In this episode, Chris sits down with Nat Eliason - founder, writer, and now launching Founders School, a new entrepreneur high school in New York City.
Tuition is $150K a year. The promise: every student hits a million dollars in gross profit by graduation, or the family gets their tuition refunded. The first class is around 20 freshmen. The day is split between AI-driven academics in the morning and business building the rest of the day.
This is also the same Nat Eliason who in his spare time built Felix - an AI agent he gave a Stripe account, an email, and an X handle, then told to launch a business overnight. Felix has done $60+K in sales since. Nat has not touched the code.
They discuss:
- Why the "game of school" is kayfabe and what's finally breaking it
- The 16-year-old flying out to California to run short-form video for Al Pacino's new movie
- The Munger inversion behind Alpha's curriculum: "why would these kids fail?"
- What businesses a 14-year-old should and shouldn't build (and the $500/month software budget)
- How Nat masters a new domain every two or three years, and why his $35K smart-contract loss accelerated him faster than caution would have
- Felix - what "zero human" actually looks like, and the rules Nat set up to keep himself out of it
- The day Anthropic shut off Open Claw and Alpha students reverse-engineered a proxy workaround in hours
- Why the founding fathers wrote the Declaration in their early 20s, and what we forgot about teenagers
Timestamps
(05:55) What Alpha Does Differently From Conventional Schools
(11:48) Playing the Fake Game of School
(21:46) How Nat Masters New Domains
(32:18) Open Claw Deep Dive
(43:50) Building the Alpha Entrepreneurship Program
(51:43) Freshman Year Structure at Alpha School
(1:00:23) How Students Can Pitch for Equity or Debt Funding
(1:04:08) Why Establish a New York Location for Year One
(1:11:15) Nat’s 10-Year Vision
(1:15:11) AI as a Force Multiplier for Teenage Founders
(1:16:15) How Alpha Students Quickly Reverse-Engineered a Workaround After Open Claw Went Down
(1:24:13) Teen-Parent Conflict as a Symptom of Infantilization
Support our Sponsors
Collateral Partners: https://collateral.com/fort
Chris on Social Media:
X: https://x.com/fortworthchris
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepowerspodcast
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/
Visit our website: https://www.powerspod.com/
Leave a review on Apple: https://bit.ly/45crFD0
Leave a review on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Krl9jO
