tl;dr: Nothing worked, and that’s awesome.

Last summer, I launched 5 climate startups in 10 weeks. All are toast.

And….

I picked up the pieces of a few of them and built something that is really working — for me and my customers. It’s called My Next Electric, an online school of sorts for people thinking about going electric — electric cars, trucks and bikes, naturally, but also the stuff in our homes — appliances, solar on the roof, insulation…

Q: Why this, Matt?
A1: Because that’s where the emissions are; in the US, 42% come from personal vehicles & homes.

A2: Because switching from gas to electric is my jam. I’ve been driving electric since 2002, and I’ve been building custom electric motorcycles (Night Shift Bikes) since 2006. Here’s a Suzuki Savage I built — with 14 Nissan Leaf battery modules where the old gas motor used to be.

At My Next Electric, I help people breakdown this hard-to-know-where-to-start topic by focusing on the fun and affordable stuff like e-bikes. And portable induction stoves. Not complicated, expensive stuff like heat pumps.

Heat pumps matter. So does solar. And we get people there, eventually. We just don’t start there. We start with the fun stuff.

Will this be my next thing? I’m not sure. Is this at quit-my-consulting-and-other-coaching-work yet? Not even close. Is it really more about learning what people need than building a real business? 100%. Am I learning much? Absolutely. So I’m sticking with it.

The STATS

I’m a big believer in #buildinpublic, so here’s some info on where things stand in May 2022.

• Rev to date: $1,863.78
• Customers: 40
• Cohorts: 2.5 so far, 3 more on the calendar
• Products: 3, kinda 4
• Net Promoter Score = 67 (aka, will people tell their friends?)
• Net Fun Score = 56 (aka, did they have fun?) HT Packy McCormick’s Funtier
• Here’s the software stack I use, it’s full of #nocode stuff.

The OPTIONS

I’m realizing people need options on how and when they work on this. Here’s the current product ladder — 4 offerings from free to $150.

• $0: Weekly drop-in Q&A/AMA inspired by Mom Test genius Robfitz.com
• $1.50: One-page cheat sheet PDF (pre-selling now
• $150: Week-long Crash-course. Next two = May 23–28, June 20–25
• $15: Join for the Monday intro session only

The MIRROR

A few reflections at 40 customers.

“You’re better when you have a cohort.” — Virginia, my partner

• This has been really fun for me, especially since my inner middle school math teacher and my inner entrepreneur are getting along way better now. I dig the routine and the pressure to add no-code automation every cohort.
• Feels like a real community flywheel is spinning and that people like the time together.
• Most importantly, I’m learning from real people what this process of exploring, struggling, wanting, not being totally sure about this very important topic — electrifying our personal stuff.

Don’t know where the biz model is yet. And I think I’m ok with that.

• There’s 25–70k of investment to do in every household over next decade or two if we really electrify, so I tend to look at this as customer discovery til I get to 100.
• Confession: That stripe email notification on a new purchase doesn’t get old.

I’m ready to fire myself from marketing My Next Electric, kinda.

CRM is a mess. SEO remains unattended. Paid distribution and social have no real systems. Yet I know I still need to work on my own network to drive customers. I just need some help on the systems now that things are starting to move a little faster.

My web presence? What do I do here?

How to juggle/drive traffic to many places: mattcandler.io, nightshiftbikes.com, mynextelectric.com, medium, totally underutilized Forbes contributor blog. And that’s not including social: 2 twitter accounts, 2 instas, a tiktok, a linkedin, 2 fbs.

Recurring revenue, should I care right now?

I think I’m worrying too much about this. Should the obsession be: Get to 100, no matter the acquisition cost, or rev? Or some nuanced take on that mix?

• Subscribe for a buck a month to get the latest PDF one-pager cheat sheet.
• Something/mo to access live AMA/Q and A sessions
• Ala cart custom coaching after you take the class.

I’m learning a ton about my self through all of this.

• #Justshipit — this is the way. Even with 5 dead ideas, there was way too much time spent worrying about copy and logos and landing pages. If I got a do-over, I’d spend 10X more time in person and on the phone/zoom with friends, strangers and neighbors, armed only with a hard copy of The Mom Test.
• I’m better in community. Solo foundering is fun for a while, but this hyper-extrovert needs people in his day-to-day. Cohorts are a big part of that. So is co-working. I’m hoping part-time marketing help might make me better , too.
• I like the mess of no-code, and learning new stuff, but I tinker too much. I’ve got to fire myself from some of this bc it’s too much fun to try new tools out and switch around from tool to tool instead of just getting out there and selling. #hardtoadmit
• #buildinpublic is good for me. See all of the above.

I’m excited to keep sharing what I learn about this. Follow along in all the places, especially my next electric on instagram — LIVE Q and A’s Fridays 2 Central!

