Interviewer: After earning dual degrees in economics and data science at the University of Chicago, you had a conventional path to Wall Street open to you. Yet you chose to build a startup in education – a sector often seen as slow or “unsexy.” Why take that leap?
Simon Yang: It’s true, a lot of my classmates were heading into finance or consulting. I interned at a big financial firm and could have followed that path, but something just didn’t click for me. I kept thinking about impact. At UChicago I’d done volunteer tutoring and worked on a project connecting U.S. students with peers in Asia, and it opened my eyes. I saw how enormous the education gap was globally – I mean, if we think American education has its issues, the disparity in developing nations is on another level. I had even spent time consulting for education departments in emerging markets, helping roll out digital learning tools. Standing in a rural classroom overseas, watching a single teacher struggle with 60 kids and a chalkboard, I realized I couldn’t ignore that problem. So I turned down the safer route. The mission of leveling the playing field in education felt more compelling than any paycheck on Wall Street. Education might be seen as a slow-moving or “unsexy” industry, but that’s exactly why it’s ripe for innovation – fewer people are tackling the hard stuff. I was young, hungry, and a bit idealistic, sure, but I also saw a huge opportunity to do something that genuinely matters. I believed that with my background in data science and my understanding of both U.S. and Asian school systems, I might bring a fresh approach. So I jumped in to build Prepp, and I’ve never looked back. In hindsight, betting on impact over income has been the best decision I’ve made.
Interviewer: What exactly is Prepp building? Describe your new product vision of an “AI-powered infrastructure for emerging market classrooms” – especially the focus on personalization, classroom support, and new developments like embodied AI and intelligent agents.
Simon Yang: We describe Prepp as an “operating system” for K–12 teaching and learning. In practical terms, it’s a platform that uses AI to automate and enhance much of what happens in a classroom. For example, Prepp can auto-generate standards-aligned lesson plans and materials, provide real-time engagement analytics, and deliver adaptive practice exercises tailored to each student’s exact learning gaps. The goal is personalization at scale – every student gets something like a personal AI tutor, while every teacher gets an AI-powered co-pilot helping with prep and grading. Imagine a teacher logging in and instantly seeing a data-driven lesson plan for the day, along with which students need extra help on yesterday’s topic. That’s the core of our product right now.
Looking ahead, we’re pushing the envelope with things like embodied AI and intelligent agents in the classroom. By embodied AI, I mean AI that isn’t just stuck in a computer but has a presence in the class – think animated avatar assistants or even a small robot that can interact with students in a human-like way. It might sound sci-fi, but these embodied agents can make learning highly interactive and visual, like a friendly robot demonstrating a science experiment or a virtual character leading a language exercise, adding movement and expression to engage kids. And when I talk about intelligent agents, I’m referring to autonomous AI systems that can take on specific tasks to support teachers and learners. These could be pedagogical agents – for instance, an AI tutor bot that converses with students to reinforce a lesson – or an assessment agent that automatically grades homework and gives feedback. Intelligent agents might also act behind the scenes as tireless teaching assistants: answering common student questions at midnight, flagging which concepts the class is struggling with, or even simulating one-on-one tutoring for a student who’s falling behind.
All of this comes together as an AI-powered infrastructure for schools. We’re essentially building the digital backbone for a 21st-century classroom in the developing world. In concrete terms, a school that adopts Prepp gets our cloud-and-edge platform that works even in low-bandwidth settings, AI models that understand the local curriculum, and a suite of tools that personalize learning for every child. The teacher sees a dashboard with recommendations – say, which students didn’t grasp today’s math lesson – and the students might interact with an AI mentor on a tablet who gives them extra practice tailored just for them. We’re also exploring the frontier stuff: imagine a classroom in a rural town where an AI avatar (speaking the local language) co-teaches alongside the human teacher, or an educational robot that students treat as a lab partner. These aren’t meant to replace educators – they’re extensions of the teacher’s reach. The vision is that every classroom, even under-resourced ones, can have the equivalent of an expert tutor for each student and a dedicated aide for each teacher. It’s ambitious, but the technology is catching up to the dream. We’re piloting elements of this now, and the early results – kids engaged with their “AI friend” and teachers telling us they feel like they have superpowers – keep us hugely excited about what’s next.
