Finn, a sixth grader, stood up. It was his turn to present his start-up: a streetwear brand named “22.” Pacing around the front of the room, with his foot occasionally falling out of his slides, he talked about the followers he’d get once he dropped his line—and how he was going to take his mom’s credit card to fund it. He also mentioned that his friend “has a connection to the billionaire Joe Liemandt,” the software executive backing Finn’s school.
I had arrived at Alpha, the most expensive private school in San Francisco, where there are no teachers, the academic day lasts two hours, and the kids love school.
The pitch is bold: Students complete all of their schoolwork each morning using AI-powered apps. The afternoons are for “life skills”—workshops on things like entrepreneurship and product design. On the day I visited, students participated in a “yapathon”—a public speaking exercise where they talked about a subject for three minutes and lost points for every filler word (“like,” “um”) they used.