Onward, Matt

PS: If you want to learn more, or sign up for one of our courses, check it out here: mynextelectric.com

PS: If you’re a founder who’s aalllllmooost-ready-to-ship-it, I’m here for you. I’ve been there, 10 times this year. Book 25 min with me here.

I’m one week into my ten week run as an OnDeck Climate Tech Fellow. So far, so awesome. Here’s what I’m trying to build/learn.

I like to electrify old motorcycles. Here’s the latest one:

See that shiny box sitting where the gas motor used to be? Those are batteries from a Nissan Leaf electric car. After they got too tired to move a car around, they still had plenty of juice left to make this 1973 BMW go plenty fast.

I’ve been cramming batteries into bikes for about 15 years now, occasionally completing an actual build. I’ve been at my newest project — a 1984 Vespa — for two years. You could say I have a problem finishing these things.

Two years ago I got a call from a good friend — way better at finishing things— who’d finished building lots of solar power plants in California over the last decade. We were riffing on the role cheap energy storage needed to play on the electric grid, and he was starting to experimenting with grid-scale storage using the same used Nissan Leaf batteries I was cramming into motorcycles.

Same batteries — different problems to solve. I was looking for a cooler way to pull up to my local coffee shop; he was trying to keep the increasingly solar-dependent California power grid from going down when the sun set. His pilot worked. Now I’m a committed investor in B2U Storage Solutions. Along the way, I’ve learned about the duck curve, energy markets, and acronyms like CAISO, and SCADA. I’ve also learned something about myself:

Electrifying stuff is my jam.

Turns out there are lots of way smarter people, like actual scientists, who have the same jam. Saul Griffith thinks we should electrify everything we can as fast as we can.

I agree with Saul. Earlier this year, I started volunteering for his inspiring new non-profit — Rewiring America — and I’m learning how hard the work ahead is and how to maintain hope that we humans can do this.

How to be useful in ten weeks?

Electrifying everything is probably not going to happen in a ten week fellowship. But building a few simple tools to help people just electrify something? That I can do.

As long as I ship.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder once said, “if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.” Marissa Mayer was right, too: “Creativity loves constraints.” Before the fellowship kicked off last week, I surfed around for examples of time-constrained sprints that might help. I found two great ones:

• Jennifer Dewalt learns to code by building 180 websites in 180 days
• Peter Levels launches 12 startups in 12 months

I split the difference between daily and monthly and committed to once every two weeks — 5 launches. In our very first session together, the On Deck team challenged that idea — encouraging us to ship things in the second 5 weeks and focus on learning from other fellows in the first 5. That sounded familiar.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Weeks 1–2: Crowdsource 99 problems people have electrifying stuff

Inspired by Peter’s Nomad Lists story (and Jay-Z), I’m using a google worksheet to get input about real problems people face before I build something shiny nobody needs.

Like Peter’s doc was, this one’s live and ready for you to jump in and help. If you do click the link, you’ll find 3 tabs:

• 99 problems people face electrifying something at home or around town
  This doesn’t have to be comprehensive, just good enough to get a handle on real roadblocks worth moving for people.
• Potential solutions from adjacent spaces
  This is a space for crazy ideas, even bad ideas, with a special emphasis on solutions to similar problems in adjacent spaces.
• Design elements that matter to me
  A space for how we should build — the stuff that might turn into values & culture if one of these actually works.

Weeks 3–5: Build 5 simple Software MVPs with no code

If we’re talking 5 made-from-scratch software tools for people to use in the next few weeks, I’m doomed. The more I studied Jennifer and Peter’s experiments, the more I learned about the fascinating world of no-code software development. Before you whisper to your neighbor, “Matt finally found it, his Fountain of Laziness,” I’d challenge you to spend some time in these communities. The energy, enthusiasm and generosity is infectious. And its familiar.

• Indie Hackers
• MicroConf
• No Code Devs
• No Code Founders
• Side Hustle Stack

Weeks 6–9: Ship and learn with users

Building in public’s not enough, I’ve got to ship whatever I build and try to sell it to real people. Places I’m thinking about launching:

• Product Hunt
• Reddit — gulp
• Hacker News — double gulp
• Tik Tok
• Etsy
• Dribbble
• Shopify

Week 10: Shut down what doesn’t work

I’m a firm believer in the brutal math of startups, especially in regulated, hyper-localized markets like energy and education. There may be a genius or two who gets it right on try one or two; I’m not that genius. It will take reps to find founder/product/market fit. That #’s closer to 10 than 1, so I might as well get on with failing as fast as I can while still learning something from each try.

Along the way: Share what I’m learning — about the future of school

“Yes, and” seems like the only way to respond to Jennifer, Peter, and others who’ve taken the time to share, so If I have any new hunches, I’ll share them.

