[00:00:15] Ghazenfer:
Hello and welcome to the Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. Today we have a guest, Andrew Sachs, a two-time successful entrepreneur who decided to take on education. After leading in engineering and retiring from the tech world, Andrew turned his passion towards making the world a better place for others. 

With three wonderful kids and a teacher for a wife, he saw firsthand how schools and universities weren’t preparing young people with technical, soft, leadership skills needed to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world. Having benefited from excellent teachers himself and from continuous learning and high-performing global project teams throughout his career, Andrew is now dedicated to providing that same opportunity to youth everywhere, regardless of income or birthplace. 

In 2019, Andrew founded Noble Navigators, which has gone from six youth leaders to thousands across 165 countries in 2025. That’s amazing. Thanks, Andrew, for being on the show today.

[00:01:23] Andrew:
Thank you, Ghazenfer, and thank you so much for having me. I also want to say thank you, for back in 2019, right before we started. Before I really started Noble, I had a chance to meet you at a local entrepreneurship conference. 

And, as many entrepreneurs know, when you start out, everyone around you, if you have a really good idea everyone around you thinks you’re insane. But when I met you, you lit up and asked a bunch of really great questions and gave me the confidence and the validation that I was onto something great. So thank you so much for that validation, and thank you for having me today.

[00:02:03] Ghazenfer:
No, that’s great. And that’s entrepreneurship being persistent, not giving up. You will have many nos, but the yeses and motivations are the ones that push you ahead. So now talk about, can you share a little bit more about your background and what turned your attention to education?

[00:02:24] Andrew:
Absolutely. Entrepreneurship, as you probably know, starts way earlier than the date. I asked my wife, “When did I start Noble?” and she said 30 years ago. But it actually started even before that. My first business, I was 13 years old. I started repairing motorcycles, and I realized how much money I could make so quickly. I think the technicians were getting paid $25 an hour and I was earning $2 an hour, so that was a big deal. In college, I actually had a business repairing and selling computers, which today would’ve cost $10,000 each. I made a ton of money and I think I really hooked myself on the power of entrepreneurship.

I started with a technology company here in Washington, D.C. TTC. We helped bring high-speed data from 56 kilobits to 40 gig and grew from 100 people to over 2,000. So it was really my first. It wasn’t my startup, I started out as an engineer but it was really a place of great innovation. My second company was actually out of Boston and we did logging and streaming of broadcast video. We were about 80% of the high-value broadcasters. We actually live-streamed the World Cup back in 2014, very early on in over-the-top video streaming. Got purchased by Verizon not exactly an entrepreneurial place to stick around. So I started contemplating, “What do I want to do?”

And I think my three wonderful kids noticed that I needed a job. My daughter sent me this message, and it was basically, “Education’s broken, and why don’t you go fix it?” And she was right. Modern work was teamwork. I saw with her, she’s a top-performing student and she hated teamwork. She hated group projects. That was really a hugely motivating thing for me, and really what got me started on this.

[00:04:39] Ghazenfer:
So for the listeners who may not know, what is Noble Navigators?

[00:04:47] Andrew:
It’s a global social learning network where youth learn social skills- I say it’s a way to take back your kids from TikTok. It’s a global social learning network and youth trade, live learning and leadership. Instead of likes, they collaborate with other youth around the globe, working on meaningful projects, lifting each other up, making each other stronger, and growing and learning at their maximum rate while they’re having fun and making friends.

They work on real projects: coding, web design, design thinking, graphics, digital marketing, AI, whatever problems and skills they want. It’s three times faster, or more, than traditional learning. It’s fun. And it gives them the skills that matter, both the technical skills, the collaboration and innovation skills, as well as global leadership skills. 

As you said, we’ve grown it from six youths back in 2019 to almost 10,000 now across 176 countries- 175 countries. And it’s really just been a fantastic journey to help these youth grow in the skills they want, develop the collaboration, purpose, and explorations they want for their life, while developing the empathetic leaders that our world needs so badly.

[00:06:11] Ghazenfer:
Well, running a tech company, I know how challenging it is. You have a lot of those tech people, very focused and I came from the same background so most of them are introverted. The social skills are the bigger piece that’s missing. Companies do hire people based on skill many times: “Oh, we need the developer, architect…” And the social skills are the ones that are many times the killer of the project or the company. 

So we also learned it the hard way. It is the most important skill in the team. Culture is key. And you cannot have a good culture if your team does not have those skills, whether it’s dealing with customers- Yeah. I’m glad you are addressing that problem. Now you can see why even way back when you were telling me, why I liked that idea at that time and why I love that, still.

