Amir Nathoo and the education that happened after school

The computer was supposed to be for games. Amir Nathoo’s parents bought him a BBC Micro when he was five, and he began teaching himself to program. There is a pleasing complication here for anyone trying to draw a tidy line between children playing and children preparing for the future. For Nathoo, the two activities shared a keyboard. Decades later, he would build a company around the possibility that a child’s enthusiasm deserves a longer hearing.

Outschool, which he co-founded in 2015, made room for classes that could look peculiar on a school timetable: critical thinking through Dungeons & Dragons, science through farts, architecture through Minecraft. The joke in the course title was an invitation. Behind it sat a serious proposition about attention: children might work harder at something they had helped choose.

By September 2026, Nathoo occupied a different seat. Outschool had appointed Brian Co as CEO, identifying its founding leader as a co-founder and board member. An eleven-year stretch of building and leading had become something else. To understand what he was handing over, it helps to return to the child at the computer, before anyone thought to call his hobby an educational strategy.

The family business, and the family classroom

Nathoo grew up outside London. His father had Indian roots and grew up in Kenya; his mother came from Czechoslovakia. Both had studied physics. Their household contained scientific training, migration, and the experience of starting again. His father ran a hi-fi shop before returning to teaching. His mother also taught mathematics.

In an interview, Nathoo recalled the family losing its home after his father’s business failed during Britain’s early-1990s recession. They spent time in shared hostels and state housing. One memory was of his father sitting at a table, retraining as a teacher. Formal qualifications had a practical use in this family: they offered a way back to earning a living.

His parents kept investing in his learning through those unsettled years. That detail complicates any easy account of a founder rebelling against school. Education mattered intensely at home. The question was how widely to define it, and whether a child’s own interests should count among its organizing principles.

“Being bored is your own fault.”

A piece of his father’s advice, remembered by Nathoo

In a personal remembrance, he collected the advice his father had given him: begin the first sentence, keep going despite fear, look more closely at the details. These were portable instructions, useful well beyond an examination room. The line about boredom has particular bite. A child waiting to be entertained might consider it unfair; an adult trying to build an education marketplace could almost use it as a product brief.

A programmer learns to leave the timetable

At St John’s College, Cambridge, Nathoo began in mathematics and switched to engineering. He graduated in 2002 with an MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences. He also rowed, learned to fly with the University Air Squadron, and competed in ballroom dancing. The future software founder had allowed himself a fairly broad extracurricular syllabus.

He met his future wife, Kirsty, through an engineering partnership: the pair won a competition to produce compressed images within a file-size constraint. Romance occasionally benefits from a deadline. He later remembered the change from mathematical proof to practical engineering as a lesson in using a different kind of thinking for a different kind of problem.

IBM came next. In software support, he worked on urgent bugs in live systems, sometimes delivering fixes late at night. He has described enjoying the combination of engineering and direct customer problems. There was a short distance between a technical decision and somebody needing it to work. For an aspiring entrepreneur, that is a useful education in consequences.

He eventually left with colleague James Brady and teamed up with Patrick Buckley. Y Combinator brought the team to Silicon Valley in early 2008. In Nathoo’s recollection, an investment conversation lasting about twenty minutes produced a $20,000 cheque. The contrast with fundraising in London was memorable. A brief visit began to acquire the gravitational pull of a possible home.

He and Kirsty moved to San Francisco in 2009, initially imagining a stay of one or two years. In a later conversation, he traced the decision partly to a California holiday and their appetite for an adventure. The temporary move became a family life. Some plans fail because nobody wants them to end.

Before the classroom, the payroll

The early business changed direction. WebMynd gave way to Trigger.io, a platform that let developers build mobile applications with JavaScript. Nathoo has been candid about that period: the founders were learning which problems they understood closely enough to solve. Tools for developers brought them nearer to needs they had experienced themselves.

A 2013 deal took the team to Square. Nathoo led the creation of Square Payroll, shifting from tools used by programmers to a product for employers. The common thread was practical software, tested against what customers actually needed. These were different markets, with different buyers and different reasons for trusting a young product.

When he left Square, he resisted simply manufacturing another startup because starting companies was what he now did. He described wanting a project that customers and his own interest would pull into existence. He was also thinking about having children. Education became a way to connect a future family with the work consuming his days.

That background helps explain the shape of Outschool. Its founders included Nick Grandy, an early Airbnb engineer, and Mikhail Seregine, who had worked on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Google Consumer Surveys. They knew software and marketplaces. Their educational proposition depended on giving independent teachers room to offer something families would choose.

What a Minecraft lesson could carry

Outschool’s format brought a teacher and a small group together over live video. Families could select individual classes, including academic subjects and interests that might never attract enough local demand to fill a neighborhood classroom. Geography loosened its grip on the catalog. A niche interest could find company somewhere else.

In a conversation with education writer Frederick Hess, Nathoo pointed to online group guitar lessons as something he had not expected to work. Teachers and learners had adapted the format. He also stressed curiosity and willingness to learn socially. A screen supplied the connection; a class still needed people who wanted to use it together.

The scale changed abruptly during the school closures of 2020. The operational questions became immediate: keep the platform available, bring more teachers aboard, and keep financial assistance available to families. In a 2021 conversation, Nathoo recalled a weekend dominated by those problems. A long-term theory about learning had become a daily responsibility to households waiting for a class.

By 2021, annual class sales reached $130 million, compared with $7 million in 2019. An October funding round valued Outschool at $3 billion. Those are company figures, rather than a measure of Nathoo’s personal wealth or a verdict on any child’s education. They show how quickly a once-unusual format had entered ordinary family spending.

Growth did not settle the argument about education. Nathoo’s more interesting claim concerns uncertainty. In a 2025 discussion about self-directed learning, he argued that adults should be humbler about predicting the knowledge children will need twenty years ahead. Loving the process of learning, and trusting one’s ability to learn again, becomes valuable when the destination keeps moving.

Even the boss’s title was up for revision

He applied some of that suspicion of inherited arrangements to his own company. In a 2025 essay, he explained Outschool’s decision to use a smaller set of management titles, including Head and Lead or Manager. Compensation and progression had a separate framework. He called his own role Head of Outschool.

The practical argument was that elaborate titles can make people mistake seniority for the quality of an idea. His preference was to let colleagues contribute without first measuring the distance between their place and somebody else’s in the hierarchy. Whether around a classroom table or in a company meeting, he wanted more people to feel entitled to participate.

His public work also extends to Tech for Palestine, where he serves on the board. A Harvard conference biography described his support for remote-learning initiatives for Palestinian students affected by conflict. The connection to education access is explicit. His public identity reaches beyond the business he spent eleven years leading.

Leaving the chair, keeping the question

On February 6, 2026, Nathoo announced he was stepping back from leadership. COO Xueyan Wang and CTO Andy Chiu would co-lead during the search for the next CEO. He described taking a break, supporting the handover, and continuing to use Outschool for his own children.

The company’s next phase included stronger memberships, asynchronous experiences, and AI-assisted personalization. By September, Co’s appointment completed the search. Nathoo remained connected through the board. A founder’s departure from daily leadership can make a clean headline; an institution usually changes hands through a succession of less theatrical decisions.

His own account of education uses a transport analogy. Schools connect major hubs like railways; children also need routes that begin and end somewhere else. It is a generous way of describing the gap he wants to fill. The child at the keyboard had somewhere he wanted to go. Nathoo’s enduring question is how many more children could get a route of their own.