Big MONEY, LITTLE KIDS And A GRAND EXPERIMENT
Can AltSchool, the edtech startup backed by $174 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Laurene Powell Jobs, save itself from failure?
“We might not be around in five years,” says Max Ventilla, AltSchool’s 38-year-old cofounder and CEO, as the two publicists minding our interview cringe. “Don’t put that in your article,” says AltSchool’s communications director, Maggie Quale, while a young woman from Rubenstein, the giant New York-based corporate PR firm, sits in awkward silence.
We’re two intense hours into an interview in a stuffy, glass-paned meeting room in a former 24 Hour Fitness that is now home to one of AltSchool’s two small private schools in San Francisco for grades pre-K through 8. Ventilla, who left Google to launch AltSchool in 2013, has spent $30 million annually over the last several years while trying to find steady footing for his for-profit education startup, which runs four schools; the other two are in New York City.
AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public. So far it has 28 customers. Revenue in 2018 was $7 million. “Our whole strategy is to spend more than we make,” he says. Since software is expensive to develop and cheap to distribute, the losses, he