AESOP Academy Board Meeting — April 10

I'm trying to figure out how to get this thing to show like what I'm presenting and people at the same time. You'd think there'd be just like "add shared display, remove me from the gallery, full screen, together mode, speaker." I just can't figure it. There's like a side-by-side something and I cannot find it.

You're seeing it. I'm not. Oh, okay. How are we doing on time? Couple of minutes. Yeah. I don't think you can share two images, can you? I haven't found a better meeting tool.

Right now every week because things are changing so rapidly.

That's right. This is the first one. Just trying to figure it out.

I'm a no-religion shop — no technology religion. Hi, Richard, good morning.

Well, it's 10 o'clock. Let's go through the formal agenda. And if people show, they show — but it's the first one, so I don't expect a whole lot.

Kelly, can you hear us? No sound for you. She didn't like Teams. Kelly, there you go.

Fantastic. Richard, why don't you start with your introductions?

I'm Scott Schindler. I've been doing IT and security for about 31 years, primarily in the Dallas market. I now live in Colorado and I will say I prefer that greatly. I've been a professor at Collin College. I've run as an executive director of multiple nonprofits and multiple education organizations, primarily for cybersecurity. My heart is always in the altruistic aspect of life, and I'm glad to be there again.

Welcome, everybody. You are officially the board I have. Whether you accept it or not moving forward. This is a call to order. Do we have an official quorum? For today we have five people here of seven, so this is a divisional quorum. Today we'll just keep it pretty informal, other than I built an agenda like I am — that structured.

Let me reiterate kind of what my current informal mindset is to the mission of this organization. I do. I'm structured chaos — I'm all for structure, but I change and I move rapidly, and so my friends often call me whiplash. Where I was yesterday is not where I am today. The primary mission stays the same; how we get there changes.

This organization — I've spoken to each of you about Khan Academy. I loved its mission. I want to do the same thing for AI literacy and the world, providing a single place for people to come, to be comfortable, to feel like it's not overly technical, for things to be story-driven or narrative-driven, and build a lot of applied content as well. Narrative-driven application outcomes. My goal is to drive this globally, multilingual, free — yet sustained with certifications and grants. I've only spent a few weeks on this, but I put probably 10 to 12 hours a day into developing the site, so it's changed quite a bit over the past few weeks.

I do expect to expand the number of board members to 12 to 15 — looking for expertise in different areas of education, AI, reach, interest in helping youth, interest in driving education into post-secondary spaces. As we formalize things, membership to the board will be by vote. Once I get stressed I'm an autocrat, I'm a commander — so if at any time you perceive that I'm acting against what I've professed, please let me know. I am genuinely doing this in the interest of changing the world. My motto is: why boil one ocean when you can boil two.

I do intend to have a Kickstarter. I do not get to form the nonprofit until May 8th because it's tax time — my accountant is busy and will not form my nonprofit until then. So my accountant and I are meeting May 8th to actually form the nonprofit and get the EIN.

Funding is coming from grants, donations, Kickstarter, and certifications. My intent is to charge $25 for the intro and basic foundations course, and $50 for everything else heretofore. You can go through the whole program for free — all the labs, all the quizzes, all the module tests, the final exam — no cost. If you pass the final exam and want that certification, then you pay $50. That's it.

Remuneration for each of you: I do expect the board positions to be paid positions. I absolutely need to get to funding to get there, but I expect to have the board develop remuneration rates based on contribution — whether that's showing up here and nitpicking, expanding our reach and visibility, helping me build programs, or literally writing or teaching classes.

I started at five-plus and had literally written the foundations programs for every two years — it was just too much to maintain. And I found that AI could not write language for five and six-year-olds. So we kind of started at 7. Intro is meant for 7 through 12. Basic is really 13 through 18. And the advance is 16 plus. So they have a little bit of overlap there. But the bottom end is probably 7 just because of the challenge of the terminology for 5 and 6 year olds.

I'll actually address it in the agenda. As we build this up, a lot of things are going to change. But yeah, we will definitively be addressing that.

Child safety: I went to KeepSafe and ChildSafe and whatever these programs are. I looked at all the international standards because we are moving toward international. I've built a hybrid question-based automation system that answers everything COPPA as well as international standards for child safety. We'll regularly review everything within our website to make sure we meet the standards. It has a button literally on our homepage to tell you where we are, what our last scores were — everything. Anybody can come look at what our child safety standards are.

