This School Doesn’t Do Grades. It Does Startups.

There's a new high school in New York City's Financial District, and it just made the boldest promise in the history of education: graduate with a business that's cleared a million dollars in profit — or get every cent of your tuition back.

It's called Founders School. It opened its doors this September. Tuition runs $150,000 a year. And if you haven't launched a business with at least $1 million in profit by the end of your fourth year, the school refunds the entire $600,000.

Read that again. A school so sure its model works, it put $600,000 per student on it.

Where did this come from?

Founders School is an offshoot of Alpha School's New York City location — Alpha is the network of AI-driven schools that started in Austin back in 2014, built around the idea that kids only need a couple of hours of actual academics a day because AI tutors handle the personalization.

The money and the vision come from Joe Liemandt, the Alpha School head — a Stanford dropout who founded Trilogy Software, landed on the Forbes cover twice before 30, then spent 25 years quietly buying up software companies. He's said he's betting a billion dollars that AI can make kids learn ten times faster.

The day-to-day is run by Nat Eliason, 33, an entrepreneur who sold his content marketing agency last year. The idea for the school came straight from the students: Liemandt asked Alpha pupils how they'd make high school "ten times better," and the answer kept coming back to the same thing — they were already starting businesses and wanted real support to do it properly.

What it actually looks like

Twenty-one students enrolled for year one. Fifteen work out of the Manhattan location; six are based in Austin and travel to New York regularly to work with their East Coast peers and mentors.

One of them is 15-year-old Sanjay Divakar from Greenwich, Connecticut, who asked his parents to let him transfer out of public school after seeing a founder talk about the school on Instagram. He's given two TEDx talks arguing that schools don't train students to their full potential. His old teachers, he says, told him running a business wouldn't get him anywhere.

That's the pitch in one sentence: stop telling ambitious kids to wait, and build the school around what they're already trying to do.

Why this hits different for our generation

Let's be honest about something adults don't like admitting: Gen Alpha didn't wait for permission to become builders. Kids are running Roblox studios, selling designs, building audiences of hundreds of thousands — with no textbook and no one's blessing.

The question was always whether the grown-up world would catch up and build structures that take that seriously. A school that treats a teenager like a founder-in-training instead of a test-taker? That's catching up — with a $600,000 guarantee attached.

The fine print (because honesty matters here)

Real talk: this school opened last month. There is no track record yet — no graduating class, no million-dollar businesses, no refunds paid out. Everything above comes from early news coverage (Network Today, LinkedIn), not from years of results. The guarantee is a promise, not a proof.

And the elephant in the room: $150,000 a year. Whatever the model proves, right now it's a gated community, not a movement. Twenty-one students. The future of education shouldn't need a luxury budget — so the real test isn't whether rich kids can build companies with world-class mentors. It's whether the idea escapes the price tag.

Still. Somebody just bet $600,000 per student that teenagers can build real businesses instead of writing essays about them. That's the most interesting wager in education right now, and it's worth watching.

So what would you build?

That's the only question that matters. Not "what do you want to be when you grow up" — what problem do you see right now, and what are you going to do about it?

You're already the generation that designs its own phone cases, runs its own channels, and learns everything from the internet. The tools were never the barrier.

So — what would you build? Drop it in the comments. And if you've already started building something, we want to hear about that too. The next founder profile on this blog could be you.