What triggered your interest in education innovation?
My parents are educators, so education was always the top priority growing up. I was fortunate to attend some amazing public schools in the Bay Area, but I could see the disparities in resources and opportunities even just a few miles away. That started a decade-plus journey of tutoring in underserved communities. At the same time, I grew up programming, and so I wanted to use technology to scale opportunities in education. A software internship at Khan Academy at age 16 opened my eyes to the potential of edtech.
What inspired you to found Schoolhouse, a tech non-profit providing free peer tutoring globally?
I founded Schoolhouse with Sal Khan and a few others in 2020 with a very similar mission as Khan Academy of providing free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere — but in a higher touch way that involves live, human-to-human tutoring over Zoom. The pandemic not only created an urgent need for the platform but also enabled it through the widespread adoption of Zoom technology. My time studying at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) introduced me to the potential of leveraging volunteer peer tutors to scale up high-quality tutoring while making it 100% free for learners.
There are many models for delivering on Schoolhouse’s mission. What drew you to the non-profit model?
We found that providing tutoring free of charge could best be accomplished with a non-profit that serves the public good instead of any single person. People often think non-profits must be less scalable or sustainable than for-profits, but I think this is frankly due to a lack of imagination. Schoolhouse is one such counterexample. We have tutored over 100,000 students across 160 countries. Our tech platform has enabled 50 million learning minutes, and we’re only just getting started.

What were your most memorable experiences at Stanford? How did attending Stanford inform or confirm your drive to launch Schoolhouse?
Launching an edtech startup requires education experience, business knowledge, and technical expertise. Stanford excels in all three. My time at Stanford was split between the GSE, Graduate School of Business (GSB), and Computer Science based in the School of Engineering.
One memorable experience was when my friend Khalil Fuller and I convened students from across these three domains for an edtech mixer at Denning House. Our thesis was that there’s not enough innovation in education because students and professionals in these areas are siloed. Teachers, MBAs, and engineers all speak different languages, and yet there is so much to learn from one another. Our mixer was one attempt at that, but I’m glad we now have initiatives like the Stanford Accelerator for Learning to take it to the next level.
How do you see the future of education evolving? What will be the role of technology?
Who knows! What I do know is that there have been two trends in recent years.
One is education moving towards personalized and mastery-based learning. Videos like Khan Academy, adaptive learning platforms, and now AI chatbots have all enabled students to learn in the way that best suits them. No more one-size-fits-all, factory model of education.
The second trend is moving towards a more personal learning model that amplifies teacher-student and student-student interactions. Gone are the lectures; instead, we have project-based learning, Socratic seminars, social and emotional learning, cohort-based learning, and peer tutoring like Schoolhouse.
While these trends may initially seem contradictory, there is tremendous potential in continuing to shift our education system to be both more personalized and more personal. One part of this is removing the factory model and lectures, making more room for the personalized and personal. The other part is about finding the right balance and intertwining the personalized and personal parts of learning.

How do you approach innovation and adaptability in an ever-changing education landscape?
Spend time with students and be a student yourself! The best way to stay up-to-date in education is to continually try out the latest curricula, tools, and ideas and talk with those who are using them.
What advice would you give to Stanford students interested in catalyzing education innovation?
Go for it. Start teaching, building, and iterating. The best way to grow your ideas and conviction is to start trying things out.
At Stanford, remember that the people you should be learning from and building with may not be in your department or even your school. Go outside your comfort zone and explore other perspectives.