🎧🍌 Turning Teachers Into Superheroes | Ryan Delk (Co-founder and CEO, Primer)
How the $1 trillion US K-12 education system works, its broken incentive structures, why teachers are superheroes, how to double their income, and why founders make the best employees
Hi everyone, please enjoy this third and final episode of the first week of The Peel! (and if you missed them, here’s episodes one and two).
From here, expect one new episode per week, including a conversation with Immad Akhund, Co-founder and CEO of Mercury on Wednesday, July 5th.
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Ryan Delk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Primer, a startup helping ambitious kids unlock their potential by empowering teachers to launch and run their own micro-schools. Primer’s supported by investors like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Village Global, Susa Ventures, and individuals like Sam Altman, Naval, Ryan Peterson, Amjad Masad, Julie Zhuo, Tobias Lutke, Lachy Groomm, Howie Liu, Dylan Field, Packy McCormick, and many more. Before Primer, Ryan was COO at peer-to-peer rental marketplace Omni (sold to Coinbase), and on Growth and Partnerships at Gumroad from $10,000 to $50,000,000 in GMV.
Find Ryan on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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In this episode, we discuss:
How the $1 trillion US K-12 education system works
The broken incentive structures in education
Why teachers are superheroes
How to double a teacher’s income
Primer’s origin story
How to open a school
If online school works
Why founders make the best employees
How the US government wastes billions of dollars
Why everyone should care more about local politics
👉 Find the full episode on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube 👈
Follow The Peel on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Thanks to Zac and Xavier at Supermix for the help with production and distribution!
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak: Ryan, how's it going?
Ryan Delk: Thanks for having me! It’s going well.
Turner Novak: I gave the quick intro so why don't we just jump in. Can you talk about the US K-12 education system? How does it work?
Ryan Delk: It's interesting because it's one of those things that I think everyone agrees isn't working, but we just accept that it doesn't work in this very weird way.
Turner Novak: Why doesn't it work and why do we accept it?
Ryan Delk: So there is a pretty wide distribution of quality and people's experiences. It’s a very local thing. When you think about the education system, most people think about the school that their kid goes to.
There are really great public schools in the US. There are good charter schools and there are good private schools. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of really bad public schools, private schools, and charter schools.
When you zoom out, we spend a trillion dollars a year on core K-12 spending in the US. For context, that's about six times larger than all the money we spend on every SaaS app company combined. And that's a mixture of private, federal, state, and local spending, and we can talk about how different schools are funded. It's this massive capital outlay every year.
The way that capital has been distributed over the last 50 years has changed a lot. And one way to think about it is, you've gone from most of that capital going to teachers or directly to the core education experience with the kids, into this secular trend across a lot of industries where there are huge layers of administration and bureaucracy.
The way it’s been allocated, you wouldn't look at one policy and be like, “Oh, this is a terrible idea.” But if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you're a someone who makes education policy, the way that you want to solve these problems is by adding more policy. And if you just layer them on top of each other, eventually you get to where we are today.
We can talk more about incentive structures but it's this massive capital allocation that happens every year. The results are really not getting better.
For some odd reason, we all accept it and collectively agree to not spend that much time or energy trying to fix it in any radical way. We hope for these like incremental improvements.
Turner Novak: So when you say federal, state, local funding – do certain layers of funding go to certain things? Like the federal funds a certain aspect, the state funds a certain one, the local funds a certain one? How does that all stack on top of each other and connect?
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Ryan Delk: It's different in every state based on which states have income taxes, local jurisdictions, property taxes, etc. But the basic way to think about it is that in a public school, 45% of their budget comes from state spending, 45% comes from the local budget (which is sales tax, property tax, income tax, all these different things), and then about 10% comes from the federal budget. It’s this layered local, state, and federal funding that comes down to fund the school district and the public and charter schools in those districts.
Turner Novak: And are there certain incentives or priorities that attach to each of those funding sources? Like they want certain things or they guide the schools towards doing things a certain way?
Ryan Delk: Yeah, so this is one of the counterintuitive or at least challenging structural problems. Intuitively, you want to give schools that are underperforming and generating bad student outcomes more resources to generate better student outcomes. But if you do that for a long enough time, you get to a situation where those schools keep getting more funding but are not generating better student outcomes.
There are all these schools that you can look at where they keep getting more and more funding but student outcomes are the same. You hear stories of corruption and all these things that are happening.
It’s one of those things that, from first principles, makes sense. I wish to give these schools more resources. But you end up in a situation where there is a radical misallocation of resources that has started to compound a lot of the problems that are happening now in the system.
Turner Novak: When you say they compound and get to some of the problems we have today, there’s an interesting stat that 42% of adults are satisfied with the K-12 education system. What are we happy about? What are we not satisfied with?
Ryan Delk: Of the things that we've learned at Primer is that parents' experience of their kids' school – and this would be most true in kindergarten and least true in 12th grade – is their teacher. If you have a really great teacher, especially in kindergarten, even if you're at a terrible school, you're going to think very highly of your kid's education experience.
That becomes less true in 12th grade. If your daughter happens to have a really great chemistry teacher or calculus teacher, maybe you think that class is amazing, but it probably doesn't impact your entire view of their education. For a lot of families, that sort of teacher-driven sentiment is really true early on.
Maybe they get lucky. Maybe they find a great school with a great teacher and they proactively seek it out so it's actually not luck. But they end up in a great situation and then they become more and more jaded over time when they either weren't able to replicate that or they have to move schools or whatever.
I think very few people raise kids in America and are contiguously happy with their kids' education experience from K-12, which is why you get this huge rise in alternative education, homeschooling, microschooling, all these different things happening.
Turner Novak: Yep. Which is exactly what you guys are working on, which we'll get into. I also wanted to say, I think teachers are incredible, the stuff that they do. They're on the front lines of training and they're underappreciated and under-resourced a lot of times. It’s incredible what teachers go through.
Ryan Delk: Yeah. The entire structure of Primer is built on this idea that teachers are like superheroes and the best teachers have the potential to change a child's life, or hundreds of children's lives over the time of their career.
One of the things that's interesting about the school system – and actually, I have this pipe dream at some point to fund a study that would test this by putting millions of dollars into a school district – is that the incentive structure is totally flipped in schools. With the way that the unions and different contracts are negotiated, most teachers they're structurally incentivized to minimize downside, not maximize upside.
What that means in practical terms is that there's very little upside as a teacher. There's not like some crazy bonus program where you're getting all this additional comp if your kids like outperform. What you're worried about is the percentage of your kids that are going to fail the state test, depending on the state that you're in or how they're going to track on their MAP scores or whatever the rubric is that the state uses. Teachers have a lot of anxiety about how low the floor is going to be and how they can raise the floor as much as possible.
Luckily, a lot of teachers in the US happen to be very altruistically motivated, thank God, so they spend a lot of their own time and money – in many cases, literally their own money – helping kids get ahead and helping ambitious kids work on cool projects, all these things. But there is no incentive.
