Sep 17, 2026 · 48 min · 15 segments
"They don't quit their job cold turkey. That's not what I've observed firsthand." Only twelve companies have ever been worth more than a trillion dollars. Ten of them are American. Eight of those ten…
Aidan McCullenHostI, in my monthly note, tried to share three trends, two thesis, which are kind of predictions of the world, and one tool.
And, um, uh, I try to keep the newsletter really concise, so Aidan, thank you for being so patient and letting me ramble on about each of these points because a lot of these are things that I wish I could have included in the note, but I just don't have the space to do so and had to keep it really concise.
Um, in the tool, I usually feature something that either I've worked with a founder or crossed paths with them somewhere and just found what they do to be really valuable.
He was at Oxford for the longest time, I believe as a philosophy professor, and then also served on the board.
Um, and he has done some fascinating work since he decided to leave and start the startup.
Also somewhat of a fractional founder story, where he had experienced this pain point working in the administration of the university and then said, "Look, I need to build a better tool." So what he started by building initially was just, look, um, the university administrator to student ratio is way off.
Like there's all of this paperwork and reporting that you have to keep up to date with the regulators so that you can stay accredited as a university.
And so Joshua's starting point with Wolf, named after Virginia Woolf, was just let's use technology, including AI, to automate a lot of the work to make it easy for a university to become an accredited institution.
So there are a lot of educational programs out there, like coding boot camps or like architectural programs, or even startup programs like the one that you and I do, um, that very much could and maybe should be accredited.
For example, you and I both have done this, where we teach on campus and, uh, all the students that are in class, of course, receive credits for that class.
And then we literally s- like, let's say, take one block off campus, teach the exact same content, and students who take that class get no credit whatsoever.
So at first he was just building this tool to make it easy for educators and institutions to make it easy to create content that is accredit- acreditable.
And then eventually he started building this to make it available to the student and corporate side as well, where for students, what if you had a lot more flexibility and you could take a couple classes at Oxford, a couple classes at Cambridge, a couple classes at Harvard, a couple classes at MIT, a few more from Berkeley and Stanford, and you DIY that entire thing into a degree.
That makes a lot of sense because you've just taken all these accredited courses.
Universities didn't historically offer you the flexibility to do that, but now we have technology to track your learning across all these different campuses and actually stitch it together into a degree.
Similarly for enterprises, when they need to do employee training, if I need to do AI training, why shouldn't you get credits towards a degree? You can absolutely earn a master's in AI, or you can learn, you can start to earn towards an MBA, um, in business administration, um, as long as you're taking all the right courses along the way.
I think we're seeing this shift where in the past we transitioned from a role of a student to a role of an employee and, like it was a one-way street.
That's not the case anymore because things are changing so quickly, where oftentimes both of those roles coexist in our lives, where we're employees, but we're constantly learning.
I, in my monthly note, tried to share three trends, two thesis, which are kind of predictions of the world, and one tool.
And, um, uh, I try to keep the newsletter really concise, so Aidan, thank you for being so patient and letting me ramble on about each of these points because a lot of these are things that I wish I could have included in the note, but I just don't have the space to do so and had to keep it really concise.
Um, in the tool, I usually feature something that either I've worked with a founder or crossed paths with them somewhere and just found what they do to be really valuable.
He was at Oxford for the longest time, I believe as a philosophy professor, and then also served on the board.
Um, and he has done some fascinating work since he decided to leave and start the startup.
Also somewhat of a fractional founder story, where he had experienced this pain point working in the administration of the university and then said, "Look, I need to build a better tool." So what he started by building initially was just, look, um, the university administrator to student ratio is way off.
Like there's all of this paperwork and reporting that you have to keep up to date with the regulators so that you can stay accredited as a university.
And so Joshua's starting point with Wolf, named after Virginia Woolf, was just let's use technology, including AI, to automate a lot of the work to make it easy for a university to become an accredited institution.
So there are a lot of educational programs out there, like coding boot camps or like architectural programs, or even startup programs like the one that you and I do, um, that very much could and maybe should be accredited.
For example, you and I both have done this, where we teach on campus and, uh, all the students that are in class, of course, receive credits for that class.
And then we literally s- like, let's say, take one block off campus, teach the exact same content, and students who take that class get no credit whatsoever.
So at first he was just building this tool to make it easy for educators and institutions to make it easy to create content that is accredit- acreditable.
And then eventually he started building this to make it available to the student and corporate side as well, where for students, what if you had a lot more flexibility and you could take a couple classes at Oxford, a couple classes at Cambridge, a couple classes at Harvard, a couple classes at MIT, a few more from Berkeley and Stanford, and you DIY that entire thing into a degree.
That makes a lot of sense because you've just taken all these accredited courses.
Universities didn't historically offer you the flexibility to do that, but now we have technology to track your learning across all these different campuses and actually stitch it together into a degree.
Similarly for enterprises, when they need to do employee training, if I need to do AI training, why shouldn't you get credits towards a degree? You can absolutely earn a master's in AI, or you can learn, you can start to earn towards an MBA, um, in business administration, um, as long as you're taking all the right courses along the way.
I think we're seeing this shift where in the past we transitioned from a role of a student to a role of an employee and, like it was a one-way street.
That's not the case anymore because things are changing so quickly, where oftentimes both of those roles coexist in our lives, where we're employees, but we're constantly learning.
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