Why do great schools have empty spots? Why don’t schools compete fiercely for students? How does reducing microfrictions increase economic growth?
Professor Chris Neilson is not your typical founder. He was born in the heart of Silicon Valley to undocumented immigrants from Chile. He is a former elite professional rugby player and has advised education policy for governments across the globe, the World Bank, and the IDB. He is a Professor of Economics and Global Affairs at Yale and has devoted his career to helping partners make the best education choices.
Chris has always believed that the market inefficiency in the schooling market was fixable, that technology-based solutions are inevitable, and that he would be leading the charge to build them.
In this episode, we talk about Chris’s childhood education experiences, his early entrepreneurial and athletic leanings, his successful research career at Yale & Princeton, and his most recent venture as CEO of Tether Education. At Tether, he is implementing his research at speed and scale. Tether is creating a connected network of schools and students through a digital platform. No school would be left behind.
What does Chris see as obviously the future?
The middle class in Latin America is growing.
As people get wealthier, education grows as a percent of GDP.
Governments aren’t getting efficient at the same rate. They are slow to keep up with new technology and updated regulations.
Despite the increase in digital innovation within the education sector, there is a risk that access to quality education may become even more unequal than it is today.
Ensuring efficient and equitable access to education requires a well-designed digital platform infrastructure to provide a well-functioning market of choice, promote competition, and speed up the adoption of innovations.
Governments and small businesses in education will need help to stay connected to the frontier of technology and innovation and not fall behind.
Today, Tether and Chris prove this thesis by matching parents to schools and daycares across Latin America and tethering schools to a platform to increase digitization.
Chris is an unstoppable force with a massive vision and an insatiable desire to succeed. In the full interview, learn more about his journey and what he’s building at Tether.
We cover:
Removing ‘micro frictions’ to achieve more economic growth
Increasing choice and competition in the school and daycare market
Fixing equity gaps by providing a platform for better decisions
The digital divide in schools is even bigger post-Covid
Academia vs Startup life: Having skin in the game with your VC
Being an athlete, learning quickly, and building a team
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Change is the only constant. Everywhere technology is bounding ahead, and new, massive opportunities are emerging. Technology is surging. Yet, many legacy institutions are calcified in the past.
Basic human desires remain the same. Peace, stability, health, and progress have been priorities for humanity.
Technology is the driving force for improving quality of life, but the pace of change is now exponential. Humanity struggles to keep up. Meanwhile, the demographics of humanity are reshaping society as lifespans are increasing and fertility rates are plummeting. The pyramid of age is being inverted. This has profound implications that are in the midst of transformation.
Technology Exponential Graph
Linear institutions, exponential technologies and the exponential gap
Lifespans are increasing globally
Source: Our world In Data
Steady decline in the fertility rate below replacement
Source: Our world In Data
The old formula for achieving personal prosperity is failing to produce results. Learning outcomes are stagnating. People are demanding more autonomy and freedom. Digital platforms facilitate increased productivity, but incomes are often stagnant. Legacy institutions are unable to product results and that is now visible. The future is not fully here.
What is required for a prosperous society in a reverse demographic period is amid dramatic transformation. How people learn, earn, and own is at the core of what is being reinvented. It is still early days.
The future looks different, but how?
Shifts in demographics and technology create the conditions for societal changes. Culture, economic structure, and public policy all eventually change based on these immutable forces. We refer to the trends that emerge as avalanches.
Every avalanche starts with invisible changes underneath the surface. They are difficult to see, in small niches, and are imperceivable except to those who are determined to find them and desperately paying attention.
Once triggered, avalanches are unstoppable.
We conduct deep research, think analytically, and develop proprietary perspectives around these small shifts before they are broadly obvious.
We partner with founders who perceive the invisible trends, use the latest technological advances, and build the new reality. These founders have been building far before the landscape changed.
Our capital is deployed to catalyze and capture the value behind the avalanche.
Changing systems and producing results at scale.
We focus initially on technologies transforming how people learn, earn, and own because these are core to the human experience, and each contain tipping points.
Learn
At the foundation of every successful life is a learning journey. Human social brains are wired to be curious and experimental. Learning compounds and creates more demand for itself. As incomes grow, the share of GDP going to education rises.