There's a teacher of the year award and there are some counties that recognize teachers. It might be like a $500 bonus or you get a badge you put on your LinkedIn profile, but these things are de minimis relative to the impact they're having on society when they go above and beyond for these students. Teachers have no compensation for that.
The idea that I think would be fascinating is: could you test over a three or four-year horizon creating a bonus structure where there's a relatively large financial incentive as a percentage of their salary for doing all these things that we know are really beneficial for kids. For $5 to 10 million in a school district, which might be a very small percentage of the budget depending on the school district, could you dramatically change student outcomes by doing nothing but adding financial incentive?
I don’t know if it would work or not, but I do think the incentive structure is like the Charlie Munger thing: show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. The incentive structure in so many school districts in the US is just completely flipped in my opinion.
Turner Novak: Is there some sort of a time horizon mismatch? Let’sc say you change the incentives and there is upside for assisting a child – it would take 40 years to figure out if that teacher actually had an impact. Is that part of it?
Ryan Delk: Yeah, it is part of it. But you can get all these leading indicators early. You can find a kid who was super demotivated that a teacher really invested in, and six months later he’s all of a sudden really motivated. Or a kid that's really struggling with reading and a teacher helps them find this unlock and all of a sudden, he's really excited.
There are all these things that teachers are able to do, and they do this all the time with interventions that change the trajectory of kids' academic careers. So yes, I do think oftentimes, you don't see the fruits of your labor for a long time, but you can see it pretty quickly.
And like I said, we're just lucky that I think most teachers actually are really motivated by that, even though there's no financial incentive for them to do that.
Turner Novak: Yeah. So how do you think we could incentivize teachers? Any ideas?
Ryan Delk: My idea is to run that study in a school district and see what happens. You're talking about a relatively small amount of capital for the impact it could have on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of kids.
I also think that one of the big challenges outside of the financial incentive structure is that there's a sort of implicit bureaucratic incentive structure within most of these school district institutions. Teachers spend so much time navigating that bureaucracy that they are incentivized with their time to just do things that line up with whatever the bureaucratic process is, instead of trying to do things that are innovative or different or exciting.
So not only is it a financial thing, but it's also this time structure thing. I talked to a teacher that's been teaching special ed for 12 years and he's about to quit because he said, “I spend every single Saturday now just filling out papers for various different things that I need to be able to report to the state or the district or my principal, or whatever. And I don't get paid for that. I'm just spending half my weekend every single week for the entire year filling out all this paperwork.”
Turner Novak: Is it literally pieces of paper?
Ryan Delk: Yeah. And he's like, “I'm sick of it. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going to be a private tutor or go make more money doing something else because I'm sick of doing this.”
That’s a perfect example of that sort of stacking thing I talked about where I'm sure that every person who passed the law that required him to fill out that next piece of paper was well-meaning and that on the face, it looks good. But when you thought about the 96 other things that he has to do and every Saturday now, clearly this is insane. And no one's actually stepped back and realized that we’re boiling the frog.
Turner Novak: So are you doing that? What are you guys building?
Ryan Delk: The core of Primer is that teachers are superheroes. If you empower them to become entrepreneurs and launch their own schools, specifically in their own communities, amazing things happen.
So you take a teacher that knows a neighborhood really well, knows a group of kids really well, knows families really well, and you empower him or her. You handle all the complexity for them at the Department of Education level, the local level, the federal level, all these things. You make it super simple for them to launch a school and you help them recruit students.
You give them technology that allows them to run a school so the school runs in a world-class way. The education is world-class, the parent communication is world-class. And when you do that, the student outcomes are amazing because the students are with a teacher that they connect with, that they love, and that knows them really well.
The teacher has an aide that supports them so you have way more support than the average third grade class. And the teachers make way more money. They're more excited about their work. And you end up with what we believe are pretty astounding outcomes even in neighborhoods or districts that typically have educational outcomes that are way below the mean in the state.
We've still seen some incredible data in terms of student progress, and we think that the microschools are the structural innovation that makes that happen.
Turner Novak: So how do you start a school?
Ryan Delk: It depends on where you live. If you're doing it on your own, in a lot of places it would be impossible. If you've have a $200,000 budget for lobbyists and lawyers and you could do it, but otherwise it would be impossible.
There’s three levels to it. One is, there's a state process for starting a private school in every state. And that process is varying degrees of impossible or difficult. It's various steps of paperwork and registration and making sure you have the right credentials to go to launch the school.
Once you get that done at the state level, which is already fairly difficult, then you have to go to the local level and you have to actually get the school live. So you have to find a building where you can actually operate a school.
You have to go to the local zoning board and say, “I'm going to operate a school here.” In some jurisdictions, they're going to say, “Great, where are you going to park the school bus?” And you say, “Oh, well I have 12 kids.” And they say, “We don't care. It's a school. You need school bus parking.” And you get in a six-month debate with them about why you don't need school bus parking.
Then finally, you give up and find another location that has school bus parking, even though you only have 12 kids. And so, it makes you want to bang your head against the wall. But we take on all that complexity for them. We go to war on their behalf to make it really easy for them to do that.
Turner Novak: How do you do that? Because it sounds very difficult. What all do you shift off their plate?
Ryan Delk: Without like giving away the whole playbook, we take on everything at the state level for them so that the teachers can essentially fill out one form at the beginning of the year with all their information.
Turner Novak: And this is not paper, this is electronic?
Ryan Delk: Yeah, this is electronic. And then for the rest of the year, we're able to handle almost everything on their behalf. Essentially what you're doing is you're registering the school with the state and saying, “I'm going to operate a new private school. This is the name of the school. Here are the students that are going to attend.” You then prove that whoever's leading that school is credentialed within the state and can lead the school.
Then on an ongoing basis, you're saying, “Here are the students that are attending this school. Here's how we're measuring academic outcomes. Here’s how many days they attended. They satisfied the requirements in Arizona or Florida or Texas, or wherever.” You're reporting all that to the DOE in very specific formats, and making sure that if they file it wrong, you're following up and making sure it's filed correctly.
On the local level, that’s actually more complicated. You're ensuring that you're in compliance with all the local zoning laws. That's everything from fire health inspections to traffic studies and there's various frequencies with which these things have to be renewed or reinspected.
There's a ton of nitty gritty. It actually turns out you can productize a lot of this, but for the average teacher, it's so much for them to try to figure out.
Turner Novak: Listening to you describe that – in the broader tech community, there's this whole solopreneur, “an individual can start a company” narrative. This sounds more like starting a corporation or an institution. This is not a small business – or at least this is not something that someone can take on by themselves, it seems like.
Ryan Delk: If you think about it, all these laws and regulations were created when a school meant a building with 900 students in it that was going to be constructed for four years and then had a ribbon pinning ceremony with the mayor. This idea of an individual teacher launching a school for 15 or 30 or 40 kids in their neighborhood totally breaks the system.
A lot of what we're doing is building a system that allows the system to work and be legible to someone who's just trying to do it on a small scale and doesn't actually need all this crazy stuff that the system requires.
