David speaks with Danielle Strachman, a co-founder and general partner of 1517, a venture capital fund that invests in technology startups founded by dropouts and unconventional thinkers. She was on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, leading its design and operations, and founded Innovations Academy, a K-8 charter school in San Diego focused on student-led, project-based learning.
They talked about:
🏫 Founding a charter school
📈 The importance of the environment in childhood development
🚀 How deschooling fuels innovation
🔍 The psychology of novelty
🌟 Early talent vs. developing potential
🌿 The ecosystem of success
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📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[01:56] Choosing passion over prestige
[04:51] Lessons learned from homeschooling families
[08:19] How collaboration created Innovations Academy
[10:26] How adult expectations undermine child creativity
[12:44] The role of environment in fostering curiosity and play
[14:56] The importance of boredom
[16:57] The human need for novelty
[19:35] Structured learning vs. personal discovery
[23:58] The art of independent study
[26:20] The impact of alternative learning approaches
[28:34] Finding the right support balance in education
[29:59] Roger Federer vs. Tiger Woods
[32:08] Why effort often outshines innate ability
[35:02] How small investments ignite big dreams
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center | https://www.bidmc.org/
Craigslist | http://www.craigslist.org/
Christine Kuglen | https://innovationsacademy.org/about-us/founders/
Innovations Academy | https://innovationsacademy.org/
Claire de Lune Coffee Lounge | https://sandiegomagazine.com/food-drink/goodnight-claire-de-lune/
Thiel Foundation | https://www.thielfoundation.org/
Google | https://www.google.co.uk/
1517 Fund | https://www.1517fund.com/
Deschooling | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society
ADHD | https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/symptoms/
TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/
International Baccalaureate | https://www.ibo.org/
Vitalik Buterin | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin
David Epstein | https://davidepstein.com/
Range | https://amzn.to/3WtR4VZ
Tiger Woods | https://www.tigerwoods.com/
Roger Federer | https://rogerfederer.com/
Peak | https://amzn.to/4dr1CMt
K. Anders Ericsson | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson
👤 Connect with Danielle:
Twitter: https://x.com/DStrachman
1517 Fund: https://www.1517fund.com/
Innovations Academy: https://innovationsacademy.org/our-team/profiles/danielle-strachman/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
[00:00:00]
Introduction
Danielle Strachman: It's sort of always this challenge I think for educators and parents to try to figure out like, Hey, is this person going to learn fundamentals that are going to take them into the future? And I'm a big proponent of exposing young people to different subject areas and topics and doesn't mean they have to become an expert in it. No, but like, I want them to have a taste of it and be able to get in there.
The other thing too is like looking at, are there things that are in the way? Are there more supports that are needed for a child to do something?
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Danielle Strachman who is the co-founder and general partner at 1517, which is a venture fund that primarily invests in dropouts, renegade students and deep tech scientists.
So, even from the headline alone you know that Danielle is someone that thinks incredibly out of the box in terms of where to find and cultivate talent and you see this throughout her journey.
So we talked about how she founded a charter [00:01:00] school not long after leaving college. And we talked about the pros and cons of different forms of education from homeschooling and tutoring to charter schools to traditional education and beyond.
And so I really wanted to understand from Danielle how things change when you start investing in people so young and how you help them to develop as founders and as builders and find their feet in the world.
And so if you are an educator or a founder or an investor or just have any interest in this space at all you'll find this to be an incredible conversation.
You can get the full show notes the transcript and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find Danielle on Twitter @DStrachman.
Before we kick off if you love this episode please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts but particularly on Apple Podcasts because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
Choosing passion over prestige
David Elikwu: I could just dive right in, but I'm really interested to know how you would lay out [00:02:00] the early part of your journey. The part where you founded a charter school and then running that but I guess the road there, like how simple was that? I think, I know that you did your degree and you were trying to figure out what to do and teaching seemed to speak to you.
But what was that process like of deciding? Cause I think that's still a gap, right? A lot of people maybe come out of university and they're not sure what they wanna do, so they might just go and teach. But deciding I'm gonna start my own school is very different.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, absolutely. So I talked to a lot of young people and I mentor a lot of young people and they're like, oh, you know, which direction should I go and what should I choose? And there's so many options today, that I think it's even harder than it was before to figure out like, who do I wanna be? What do I wanna be when I grow up? Something like that and the likelihood that anyone stays on any one career path for even a couple of years. It feels to me like people are like always switching things. And I had some time like that also where I thought I was going down a different career path.
