The World is Changing. Your Child's Education Isn't.

Hello,

My name is Akshay Iyer. I am a founder who just turned 24 and have spent the past year in San Francisco in the middle of the tech startup ecosystem, observing how effective founders operate.

By background, I ranked among the top 0.01% in India's toughest STEM exam (the IIT-JEE), completed three years of AI research at IIT Bombay (one of India's best tech universities), and earned a Master's degree in Computer Science from Columbia University (Ivy League). I've built multiple software products used by thousands of people and previously ran a YouTube channel with 20k subscribers and millions of views.

Outside of formal education, I'm also an avid reader of biographies, science, economics, and strategy, and it has compounded my thinking in a way no other education has.

I have been seeing how AI is changing the world; and from the center of the city leading that change. I viscerally feel how short our current education system falls. This program is my attempt to give a small group of students exposure to the way serious founders actually think, learn, and build.

What am I offering?

Traditional education was made to train your kid to be an employee in a world without AI. That world is going to change incredibly quickly. Software engineering has already changed irreversibly - AI today codes so well that many of the CS skills they would have learnt in college have begun to rapidly diminish in value.

I want to give your child the skills and mindset that will help them win in this new world, the founder mindset. I think the best way they will learn is by:

1. Building something real and high potential for the world. (An AI/software product)
2. Building judgment and independent thinking by learning the best ideas from founders, economics, psychology and strategy - This will be based on the most critically acclaimed books in the space. This is very important to both decide what to build, and to be the one who succeeds at it.

I will teach them to think and act like the best startup founders in San Francisco.

Who is this for?

The first cohort of this program is strictly for students who are:

1. Very motivated and curious.
2. Know the basics of coding.
3. In Grades 9-11.

This is NOT for:

• Students looking for a "coding class" or "extra tutoring."
• Students who need to be reminded to do their work.
• Anyone looking for a passive learning experience.

Students will be expected to read, write, build, and think independently every week.

What will they have to show for it?

Their Writings: They will publish blogs to put their ideas out into the world and build an intellectual footprint. I will help them build a presence on twitter, where the tech community has the most presence.

A Real-World Product: I will guide them through the process of launching a product publicly and acquiring their first real users. They won't just have an idea; they will have a public track record.

Visible Conversational Change: You will see a visible change in how they speak and think. This is something I have seen in myself and many of my friends who have given themselves a similar self-education. This difference will be evident in their college applications too. It will give their opinions a level of depth that would not be possible otherwise. The smartest Stanford students I know are very evidently well read.

A Love for Reading: I may be able to help them prioritise learning and reading more than they do currently. As Naval Ravikant once said, reading an hour a day may very well put you in the top 0.001% of people.

How will I do this?

I will mentor them 2 hours per week in small groups or 1-on-1.

I will give them access to an AI tutor that they use during the week, which will help them consume important content that will help them understand how the world works - this will be content grounded on the most important books and biographies in the course plan.

I will mentor them to learn what interests them and use AI to build projects in those domains.

The 3 Month Roadmap

Most of the content I will cover will be based on the books that the most successful founders have repeatedly quoted as changing their lives and approach to work.

We are not reading these end-to-end. We extract specific mental models and apply them.

Week 1: The Foundations of Thought

We begin by reshaping how students think at the most fundamental level. The focus is first-principles reasoning, rationality, and explanation-based thinking. We examine how great thinkers deconstruct problems, what the right way to evaluate risk is, and where human reasoning systematically fails.

Core readings:

• The Beginning of Infinity - Sam Altman and Naval Ravikant's favourite book.
• Elon Musk's first-principles approach (essays, interviews, case studies)
• LessWrong Blogs
• Naval's Almanac

Week 2: Artificial Intelligence & the Long-Term Future

We zoom out to understand where humanity is heading. Students learn how to reason about exponential technologies, long time horizons, and civilisational shifts. The goal is not hype, but sober thinking about AI, intelligence, and the future of work and power.

Core readings:

• The Singularity Is Near
• Superintelligence - Highly recommended by Sam Altman.
• Iain Banks series on humanity post AGI
• Machines of Loving Grace - By the CEO of Anthropic

Week 3: Frontier Technologies

This phase builds conceptual fluency in the technologies that will define students' lifetimes. We focus on understanding how these technologies work at a high level, what problems they unlock, and why they matter, without turning students into passive consumers or narrow specialists.

Week 4: Self-Mastery & Influence

Before changing the world, students must learn to govern themselves. This week focuses on habit formation, decision-making, persuasion, and social intelligence.

Core readings:

• Atomic Habits
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Thinking Fast and Slow

Week 5: High-Agency Lives

This week grounds everything in reality. We study individuals who took responsibility, made hard decisions, and executed at scale.

Core readings:

• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Titan by Ron Chernow
• Founders Podcast

Week 6: Strategic Reality

This week shifts students from abstract intelligence to real-world strategy. We study incentives, power, competition, and cooperation.

Core readings:

• The Art of Strategy
• The Art of War
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Weeks 7-12: Building & Launching

With the intellectual foundation in place, I work 1-on-1 with each student to continue helping them build out what they see the world needing. And build something real, and see how the world reacts to it.

I will hold them to a very high standard.

I am accepting a very small number of students for the first cohort. If you're interested, please reach out.