Turner Novak: So when you say homeschooling, I would think of launching a school from their home. Is that often what happens or do some of your teachers actually have a building that people go to?
Ryan Delk: Actually, all of them are in buildings. None of them are in homes right now. They're in churches, community centers, libraries, commercial buildings – we do analysis and essentially find the best locations for the teachers for their schools. Then we work with them to help them find a great location near them.
Part of how we're able to offer the school at a really affordable cost to families, or in some cases, at no out-of-pocket cost, is by using existing real estate. We're not going and building a new school to launch a school – we're operating in existing underutilized real estate.
Turner Novak: What are some of the big narratives related to real estate? It's like, “All these commercial buildings are not filled. People are not renting. People are not going to work anymore.”
Ryan Delk: I was talking to someone the other day and he was like, “I own or co-own a bunch of malls across the US. We should put a Primer school in every mall because I need foot traffic. And then we'd have parents coming twice a day to drop off and pick up their kids.” I hadn't thought about that, but I do think there are a lot of interesting things.
The foot traffic component is a huge asset and also the underutilized component. Every church has space underutilized Monday through Friday from 8am to 4pm that you can use. Guaranteed. Community centers, same thing. Most of the activities are going to be after school on the weekends. Library, same thing – most of children's programming is after school on the weekends.
There already is this real estate footprint that, if you get good at navigating it, you're able to help source these locations for teachers.
Turner Novak: So on this homeschooling thread again – growing up, I had some friends who were homeschooled and it was at home with their parents. Maybe it was online, like what we went through with Covid. Does that work, online school?
Ryan Delk: In my opinion, the best possible learning environment for a child is going to be a world-class teacher interacting one-on-one in person with a kid. I think that's just far and away the best option.
The interesting part about technology is that it allows you to potentially give kids access to much higher quality teaching or learning experiences. So you have to figure out how much do you discount the fact that it's virtual versus the higher quality than they could get locally?
What happened in COVID is we took public school or private school, and we just changed the medium without changing anything about the structure, the delivery, or the schedule. There were slight modifications, but not really. We just said, “Okay, instead of this happening in person, we're going to have it happen online. It's going to be the exact same thing: 55-minute classes, etc.”
Obviously, that didn't work. And every parent has insane stories about their five-year-old trying to be in Zoom school. It's just like…come on, there's just no way this is going to work.
So my view on it – our view at Primer – is that technology is an incredibly powerful tool. We do use it for a lot of things. But it's best not to replace the in-person teacher relationship, which is why every microschool is led by a teacher and an aide. And they love the kids and they know the kids and they build a relationship with the kids.
It is an in-person community experience that uses technology to augment the experience for kids. It gives them virtual tutoring when they're behind or when they want to get ahead. There are always things that we use technology for, but the core is the experience.
If we talk to a kid, they're going to say “My teacher is Miss April. That is my teacher. I love Miss April. She knows me. She knows that my dog died last week and she sent me a note about it.” They have that relationship and I think that part of it is, especially for the elementary years, incredibly important. You cannot replace that with technology.
That being said, there are incredibly powerful tools for learning that we use and a lot of other schools use, and we're building some in-house too that are amazing and going to change the game. But I just don't think it's a one-to-one replacement for teachers.
Turner Novak: So if I'm a teacher interested trying something like Primer, what are you going to give me? You said you're building some really cool tools for them – what are some of the things that you guys have built so far?
Ryan Delk: When you sign up for Primer, you get all the regulatory stuff we talked about, which is, “We're going to handle creating this school for you. It's going to be spun up. You're going to not have to think about that at all.” And then you get our whole engine for family engagement and student engagement.
We have all this in-house technology that we built that takes all the learning experiences that kids are having across their in-person experiences with their teacher, virtual tutors that they might be working with, learning apps like Lexia or Edmentum or Zearn or Khan Academy or whatever, and it automatically ingests everything that they're doing. And then it gives the teacher and the parents a view into that so they understand how the students are progressing against their grade level benchmarks, where we think they could be.
We also show kids, “If you just kept working like you're working now, this is where you'd be at the end of the year. If you wanted to work really hard, here's where you could be at the end of the year.” And we show them that delta. We show, “If you work an extra 30 minutes a day, this is where you could be in math by the end of the year.”
And it turns out that kind of stuff is really motivating for kids, when you treat them like humans. They get super motivated by that and they end up working really hard and they love seeing their progress. So there are a lot of things like that that are not rocket science, but just most schools are not doing.
Turner Novak: What are some stories from students or teachers? Anything that stands out from the success that you guys have seen so far?
Ryan Delk: Yeah, a lot of them feel good, but they're also really sad. We had a student who came and her mom said, “She needs a lot of support. She's on an IEP[1], she's on medications, all these different things. She has this long list of things that her teachers have told me.”
[1] For kids to receive special education services, they need to be evaluated and given an Individualized Education Program, which is a program developed to ensure that a child with an identified disability receives specialized instruction and related services.
She came to Primer and a few weeks in, her microschool leader talked to our head of education and said, “I'm pretty sure she just doesn't know how to read. No one's ever taught her to read. She's in fourth grade and she's just really frustrated because she can't read.” And that'd be really frustrating for any fourth grader. So we have these accelerator or remedial support tracks that will give kids additional support in if they need.
Of course, it doesn't take that long for a fourth grader to learn how to read after being put in this support track. A few weeks later, all of a sudden, all these things started clicking for her. The mom was like, “What changed? What’s going on? What are you guys doing? This is amazing!”
They just helped her learn in a way that was actually personalized to her and made her feel supported. And for this family, it changed the world but for me it was extremely sad because this mom has been living in extreme anxiety about her child. This child has been completely failed by the system. And the domino effect of that, if it hadn't changed, could be catastrophic for that family.
That stuff really bothers me. As a parent, it bothers me and thinking about leading Primer, it bothers me.
We have other kids that come from really “good” public schools and they come into Primer and they're in the first percentile in reading and math. They're two or three grade levels behind. We had a kid, he was in the first percentile in reading and math, so we put him on this accelerated track and he got personalized tutoring and different resources.
And he actually came to his microschool leader and they were talking about what the goals were for the year, and he said, “I want to learn to read.” He was in third grade. “I want to learn to read. I'm sick of not knowing how to read. I'm sick of being made fun of.” And we're like, “Well, you're not going to get made fun of here, but we can definitely teach you how to read.”
So he and his parents and the microschool leader came up with a plan. And in 12 weeks, he went from the first percentile to the 38th percentile in reading.
Turner Novak: In a few weeks?
Ryan Delk: Yeah. In like three months. And then over that period, he was in the 99th percentile for rate of growth in the United States. So he grew faster than 99% of students.
And the crazy thing is that his math – we didn't do any remedial work for math. We just did reading, that's all we did. There was no additional support for math. His math scores jumped by almost the exact same amount.
