The education system is broken. Everyone knows it.
I won “highest academic achievement” at my elementary school. Green checkmarks on a piece of paper. Teachers loved me. I thought that meant something.
It didn't. School was just a game, and I was good at playing it. The checkmarks were points in a system that rewarded compliance, not understanding. I wanted more, faster, and better, so I applied for IB. I got in, and the workload nearly broke me — not because learning is hard, but because what I was being asked to do had nothing to do with learning.
At the same time, I was spending my nights teaching myself to code. Building apps. Shipping things to real people. I remember being at a school dance and watching people's faces light up when they realized they could send the DJ any song from their phone, using something I built. That feeling — seeing your work create value for someone else — was more educational than anything I'd experienced in a classroom.
I dropped out of IB. Switched schools. Built products with thousands of users. And I kept asking myself the same question: if the most successful people in the world got where they are by spending an obsessive amount of time doing one thing, failing constantly, and learning from it — why does school punish you for that exact process? Why does a 60 on your first essay and a 95 on your last average out to a 77, as if you didn't learn anything? Why does the system treat your worst day and your best day as equally representative of who you are?
Everyone complains about this. Nobody does anything about it. So we started building.
We spent nearly three years making AI tools for teachers. Chrome Extensions, Google Docs integrations, the whole thing. Teachers loved the product. But teachers are the last people to adopt new tech, and selling to schools is an uphill battle against a system that doesn't want to change. Even if we won — even if thousands of schools used our tools — the student experience wouldn't fundamentally improve. We'd be saving a teacher 20 minutes on grading while the kid in the back row is still bored, still averaging their worst day with their best, still waiting four months to finish something they could learn in two weeks.
That's when we asked the question that changed everything: why are we building for teachers? Why not give students the tools directly? If a student can learn faster, they can learn more, and they can get to the real world sooner — to do what they actually want to do. That's the outcome that matters. Not saving a teacher time. Not selling another software license to a school board. The student.
In five years, education will be forced to change. The type of work we do is changing, and so must the system that prepares people for it. People will care about outcomes — what you can do, what you've built, what value you provide. Not how many hours you sat in a chair. But we live in the present, and in the present, you still need credits to graduate, you still need a transcript for university, and the game still exists.
So we made the game faster.
VibeLearn lets you earn real Ontario high school credits — the same OSSD credits accepted by every university in the country — in weeks instead of months, so you can get through the system and get to the real world faster. Learning is free. AI coaching is free. Every lesson, every exercise, every coaching session. You only pay $249 when you want the official credit — half what other Ontario virtual schools charge for a PDF textbook and a four-month waiting period.
Every credit is assessed by Ontario Certified Teachers. Every course follows the curriculum. Every credit appears on your official transcript. The credential is exactly the same. But the experience is built around how people actually learn: you submit work, get real feedback, revise, resubmit, and your grade reflects what you know now, not an average of every mistake you made along the way.
This is for the student who already knows what they want to do with their life, and sees school as the thing standing between them and actually doing it. For the parent who wants their kid to have every advantage without overpaying for outdated technology. For the teenager who could learn this material in two weeks if the system would just get out of the way. For anyone who has ever sat in a classroom and thought: there has to be something better than this.
I used to say that one day I'd build my own school, and that if I failed, at least I'd have a crazy story to tell my grandkids. Turns out “one day” came faster than I expected. The system wasn't built for people who move fast, who want to prove what they know on their own terms, who'd rather be out in the world creating than sitting in a classroom memorizing.