🎧🍌 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.

👉 Find the episode on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 👈

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.

---

This episode is brought to you by Secureframe, the automated compliance platform built by compliance experts. Book a demo here.

To inquire on sponsorship opportunities for future episodes, click here.

---

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?

Stream the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.