AltSchool is looking for a systems thinker to scale education innovation

This story was produced by Job Portraits and commissioned by AltSchool to highlight its School Systems Innovation Lead role. For the interview below, Job Portraits spoke with AltSchool CEO Max Ventilla and VP of Operations Anna Cueni at their office near Folsom and 8th in San Francisco.
What does AltSchool do and why does it matter?
Max: AltSchool is a new model for how to educate children in the 21st century. We are making the most desirable education the most accessible education. Starting with is an education system that’s able to personalize the classroom experience for every student, AltSchool combines the best elements from home school and traditional education. That allows teachers to have more autonomy and families to have more flexibility.
We are in the unique position of rethinking education from first principles. We’re asking, “Given all that we know about education and what it takes for people to be happy and successful in the modern era, what should we be doing to prepare students?” That includes everything from how to staff the classroom to how to think about homework to what role families play. That broad rethinking hasn’t been done for 100 years.
Doing that takes a very long-term focus and a very cross-disciplinary group of technologists, educators, operators, designers, and user researchers. And what I’d say most differentiates us in this space is that we combine the best technology prowess of a startup with the best in school operations. We actually operate schools. We have students year round in physical classrooms that need to have fire drills, and lunches, and safe transportation — all the things to create an environment where they can learn.
Most people working on education technology are operating on a very small part of the problem: the SMART board, or attendance tracking, or student records collection. That’s not to say that they don’t have an enormous opportunity for impact, but it’s actually quite different from what we’re working on, which is trying to fix the whole problem.
Tell us about the School Systems Innovation Lead role.
Anna: In the operations department, our positions are focused on metrics rather than functions. Rather than look at everything the school does and divide that up into departments, we’ve tried to think about what metrics we want to optimize. Then each person is responsible for deciding which activities will have the maximum impact on those metrics.
We will work with the School Systems Innovation Lead to determine the right metrics to measure, but they will broadly focus on optimizing the network effect of our schools. We want someone to come in and figure out, “How do we measure these network effects? At what rate are innovations arising? How does a good innovation spread throughout the network?”
That innovation could be at the level of a piece of curriculum, or a teaching approach, or a classroom practice. And when an innovation isn’t working well, how are we detecting that and failing fast, without failing a student or a school or a teacher? We’re hoping for someone who has experience with complex multiuser systems, ideally with evolutionary dynamics. We have these preconditions set up, where everyone is on the system where information is shared and everyone is excited to learn from each other — now how do we actually start spreading practices?

“It’s a really cool position. Max and I agree, if we didn’t have our current jobs at AltSchool, we would want to have this job.” —Anna Cueni

For instance, we might find that new innovations aren’t arising fast enough. Then the question becomes, “What do we need to do to make an educator feel comfortable taking a risk?” Or it might be that lots of great innovations are arising but they’re not spreading. In which case it’s more a question of, “How do I expose other educators to the great things that are going on in similar classrooms?” And although these initial experiments will be with the small network we have now, we need someone who can imagine how the process will work with 10,000 students, or 50,000 students down the road.
Another thing about this position is that it co-reports into the product organization, like much of the operations team. In that way our org chart really reflects our mission to be user-driven. That means each operations lead has a specific amount of time carved out to take what they’ve been prototyping and turning that into scalable products. So we’re looking for someone who has a background in product as well.
We’re not necessarily looking for someone from education, because we aren’t aware of other school systems that function in this way. Generally in a large school district, if you ask them, “What if a teacher invents something that’s just better than anything else; what’s the path for that to spread?” Traditional schools are not typically optimized for rapid, iterative change. Therefore, it’s more important for us to find someone who comes with a startup mindset, is passionate about education, and who has the empathy to understand educators and their day-to-day experience.
What are the other big challenges of this job? What’s hard about it?
Max: I think that the high-level appeal and the high-level challenge of this position are the same high-level appeal and the high-level challenge of my job and Anna’s job, which is they are fantastically, thrillingly complex. The number of things that we get to work on dwarfs anything that any of us have gotten to work on before. This is a position where you are close to having to get your head around everything as for my role as CEO. And that is also the challenge: to manage complexity and still accomplish amazing things, but through incremental steps.
How will AltSchool as an organization and the education space be different because of this person? What is the impact they stand to have?
Max: At the highest level, we are trying to create a model of education where the most desirable form of education is available to a very broad section of people. The School Systems Innovation Lead will be mostly focused on creating that accessibility. In order to be able to admit the vast majority of students, we need this person to focus on making AltSchool more scalable. On top of scalability and accessibility, we also want there to be network effect, so that as the network grows, each parent, student, and teacher benefits.
We are really going after one of the big five problems on earth right now, and not just a slice of it. We are literally trying to solve the whole problem. That’s an amazing thing. You get to work on that and also be compensated and have the benefits and co-workers that go along with working at the best startups.
Do you want to say something about the compensation for this role?
Max: We want anyone who works here to do better at AltSchool than they would do anywhere else, so in most cases that means they get more compensation here if you take into account their base salary, their bonus and the value of their equity.
One of the things that is different at AltSchool is that we set aside a much greater fraction of our option pool for promotion grants. Most startups spend 80% of their options on people joining in the company, then about 20% for follow-on promotion grants. We’re about 50/50. That creates much more potential to gain equity as you take on more responsibility at AltSchool.
Anna: We also dedicate a lot of company time to performance interviews. We do a full 360 performance review for every employee quarterly. It takes a lot of time, but is worth it for us given how quickly things change in this environment. During those reviews they’re getting actionable feedback to help them advance in their career, plus there’s also a compensation review. We have several people who have substantially higher compensation now than when they started at AltSchool.
Max: In addition to compensation, we are focused on balance and flexibility. We want AltSchool to be an ideal place to work no matter what stage of your career — or life — you’re in. We don’t want people to decide between having a fulfilling personal life and a meaningful career. At AltSchool, you really can have both.
What is the day-to-day rhythm of work at AltSchool?
Anna: We work in a six-week sprint process, which includes five weeks of execution and then one week of companywide reflection. We’re trying to get down in the weeds and do a pretty substantial chunk of work and then level up and do more brainstorming, reviewing metrics, and planning the next sprint.
Max: We have two times a week where everyone in the company gets together for an hour. Tuesday is more around information, like iterations on the product roadmap or decks I’ll be presenting to the board. We have a very firm commitment to transparency as a company. To be bottoms-up, you need everybody in the company to understand the major things that are happening, because otherwise, in the absence of being told what to do, they’re not going to be able to use their own judgement.
Then we also take an hour on Friday, which is more of a social thing. We spend about a third of that time just giving kudos. Everyone has the opportunity to say what they think was the best thing that happened last week. It’s an opportunity to call out just one of the really brave small things that are happening all the time here.
Interested in joining the AltSchool team? Apply for this and other positions here , or contact Human Resources and Recruiting Manager Ashley Hayes at [email protected] .