In partnership with

GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), delivering you a startup idea that rethinks school for families who don’t stay put.

NTE Pro: 6,500 startup ideas to get you to start thinking

WhoFiled: We just added Product Hunt + GitHub listings as live signals (make sure to sign up for free)

Check out all the past newsletters here

Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - School Without Borders

• PTA Emergency Meeting

School That Travels With Your Kids

The One Liner

School that moves with your family

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

Worldschooling for remote families: a traveling classroom with teachers, peers, and structure - no homeschooling chaos, no Zoom fatigue.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

A lot of families want to travel long-term. Very few want to blow up their kids’ education to do it.

Traditional schools lock you to one zip code.
Homeschooling turns parents into full-time teachers.
Online schools check the curriculum box but miss the social one.
Worldschooling exists… but it’s fragmented, lonely, and improvised.

Parents don’t want “school on vacation.”
They want real teachers, real peers, real routines - just not tied to a single place.

So families hack together short stints, Zoom classes, tutors, WhatsApp groups, and hope it works. Sometimes it does. Mostly it’s exhausting.

The Solution

A portable classroom that travels with the families.

Small cohorts move together from place to place.
Certified teachers travel with them.
The curriculum stays stable while the world changes.

Kids keep the same classmates, schedule, and academic rigor.
Learning plugs into the location - history in Rome, ecology in Costa Rica, language everywhere.
Parents get community instead of chaos.

Think 6–12 families, 1–2 teachers, 4–8 weeks per location.
Not a tour. Not a camp.
School as the organizing structure for a nomadic life.

The kids get continuity.
The families get freedom.

How We’d Build It

Phase 1: Prove it works
Start with a single cohort and a narrow age band.
Use an existing accredited online curriculum as the academic backbone.
Layer in live instruction and local learning.
Run ops with tools people don’t associate with schools:
– Notion for curriculum + parent comms
– Tactiq to turn live lessons into structured notes
– Synthesis-style cohort dynamics for peer learning
– WhatsApp + Circle for parents and kids
Vibe-code the parent dashboard with Lovable or Replit to manage schedules, locations, and progress.

Phase 2: Make it repeatable
Add a second cohort and a second destination loop.
Build a lightweight internal tool for logistics: housing, visas, teachers, calendars.
Standardize teacher playbooks and travel rhythms.
Introduce short-term programs (summer, semester) to widen the funnel.

Phase 3: Scale carefully
License the model to trusted operators in other regions.
Build a proprietary curriculum layer designed for location-based learning.
Create a premium network effect: alumni families, returning cohorts, sibling pipelines.
Growth comes from reputation, not ads.

Why It Needs to Exist
Remote work broke the link between jobs and geography.
Education never caught up.

There’s a growing class of globally mobile, ambitious families who want their kids to be worldly without being unmoored. They have money, flexibility, and intent but no modern education model designed for how they actually live.

This doesn’t need to be big.
It needs to be great.

If school doesn’t have to stay still anymore, the most interesting question isn’t where kids will learn but it’s who they’ll grow up alongside while they do.

Your Boss Will Think You’re an Ecom Genius

If you’re optimizing for growth, you need ecomm tactics that actually work. Not mushy strategies.

Go-to-Millions is the ecommerce growth newsletter from Ari Murray, packed with tactical insights, smart creative, and marketing that drives revenue.

Every issue is built for operators: clear, punchy, and grounded in what’s working, from product strategy to paid media to conversion lifts.

Subscribe for free and get your next growth unlock delivered weekly.

Sign up now

The PTA Emergency Meeting

The email subject is all caps.
“MANDATORY MEETING. TONIGHT.”

By the time you get there, half the room already knows why. One family isn’t just transferring schools. They’re leaving… permanently.

Not to homeschool.
Not to an online academy.
To a traveling school. Teachers, kids, curriculum - all moving together.

The Visionary Parent goes first.

“School doesn’t have to be a building. My kid can learn algebra anywhere. What they can’t learn later is how the world actually works. This gives them peers, structure, and global exposure. Same teachers. Same classmates. Just… different countries.”

A few heads nod. A few eyes roll.

The Skeptical Teacher jumps in.

“You’re underestimating how much structure matters. Routine matters. Burnout matters. You think teaching fractions in a classroom is hard? Try doing it while managing jet lag, new housing, new rules, new cultures every month. Teachers aren’t influencers. They’re humans.”

The room tightens.

Then the Logistics Chair clears their throat. This is the person who worries about buses and lunch menus. The unsexy stuff.

“Who’s handling visas? What happens when one country rejects a teacher? Whose curriculum are we accredited under? What if a kid needs special services? What if a family wants out mid-semester? And also… who’s packing the lunches?”

That last line gets a laugh. But it lands.

The Visionary Parent pushes back.