I thought I was going down the career path of a [00:03:00] neuropsychology actually. Because I had always loved teaching and the idea of being a teacher since I was a little kid, I was the person who would stay inside at recess and help people with their homework, and I liked school and things like that.
But one of the things that was also true was that lots of people were driving me away from that career path. Like I knew a lot of teachers who were my friends' parents, and they would say oh, you shouldn't teach, there's no money in it, the respect is really low, and things like that. And I started going down a pathway of getting interested in, in neuropsychology. And I was one of the youngest people to intern at the neurology department in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. And I was getting a lot of kudos for it, when you say neurology, people are like, whoa, cool neurology. And I would even go to parties as like a 20 year old and people were like, oh, what are you studying? When I was studying education, it was like, this snooze fest, and I swear people would like walk away from me, but when [00:04:00] I'd say, oh, I'm studying neurology. Oh, that's interesting. You must be so smart, blah, blah, blah. And I was very driven by that sense of kudos that I was getting from my peers and I had this early quarter life crisis.
I think a lot of people sort of have the quarter life crisis oftentimes, like once they finish school or maybe have started their first career and then go, oh my gosh, what am I doing with myself? I had mine a little bit early. I think I was about, 21, 22. I had just finished school, I thought I was gonna go to grad school, I had applied to grad school, I got into grad school, I was either gonna be Like a clinical neuropsychologist or a researcher or something like that. And I had this wake up call of, oh my gosh, what am I doing with my life?
As much as I liked the neurology track, I wasn't like eating and breathing neurology. I wasn't super into it.
Lessons learned from homeschooling families
Danielle Strachman: And I decided to take a left turn with my life and, you know, I said no to grad school, and I thought, well, what were the things that I [00:05:00] was really driven about and passionate about when I was a child? And teaching came back to mind.
And I grew up in a family of people who are predominantly like small business owners and things like that. So I always just learned by osmosis that, you make your own money, you don't have to go work for somebody else. And I decided I would start a tutoring company and I remember thinking like, I'm done with my undergrad, I don't wanna go back to school for another degree. And what's a way I could do this? Well, I could be a private tutor. And it was from private tutoring that very randomly I got niched in with homeschoolers and those people changed my life.
I used to Ab test ads on Craigslist before Craigslist was creepy. I'd find different clients and I worked with public school students. I worked with private school students and then a homeschooler hit me up one day and I was so excited because, in part I was excited cause it meant that I could do tutoring during the morning instead of having to wait until the afternoon for children to be outta school. And then when I met these [00:06:00] people, I mean, they just rocked my world completely. That sense of lifelong learning was really embodied in the whole family. And I would come over and they'd be like, oh, you're here. Can we do reading and science? And can you stay to do this other project? And I was supposed to be there for an hour and I'd end up staying with the family for three hours doing different things with them.
And, you know, often talking to the mom at the end for an additional hour about philosophically how did they get into homeschooling and why do they do what they do? I just love these people. And it made me think a lot about choice and education and how things could look different. And at first I thought, oh, it must be this one kooky family that I work with that is just like this. And then I met other homeschoolers and it was like, oh no, this is a culture. There's a whole thing going on here with students who are self-directed and families who are being child led in their approach.
I remember some students that I worked with you know, had like specialties, like geek out areas. In a way it translates to what I do now where we look for something called hyper fluency in the [00:07:00] people we invest in of like this ability to talk backwards and forwards about a space. And I had so many tutoring students who they had their special geek out area, whether it was history or, I had this one young man who was specializing in lapidary, which is like, how do you infuse gemstones into things? And he would go to gem shows and traveling all over the country. And I was like, wow, okay. This is pretty nutty. But I was coming in to do, you know, math and writing and things like that with him.
So yeah, working with those communities really led me to see that there were many different paths of what it looked like to be an educated young person which led into starting the charter school. I was working in a homeschool co-op and we were thinking to ourselves, and we didn't have startup vernacular. We weren't like, how do we scale this? How do we make bigger? Like nobody talked like that. And this was, we started working on the charter in 2006. And so yeah, people weren't enculturated into like startup babble, if you will. [00:08:00] But we did have this inkling of, hey, we have this co-op, we're working with homeschool students, and we hear from other parents all the time, who would love to participate especially single moms. And we would think, if there was a bigger way to do this, if there was a way for us to do this inside, like a public school setting and have these values there, that could be really powerful.
