The school with no teachers is crushing America’s best.
Kids score in the top 0.1% with just two hours of study a day.
A secret billionaire school wants to erase homework forever.
Kids beg to stay in class instead of going on vacation.
In Austin, childhood got hacked.
Fourth graders run food trucks. Build drones. Simulate MBAs. While others still trace cursive.
The software says it can teach a billion kids twice as fast.
Students catch up on two lost years in 40 hours.
They call it Incept and Timeback. The tutor that never blinks.
It tracks mistakes, distractions, wasted seconds. Then regenerates until mastery.
Sounds like surveillance?
It is. And it’s why kids outscore elite prep schools with half the effort.
The factory classroom is finished.
Twelve thousand hours shrink to four thousand.
The vision is simple: give kids their time back.
The outcome is bigger: polymaths at scale or digital cages for a generation.
This is the biggest lever ever pointed at childhood.
The only question: do we build a peaceful, spacefaring civilization. Or hand regimes the perfect indoctrination tool?
Who's building it?
Joe Liemandt.
He was the Stanford dropout nobody bet on.
By 27 he was on the cover of Forbes. Twice.
He built Trilogy. The first billion-dollar AI product in enterprise software.
SalesBuilder rewrote how Fortune 500s sold and manufactured.
He made a decabillion fortune by buying dying software firms.
ESW Capital turned collapse into a cash machine. Hundreds of companies. Billions in flow.
Then he vanished.
No interviews. No spotlight. Gone for 25 years.
In the shadows he built surveillance tech for remote workers.
WorkSmart tracked every click, every keystroke, every screen.
He stayed quiet while tech culture exploded around his playbook.
Recruiting, boot camps, bro-culture. All seeded at Trilogy.
Now he is back.
Not for money. Not for press. But for a school.
Alpha School. Two hours of AI learning. Four hours of workshops.
Kids test at the top 0.1% nationwide.
His new product is called Timeback.
He calls it the best thing he has ever built. Better than Trilogy. Better than ESW.
This is his first interview in 25 years.
And he broke silence for only one reason. To talk about the end of school as we know it.
Here's the link to the awesome article that explores the current state of Alpha School and the stories behind it.