For ex: Alice, a great designer, could give each of her students capital that the students can use to pay rent, food, products and services to help them design, explore, or whatever (it’s their money!).
But what exactly would Alice get in return? Let’s say we create a “personal token”, an instrument that represents an individual’s potential, with transactable shares, grounded in their equities in companies and other personal tokens (via dividends on capital gains).
So Alice would get shares (equity) in each student’s personal token in exchange for her training + capital.
This would mean:
1. Students don't take on debt. In fact they get paid to learn!
2. Alice is held accountable. If she fails to meaningfully improve her students' outcomes, she loses her investment. This means Alice is forced to adapt her training to what is actually relevant to the world.
3. Teacher-student relationships last years / decades, not semesters. Alice is strongly incentivized to help her students whenever they need it, because she has equity in their long-term success.
But why? AI is making outcomes extreme (power law distribution). We can already feel this in software engineering: AI makes the best engineers far better than the median. As the gap between the best and rest grows, it becomes too risky to finance education with debt for the same reason it’s too risky to finance startups or content creation with debt.
Paul Graham was one of the earliest examples of this model. He didn’t need to guard his knowledge or put it behind a paywall because he had a much more powerful way to capture value: by investing in the founders his essays attracted. If teachers could invest in students, knowledge would spread more freely because sharing knowledge itself would become a funnel for investing. Even students who never raise would still benefit from the higher-quality knowledge that becomes available.
Thoughts?
