#352 - Ryan Delk - Founder @ Primer - Fixing the Broken US Education System & Saving San Francisco

Chris Powers: Ryan, thanks for joining me today. 

Ryan Delk: Happy to be here. 

Chris Powers: I thought a fun place to start would be a letter that your mom wrote a paper on why homeschooling was a terrible idea. And then you were home-schooled for many years of your childhood. Can we start there? 

Ryan Delk: Yeah. She'll probably kill me for telling this story, but my mom was a public school teacher for many years before I was born.

When she and I were young, we moved from Atlanta to Florida. Before, when she was in college, getting a teaching degree, she wrote a paper. I remember reading it or her telling you about it, but it's some version of alternative education that should be illegal. Like we should not, you should not be able to have kids be home-schooled in private school charter schools.

It's just to be in public school; that was where she was. Then we moved to Florida, and she took me to kindergarten orientation at the public school we were zoned for. We had no money, so there wasn't an option to go to private schools, and there were no resumed charter schools then.

And she freaked out, and she's like, I can't leave you here. And this was the early nineties in Florida. So I am still determining exactly where they rank, but last time I checked, it was like Florida was 46th in the nation regarding school quality. So this is like a bad school in a bad state for public schools.

And she freaks out, and she's like, I can't leave you here. And so I think at that moment, the way she told me, it's like that moment was like her whole worldview, like switched, and I've seen what you're going with this as she ended up starting a micro-school co-op for us and home-schooling us.

She thought she'd do it for a year and ended up doing it for much longer, but everything was like one 80 for her right then.

Chris Powers: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, so we'll get to what you're doing today. But you should set the stage for what you're doing today. As you can see, what's wrong with education in America today, especially for kids?

Ryan Delk: There has been good talk for a long time about this. There are structural, incentive, and personal day-to-day problems for kids. The structural issues might be contrarian, and many people want an alternative education.

You probably wouldn't say this If you told me that I had to design an education system for 70 million kids, and it had to be the same real estate profile, staffing model, curriculum, everything. So, it is a homogeneous system and works in every state. I could do better than what currently exists. And so what I reject is the idea that you should have this homogeneous system where every public school has almost the same structure and setup. And so that's the first piece of it. And then you have an incentive problem at the staffing level with teachers. Teachers are incentivized, and basically, the entire incentive model compensation incentive model for teachers is downside minimization.

So there's no. If you're a top-performing teacher in a district, you might get a plaque and a 500 bonus. You could also go to a conference. But we rely on teachers being super altruistically motivated to go above and beyond to help kids succeed and get ahead.

So, you have this incentive problem where teachers are not properly incentivized to help kids get ahead and go beyond. They're incentivized to ensure that some of their class are doing well in the state tests. Then, you have the day-to-day personal experience of kids, where what parents and students want will be met by something other than this giant, homogeneous, industrialized system.

So you have students who need smaller class sizes or bigger cost sizes, more time on ELA, less time on math, and more time on math, less time on ELA. And there's no way to personalize that effectively when you have kids going through an assembly line from 8 to 3 daily.

Chris Powers: How long has the current system been in place?

Isn't this from the early 1900s, or is it even predated? 

Ryan Delk: Yeah, we could go back to, like, horse riders, all sorts of you go way back in history. But yeah, there's been different versions of it. But it's like the early 20th century when you started to see the current, which also coincides with how professional people's lives in America changed regarding how their jobs in the U.S. shifted. And the dirty secret of education is that childcare is a huge component. You need a place if you're working a job; you need a place for your kid to go for me to three every day. And so that was originally a massive component of it. And it's now this thing that no one talks about, but it is an enormous piece of the value of education for families.

Chris Powers: We figured that out in COVID when people try to work and keep their kids at home and school. It didn't work. What do you think about incentivizing teachers? What would be an excellent way to incentivize them? How would they be incentivized to ensure their students succeed and do well? Is it purely financial? 

Ryan Delk: So I need to find out the counterfactual. So it's hard for you. It's hard to say definitively, but I would love to run an experiment in a district where you say, Hey, we have private funding. That's going to layer this compensation plan on top of your existence.

So whatever the unions negotiated like that can stay, but we're going to do this additional compensation plan on top of that. We will set up a series of incentive-based milestones that teachers can head. The challenge is that you get into situations where whatever you decide to quantify to tie to those incentives can lead to teachers teaching to the test.

So you have to be thoughtful about it. But if you had the proper incentive structure in place and most districts, you could reallocate the budget from the administrative, bureaucratic budget and shift that over to teachers. You could drive much better student outcomes and incentivize teachers to go above and beyond for kids more often.

And then, all of a sudden, if you have a kid, you can get a year or two of grades ahead in math, and that becomes a big deal. You're incentivized to focus on that and make it happen instead of, okay, I need to ensure 60 per cent of my kids will pass the state test in April when we take it.

Chris Powers: Okay. You told me about one incentive structure that you think's messed up. I'm going to read it to you. The incentive structures, both social and economic, for teachers in the traditional education world are entirely broken. The incentives are all oriented around avoiding the downside, kids failing, and place zero emphasis on the upside, kids excelling.

Almost no one talks about this, but it's at the root of many of the problems in the education system. Is that exactly what we were talking about? The second one is the idea of where all the money's going. Talk about that. 

Ryan Delk: So per pupil, everyone talks about per pupil spending in the U.S.

If you look at, well, let's back up. Education in the U.S. is funded through a combination of local, state, and federal dollars, depending on where you're from and the type of school. It could be a public school, charter school, or magnet school. Most people think property tax dollars fund schools, which is directionally correct, but other money gets pulled in.

So, a charter school might have state funding, pull in some federal money, etc. However, depending on the district, schools spend between 12 and 13,000 to about 30,000 per kid in the public school system. There's all this data out there about per-person spending, and people talk about it and say that it needs to be higher, too high.

But what's more interesting to me is to look at where the spending split is going. And so if you talk to someone who's a teacher in the 1980s, they would tell you, " Oh, I've taught at this middle school, and I had a principal. And maybe there was an assistant principal, some janitors, some ops people, or whatever.

But it was a bunch of teachers and a principal, which was like the structure of a school. Now, you have this entire class of consultants and administrators. It's the same thing that's happened in almost every industry in the US, where you have this sort of bureaucratic layer layered on top.

And so when you look at the percentage of so per people spending goes up, but the amount that teachers are making is going up at a different rate. And so most of that spending is going to this new class of professional services, consultants, et cetera, on top of the school layer. And it's not an oversimplification to say, like, you should give all the money to the teachers, but that's what we do at primer.

And that is, to the first approximation, which is a much better way to deliver better student outcomes, saying, Hey, we're going to give as much money as possible. It will go into the classroom with the student toward teacher compensation, classroom supplies, etc.

And for most schools, you could cut a ton of this bureaucracy at the top and be like every industry in the U.S. And be fine. But that's where all the politics and everything happens, so those continue to get funded. 

Chris Powers: When you say all that, one thing I think about is what's going on at the Ivy League universities right now, where the main issues have nothing to do with educating kids anymore.

It concerns this vast bureaucratic layer,  forcing different agendas and ideologies on people. Do you have an opinion on how that works its way out? Is it going to become a supply-demand thing, where nobody demands to go to those places anymore, and they wash themselves out? Or is there a better way to fix it? 

Ryan Delk: I'm not an expert on higher education, and I'm not an expert on what my sort of armchair quarterback opinion would be, but I think it's very likely that if you rank the top 20 schools that 16-year-olds, ambitious 16-year-olds, want to go to today, the next ten years will have the highest reshuffling.

Of the last, what are schools? You likely have some public schools that become very aspirational for ambitious kids, and you likely have top schools that are no longer attractive to ambitious kids.

Most of that would be reshuffling existing schools, but there are also efforts like the University of Austin that Joe Lonsdale, Barry Weiss, and those folks are working on. They have a very, they're to our product market fit, like the perfect time. And obviously, that's part of the impetus for starting with all this stuff.