[00:07:20] Andrew:
Thank you. I think you obviously run a business that satisfies customers’ needs, solves real problems, and it’s an integration of technology and people skills. You have to understand your customer’s needs, their problems.

You have to develop trust. I like to say empathy is about getting deep data from humans. You need data to make decisions. And what it takes to be successful is a combination of technology and people. So you need both the technical skills and the people skills to do the best job possible.

[00:07:51] Ghazenfer:
From six people to thousands of those students- how did you scale it? How did you grow? And then also talk about, in terms of how are you structured or funded? Is it venture funded? Is it just private founders only?

[00:08:13] Andrew:
Good question. I started out in 2019 with an idea, and I didn’t actually think that it was going to work. I’m from technology. If you actually go look around, you’ll see there are so many people who have tried to fix education and failed tried to teach kids soft skills. 

I went and was looking around from about 2016 to 2019. I did a lot of research and found all these. I’ll call them dead shells of companies. People that tried to teach youth these things. I just had really good timing and a great concept.

So we started, we met in 2019, and I actually had our first class of youth leading and teaching other youth that year. We had 13 youth out of a fantastic set of high schools here in Washington. It was Wootton High School, Churchill High School, and Thomas Jefferson. Great, great kids. And of the 13 kids, six of them became leaders. And not only did they like being leaders, they were incredible leaders and teachers of other youth. 

That was my first “aha” this is something that can work. But you still think, there’s a lot between six and six million. 2020 was COVID. It was crazy for everyone. It didn’t matter who you were or what field, just a tough year. One thing that happened was that our program was actually always designed to be hybrid, both in person and online. So when COVID came, all these kids had nothing to do. 

School was shut down. They had all this time on their hands, and they kind of piled into Noble which actually caused us some problems. You can grow too fast. We learned a lot that summer. We ended up with 27 leaders but crashed on not having a sustainable system. Too many students, not enough leaders.

It was 2021 that really got us into a system that could scale. We shifted to an older age group 13 to 30. And to youth that actually wanted to learn online, tried learning online that was coming from schools. Schools did a bad job of online learning. They did it in a hurry while we had been perfecting it for a long time. So ours looked much better. Schools were also pushing back to in-person, and their online learning was bad, so we continued to look great.

We grew to 71 leaders that year. And of all countries, we grew mostly in Ukraine. If you want to thank anyone for Noble, thank Ukrainians. They were the energy, the hardworking ones, the ones who wanted to be global. They powered us ahead.

From 2021 to 2022 we grew almost 5x. That was a crazy tough year. It’s essentially reinventing the company every six months. The process you have to use, you have to create- every problem, you have to create a system, then scale it to the next level. One big problem I ran into was discovering that this notion of that I was so passionate about, servant leadership- building up people was so counter to what these youth had ever experienced in their lives. Their experience of leadership was telling them what to do. That is not what Noble does, and not what the agile world of tomorrow.

That was a big shift for us and, So I refactored our leadership training program to ensure we grew truly empathetic leaders who were there to build up and inspire and develop others.

And then we kept growing. Every year we grow ~3x. This year probably 4x. Building systems, more courses. The job of a CEO is rough when your company is doing badly and rough when it’s doing really well, your job is rough. You get nothing but the tough problems. But this year we’ll probably hit 10,000 youth, and they have a life-changing experience when they’re in Noble.

[00:13:39] Ghazenfer:
Yeah, no, and as it’s growing, those are good problems to have because you’re building processes and learning. We always say when you have customers, when you have users, and that growth is good growth, those problems are good problems.

[00:13:55] Andrew:
Great to be challenged with those.

[00:13:58] Ghazenfer:
For those who don’t know, you used the word “leaders” multiple times in different countries. Who are those leaders? Are those content creators? Administrators? Coaches?

[00:14:15] Andrew:
That’s a great question. You come into Noble and we call it “Learner to Leader to Mentor to Coach.” You come in as a learner, you learn a class, and then you turn around and teach it to someone else. So you immediately become a facilitator. Not everyone is ready for that, so everyone goes at their own speed. But it turns out almost everyone can learn how to lead and facilitate.

We teach them principles of real leadership. They begin to work on projects with other people. They’ll work on teams. They’ll take classes. They’ll be teaching high level class, like a TA in graduate school taking higher-level classes while teaching lower-level ones. They might be leading a team. We had youth in Pakistan, Ukraine, and Bangladesh come together doing a whole series of sessions on green and sustainable topics. Youth came together, said “We want to create this learning environment,” and then organized events and content for that.

