Boarding school for Americans... in Africa?
Chronicling my entrepreneurial journey launching (what I think to be) the most ambitious education initiative this decade.
Hi there!
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of two groups: You either signed up to my old website 5 years ago, or you recently subscribed to my substack to learn more about the developments at the Douglass Leadership Academy.
If you’re in the former group, I’m sorry I never came around to writing anything—school was kicking my ass. And, to be honest, I got to a point where I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the African JP Morgan. I had a comfy job at LinkedIn and was feeling quite burnt out. I even took an extra year in college to just… do nothing (well at least that was partly the plan—if I ever felt convicted, I’d also pursue an entrepreneurial idea).
However, a series of miracles happened in the past few months (and honestly, looking back, my very coming to the US was a miracle in of itself—but I’ll get into that in a later post) that led me down this path.
Ok 95% of you are wondering what tf I’m talking about.
If you didn’t get the memo yet, I’m starting a school. A big school. Some say the biggest. You’ll look at it and you’ll say, “Kevin… this is a BIG school. Maybe the biggest school anyone’s ever seen. Incredible school. People are talking about it.”
Think of DLA as the best parts of United World Colleges (bringing kids from across the world to learn and create memories together) and African Leadership Academy (almost like UWC but with a focus on Africans and a particular focus on entrepreneurial leadership)
However, instead of global citizens, or Africans, DLA will focus on MURICANS🇺🇸🇺🇸 —at least One from Every Zip Code(we might also admit students from across the world; however, for the start, it will be America(ns) First™️)
We will also use Khan Academy’s Mastery-Based curriculum. In mastery-based curriculums, you move to the next chapter when you get an ‘A’ not when the semester ends (C’s don’t get degrees in this club, Sorry!). The goal is for students to work at their own pace, only moving on when they truly “get it”. This has profound implications for their learning in later classes.
Khan Academy has innovated quite a bit—with tools like Khanmigo (basically ChatGPT within Khan Academy—minor friendly), and One World Schoolhouse (an army of globally distributed volunteer tutors)—it’s leading the frontier in education innovation.
“Ok Kevin. That’s cool and all, but last I checked, you were couchsurfing trying to build a social media for dogs. Where on earth did this school thing come from”
Glad you asked.
While the entire story is too long to share right now, I’ll let you in on a few highlights.
TL;DR: I cold emailed Sal Khan
While I’d been cold emailing at least a dozen people a week at this point (you’d be surprised how well this works) I was also surprised that he responded—positively (but non-committal) at that.
At this point, I had so much pent-up hunger to start my own venture. I’d been exploring dozens of business ideas but didn’t really know which one would stick. I had also spent the previous 6 months at an old friend’s startup as the interim CTO and had come to appreciate how easy it’s become to build things with the advent of AI, but how hard it remains to sell to enterprises. That revelation prompted me to leave that job (with nothing lined up—crazy for someone on a visa but whatevs) and pivot to sales. It’s that foray into sales that had me cold-emailing everyone-and-their-mom, in hopes that I’d get some insight into how to break into sales—I didn’t know anyone personally that had made such a radical career switch.
A few fortuitous conversations with some startup founders—one who raised a $200m series A to do a venmo for Africa— reminded me of what brought me to the US. I had come to the US (and bear with me here) to learn why Africa is poor and what I can personally do about it.
The conversation with Lincoln (Wave’s founder) was particularly helpful in getting me to appreciate the opportunity in Uganda. After all, he’d raised more money than many of us will make in several lifetimes to operate in Africa. What was he seeing that many of us Africans—sacrificing our dignity to remain 2nd class citizens in America—weren’t seeing.
A lot it turns out.
Compared to the US, Uganda—and East Africa in general—is pretty green. More than half the population is not on the internet yet. Most businesses still operate with physical log books (like Google Sheets but in a physical book—for my any Gen Alphas reading this) since computer literacy is not all that common. Most people, however, are very mobile savvy. That brings its own opportunities and challenges.
All in all, Lincoln’s conversation had me thinking of actually returning home and at least trying to start something.
Yes, earning $230k while sharing a 3BR with 4 roommates in SF is great, but if I started something in Uganda that went on to impact the livelihoods of even a couple thousand people, that would be extremely fulfilling—perhaps more fulfilling than changing the color of a button in Google Photos to drive ad revenue by 0.02% ($700m for Google)1.
So, I did what I do best—post controversial stuff in the family group chat.
“I’m coming back home to start something”
“Wtf?”—one of my uncles (I’m paraphrasing)
“Bruh. Don’t even think about it. This is a failed state.”—almost everyone else. (not paraphrasing this time, I’m afraid)
It turns out, the Ugandan economy isn’t doing too great. Ever since they signed all that anti-LGBT legislation, they’ve lost several AID sources which are a significant part of the country’s budget. The Ugandan version of the IRS is (allegedly) squeezing every ounce of tax revenue out of businesses to cover the gap.