And so you will probably see some new players arise. Still, I also believe you will see, and this happened at MIT and some extent Stanford, some of these schools that are the like legacy places that everyone wants to go to are saying, Hey, we're going to cut all this crap and bring it back to basics. And they will probably be rewarded for that as my guest.

Chris Powers: Okay. Going back to more developing education, kids, do you have an opinion on the actual curriculum that most are being taught in, whether it's private, public, or standardized? Is it a reflection of what kids need to know today? Or are these just filler courses that, because we've always taught them, we're teaching now?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, it depends on the subjects. In our primer, we heavily emphasize math and reading. We could spend 100 minutes daily on math and 100 minutes on E. L., which could be reading or writing different things. And we're very unapologetic about that.

Math is the promise we make to families. One of them is that math and reading are the foundations of learning. We spend way more time on that than any other school in the U.S. We also believe that things like science and social studies and traditional things, like public and private school classes, should be 100% experiential.

So, kids should write letters to their representatives about things they're excited about. They should start companies, launch podcasts, write books, and work on science projects. It would help if you didn't learn science from a textbook. You should know it by working on projects. So, we divide it into those two categories.

And that's our pedagogy on it. The state standards are mostly acceptable. There are no different things that we tweak, but there is some value in the fact that there's fungibility between schools. And so the counterfactual, if you were to remove state standards, is that a kid moves from this district to this district, and suddenly, they're on two different systems.

Abolishing state standards is very popular, but it's a bit, especially with how much people move now. People only think that they're on two different systems. Fungibility is a vital feature of the school system. 

Chris Powers: What are state standards?

Ryan Delk: Individual states have this. You can think of it as a list of all the atomic units of a given subject people need to learn in a given grade. It might be a three-digit addition, three-digit subtraction, or something similar. Then, there are milestones that kids are supposed to hit based on their progression to those grades.

Any curriculum used in a state is supposed to take students through those milestones in the same way, using roughly the same structure. 

Chris Powers: Are we getting more competent as a society? 

Ryan Delk: How do you define smarter? 

Chris Powers: I don't know. You have attacked this problem. One way to do it would be to compare it to test scores.

That's probably not the correct answer. How do you look at it? Let me rephrase the question: Is the current education system benefiting our kids more today than it did 30 years ago? Or is it still a flat line? 

Ryan Delk: It's tough to quantify. So there are these famous things where people will say, okay, here's the Harvard entrance exam from 19, whatever, 30 versus the one, the equivalent of today.

And here's how much harder it was back then. Much research shows that the rigour around tests and different milestones people compare is less intense today than before. Test scores are going up or flat, but accommodations are being made to maintain that.

What's missing is the zooming out. The industrialization of education is the experiment for all of human history. It's been effectively micro-schools. It's been a small group of kids with a great teacher who is motivated and excited about teaching those kids.

Every human has learned this way forever. Then we had this industrialization of education that's happened over the last 80 years, and everyone acts like micro-schools and home-schooling, and these alternative educations are the experiment. But that's how we've always done it.

This industrialization thing is a big experiment. And so, are we getting smarter? It's not tough to quantify that. I am still trying to determine a clear answer. Still, even outside academics, you can give out the formation of humans and the goal of education, helping every kid reach their potential.

The current education system needs to deliver what it should, especially relative to how much we spend on it for kids. 

Chris Powers: All right. Well, then, let's talk about what you're doing today. You started a company called Primer. So clearly, something was tapping on your heart, and there's a better way to do this.

You said that this is the company's mission—I could be wrong—but you're there to take kids seriously. So, I guess the first question is, are we not taking kids seriously right now? 

Ryan Delk: We have this, and our office has this neon sign that takes kids seriously.

So it's the first thing you see when I walk in every morning, and it became like this, I don't know, rallying cry phrase, whatever internally for us. And that's why we all gravitated towards it. Student agency is the less marketing-me way to talk about it.

We inject student agency into every part of the student experience process. If you distil down what works about homeschooling, a massive part of that is just agency. Kids can move at their own pace; when they master something, they move on.

If they haven't mastered it, they don't move on. They have learned skills in time allocation. So How am I going to spend the next hour, two hours? It's not predetermined for them. They have to learn that they often have optionality of how they spend their time in the afternoons or different passion projects.

We try to inject agency at every turn. That translates to primer and the two main ways in core academics: Kids set their goals and are accountable to those goals. So, they log into their primer dashboard every five weeks and see where they're on every subject.

They see where they would be if they worked. We call it standard, fast, and lightning; they can pick how fast they want to go and how many villages, like how hard they want to work every day. Based on that, we show them a projection of where they would be at the end of those five weeks and then at the end of the year.

And so we show them like, Hey, if you were willing to work extra time every afternoon, you would be finished with, like, you're a third grader. You'd be finished with fourth-grade or fifth-grade math by the end of the year. And they can decide if they want to do that. So they lock in their goals every five weeks.

And then they're accountable to their classmates and teachers for those goals. And if you walk into a primary micro-school, kids could be playing soccer outside, and you can walk up to a kid and say, " Hey, Jeremiah, where are you at on your math call? Like he will know exactly where he's at ahead behind without ever looking at his dashboard.

They've internalized this, and this is like a third grader. These are not eighth graders, so kids have total agency over the academic process. So we're non-negotiable about it. We won't apologise for believing math and reading are essential; you will work hard at this.

And we're going to have rigorous academics. But we say, like, you're going to set these goals, and then you're accountable. And you've got to get in front of the class five weeks from now and say whether you hit them, just like in real life. And it turns out that when you do that, kids get motivated.

And so we have kids that come to primer. We had a kid, a third grader, who came to Primer and couldn't read. We're talking about the goals with him. And he said, Hey, I'm sick of getting made fun of that. I can't read because he got made fun of it as old school. And the teacher said you're not going to get made fun of a primer, but if you want to learn to read like, you can click that lighting button. I will give you everything you need if you're willing to work hard. He was in the first percentile, and reading on his map score, he was behind 99 per cent of kids in the U.S. He went from the first percentile to the 30th percentile 12 weeks later. He was; he grew faster than 99 per cent of kids in the U.S. over those weeks.

And so the student agent thing works. Like, I'm very, very high conviction on that. The second thing we do is that kids get to determine how they want to spend their afternoon time in the afternoons. So, we call them primer pursuits. And so kids can make products with other kids. They could say, we want to work on this project together as a group.

They can get a budget for it. They can organize it. Or they can do it; it's almost like independent study. So, if they want to write a book, launch a podcast, start a company, or do whatever, they can do that. And so we've had kids that have analyzed the NFL draft, pick like doing, running like a data model to figure out who the Miami Dolphins should draft in the NFL draft based on their current roster and who's available.

We've had kids work on very in-depth science projects. One kid was sick of turning his lamp on at night and built LED reading glasses from scratch. These kids invent these projects and go for it. In both cases, like the kids, there are guardrails for it. And it has to be. They have to work hard. We have a culture of this, as we call it, earnest work, but they have agency and can. They feel like they're in the driver's seat. And so that's what taking kids means for us. And that's what, if you talk to most parents who send their kids to primer, they would say is the defining feature.

Chris Powers: So, take that third great example of reading and how it works. Do you guys list potential goals, and they pick which one? Or do they tell me how he would have picked a goal? What's the process a third grader goes through to choose a badass reading goal? 

Ryan Delk: So, in reading, it's more binary.

It's like, are you on grade level or not? And can you read or not? And then once you can read, once you understand phonics and can read a book and understand it, it's like reading comprehension. It's writing. It's these other ELA components. Math is a much more granular example.

So, with math, they'll see a dashboard and be like three-digit subtraction or addition. It'll either be checked off because they've mastered it, or it won't be. And when they master it, they'll see it, and their parents will see it. Everyone has total transparency in it.

You're doing something other than six weeks for a report card. It's right away if they master it. And so the feedback loop for kids is gratifying because they see that they understand the concept of, Hey, I didn't know this thing. And then I like to work hard. And then, now, I see this thing.