It turns out that he just couldn't read a lot of the math problems, but he was actually incredibly strong at math. And so once he could read a lot of the math problems and the instructions, which is normal in third grade – math has words that are explaining thing – everything started clicking and it was all because of this remedial reading track that he was on.
None of this stuff is rocket science, but I just think that this comes back to the bureaucracy and stiffness of the traditional system that just struggles to serve these kids well. A lot of the challenge for us is: can you figure out how to scale that to a hundred thousand, to a million kids? Can you launch 5,000 microschools a year that can deliver those kinds of outcomes?
I think the only way to do that is through code and through technology, so that's what our team's working on.
Turner Novak: How old was that kid?
Ryan Delk: He's a third grader.
Turner Novak: So he was eight or nine years old?
Ryan Delk: Yep.
Turner Novak: There's no way that he could have done that by himself in the school system, right?
Ryan Delk: He would've been lucky to have some sort of remedial specialist that would've come in once a week or something and done one-on-one support. Schools try to do this, but it's just very difficult in the budget structure and the way that headcount is allocated.
Often times, these kinds of positions are actually funded by parents through the Parent-Teacher Association. And so they'll actually be donating money that will cover one headcount inside the school for a remedial reading specialist. It's not even covered by the district.
Parents are funding this position, thank God. But then every kid just gets a little bit of that time and you can't give them what they need.
Turner Novak: How did those kids discover Primer? Was it related to some of these struggles that they were having?
Ryan Delk: No, it was all through the teachers. These teachers are the face of the school. They're the superheroes. We're like, “Miss April's launching a microschool in Miami. You should join Miss April's school.” And Miss April is talking to families that she knows and telling them, “I'm launching my own school.” So really, they're the stars.
Turner Novak: How do you do that? I'm thinking, a teacher – they're very good at teaching, connecting with kids. All of a sudden they have to start marketing.
Ryan Delk: So it is different skillsets, but marketing is really just being able to communicate something in a way that connects with your audience and doing it in a way that leaves them trusting you or being willing to take some next step that you want them to take.
Teachers are actually really good at that because they're super good at interacting with parents. They're super good at interacting with kids, and they're super good at building trust with families.
We've found that it takes some push to say, “Here's the language that you could use.” Or “Here are some assets you could use.” But once you get in the ideas, it starts clicking, and we have some microschool leaders now that are really good at this. They are incredible entrepreneurs.
Everyone asks these questions like, “How do you get a teacher to run their own school? They're in charge of managing all these things?” And you're like, “Yeah, they're actually amazing. You're just underestimating teachers. That’s fine, you can keep underestimating them, but we're going to go empower them.”
The vast majority of them, when you put them in an environment like this, thrive. They're so excited. They actually just need someone to empower them and say, “We think you're amazing. Here are all the tools you need. You go chase this vision.” And they crush it.
Turner Novak: Yeah. The thing I found too, with parent or child-related, products – parents talk to each other. Did you unlock that in any way?
Ryan Delk: Yeah. We think about it as neighborhood growth. If one year, there's one microschool in a neighborhood with 20 kids, the next year we want there to be three microschools in that neighborhood with 60 kids across those microschools.
We track that very carefully and that's happening in every neighborhood that we're in. It's a combination of teachers driving the growth and the families driving the growth.
So many families are desperate for better schools that once one family is saying, “Oh, we love this school that we're at and it's really affordable, you could probably afford it.” That just spreads really quickly.
Turner Novak: Okay. So on “affordable.” Say I'm a parent and I'm excited about Primer. I find a really good teacher in my neighborhood, but the public school is free. I probably have to pay for Primer in some capacity. How does that work?
Ryan Delk: We work super hard to find every scholarship dollar available to every family. There are families that attend Primer and pay out-of-pocket , and they’ll pay tuition that's on par with good private schools – not the top private schools, we're not competing with the $50,000 year private schools – but they'll pay full tuition.
And then we also have families that are extremely low-income that can pay either zero or very little out-of-pocket. We have, to date, never turned anyone away for how much they could pay.
We built this system that essentially gets every family every possible scholarship dollar they could get, whether it's from the state or from private foundations. We also have the Primer Foundation, which is our own foundation that we go fundraise for, that helps cover some of these costs for low-income families.
The reality is that most of these programs are very difficult to navigate for families, but they're out there. If you help families navigate them and you educate them on them, they end up totally able to do it and access the capital. But programs are not super user-friendly.
The goal for us is: how can we make these schools be able to be self-sustaining, even with very low out-of-pocket contributions from some families. That’s sort of the holy grail, because if you can do that, you can compete head-to-head with a traditional system.
Turner Novak: Okay. So how do you get the teachers on board?
Ryan Delk: Teachers are pumped about it. We get tons of applications for every microschool when we announce that we're launching a new city. We also go out and proactively find teachers that we think are going to be a really good fit.
From a teaching perspective, they get a huge raise over what they're typically making. They get the opportunity to make a lot of income where their income is incentivized with the success of the school. They have additional bonuses and raises and different things that happen based on that.
They also get extreme amounts of freedom because most teachers are motivated by connecting with kids and driving academic outcomes. We give them basically total freedom to do those two things and a bunch of technology that makes those two things easier.
What they hear from their friends that tell them about it is, “There’s a school you can go work at where you can start your own school. You have a ton of freedom, you make more money, and you get to make a huge impact on these students.” That’s every teacher's dream.
Turner Novak: So how can you afford to pay a teacher more?
Ryan Delk: There's no bureaucracy in the system. It's a teacher and an aide in an existing underutilized real estate asset, which are still very nice, by the way. These campuses are beautiful. They're gorgeous.
It's just that we're not going out and building some new school. We're using something that already exists and there's very little overhead for the school. It's the building, insurance, rent, utilities, cleaning, the microschool leaders’ salary, the aides’ salary, the virtual teachers, and the curriculum for the kids, and that's it.
There isn’t this huge cost base of principals and operations managers and all these things that exist in the traditional system. You take all that out, and all of a sudden, you have a lot more money to go to teachers.
Turner Novak: You kind of unbundled it, because currently schools are just bundles of all these little classrooms and they operate independently. Do you miss out then, on having music class or art class or gym class? Because there's no gym teacher, there's no art studio and music space?
Ryan Delk: Some of that you can do virtually. We have some of that that the microschool leader will lead. We have one microschool leader this year that was very passionate about robotics, so she led a robotics intensive for her kids that were all really excited about robotics. A lot of the elective type stuff can happen in that environment, but certainly there are trade offs. You're not in a 1,200 person high school with a football team.
There are things that some families will value and some students will value, where microschools are not a good fit. But we think for a lot of families, the trade-offs of having this intimate environment where kids can move at their own pace, they feel supported, and they have agency, is worth the trade-off of those things.
In Florida and a lot of states, you can still participate in a lot of stuff after school at your local public school or at any private school. So in Florida, for example, you can play sports at a public school regardless of whether or not you go there. So there's actually a lot of choice for afterschool and different types of activities for kids regardless of where you go to school.
