Teachers, Capital, and the Most Important Startup We Have

Originally written in 1997 - edited with 28 years of insights in 2025.

I wrote the original version of this in July of 1997. I was younger, more confident than I deserved to be, and a little too comfortable saying things without footnotes. Still, rereading it now, I don’t cringe as much as I expected to.

The core belief hasn’t changed: teachers do civilization-level work, and we pay them like temporary labor.

In business, we understand something pretty intuitively. Capital isn’t just money. It’s belief. It’s optionality. It’s a way of saying, if this thing works, the people who helped build it should share in what it becomes.

Teaching has never - to my knowledge, anyway - worked that way.

Teachers show up, shape lives, and then watch the economic upside of those lives flow everywhere except back toward the system that made them possible. Gratitude is expressed symbolically. Compensation stays transactional. Nobody is malicious about it. It’s just how we’ve always done it.

My original idea—letting people with “excess wealth” direct money to individual teachers in a tax advantageous manner—was well-intentioned and also, looking back, pretty flawed. It would have created inequities, popularity contests, and outcomes that reflected wealth and visibility more than impact. I get why the few people I shared this with pushed back. They weren’t wrong.

But the instinct behind it still feels right. And that came through too.

What if, instead of endlessly arguing about how much of someone’s extreme success should be taxed away, we asked a different question:

How much of that success should be consciously returned to the education system that helped make it possible?

Imagine a world where extraordinary economic success carried a structured obligation—not just to government generally, but to education specifically. Not charity. Not guilt. Participation.

That contribution could be directed across layers:

• Your teachers — not one hero, necessarily, but all the educators officially tied to your public education record, sharing equally in the recognition that no single person “made” you.

• Your schools — the communities that shaped you, not just the classrooms.

• Your state or region — because education is an ecosystem, not a transaction.

• A national pool — so success anywhere strengthens opportunity everywhere.

Direction wouldn’t mean favoritism. It would mean connection. A reminder that success is cumulative, not solitary.

This wouldn’t replace taxes. It would sit alongside them—more like a dividend paid backward. A quiet acknowledgment that capitalism doesn’t begin at the first job offer. It begins much earlier, in classrooms run by people who chose meaning over money and then lived with that financial tradeoff.

Teachers, administrators, counselors, and staff wouldn’t just be funded by budgets. They’d be participants in the outcomes they help create. Not owners of students’ success—just acknowledged contributors to it.

Are there hard questions here? Absolutely. Safeguards would matter. Design would matter. Fairness would matter. I don’t pretend to have all of that figured out.

But direction matters more than perfection.

If we believe capital should be put to work, then we should believe in putting it to work where the future actually begins. This isn’t about ideology. It’s about coherence.

The American-brand of Capitalism - in my view - will be at its very best when participation is broad, incentives are aligned across all contributors, and contribution is rewarded over long periods of time. What we practice today is something closer to what I call “Orthodox Capitalism”—faithful to shareholder doctrine, disciplined about returns, and surprisingly indifferent to participation and overall contribution.

Teachers don’t just prepare students for the economy.

They are among its earliest investors.

“But they don’t take the risk we do!” the investor-types might cry. Well, if you don’t consider a life-time of sub 6-figure income to be a risk, at least financially, you aren’t looking at risk in its wholistic form.

Maybe it’s time the returns flowed both ways.