@immad honestly, reminding me of some of the conversations we've had building @zero_university. i find a lot of investors don't look at the product and try to fully understand it. they focus on the spreadsheet.
btw... we launched Zero today, university alt: https://t.co/bGZtJPda2B
There should be a separate path for people who want to socialize, that’s much cheaper. Universities aren’t great at educating anymore. They’re an expensive social experience. Then people expect a job after, but many struggle and come out with debt that takes 10 years to pay off.
Universities are an ok proxy because it’s all that really exists today. There isn’t a good alternative. We got shitty boot camps and MOOCs that sell certificates. But soon there will be better alternatives, and I think @zero_university will be one of them.
https://t.co/79ioTwWoSF
this is Zero.
i was going to launch @zero_university 6 months ago, but decided not to.
i felt if we launched too early, the team would get distracted. the product still had areas where i wanted to make the experience incredible, not just 'good'. Zero is more like a video game or movie, where the experience matters. it's not a tool, it's immersive. how people feel when they use it matters. it needed to be fast, feel real, and actually work.
so instead of launching, we went heads down for 6 months to craft the best learning experience the world has seen. it has the best applied AI models, immersive experiences that feel like the real-world (like kick-off meetings, feedback walk-throughs, and real-time collaboration), and modern workflows that train people on how to use AI tools to make them more productive, rather than use them mindlessly as a crutch.
it was a tough decision because my team put a ton of work into this video and wanted the world to see it. imagine, this was made 6 months ago! i'm super proud of my team for what they made, and i'm even more proud to finally share this with the world.
so yea, this is Zero.
this is the future of education.
to join the beta, let me know in the thread.
🔴 I'M BUILDING THIS OUT OF HATE! 🔴
I'll be honest. I don't love education. I never have.
I grew up inside it, then started my career building more of it. I lasted long enough to learn how it really works, and I left swearing never again.
You know the shape of it. A syllabus older than the students. Forty kids taught like they're one kid. Nine hours of school, four of tuition, then a room full of us mugging up the same shit until we could repeat it on cue. It was never built to find smart people. It finds good memorisers.
Your Netflix knows you better than your school ever did.
And if you didn't fit it, you were told you were the problem. You weren't. The system was just bad at you.
I only know it can be different because of design.
In design, nobody asks where you studied. You open the portfolio. It either blows them away or it doesn't. The degree doesn't count. The work does. It's the fairest test I know, because it asks one honest question. Can you actually do the thing?
For years that was true for design and almost nothing else.
So that's what we're building @zero_university for. Proof of work, for everyone. Not a grade. Not a profile you wrote about yourself. A real record of what you can actually do, and how you got good at it. Something you can't fake.
Picture what that unlocks. No take-home assignments. No seven rounds of interviews to slowly find out what your work already shows. You stop proving yourself from scratch in every room. You walk in already proven.
And we built Zero so we only win when you do.
Most schools treat students as customers, so they're built to chase more of them, not to make the ones they have any better. We flipped it. You're not who we sell to. You're what we build. So we'll never trade you a degree, a hostel, and a nice story about your life for four years and a fat bill.
Zero is free. And our beta users get a guaranteed interview, the one promise your college couldn't make you after all those years and all that money.
This is the first launch.
The thing I hated most turned out to be the thing I'm here to build. I'm writing this from a treadmill in Vietnam, and I haven't felt this alive in years.
Universities are just businesses.
They used to be a place for people to learn and grow, but now they're just a business maximizing profits. Their product is a degree, and the customers are students. The degree is paid off in (usually) four annual installments, and if you don't complete the payment, you don't get the product. If you look at the curriculums at most universities, they're not related to what companies are looking for. They're academic, not practical, and more focused on content and assessment of that content rather than job readiness.
The craziest part is that the whole education system is tied together by universities. It's the whole reason why students care so much about getting good grades in high school. It's the whole reason why the high school curriculum doesn't change to adapt to the real world. It's because everything is optimized for getting into university, but at the end of the day, what's the point of getting into university if it doesn't prepare you for the job and get you hired?
Most people aren't going into debt and spending four years just to be formally educated. Education's free on YouTube. It's probably the best place to actually learn anything. The only reason why universities haven't been replaced yet is because there is no replacement. And as long as there is no viable replacement, the education system will continue to optimize for getting accepted into universities, and as a result, stay outdated.
I'm building Zero to be that replacement.
@zero_university