Turner Novak: Is there like a Primer curriculum that is being top-down distributed? If I'm a teacher or even a parent, do I have input on what gets taught?
Ryan Delk: Parents have transparency into everything their kids are learning.
Turner Novak: Is there an app?
Ryan Delk: Yeah, so they see everything their kids are learning. They know, “My kid is using Khan Academy to learn more about three-digit subtraction” or whatever it might be. They obviously know who the teachers are. They have parent-teacher conferences, all that stuff. We mostly tell the teachers, “This is the stack, this is what we developed.” It’s some combination of in-house and existing stuff.
The teachers do have some flexibility within that and so they can decide, “I think like the class needs a lot of help with this specific thing,” or “They're really interested in this thing and so we want to pivot and spend more time on this.” They have the freedom to do that.
So it's a combination of things that we've developed in-house, existing things, and then the teachers reading the room and understanding what students need and calibrating on that.
Turner Novak: So you probably take feedback from the teachers and are building new capabilities and products and making their job easier as they go, right?
Ryan Delk: The quality of the teacher sets the floor. If you take an absolute top 0.001% teacher and you put them in a room with 30 kids, they're going to crush it. That's going to be an unbelievable experience.
If you had one of the top hundred third-grade teachers in the US, it doesn't matter what technology exists, it doesn't matter what room you're in. You could be in a warehouse somewhere and those kids are probably going to have an amazing time because that teacher's just going to nail it and everything's going to be amazing.
Technology is, I think, something that can actually raise the bar for every teacher regardless of what their specific strengths and weaknesses are. And so some teachers are really good at figuring out and intuitively knowing where each kid's at and where they're struggling. Some teachers are really good instructionally. Some teachers are really good at emotionally connecting with kids.
The way we think about technology is: how do you help every teacher be top 1% at everything? They get to do what they can do best and they have technology that shores up the things at their weak end.
If a teacher isn't the best fifth-grade math teacher in the world, they have a virtual fifth-grade math tutor that can work one-on-one with a student and help them learn something and do it in a way that's extremely tailored to that student's experience.
They then don’t have the pressure to nail that themselves when they might be really good at history or science or pursuits that are more immersive things that we work on. The idea is that technology augments and raises the bar for the teachers.
Turner Novak: I'm jumping back a little bit, but what was the moment that you came up with the idea to do all of this?
Ryan Delk: If we jump way back, my mom was a public school teacher and we moved from Atlanta to Orlando. She took me to kindergarten orientation and she had a crisis where she was like, “I can't leave you here” because like most teachers, she had taught me math, reading stuff before I was in kindergarten.
She was actually very anti alternative education so she wrote an essay against homeschooling and against alternative education. She was very pro public schools, but she kind of had this crisis. We didn't have any money so there was no world where I was going to go to a private school. And so she decided to quit her job and essentially what she started was a microschool.
It wasn't called out at the time, but she got a group of other families together and she started homeschooling me and helping organize these groups of kids that were mostly in our neighborhood. I had this unbelievable education experience and she thought she would do this for like a year but she ended up doing it for 16 years. She taught kindergarten through eighth grade for me and my two younger siblings and it was incredible.
In the moment you're like a snotty-nosed fifth-grader, you have no idea. You're like, “Oh, this is school, whatever.” But I look back on it and it's like, oh, we needed to learn about the American Revolution? She rented a van and drove us up the coast from Florida to all the 13 colonies to walk where Paul Revere rode the horse. She made all these things come to life for us.
I remember we were learning something about biology or organs or something, and she went to a butcher and convinced a butcher to give her the lungs of a cow or something and brought them home in a cooler. It was like this bizarre but amazing way to learn.
I just thought that was school. And then I went to traditional high school, college, dropped out, moved to San Francisco. I met my wife at college. We got married and we started having kids. And I was like, “Okay, well I want them to have that. That's the thing that I want because that was incredible.”
And I sort of knew this intuitively every year, but I learned how rare that was. I just assumed that someone had cracked that nut. I knew it was a huge market. I knew we spent ton of money on education. I thought there was this pretty interesting decentralized distributed approach with microschools. And I knew that homeschooling and homeschool co-ops were already a thing. And so this is like a productized version of that.
It wasn't that big of a shift in terms of consumer behavior and these things were sort of already working, but they were very organic. Basically, I realized it didn't exist.
I was in the process of selling the last company that I was working on and I still remember a very clear moment where I was like, “Okay, I'm going to do this. And hopefully this is my life's work.”
I think it's one of those problems that you need to have kids to feel personally how big of a deal this is. It was very clear to me that so many other people in the space were either building auxiliary things that were add-ons or extracurricular or whatever, or they were trying – if they were building actual schools and trying to solve this fundamental problem – they were doing it by building really high-end private schools.
They were competing with the $50,000 per year private schools and no one had really tried to create a model that could compete head-to-head and actually be accessible for the average family making $55,000 a year living in the Midwest.
That was what was interesting to me because that was my family. My family was not going to pay $50,000 at private schools. It's never going to happen. And so once the pieces started coming together, microschools felt like this sort of structural shift that allowed that to be possible.
Turner Novak: So why don't you think anyone approached it the same way that you did? All the things we've just talked about, it sounds very complicated.
Ryan Delk: Actually, I briefly tried to get other people to start this company and tried to convince other founders because I wanted it to exist for my kids. I was like, “Oh, someone when should build this.” And they were all like, “That sounds terrible. I would never do that.” It's extremely hard.
It’s one of those startups that like what Elon talks about with SpaceX famously, and with Tesla the same thing: this will probably fail. The odds are that this will fail, but if we're successful, we're going to change the course of civilization.
I feel that we're in a very different market and industry, but education is one of those problems that most people that attack and fail. But if you are one of the companies that can actually figure out how to find some wedge or find some structural shift that makes some change possible, that will change the course of those kids' lives.
I think the reason why so many people haven't done it is because the incumbent forces are very good at protecting their interests. They do that through funding, through legislation, through making it hard to compete. And the reality is that that machine is real, and you have to be ready for war if you're going to go into this market because they know what they're doing.
These are not amateurs. They’re very good at this. They've done it for 60+ years. They're going to continue doing it for a long time. And so it’s one of those things that you have to go and clear-eyed about.
But I also think that makes the opportunity so much more exciting because the challenge is not wondering if there's demand, or wondering if you're going to be able to figure out: is this thing something people want? You know it’s something people want and people are voting with their feet and their dollars and their voices and polls.
You just have the question: can we execute? And that's what's exciting to me. That’s what our team wakes up every morning really excited about.
Turner Novak: Okay so you had this idea. How did you go about doing this? Like how did you make it start to happen and work?
Ryan Delk: The first idea was, “Okay, we're going to build an online aggregation point.” We called them clubs, where we're going to get all the most ambitious kids together on the internet and have them work on projects together. Our seed memo was like, “We're going to build this, and then once we get geographic density, we're going to launch microschools in those communities, and use the internet-native product to scale super fast.”