And it's not like a month process. It's like, oh, and in a week or three days, I've mastered this new thing, and I can see the progress I'm making towards a fourth grade or fifth grade or whatever math. And so it's gratifying for them because it's like this very tight feedback loop. And then that becomes the high-status thing.

Every school has a culture where there are high-status and low-status people and high-status and low-status behaviour. Primer's high-status behaviour is working hard, being ahead on core academics, and working on these cool passion projects.

That's what we try to instil in every kid, 

Chris Powers: Assuming that these kids are accelerating, it's interesting that you take it back to age. I met a guy the other day who graduated high school when he was 14 and started medical school when he was 15.

I first thought society needed to be built for 15-year-olds to start medical school. But if you're successful, you will launch these kids into the world far ahead of their years. Have you thought at all about that? Imagine a world where a typical senior is now 12 or 13.

Ryan Delk: So we still need to do high school, but I tell the team and myself that we have to earn the right to do high school because high school is where it gets enjoyable. That's what I'm so excited about. I remember my dad from high school. Like everyone, he emailed all these business owners across where we lived in Orlando.

And he just said, Hey, my son's interested in entrepreneurship. He's interested in starting companies. Would you like to get coffee with him? Could he come to shadow you at your job? Like, talk to you. And so I met with someone running a coastal reconstruction company, insurance, auto dealerships, car body shops, and all these jobs.

I was in ninth grade. Getting exposure to it was such a formative experience for me. So it's like a dream for primers that you could start to give kids real-world experience, whether it's internships, apprenticeships, or whatever it might be, very early on in their high school careers.

By the time they get into 11th and 12th grade, they have an excellent idea of what they want to do with their lives. For some kids, that might be going to Harvard or Stanford and doing excellent biology research, or for other kids, I might be like, Hey, I want to start an HVAC company in my small town.

And we want a primer to be the best launching pad for them to use. So we want it to be like, whatever this is, where it comes down to, like, you want everyone to maximize the probability that every kid can reach their potential. Not every kid should go to Harvard, not every kid should launch an HVAC company, but we want a Primer to be the best place for those kids, regardless of where they're headed.

Chris Powers: All right. Well, let's take a step back real quick. You've mentioned micro-schools, and you've mentioned these kids getting on these dashboards. The micro school has to be created. So, how does that even start? 

Ryan Delk: So yeah, this is what we spend all our time on. Primer aims to help the top 1% of teachers launch micro-schools in their communities. That's it. It's straightforward and challenging but effortless. If you're a fantastic teacher who loves your community and wants to start a school, we want to make that as simple as possible. And so I'm obsessed with how you reduce the friction for each marginal new student seat.

That's available at primer because it's the simplest way to distil all this into one equation. It means helping the micro-school leaders secure real estate, state-level approvals, the Department of Education, local fire, health, land use, zoning, etc. Then, it also includes student recruitment and the student experience.

And so we have the primer operating system, which handles much of this now. And one way to think about it is that we were placed like school bureaucrats with code. And so we're taking everything that would have a bunch of like paper pushing humans behind it. And we're either automating it, or building a a product that takes care of that for the teachers.

So, the micro-school leaders sign one document at the end of the year, and then we handle everything for them. And they can't believe it. They're like, I used to spend on micro-scooters. She told me she spent four hours every Saturday doing paperwork for her class, and she wasn't getting paid for this.

She made about 50 grand a year and spent four hours per Saturday doing paperwork, so we automated all that. The hardest part right now is that last year, we had 1800 micro school leaders apply to launch schools of primer. We launched 18, which matches the micro-school leaders, real estate, and families and connects those three pieces.

And so we're obsessed with how you make it easy for a micro-school leader to go from, " Hey, I'm a fantastic teacher. I've proven that to primer. I've been able to launch a micro-school, so I'm life. So, we have a real estate model with which micro-school leaders partner and help them partner with existing facilities ready for micro-schools. You can think about churches, community centres, libraries, and performing arts centres; they already have space from eight to three daily. It's usually nice. It's built out. It's safe. It already works for kids, and it's not in use. And so we're able to secure that space very cheaply for the micro-school leader, which reduces their op-ex, and there's.

Very few cat-backs because it's usually ready to go. And then we help them go from that position where they've secured a location, and they're prepared to recruit all their students and be life. And that's what the whole team works on every day. And then once they're life, the micro-school leaders, like the superstar, like they're the entrepreneur that's launching this, and they use our software, but like they're off to the races, and we stand in the background.

So, we don't even let parents know that it's a primary school, and we want them to. Yeah, they positively associate with us, the brand, and the product and like the dashboards. But we want them to think of it. Oh, Miss April is fantastic. She's like the teacher who changed my kid's life.

That's what we want people to think about as primers, like the actual micro school leaders, not us. And that's why we spent all our time on that formula.

Chris Powers: Would a micro-school leader hire other people under them? Is it usually a one-person job? 

Ryan Delk: So it's usually one person with a studio guide.

Chris Powers: And they're teaching all grades.

Ryan Delk: They teach up to three grades. Much research shows that mixed-age classrooms are perfect for kids. So we do up to, so it could be like K through two, three through five, and six through eight. And they can pick which one they want to teach. They can also drill down lower if they have enough kids.

They have a studio guy who helps them. And then, yeah, we have several micro school leaders who have recruited many kids and want to start a larger school. We'll help them do that and have multiple micro schools under their school.

Chris Powers: So, is it fair to say that securing real estate is one of the biggest blockers to this?

Ryan Delk: The new and asset-light models are working well. Okay. However, real estate is complex; figuring out a cracked real estate is the most challenging. 

Chris Powers: And you, the asset-light, are there because your team just said, look, we'll find the sites in your area that would work.

So you don't even have to think about that. And as soon as you're ready to go, we'll give you a menu of five sites. You pick which one you want to open in.

Ryan Delk: Or even better, our team doesn't have to do that. And we tell the micro-school eater, Hey, here's five. Here's a church, a community centre, a synagogue, and a library in your area that we know will work.

The zoning works, and the build-out is sound, like its high-quality space, visibility, etc. You can talk to them, and the hit rate of a teacher approaching the community centre says, " Hey, I'm a local teacher. I want to launch my micro-school, and the hit rate is very high compared to some companies, and I'm saying, Hey, can we sublease the classroom?

We empower them to talk to those people. Then we handle it; we take the risk on the lease and all that. But these leases are very inexpensive. We're not asking them to get involved legally, but they help with sourcing and securing. And then we handle the step from there, too. Okay, you're approved zoning-wise for the state D O E. Everything's ready to go, and it's your life.

Chris Powers: What zoning do you need? When we first met,  you told me about zoning, and you're like, it's one of the most significant pieces of the puzzle. 

Ryan Delk: Yeah. I've spent more time looking at zoning maps of cities than I ever thought I would.

It depends on every day, not every city, but one of the enormous problems has been historically, so maybe we can talk a little bit about one thing that's broken: the traditional system or the education options in general. Everyone thinks the Department of Education creates all the friction for launching new schools.

So they think of that as the bureaucratic entity that creates all this friction and red tape to keep schools out. It's not the case in most states. It's usually local land use and zoning. And so what happens is it's like, let's take the city of Miami. It's a metro area of 7. 1 million people. There are 176 buildings in  Miami where you can operate a school by right. And spoiler alert, they're all occupied and not available. And so if you want to operate a school in the city of Miami, you have to find other locations in other zoning and then go through a conditional approval process, which, as required, is all qualitative.

So it's a thousand times when you can get stopped, and some person can complain, or some politician can get involved because they don't want your school to open. And this is all by design, so it's all designed to make it very difficult to launch a new school.

In Florida, we changed state law and drafted legislation that allows private schools to operate legally in every church community centre, Performing Arts Centre. There are five or six other categories, all religious institutions and theatres, in this state, and they can operate legally, regardless of what local land use says.

