Arvind Nagarajan

Again not true. Called Calley last night. He didn’t answer or return my call. He messaged me this morning. After a few messages and telling him I’d consider suing him if he defamed me, I told him was done responding to him privately. And haven’t since. Calley, your poor me act is tiring and embarrassing for a grown man who launched a smear campaign. I’ve been countering your factual inaccuracy all day. You thought I was gonna lay down and take it? I do this for a living. I’ve been called worse things by better people than you. And I haven’t even gotten started.

Book says let sleeping dogs lie here. Don't amplify and it'll blow over. These things have a way of sneaky fucking with your reputation though. First things first, I love Anduril, and I love Matt's ongoing "call out SPV sleazeballs" series, particularly when I'm not the target of it. I had a lot of fun writing that deep dive on Anduril with the company, and have held them up as the Prime example of a Vertical Integrator. Also, [leo clip] i'm not fucking selling. I wouldn't and didn't "sell a slice of my SPV to USVC." USVC told me another fund had offered their LPs liquidity via USVC (directly to LPs, not GP selling a slice), that the company was aware and approved, and asked if they could offer the same thing to mine. I said yes. Should have confirmed that the company was cool with it, but a couple of texts was the extent of it. One (1) LP hit the bid and so USVC replaced them in the SPV. They did the transaction directly. I didn't sell anything - whether Anduril shares, management, or carry. I made $0 on this. Matt said they had no visibility on my fees and carry: 0 and 20, direct investment, not stacked, pretty vanilla. Again, love Anduril, and even love this crusade, but funds letting new investors buy out LPs who want liquidity is super common, don't require the approval of every company in the fund's portfolio, and i'm sure some funds invested in Anduril have let their LPs sell their LP stakes in the fund to new investors. Should Ankur have tweeted about it? God no. Poked the bear, sliced our hand and put it into the water next to Jaws. Tweeting about Anduril SPVs is like saying "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" into the mirror but you get Matt Grimm instead of Beetlejuice. Anyway, long Anduril, pry my shares from my cold dead fingers, etc... thank you for your attention to this matter.

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption. That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time. Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.” The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs. That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone. But the education system still runs on its logic. A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait. Neither is being served. Both are being processed. Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.” AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student. One at a time. Every time. It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle. It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done. A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture. The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does. No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill. Because the math doesn’t work. AI doesn’t have that constraint. Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.” The brain isn’t broken. The format is. Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem. Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.” Four years. Six figures of debt. And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you. The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance. Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.” The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you. Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace. The question isn’t whether the old model survives. It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth has been taking bright students through AP science courses for decades. I created a school for gifted students where we did the same. For a reasonably bright kid, middle school science is entirely unnecessary. They spend three years spinning their wheels before they are allowed to start real science.

At Alpha School, my daughters would dive deep into history - researching heroes, dressing up, and fielding questions from classmates in character. Everest is 10 years old, and she just brought this method to the Jennifer Hudson Show. Check out the clip in the article below 👇

AI really can help education: Randomized controlled experiment on high school students found a GPT-4o powered tutor that personalized problems for students raised final test scores by .15 SD, "equivalent to as much as six to nine months of additional schooling by some estimates"

I moved to Austin in part so that my kids could go to Alpha School (despite tuition being $40k/year/kid). Now kids in Texas get the exact same academics for free, even from home, with GT School Anywhere.

Yesterday I was honored to witness the ribbon cutting for GT School's new Competition Lab - basically the container for the future of competitive academics at GT School. Students earn the privilege of participating in Competition Lab by meeting their daily XP goals on Timeback and staying up to speed on their standard afternoon workshops. We will provision eligible students with time, materials, and support to achieve new heights in their specialties: math, robotics/engineering, creative writing, quiz bowl, etc. But we can't do it for them, and we won't let them coast. Competition Lab's GM, guide Matt Starolis, challenged our kids to formally sign the Competition Lab pledge and initiate their responsibilities as members. That's my daughter, Claudia (age 10), accepting. She heads to quiz bowl nationals in Chicago in May, and she meets her new writing coach on Thursday.

What is the single most efficient use of a student's time right at this moment? Have them do that. Because to do otherwise is to hold them back from achieving their fullest potential.