I'm Daniel Martinez.

I had one semester left. I could've easily finished my last four courses—they were all online. But when I told my school in hopes that they'd help me get my visa to work in the U.S., they told me I was going to be demitted.

Every day I would walk by a big decal in the atrium of my school that read “Be a Changemaker”. But the moment I did it, they kicked me out.

In fact I should've seen it coming. For more than a year I'd been working on partnering with my school district to implement AI to help teachers grade student work.

And while I saw it as a win for everyone—better feedback for students means better outcomes, faster grading means less strain and burnout for teachers—the school district relentlessly dismissed the idea, stating a multitude of strawman objections.

When I didn't take no for an answer, they simply labelled the matter as “not a priority”.

A month before they kicked me out of high school, I had my final exam in English class. We had to write about what we'd learnt in the class, surrounding a theme of fear.

I had skipped the whole school week prior so I could go to an edtech conference in Orlando, so I winged it.

I wrote about what I was genuinely passionate about. Over the years I had realized that time and time again, the school professing change and innovation, building up students with hope while controlling them with fear—only to reject it all when someone actually cared enough to make it happen.

I had spent years trying to work with the system. It was a pain point I witnessed first hand by both students and teachers, and I wanted to make the change because it was clearly a net positive.

I went to 78 teachers at my school, including the one that inspired the idea in me when I saw her grading 60 papers in one evening, but all of them dismissed it. My district told me to submit a public tender.

I was 16.

Time was running out for me. By 12th grade, I realized that I had to make it work, or submit to going to university or getting a job. And although it had been my dream to study at MIT, that dream had long passed, as I became disillusioned with the school system entirely.

I realized the incentives were misaligned.

Admin did not care about saving teachers time.

And as it turned out, admin didn't even actually care about students at all.

Above a certain threshold, as long as students aren't failing, there is no reason for them to invest more energy, time or money into improving the experience for students.

That's when it all made sense to me.

At first I just thought they had the best of intentions, and simply didn't understand the benefit.

But it wasn't that.

It was that they didn't care enough about actually improving the system.

And the system doesn't change unless the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of changing.

It wasn't that they couldn't see the upside.

They just didn't have a reason to care.

And after all that—getting kicked out of high school, getting into YC at a 0.8% acceptance rate, getting covered on Forbes, a billboard in Times Square, and signing several independent schools and districts in the U.S.—my school still never acknowledged my work.

Because to acknowledge it would be to admit that they were wrong.

To admit that their system was designed to make students do the bare minimum to avoid getting punished, rather than taking the catastrophic risk of possibly being wrong to have the chance of creating a better world.

To acknowledge a straight-A student who decides to skip finals, drop all his courses and bet all his chips on his dream, is far too dangerous.

It would put into question why we sit students down for 12 years to drill into their minds not the fundamental concepts that they need, but to condition them to fear making mistakes.

It would expose how they're conditioning students to do the opposite of what actually creates greatness, in favor of control.

There are far too many kids who've had their talent buried under a fear of stepping out of line from the system's expectation of them.

So to prove that it's possible, to bring upon us a generation of people great at their craft, I'm dropping everything I've built over the past 3 years.

We're done with smoke and mirrors. Done with the theatrics.

You can't build for a system that is broken. For a long time I believed that traditional education would either be forced to adapt itself to the real world, or find itself obsolete.

We're here to do that.

No proctoring, no AI bans, no grading that punishes early mistakes. Every project produces something real.

In 2030, school as you know it, will no longer exist.