With the rapid rise of AI, our world is evolving faster than ever, and no one, parents and teens included, know how to answer the all important question: What does it actually mean to operate in an AI-first world?
These two questions plagued Ivy Xu’s[CEO] mind, and five years later, she found the answer…
In 2020, Ivy Xu watched her 15-year-old sister Jane struggle with the same problem she'd faced years earlier. Jane was ambitious and wanted to shape her own future, but coming from an Asian family, she often felt pressured to pursue her parent’s acceptable career options. They were to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant.
None of these options truly spoke to Jane. The only thing that she really loved was art, but the "starving artist" narrative had stressed her out. She was worried that her passion wasn't a viable career path for the future.
Fortunately for Jane, Ivy had spent the past decade forging a unique perspective on the issues of the modern education system. She'd seen how the world was changing, how many jobs that existed ten years ago were gone, and how many jobs that will exist in the future didn't exist yet. Ivy found that deep down, the core problem wasn't just Jane's confusion and lack of motivation about summer programs; it was a systemic problem.
More and more, teenagers feel like they have no control over their lives, only being exposed to outdated career options in school and not having a clue about what the real world looks like. Jane, and millions of other high schoolers, were learning about their future careers from textbooks instead of actually doing real work, tackling real problems, and building real-world skills.
And that's exactly why Ivy created what would eventually become Prequel. Starting with the simple goal of helping students make their first few dollars online, Ivy discovered that when teenagers are given highly ambitious goals and the structure to achieve them, they stop making excuses and start making things happen.
What began as a way to help a single confused teenager discover her passions became a program that has reached thousands of students across the world. Ivy proved that the solution to the epidemic of teenage confusion around the future wasn't better guidance counselling or pricey private education, but instead was exposing students to what's possible when you stop limiting them to predetermined, formulaic career paths.
The Five Core Lessons
In my conversation with Ivy, I learned so much about her journey and how she brought Prequel to life, from the first cohort of teenagers who built tiny businesses, to how she expanded her curriculum across the globe. During our discussion, there were five key points she had mentioned that stuck out to me, advice she has carried with her throughout the last half-decade of building Prequel.
1. You Can't Know Your Limit Until You Try 100%
One of Ivy's deepest core beliefs is that:
"Because most people never try 100% during their entire life, they'll never come close to knowing what their 100% looks like."
This insight came from watching her own friends during college applications. She noticed a pattern where students would decide they didn't want to apply to Ivy League schools, not because they weren't interested or passionate about getting in, but because they were protecting themselves from potential rejection.
Parents: Have you ever noticed your child doubt their ability?
Students: Ever had an idea that the people around you shut down?
"If you don't even apply, then they can always be like, 'Oh, maybe, had I applied to Harvard or Yale, or MIT, I would have gotten in,'" Ivy found. This self-protective mechanism allows students to maintain the illusion of capability without testing it. Ivy saw this as a form of perfectionism where students preserve their ego by never risking failure, but they also never discover what they're actually capable of achieving. It's the classic "I didn't really try" excuse that keeps people from ever finding their true limits.
Even worse, the educational system mirrors this problem by setting artificially low benchmarks that give students a false sense of their abilities. "In normal school, you're telling kids to reach whatever standard is at that school, which is usually not very high, to get 100% and they feel like their limit is so much further than getting 100% in school and doing whatever projects that they're doing in school," Ivy finds.
When Ivy returned from traveling the world and working in Silicon Valley, she was shocked to see that school standards hadn't changed since she was a student. Teenagers were still filling out worksheets and doing tedious busy-work while emerging AI tools and alternative education methods were already democratizing the ability to gain real-world, industry-forged experiences as a high schooler.
"The sooner you realize what the best in the world looks like, you also ask yourself, what is my limit? How do I push my limits?" Ivy says. This philosophy directly influenced Prequel's evolution from helping students make their first dollar online to setting six-figure revenue goals and using Ivy League admissions as a measuring stick for world-class achievement. Ivy realized that without some concrete measurement of excellence, students would never push themselves to discover their actual potential.
2. Mastery > Exploration & The 80/20 Rule
The education system has increasingly created the myth that real learning requires constant novelty. It always force-feeds students new information without teaching them how to go in-depth and create their own views and opinions. Ivy admits she fell into this trap herself during Prequel's early years.
"To sell the program, people want new content, right? You, as a consumer, want to make sure that you're getting your max value for a year. You want to have different classes and learn 52 different concepts for every week of the year. But that's what we did, and ultimately, none of my students were doing any of these pieces very well,"
This approach mirrors what's wrong with traditional education, with the constant pursuit of breadth over depth limiting what kids know about, quite frankly, anything. Ivy described how in Prequel, they used to teach business negotiation one week, then how to harness AI coding tools the next week, jumping between topics without ever allowing their students to develop real mastery.
This debate on exploration versus mastery also illuminates a fundamental misunderstanding about how we teach teenagers and high school students to develop skills.