“This already exists, just badly. Worldschooling is happening right now, except it’s chaotic and isolating. This fixes that. Small cohorts. Real teachers. Predictable schedules. It’s not vacation. It’s school, just untethered.”

The Skeptical Teacher isn’t convinced.

“Or it’s a premium fantasy for parents bored of normal life. Kids don’t need novelty every month. They need depth. Friendships that last longer than a passport stamp.”

Now the room splits.

One side sees a future where education finally adapts to modern life — remote work, global citizens, learning by living.

The other sees a fragile system where one sick teacher, one visa issue, one burned-out family brings everything down.

No one storms out. No one wins.

Because the uncomfortable truth is this:
Traditional school works because it’s rigid.
This works only if it’s intentionally small, expensive, and disciplined.

It’s not for everyone. It shouldn’t be.

But the idea refuses to die because it’s answering a real question parents are already asking:

If work can be remote, life can be mobile, and learning can be online…
Why is school still stuck in one place?

The meeting ends. No vote. No resolution.

Just one lingering thought everyone takes home:

If someone actually figured this out — really figured it out —
it wouldn’t look crazy at all.

The Founder Test

Quick test.

If you saw this idea, would you build it?

• A service that replaces referral programs with profit-sharing
• A product that monetizes corporate compliance anxiety
• A platform that turns abandoned Slack workspaces into assets

If none of those triggered an immediate “wait… I could do that,”
NTE Pro probably isn’t for you.

But if one made you stop scrolling,
that’s the signal.

NTE Pro is 6,500+ startup ideas designed to create that exact reaction.
Not inspiration. Conviction.

Most people will close this.
The right ones click.

NTE Pro — Take the Test

EpisodeRecap: The Career Framework Hidden Inside Lenny’s Podcast

Lenny’s Podcast: The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale

The podcast wasn’t about startups.
It was about careers.

But buried inside the conversation was a different pattern.

Molly Graham talks about how most people are taught to think about careers as stairs:
step-by-step promotions, clean progress, no big drops.

Then she tells a story.

When Chamath Palihapitiya pitched her a new role, he didn’t talk about titles or leveling.
He drew a picture.

Two paths.

Stairs.
And a J-curve.

Stairs were safe. Predictable. Boring.
The J-curve meant jumping into something you’re wildly unqualified for, falling hard for months, then climbing out somewhere the stairs never reach.

Molly describes the fall clearly:

• Feeling like an idiot

• Asking “dumb” questions

• Getting one of the worst performance reviews of her career

And then the turn:

• Understanding clicks

• Confidence compounds

• The fall becomes leverage

Later, she names it directly:
Learning to be a “professional idiot” isn’t a weakness, it’s the price of non-linear growth.

That’s where an idea surfaced.

If this is how real careers actually work…
Why do resumes, hiring systems, and career tools pretend they don’t?

J-Curve Careers is the idea that came out of listening.

Not a product Molly described.
Not something the podcast announced.

A startup concept implied by the conversation itself.

A career platform that would track:

Jumps instead of titles, Falls instead of gaps, Recovery speed instead of polish, Learning velocity instead of pedigree

Where failure isn’t hidden, it’s structured signal.
Where companies hire for how fast someone climbs out, not how clean their path looks.

That’s the point of Episode Recap.

Not summarizing what was said.
Not repeating advice.

But extracting the unbuilt ideas hiding inside great conversations like
the ones that only appear when you listen for patterns instead of quotes.

WhoFiled: Capital Isn’t Chasing Moonshots - It’s Buying Certainty

Last Friday’s Form D filings tell a very specific story: capital is flowing toward problems that are expensive, unavoidable, and already budgeted for. Investors aren’t underwriting new human behavior. They’re underwriting better ways to do what already must be done.

Look at where the money actually landed.

KoBold Metals raised $280M not to reinvent mining, but to marginally improve discovery accuracy in a world where missing critical minerals is geopolitically unacceptable.
HawkEye 360 pulled in $106M because persistent RF signal intelligence is now table stakes for national security, despite long government sales cycles.
Legence filed for $100M by bundling commoditized services into something enterprises can operationally rely on.
Velo3D raised $30M betting that certain aerospace parts simply can’t be made any other way.

Even the “platform” bets like Lumin Digital and Tive, only work if they integrate cleanly into legacy systems, not replace them.

The pattern is clear:
This is renovation capital, not invention capital.
AI shows up as a de-risking tool, not a miracle.
Debt appears early when R&D is long but conviction is high.

WhoFiled isn’t about headlines.
It’s about seeing what investors are actually willing to underwrite and today, novelty is losing to inevitability.

View all filings →

One More Meme

Learn how to make AI work for you

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 1,000,000+ professionals read The Rundown AI – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to use it in just 5 minutes a day.

Sign up to start learning.