts the school on the hook for its own selection process while still keeping the “you get your money back” halo intact.
On the academic side, students will use Alpha’s Timeback platform (formerly branded 2 Hour Learning), which Alpha says is not a generative-AI chatbot wrapper but a complete system into which $100m has been invested. That may be, but I am dubious about the claims about 10x learning gains as they are based on internal analysis that has not been independently verified.
There’s a parallel in the hybrid-school model surfacing in London. Inspired Edge Academy, part of Nadim Nsouli’s Inspired Education Group, opens its first early-access programme in Central London in January 2027, with Lisbon, Milan, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo and Auckland following from September 2027. It’s worth flagging the comparison isn’t quite apples to apples as Edge is a primary school offering teacher-led, AI-supported individualised learning in the morning and life-skills and creative-workshop building in the afternoon, rather than a teenage startup accelerator.
Edge’s ‘AI’ partner is confirmed as CenturyTech although the website refers to “adaptive learning platforms”. There’s no publicly available pricing yet. I’ve never bought into CenturyTech’s claims, but we’ll see. As for Alpha’s “10x learning” pedagogy, it’s really just: diagnose the gap → serve targeted content → require mastery before advancing; the same basic model that’s existed since B.F. Skinner’s teaching machines of the 1950s. For anyone interested in the history of this, you must read Audrey Watters’ 2021 book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.
I used to be involved in the London edtech startup scene, helping fund, host and/or run two Startup Weekends at Google, a programme called ed-invent with Cambridge University (for teachers only), and I was around with Night Zookeeper when they were in Wayra’s London incubator. So I know how hackathons/startup programmes operate. Can a school legitimately offer a money-back guarantee tied to a startup outcome? It’s a heavily qualified yes, because verifying real profit out of a startup business is more than a little vexed.
I mention this because the obvious question hanging over Founders School isn’t valuation – the school has been admirably specific that it’s profit, not a paper valuation, that triggers the guarantee. The question is who audits that profit figure, and against what standard? Is it profit after the mentors’, AI tools’ and “entrepreneur in residence” input is factored, is it after taking tax writeoffs for IP and similar, EBITDA, etc? None of that is public and what will $1m be worth in four years’ time anyway? Inflation alone might knock it down to something closer to $850k in today’s money. Even so, if the entire founding cohort of 20 had to be fully refunded, that’s just $12m, an accounting rounding error for a serious billionaire like Liemandt.
In one sense this is a smaller, parent-funded bet against Liemandt’s bank balance, and you could argue its ideological ancestor is Peter Thiel’s Fellowship, which pays young people to drop out and build instead of finishing a degree. That grant has just been raised from $100,000 to $250,000 as of the 2026 cohort.
I’ll be watching how this pans out. I’d bet it does better than the promises Chris Whittle made when he founded Avenues, The World School, in New York in 2012. But whether it produces another Adam Guild (Owner.com), another Zach Laberge (who raised $3m for his construction-tech startup Frenter at 14, and has since gone on to raise a $31m Series A for his second company, Omen AI, at 20), or just another wave of AI-enabled dog-dating apps (I wrote about this four years ago) is a less-than-even bet. Ultimately, that’s what Liemandt is offering: a $600k wager on $1m profit (however it’s calculated) over a four-year race. Liemandt could spread the risk and lower the odds by taking a few pre-seed equity stakes in these startups. You and I are better off buying a lottery ticket or backing the Melbourne Cup favourite (which I still do).
Worth noting too: Alpha School isn’t without governance baggage of its own. WIRED’s October 2025 investigation into the network’s lower-cost Brownsville, Texas pilot reported an aggressive metrics culture and surveillance extending into students’ homes; Alpha disputed the reporting. None of that maps directly onto the new Manhattan operation, but given how tightly the Founders School guarantee depends on trusting Alpha’s internal reporting and measurement, it’s worth keeping in view.
Innovation in education isn’t only driven by private schools, whatever their advantages in money, connections and power. You will know that I think Oak National Academy is, by some margin, the most innovative edtech endeavour internationally, not just in the UK. I’d say much the same of Tom Hooper’s Third Space Learning. And despite my long-held view that Nadim Nsouli’s Inspired Education Group is, alongside Nord Anglia, the world leader in private education at scale, I’m sceptical about Inspired Edge Academy’s ability to deliver if it’s relying on CenturyTech’s AI to support the teachers who will be doing the serious pedagogical work.
Reservations aside, Founders School and its founder are running exciting system-level thinking, of a kind no Labour politician, SPAD or acolyte in the UK currently seems capable of. I wish the school, its students and their families well. But no more than I wish every kid and family well in the rackety old game of education.
Richard Taylor is a specialist in education sector start ups, edtech, business intelligence, market, company & sector analysis.