How collaboration created Innovations Academy
Danielle Strachman: And that's what made myself and my co-founder Christine Kuglen, start Innovations Academy. It sort of has its own startup story. Like, we would meet in a coffee shop a few times a week. This place that was called Claire de Lune. I don't know if it made it through the pandemic or not. This was in San Diego and we'd sit there and talk about ideas and a charter petition, at the time is this like 400 page research project. Basically you have to write up to say why the school you're going to build is going to work before you build it. Which is a bit funny cause you're always iterating on these different things. And we went through an accelerator program that was called Charter Launch that helped guide us through the process of like, here's how you get a school started. We had to do customer [00:09:00] discovery in terms of talking to parents and learning more. So there's a lot of similarities and also similarities in terms of responsibility.
I remember when we first opened the school, we hired a staff of 14 people and me and my colleague used to pass each other in the hallway, my co-founder and we'd whisper, Who allowed this? Like how did we go from literally just being, I was a tutor, she was a homeschool mom and somebody allowed us to, all of a sudden, be directors of a school. And yes, we had to go through this whole process, but yeah. Okay, 14 staff members are here who are trusting their livelihoods to what we've built. Parents were truly Guinea pigs that first year coming in and saying like, Hey, yeah, I want, I want something different for my children and I'm going to enroll them in this school.
So that first year was particularly mind blowing of like, wow, I can't believe people are really trusting us. And I know that my startup founders often feel the same way with like, wow, people are trusting us with money, or people are trusting us with their careers and users are trusting us with the product we're building and so on. So it's interesting to see some of the [00:10:00] parallels.
But yeah, that homeschooling like philosophy is very deep in me and is very much the thread that's actually throughout my work with the Thiel Foundation also. And with 1517, sometimes we joke and we say we're homeschooling CEOs. In that CEO led way, instead of it being child led, it's like, hey, no, like, the founders we're working with are gonna guide us as far as what sort of support they need and where they wanna go. And our role is to be a resource to them in that.
How adult expectations undermine child creativity
David Elikwu: You said a few really interesting things. One thing I'd love to dig deeper on is, between your experiences going through traditional schooling yourself, the homeschooling and charter schooling, what you notice, and I know you mentioned some, like for example, being self-directed, but I'd love to know what you think are maybe some of the commonalities that you noticed among the students that go through some of these different processes.
And in particular, the second follow up question. What do you think comes first between the chicken and the egg in that? It's one thing to maybe identify that, [00:11:00] okay, a lot of these homeschooled kids maybe seem to be self-directed as an example, but are they simply self-directed because they are self-selecting, like the group of people that end up doing homeschooling or going to charter schools?
Are they already like that or do they become like that by going through this process?
Danielle Strachman: Wow. Really, really good questions. It's funny, I have some beliefs that I think some people balk at a little bit. And one of them is like, I think all children have their own genius. It's like they all have their own things that they're really good at and that they really shine in. Some people are like, oh, no, genius is only about IQ scores. And I used to do IQ testing. So I, have a different take with it.
But I've seen a few things. Like, I remember actually towards the beginning of the pandemic, I remember I saw somebody tweet something out about like, you know, my brother is so bored, he's playing guitar all day. And I was like, that's not boredom, that's motivation. And I think sometimes, in the like adult world, we tend to look at what children do [00:12:00] and say, oh, they're bored. So they're doing a non-productive thing. It's like, we're starting to talk more in the startup world about toxic productivity. And I think it's actually, I think toxic productivity also is really seen in the child world. Children are heavily overscheduled now, and oh, you have to be doing something that looks like learning or school or something like that. But I think most children have things that they're very motivated by, but in the adult world we judge that as well. That's play time. That's not serious. So I think if we look at most children, you'll start finding, okay, here's, here's the thing that really lights them up.
And when I used to be a private tutor, I would try to figure out what were those things that really lit them up and use those as mechanisms to get through homework or to teach a subject.