So everything from content creation all the way to being a coach. We teach youth how to be effective coaches for other youth. The world is incredibly complicated. Schools aren’t serving our kids well. Media and social media aren’t either. It’s a distracting world with a thousand friends but you’re lonely. So we teach youth how to coach each other in their journey, schoolwork, and life. Everything from learner to coach.

[00:16:24] Ghazenfer:
Cool, cool, cool. Now I have a lot more understanding of the whole process. So obviously you’ve been talking about education and the system being broken. You said youth today aren’t being taught the skills needed for the real world, especially AI and technology. So if you were to redesign a high school curriculum from scratch today, what must-have components would you include?

[00:17:00] Andrew:
Full disclosure, So my wife was a teacher. And if you look at our education system, it was actually designed in 1890. It was designed to create compliant factory workers who could read and write and be the automation. It was designed for the industrial era to help make workers who could then be managed and led. And it has never given up on that. It has never changed from that mission. It’s got an identity around that control.

The first thing I would do is ensure that all participants in high school truly want their youth to participate in the innovation age. That they don’t want their kids to just be the compliant ones following directions. Those two worlds are so different. I’m teaching someone to be the automation versus teaching someone to be the innovator, a leader they’re very incompatible.

I would say you’d need to reduce the number of hours kids spend on normal academics so they could focus part of their day on AI, innovation thinking, and problem-solving in whatever areas they want.

And I wouldn’t even start at high school. I would start earlier. One thing we find is kids enter school and the three-year-old is constantly curious, asking questions all the time, not afraid of making a mistake. That’s how humans learn. But by high school, they’re already not saying anything. They’re already worried about what will happen to their grade. So you need to start way earlier to preserve that natural curiosity and creativity they need in the real world. To have them focus on learning, not grades.

Because if I get a problem wrong and it affects my transcript and I don’t get into my college, I’m not going to take risks or try something new. So you must start earlier than high school. And we see kids go through a transformation of, “Oh my gosh, I can ask a question, I don’t have to be right all the time.” It’s an amazing transformation.

A lot of what we teach is basically therapy from school. Kids are naturally creative and curious. But we beat it out of them. And that curiosity, creativity, and problem solving that’s actually what they need in life.

[00:20:20] Ghazenfer:
Absolutely. And we have seen the same in our company. As well as, I have three kids, so I see that. You’re very right. Early stages they’re curious. Gradually they’re less. The focus is more on the specific outcome. Same in companies if companies measure performance only on certain capabilities or deliverables, the focus becomes just that. People aren’t learning new things.

When we hire engineers or designers anybody they’re technically trained, but the world is changing so fast. You’re hired for something today, everything changes. How do you ensure those are the right people that can quickly pick up new stuff? And how would they do it? It’s a mindset change. You have to push them to be curious. We push that: you must challenge our customers. Sometimes it gets difficult, but if you’re not challenging what the customer brings, you’re just accepting as is.

That’s the feedback I hear when people work offshore. Some will just do what they’re told. Yes, they’re good instruction followers, but that may not be what the customer actually wants. So we teach them. 

And also like looking at the world ahead, where the world is going. How do we train these people to be looking six months, a year, two years, five years ahead so that they are prepared, whether getting them on a path of AI or any other path? So that definitely, totally agree with that. 

So you talked about the danger of tech controlling us instead of the other way around. How do you help young people build a healthy relationship with AI and digital tools? 

‘Cause I also talk about the same thing where we talk about how technology should serve humans, not the other way around. That’s the danger. We’re seeing the tech controlling, and with this AI, that’s a scary time as well.
 

[00:22:56] Andrew:
Great, great, great question. Yeah, no, this is, I think, the pivotal item for humanity right now. We’ve introduced this, as you all know Harari says, right, we’ve introduced this alien to our world. It’s AI. And the question is, is it gonna serve us or are we gonna serve it?

Now some people ask me, “What are we gonna do if AI is controlling us?” And I look at them and I’m like, what do you mean, When? With all of our clickable social media ecosystem, we’re already being manipulated on a constant basis by AI. We just, we don’t, maybe we recognize it, maybe we don’t.

And as a society we’re suffering badly because of that: misinformation, arrangement, kids spending eight hours a day on their devices, of which less than an hour is actually functional. So you’ve got incredible amounts of time that kids and adults are spending on their devices.

What we did in Nobel, it’s a global social learning network. We get you addicted to learning and leadership instead of likes. Instead of gaming, we pull you away. We take you back from TikTok, we pull you away from the media and the social media, and we harvest that eight hours. And instead of eight hours, maybe you spend an hour on your phone that day, but the rest of the time you’re spending learning and leading and having fun and making friends.

