With the Ivy League under fire and public education facing persistent challenges, it may finally be time for alternative education models to have their moment. At least, that's the vision at Outschool, the marketplace for live online classes that's quietly redefining what learning can look like.

Founded in 2015 when most investors considered education a "dead sector," Outschool connects kids with passionate teachers for everything from core academics to creative pursuits like Minecraft modding, hair braiding, and Dungeons & Dragons. While traditional education remains stuck in industrial-era models, Outschool represents a growing movement toward what some call "networked learning" or "open education."

In this conversation with Isaac Morehouse, CEO of OpenEd, Outschool founder and CEO Amir Nathoo discusses how education is being unbundled, why screen time isn't all created equal, and what happens when you bet on kids and teachers to design their own educational journeys.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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Isaac: Let's start with the Outschool elevator pitch for those who are not familiar.

Amir: Absolutely. Outschool is a marketplace of live online classes for kids. Teachers teach the classes that they always wanted to teach, everything from core subjects to enrichment of all types, and offer classes to their design for kids aged 3 through 18. These classes take place in small groups or one-on-one over video chat.

You can access a learning group and a teacher from anywhere in the country or the world that exactly fits your child's needs. And that's the point. By offering tremendous variety of classes, both direct to parents, as well as through partnerships and institutions, we hope to offer unlimited customizability in education and true personalization.

That's more and more important in the future as we recognize that every kid is different, their needs change with time, and it's impossible for a single institution school to satisfy all the needs of even one kid, let alone all the needs of all kids. We give people the option to customize their education, whether it's around traditional schooling choices or quite frequently around alternative education and homeschooling choices. And through that customization, not just getting better outcomes, but getting healthier, happier kids.

How did you end up in this space? Was it a passion for education first, or did you come from the entrepreneurship side?

The story of how I came into this is a mix of professional and personal motivations. My professional background has been in software and tech my whole career. I've been a founder and entrepreneur for the majority of my career, working in a variety of different industries. But when I look at my personal background, that's very influential on my thesis behind Outschool.

Both my parents were teachers. They not only helped me with my traditional schooling—I was fortunate to have an excellent traditional school in the UK—but really importantly helped me pursue interests outside of regular school, including helping me pursue my interest in programming. This was way before we ever knew that this was gonna be a profession and an important skill. They did it not because of potential economic preparation or benefit, but because they believed that helping me pursue my interests was gonna be valuable for my motivation, for my love of learning.

When it came time to think about what I was gonna do next after my first company and after I'd been at Square for a while, my mind turned to education. I started to think about what I wanted for my own kids. Then I started developing this thesis that's actually different than what I experienced in traditional education. I bet that a lot of other people like me with young kids today who have grown up through all the changes with the internet and changes in the workplace are going to be thinking the same way.

You started OutSchool around 2015, which was when the sharing economy and marketplace businesses were really taking off. Everyone was trying to create the "Uber for X" or the "Airbnb for Y." But so many of those marketplace startups failed with their cold start problems, quality control issues, and supply-demand matching. How did OutSchool manage to not only survive but thrive as a marketplace business?

That's one of the core strategic challenges that any marketplace faces. It's very, very hard. It's what makes building a marketplace a much more challenging business model than most other types of products and business structures. There are many ways to fail at doing that.

One of the key ways to fail is just to try and recruit supply and recruit demand independently and also go too broad too early. You really need to pick a niche to try and create initial marketplace liquidity. The way we solved that was by really focusing in on a narrow niche, which initially was gifted homeschoolers in person in the San Francisco Bay area.

We used the fact that this early adopter audience is highly networked—meaning the way they transmit information is through personal connections, Facebook groups, Yahoo mailing lists, a lot of word of mouth sharing of knowledge. That often happens in these early adopter communities where there's not much external support.