The role of environment in fostering curiosity and play
So I do think that this curiosity and play are innate human experiences. Yeah, it's hard for me to think of children who don't have those things. I'm sure it comes up [00:13:00] in these minimal or outlier cases. I do think of it as innately human different environments than foster or stifle that. And so for some children, they go into environments like, one thing that's interesting is I wouldn't necessarily even like abolish typical book learning or like, Hey, turn to this page and do this thing. Cause some children thrive in that and they do really well with that and they want the structure and some children want more messy, like, hey, we're gonna get our hands literally dirty or tactile or they're social learners and they wanna be engaging with people in a group.
Danielle Strachman: But it's about finding the right environment and I think a lot of people think that, oh, or even told, Hey, my child isn't making it in school, which means there's something wrong with my child. To me, it's just like, it's not a fit. In some work environments as adults, we would say, Hey, I fit really well in like a big corporate structure. And I, you know, I don't know. I've never worked at google, so I'm just making it up [00:14:00] here. But it's like, I like working at Google, like I know what I'm supposed to do, this is my team, things like that. And other people are probably gonna want to be in an environment where maybe there's more fluidity between roles and you're wearing different hats every day.
So, I think environment can amplify or compress things. But I think at the end of the day, the majority of humans have these different drives, and the way that I think about teaching or like the adults and children's lives is our job is to just not layer on stuff that's gonna compress what's already naturally there. It's like, how can we bring it out more? Is more how I think about it. If that answers the question.
David Elikwu: No, no, no. It does. And I loved the point that you made about the difference between or I guess the balance between motivation and boredom and things that look like boredom because of how much we structure our days, and I think even as you were saying that, I was just thinking about,
The importance of boredom
Danielle Strachman: I was gonna say there's something that was coming to mind, which is, [00:15:00] there's a theory within homeschooling of like called deschooling or like decompression time, and we saw this at our charter school too. We would have students who were from like normal school environments and they would come to our school and it would be so different that they were sort of testing the boundaries of oh, okay, at this school, I'm sort of allowed to have feelings about wanting or not wanting to do something. Let's rev that up and see what the adults in this environment do. And I've seen this a lot in homeschooling families too, where maybe they make a shift in the educational environment to something that is more unstructured or more fluid or more child led.
And some people will talk about these stories of like, oh yeah, took my teen out for middle school and homeschooled then, and the first few months was like video games, video games, video games. And then there was something new that emerged after that. But sometimes we need to allow that de-schooling period. And you hear people in the working world talk about this, sometimes [00:16:00] that's called sabbatical. Sometimes that's called taking a staycation or like, you're in between your jobs and, okay, like what am I gonna do to decompress now?
And I think it's just as important for children to have that time too. And the reason that was coming up in my mind was that whole boredom thing again. I think boredom can actually like really lead people towards like what is motivating for them. And it's just an adult frame to say like, oh, they're doing this thing cause they're bored and it's like, actually they're doing that thing cause they really love it.
David Elikwu: Yeah. Yeah, and I think boredom is super important and it feels like a lost art. I remember there's you know, a study that people quote a lot, which is I think the result was essentially that people would rather give themselves a small electric shock rather than sitting by themselves for 15 minutes.
And so it's just this idea that we have now become so unaccustomed to just sitting alone with our thoughts that anything, even if it's painful, is better than that.
And even as, oh, go on. Yeah.
The human need for novelty
Danielle Strachman: Oh, I was gonna say, I heard about that study [00:17:00] recently and I remember, I don't remember who I was talking to. I was talking to a group and we all sort of have this quizzical look like, but what if it's novelty? What if it's just like, but how bad does the shock? Like all of us on the call were definitely probably like the very curious, like ADHD brain types who were like, but what's the shock feel like?
It's not like I, so some of us were hypothesizing that like maybe it's that they'd rather sort of shock themselves, then sit with themselves and yeah, people do have a hard time just being still. Um, But I, I do have to wonder sometimes, like, well, how much of that is just people seeking novelty, which is also just, you know, like a normal, a normal thing to want.
David Elikwu: That is true. But I guess the parallel is that. For a lot of us in our regular lives, I think, I'd question how many people actually seek novelty? Like people seek novelty, I guess in like microcosms, so long as they feel safe. But we also love order and structure and safety. And so we like jobs where they, okay, they'll [00:18:00] tell us what to do and we can, we can just sit there.