Starting July 1st, there are 70,000 new locations across Florida where you can operate a school. We can manage a school by right, regardless of whether they have the zoning or the local land use authority. And that's the structural stuff you must fix if you want to fix these problems. Otherwise, in Florida, on average, 35 new non-public schools have opened per year in the last four years.

So, a state of 21 million people, 35 new schools, and it's all by design. That's the type of structural reform you have. That's the war you must be willing to fight if you're going to be in this space. Luckily, like most other states, it is much easier than Florida. From this perspective, Florida is uniquely challenging, but we had to go toe to toe with everybody in that battle.

No, that wasn't something people were excited about that we were trying to pass, but we got it done. 

Chris Powers: How'd you do it? And real quick. So the issue was a bunch of bureaucracy and legislation that said a school had to fit precisely this box to operate.

Ryan Delk: Well, the specific issue is that the state, like most things, seeded all control to local municipalities. The local municipalities, the incumbents in the education system, would ensure that there were very few places where you could start a school by right, which gave them the ability to kill or make it very difficult to launch a school.

It could have been more enjoyable, but it wasn't a big challenge because we're a relatively large company. We have lobbyists and lawyers. And so I can go, fight the battles, meet the mayors, say, Hey, we're trying to start a school, and the mayor gets on board.

They help us push it through. We can get that done. But if you're a teacher who decides you want to start a school, you have 10,000 saved. You have no chance. So, I would talk to micro school leaders all across the state who would apply for primer. And they would say, Hey, I've tried to do this thrice.

I tried to do this five years ago. I was shocked at how I worked for three years to get this live, and I couldn't. So that's, I mean, this legislation helps primer. But I'm more excited that it will help every small teacher who wants to launch a tiny community school for their neighbourhood with ten kids.

Now, they can do that and deliver a great option.  The structural issue was that all these local municipalities would create exclusionary zoning, making it impossible to launch schools. And now this is a state-level pre-emption that comes in and says, Hey, it doesn't matter if this is a church, performing arts centre, synagogue, or other religious institution or library.

Now, you can launch a school right now. As long as it fits these categories, you must issue a certificate of use for that use in that building. 

Chris Powers: And what do all those things have in common? They're like public spaces with parking, probably in areas that can handle some traffic.

 What do all those have in common that makes them all like thumbs up? 

Ryan Delk: They have very similar uses in structure. Imagine a group regularly coming to the space in the same room. This group usually consists of kids, so you already have fire and health approval.

There will be up-to-code work, parking traffic will be handled, and in almost every case, school use will be much lower, like the peak utilization of a school in those spaces will be much lower than the peak utilization for the core use.

So, when there's an event at a performing arts centre, I have 1000 people showing up, or a theatre or library might have three or 400 people showing up for various things. But for a school, it might be 30 kids, and for a micro-school, it might be 60 or 70. And so, it works because these buildings already have the capacity and the approvals for a similar use.

And so they can say at the state level, Hey, we feel good about these across the state as long as they're up to code and have the proper inspections and all that. 

Chris Powers: Is it fair to say that it's like if a micro-school leader or a teacher does this well? They make more money, and that's good for everybody.

They get their entrepreneurial itch scratched. They get paid for their talents rather than just lumped in with every other teacher and paid a small salary. They're getting paid to work those four hours on Saturday if they have to. 

Ryan Delk: Yeah. With primer, they make about 25 per cent more than the district-equivalent salary that they would make.

Then, they also get equity and primer. So they have equity in their micro-school and additional revenue share and earnings opportunities for things they might want to do, like after school or other things. So we treat them like entrepreneurs and say, Hey, if you're going to do all these different things, you can make a ton of money.

They get money and referral bonuses for referring students so that they can make money in many different ways. It comes back to whether you replace all the bureaucracy and administration with code like you have a great teacher running a school. So it's just a teacher and students, some real estate.

It turns out that when you remove everything else, there's much more money. 

Chris Powers: So it's fair to say that if they have equity in the company, they would be incentivized to bring in their great teacher friends, who are also excellent at starting micro schools because it lifts all or rising tide lifts all boats.

Ryan Delk: Exactly. It's the goal.

Chris Powers: To do all this. You raised money from some of the most iconic VCs. I'm just curious: what's it like to raise funds from iconic VCs? How'd you pull it off? I'm reading like Sam Altman, Keith or Boy, Cost of Ventures. What's that like? 

Ryan Delk: The way to think about great investors, or how I feel about investors in general, is that you want to bring in investors who will increase the probability of success. And so the note coastal has this great saying where he's, I think it's like 90 per cent of investors like negative value add.

And I think that's probably true. There are a lot of wrong investors, and many investors who, yeah, most bad investor behaviour is writing a check and then wanting to have extreme levels of involvement but not having earned the right to have that level of involvement. So, I think that the check is the ticket for being able to micromanage or make decisions.

And so what great investors do is they support capital and know where they can be practical and helpful. And they are very meticulous about staying in those lanes. And they, the rest of the time, are supportive and empowering of you, but they will tell you very directly when they have high conviction that you're off base.

And so, several of our investors have told me at times like, Hey, this is, I think you're overthinking this, or I think you're probably thinking about this the wrong way, or I think this is a mistake, or I think you need to move faster here. But it's always been about things they're very highly convinced about.

And they either because they have operating experience building the same thing or they've seen it a hundred times in other portfolio companies. For the most part, our investors are all very supportive, but for the most part, they focus on Just like empowering us to be successful.

I get great feedback a few times, but I thrive on it. I'm all about being the founder who thrives on blunt, straightforward feedback. So I seek that out and get as much of it as possible, but I'm sure it's different for every founder. 

Chris Powers: What will have happened for them to see the return they hope to see?

Ryan Delk: I mean,  we primer has a chance. Education is a trillion-dollar-a-year market. And historically, it's been difficult for any organization to find a way to crack that meaningfully. So you've had a niche 50 000 a year private schools that start, and you've had companies like Alt School that have tried to compete in that very high-end market.

And then you have things like charter networks. But they're very, very difficult to scale. Starting a charter school is probably the fastest launch in three years. And usually, it's a five- to six-year process from, Hey, we want to start one to, Hey, it's life from the beginning.

And so no one has cracked. No one has created something financially accessible for the mass market like the average American family. The bill has figured out how to get the friction per net new, like marginal seat, down shallow so it can scale quickly.

And that's what we're trying to do at Primer. The whole goal is that, and  I'm so obsessed with micro schools because the OpEx and the CapEx are so much lower than traditional education. And so you have the opportunity to deliver something at a price point that's accessible to most families.

If you do it right, you can empower micro school leaders to handle most of the lifting to get the new schools off the ground. So, the schools can scale very, very quickly. And so if we do that, everyone will be pleased. And there's also the ideological aspect, I think. Most of our investors are excited about a highly rigorous alternative to the traditional system available to regular families, not just families that can afford 50 K a year.

  Almost all our investors would say they're financially motivated about the returns.  I think it's a beautiful market and a great financial opportunity, but this is an essential problem for the United States. And so we have this imperative to figure this out, whether it's primary or something else. Someone has to crack this if we're going to solve it.

Chris Powers: What is the cost? What should the price be for a student to go through the primary? 

Ryan Delk: Our average family pays, so we allow families to use state scholarships, essays, vouchers, and other funding. Most families spend a couple hundred bucks a month, so it's called 300 dollars a month on top of their state scholarship.

We have a sliding-scale tuition for some. It depends on the campus, the micro-school leader, and various factors. Some families might pay as much as a thousand dollars a month, but most families are in the mid-hundreds of dollars a month range. And then we have some families that pay much less, sort of scholarships that we give to make it accessible to families with minimal financial resources.

Chris Powers: What did the haters, the naysayers, what's their reason for this not happening? It sounds like a win-win, but what are the top reasons people wouldn't want this to happen? And I can assume there are probably teachers' unions that think this is impeding their stronghold on American education.

Let's take that one off the table. It seems like the obvious question: Are there other reasons people don't want to see this succeed? 

Ryan Delk: Yeah, we've had more. When we started it, I knew it would be hard, and we would have aggressive opposition. I think I was very clear-eyed about that.