I have two half-hunches already, both are less about the future of software or climate than they are about the future of school and learning:

1. There’s a profound commitment at OnDeck and in most of these communities — say Li Jin’s Side Hustle Stack — to iteration and popular participation — things Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton and Brazil’s Paolo Friere considered fundamental to education that liberates and equalizes in We Make the Road by Walking.
2. High-quality, high-volume hunch collision is happening. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Stephen Johnson says caffeine was the enabling tech of the Enlightenment coffeehouses of Europe. In the hands of the baristas at On Deck, a artisanal blend of Zapier, Integromat, Zoom, and Slack is opening up another type of space where humans can supercharge innovation.

We’ll see what my inner entrepreneur learns about finishing things, but I’m pretty sure my inner teacher’s already jamming on the lessons he’ll learn about what school could look like some day. I’ll keep you posted on both.

Please follow along at nightshiftbikes.com or twitter.com/mcandler, and if you want to see me finish that Vespa, at instagram.com/nightshiftbikes.

Onward,

Matt

PS, original post from my website lives here!

4.0 Family,

8 years ago I wrote a business plan oozing with certainty about what New Orleans and other communities needed from me and other experts concerning the future of school. It was a shining example of what Dr. Lisa Delpit once described as reform done to Other People’s Children.

4.0 has changed in many ways since 2010.

We’ve tried to stop doing reform and innovation to communities and start doing innovation with other human beings, defining expertise as a function of proximity not privilege, and thinking less about scaling institutions in favor of building scale through relationships between human beings. We’ve made progress towards this more with approach, but that’s not our goal. What’s emerging today is a vision of 4.0 co-owned by the humans within it — a self-determining, self-actualizing, self-sustaining community of people bringing the future of learning to life where they live. While our view of that future is pixelated, I’m very excited about pursuing it and making it real with you.

I’ve changed in many ways since 2010, too.

When we came up with the name 4.0, it was supposed to be a clever play on words/numbers about change and iteration. But I had no idea what it was really going to mean for me.

I often talk about 4.0 investing in the 20-year version of each member of this community, not just the idea or venture that’s top of mind right now. That’s true for me, too. Here’s a look at who I’m becoming — the 20-year version of me:

Thank you.

These eight years have been the most rewarding and challenging of my entire career. I close my eyes, and a river of memories rush by — learning moments and conversations where someone took enough care to show me something about me; about us; about learning; about humanity. Countless moments about hospitality; yes, and; co-ownership; transparency; equity. Things that I could never, ever have (un)learned on my own.

For the last 18 months, I’ve had the privilege of preparing for the hand off of one of the many roles in our community to another member of it, someone with whom I’ve shared hundreds of those “Well, I just got more human!” moments.

Our goal has been a thoughtful, deliberate CEO transition — one that’s well-planned and integrated into a much larger strategic vision of where 4.0’s headed. This has been a tremendous group effort by the 4.0 staff, board, and alumni who’ve helped us discern what the future of this community might look like.

And now it’s time to take the biggest, most exciting step in this process….

On January 1, 2019, Hassan Hassan will be CEO and the newest board member of 4.0!

Who he is today, who he wants to become, what he’s deeply passionate about, how he’s moved through the last six years from curious bystander to fellow to alum to fellow and alum again to staffer…we believe Hassan is the right next 4.0 CEO.

You absolutely must take the time to hear Hassan’s thoughts and dreams for 4.0. If you read anything else today, make sure it is this.

I’ll stay on staff until June 30 and serve as board chair after that.

Research says good transition includes a measured period of transition, with founders playing a specific role for a fixed period of time. So I’ll stay on to help Hassan with fundraising for our next few years of operations and new funds that could sustain the work of thousands more fellows over the longer-term.

Some of you might want to ask what I’m up to next. I don’t know yet, at least when it comes to job stuff. I’ll gear up for some courageous sucking in whatever my next chapter might have for me, but anything beyond the next six months is usually pretty pixelated for me, and for now, I’m really excited to walk alongside Hassan as we engage funders in honest dialog about where we’re headed next.

Here’s one thing I do know. I am going to continue to do my personal work. I have much work ahead towards becoming a human of greater compassion, empathy and awareness. I have much work ahead to understand and dismantle the bias and racism and sexism wired deep within my own fragile identity, in my whitewashed heritage and in the structures and systems all around us. I can’t do that work on my own; I must do it in community, and I am so grateful this has become and will remain one of those places for me.

Hassan will be the third alum to join the board this year alongside Caroline Hill and Aaron Walker!