Interviewer: EdTech startups often struggle to scale, especially when working with public schools. But you’ve mentioned Prepp is scaling via a B2G2C model (business-to-government-to-consumer). How does that work, and how are you making public-sector sales effective?
Simon Yang: Scaling in education is definitely tricky – it’s the classic chicken-and-egg of needing broad adoption to prove efficacy, but needing proof of efficacy to get adoption. We made a strategic decision early on to go B2G2C, which means our primary customers are governments (like ministries of education), and through them we reach teachers and students. In practice, we partner with public school systems – say a state or national education ministry – and they deploy Prepp in their schools top-down. The government might license our platform or commission custom content aligned to their national curriculum, and then roll it out to hundreds or thousands of schools at once. The teachers in those schools become our on-the-ground users (we train them and support them), and the students are the ultimate beneficiaries, effectively the “C” (consumer) in B2G2C.
Why go this route? Because if you crack the public sector, the scale is massive. Instead of selling one classroom or one school at a time, a single partnership with a Ministry of Education can open access to an entire region or country. Yes, the sales cycles are long – we’re talking months or even years of relationship-building, pilot programs, and procurement processes. It’s not the move-fast-and-break-things approach. We’ve had to learn patience and navigate a lot of bureaucracy. But once you’re in, the impact and business upside are huge. For example, if a nation’s government approves and funds Prepp for their middle schools, overnight we might be serving a million new students. No purely direct-to-consumer approach hits that kind of scale so quickly.
The key to making it work is alignment and trust. We tailor Prepp to each partner country’s curriculum and standards, so officials see it as helping reach their goals (better test scores, more efficient teachers) rather than a foreign tech imposing something. Our team works closely with local teachers and administrators in pilot programs – essentially turning them into advocates. We show the data from those pilots: improved student engagement, reduced teacher workload, better lesson coverage. That data helps persuade the decision-makers. We also structure deals creatively. Often the platform is free for the schools and students initially, which removes barriers to adoption, while the government or education department pays for the implementation, training, and any customized content or analytics they want. In other words, we ensure Prepp is free at the point of use for classrooms – teachers aren’t having to beg their principal for budget to use it – and the value proposition for the government is that they’re investing in a scalable improvement to their entire education system.
Building those public-sector relationships does take time. In some ways we operate more like an enterprise SaaS company than a typical scrappy startup – we spend a lot of time with officials, attend education conferences, respond to RFPs. But I come from a background in emerging-market education projects, so I understood from day one that this is how you unlock the next level of scale. We’ve also learned to be creative: in one country, for instance, we partnered with a local telecom to bundle Prepp with internet access for schools, easing the government’s concerns about infrastructure. In another case, we worked with the World Bank on an initiative which helped get us introduced to ministry officials. It’s a B2G2C playbook of finding win-wins. Governments get a solution to improve public education outcomes (which is politically and socially a big win for them), and we get distribution to millions of users with relatively low customer acquisition cost.
And once we land in a region, we continue with a B2G2C flywheel. Teachers and students start loving the platform – teachers talk about how it saves them hours each week, students tell their parents about the cool AI tutor they have. That grassroots excitement often flows back to the ministry in positive feedback. It helps when renewal time comes or when we propose expanding to more grade levels. We’re essentially making the public sector a stakeholder in our success. It’s not easy – public budgets are tight and priorities shift – but we’ve proven that if you stay the course and deliver real value, you can overcome the slow start. In edtech, slow and steady can indeed win the race, and then suddenly you’re scaling faster than any purely consumer app could, because you’ve built trust at the highest levels.
