Benjamin Somers

Ben is the founder of Recess, a company built on a simple thesis: delete school. Not education, but school. Kids learn best when they're immersed in the world, not sealed off from it in age-sorted rooms. His conviction comes from years in the trenches. At Synthesis, the startup spun out of Elon Musk's Ad Astra School, Ben ran growth (taking revenue from under $100k to over $5m in a year) and later led core product. He regularly TA'd for Josh Dahn, Elon's co-founder for Ad Astra. Working directly with kids, he developed core insights into what actually drives retention and motivation in young learners, insights that became the foundation for Recess. Recess has served thousands of homeschool families with consumer-grade product metrics and grown 2-3x YoY for three years running. This year, their new AI-powered product has moved a handful of kids from the 30th percentile in math and reading to the 90th. It's still in closed beta, but the early results speak for themselves. Before education and alongside his brother, Ben built and scaled a YC-backed infrastructure monitoring company to $7m ARR (still running today, serving major oil companies worldwide) and studied Machine Learning at Northwestern. He started his first "company" building raiding and trading guilds in World of Warcraft, which, arguably, taught him more about motivating people than anything since.