As I mentioned earlier, Hassan moving into CEO is part of a larger story that includes ceding/sharing power to/with alumni. If you don’t know Caroline and 228 Accelerator, or Aaron and Camelback Ventures, I encourage you to follow what they do and how they lead. They’ve each been profoundly important voices of candor, clarity and encouragement for me, and they’re remarkable leaders who will bring a new perspective as alumni and fellow investors to the board.

Please read….

Hassan’s thoughts on the transition. This is a stunning piece of writing and a delightful glimpse into the person who’s leading our community forward.

To be (un)real with you. - Hassan Hassan - Medium

Hassan, thank you for who you are, how you live, and what you’ve taught me and so many others. I’m honored to walk the road with you.

and.…

A take on where we’re headed next, brought to you by the entire 4.0 team.

(Im)possible Over Perfect

Here’s to an amazing new chapter in our story. I will never, ever be able to repay each of you, all of you, for what I’ve learned, for who I’ve started becoming in your midst. But I can say thank you.

Thank you.

Matt Candler, Member, 4.0

A Deeper South

This post is a great example of adeepersouth, a project my brother Pete and historian John Hayes just launched:

The tiny hamlet of Boykin, Alabama sits on a bend in the Alabama River, across from the town of Camden. Boykin is its official name, but it is still known as Gee’s Bend, after the cotton plantation established here by Joseph Gee in 1816. The population of Gee’s Bend is roughly 750 — entirely African-American, and mostly descendants of enslaved people on Gee’s plantation. All around Gee’s Bend are painted murals depicting designs for quilts created by the women of the town, who have been making quilts in a distinctive style for generations. In 2006, The United States Postal Service released a series of stamps featuring the Quilters of Gee’s Bend. The Whitney Museum in New York held an exhibition of some of the quilts in 2002. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times described them as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I’m wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee’s Bend was a plantation.” I do not think Kimmelman was exaggerating.

Access to the much larger city of Camden (pop. 2560), the seat of Wilcox County, is by a ferry across the Alabama River. Until the Civil Rights Movement, no black person was registered to vote in Wilcox County. In the early 1960’s, citizens of Gee’s Bend took the ferry to Camden to register to vote, until Sherriff Lummie Jenkins, who ran Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971, and the ruling powers in Camden discontinued the ferry service, forcing the people of Gee’s Bend to make a 2-hour drive to Camden. According to a Pulitzer-Prize-winning article in the Los Angeles Times by J. R. Moehringer, Sherriff Lummie was heard to say, “We didn’t close the ferry because they were black. We closed it because they forgot they were black.” #adeepersouth #roadsideamerica #americanart #africanamericanart #folkart #culturecare #geesbend #racism #southernhistory #civilrights #alabamahistory #civilrightsmovement #quiltersofgeesbend #southernculture #publicart #blackhistory @bittersoutherner @southernstudies @southerncultures @sohporalhistory@umsouthdoc

There is stunning art and beauty in Boykin; it lives on within a strong tradition led by descendants of enslaved people.

There is another tradition that lives on, one this project seeks to help end. It’s carried on by people who aren’t descendants of enslaved people when we avoid even basic study of the very visible track record of violence, disenfranchisement, and active disregard of those artists and others by white people in power.

Please consider following and joining the fight to understand more deeply, together.

IG: adeepersouth

Long-form writing & soon, images from 35mm film: candler.ink

Dancing Grounds shows us what it looks like.

I’ve been trying to explain for a few years the promise and possibility of specialized learning spaces. Sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don’t.

Today, in the French Quarter’s Le Petit Theatre, Dancing Grounds’ founder Laura Stein and her remarkable teachers threw down a jaw-dropping example of what the future of school can be.

We took a time machine to the future today — a future that’s more unbundled, more humanizing, more personalized — but in a way we usually don’t talk about. A future experience for more kids that’s about a mix of schools willing to do less and specialized learning spaces like Dancing Grounds willing to help carry the load.

Schools whose leaders are willing to trust partners like Dancing Grounds to help serve their students can create a remarkably rich menu of options for their kids.

Come join 4.0 and build something like Dancing Grounds in you community. #respect #hope #futureofschool

Back to the future of specialized learning spaces was originally published in Future of School on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When the Curiosity Rover landed in the Gale Crater in August of 2012, NASA planned for it to rove around Mars for two years. Almost five years later, it’s still going.

It makes me wonder: How much planning goes into a mission like that? How long does NASA test before they send that kind of mission up?

If you squint at the cool Journey to Mars chart above, you’ll see landers like Curiosity way over on the right. They’re part of a much bigger plan to get humans to Mars by the 2030s.

In fact, let’s take a second to unpack the Curiosity part of the Mars project. Here’s a highly detailed chart on how long the process took.

Even though theirs is a tiny piece of the whole Mars puzzle, the Curiosity team spent way more time testing than they did flying or roving. In fact, they spent 73% of their time actively testing things here on earth before the 7 month flight. That’s a 12:1 test:fly ratio and a 3.5:1 test:rove ratio.