Interviewer:You’ve described your leadership style as balancing “Asian execution” with Silicon Valley creativity. What does that mean in practice?
Simon Yang: This phrase really comes from my personal background and the cultures that shaped me. I was born in China and grew up there before high school in the U.S., so I’ve seen first-hand how companies in Asia operate versus how things work in Silicon Valley. When I say “Asian execution,” I’m referring to that relentless work ethic and speed you often see in startups there. It’s the mindset of no excuses, get it done yesterday. In China, teams will push incredibly hard, iterate rapidly, and focus on practical results. There’s a phrase “996” – meaning working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week – and while I don’t literally force my team into 996, I do take inspiration from the sheer drive and operational excellence that’s common in Chinese tech culture. It’s about being extremely execution-oriented: setting ambitious deadlines, staying agile, and out-hustling the competition. When we need to roll out a new feature or deploy a pilot in a tough environment, that bias toward action kicks in. We don’t complain about constraints; we find a way. That’s something I credit to my Chinese side – it’s ingrained in me to value discipline, efficiency, and a bit of healthy intensity in the workplace.
Now, Silicon Valley creativity is the other side of the coin. One thing I learned in the U.S. – from my time at UChicago and working with American mentors – is the power of thinking big and outside the box. Silicon Valley has this innovation culture where questioning assumptions and encouraging wild ideas is the norm. It’s less hierarchical, more open to experimentation. So at Prepp I try to foster that too. In practice, it means even as we work hard, we also take time to brainstorm and encourage creativity at all levels. I’ll give you an example: when our engineers were building the first version of our lesson-generation AI, I set an aggressive timeline. But I also told them, “Pretend you’re at Google X – no idea is too crazy,” and we ended up with a much more innovative solution (involving some novel use of large language models) than if I had just said “copy what’s already out there and do it fast.” We do hackathons, we invite teachers and even students to ideation sessions, and we’re not afraid to pivot if a creative insight shows a better path.
Balancing the two is admittedly a challenge – moving fast can sometimes conflict with taking time to think differently. But I believe the best companies in the world manage to do both. It’s like combining the best of Shenzhen and the best of Silicon Valley in one team. In Shenzhen the mantra might be “build, build, build” and in Silicon Valley it might be “dream, disrupt, innovate.” I want my team to do all of the above – work with urgency and imagination. Concretely, this means I might set very high targets (e.g., “Let’s onboard 100 schools by year-end”) and push the team hard, but I also empower them to challenge my directives, suggest novel approaches, and even take riskier creative leaps. We’ll grind late into the night when we have to (that’s execution), but we also have a culture where someone can propose an off-the-wall idea like a VR classroom feature and we’ll seriously consider it (that’s the creativity).
Ultimately, I think this blend reflects who I am: I have a bit of that Asian tiger mentality and also the Western startup ethos. And I see it rubbing off on our company. Our folks joke that I run on “Eastern time and Western time simultaneously.” But I notice they appreciate it – we get the satisfaction of hitting milestones and the excitement of innovating. If you walk into our office, you might see a very organized daily stand-up (which appeals to my execution focus), and then later see a spontaneous whiteboard jam session with everyone throwing out ideas (which is very Silicon Valley). Marrying those two approaches isn’t always seamless, but when it works, it’s incredibly powerful. It allows us to build quickly without building blindly, if that makes sense. We execute, but with a creative compass guiding us.
Interviewer: When pitching Prepp, you framed it around global education equity – a vision that ended up resonating with top-tier U.S. investors like Andreessen Horowitz. How did you pitch this mission in a way that got Silicon Valley excited about what is often seen as a tough market?
Simon Yang: We knew going in that pitching an emerging-markets education startup to Silicon Valley VCs could be a tough sell – education isn’t the typical overnight unicorn story, and international markets add another layer of complexity. So we made a conscious effort to pitch global education equity as both a massive opportunity and a solvable problem. The narrative was crucial. We didn’t position Prepp as a charity project or just an altruistic endeavor; we pitched it as the company that could fundamentally transform learning for the next billion students and build an enduring business in the process.
