So we've been working on our early version of the software to teach preschoolers to read.

We probably thought we had about another year of work before we were ready for a big public

launch.

And then this way too online, ultra-progressive Bay Area activists got her hands on one of our early

investor pitch decks and posted some pages and said, look at this terrible

company. Can you believe what they're doing? They want to teach two-year-olds to read. They want to

teach four-year-old's algebra. Isn't that terrible? And a lot of people looked at that and said,

this actually sounds really great. How do I sign up? Yeah, what was so bad about it? She was saying

that basically, you know, we are conspiring with Replit and Gary

Tan to subvert child labor laws by like making children productive at an earlier age. The best

thing about this is that she did not back down. It became this pile on where the entire internet

was like, I don't understand what you're saying. This seems really crazy. And the more they kind of went back and forth at each other, the more visibility of Mantavica. So before this whole thing happened, we had thought, okay, if we can do a soft launch and get maybe 10 families in here using our software, that would be awesome. That way we can just iterate and learn from this small group, keep improving our software. And I don't remember the exact. We had a lot of families sign up and give us a deposit, which is wild because our software wasn't live at the time. We hadn't even submitted to the Apple App Store. We had no way to sign up and actually create an account on our website. The only thing you could really do is if you went through sort of an interest questionnaire, at the end of that questionnaire, there is a little link that allowed you to put down

a 500 deposit for your first month in P&B. And people managed to find that and gave us

so many deposit that we said, okay, I guess, I guess this is it. We've basically exceeded our

revenue targets for our first year, so we'd better launch now and get the software into people's

hands. Welcome to the Peele. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital, a venture capital

firm for founders who can't read you. Today's guest is Niels Hoven, founder of Mantava,

building software that helps ambitious kids learn faster. We talk about the power of

hater marketing and why most of us are taught to read the wrong way.

This mystique that has been built up around reading to make people think that it's really hard, but it's actually not rocket science.

How education policy can hold back high achieving kids.

We want everyone to have the same abilities and learn at the same pace, and fundamentally that that's just not true.

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