When I reflect on that timeline — especially, the time spent testing vs launching, it makes me rethink how we’ve been launching schools.

I take a better, more equitable future of school as seriously as the NASA folks take Mars, but I’m realizing that I spent many years as a school builder not taking pre-launch seriously enough. And I’m working with actual kids, not robots.

How can we find smart, safe ways to test breakthrough ideas in schooling before we send schools up? Before we blow millions? Before we risk student’s and families’ real lives and futures?

I, and many of my peers in the school reform space, haven’t valued pre-launch as much as I should. We just haven’t. We preach markets and choice and then encourage people to shoot for Mars in rockets they’ve only written about. Charter schools, for example, are often approved and launched solely on the written word. No state I know requires real pre-launch engagement with actual students and families. Same thing with in-district initiatives. Few district leaders have a real way to do pre-launch for their educators, either.

What if we thought about school innovation more like NASA and less like Silicon Valley?

Tech and innovation are what getting to Mars is all about, but NASA has a different take more informed by a vision for transporting precious human cargo than on ROI. The Silicon Valley-centric approach to innovation too often looks like begging aspiring entrepreneurs to quit their jobs and “give it a try” just so investors can increase their odds of a big payout on their work. This is lazy and reckless. Getting to Mars involves delicate human cargo. The word “disruptive” doesn’t really fly in NASA the way it does in the Valley.

We should take our responsibility to kids more seriously and work to find ways to test really ambitious schools they way NASA tests their rovers — deliberately, iteratively, with a deep sense of humility about what may or may not work.

That’s a big part of what we’re trying to do at 4.0 — create quality pre-launch experiences for more people who want to get to Mars, I mean who want to make the future of school radically more relevant and effective for actual kids and families.

Here’s another highly detailed chart about how our two fellowships serve as pre-launch opportunities:

Turns out, our application process is open for both of these programs right now! We’re looking to support school builders that are willing to do the pre-launch work with students and families at the helm. The Tiny and Essentials fellowships help you build your school responsibly with support in the form of community, capital and coaching. Applications for both of our fellowships will close 5/14/16. If you are interested join us 5/8/16 for a live webinar to learn more. If you’re ready to apply head over to 4pt0.org/apply.

If you’re thinking about a better way to build schools, or other learning spaces, give our pre-launch stuff a try. Kids who go to school in the future will thank you for it.

What if we launched schools the way NASA launches spaceships? was originally published in Future of School on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday, we opened up a new application for both 4.0 Fellowships — Essentials and Tiny.

Want to see what other people have created while participating in these programs? Austin Crouse, who leads the Tiny Fellowship program, shares the amazing work being done all over the US by members of the last two cohorts of the Tiny Fellowship in this great post.

Congrats New Tiny Grads!

And please share this post (or this link: 4pt0.org/apply) with anyone you think might be curious about a better way to do school in their current school or community.

Onward, together.

Matt

How 4.0 got to 2017 and where we’re headed next

Welcome to 4.0, a community of gutsy people focused on a very big problem — school isn’t great yet for every child. But we’ve made a tiny dent. In the last six years, more than 750 4.0ers have learned how to test promising learning spaces and schools that work better for more kids. More than 100 4.0ers have taken what they’ve learned in those tests and built breakthrough solutions that now serve more than a million students.

Here are some of those 4.0ers, currently part of the Tiny Fellowship:

In this document, I’ll catch you up on where we’ve been and where we’re headed, and share some hunches we’ve got about the future of school. Most of it’s based on conversations in New Orleans on February 9–10, 2017, during our 2nd National Community Summit. I’ve added some color to what I shared then, most of which you’ll be reading in the third person — words I shared with the 4.0 community. Here’s a table of contents:

Onward,

Matt Candler | Founder+CEO

It’s so good to have each of you here for my favorite two days of the year. This session is about the current state of 4.0 and where we’re headed. I thought we’d kick it off with a trip down memory lane — not for nostalgia’s sake but for getting-better’s sake. After that, we’ll come back to the future of 4.0, and school itself.

Let’s use mad libs, because…mad libs. What’s a mad lib, you say? It’s a fill-in-the blank tool we use at Essentials: ___ has a problem — ___; we solve this by ___. I’ve filled out one of these for each stage of 4.0’s development, pairing each with lessons I’ve learned about two relationships critical to our work: our relationship with the 20-year version of each of you, and our relationship with local communities. Here’s a high-level on those before we dig in.