We'd talk to tutors who served this market and say, "What parents do you work with? Do you mind if we interview them?" And then we'd say, "Hey, I know you've got these parents that you already work with, but why don't you list the class on our site and we'll get you others." We were very hands-on in helping to make it very easy, so it felt like a kind of a low-risk proposition for them.

Then we went to the parents who already worked with that teacher. "You work with this tutor? Great, we're going to try and get him on our platform. Who else do you work with?" Those parents would tell you, "Well, actually we work with this program, this institution, this other teacher." Then you approach those, keep on doing it.

You end up basically facilitating the connections that might otherwise be made informally, but be quite laborious. This is how the information travels through the community. You use the tactics that match what's already happening. You just make it easier for the participants by helping manually along the way. Later on, your product helps in this way.

There's been a lot of debate about screen time and technology. How do you approach this issue, especially since Outschool is an online platform?

Technology and the tools we build are immensely powerful tools of our civilization. You're doing kids a disservice if you do not give them access to it at appropriate ages. That doesn't mean it's a free-for-all. You need scaffolding, structure, and boundaries, for sure. But access to technology should be a key part of education because if you go too far in restricting it, then how are you going to prepare your kids for the future?

It's tough, and everyone struggles with this. I struggle with this as a parent. We put in some boundaries. It also depends on your kid. My six-year-old loves Minecraft. He loves his iPad. He'll play on it for hours. I used to play on my computer for hours. But one thing I've noticed about my kids is that he does get bored. Eventually, he'll put down his iPad. Usually, I intervene and we have set timers, but it does happen naturally too.

Not all screen time is created equal. Just watching stuff on YouTube is completely different to building a virtual world or learning a tool or building a virtual world with others. You can also draw another dimension about interactivity with other humans.

The great thing about kids interacting and building virtual worlds is, ultimately they want to build in the real world. But when you're a kid, it's not safe to let kids do real-world building or physical activity. In virtual worlds, they can practice, and you can start that practice young. Kids instinctively want to learn the powerful tools of adult society, and these are playgrounds that can be used for that purpose.

I've got my own Outschool story with my son. He's almost eight and loves Minecraft. I'm not technical at all, unlike you—I'm not a coder. So he plays Minecraft, and we have limits around screen time, with a continuum from consuming content to creating. The more creative, the less worried I am about screen time. He said, "I want to learn how to make mods," and I was immediately stressed because I don't know how to do that but wanted to say yes to him. After trying some options that didn't work well, we found an Outschool class—every Friday for six weeks with a great instructor. Now he can make custom blocks, and he knows more than I do about this.

That's so funny. I had exactly the same experience. I can program, but I still can't learn Minecraft. It's very complicated unless you invest significant time. I don't know how much money I spent on a Minecraft tutor of all things. He had one-on-one tutoring sessions to learn some specific things. And now he's in a group class.

He's building worlds in a collaborative way with other kids supervised by a teacher who's helping the kids use Minecraft. He does that every Sunday afternoon and absolutely loves it. And this is the thing about screen time. I really like how you do that continuum from consumption to creative, and you can also draw one with interactivity as well with other humans.

Some screen time is incredibly powerful and valuable for kids. You can see the difference. If a kid has spent an hour watching YouTube videos, they have a different look on their face and need a few minutes to detox or they're a little edgy. Versus coming away from Outschool classes brimming with creativity and excitement. You could not convince me that was a bad use of screen time.

How do you define what's happening in education today? It seems like we're moving beyond simple categories like "homeschooling" versus "traditional school."

This is a challenge in alternative education right now. The boundaries are blurring. When we started, we were very clear that we were targeting homeschoolers first. It was quite clear how to identify them—people who had made the decision to pull their kid out of traditional public school and not enroll them in a private alternative or charter alternative.

Now alternative education has blossomed to being far more than homeschooling. You've got part-time enrollment, dual enrollment, microschools, parents who are making alternative educational choices who are values and attitudinally aligned to the vision. But it's harder now to identify when a family is doing it.

