Class Dismissed

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Salutations, Olio aficionados! 👋

Midweek greetings to all, as we unveil the 181st chapter of Weekly Olio—a delightful concoction of laughter, insight, and a sprinkle of mystery. Within these pages, you'll discover a handpicked selection of fascinating finds from the vast realms of the internet.

Keep your eyes peeled for this week’s Publisher’s Parmesan, arriving this Sunday!

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The Quote󠀢 💭

The Tweet 🐦

India has a trade surplus with the US in goods, especially in tech and labor-intensive areas. However, to maintain this, India might need to buy more oil from the US instead of Russia. Although not directly stated, tariffs are being used to encourage this shift. India has options: it can strengthen its ties with BRICS, where it has a large trade deficit, especially with China, or it can work on improving access to US markets by reducing its oil purchases from Russia.

The Infographic 💹

In EU, last year, deaths outnumbered births by a stunning 1.26M. These are signs of a coming population collapse that threatens to upend economic and social systems all over the world.

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The Short Read 📝

The Mongolian startup defying Big Tech with its own LLM - by Viola Zhou

Viola Zhou is a senior reporter at Rest of World, focusing on China. She has over 10 years of experience reporting on Chinese technology, business, and internet culture. Before this, she wrote about Chinese politics and society for Vice World News and worked for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

Egune AI is creating language models focused on the Mongolian language, culture, and nomadic traditions. Many popular language models don't work well with less common languages, which can lead to more inequality. Because there aren't many resources, it's difficult for these models to compete with those from big tech companies in the US and China. Read more…

The Long Read 📜

Class Dismissed - by Colossus

Joe Liemandt is a tech wonder kid and a deca-billionaire. He earned his fortune by building Trilogy - the software giant. By the age of 27, he was on the cover of Forbes magazine twice. Since the last 25 years, he has avoided public attention like plague. This is the first profile or interview that anyone has managed in the last 25 years. The first half chronicles the story of Joe Liemandt - his journey from a college dropout to becoming a billionaire. It also focusses on the life story of Mackenzie Price - a former Trilogy staffer who is now partnering with Joe to fundamentally transform education. The second half is focussed on his newest obsession - using AI to upend the education system.

Joe’s latest obsessions is with Alpha School: the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas. Students in this school have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing learning with AI tutoring apps for just two hours per day. Students are incentivised to complete school work to a ‘mastery level’ - scoring over 90% in only 2 hours using a mix of material and immaterial rewards. The rest of the day is spent in workshops, learning life skills or playing sports. Since Gen AI became mainstream, Joe has taken out over $1B from Trilogy to fund and incubate proprietary AI products at Alpha School where he serves as ‘as the product guy’, dean of parents and principal. Highly recommend reading the article in full. Read more…

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

_{Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.}

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this edition, we’d really appreciate if you shared it with a friend, family member or colleague.

We’ll be back in your inbox 2 PM IST next Wednesday. Till then, have a productive week!

Peeyush and Mohit

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.