We unfortunately slash fortunately launched Primer ~30 days before the COVID lockdowns. And so we had this massive surge of interest of all these people being like, “I need to teach my kid math!” The company is like 26 days old or something at this point and like…no, we can't teach your kid math. We were still trying to figure things out.
We had this huge surge of interest and then everyone went back to school so there was a bunch of churn, and we had this choice where we could continue working on the internet-native version of Primer or we could go right for the endgame.
I had breakfast with a prominent friend, investor – not an investor in Primer – but I was asking him for his thoughts on this dilemma that I was facing. Hee said, “Look, I don't know anyone who's ever regretted, in this position, going after the absolute hardest problem as fast as possible and trying to deliver the fundamental solution to the market and saying this is the whole thing.”
Microschools were the whole thing. It's literally a one-for-one replacement of your kid's existing school that you don't like. It's not an afterschool thing. It's not this online program. You can go to this next year instead of the school that you hate. And that was a very critical moment for me in this decision to go all in on microschools and accelerate that.
Keith Rabois has this great concept of barrels at companies. I knew that if we were going to do this, we would need to have a barrel, uh, that could sort of own this like end to end and make it happen.
Turner Novak: What's a barrel?
Ryan Delk: Barrels are people or companies that can take a project and own it end-to-end. And so you can say, “Hey, we need to do this thing.” That’s the one conversation you need to have and then they will go figure out, “What do I need to be successful? How do we define success? What are all the inputs? Let me go make that happen.” And you can just trust them to get it done.
I ended up meeting this guy Ian, who was actually in OnDeck, who was working on a microschool company in Miami. I was able very thankfully to convince him to join Primer. And he just spearheaded getting these pilot schools off the ground.
We actually launched the pilot schools in 126 days from when we decided to like do it. 126 days later, we had five pilot schools live in Miami with students and teachers like ready to go, which was insane.
Turner Novak: How did you convince him?
Ryan Delk: He's a long-time educator, so he has launched schools and been in the charter school world for a long time. He would probably say that the education side of it was very clear to him. But the sort of regulatory, capital, company side, was this whole other beast.
By doing it as part of Primer and joining us to help get these off the ground, he was able to de-risk a lot of that and then focus on the actual operations and education side of the microschools. I think that was a trade-off that he was really excited to make.
Turner Novak: How do you approach that? Hiring somebody super talented that could probably start their own company?
Ryan Delk: A bunch of our team members actually are former founders, and I think the common thread is that you have a company that has a sufficiently large vision so they have a BATNA, like the best alternative to negotiated agreement.
If you're a former founder, you have all these ideas that you could go build and you could probably start a bootstrapped company if you wanted and raise money if you wanted. You need to have a vision that is sufficiently compelling that is better than anything that they have thought about doing themselves and that they're excited about doing instead of all these other things.
And then I think you need to have a culture where they can come in and operate like a founder. Primer's culture is extremely autonomous. It's very rare that I will tell them how something needs to be done. It's almost always, “This is the goal. This is what we're trying to do. And I totally trust them to go figure it out.”
Turner Novak: How do you trust someone?
Ryan Delk: Hire really good people.
Turner Novak: Okay, fair. (chuckles)
Ryan Delk: And I think that honestly, the only way to make that type of culture work is if you have great talent, because otherwise you're going to have to be involved in every single detail and you have to be prescriptive about how things get done, not just what the output is. If you do that, you just get super bogged down.
Our team is super small. We're only 12 people today at HQ. So we have to have a very talented team. I think across the board, our team is just exceptionally talented and a lot of them are former founders or people that have been on the founding teams of great companies.
Turner Novak: It's almost like that also flows down to the teachers because they are part of the company. How do you hire really good teachers?
Ryan Delk: That’s a good question for Ian. We sort of screen for three things. The first is instructional ability. Are they a great instructional teacher? We look at references, we look at classroom videos. We have them do lessons that they teach to screen for their instructional ability. That's table stakes.
The second is how do they relationally connect with kids? Every kid has a teacher that's like, “That teacher changed my life. That teacher was my favorite person, my hero, whatever, when I was in second grade.” Every Primer teacher should be that person for those kids. That’s how they should look back on it 20 years from now. That’s our bar.
The third piece is, are they entrepreneurs? And we talked about this earlier – are they able to run their own business, their own organization, and can they, when the printer breaks, figure out how to fix it? It’s all these things that, at a traditional school, you'd have someone to do that. All of a sudden, it's you and the aide running the school. You have to figure it out.
Those are the three things that we screen for. And then we weigh really heavily references from families and from colleagues. It turns out that family references are like gold for this because families are really honest about their teaacher experiences.
Turner Novak: Yeah. So Ian joins, you've launched the first five schools in Miami. What time is this?
Ryan Delk: May 2022.
Turner Novak: So about a year ago.
Ryan Delk: Little over a year ago, yep.
Turner Novak: How did it go?
Ryan Delk: Those 126 days were maybe the most intense of my career. But in great way. The first day of school, families showed up, teachers showed up, and this was the beginning of or middle of August. There were a lot of things that we didn't know and there was a lot of things that we messed up.
Turner Novak: What did you mess up?
Ryan Delk: I think we underestimated the distribution of the actual grade levels, meaning the current abilities of the kids that were coming in and how wide those would be for kids whose education mostly happened during COVD. You can read all the New York Times headlines and you can think it's fake but that learning loss is real.
Turner Novak: What were the headlines?
Ryan Delk: All these stories where either it did impact kids a lot or didn't impact kids a lot. It did. And these kids are behind.
I don't think we were as clear-eyed about that reality going into it and I think we would've done a lot of things differently. We didn't figure out this whole remedial, accelerated structure until later on in the year. And we definitely would've prioritized having that ready on day one if we would have known that. because it turns out that's really effective, but you have to have that infrastructure in place and the staffing and everything to make it happen.
We got the schools live and parents, it turns out, are very excited and love it. Almost every parent and family is coming back next year. A hundred percent teachers are coming back next year.
Every single campus has net negative revenue churn. Between siblings and parent referrals, there are more students, even without any of our marketing efforts, attending every single campus than last year.
Turner Novak: Okay, so this is leading up to right now. Did it end yet or is it still going?
Ryan Delk: It depends on the campus, but next week is the last day of school for most of them.
Turner Novak: So what happens in the summer now at Primer?
Ryan Delk: It's weird because, depending on the team, it's either your time to exhale or your time for all-nighters and working every weekend. For the operation education side, this is the time to take an exhale. For the admissions and growth side, September, October is the time to take the exhale because it’s after the school year starts, and right before you ramp up for next year. It's kind of these staggered times, but the team's excited.
Turner Novak: So what are you guys doing on the admissions and the growth side? Right now specifically, are there certain tests you're running? What are the best channels?
Ryan Delk: The biggest thing we're leaning into is just microschool leader-driven recruitment. Like how do you make them star of the show? How do you give them all the tools and resources they need to be able to go effectively recruit students?