And I underestimated it by an order of magnitude, the level of just downright evil behaviour in the education industry. We've had people target our families. We've had people try to create very grave personal finances, trying to sue our micro school leaders personally, telling them they're going to bankrupt them, trying to scare them. Like, I mean, just really, really nasty stuff.

Chris Powers: Why? What are they feeling threatened by? 

Ryan Delk: They view us as the first. Most innovations in education happened at this upper end of the income market, so it's been the 30,000, 40,000, and 50,000 dollars a year in schools.

And we're the first one that has said, Hey, we're actually for the average American family. We have high-income families that attend primary school because it's an incredible education, but we're structurally built for every man with an average middle-class family. And I think that when people realize there is a potential alternative to the traditional system that is gaining steam.

That threatens many things, and I think it's related. You talked about the teachers' unions, but  second- and third-order relatedness exists. It's not just the unions. It's all the other places that they have power and have established political power.

When you get traction, you become the target that needs to be shut down by any means necessary. So that's why we've fought many of the fights we fought at the state level, changing legislation. And I have spent much of my time over the last two years.

 I'll talk with one of our microsplitters or someone on our team. And I'll say primer has your back, like to the end of the earth. We will not let them, like they can, do whatever they want, but we will have your back like there will not be personal repercussions.

Because these tactics work like they,  and people are human. Like you tell someone like, I'm going to personally bankrupt you and make sure you lose your house because of this decision you made. And you're a teacher that's created 60,000 a year your whole life. Like, of course, you're going to be terrified.

And so, I drastically underestimated how much hate we would get as early as we got and the viciousness of those attacks. 

Chris Powers: I will start a start-up that Fs with the people who go after the teachers.

To get this is a story you had, but if you're successful, one of the things you're going to have to do is attract and hire talent. And you said one thing you're good at is attracting and hiring undiscovered talent. And you've been in many start-ups. And for those listening to this, go to the show notes, and you'll see a list of his career.  What do you know about hiring talent that you've learned that maybe your everyday entrepreneur doesn't know?

Ryan Delk: So this is something I learned from Keith Revoy pretty early on in my career

It's intuitive, but I think most people don't. It's intuitive at the intellectual level, but it's tough to put into practice. So, by definition, if you're going to start a start-up, you're resource-constrained, except for the two years of the Zerp era.

And so you must find a way to hire great people that don't blow up all your resources. And so if you're competing for all the same engineers, designers, and operations people that Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google are competing for definitionally, you will be.

You'll have to compensate them at a competitive level. You might find someone great who you can convince to take a bunch of equity in exchange for a salary, but still, you'll need to compensate them very highly. A good mental model for this is that you must figure out how to discover great people before their greatness is legible to the outside world. And typically, that means being willing to compromise on some dimension. It could be how polished they are, their age, or what school they went to. 

It could be intentionally getting perfect in that dimension, filtering for people who have all the other things but are probably overlooked for this one thing.

 I'll give you an example. Age is a perfect one. We've hired two high schoolers full-time at Primer, both phenomenal engineers. One of them is still on the team. He started working part-time for us when he was 14 or 15 and joined the team full-time.

I think he was six when he turned 16, moved to San Francisco, and got an apartment at 16. He is one of the best engineers I've ever worked with. He will be, whatever phrase you want to use, in the top 1%. He will be one of the most excellent technologists in the tech world of all time.

I think, when it's all said and done, he DM me on Twitter and just said, Hey, I'm 14 years old, and I  like what you're doing a primer. It's what I  wish I had as a kid. Can we chat? And I was like, yeah, let's chat. And I said, do you want to come to San Francisco?

He came to San Francisco, met his parents, and got to know them. And I've had multiple times in my career where I've been convinced. I like to talk to parents to recruit their high school or college kids, like getting them to drop out so that we can work together. And so age is a perfect example of this, but,  like polish the university they went to, all these things are other vectors you can be willing to compromise on. Still, you must find something you can identify very well.

You have to be willing to bet on those people. The most fulfilling thing in my career has been betting on someone I know will be great.  I put them in a position where they can become a known quantity.

And so they joined my company, and no one knew who they were. They couldn't start a company independently or have difficulty raising money. By the time they leave, they're someone who can raise an excellent seed round and start a company. And so my last company, Omni, the last time I checked all my direct reports, 80 per cent of those direct reports now are founders of venture-backed companies that have gone on to raise a bunch of money and be very successful.

And many of those I hired straight out of school or were college dropouts without experience. And they came and worked for me. And they worked their tail off, made a name for themselves, and could go on and do great things. And so I, regardless of what company I'm working on, regardless of all that, there's this fundamental thing for me: if you can attract and hire great undiscovered people, be the place that they make a name for themselves and help them launch incredible careers.

 That is such a fulfilling motion. It also pays enormous dividends because you can invest in their companies and partner on projects, so there's a ton of upside to getting good at this. 

Chris Powers: I assume you're a product guy, not an engineer. Is that fair?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, not an engineer.

Chris Powers: Okay. So, as a product guy, what do you see? Let's take the example of this 16-year-old kid you said might be among the top 1%. What's he doing that you can recognize as making him so great?

Ryan Delk: I think about it for someone young when you're meeting them.

You're looking, I look for a couple of things. So, do they have much higher clarity of thought than you would expect from someone? So this doesn't need to be age. It could be someone without start-up exposure, but you talk to them and say, wow, you have first principles.

You have good instincts about how a start-up would work and sound clarity of thought. You can articulate ideas compellingly. Even if someone has never worked at a start-up, you can take that, and they can become highly effective because that's foundational for many roles.

Another thing that I look for is whether people are willing to work extremely hard. The idea that you can have this fantastic work-life balance, start a start-up, and be successful is totally bonkers. So you have to be willing to work extremely hard.

And so you can screen for that in the process, saying, " Hey, can we meet tomorrow? And are they able to make that happen? Like working on projects together and seeing what the turnaround time looks like. There are all these things that you can do to screen for that. Then, the last thing I look for is if they have a track record.

It's actually for very motivated people. It's straightforward for them to have a track record of shipping and building things at a very young age. So, it might be a straightforward web app, an iPhone app, or a small business they started in middle school, but do they like taking the initiative to go zero to one on something?

And usually, even for someone who's 16 or 17, if they're outstanding, they've done that multiple times. And so, the funny story about this guy that we're talking about is that when he was nine or 10, he started a Discord server for a particular coding language.  It grew to be the largest Discord server in the world for this language.

And Microsoft execs reached out to him and said, Hey, we want to talk about sponsoring this, like, this is amazing. Before the Zoom call, he downloaded a voice changer app to change his voice and make it sound like he was an adult because he hadn't gone through puberty yet. And then he had to tell them, like, I don't know what's happening.

My camera's broken. I'm so sorry, but it must be an audio-only call. At 11 years old, he negotiated with Microsoft's lawyers about how they would partner on the server he had built. And so that's an example of when you hear that story, you go, okay, this is something special.

And it's not always going to be that insane of a story for everyone, but there are usually some seeds of that thing. 

Chris Powers: Education is the most exciting thing you're up to. But the second most exciting thing is maybe what you're doing in San Francisco. And I won't say it's equally important, but I think it's essential.

One of your beliefs is that situations like what's going on in San Francisco, and I don't live there, So maybe you can, with your boots on the ground,   describe what you believe the situation to be. It can be fixed in a world where I think we've been convinced over the last few decades that, as that ship sailed, this is the new world you will live in. So, maybe let's frame the issue as you see it today. 

Ryan Delk: So, the issue we should talk more about is this sort of paralysis people have around problems. But the issue in San Francisco is that you've had, I would estimate, 80 per cent of the city's residents have been entirely unmotivated and disengaged politically, which has allowed a savvy group of ideologues to capture every institution.

From the school board, the city college board, all the way up to the board of supervisors, which has been the legislative branch of the city for the last 20 to 30 years, they were highly savvy at what they did. They would activate these tiny groups of people, and then basically everyone just said, Hey, it's not that bad.

