Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987540

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but my concern is that will lead to a less educated population. there is positive, life changing learning that can happen on social media. kids finding their tribe by connecting with people like them in other parts of the country / world. kids discovering skills / crafts they become passionate about. heck, even learning how to communicate effectively with others. i think social media is a treasure when it is used correctly.

ofc, i agree with the concerns and ofc the right "solution" is one that enables the positives and minimizes (and ideally eliminates) the negatives. and having social media as a closed, proprietary, centralized product that can't be tweaked (e.g, choose your own custom algorithm, or filter out a "type" of content that you don't want to see, etc.) is the core problem here. a decentralized social media would allow even regulators to apply much more fine-grained controls so that they don't have to remove access entirely.

but sadly bec. we don't have a good way to apply fine grained controls to how we use social media, it seems blanket banning entirely for an entire group of people is the best approach. like, i get why it may be necessary (it seems like most / many australians are currently on board), but i really hope this inspires people to build better social platforms that give more control to users.

the teacher takes the risk. if the student succeeds, both share in the upside. if not, the student walks away free, unlike debt, where you’re burdened for life whether or not the education worked.

where is the debt in this model?

2. If the person has become far more valuable, I don’t see that as a problem. Yes, they might be paying 100x compared to their early valuation, but that’s because their potential has grown 100x. From the student’s perspective, spending 1% of a much larger pie to buy out a teacher (even if toxic) isn’t “robbing their future self”. The real benefit for the student is that they never take on debt. Ever. They are never burdened if they don't become successful (unlike our current system).

Teachers can still realize returns through secondary sales (with the student’s approval). In that case, the student gives up nothing (their life isn’t affected) while the teacher profits. That’s why I framed “giving up” only around equity sales by the student because only that results in the student "giving up" something. But from a teacher’s perspective they can clearly profit without requiring the student to give something up.

> They nearly always cave to pressure to produce more profit, so the investor can make their money back, even at the expense of the vision for the company or the long term health of the business

That happens in companies because investors hold voting rights and can push out founder(s) or make decisions about the company. With personal tokens, shareholders have no control: they can’t fire you, push you toward an exit, or override your vision. If someone becomes toxic, you could buy back their shares at market price and even cut off contact. Personal tokens are designed to keep individuals in full control. Unlike company shareholders, personal token shareholders don’t “own” you.

> If they are cut off as deadweight, it undermines the whole concept, as they were still a building block to get you to where you are.

Agreed. Unfair ejections would kill trust. That’s why all actions would be transparent. If a student ejects a teacher without clear justification, they’d damage their reputation and likely struggle to raise in the future. Transparency is what keeps the system honest. But even in an unfair rejection, the student would have to pay market price for that equity (or get a new investor that buys from the investor they are ejecting). Assuming the student’s value has gone up, then the ejected investor would still profit.

> For teachers, it just feels like a perverse lottery. Go for volume and hope one pays off.

In the same way the best investors don’t see startup investing as a lottery but as a skill: where you won’t bat 100%, but you can be orders of magnitude better than average. Great teachers would have a knack for identifying and developing talent and won’t view this as a lottery. And for teachers who don’t want to play this game, nothing changes: they can keep teaching in the current system. This is about adding another option.

If giving up 1% to a teacher-investor helps me create 10x more value, that’s a fantastic deal. Without factoring in their impact on outcomes, it’s misleading to call that “robbing.”

And let’s be clear about what’s actually at stake. If I sell equity in a company for $10M, and a teacher owns 1% of my personal token, they’d receive $100k — only at that exit event. Compare that to owing a bank $200k in student loans right after graduation, regardless of outcomes.

It’s also not indentured servitude: there are no guaranteed repayments, I keep full agency, and personal tokens could allow “ejection” of shareholders if needed. Startup founders don’t see themselves as servants of their investors, and neither should students.