We don't have the certification that individual states will require, but I think our standards are pretty solid compared to what's been built. I'm hoping they can see it the same way long term.

I literally put an AI policy on the website — what we collect, how we use it, which systems we use — as well as disclaimers of why we don't have the different types of policy documents some organizations are expected to have. The reason is we only collect data when somebody joins the forum (to make sure they're over 13 or have parental access) and when they purchase a certificate. So we have a lot of protections from COPPA and privacy law expectations. Take a look at the website. The AI policy is already posted.

We are absolutely using AI to write everything. That is kind of literal. We called it out in the AI policy and in the parent and teacher reference. We are using AI for everything and AI to evaluate everything.

From an evaluation perspective of our courses and tests — yes. But not the policies. If you think that's valuable, definitely bring that up through the board meetings as we have these policies and develop them. Using the forums. I would like all of you to get to the website and become familiar with it. That's the only ask outside this meeting. Go see the website.

I'm going to say I'm in a good 80-20 place. I'm a big believer of 80-20 — we're 80% of the way from a go-to-market perspective. The 20% is details and additional course development. If you go out there and see anything different, first of all get an account. Get into the forums. There's a developers forum. Once you have an account I'll be able to make you an admin. There's a lot of functions in the site that only admins can get in to — child safety review and various capabilities.

Please get into the site, create an account in the forums. We'll start having conversations there and be able to track threads.

Current course list and development. This is my field of dreams methodology — if you build it, they will come. That's the methodology I'm trying to use to beat EC Council, to beat Microsoft, to beat anybody else going to market with AI. I'm trying to beat them with content, external validation, and cost. I want to be able to say we are the largest provider of AI literacy education in the world, and it's free.

In just the last two days I built the three foundation courses, their tests, and now three other elective classes: governance, ethics, and AI's use in society. Go out and take a look at those. I think I have like 68 other courses that you can filter through on the roadmap. I have a feeling I can get through at least a third of those by the end of this month. And I'm going to be leaning on you to talk about what courses we should be delivering, and building agents that evaluate social media and recommend courses as well.

The intent is to move to Spanish next week for the foundations courses. I don't know how that's going to go, honestly. But we are definitely going to need people that can evaluate the value of those languages once we've translated them.

My initial go-to-market date is September. So we're anywhere near moving along like this, this quickly — it's really a testament to the power of AI. I would consider the product in alpha. I would consider the structure stable enough and the content good enough to be in an alpha state. We as a board will determine what the beta criteria are and when we move, and then the production criteria.

I am talking to an organization about LinkedIn, social media presence expansion, as well as investor connectivity globally. The cost was $3,500 for three months or $6,000 for six months. The company's out of Pakistan. I'll get feedback based upon conversations I have with their customers.

After this meeting I'm going to go post that we were here, that we had our first conversation. I would love you to not just comment on it, but re-share that post, re-post that, and put your own hype and message on it. This organization is going to spread by word of mouth. Even if you don't know everything about where we are right now, the things that do make sense to you — call those pieces out. Put one, two, three messages out a week each to drive word of mouth.

I appreciate it so much. I asked nothing and you did that. Made me feel really good. What I'm looking for is champions for the board — people that believe in what we're trying to do and it's natural for them to champion our message.

This is global, and I am definitively looking for someone to help me translate it and validate it in Hindi. At least some language or dialect. I think of Hyderabad as the center of technological excellence, and then Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai — but I need guidance on how to provide that for others.

There are three groups I'm most excited about outside of the United States: Spanish for U.S. schools and accreditation, Pakistan because of the Saudi Arabia investment connection I'm speaking to after this, and then some type of Hindi because of the reach of the Indian technology market. And then potentially Pakistan — 260 million people who also focus on technology.

The AI Mastery Certification track: I've built three certification levels — professional, advanced professional, and expert. You have to maintain a number of core credits and active credits and take the foundation courses to get those. Nothing special about them, but it's incentive for people for their resume to count themselves as certified in the AI space.