It would help if you dealt with some annoying stuff, but everything else is excellent. All the start-ups and VCs are here, so we'll just put up with that. And then, two or three years ago, we had a tripwire, and suddenly, people said, Hey, this is like whatever my mental line in the sand was, we've crossed it.

And so now I'm pissed, and now we got to go figure out how to, and either I'm going to leave, which is what a lot of people did, or now I'm like motivated to figure out how to solve it. And so I think in some ways, like credit to the ideologues that figured out how to capture this, I would argue that it is one of the most amazing cities in America for so long. But their reign is over. 

Chris Powers: What tripped the wire getting children involved in the mess? Or was it COVID? 

Ryan Delk: Yeah, I think the schools were a big deal. During COVID, the school board closed several schools for months, and then, instead of working on reopening them, they spent all their time renaming them.

And so they renamed, for whatever ideological reasons, this person was a racist or whatever. There are some fantastic stories about a few school board meetings where they said things that made no sense about people, like they looked up the wrong person.

There would be two people with the same name, and they looked up the wrong person after whom the school wasn't named. Then, they figured out that they were just on Wikipedia during the school board meetings, deciding which schools to rename. And they were just on the wrong Wikipedia page.

They were reading all these things about a different person, just incredible incompetence. And so there's that whole renaming thing, which I think was for many people who value communities that value education. So, people who went to public school are first-generation immigrants who view education as the way out.

That was a big thing. And then there's public safety,  probably the biggest tripwire where people were sick. They're like, we shouldn't live in a city where your car gets broken into or, you see, people using drugs on the street all the time. People's houses, people's housing getting broken into as much rarer in San Francisco.

It’s mostly like petty theft, like car breaking, etc. But that whole category of things, people just eventually said, Hey, enough is enough. We're not dealing with this anymore.

Chris Powers: Oh man, I have so much here. I would start by saying, like, I love San Francisco. Maybe you know my buddy James Beshara?

Ryan Delk: In the medical times.

Chris Powers: Yeah, so anyway, he was running Tilt. I used to visit him all the time, and I loved it. I haven't been back in a long time, so I'm glad to hear that San Francisco's doing well again. I think one of the things that shocked me from afar was when China's leader came to San Francisco, and what had been the narrative that, yeah, it's just going to be this rotting downtown forever was cleaned up.

And so my first question is, did they let everybody come back, or did it stay clean? They never really followed up with like, where are we today? A month after this arrival.

Ryan Delk: Yeah, that was like all temporary. So there was no way to, like,   reshuffle people and pressure.

Chris Powers: Okay. So they let them all back. Interesting, I didn't think you were going to say that. So they just moved them temporarily, cleaned up everything and then said, come back. 

Ryan Delk: I don't know if it was explicitly come on back, but they created all these barricades downtown where you couldn't even go in these areas unless you lived in a building you needed to get to.

So, it was not just homeless people; everyone was kept out. 

Chris Powers: The second thing is to set the stage. We're going to start talking about what you all are doing about it, but what was the goal of the ideologues, or what is their ultimate ambition here? Is it the oppressed oppressor thing, and they think they're helping the downtrodden, or is it more profound than that?

Or, how would you describe what they're actually after? Because they're damn passionate about it. 

Ryan Delk: So one of the things I would probably pay the most money for in my life would be if I could somehow get VERITAS serum from Harry Potter and I could sit down with three or four San Francisco politicians, which is the truth serum give it to them and ask them like a series of questions.

I don't know. For my life, I cannot figure out some of these policies. They're so disconnected from reality. My two best ideas make more sense than ones that would be very sad if they were true. So, the first is that San Francisco has been historically a perfect launching ground for national political careers.

 Several people, including Dianne Feinstein, are on a long list of those who started in local politics in San Francisco and eventually went on to a national career. One of my theories is that there was a set of prevalent national policies, and local politicians with national ambitions thought they needed to lodge some wins in that direction.

So they passed these locally, even if they made no sense locally. A good example is the San Francisco County jail. Decarceration was a massive issue within the Democratic party. I don't remember the average or the numbers. Still, when I looked up this happening, many San Francisco politicians made a massive push for decarceration from the San Francisco County jail.

But if you looked at the incarceration rates in San Francisco, they were already one-sixth of the national average. And they proposed to empty half the jail or something crazy. And so they—my best explanation—wanted this win to be able to, like, when they campaign nationally to say, Oh, I was the champion of this. Still, it's totally like the optimal incarceration rate is not zero. If you're already at one-sixth or 10th or whatever of the national rate,  you're probably fairly close to the optimal incarceration rate. Still, they were, and that was irrelevant to them because they just wanted to launch this win. So that's the first theory I have, which I think makes more sense.

The second theory, which would be far scarier if it's true, would be that there are some infamous, some willingness to sacrifice things to try to right the wrongs of this oppressor, oppress dynamic, or something where it's OK if Rome burns if it burns for a virtuous reason or something. It is hard for me to believe, but several people think that's the root of it. I don't know.

Chris Powers: I fall more in that camp as a witness to it all, but that doesn't matter. Okay, so a wire got tripped two or three years ago. And San Francisco is filled with brilliant minds and one-step-back paralysis that people have around problems.

What is the paralysis that people have around problems? 

Ryan Delk: People don't realize that you can do things. I talked to so many people when we went to change the state law in Florida for primer. I probably heard from 50 people who said this has been a problem for us for ten years or that I've been struggling for 12 years.

It was challenging to get this passed, but it wasn't that hard. It wasn't the hardest thing I've ever done. It took, whatever, 12 months, a bunch of meetings, convincing, taking some body blows, spending a little bit of money, but eventually, you got it done. Any of those people could have done it if they had just decided, Hey, we're going to change state law and then make all these problems go away.

In San Francisco, to move to the tripwire point, people often want to underestimate how much potential energy exists in a problem that needs to be converted into kinetic energy because there's no viable place to go. And so, people don't convert their desire for change or fixing something into action because they feel there needs to be a viable path to invest in that.

And so San Francisco is a perfect example where you had a growing number of people for the last decade who thought San Francisco was off track. Still, there was no place to convert that feeling of, Hey, I wish I could do something to fix this to impact change. These little organizations were basically like country clubs for moderates where they did absolutely nothing, but they all just hung out all the time, and they never won a single election.

So people just got jaded and said, okay, well. I won't give money to these organizations or volunteer for them because they're not serious people who will deliver change. Once you make a credible effort, people will realize that you can convert this potential energy into kinetic energy and change these problems through money or time.

All of a sudden, the tsunami of people who are all feeling this silently gets involved. And that's where everything starts changing. It is probably happening in a lot of cities. If someone would start the movement, many of these people suddenly coalesce and say, Hey, I'm willing to donate my time, money, energy, or whatever. Still, no one's like taking the plunge to start it.

Chris Powers: Okay. Let's spend some time giving that person, listening, the confidence to be that person in their city. What's the playbook for making this happen? 

Ryan Delk: I'm just a humble catalyzer supporter. People are working on this full-time in San Francisco, and Gary can run for mayor.

We learned in San Francisco that there are, you believe, these politically entrenched political organizations that are very good at winning elections. You think of it almost like dark art from the outside. It's like, Oh, I wonder how they do that.

But if you think of it like anything else, which is, Hey, we have a group of voters that we need to educate and convince to vote in a certain way, it's relatively straightforward. And if you have people who are good at marketing, Facebook ads, targeting, data models, and all those things, it's pretty easy to assemble a team that can get it done.

So now, the moderate groups in San Francisco are way more competent than the far-left progressive groups. They've only been around for about three years, while these people have been doing this for 20 years. There's a hilarious thing where there's a far-left voter guide in San Francisco and a moderate voter guide.

We also got the moderate voter guide to rank above the far-left voter guide. And they needed to understand how that was possible because they thought SEO was just based on how long your site has been around. And so they went on this substantial conspiratorial rant about how we like to convince the Google executives to like because they don't understand SEO.