We do like the novelty, but in predictable forms in a sense. So like you go on TikTok and you don't know what videos you're gonna see, but you're kind of going back
Danielle Strachman: But you still know like within a range.
David Elikwu: Yeah, exactly. Like if you open your TikTok app and flies could come through your window or something completely random could happen, you'd probably never open it again.
Danielle Strachman: No. Well, it's funny, I talked to some people who really don't. I have some friends who really do not like surprises, even happy surprises. They're like, I do not want to be surprised. And it's funny for me cause I'm like, what? Like, I love surprises.
So, you know, we all have our individual experiences, but you're right, there's certain range of surprise you want of like, Hey, I know what I'm signing up for and this is it. And if it's outside the bounds, then yeah, maybe it's too much and it's not what you want.
[00:19:00]
Structured learning vs. personal discovery
David Elikwu: To go back a step to one of the previous things that you mentioned, so I will share a personal analogy actually, but I'm interested in, I guess there's two parts of it. One is the extent to which we should be structuring the information that children or people in general need to learn, and I guess the benefit.
And the extent to which children can benefit from being allowed to chase their curiosities. And I have a really good analogy or a good example, which is from my own personal life [00:20:00] and to this day, I still haven't decided whether I made good decisions or not.
The structure and constraints, right? I think one thing that is very interesting is you have this idea where people say, oh, this kid is ahead for his age, and so we might put him ahead of class. Or you might say, oh, this person's falling behind, and they're not keeping up with maybe their age mates, but all of this stuff is just made up, right.
And I'm interested maybe as an educator in your perspective on at what point should people be learning certain things, like what should those benchmarks be, and are there any logical points at which it makes sense that we should say, oh, by the time you are eight, you should have a grasp of this much algebra, because if you haven't learned it by then, then maybe one day when you are 11 or 12, you might come across some random trigonometry and you might have some problems or something like that.
So I guess that's like a background question, but I guess the thing that I would share, so when I was, I don't remember. I did the International Baccalaureate, so the IB, I don't know if you've, okay. Yeah.
So instead,
Danielle Strachman: I know a little bit about it. [00:21:00] Yeah, it's pretty, IB's are really intense.
David Elikwu: Yeah. It was not fun. It wasn't fun. So I could have done A levels, which most people do here, but I did the IB largely because funnily enough, I was very particular, I can't even remember exactly why, I just decided I wanted to study economics and I wanted to study Mandarin, and I was willing to change schools and I would only go to a school that would let me study those two subjects.
And so it was between a school that's in like Holloway Road, both of the schools were not anywhere near my house. But one is in somewhere else in North london and then another school in West London somewhere. Both of them, the commute was like between, the one I ended up going to was like one hour or so, and then the other one would've been like two hours each way. So not fun. So I didn't pick the further one.
But the point was in the second year, I was not the best student in general in terms of like studying. I, I guess I didn't, I had never needed to build a habit of studying to do well in tests up until this point. And so suddenly during the IB you're doing like six subjects. And actually, [00:22:00] I think exam start in May, and this was March. And I realized, huh, I probably should seriously start some of the studying stuff. And we were getting to the point where I think in a lot of classes you do electives. And I made the decision, and this is the part I'm objectively, I think it was probably a, a very bad decision. However, it did pay off in, in some ways, and I guess it's triggered an interesting set of circumstances in the rest of my life.
But I decided that, the school usually picks your electives for you, and that's what the teacher teaches. And I decided that I was gonna pick all my own stuff. And so I stopped going to most classes and on the top floor of the school there's a class, like near the end of the hallway and I pulled one of the desks out from that classroom and just pushed it to the end of the hall, and I would just go and sit there. So I would go to school like, I'd leave my house, go to school, and I would just sit at this desk by myself in like the back of this hallway. That's when I started studying and I taught myself that last part of the curriculum. And so I do my exams and you know, [00:23:00] mixed results is the, is the result. So in some subjects like English, I did well beyond what I might have even expected. I got like, some of the, technically some of the, best results in the world. I pretty much got, I did both English language and English literature. I got a hundred percent on one and the other, I dropped like one mark. So that was like, the top 0.5% globally grade-wise. And but that's good. So on one hand you could say, oh I chased my curiosity. And wow, the asymmetry of exponentially positive results. And then there were also some other subjects like economics and some other things I was supposed to do well or expected to do well and I did not do as well as I should have. And so I guess that's the balance.