All in all, Ugandans are broke AF. Any business I’d set up targeting them was doomed to fail.
“Ok,” I thought. “I guess I won’t target Ugandans then.”
And so I wrote down a list of a few dozen ideas I could start in Uganda while targeting American/European customers. Lots of agro + manufacturing stuff, but I eventually settled on education. This insight—that I’m a born educator—came from my bestie Fernanda (she’s a VC so this was partly out of self-interest). She’d stalked my LinkedIn and saw Education2 as a recurring theme in several of my ventures. Of course, she was hoping I’d come up with something she could fund, but welp.
I’d also read about the stuff Sal was doing at KLS. In fact, I ran an SAT bootcamp in Uganda for several years where we used Khan Academy’s free SAT prep. I was trying to get the smartest kids I could find into elite universities in the US—for free—and failing miserably (it turns out not every smart person wants to go to Harvard—or, rather, they are not willing to endure the pain required to get there). So I’d always had the idea of starting a “Brick and Mortar” Khan Academy. This exercise garnered in me the conviction to cold email him cuz YOLO—and the rest, as they say, is history.
Soon as Sal responded, I scrambled like a headless chicken, trying to get together a coherent proposal so I wouldn’t f*ck this up. At the time, I was crashing at an MIT frat house on my buddy Richard’s floor (it makes for an epic story now, but life was… pretty grim). He grilled me about the implementation details. My central idea was a school for the talented & gifted—where East Africa’s smartest would study at lightning pace, and maybe we’d finally get an IMO medal or —heck—maybe even a nobel prize(in the sciences!).
One thing I couldn’t figure out for the life of me was the business model. How was I going to fund this? All Sal? No, surely that wouldn’t work. This needs to be sustainable.
…And I thought about it for days, until one day—it hit me. I was in the shower and— like Archimedes during his eureka moment—I almost ran out to proclaim my insight to pedestrians across the street.
“VOUCHERS!!” “I’ll fund it with vouchers!”
“Vouchers? What are those?” I hear you ask.
Well—to oversimplify—vouchers work like this:
You pay property taxes
Some of those taxes go towards funding a school within your neighborhood that you’re typically required to attend
If you don’t like the school you’re assigned to, you’re given a portion of the per-student expenditure (~5k-$18k) to pay towards a private school of your choice
I did some number crunching and realized that it was entirely possible to fund a world-class facility—including room, board, healthcare, and even flights—for the price of a voucher.
It'd be super slim margins, but it would be sustainable.
That’s when I pivoted my model from a KLS school in Uganda to DLA—a school in Uganda for low income Americans—with the hope that, at scale, I could even cross subsidize local students.
I immediately called up Dawn—the leader of URochester’s dining workers’ union about this radical idea—taking inner city kids to boarding school in Uganda. She thought it was a good idea(she’d visited Tanzania before), so I left Boston and travelled back to Rochester to lay the groundwork.
UofR had two critical things:
A school of education, Warner, which I figured would be great support as I fleshed out the pilot. Warner also did some exceptional work with a public school in the Rochester City School District that was on the verge of shutting down.
People who trusted me enough to let me take their kids to Africa (I’d worked in the dining in my freshman year). The plan for the pilot was to take them to an international school in Uganda offering the IB curriculum.
This was early Feb.
In the 7 weeks or so since then, we’ve pivoted from IB back to Khan curriculum (reached out to Sal again, got a response this time around, and he actually LOVED the idea—apparently he’d thought about similar models himself, but in Mexico), and pivoted from Uganda/East Africa, now to Prospera, Honduras.
Prospera is set up well for this type of thing(the goal of a charter city is to attract businesses, after all), and getting a campus was quick and easy (shout out to Lonis and Andy!).
The concept itself has also evolved a bit from a mere boarding school in Uganda for Americans, to this grand vision where each and every zip code elects its young leader to study in one of our pristine campuses around the world.
I hope this gives you a rundown of what led me down this path (lots I left out that I’ll share another time), but thanks for reading.
My plan is to send this newsletter out every Friday with details of what I got done this week (Hi, Elon!)
While this is tongue in cheek, it’s not far off from what you actually do at a large company. The upside, of course, is that some people think you’re really cool, and you get some AMAZING perks. Tech companies work really hard to make sure you don’t ever think about leaving.
Some of my education experiences:
a) Founding E-JAB—essentially a Common App for Ugandan universities. This was inspired by my experience applying to colleges in Uganda and having to literally travel to each campus and hand in a physical application—yet, here I was applying to several colleges in the US via a unified online portal
b) Founding Future Uganda—essentially a Ugandan version of QuestBridge.
c) Several TA positions throughout college.