In a society automated by machine intelligence, the value of learning and being learned will be foundational and exceptional. Salespeople teach their customers. Scientists pioneer new technologies based on significant knowledge bases. Skilled laborers fix the infrastructure that we live in. Everyone, everywhere, will be supercharged by computer assistants, but they will need to know the foundations and key skills to stay ahead.
PRISMS OF REALITY- The new platform for STEM Education using spatial reasoning
Earn
The world of work and career is fundamentally changing to be more platform-driven, flexible, and independent. The talent marketplace is now global, skilled talent can geo-arbitrage and jurisdictions will compete for talent.
Everyone is an entrepreneur, or they must learn to think like one. We invest in platforms that drive a shift to greater efficiency and empowerment and increase skills in every vertical.
HUMANLY.IO- AI-Driving easier and more equitable hiring
Own
In every society, optimizing ownership of assets is the key to success.
Demographic and technological trends is driving huge changes in the key economic parts of ownership.
Effective public goods are critical to every society, but traditional institutions have yet to adopt to modern times. Startups will implement and run last-mile delivery of government programs to achieve public goals.
Pensions and home ownership have traditionally provided a buffer of savings and stability for aging populations, yet their accessibility is changing.
In an AI-driven economy, owning data and rights to your intellectual property will be a critical element of wealth. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and programable money are technological solutions to decentralize ownership.
BLUESKY - End-to-end best-in-class software allowing for user control and ownership
We back founders catalyzing the future and building their life’s work.
We look for smart, thoughtful, and structured founders who take every element of their work seriously. The founders we back have prior work experience demonstrating excellence and high performance.
Founders who view their companies as their ‘life’s work,’ and who are solving a problem they care deeply aboutwill persist. Our founders view their customers' success as integral to their own. This alignment of incentives creates a powerful formula for results.
Our job is to talent and idea scouts and then deep partners to our founders. We will do whatever it takes to help them be successful post-investment. Sometimes this means getting out of the way. Sometimes this means taking an active, partnering role.
Massive Success
We will unlock of trillions of dollars of economic output when our founders succeed.
The outcome will be enormous when the Avalanche opportunity meets the determined founder and is catalyzed with capital.
All big things start small. We are dedicated to massive success in a decades-long time frame. We know anything is possible with enough grit, talent, and belief.
My Life’s Work
For me, avalanche is personal. I’ve built my career from my early days leading Duke’s largest student union to pioneering low-cost private school chains in the developing world to building Delivery Associates. I have a keen eye for talent and ideas who are undervalued and whose time has come.
My last venture was building Delivery Associates with Sir Michael Barber. As an analyst at McKinsey, I met Michael and instantly saw the power of deliverology in action. It was clear to me early that Michael was a unique and visionary leader whose ideas were fundamentally important to the world. It was obvious from the inbound demand from clients, customers, and jobseekers that Delivery Associates was needed in the world. While we raised capital, I invested my career and sweat equity from the early days of idea formation to the final stages of negotiation in the exit to Private Equity. I loved building the company into an institution that disrupted an industry and aim to do that again.
Over my investing and operating career, I’ve seen the power of capital allocators. Investors decide which visions get funded and where we invest our finite time. With Avalanche, as with Delivery Associates, I aspire to be the premier partner to the most outrageously ambitious founders who are building their life’s work.
I’m not in this business to collect lottery tickets, blindly accumulate assets, or jump into party rounds. I’m here to work with serious people on serious ideas. We are not commodity capital.
I love working with founders to will the future into existence. Investors who do the work and have conviction, particularly early, can create the avalanches we need to push society forward and crowd-in capital. This is my life’s work.
Lastly, our firm is serious about how we do business.
Think independently. We don’t care what the crowd thinks. We use our own judgment and collect primary evidence to form original perspectives.
Outrageously ambitious, long-term and relentlessly practical today. The future will be vastly different, but the reality of the world today needs to be addressed. We don’t lose sight of what’s needed on what timeframe.
Life-long relationships built on shared values. Success for us looks like building life-long relationships with our LPs, founders, team members and network partners. We are creating wealth together.
Stewardship of capital. We operate with humility, transparency, and integrity in all aspects of investing and capital management. Our goal is to maximize financial outcomes from all our partners.
Out cooperate the competition. We have a carry-share program for our network partners and advisors who help us build relationships and understand avalanche opportunities.
Join us.
We are amid huge societal transformations. We seek to investors, builders, and founders who share our long-term vision of the future and want to build together. This is our avalanche.