So I guess those are those two parts that I'd wanted to ask you about. One is like the level of structure we might need, and then also the extent to which it's worth letting kids chase their curiosity like me, who then maybe on average did not end up doing as well as I could have done if I just did what everyone else was doing.
The art of independent study
Danielle Strachman: I have a clarifying [00:24:00] question. So when you were in that hallway, were you studying more on like the English side and you were like leaving the economics behind? Or were you also studying economics and were you doing all your own of self-study of these areas and then you took these tests and you're like, oh, I've got, I'm majorly above here, but it looks like I have a deficit you know, over here kind of thing.
David Elikwu: So I would probably say it might have been hard to gauge, I guess, because I wasn't in the class anymore. And the balance was, I was studying everything. Also, because I hadn't been regularly studying everything throughout the year or throughout the past two years, cause I guess that's the other wrinkle is that when you do the IB, if I was doing A levels like we do, like everyone else does, you take exams at the end of the first year and then you also take exams at the end of the second year.
Whereas in the IB you just take exams at the end of the second year. So it's like two years worth of stuff where I haven't necessarily been tested on. And you figure out how much, you know at the end.
Danielle Strachman: Sure. Okay. Interesting. That's fascinating to me that your school allowed you to [00:25:00] even, it's one thing for a school to allow a student to do their own self-study, even at the back of the classroom, the fact that you moved the desk out of the classroom and they were like, all right, this is where David's doing his thing. Like, I think that's, that's interesting.
I guess the hard part about individual stories that we don't get to do, we don't get to do the multiverse on it. You don't get to say okay, and then I went and I was inside those classrooms and this is how it came out. Like, maybe had you been in those classrooms, you would've been at the middle of everything, but maybe your appreciation for english and literature wouldn't have been as high, for example. Cause you wouldn't have been able to like dive as deep.
I think it's a really interesting question that you ask because there's this sense that children should all be traveling on this normative curve for their learning. And what's interesting is that you do see these like, peaks and valleys in terms of ability. And we even saw this inside of the Thiel Fellowship where it was like, okay, yeah, someone could talk our [00:26:00] ear off about econ all day. But maybe like, setting their own schedule when they became a Thiel fellow is difficult, or certain skills just were like not as developed as like other skills, which like it makes sense. But we put this expectation on children that like, well you should at least be dead average on all the stuff. It can be challenging too, like anecdotally.
The impact of alternative learning approaches
Danielle Strachman: My colleague from the charter school, Christine, she has four children that she's homeschooled and her oldest, and she was a teacher before she was a homeschooler, like she taught in public school. And so she remembers that when she started with her oldest son, Miguel. She was like, well, you know, I've been a teacher. I can get the reading books out. And you know he was five when they started homeschooling and like, he did not want to do anything structured, anything that came out of a book. And it took I think a lot for her to put it aside and it was also really difficult because I think at the age of like 11. Miguel was just barely reading. Just barely and like not well. And so her whole family was like, [00:27:00] what are you doing? Your kid doesn't even read. They're 11 years old. She's like, well, you know, we read every day. And I read to him and she sort of had this sense of like, we're going to get there eventually. And what was really interesting is something clicked and when he was 12, he was reading like way above. It's like he just took off. He was reading way above grade level at that point.
And so it's, sort of always this challenge I think for educators and parents to try to figure out like, Hey, is this person going to learn fundamentals that are going to take them into the future? And I'm a big proponent of exposing young people to different subject areas and topics and doesn't mean they have to become an expert in it. No, but like, I want them to have a taste of it and be able to get in there.
But it's interesting cause when I used to tutor, it was so hard, especially when I went over children's houses who were both public and private schoolers cause they would have this like homework half do stuff that I felt like I was like putting a bandaid over a bullet wound of like, oh man, I'm here to do [00:28:00] homework help. This is always really hard and I would try to make it relatable or I would try to go like, okay, you know what? We're working a muscle right now. Like, okay, this child does not like algebra, but what we're working is a particular thinking style here. And like that's what we're really doing and trying to abstract, being able to think in these types of ways may be helpful in the future. And I do think like some level of basics is important, but whether the person gets that basic at 8 years old versus 12 years old. It's unclear to me how much it has to be within, within a band.