The accreditation tracker — this is really where I need Richard and Irvin to come in. There's a tracker on the website publicly. We want to be able to say we are going through and getting into all 50 states, starting with five and applying for accreditation at K-12.

Go take a class. Come to the website, take a course. Give me some feedback in the forums — or in text or verbally or whatever — but go take at least one class. If nothing else, AI and Societies.

If we can keep you guys around as board members, I think we're about four PhDs in. Let me give you just a one-minute blurb of what we are and what we're doing, Anand. So this is a Khan Academy replica to provide AI literacy education globally in as many as nine languages right now, moving first to Spanish and then focusing in India, Pakistan, and China. A nonprofit, and the goal is to become the largest AI literacy education program freely available in the world across multiple languages. That simple.

We are four courses in. Three foundations courses meant for 7 to 12, 12 to 18, and 16 plus — and then governance, ethics, and AI use in societies. On the website there's a dev tracker of all the classes that exist, when they were published, what's next, how they count towards our certification programs. We've got roughly 70 courses meant to be developed — all essentially two-day courses. I'm always going to be looking toward the board as well as some agents I'm building to determine what should be taught next and what should be prioritized. And I have the same thing for child safety — a whole rubric from an international standard, COPPA+, for evaluating us for child safety.

I love how you think — you think like an entrepreneur. So active courses are already in the core set for agents. I am building agents that will be reading social media — primarily YouTube — for content that's interesting and modern, and the agent will be building us a recommendation list for exactly that: short active courses. Our certifications have core courses and active courses. Core courses renew every three years. Active courses renew every year because things change so rapidly.

Funding: one, we're doing Kickstarter. Two, we'll have access to grants because we're working on our accreditation across all states — state grants, federal grants, international grants, donations. And yes, I'll be talking to an international team right after this meeting focused on expanding our reach across LinkedIn and helping us with investors, particularly international investors, particularly in Saudi Arabia. The cost is $3,500 for three months, $6,000 for six months. Everything's come out of my pocket. I've spent probably $4,000 so far on tools and products and licenses. My initial expectation was to spend up to $20,000 of my own money to get this moving and then move into other investors and funding.

My primary driver outside of English was Spanish because this was meant for U.S. schools. After that, the Pakistani team I'm speaking to after this is getting funding out of Saudi Arabia. And then my intent was to go to Urdu and then some type of Hindi because of the reach of the Indian technology market, and then potentially into Pakistan — 260 million people who also focus on technology. I will bring that to the board; we'll make that decision together.

He knows me. We've met many times, and his former chief of staff, Angel Mosley, is kind of helping us too. K.J. Haywood is on the board. Very good. Let's see. Any other questions? We really did go through everything.

The Hype Machine: one, the organization we're talking to right now about hiring to expand our reach and visibility on LinkedIn and find investors. Two, Mike Allen on the board now — his CEO is very well connected in the philanthropic investment space. So I'm going to be meeting Roger, who knows me, and I've known him for a long time. I'll talk about that and report back to the board. The one piece I talked to the team about today: after this meeting I'm going to go post that we were all here, what we talked about. I'd like you to come in and repost that message. Take what you already know. Focus on what value you think we're trying to accomplish — helping youth, global reach, multilingual.

Take the training. Go out to esopacademy.org and take one of the four courses out there right now. At least peruse them, and then look at our development list. We definitely need feedback — right now I'm using AI engines and AI models to evaluate the training. I'm doing all of this in Claude, and then I'm having GPT and Perplexity and Gemini evaluate the training.

I'm asking you all to meet once a week already and your busy schedules — that's a lot. If you volunteer anything outside of these meetings, wonderful. But I'm not asking you now. We're too short and we've got a lot to prove before I ask anything else. But if you volunteer, I do appreciate it.

It's whatever we can — I mean, I think we all have great imaginations. I think we're creative, and I think we have good hearts. And AI allows us to do things we weren't able to do before. And if we combine those, I think we can make historical changes that are meaningful and rememberable. Just made that word up. Rememberable. That's it. Let's do the informal close of the meeting. Thank you all for coming today. I will go post on this. Please follow up. Take a look at the website. Create your forums account — that's the only place we create accounts — and then we'll give you admin access to the developer space where we'll start discussing things and have some historical threads. Thank you all for coming. Appreciate it.