Our relationship with the 20-year version of each of you: We’ve been up and down the value-chain of innovation — from hunch, to first test, to more tests, to launch, to scale — looking for the best placement of 4.0 resources for you. Moving forward we’re going to center our work on helping you and others validate and test new solutions within the Essentials/Tiny Fellowship sequence. We’re doubling down on delivering support to people without making them quit their jobs. This means we can serve (and become) a radically more diverse group of people with much bolder ideas.

Our relationship with local communities: We’ve struggled to find the right balance between supporting you as individuals and investing in the communities where you live. We’ve tried a bunch of things: establishing a second hub in New York, taking over Startup Weekend EDU, and helping launch local 4.0 affiliates in our Community Catalyst program. I now believe that 4.0’s small team should focus on founders and do less direct community support. We can kick the money we’ve been spending on staff efforts to you — to 4.0 Essentials and Tiny alumni already on the ground across the country. You’re aligned with our vision and can respond faster to each other than we can. Regardless of how many hubs we’ve got, you’ll always be smarter and faster collectively than any institution(s), including 4.0.

One more thing, I’d also like to share what I’ve learned along the way; I’ve grown a ton and have a clearer sense of things I need to keep working on. Spoiler: My to-learn list keeps growing.

Ok, let’s start with a mad-lib about our first two years: 2011–2013.

Founders: We focused mostly on founders of schools here, not founders of other solutions. We were pretty downstream, focusing more on the 18–24 months before opening day. Since then, we’ve moved earlier, or further upstream in the process.

Communities: We originally focused on the Southeast, trying to fill the often overlooked need for investment in this region. In fact, our first Launch cohort of six included three teams from Tennessee.

This stage was home to one of my scariest moments as a CEO, calling our first funders to say we needed to change course; founders didn’t need what we had promised them/what we raised money to do. They wanted support earlier, and for more than just schools.

I could talk for hours on relationships with funders here but long-story short — we gave up ~$6M when we made this tweak. Some funders came back, some didn’t. It was the right call. Scary, but right. Those changes, from schools to more than schools, and from the SE to the rest of the US, led us to another mad-lib, which we ran with for about two years, from 2013–2015.

Founders: We did a lot. We expanded our user base, throwing our own events to recruit more than just school builders. We asked alumni to help, too; 4.0 birthday parties across the globe were a huge success. Partners like Idea Village in New Orleans and Startup Weekend EDU helped us get the the word out, too. We helped people validate problems in our Essentials workshops then helped them create companies to deliver those solutions, often encouraging them to quit their jobs to do our Launch program.

Communities: We tested Essentials in three new markets in 2013: the Mississippi Delta, San Francisco, and NYC. NYC was the most responsive; we put boots on the ground quickly.

Cambria, our communities lead, went up in Spring of ’14 to run a 12-week program called Prototyping Bootcamp. We hired Fu that winter. Alli started helping as a consultant in April 2015 and came on full-time in August. To meet growing national demand, we tried doing Launch once a year there. I signed a three-year lease for our new hub.

Looking back, I wonder if we could have done Launch without our own space, bootstrapping for even longer than we had until then, because instead of supporting the local community, Alli was stuck managing our facility build out and operation.

Elsewhere, Fu, our Chief Hustler, began building the first iteration of what would become Community Catalyst. Leaders from Austin, Birmingham, Charlottesville, and DC started doing local events and coaching back home with 4.0 help. We also took over Startup Weekend Education Education in the US (SWEDU).

Looking back, we were spreading 4.0 too far across the many stages of new idea development, promising too much for founders while asking them to take monster risks.

Of all the stages, the validation and testing work in the middle was where the greatest need was; there just weren’t any places to go to define problems and start to test solutions with real students and families before quitting your job.

We started narrowing in on that while making a more concerted effort to find great partners to help upstream and downstream of our now narrower area of focus. We were soon on to another mad-lib, one focused on validating and testing, and on helping people without making them quit their day job.

Before I get to the 2016 mad-lib, I want to share another observation I came to, too slowly. We weren’t just over-promising/under-delivering for founders, we were doing that for people interested in building communities, too — SWEDU organizers and Community Catalysts. They were actually a second user we’d committed to serve and it was our relationship with these members of the community I’d struggle to define in 2016.

Founders: We made a firm commitment in the Tiny Fellowship to serve people before they quit their job, zeroing in on the validation and testing stages. We were able to run two iterations of this new format, adapting much of the Launch program to a larger cohort, in a more blended virtual and camp-based format.

Communities: We’d started a second cohort of Community Catalysts in Denver, Los Angeles and Kansas City, but I didn’t do a good job predicting what we could deliver, what we’d ask, how we’d coordinate. Meanwhile, a year into managing SWEDU, we realized we’d have to start raising new money and wondered if TechStars, new owners of SWEDU, would keep it going on their own.