In the pitch, I often started with a simple but jarring comparison. I’d say something like, “Consider a classroom in suburban California, then consider one in rural India or sub-Saharan Africa.” The gap in resources and outcomes is staggering – and I’d follow with, “It doesn’t have to be that way.” I basically painted the picture that with today’s AI technology, a kid in Lagos or Lahore could have access to the same quality of instruction as a kid in Los Angeles. That vision of leveling the playing field really grabbed attention. I remember telling the Andreessen Horowitz folks, “We want to give every child a world-class tutor in their pocket and every teacher an AI assistant on day one.” It helped that this was post-COVID, when everyone had seen the drawbacks of status quo remote learning and the global need for better edtech was more obvious. We backed our story with numbers too. For instance, we highlighted that the global EdTech market is on track to reach over $400 billion by 2025, growing fast, yet still only a single-digit fraction of the trillions spent on education – meaning there’s enormous room to run. We also pointed out how outside the U.S., things are moving even faster: in China, online education was already a $50+ billion industry in 2020 and projected to more than triple in a few years. That kind of growth story showed investors that this “tough” sector can generate big wins.
Another thing that resonated was our approach of treating education like infrastructure. I literally called Prepp the “operating system for emerging market education” and likened what we do to an Apollo mission for global learning – ambitious, yes, but ultimately a moonshot that could succeed with the right backing. We showed them early pilot results – e.g., significant jumps in student engagement, teachers saving hours of prep time – to prove it wasn’t just a pipe dream. And we leaned into the B2G2C model as a strength: while others might see selling to governments as a negative, we framed it as our Trojan horse to quickly reach millions of users and secure long-term contracts (which savvy investors recognize as high customer and revenue stickiness).
Crucially, we spoke the investors’ language when it came to scale and defensibility. We said, “Prepp isn’t just an edtech app, it’s building the digital rails for education in markets that are leapfrogging straight to AI-powered learning.” That implied winner-take-most dynamics – if we become the platform that a country standardizes on, that’s an enormous moat. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, has a thesis around backing bold bets that can create new markets. So we tapped into that. We argued that emerging markets don’t have to follow the West’s slow path of educational development; they could skip straight to a data-driven, AI-first model (just like many skipped landline phones and went mobile). And Prepp would be there to enable it, partnering with governments the way infrastructure companies do. I think that framing – education as the next frontier of technological leapfrogging – got them excited.
Finally, I’d say our genuine passion shone through. Investors hear a lot of pitches, and many are about the next fintech or enterprise SaaS. When someone comes in talking about uplifting millions of children and actually has a plan to make it profitable and scalable, it stands out. I told the story of a school I visited where kids were sharing outdated textbooks and how their faces lit up when a tablet with our software started talking to them in their native language. We weren’t just selling software; we were selling the future of learning globally. That emotional core – this is why we do what we do – combined with a credible business model struck a chord. Andreessen Horowitz ended up selecting us for their Speedrun accelerator and investing, not out of charity but because they saw the upside. As one partner said, “If it works, you’re not just a company, you’re an institution.” That validated our approach.
In the end, the way we pitched global education equity was by showing it’s both a moral imperative and a massive market. We had to convince them that Prepp could be as transformative to education as, say, Tesla was to transportation or SpaceX to aerospace – big comparisons, but that was the level of ambition we wanted to convey. And we backed it up with tech demos, market research, and a rollout strategy that made it believable. The fact that top-tier investors came on board tells me that the narrative landed. They saw that our mission to bring quality education to every corner of the world isn’t just a feel-good story – it’s also a venture-scale idea whose time has come. And that’s exactly the intersection where impact and investment meet, which is where we always aimed to be.
