Creating future Elon Musks: Meet Synthesis Co-founder & CEO Chrisman Frank

Solving problems, SpaceX CEO style, is what Frank and his co-founder, Joshua Dahn, hope to teach students

It was when he landed up at SpaceX’s headquarters at Hawthorne, California in 2015 and saw a bunch of kids running amuck while ostensibly studying and learning at Ad Astra, an innovative lab school at the time on the aerospace manufacturer’s campus, that Chrisman Frank’s life changed forever. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen kids so animated and free in any school.

As he watched them and thought about his own desultory school experience, Frank felt a pang of FOMO (fear of missing out) for his son, then two, and millions of other children. So he decided to do something about it.

Today, Synthesis, the venture he co-founded in 2020, has become quite the rage among parents in America with 2,000-odd kids enrolled and a waiting list of over 20,000. The mission of the start-up is to “accelerate human progress through education”,

Elon Musk style.

We are connecting over Zoom in the second half of 2021. It is post-dinner for me but Frank has his breakfast of fried eggs and toast with some coffee as we chat. I’d stumbled upon Synthesis and him more by chance than design, after a member of Sal Khan’s team introduced us.

The Ad Astra lab school run by Joshua Dahn, his Synthesis co-founder, educated Musk’s six children and struck Frank as very different from anything he’d seen. One, kids were not segregated by age but were all trying to work on something simultaneously, whatever age or stage they were at. Second, the approach was not the norm. For instance, in a traditional school, if students were learning how to use a screwdriver or a wrench, they might be given short courses on how these tools work. Here, the kids would be given an engine and handed a screwdriver and a wrench, and they’d learn how these worked as they took he engine apart.

“The whole approach,” says Frank, “was principles- and problem-focused” — radically different from his own schooling experience where “I failed to see how anything I had learnt would help practically in my life going forward”.

After finishing his studies from Virginia Tech, Frank worked in a bunch of companies, drifting in and out till he found his niche with Class Dojo, a UK-headquartered start-up that has since grown dramatically. He worked hard, stuck it out and earned a decent amount through his stock options.

All along, though, he’d known he would end up in the field of education.

The pieces fell in place the day he visited the SpaceX head­quarters, but it took close to four years of conversations between him and Dahn to shape the contours of what became a company only in the second half of 2020. Both the Synthesis founders believed firmly in Musk’s approach of teaching but they could also see that Astra Nova would only benefit a few. (Running on SpaceX’s cam­pus from 2014 to 2020, Ad Astra was spun off into the independent Astra Nova, now with its own cam­pus.) “We wanted to do it at scale and reach the maximum possible number of children,” he says.

For Dahn, this meant straddling two stressful boats: meeting Musk’s astronomically high expectations as he steered the Astra Nova boat, while finding the time to give shape to his new idea with Frank.

For Frank, married with three children, it meant rocking a steady boat. He sold some of his stock in Class Dojo and used most of the money to fund the start-up. Subsequently, a small seed round of funding was also raised. Revenues began to flow in and by March 2021, they raised another small round of $5 million. Running with 50 full-time employees and 300 teachers (many part-time), the company is cash positive and doesn’t need to raise funds immediately. “The idea is not to grow at a frenetic pace, and not going the VC route will help us stay in charge,” Frank says.

I interrupt to ask what exactly learning from first principles means. It means finding a “new innovative solution to a complex problem” starting from what one knows to be true and reasoning up from there, he explains. For instance, one may know the existing cost and method of building a space rocket but can

it be improved upon in some way to be more cost-effective, environmentally friendly and so on. “The idea being to improve on what we accept and know to be true,” he adds.

He’d watched as Dahn had confronted his Ad Astra kids with a very real problem they were grappling with back then — where and how the school campus could be relocated causing minimum disruption — and was blown away with the solutions the kids came up with.

Synthesis, I learn, is a weekly simulation exercise where a cohort of 6-14-year-olds is connected through video, broken up into smaller groups and given a game to win. The games are fast, complex and continuously changing with no prescribed rules. The teams debate, get louder and louder in order to be heard and prevail to come up with winning strategies. Course correction is built into how the kids learn. “At Synthesis, the kids who win make more mistakes and faster than their rivals… perfectionism has to be left behind at the door,” he explains.

After the winner is declared, the teams learn through reflection on how they could have done it differently to win, and as they get better at the games, they move into cohorts with higher difficulty levels. The idea is that kids never lack a challenge at Synthesis.

Frank says they have watched many of the smartest, gifted, talented kids come in with their teams, cocky and confident, reasonably sure that they can crack the problem faster than the others only to see them crushed when they can’t. “But unlike adults, who can take a long time to recover from failure, kids bounce back within hours and begin to look for new ways to crack it. Resilience is in-built,” he adds.

More recently, an invite-only accelerated programme has been added for around 150 top students, those who have progressed well with the standard Synthesis games and simulations.

One of the loftier aims of the venture is to help accelerate human progress by creating minds that think like a Musk and tackle real-world problems at scale. At a later stage, the company will reach out directly to national governments to run the programme for their most advanced students. The aim is to make it accessible to all one billion children in their targeted age group at some stage but “not everyone will end up thinking like an Elon Musk” or trying to solve problems that benefit mankind.

As we wind up our chat, Frank says he thinks of Synthesis as a “tournament”, a bit like a jiu jitsu class where anyone can enroll but not everyone ends up a black belt. To get to this advanced stage, one needs a sharp mind, an iron will to work hard and a Musk-like killer instinct. That will separate the wheat from the chaff.