After a year of unclear expectations for how to serve this second group of users, I had to admit we could only focus on user 1. So with as much humility and candor as we could, we: renegotiated a partnership with TechStars for them to run SWEDU while still sending teams with promising ideas to our Essentials program; explored lighter footprints in NYC; and decided to phase out the Community Catalyst program. We’ll still support our first two Community Catalyst cohorts, but we’ll focus on giving founders in their communities access to Essentials and Tiny when their own programming isn’t available.

Shoutout break:
Fu. (David Fu’s been a rock at 4.0 for 3 years as Chief National Hustler.) You’ve selflessly given to founders and communities all over the US. You’ve taught me a ton; I can’t wait to see your next 17 years, especially in Johannesburg. Thanks.

SWEDU organizers and Community Catalyst partners. To a person, you’ve been more gracious and patient with 4.0 through many iterations. Thank you. I think our new path will let us work more transparently and be better partners for each of you.

Its 2017, and we’ve got a tighter mad-lib focused on two key features of Essentials and the Tiny Fellowship:

1. Training and community experiences here in New Orleans, and
2. Timely support for each founder when they’re testing solutions with students and families in their local community.

Founders: This latest mad lib seeks to clarify community support in service to founders through eight distinct stages along what we call the 4.0 Founder path:

I’d like to share my favorite food metaphor for the most intensive section of the path, stages 4–7. In the old days, chefs had to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a better restaurant — risky, little actual diner involvement, limited to those with access and cash.

These days, a chef can test incrementally with real humans long before they raise money or quit their job for a few hundred bucks. This chef might buy a friend (who’s got the keys to the restaurant where they work) a six pack of their favorite IPA and use their kitchen on a Sunday night when the restaurant is closed.

This low-stakes, very real world world test of a new restaurant concept is far more effective than sharing recipes with friends. Within a supportive community of people who can lend you resources to run that test and people who will eat your food, this can be done quickly, cheaply, and with much less risk than starting a whole restaurant. And best of all, it’ll let you see what actual humans think about your new food.

While Essentials (Stages 4, 5) focuses on planning and running pop-up dinner scale tests, The Tiny Fellowship (Stages 6 and 7) represents the food-truck stage of development. If an aspiring chef gets some good feedback, she might level up to a food truck.

Where a pop-up meals costs hundreds, a food truck costs thousands but provides much more feedback and better mimics what a future restaurant might look like. It might even convince the chef they don’t need a restaurant at all!

That’s what we try to coach during the Tiny Fellowship. With a $10K wallet and lots of coaching, we equip you, founders of new spaces and tools, to run extended week- to month-long pilots with 10 or more students in your local community.

Education is still stuck in a pre-popup, pre-food-truck world. We’re trying to change that.

Education is still a pre-popup, pre-food-truck world.
Financial and political capital is stacked too far downstream waiting to “scale what works.” We assume the next generation will get to this mountain on their own — that they can come up with breakthroughs sans-support, sans-$ and sans-feedback.

We can blame the system for its capacity to resist change, but I think our approach to changing the system needs work. We need to move upstream to meet the people trying to make the future better where they are right now instead of waiting for them to work miracles without capital and support.

We think we can make the future of school better with investments like these — smaller, faster, earlier. For too long, we’ve kept capital away from you, the next generation of leadership, until you can prove yourselves worthy of spending million dollar checks to scale things. This approach gives us an opportunity to move capital further upstream in ways that minimize risk for investors and maximize opportunities for you to build a far better future of school.

Communities: Instead of running a separate business line to establish local institutions to support founders, we’re going to hire individuals — alumni of Essentials and Tiny. You, if you’re interested, will provide targeted, timely, local support to founders when they’re in one or more of these 8 stages. This lets us be more responsive to many more founders in many more places.

And it lets us react year-round instead of once or twice a year through SWEDU. It also gets cash to alumni when you really might need it — in your early days. Finally, it leverages the best coaches of all — you; you’re the best people to help others on this path because you’re just a couple of steps ahead.

This simpler approach emphasizes founders helping founders, letting our community explore something critical to the future of school itself, student-to-student teaching.

NYC: After three years as our second hub, we’re planning to transition out of NYC by the end of June this year. After that, we’ll do our coaching for NYC-based Essentials alums and Tiny participants primarily through alumni contractors. That means all 4.0 Schools staff will now be located in New Orleans. Our NYC Community Manager, Alli (Dunn) Lee, who has been working for the NYC Education community for nearly nine years, will be staying in New York City to pursue other efforts in the education community in the City, and will be moving on from 4.0 Schools by the end of June.

NYC shout-out:
Alli: You’ve dealt with the constant adjustments to NYC and its role in our national strategy with candor and hospitality, providing leadership, coaching and profound hospitality to me, the 4.0 team and the NYC community. Thank you for being part of this family; your vision for a more humanizing and equitable system of schools for more than a million kids in NYC is sharp and right, and I’m fired up about what you’ll do in the next 18 years.