Finding the right support balance in education
Danielle Strachman: The other thing too is like looking at, are there things that are in the way? Are there more supports that are needed for a child to do something? I for example, read late. You know, my peers were reading in first grade. I was not reading in first grade. So it's like, okay, we got a tutor. I got support and then I was able to do it. So I also think people need to look at like, what's the support that is needed for someone to start succeeding in something? But like, yeah, [00:29:00] I have this other part that is like, okay, geometry, I was terrible at geometry, really good at algebra. Really, really good. I could puzzle anything together and figure out, solve equation. No problem. Geometry, don't get it at all. Is it the end of the world that I'm bad at geometry? No. Do I think I was supposed to go in that direction for my career for some reason? No. And that's okay.
So I, I just think, this such a hard question because there's like being flexible with what people know and what they learn and letting people excel in areas and letting them maybe atrophy in other areas. But then there's that question of like, is the atrophy, because like more focus is being putting into something else and there's like an acceleration happening, or is there an atrophy because there's more support needed?
And I think that can be tricky to figure out. So maybe that's where I land on that is something about are they excelling somewhere else? And that is where they're putting the energy versus like they need more support and they're not getting it. And that's why something is atrophying.
Roger Federer vs. Tiger Woods
David Elikwu: [00:30:00] There was one question that just came to mind cause it links heavily to what you were saying. I would've saved it till later. But it makes sense to ask you now because it links to, I guess, the work that you do with 1517 and also maybe. Some of the work you did on the Thiel Fellowship, which is, you know, you're going out, you're trying to find the founders of tomorrow and the people that are gonna be breakout founders, but you're trying to find them early. So a lot of the people that you found working on the Thiel Fellowship, like Vitalik and multiple, multiple founders, and you can share some of those stories, but you found them all very early.
What I'm interested in as it relates to what you were just sharing, is how you find the balance between not falling for the trap of precocity? And just like you were sharing, there are some things where maybe early on. It might have taken you a while just to learn a particular thing or like your friend's child. It took a while for them to get reading and then once they did, they just took off.
And I think, David Epstein has a book called Range and he talks about this idea of precocity and he uses two models, one being Tiger Woods and the other being Roger Federer. And Tiger Woods from, I think age of [00:31:00] two or three, he held a golf club for the first time and from then he was pretty much just a golf pro. He, he was an incredible prodigy at golf from a baby. And obviously it was drilled into him by his parents, particularly his dad. But he was always good at this one thing and drilled this one thing and showed the signs of being excellent from early.
And then the other model that David Epstein used is Roger Federer, who I think up until he was about 15. He did three sports through the year, so he did skiing, he played football or soccer, and then he also did tennis and I think one of the things David Epstein was mentioning is that actually it's all the different skills that Roger Federer was picking up that actually ended up helping him to be so good at tennis by the time he decided to focus on that. But the benefit was that he got to spend a lot of time finding match fit and a lot of time trying lots of different things.
And so I guess the connection there to potentially some of what you do in selecting and trying to find really good founders early, how do you find the balance between, essentially not [00:32:00] missing people who maybe just where things haven't clicked yet, and maybe where they have some of the raw ingredients, but they're just not ready at a particular point in time.
Why effort often outshines innate ability
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, so there's another book that I wanna bring up. I don't know if you've read about Peak and Peak is by Anders Ericsson. And I think it's really fascinating, there's a chapter towards the end that I especially love. And what, what the whole book is about is really that yes, there is that initial spark of, Hey, this person seems to have an aptitude in this area, or an interest in this area.
But then the importance of very deliberate practice within that area and how it brings somebody forward. The chapter that I found just most salient was they talk about that everyone assumes that the best chess champions were probably the ones identified like super early. It's like, okay, cool. We identified you as someone who's has this aptitude and they're really good at it. It turns out it's the second tier people who tend to become the masters. Cause the second tier people have like some aptitude, but [00:33:00] they also had to start practicing and developing a habit of practicing. And then they're the ones, who like maybe the first tier people shine for a while, but kind of like what you were talking about a little bit earlier in your own journey is like, I don't have to study, I'm just good at this. I'm just good at this. And then you hit something where you're like, oh crap, I have to study now. It was the people who were in that first tier when they would later get to like, oh, I have to like practice and try at this. They hadn't gotten practice and practicing yet, and it seems like they start dropping off, whereas the people who needed to try a little bit at the beginning seemed to outshine those like first tier peers and those are the people who are becoming the chess masters.