We're also trying to figure out the optimal process is. Every school does the same thing, which is you come to a tour, and then if it's a private school, you do a family interview type thing where you go meet the administrators and they're kind of screening you and you're screening them and whatever. It’s this awkward like thing.
Turner Novak: Your kid is there, the kid is kind of playing with the toys.
Ryan Delk: Exactly. And they're observing the blocks like “Oh, he didn't stack the blocks, can’t get into this school…” It’s a bizarre thing. So we thought about all that from first principles, like what's the actual optimal way?
And it’s this balance. You want to give parents enough information that they feel like they have the information they need to make a decision. But I think the reality is, most parents actually want less time spent on the dog and pony show, and they more just want to get the info they need very efficiently make a call, and then they want to be able to opt into more information.
The way we do it is we have a very lightweight process and then at the midpoint of that process, the family can choose, like do you want to come on a tour or do you want to come meet your teacher? Do you want to do all these things? And you can do all those things.
If you're like, “No, I know I want to enroll and I'm going to go on summer vacation and I don't want to do all that stuff,” you can just like enroll and then we'll see you when you show up for the first day of school. So there are a lot of things we're trying to figure out from that side.
It's a funnel basically, so what's the most efficient funnel amd how do you apply all the things that we know that are best practices from running tech companies for thinking about funnels to a school admissions process.
Turner Novak: So what's working the best there?
Ryan Delk: Everything related to the microschool leaders is working the best. Them talking to families, them being at tours, talking about the school, them doing events –all that stuff outperforms everything else that our team could do.
As far as running Facebook ads or things like that. the other thing that works really well is, now that we have one year under our belt, being able to show very specific student outcomes from last year. Obviously it's anonymized, but very few schools show any specific student outcome data.
It's usually like, “We're a blue ribbon school, or we're a gold ribbon school.” And it's like, okay, what does that exactly mean? It’s sort of this big aggregate idea.
We're able to say like, “Hey, here's an anonymous story. You have a kid that came in at this level, went through this specific track that your kid could also go to if they needed it, and then six months later they were at this level.”
That's very compelling for families because it feels like, there's an engine here that my kid can benefit from, and can be opted into or I can opt them into. This is specifically how it would work and it's not this vague idea.
Turner Novak: So it sounds like you have a little bit of what the tech community likes to call a flywheel. There are little things that are really starting to work, compounding. How did you get the first couple teachers on board? Because if you're just like, “We're doing this new school,” it probably sounds a little bit insane.
Ryan Delk: Ian led all of that on our team. Some of them were people that we knew already or that the team had relationships with. But honestly, they took a flyer on us. I will never forget. I told them this actually. We had an all hands with them two days ago.
Turner Novak: In person?
Ryan Delk: No virtual. And I told them, “All of you took a bat this year on Primer, and I will never, ever forget that.” They all have equity in the company. They joined when it was nothing.
They just believed us, that we were actually going to launch these schools. They went and recruited kids. It was the ultimate vote of trust and hopefully that pays off for them. But yeah. I'll never forget the ones that took a bat on us last year and I don’t take that lightly.
Turner Novak: Is there anything that really stands out to you? Any numbers about how education works that are really surprising to you that other people might find interesting?
Ryan Delk: We talked about this a little bit earlier, but the blend of where spend is going. In general, the trend is that we spend a lot of money on education on a per kid basis. The average public school spends twice what we need to spend at Primer to educate kids. And there's so much of this that just goes to the bureaucracy layer.
A lot of this, I think, comes down to a lack of trust in teachers and all these management layers that have been put in place. There was an essay that I saw that was a person writing out their experience working in a school in the seventies and the org chart. And then the experience working in a school that, I think maybe their daughter or son works in a school now, has. And they were just comparing the difference.
Turner Novak: We can put it in the show notes.
Ryan Delk: They were talking about the experience, the difference in experience between 53 years or whatever – the difference in the org chart of running a 600 kid or 900 kid elementary school. This is a reductionist narrative, but it was like a principal, some teachers, the school janitor, and a few other people. And now the school has the principal, and then however many assistant principals, and these other management layers, and then teachers, and then all these support staff.
These things are – maybe not the management layers – but the support staff and these things are nominally there for improving student outcomes and supporting students, but there's just a lot of money going to things that are not “a teacher teaching these kids math.”
Maybe one of the things that's interesting to talk about is the difference between, the signal versus the actual outcomes. In San Francisco, the school district has historically been obsessed with the signal that they put out about the things that they care about. And so they put out all sorts of signals that they care about minority students and minority students feeling a certain way in schools, or that they want to prioritize minority students. They make all these changes and they make this huge sort of big grand public PR statement.
And then three years later, it turns out all the minority students are doing worse in all the subjects after all the things that they change. You look at the math data and it's just very clear, and no one talks about it. No one mentions it. It's like no one makes a big deal out of it.
They created this signal publicly that they were going to make all these radical changes in the name of this initiative and then it actually had the exact opposite outcome of what they wanted but they still have this brand of like prioritizing these things.
Turner Novak: Has anyone diagnosed and figured out why that happened?
Ryan Delk: I haven't looked into the specifics of that, like what exactly it was that they changed, but I think it is a symptom of the problem where a lot of these institutions, they care a lot about the signals that they put out, but they're not actually obsessed with the outcome data.
It's much easier to create a signal. It's much easier to create a narrative that like, “We care about this” or “At our school, we prioritize this,” and it’s actually really hard to create good student outcomes. That's one of the things people don't realize about education. It's very difficult.
There are a lot of reasons why the spend is going where it is, and you can trace it back to some of these broader secular trends around the managerial class and the bloat of that level of organizations and I don't think schools are any exception.
Turner Novak: The thing that's always blown my mind about the San Francisco school system is, we both have kids that go to school. This is a little bit of an extreme example, but you might live right next to a school, but San Francisco has a system where it's a lottery, right? And you don't get to pick. You might live right next to an elementary school and it makes sense to send your kid next door, but your kid might actually have to go to a school that’s 30 minutes away.
Ryan Delk: Yeah. And this is a perfect example – that policy was enacted to increase the equity of school districts or schools so that the people that lived in lower-income neighborhoods were also able to go to schools across the city and then vice versa. You wouldn't have any bad schools, you would have kids from all over the city constantly going to all these other schools – on the surface.
You take the geography out of it, and this sounds awesome. But no one talked to parents about like, “Are you okay carpooling? Or driving your kid for two and a half hours and being in the car every day if you have a kid that goes to school?” 90% of parents would be like… no, definitely not going to do that.
And so, of course, private school enrollment in San Francisco skyrocketed. People leaving San Francisco skyrocketed. I think this is a crystal perfect example of a well-meaning policy that on the surface looks good, but the implementation of it actually has the exact opposite effect, which is that a lot of the students just leave San Francisco and the enrollment in SFUSD[2] has gone down four years in a row.
[2] San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is the seventh largest school district in California, educating around 49,000 students every year.
