Masterplan
From barely working demo to bankrupting Harvard
London, UK - April 2024
Mission
Build the worlds best university and make it free and available for everyone.
Problem
Our education system is simply completely broken and not sustainable, and "sustainability simply means that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That's what 'sustainable' means. It's not some silly, hippy thing—it matters for everyone." I stole this explanation from Musk's Master Plan, Part Deux because it's the perfect explanation. So, what’s not sustainable in education right now:
- 250 million children who don’t go to school.
- The most prestigious education institution in the world currently teaches 25k rich kids and charges them $330k for it, turning them into extremely left-leaning individuals while being heavily funded by the CCP.
- Generation after generation is forced into student debt for degrees that are simultaneously useless and required by the job market.
- Extremely low transparency and high corruption lead to a massive societal exodus from science (science is amazing, but modern scientists often are not).
- Dramatic suppression of freedom of speech in academia.
- Stopping the highest achievers from succeeding to enforce equality.
- Increasingly stronger decadence and pessimism among the (supposedly) brightest people in the world who should be building a better future for all humanity.
- Hate on capitalism, advocating for society to "just consume less" and turn off all technology, revert to caves, or ideally, simply go extinct, instead of exploring ways to progress, grow, and flourish sustainably.
Prestige vs Quality
The purpose of the Homebrew College Club is to democratize higher education and move away from the ridiculous prestige market, where value is based on scarcity, not quality. Homebrew is based on a completely opposite mechanism: colleges are open to everyone by design, and ranked by quality of education, not prestige.
Why online education haven't worked yet?
The concept of long-distance education isn't new at all; in fact, people tried it back in the 19th century with the first correspondence courses. However, it never outperformed traditional face-to-face learning methods in terms of popularity and credibility. Why? I found that among many, these reasons are the most important:
Wrong people
Well first of all, it was almost always done by the same people who first did traditional learning and then tried to copy-paste the same thinking and methods for e-learning, which has no right to work. The online world is much faster and more entertaining, and because of that, content must be of much higher quality. If you are stuck in a university class, you can't leave if the lecture is boring without being rude, and you paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars for that one lecture, so you will tolerate much more than at the free online lecture you can close at any time. Also, people in academia pay much less attention to the quality of their content because they have a much longer feedback loop, and they are compared to much lower standards than YouTube educators. Compare the tempo at MIT python introduction to the tempo at Fireship python introduction.
Wrong tools
Because it was done by the wrong people (academics, not hackers), the software has the quality of academia, not a hacky startup, and it's painfully visible that the authors had absolutely zero care about its users (probably because it would be a very financially painful realization for them and thousands of their colleagues) at every aspect of the software. Modern online education tools look much more like a government website than a startup product and have a similar level of UX. I spent many hours talking about this with my lecturers, and they all said that online education doesn't make sense, millions of people tried it and it never worked (kind of like the car industry, right?). Maybe because it was tried millions of times by people like you? Thinking from first principles makes it crystal clear that online education (done right) is 1,000 times better than traditional education; it simply hasn't been done right yet.
Wrong models
One of the biggest reasons is that people tried to copy and paste the legacy one-size-fits-all approach from traditional academia and used the wrong tools to make it online. They lifted the traditional learning model with all its flaws and made it even worse by putting it online, while adding zero benefits of online learning. Also, traditional academia has a monopoly on formal education, so if you take something that sucks but you have a monopoly over it and put that on the free market and nobody wants it, it's quite arrogant to say that the free market doesn't work because it's impossible that your content sucks; it must be the fault of the medium.
Milestones
Our mission is to "Build the world's best university and make it free and available for everyone," but it's a very hard and expensive task, and definitely too much to chew on at a time when Homebrew isn't even an incorporated entity and my personal net worth is equal to $10. So, we must have some plan on how to get there and laser-focus on crushing the nearest milestone instead of dreaming about the future we can't afford to build yet. Here is the list of milestones to make this vision a reality.
Dominate a small market
Build a tool that allows startups to educate their users 10x better then anything else now, which will allow them to grow much faster and build great community around their product.
Dominate IT education
After finding prodcut market fit grow until Homebrew will nr. 1 in the IT education (measured by putting people into IT jobs)
Dominate education, bunkrupt Harvard and build Giga Campus 1
Get official acreditaions for your degress for regulated proffesions, like layers, doctors etc. Bunkrupt Harvard (see Appendix A) and buy their campus and turn it into Giga Campus 1 (eventually built a new one if bunkrupting them would be taking too long). When Giga Campus 1 will be ready finally switch to target business model and crazy money. (see Apendix B)
While doing all that, also de-moronize society and rebuild Hackers culture
I wrote enough about that in From Moonshots to Madness essay and even more in Homebrew Manifesto. Homebrew's mission is to go against that moronic trend and build our moral fundamentals on the shoulders of giants of Western civilization and philosophy, rather than toilet-thoughts of pink-haired screaming teenagers. We must build a culture where building cool shit is ultra respectable and kids look up and learn from hackers, not from random tik tok twerking hoes.
Apendix A - Target business model
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the best business model for education would allow a University to make billions and at the same time providing education 100% for free for everyone on the planet. And I think I figure it out. Here it is:
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We need Giga Campus 1 (or more in the future), the greatest, most modern and advanced university campus in the world where real progress happens, and everyone wants to be there. It must be massive like 100k students or so. There is no classroom, just on campus co-work offices and labs, 100% of teaching is online and it's 100% for free not only for this uni students but for eveyone on the internet. You pay for the best in the world student experience and network (biggest value anyway), but if someone is less fortunate than you, they still have access to the same quality of education. To both make money and have the smartest students in the world 50% of students are children of the biggest doners and 50% are choosen by the meritocratic, open sourced algorithm and we don't tell them who is who.
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We build more Giga Campuses (or buy out more unis campuses around the world) and incrementally make being on the campus more and more affortable to the point is chepper then normal rent.
Apendix B - How to bunkrupt Harvard
When scenario from the appendix A will become reality Harvard will simply have to bunkrupt, but I think it can happen even sooner. Why?
Basiclly bancrupcy = expenses > revenue && broken morale
Harvard operating revenue 2023 = $6.1 billion
Harvard operating surplus 2023 = $186 million
Harvard revenue from philantropy 2023 = 45% / ~ $2.7 billion
Harvard is simply a very fat and unprofitable organization, and the only reason why it's still functioning is that it's heavily financed by rich philanthropists. They are great people; they want to support education and science, so they donate to Harvard, because there is no better alternative right now. But they care about the efficiency and the scale of impact their money makes much more than Harvard management. I don't think it would be very hard to convince them to change the university name on their check after showing them a solution that is 10,000x more efficient, especially since they start to realize that Harvard turns their kids into Marxists who hate them.