"I think you spend 20% of your time exploring, but 80% also developing a skill on understanding how to get good, what good looks like. How do you stand out in this world?" Ivy finds. Most educational systems flip this ratio completely, encouraging students to try and sample everything while ultimately mastering nothing. "There are only so many frameworks that you actually need to know to succeed." Another breakthrough came when she realized that real-world business coaches and successful companies don't constantly introduce new concepts in their internal processes.
Instead, they work in quarterly cycles, revisiting the same fundamental frameworks but applying them to increasingly complex challenges. Ivy asserts that "If you always wait to find exactly the perfect thing to get good at, you're never going to learn how to get good at something."
3. Kids' Communities Determines Their Ceiling
One of the biggest issues in modern education that Ivy aimed to remedy during her time scaling Prequel is that traditional education treats academic achievement as an individual pursuit, a path that teenagers have to traverse without help from their teachers and peers. Kids are taught to hate group work and collaboration in general.
Still, Ivy maintains that a strong peer-to-peer environment might be the most potent factor in helping students excel. She found that Prequel students who did the foundational summer program consistently outperformed those who jumped directly into the more advanced curriculum, not
necessarily because they had gained more maturity or technical skills, but because they'd been part of a community that set high achievement as the normalized standard.
"You are the average of the five people around you who inspire you. This isn't just motivational jargon. When students see peers building real businesses that generate thousands in revenue or getting accepted to top universities, it fundamentally recalibrates their sense of what's achievable.” Ivy finds. Most educational programs ignore the power of creating a community, instead focusing all their energy on individual tutoring and coaching.
"Most people think they're doing very well generally, until they see what everyone else is doing," Ivy finds. Prequel deliberately creates environments where high achievement is the baseline, where students constantly see peers pushing boundaries and reaching new levels. This exposure doesn't just provide encouragement, it expands students' conception of what's possible at their age.
4. AI-First Thinking is About Mindset, Not Tools
As AI-forward education begins to proliferate more and more into high school and higher learning, most discussions focus on how to teach specific tools or techniques. However, Ivy argues that we need to go deeper into how students need to think and operate in tandem with AI. She uses the term "AI-first" instead of "AI skills" because technology changes so rapidly that teaching specific tools becomes obsolete quickly.
"By AI-first, what I mean is, you know that the world now has AI, and you should think of everything that you do with it. How do I leverage all the tools that are out there?" Ivy says. This requires a fundamental shift in how students approach problems, moving from "How do I do this task?" to "How do I orchestrate the right combination of human creativity and AI capability to solve this problem?" Students need to develop what Ivy calls "executional thinking" about how to get things done in an AI-forward world.
However, Ivy also argues that students who rely too heavily on AI for ideation risk developing bland, consensus-driven perspectives that lack the contrarian insights needed for breakthrough thinking. "More and more with AI, you need to come up with your own perspective on how to operate on the outside bounds of common knowledge that everyone knows," Ivy finds. The students who succeed will be those who can use AI to automate their work but can also think beyond what AI can generate.
5. Virtual Learning > In-Person Learning
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive experiment in virtual education, with all levels of education shoved into the digital realm without much choice. As such, most educational institutions concluded that virtual education was inferior to in-person learning. Yet Ivy reached the opposite conclusion for reasons far beyond the convenience or cost savings of virtual-first education.
"I didn't realize until 2020 when I started Prequel, that virtual can be better than in person, because you can get speakers from anywhere in the world. You can meet people similar to you that might not be within your community," Ivy says.
Virtual environments can democratize access to experts and a new world of peers in ways that physical schools can never do. With Prequel, a student in a small town can learn directly from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and collaborate with the most ambitious teenagers from around the world.
More importantly, virtual programs expose students to global standards of excellence rather than local, less intense standards. "Compete not just with your local community, but with what the best in the world looks like, because most people just aren't even aware," Ivy finds. When students only interact with their local peers, they develop an artificially limited sense of what's possible.
Unlike traditional education, real-world working environments run on digital and virtual systems. Virtual-based education is way closer to the real world than the real world is. "Most of you guys are never going to go to an office five days a week anymore to collaborate in a physical breakout room," Ivy finds.
Rather than preparing students for a world that no longer exists, Prequel focuses on teaching the collaboration and communication skills they'll need in their careers.
Prequel’s Legacy
Five years after starting with a handful of teenagers in her first cohort, Ivy has built something that fundamentally challenges how we think about high school achievement. Today's Prequel students aren't just getting into excellent colleges and building top-tier projects; they're out there in the real world redefining what's possible for teenagers to accomplish before they even graduate high school.
The numbers only tell part of the story.
"Prequel students are building mountain bike park businesses that have raised $3.2M and earn $500k annually, securing paid internships at VC-backed startups that have raised $170M, and getting accepted to Ivy League schools, MIT, and Stanford."
They’re conducting research that gets published in Top 10 scientific journals, creating documentaries featured on Fox News Prime Time, and building followings of 60k+ on social media that lead to internships with Stanford and Harvard-educated founders.
But the most significant transformation isn't in the projects themselves; it's in what these achievements represent. Where traditional education forces students to wait until college and beyond to start doing meaningful work, Prequel students are already building, creating, and leading while their peers are still studying for the SAT and completing yet another worksheet.