Turner Novak: Is this a San Francisco-specific situation or are there other examples or similar things going on broadly across the country?
Ryan Delk: San Francisco is one that makes a lot of headlines, but I think it's emblematic of a lot of school systems across the country and the dysfunction. They've just become very political, not in a left or right way, but just they are political entities in that, in San Francisco for example, it's a stepping stone to higher office.
You run for school board and then you run for board of supervisors. And so there are just a lot of politics, and these people actually make very critical decisions for the school district and they vote on very important things. There's a very real sense in which those things should not be political, that it should function more like a board of directors versus like an elected mini legislative branch of the school district.
Turner Novak: Yeah. And then when you think about what the downstream implications are, it’s the kids that are that are in this every day. Anything else that you've kind of seen?
Ryan Delk: At some point we'll share stories publicly. I think there are a lot of really good public schools in the US and I've been to a lot of these schools so I don't want to make a blatant statement about every public school. But the worst public schools in the US are an order of magnitude worse than people think they are.
The stories that we hear from parents about what their kids experience – it is like just gut-wrenching stuff. I think that’s a very uncomfortable truth that we sort of push to the fringes and just say, “Well if you’re talking about that, you're trying to create some anti-public school narrative” or whatever.
The reality is, if you really care about public schools and you want to fix public schools, the fastest path to doing that would be being real about that reality – Talking about the data, making the data transparent, and then figuring out, “Okay, what are all the inputs that have led to this, and how do we change all those inputs to make sure this doesn't happen again?” A lot of these schools, it's just a very sad situation.
Turner Novak: Yeah and that's not really unique to the education system. Anything in life, you gotta face it.
I also wanted to say, my daughter goes to a public school we love it. It's great. We're huge fans. So it does work in a lot of cases.
If you weren't doing Primer, what other problems out there would you take on?
Ryan Delk: So I had an idea I briefly explored before Primer that I don't know I've ever talked about publicly – I had a friend and one of his business partners, his other business was government contracting and winning these government contracts.
He had just figured out a way to game the system and make a couple million bucks a year by basically arbitraging things like buying them and then immediately reselling them to the government for significant markups. He would tell me all these stories about the procurement, departments of various government entities, and how they were double paying for software and all these things.
And so an idea I briefly explored, which I decided not to do and might be one of the things that would be harder than education, was building software to try to fix government procurement.
One of the macro things that I'm very worried about is debt-to-GDP and how, because of the structure of our government, it’s going to always be a problem that no one wants to tackle because the only way to tackle is by making very uncomfortable decisions that are going to be very unpopular with voters and no one wants to get voted out.
What we always talk about in terms cutting government spending would be to cut these programs. I'm not saying it doesn't need to happen, but the government wastes insane amounts of money. I could never get a real number, but it's certainly billions of dollars, I think, that you could remove from the system.
If you were able to deploy some sort of software layer that would be able to predict where double spend was happening, be able to help figure out how to cut costs – some of it would be process reform and some of it would be an actual software layer – if you could sort of do what like Anduril is doing for defense, but do it for government procurement and contracting, I think that's a huge opportunity that, if you were sufficiently motivated about this sort of government spending problem and attacking it by making the government much more efficient, is really interesting.
It would take a long time to infiltrate the system enough that you could actually get whatever solution you figured out to reform procurement to exist everywhere. And it would be probably very unpopular. But if you could do it, I'm convinced that you could save absurd amounts of money and then the pitch would be like, “You should have bipartisan boards because we can go pay for all those things that you all want to do and we can pay without raising taxes.”
Turner Novak: Or even cut taxes.
Ryan Delk: Yeah, hypothetically. I think it's one of those things that would take someone totally insane to go actually try to build that.
Turner Novak: People benefit from the government overspending.
Ryan Delk: Exactly. This is the problem. And in some ways, it's a sort of social program by taking taxpayer dollars and getting it back into the economy. So there are both sides to it.
Turner Novak: I know there's been a meme every time, it really resurfaces. It’s about how much money the Pentagon doesn't know is being spent. It's like half of the budget. They just don't even know where it goes.
Ryan Delk: The Pentagon has never passed an audit. That’s the crazy stat. They've never successfully been able to say, “Here's the paper trail on everything.” And it's not minor things that they don't know, it's like a billion dollars. It’s probably very important parts for airplanes that cost insane amounts of money, and they just don't know where they are.
Turner Novak: Yeah, that definitely sounds like a problem. Anything else?
Ryan Delk: All the other ideas that I have are not really like venture scale things. I think there are a lot of things you could do to fix local politics. I think there's this huge societal problem, which is that everyone cares an order of magnitude or two, maybe more, about federal politics than they do about like local politics, when actually, local politics impacts your life probably the same extent. But almost no one knows, even in San Francisco where it's very contentious.
We did some recent polling and it was like, 70% of people don't even know who their local supervisor is, much less have an opinion on them or vote for them or whatever. They’re probably one of the people in your life that has the highest amount of power over your quality of life for the next four years, certainly more than the president. Everyone in every city just has no idea.
I think there are things that you could do that would connect the work of local governments more to the day-to-day experience of citizens. You could sort of make the way the system works legible to citizens in a way that would make them more excited to engage in elections and advocacy and different things. I think that would be a very positive force, certainly in the United States, to have more people engaged in local government.
Turner Novak: It really ties into, a little bit, what you're doing with Primer. Not directly, maybe indirectly. We can end with, what does the future look like for Primer? How do you think about the next couple years, five years, ten years?
Ryan Delk: The goal is to build an engine so that you can launch thousands of microschools a year. You can use technology to take any top 1% teacher and help them launch their own schools. That's what the team's focused on.
Do it in a way that's accessible to every family, so not something that just is accessible to people that can afford to spend $40,000 on private school. The average American family can have a great education option in their neighborhood.
Turner Novak: It's really interesting when you think about outcomes, but when you really think about it, if you are the federal government, these students and these kids are going to grow up and they're going to contribute to society. And when we talk about tax revenue, you want to optimize the tax revenue of the the kids that are coming through. You want these kids to be very successful. They benefit the country as a whole.
Ryan Delk: When I think about my own fulfillment, I was talking to my wife a couple weeks ago, I was like, I think the moment that will be successful to me is if I'm 60 years old and I'm reflecting back on Primer, I can think back on all these kids for whom Primer was a small part of their journey, and they went on to find their own fulfillment or make a huge impact on the world. I would be just as excited about a kid that grew up to start some awesome small business as I would be someone that went on to become president.
The idea that Primer is sort of like this index fund, not in a financial sense, but in a sort of outcome for humanity sense – Primer and education in general is upstream of solving all these problems that we have, whether it’s political or science problems, whatever they are.
The idea that we are this engine that can help push more kids into taking on these ambitious challenges – I think that's the thing that when I'm sixty years old, hopefully I can look back on and feel that fulfillment.
Turner Novak: Yeah, it's pretty exciting.
Ryan Delk: Thanks man.
Turner Novak: This is really cool, thanks for your time and coming on!
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