And honestly, I wouldn’t even want to buy back equity from investors who are actively helping me win. I’d rather keep them incentivized to keep contributing. (Of course, if they stop actively helping me I would want to buy back shares from them because they are deadweight). I think this could be implemented in a way that gives such control to the individual (e.g., you can buy back shares whenever).

Also, I meant 5 - 10% over the course of their lives (across all that they raise from). I should have been more clear.

This flips the incentives: teachers only win if students do. Instead of extracting value at the start, they share in the upside when their students succeed. That seems like a healthier alignment than the status quo.

For example, if a student shows strong potential - say they ship a prototype that gains traction online - new investors may want to back them. At that point, the teacher can sell some of her shares to those investors (with the student’s approval), realizing value earlier while still staying aligned with the student’s long-term success.

As for returns: there are no guarantees, just like in venture capital. The model assumes a power-law distribution — you might mentor many students, but only a few will generate outsized successes. As AI makes outcomes more extreme, this dynamic will likely intensify, which is why equity (rather than debt) is the only model that works.

Dividends only flow to shareholders when the student realizes capital gains (e.g., selling equity in a company), not from salary. Even then, there can be sensible safeguards, like only triggering dividends once total gains exceed $1M.

So students still keep nearly all of their upside, while gaining resources and support they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

If someone becomes a teacher, they would earn equity in their own students’ personal tokens. When those teachers eventually realize gains by selling shares, their own teachers (as shareholders) share in that upside too.

And if the teaching doesn’t actually create value, then everyone in that chain loses, which keeps the system honest.

Over time, though, I see it spreading to more domains as venture-backed models expand. For example, more researchers now get equity upside because more companies are being built around various kinds of research.

For ex: Alice, a great designer, could give each of her students capital that the students can use to pay rent, food, products and services to help them design, explore, or whatever (it’s their money!).

But what exactly would Alice get in return? Let’s say we create a “personal token”, an instrument that represents an individual’s potential, with transactable shares, grounded in their equities in companies and other personal tokens (via dividends on capital gains).

So Alice would get shares (equity) in each student’s personal token in exchange for her training + capital.

This would mean:

1. Students don't take on debt. In fact they get paid to learn!

2. Alice is held accountable. If she fails to meaningfully improve her students' outcomes, she loses her investment. This means Alice is forced to adapt her training to what is actually relevant to the world.

3. Teacher-student relationships last years / decades, not semesters. Alice is strongly incentivized to help her students whenever they need it, because she has equity in their long-term success.

But why? AI is making outcomes extreme (power law distribution). We can already feel this in software engineering: AI makes the best engineers far better than the median. As the gap between the best and rest grows, it becomes too risky to finance education with debt for the same reason it’s too risky to finance startups or content creation with debt.

Paul Graham was one of the earliest examples of this model. He didn’t need to guard his knowledge or put it behind a paywall because he had a much more powerful way to capture value: by investing in the founders his essays attracted. If teachers could invest in students, knowledge would spread more freely because sharing knowledge itself would become a funnel for investing. Even students who never raise would still benefit from the higher-quality knowledge that becomes available.

Thoughts?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45145641

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45122782

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(not all ofc - i would say this forcing function applies to < 1% of the population in SFBay, but that is still a far greater concentration than anywhere else i've seen).

i find similar truth-seeking-ness in long-term investors. cultures that are more short-term oriented, and who have less feedback from the market, seem to deviate away from truth-seeking because the forcing function becomes weak: you aren't quickly penalized for being wrong.

Devin won't replace you if you can create valuable products through "vibe coding" or whatever else you call it.

when coding itself becomes a commodity, value creation becomes more concentrated up the stack: what you choose to build, how well you market / sell it, how you connect with your customers, product design. Devin won't outcompete humans at these skills anytime soon.

instead of sticking to a skill that's quickly becoming a commodity (as the author recommends), moving up the stack is the way to go (outside of very niche, specialized engineering domains - e.g: training base models).