The long term plan for Tofugu is to start a (general education) school. Likely starting with K grades. The longer term plan is to help make the world better educated. That is, increase the chance that humanity will both solve the problems we currently face as well as make progress for humanity. One of the limiting factors of human progress is the kind of education someone gets. One thing to note is that education doesn’t stop (or shouldn’t stop) at the end of high school, or college/university. Every single human on this Earth can contribute to the progress of humanity, the world, and how happy we all are in it. I’d like to start by having a large, positive effect on the lives and education of a handful of students. Then, grow that out to as many people as we possibly can.

Long term plans are nearly impossible to accurately predict, but here’s the basic version, subject to change:

• Grow Tofugu / WaniKani. Get better at running a company. Develop a shared culture. This, I think, reduces a lot of the need for “management” as a solution for organization and direction.
• Get WaniKani to the point where we can add a second, higher payment tier. I think that means we’re helping people to read, listen, write, and speak Japanese, and doing one of those categories pretty well. This will increase our profit margin further (not to mention help people out with their Japanese more). School’s going to need some money to get started (though the intention is for it to make a profit as well, once established).
• Get Tofugu (co) to the point where it’s close to running itself, and doing so pretty well.
  • End of 2022: Jaered is basically only doing ‣ and ‣ roles.
  • End of 2023: Jaered is just doing the big picture part of ‣.
• Mid 2023: There’s a handbook for school. Philosophy, structure, principles, etc. This is the starting off point for building the thing. I’ll write about this somewhere else soon. To serve people for the future we’re heading toward, school and education needs to look a lot different (in the US, at least, but in many other places as well).
• Mid-End 2023, Hiring and searching for the right people for school #1. This is teachers and other school staff, but also includes things like a Lead of Literacy, as well as other educational categories that need a bigger picture right away.
• Beginning of 2024: Working on lessons, curriculum, planning for the first class and school year.
• Summer 2024: Run summer classes as training, and testing, of curriculum and lessons.
• Sept 2024: First cohort begins.
• Sept 2025: Add another grade. More if we’re able. This continues indefinitely, year after year.
• With success, add more schools. Without success, iterate and make what we have better. Then add more schools.
• At some point, we’ll need to develop a teacher training program. This likely comes after our principles are battle tested. A lot of school of education programs are kind of a joke. If we can create excellent teachers, we should do that. May mean buying a floundering college, so we can get accreditation. Or getting it the long way.
• Make money. The goal is not to help those who are well off (though that’s how we’ll probably have to start). The goal is to help those without access to incredible education. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make money in schools (at least, assuming you want to pay teachers well, and give everything back to the students). This may look like:
  • Getting money from non profits, and other organizations, and using it to build and fund schools in lower income, or lower performing areas.
  • Packaging and selling our best lessons and learning methods for individual topics. We did it the other way around, but say we had a teacher of Japanese who had the idea for WaniKani and wanted to build it. We could help them to do that (or, when we’re working in HS or university level, students could help create it as a part of their education), and then sell it to the general public, as well as to other schools, and use that money to a) pay that teacher more, and b) get more people an education that they wouldn’t normally have access to.
  • “Seed investments” in student businesses. It doesn’t matter what it is, but I think students should be involved with the creation of something, especially at higher grades. The School can fund this to a certain extent, at least, and own part of that business. If it does well after the student graduates (or while they are there, even), the school gets part of that windfall, and can invest it back into students.
  • Build an investment fund that (hopefully) grows over time, allowing us to do more as it builds up.
  • Donations from the outside, or from graduated students (not a fan of this one, but it probably works to some extent, at least).
• Get schools outside the US. Our goal is to help humanity to make positive progress, not just help the US.
• Expand the world’s view of education, so it’s not just K-12, plus university. Learning is lifelong.
• Become a standard for education around the world. Help and encourage others to do what we’ve done, in their own way. Share what works freely with others. Our goal is to advance how well the world does education, not take over the world of education. Continually push up the standard of “what is a good education.”