The best we've come up with so far is "thinks expansively about education," but that's kind of vague. Another approach I've been playing with is "is a member of more than one educational institution." If you can say, "My kid goes to that school and that school alone," that doesn't feel alternative. But if it's, "They go to a traditional public school and they also are a member of this supplemental program," or "They do this three-day-a-week homeschool co-op and then unschool the rest of the time," that's kind of a member of two different categories of education.

We went through the same exercise when we rebranded from My Tech High to OpenEd. We decided to define a new category called "open education."

Anyone who's doing two or more education approaches at the same time has basically opened the box to varying degrees. They may just have it open a crack, but the box is closed if you're all in one school all day, every day. Maybe that works for some people. There's nothing wrong with that, but recognizing, "10% of this doesn't work, or 50% of it doesn't work, or 80% of it doesn't work, or 0% of it is working," you open up that box to varying degrees and then say, "I'm gonna modularly add this one component." Now you're an open educator.

I love the term "networked schooling" that you mentioned.

It's an ecosystem. The other kind of verbiage I started to play with is networked schooling and that you're members of multiple networks. But saying that you're members of multiple schools still gives it a sense of a physical presence, whereas it might be geographically distributed.

For example, my son goes to alternative micro school in San Francisco, and he spends also a lot of time on Outschool. He has multiple other memberships, but probably the two biggest ones are those two. Certainly, the Outschool one is not local, and within Outschool, he's a member of multiple different kinds of groupings.

There's a real benefit to this approach that mirrors real life, isn't there?

We don't live in a world where our entire existence is contained in one box and one set of networks. We have our friends that we only do sports stuff with. We have our friends at church. We have our work friends and our life over there. We have our stuff that we do in our garden. We have all these domains and spheres that overlap.

It's a better structural model for how humans actually are. You have these different parts to yourself, different interests, different identities, and they're intersectional. The structure should reflect that. There's no reason it can't now because in the past we were held back by logistics, but this is what we've solved with the structures that Airbnb created, Lyft and Uber, we can do that now.

It's just a better model, but of course, it's always hard when you're trying to transition an entire system and way of thinking in a domain as emotive and high-stakes as education.

Outschool also opens up opportunities for teachers. Can you talk about that aspect?

We aim to treat all of our teachers as creative entrepreneurial professionals, which is what teaching is. Unfortunately, there are so many roadblocks within the traditional system to teachers acting like that. When you remove those blocks and give them an option, then many, many take it.

It's truly exciting to think about what could happen if a generation of kids are educated by a generation of creative entrepreneurial teachers who are genuinely passionate about their subjects. They're given the freedom to teach the way they always wanted to teach. That sounds like the future to me.

It's like you're creating one-room schoolhouses for the digital age.

It's like every teacher can spin up their own little one-room schoolhouse one day a week for six kids to do that one thing. And then the kid can kind of pop from this one-room schoolhouse to this one and to this one.

What are you looking at for the future? What's the next big horizon?

I think a lot about what's happening with school choice and ESAs and the public funding now available for families embarking on these alternatives. That wasn't present at the start of Outschool's journey, so we're very focused on enabling families to access those funds to use on supplements throughout school.

From a technology perspective, AI is an incredibly interesting trend. We have some theses that are quite different from other education companies on how AI can be used. One of the challenges of choice is it's overwhelming and complicated. Marketplaces like us have tools to help people navigate the variety, but there's now immensely more power available both on the technology side through AI, but also through human navigation services that can help make choice less overwhelming.

We're also thinking about expansion to different types of learning. Right now, we offer online learning in groups and one-on-one, and many educational use cases can be well satisfied using those. But through partnerships or bringing different kinds of teaching and education experiences onto our platform, we aspire to provide even more variety, not just in terms of class content, but in terms of delivery mechanisms.

How can we provide simple navigation of a vast array of different educational modes and content types and provide that in a very cost-effective way to the family using public funds? That's a brief summary of where we're headed.