Max Ventilla isn’t someone you’d expect to be at the helm of a new private school brand. With a history as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur dating to the 1990s, Ventilla founded a social search company that Google acquired in 2010 . There, he helped build Google+ and later led a new “personalization” team that grew to 100 people as it undertook the task of adapting the search giant’s vast array of products to better understand users in real time.

Earlier this year, Ventilla left all of that. The new challenge he is tackling–reinventing the elementary school model–could either be viewed as typical of Silicon Valley’s sometimes misguided ideas that a tech mindset can fix difficult societal challenges, or a perfect fit for his background and the needs of the education world today.





AltSchool, a private company backed by $4 million from seed investors, opened its first school location this September in San Francisco. The motivation came from Ventilla’s own dismaying survey of the limited landscape of school options for his two young children. Many private and charter schools seemed mediocre, he says, and most seemed proud when they could tout exclusive, single-digit acceptance rates. “That seemed alien to me, as someone who works at experiencing things at scale. In my world, things get better the more people that are using them,” Ventilla says.

With a staff now comprised half of former Google engineers and the rest mostly educators, AltSchool’s mission has two focuses. The first is to grow a network of excellent elementary schools that harken back to the single-room schoolhouses of long ago, and the second, as any tech startup would do, is to use the schools as labs to learn, iterate and improve on the model.

“With a very broad brush, our approach is to be the elementary education R&D player,” Ventilla says in a phone interview. “R&D is essentially an investment in your future performance. …If you’re not spending anything on R&D, you’re not going to be changing anything you do.” The health and IT sectors usually invest about 10% of revenues back into R&D, he notes, but in the education world, that figure averages less than 1%. (AltSchool aims to equal the 10% figure that is typical of high-tech industries).

As you’d expect, technology is a heavy focus in the classroom located at the first school, which has about 15 students up to age 10, as it will be in the next several schools planned in the Bay Area this year.

Like a personalized Google product, the idea is that the engineering staff can work with teachers to build and deploy technologies that help a school program adapt to the needs and interests of each individual child. This is not a revolutionary concept on its own–Ventilla learned from some of the most successful schools that use a “child-centric” approach. But the execution and ability to scale up this model, as the startup aims to do, might be. AltSchool’s technology is less about expensive iPads and fancy screens and more about software technologies that can’t be seen, Ventilla says.