Austen Allred
Gauntlet AI
Gauntlet's 100-hour weeks produce better engineers than any university.
I'm Ben.This is my quest.
Seven stops, and why the next one is The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
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01 · The quest
“A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success.”
Trae Stephens & Markie Wagner, Choose Good Quests
Fixing higher education happens to be mine.
The quest, in one line
Fix higher education. It is the most important thing we do for young people, and we do it badly.
The years right after high school decide more about a life than any others: what you learn to do, who you meet, what you believe you are allowed to attempt. We hand those years to institutions that cost more every year and teach less, and we call that the safe choice. I don't think it is safe. I think it is the most expensive mistake a country can make, and we make it a few million times a year. It is not a problem you fix in a job or two. It is a life's work, and I have been working on it from a different angle at every stop since I was eighteen.
02 · The route so far
High school · Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sneaker bots.
I went to a college-prep high school. What I actually studied was the resale market. I wrote bots that bought limited sneakers and consoles the second they released, and I sold them. In the COVID year that was $125K in sales. Nobody taught me any of it, and I learned more from it than from any class I have taken since.
Freshman year · Eugene, Oregon
The business degree.
I went to Oregon for a business degree because that is what you do at eighteen. By December I could see that everything on the syllabus was free online, and that the people I actually wanted to learn from were not on campus. I left after one semester. That was the first time the quest had a shape.
First dropout · Minneapolis, Minnesota
Landscapers.
I went home and started a marketing agency for landscaping companies. Cold calls in the morning, sales calls in the afternoon, ads and delivery at night. It got to $4K a month, which is not much. It was still the most I had ever learned in a year, because every mistake had a price and every customer was real.
Back to school · St. Paul, Minnesota
The acceptable thing.
I went back to school, this time St. Thomas, because leaving twice looks worse than leaving once. The classes were fine. What that semester was really for was writing. I wrote about why the paths out of high school are broken and what should replace them, and thirty-eight thousand people started following along. The ones who mattered found me. One of them was Balaji.
Second dropout · Forest City, near Singapore
Someone else's attempt.
Balaji Srinivasan, once a General Partner at a16z, was building his own answer to the university. He called it Network School. Learn, earn, burn. Linear algebra taught by working engineers, a workout every morning, a campus full of people shipping things. I flew across the world to live inside it. What I learned there is that a new institution is mostly operations, and someone has to run it well or the idea does not survive the first semester.
Now · Austin, Texas
Contrarian Thinking.
Contrarian Thinking teaches ordinary people to buy and scale small businesses. It is an alternative to how private equity works, and that is why I came. I started on the phones. Seven months later I was running revenue operations: the CRM, the reporting the leadership team runs on, the AI systems behind the sales floor, and the numbers for every experiment. It is where I learned that an alternative only lasts if it is a business that works, and that someone has to run the business.
Next · San Francisco, California
The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
Built around doing instead of knowing. A network of the best builders in the world. Real co-ops inside real companies. For-profit and venture-backed, so the incentives point the right way. A life's work problem needs a life's work company, and this one is built like one: a real company with real capital, a founding team, and a plan that runs past the first class. I have been looking for this place since I was eighteen.
03 · The people
Along the way I asked the people building alternatives how they did it.
MacKenzie Price
Alpha School
How Alpha School makes kids love school more than vacation.
Danielle Strachman
1517 Fund
The case against college, and funding young founders.
Dr. David Ruth
University of Austin
Inside the most innovative college campus in America.
Dr. Matt Bateman
Montessorium
Why traditional schools kill agency, and Montessori fixes it.
Augustus Doricko
Rainmaker
Greening the Great American Desert with cloud seeding.
04 · 2025
Network School.
Balaji wrote The Network State, then started building it. Network School is the first campus, and it is his life's work. I lived inside it for six months.
(me)
Balaji
@balajis · Jun 2, 2025
Jason just visited Singapore and Network School, and we did a new podcast together. Coming soon!
05 · Now
Austin.
Contrarian Thinking, where I run revenue operations and build the systems the company runs on, and where I learn from two people who have built real companies.
Codie Sanchez
Founder
Marc Hustvedt
President
06 · What the road taught me
What higher education has to be.
- 01Built on real work.
- 02About doing. Knowing is already free.
- 03Real stakes.
- 04The best builders in the room.
- 05Run well. An institution is mostly operations.
- 06A business that works, so it lasts.
I learned this one stop at a time. The Academy is the first place I have seen that is all six, and the first one built to outlast the people who started it.
I don't want to start my own version of this.I don't want to be a student in it.I want to spend the next decade building this one.
Let's talk.
Austin, TX → San Francisco, CA