And the thing that I think is really interesting is that the author brings up this sense of loss actually of how many people are we losing to because we're putting them in a fixed place of like, oh, you seem really good at math, so we're gonna put you in the advanced math class and you're gonna be math everything throughout versus someone who's [00:34:00] struggling a little bit, but they're like starting to do it. But then they get placed in like, oh, well you're gonna be in a standard class cause you're not as good. And so this author is talking about delaying that amount of placement until later just based on like some of this other research of like, hey, it actually looks like it's like the second tier people who are like outshining in the long run. But in the short run it's hard to see.
And so it sounds to me like you're getting at some of this too with some of the founders we work with. And what I would say is that we are looking for people who have different qualities and attributes and they're showing their aptitude for wanting to like, they're really hungry to go deep in certain areas.
And like that might be coming out in the work they're showing or how they express something. Does it mean that you know, we're like writing checks on the 1517 side to like every one of those people. No, but it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about environment of, like, can we help to put them in a more [00:35:00] satiating environment with more resources?
How small investments ignite big dreams
Danielle Strachman: And there's a few ways we do that with 1517. So one way is through our community. We have a really active community of a few thousand young people, and we do in-person events and we do online work as well and online communities and things like that. And what, what we hear is like, wow, I don't get to meet other young people like me very often. And so that is just such a resource to these teens is like, oh wow. Like I'm talking to other people who it's not weird to them why I would be wanting to geek out on this one area, or building a project or building a nonprofit or building a startup. And it's like socially acceptable in this community where you come and people aren't like, what? What undergrad are you at? Like, we're not asking those questions. It's more like, what do you like to geek out about? Let's talk about that.
To us it's more about like, what's the right environment at the right time? This is something we saw in the Thiel Foundation too was, we started doing these community building events and we were getting to meet these people who maybe on paper for example, [00:36:00] it's so obvious, but viscerally it's even more exciting to see that everyone is 10 x what they sound like on paper. So it's like someone writes in about what they're working on and the articulation isn't that good or doesn't sound that exciting, but then you get on a call with them and they're like, really lit up about it and you're like, wow, this person's really interesting. And then it's this question of, hey, do we wanna bring them into the environment of our community? We have a grant program we run where sometimes we'll say, Hey, like we wanna kick you a little bit of resources, a thousand bucks to like build what you need to build to get to the next level. Sometimes it's an investment opportunity and like we think about it in a scaffolded way.
And one thing that was hard during the Thiel Fellowship was like we had our community and we had our, you get a hundred thousand dollars a year for two year program and there wasn't really an in between. And we had this insight during the last year that we were there that maybe people don't need a hundred thousand dollars to get started. Maybe they need a thousand bucks. And so we started piloting that a little bit.
And one of the young people [00:37:00] that we gave a thousand dollars to at an old Thiel summit. He sold his company right actually, it was right when the pandemic hit. And he sold the company, it was somewhere around like $30 million. And it was like, wow, that was in part kicked off by a $1,000 grant to get this person started on what they were doing.
So I think that the sort of question is an interesting one of when and what environment is going to get someone to like take those next steps. And sometimes for us, that's community, sometimes it's a grant, sometimes it's an investment. But for us it really is hey, like which bucket is this? And if someone really values aligned and they're really eager, It's like they're going to usually fit into that community bucket. And I know some communities that are more about coolness factor, and I've talked to a lot of young people who are like, oh, I didn't get into this community. I didn't get into that community. It's like, It feels very high school and very clique-ish. And I'm like, come be in our community. We're gonna be here for you in the long term.
And there's lots of people that we've worked with where we've said no to investment. Maybe they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and they're like, [00:38:00] yeah, I'm ready for a million bucks. And we're like, we don't quite think you're ready for a million bucks. But and we, we're wrong a lot, Like that's our job. But sometimes we can't get there on that. But we can get there on, like, Hey, you should be in our orbit and environment and have other resources.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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