There are these basic things you can do if you execute well. And so, the most challenging thing is that I'll zoom out. So we created a viable organization called Grow SF, where people could donate money, time, and energy and know that the money would be well spent efficiently.

It's a classic start-up with a very lean staff. Meagre OpEx maximum dollars are going to solve the problem. If you donate to that, you will see returns. Once we had that going, it was all about how to make these dollars as effective as possible.

That's where all these things come in: data science and marketing. A good example is Gross F, which doesn't use consultants for anything, such as ad spending. Typically, a political consultant will mark up all the dollars you spend on advertising and mailers by two to five X. And so grass that doesn't do anything. They do it all in-house, and then all their dollars go further than their competitors because there are no consultants. And so that's the sort of like organization side. The hardest part is getting candidates that will run because no one wants to run for these things.

Like all the good people, why would I ever spend four years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? That sounds terrible. Even worse is the school board and all these junior roles. The most challenging part is that you need a bench. And so what the progressives in San Francisco were very good at was having this fantastic bench system where they would take over the city college board, the school board, and all these more junior positions.

Those people would rise in prominence and be ready to backfill any positions on the board of supervisors when they ran for state office, were termed out, or whatever. And so you had this dynamic where they had multiple waves of people ready to go.

Then, the common sense groups had very few people. And so that was, honestly, the most challenging part for Grow SF, which was convincing good people to run. And so for the first couple of years, it was like, okay, we have like one candidate in this election we can support, but like everyone else is like sucks.

For the first time in this November election, there will be a Grow SF-endorsed candidate for almost every seat, and most of them will win. So, the most complex challenge is convincing highly qualified people, former start-up founders, business owners, investors, etc., to run.

Chris Powers: How do you convince them? 

Ryan Delk: I wasn't very involved in it, but once they saw that they had, There was an organization behind them that could help them win. That's when people say, okay, well, this is worth doing. And there's a coalition behind it. Gross F's other brilliant thing was building this data model, which allowed them to get clever about the most vulnerable elections.

And so you can look at all these, how do people vote on this ballot prop? How do people vote for this election? And you can start to understand the dynamics of districts. And then you can figure out where, let's, in San Francisco's case, the board of supervisors that are representing a district, which is the legislative branch of the government that you can find that that district is misaligned with that supervisor, which gives you some indication of you.

You could do that for every district and then determine which supervisors are most misaligned with their district, which correlates to their vulnerability. Once you know that, you can prioritize which districts. None of this is rocket science, but you could run a similar playbook.

Gross F was founded three or four years ago in two years. They flipped a board and beat an incumbent board of supervisors, a member for the first time in San Francisco history, which had never been done before. They defeated an incumbent with one of their candidates.

And then, this past election in March, they won 21 of 24 seats available in the democratic party central committee. And then in November, it'll be another similar result. And they're going to be five years in, and they're going to have flipped, almost the entirety of San Francisco's government towards common sense, you know, people.

Chris Powers: Is a board of supervisors something unique to San Francisco, or does every city have a board of supervisors? I've never actually heard that terminology. 

Ryan Delk: It's called a bunch of different things, but typically, there are the executive and legislative branches.

Chris Powers: Yeah. The legislative branch of SF-Gov comprises 11 members of the board of supervisors. A costly supervisor race might raise $500,000. So, for half a million bucks, you could fully fund an election to control 9 per cent of city government in one of the most influential cities in the world.

So imagine what you could do with a million. A successful million-dollar investment could unlock billions of dollars of value. 

Ryan Delk: Yeah. And I mean, it's more complex. There are tons of candidates who have raised a bunch of money and then totally failed. So you can't just win elections on cash, but it is a massive piece because it's what funds the ad buys and everything.

We spend all this time and energy on federal elections and get so heated. But the reality is that everyone listening to this, like their local government, impacts their quality of life and day-to-day lives by a hundred times more than whatever happens in November at the federal level.

But we spend all of our energy on that when, in reality, all your time and energy would have a way higher ROI on local stuff. However, most people need to learn who their mayor or city council member is. 

Chris Powers: Has anybody in San Francisco considered starting a non-profit start-up where different cities could hire talent from San Francisco to help them save their city?

There are many tech strategies built into this that need to be improved. If I were to do Grow Fort Worth, which I don't need to do, we'd be not; we're good right now. Thank God, but if I did, I'd be like, well, there are not a lot of folks in town who are as tech-focused.

Have you all thought about using this playbook for other cities to adopt? Or is that not a thought right now? 

Ryan Delk: I don't know. I know that people have approached the Gross F team about other cities. There's a way to open-source the playbook. And some of it is talent, but it's just stuff you must learn by trial and error.

Once you figure it out, I would love to see the founders open-source it, and then other cities could jump on. Every town has talented people who can take and run with the torch. It just takes them to know what it is. 

Chris Powers: Well, you talked about this. We discussed this: the vibe shift, a return to religion, getting married, having kids, and working on real problems. We can talk about all those, but the real problems are things like, even if you look at the October 7th issue.

And we go back to what's happening at the private universities up in the Northeast and what Elon's done with Twitter. Growth Seth is going after the local council. Elon's going after the head of every significant global institution and country. Then you have folks like Bill Ackman talk about it. He called it a think-and-do tank.

So we're not going to do a think tank, a think and do where he's if you're a cheater, a liar or whatever. We're going to cancel the cancelers. Then, you can go down the list. You see Rogan and Tucker Carlson, and I even throw now Dana white from UFC in there, but you are seeing this generation.

The wire tripped in San Francisco and across the country. I'm certainly feeling and supporting it to the extent that we return to common sense. That's all anybody wants. I'm excited about what you all are doing in San Francisco, but it's a significant shift.

Ryan Delk: Yeah, you're right. And the cool thing that's happening in San Francisco is like it's bipartisan. It's not like a yeah, there are people on every, on all sides of the aisle from all demographics and voting history and political history that are like, Hey, we're done with this crap.

We're done with the ideological stuff. We need a functioning city that works. And there's a bunch of; you could use the example of, now it's invoked to have kids or more invoked to have kids and get married and join a church and all these things. And these things are political to some extent, but they're political in a way.

It's a fundamental vibe shift, and it happened. Maybe I started noticing it two years ago, but it's accelerating. It's not peaked. It's still accelerating.

Chris Powers: Oh, I think it's in the early innings. People are starting to build confidence.

I was in that camp for a little bit of, like, man, this ship has sailed like poor us. The other part is that you go to different areas of the world outside of the West. And we look like buffoons to a lot of the world, especially those in like third world countries that are like, man, the things that we wish we had those problems to argue about.

Luxury beliefs to a core. You said, I thought this was awesome. You said it's possible to have kids young, be a great dad and a husband, and still work your face off. But you also meant that we need more people doing those things in leadership positions. And you went on the record, at least to me, the record to me.

You said we could solve some of humanity's most significant problems if we had a hundred times these people. What are people who have those things going on in their lives? What are they able to offer the world? Why do you think they would solve humanity's most significant challenges? 

Ryan Delk: What's interesting to me is the shift I've noticed.

So we had our first, my son was born six years ago, and the tone when we started having kids, I had so many questions six years ago, like, Oh, how are you going to like run a start-up and have a kid or how are you going to, do all these things you're doing and have a kid.

And it was almost always scepticism and light shade, like, you won't be as committed to your start-up because of this. Now, it's almost always talking about things in the positive, like, Oh, I think it's so amazing that you have, soon, three kids, and you're running a company and working on these other things.

And so my view is that once you have, once you're married and have kids, I think it's fundamentally, and everyone agrees like this, I think, I don't think it's contrarian that it fundamentally shifts. How you feel about the world, how you think about your life, your legacy, and all these things. So, you approach problems differently, and there are practical ways that show up.

Having kids is incredible because it creates a very high opportunity cost for every minute of your life. So, if you're at the office, and when I'm there, I'm mainly in the zone for the entire time I'm there. I'm not just doing things I might've done before I had kids.