Some thoughts on the word “school”
Here’s our current mission statement:

You might note that we’ve left out the word “schools.” That’s not because I don’t believe in schools. It is because we need to push ourselves to rethink school.

For aspiring school founders in the group, I dare you to first build non-school-of-record learning spaces for kids before pursuing full-day school models. You can be more innovative, and you’ll have more reps with students and families if you hold off on the recipe-sharing and just start cooking for students and families.

Often, modular learning spaces are the cheapest, fastest first step you can take. (Insert rant here about how recipe-centric current innovation work is. i.e., most charter processes are recipe sharing exercises that lack local taste-testing.)

Another shout out:
You. 4.0 is not an incubator. Nor is it an accelerator. Nor is it a school for entrepreneurs. It is a community. Scratch that. We. Are. A community. I’m learning from you faster in this community of humans than I ever could if 4.0 was just an institution. I am grateful and humbled to be part of this with you. Thanks for your courage, candor, and commitment to our children. Let’s keep learning, together.

During 4.0’s 2nd Community Summit in February of 2017, I shared some thoughts on the future of school. Here are the images I shared, with some commentary thrown in on a few.

I use another fill-in-the-blank mad-lib: the future of school is _____.

The future of school is for all of us, not for a few.

Since we passed our first law about school in 1642, which contemplated school for wealthy white children but not enslaved children, we’ve written a history of schooling that’s the few vs. the rest.

During Community Summit, I couldn’t find a better way to express what I feel about this than what Langston Hughes wrote in 1936 about the past and the future of America. So we read his poem as a group, out loud, 1 paragraph per person. We really owned it. It was a powerful experience for many of us.

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes, 1936

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — 
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek — 
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean — 
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today — O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home — 
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay — 
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again — 
The land that never has been yet — 
And yet must be — 
the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine — 
the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME — 
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose — 
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath — 
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain — 
All, all the stretch of these great green states — 
And make America again!

The future of school is human, not institutional.

I discuss one current dictionary definition of school and how unhelpful and outdated it feels and then propose an alternative definition that we’ll be using moving forward within the 4.0 community.

The future of school is smaller scale.

The concept of industrial scale dominates how we think about and do school. I don’t buy it; I want school to be human scale. I argue for smaller learning spaces of close to 150 students or less where we can invest in students teaching each other.

The future of school is unbundled.

I argue for disciplined responsible investment in diverse ecosystems of learning spaces and tools that provide far more variety and opportunities than a monolithic one-size-fits-all industrial solution.

The future of school is rated R.

I argue that changing stuff in a highly institutionalized world isn’t the “aw that’s sweet” kind of story we usually associate with people who choose to become educators; it’s actually a very messy, conflict-laden exercise. Then I drop a verse in from my favorite songwriter, Bill Mallonee.

“Skin” by Bill Mallonee, 1995

now look if you’re gonna come around here

and say those sort of things

you gotta take a few on the chin

you talking about love and all that stuff

you better bring your thickest skin

The future of school sounds like bubbles popping.

I share a powerful insight from Hassan, who hopes the future of school can break through the barriers we put up between ourselves and others, and the barriers between ourselves and knowledge we’ve yet to attain. I suggest a bubble popping as a better illustration than a lightbulb turning on for the moment when learning happens. Then, I show a really cool slow-mo video of a bubble popping from the The Slow Mo Guys.

As we move forward, we’re hoping the learning spaces and tools people in our community create for the human students and families they know reveal glimpses of this brighter, better future of school — a future with less bubbles. That’s what we’ll be working towards over here at 4.0. If you’re able/interested, you should absolutely join us.

4.0 is not-for-profit and the people who work here are dedicated to connecting, coaching and investing in people to test new learning spaces and tools with students and families in their local communities. We’re at 4pt0.org, on medium: 4.0 Schools, fb: /4.0Schools, and twitter: 4pt0schools. Matt’s at @mcandler on twitter and medium.

Thanks again for your time. If you want to go even deeper, here’s a video of our full future of school session from Community Summit!

The future of school at 4.0 was originally published in Future of School on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear 2016,

And as far as THIS year goes, we’re ready to roll out some pretty exciting stuff - 8 days from now at our 2017 Community summit. Keep your eyes peeled for livetweets at @4pt0schools

The crew at Bright asked me to kick off a conversation on investing in the future of school based on this fascinating report from the Education Commission — The Learning Generation.

Check out the discussion and join in with your own thoughts!

• Investing in the Learning Generation
• In Education, What Can the U.S. Learn from Developing Countries?
• The Education Breakthrough That Matters
• Smart Education Investments Can Solve the Global Learning Crisis