Because if I'm at the office, I'm not with my kids, and I would love to be with them. And so I will ensure every single second is as productive as possible. And that's a beautiful feature of having kids. There are practical things like that, but then there's also this more significant picture thing where I think it makes you feel about the world in a different, on a different timescale and in a different way, because you have these kids that are 20, 30, years younger than you that are going to inherit, the world that you leave them.

And I think if we made it more permissible and made it feel possible to work on very, very hard problems, work extremely hard, work long hours and have kids, and have a family, one, I think it's fantastic for the kids to be able to see their mother or father working extremely hard.

But two, those people as role models don't feel impossible for the next generation. It feels possible to start a family and work on these world-changing problems. And so I hope I and many others can inspire people not to think these things are mutually exclusive. And that's part of the vibe shift that's happening. 

Chris Powers: I'm curious. Everybody who starts a start-up thinks they're conquering some tricky problem. Although you look at some start-ups, they're selling like digital cats or something like that, which I don't consider solving a considerable need.

But one thing you said earlier is that people can do stuff. I'm going to break this into three parts. People can do things. You decided I would tackle a challenging problem and get the most out of each day. So if somebody is listening to this, going, Man, I want to go after that massive problem, but I have kids.

Everything you just said, how does a day look like for you? Or a week? How do you get the most out of your day to inspire others? They're like, it can be done. 

Ryan Delk: First, people often shy away from these big problems because they correctly understand that the probability of failure is much higher.

So, the probability of us succeeding at Primer is much lower than if I had started a small business accounting firm or something with a higher likelihood of success. But people need to know that I and many other people like me will respect you way more for trying something challenging, trying to solve a tricky problem, and failing and succeeding at something much more manageable.

People will misunderstand that. They think succeeding at some tiny, easy thing would be better. And there are a lot of people who respect you way more if you take the giant swing, even if you fail. Yeah, the biggest thing is to be highly disciplined with your time.

I've never talked about this publicly before, but you asked, so I make breakfast for my kids every morning. So, I wake up every morning that I've been home for the past six years and make breakfast for my kids—hot breakfast, eggs, bacon, the whole thing. I wake up around 5:30, work a little, and start breakfast.

By the time they're up at seven, breakfast is ready. My wife and kids come down, we eat breakfast together, and then I'm off to work. I work a full day, typically working more at night. I am home for dinner when possible and work more after dinner. So, I have made sacrifices; I have no hobbies.

I don't play video games. Never. I've never played a video game as an adult. I don't do anything like that. I spend all my time building primer, working on crucial things like fixing San Francisco, investing in companies, and doing things like that. And with my family, that's it.

There are trade-offs, but you have an excellent relationship with them if you're highly disciplined with your time, like my kids. I do spend a decent amount of time with them. I make sure that there are blocks where I am on the weekends. I work a lot on the weekends, but I make sure there are blocks that I complete.

I'm locked in the zone with them, but the most important thing is that you can't delude yourself. Time is zero-sum. And so every minute I spend building primer is time I'm not spending with my kids. And the bar for me on the things that I work on is that I want my kids to come to me when they're 18 and say, Dad, I've been thinking about my childhood, and I Love you.

I feel connected to you, but I wish you had spent more time with us doing this. Or we would have, you would have, you. I remember you missed this thing. I want to be able to tell them what I was working on, and I want them to feel like that was a worthy sacrifice.

I want them to be proud of how I spent my time and feel a sense of partnership in that sacrifice. It is not a cop-out for being an absentee father, and that's not what I'm advocating for. However, one of the beautiful things about working on complex problems is that I am 100 per cent convinced that my kids are obsessed with primer.

They love primer. They look at videos of primer kids. My son is six, and he asked me how many new schools we are launching this year. He feels like some genuine partnership with me in this. And so when I'm here travelling this week. He knows I'm working on growing primer, launching new schools, and meeting families.

And so if you're working on these complex problems, the nice thing is that when you encounter the opportunity cost, whether with friends or family or elsewhere, it becomes something that you can be proud of what those trade-offs are. And then, in the case of your kids, when they're older, they'll understand and feel some partnership in that.

It hopes to inspire them to do the same thing when they're older and realize there are trade-offs, but those are worth it. 

Chris Powers: How do you include your kids in your work at that age? Just being around them, like if you're in the vortex, you can feel it. Are you intentional about telling them what's going on?

Ryan Delk: It's very intentional. So I tell them about it. I mean, my son is six, and my daughter is three. So I only understand a little about it, but my son is very in tune with it; he understands precisely what we do and the model. He understands the things and the complex problems. He understands the types of things I'm working on, but not in extensive detail.

He gets excited when there are wins. He will understand if we open a new school or something fun happens. It is like taking kids seriously from primer, but I bring them in with my kids. It is business stuff. And they are way more capable than most people realize.

My son and I will start a business together within a year or two. He's capable of beginning to think through things and work on different ideas, so bringing kids into it is beautiful, even at a very young age.

Chris Powers: That's awesome. All right. We'll finish on a story you've never said publicly. He said I realized it was all fake.

So, you worked at Gum Road in 2015. You don't have to say names, but realize it's all fake. What did you mean by that? 

Ryan Delk: Yeah, it's funny. We discussed this podcast, and you're asking me about exciting stories. And I saw an apology, who, as a friend and private investor, he was talking about. Some books came out with Jonathan Hate's New Book or a bestseller on Amazon but still need to make the New York Times list.

He was talking about how the New York Times list is fake or editorial and not data-backed. And it made me think about this. So, there's enough distance where I feel I can tell these stories now. So yeah, we, I was, dropped out of college, worked at the Square and then joined Gum Road, and Gum Road is an e-commerce platform for selling, like people, artists to sell things like music, films, books, apps, anything.

We would work with all the big, a lot of the biggest names in music, particularly in publishing and films. And so I was; my job was basically to close these deals. And so we got Eminem, Coldplay, and all the prominent artists to use Gum Road. And so I was running around, meeting all the managers, and I didn't know, I was 20 years old.

I didn't know what I was doing but ran around, trying to close these deals. One of the most prominent artists in the world, which is not one of the artists I named, used Gum Road for their release to launch an album. And I got a text from their manager, and he said, Hey, can we jump on a call?

And I was a year into government at this point, like, yeah, sure. So he jumped on a call and said, Hey, I need you to add a zero to everything. It's all the sales that you report this week to the different agencies. And I couldn't process what I was here. I was like, this is an automated thing.

How, how, what do you mean? The sales were lower than we expected. The album must be number one this week because this is one of the most prominent artists in the world. We can't be number one on release week, so we need you to add a zero.

And I said no. And he went on to explain that this is normal. He made me sound insane for thinking this was weird. And then this is just like a regular thing. It happened with books and music, where we get these requests.

And it was at this moment that I realized I had. It's been my whole life. Like you, you hear all these things: Oh, the new number one album, the new number one New York Times bestseller. And I had been completely, I created a profoundly ingrained psychological model for what those phrases meant.

Have I heard the phrase number one album? Number one, I believed all these things to be true about that statement. And in like a single seven-minute phone call, it all just crumbled. And I was 20 years old. I was like, and I literally remember where I was sitting, like when this phone call happened, and I didn't even know how to process what I was hearing.

And then it happened over and over and over again over the next two or three years. It was the first time I realized things like this: there are all these constructs. In life, you have these, which you've been socially conditioned to believe are true or accurate or whatever framework you want to use, but they are just constructs.

They're not what you believe. The thing that's backing them is different from the thing that's backing them. There are a lot of other examples like this, which ties into the fact that you can do things as well, like having a similar contract about things that are hard or impossible or can't be done.

But it turns out they're the way they are because someone like you decided to do them and set that law or do that thing. And you're just as capable as them to go and do it. And so it was a very formative moment for me that changed my perception of many things, mainly in a negative way, but in some ways, a positive way.

Chris Powers: All right, Ryan, thanks for joining me today. 

Ryan Delk: Thanks for having me. 

Chris Powers: It's incredible.