And at the same time, you understand how to use AI as a tool for your productivity and not be taken advantage of by that tool. So you recognize what’s happening to you. The eight hours a day that they spend clicking and doom scrolling, it’s 2 cents per click, 40 cents per hour off of your mental health and grip on the truth.

And we transfer that into skill upskilling, and they have fun and make friends. This works. Turns out it works for youth and it also works for adults. It’s a great way to teach durable skills, such as creativity, design thinking, problem solving, leadership, innovation thinking, digital marketing, whatever it is. And at the same time, they’re having fun and making friends. So it makes it a more human world and it makes it a more productive person.

[00:25:22] Ghazenfer:
And how did you integrate AI into education?

[00:25:26] Andrew:
I would say we’ve integrated AI into the courses themselves. So you use it for brainstorming, you use it for coming up with ideas, you use it as part of your team.We talk a little bit about high performing teams, right? 

But AI used properly, this is the greatest cognitive lift humanity has ever had. Imagine having the expertise, all the expertise of the world, all the knowledge, all the information that you might need to go after a problem, imagine having that contextually available to you at all times in a project. That’s amazing.

I think our world is gonna shift from those that know to those that do and solve problems. And what we teach these youth is how to solve problems. And using AI, no longer is syntax a hurdle for coding. Anyone can code up an app. Everyone can be a builder and they don’t have to wait a week or a month. They can have an app running in an hour.

And that power of being able to go from idea to brainstorming to implementation and try something and put it in front of someone, that’s unbelievable. The learning that can happen, the problems you can solve, the systems understanding, the teamwork skills, the deep domain expertise you can gain by actually being able to build and solve real problems that fast. That’s amazing.

So it’s everywhere. Use it as part of your team. It’s another member on your team. Like, you know how to code, maybe I know DSP algorithms better, right? Well, turns out Claude knows how to do apps, different team member.

[00:27:22] Ghazenfer:
Yeah, AI-driven development is changing a lot in our business as well. So we use a lot of AI-driven development.

For proof of concept, when a new customer or new lead comes in, we use amazing Claude. Replicate, Bolt, all these different tools like Broid and create everything from scratch. You could just use, for example, UX Pilot, Visily, or any of those tools. You can quickly create the product.

It used to be hand sketches. You can still do that, but now you give even hand sketches to Claude or any of those tools, they’ll convert it into something that’s amazing. So I mean, I use it all the time for my use, and pretty much everybody does.

So we have a mandate in our company that everybody needs to be 10x productive. So we allocated a fixed amount of money and then they can buy any AI tool for their learning. But we need to see productivity. And we meet once a week, the whole company, and we talk about it. We share what we learn or define those quarterly goals for each company member.

So we realized if we’re not doing it, we’re just gonna be behind, because then people are going in their own paths. And that may be slow, but in the world where things are moving so quickly, we don’t want to be another Blockbuster type of company or Toys R Us or Babies R Us that are closed and behind innovation.

So if innovation is changing, we need to be competing rather than just sitting and watching.

[00:29:00] Andrew:
This is the transistor moment for business. Absolutely. Everything is gonna change.

[00:29:06] Ghazenfer:
Yeah. And that’s the time to get on that rollercoaster. You can either be part of it or you can just watch others doing it. So yeah, the decision is yours.

[00:29:16] Andrew:
Yeah, you got an option. You can go off in the woods, get a cabin in the woods and enjoy the lake. That’s an option. You can retire. 

[00:29:25] Ghazenfer:
Closing in is an option, but obviously not gonna take you anywhere. Not what you would wish later: “I wish I didn’t do it.” So…

[00:29:34] Andrew:
Yeah, I think what I find interesting is there’s actually a remarkable number of people, older people especially, that choose not to jump on AI and choose to retire. And that’s okay.

[00:29:46] Ghazenfer:
And it’s human nature. Change is hard. There are people who don’t want to. I mean, we had somebody quit in our company because after those weekly meetings, a comment came: “Oh, I have to restart learning everything.” Because a lot of people assume, “Okay, I got the degree, now I’m at the job, I’m doing the job.”

But not necessarily, because if you’re not growing yourself, you’re not gonna move up your ladder. So you can stay where you started and may actually go down because the need is gonna change. And AI is changing all careers as well, so you have to catch up. So that’s a necessity. There’s no choice.

[00:30:28] Ghazenfer:
So yeah, one question I forgot to ask earlier. Given all the people before Nobel who tried to change education, and obviously we know the system is broken, there are holes. Why now? And how do you think you can solve it, and why now?

[00:30:53] Andrew:
Great question. My wife told me I’ve been working on it for 30 years. After my company got bought in 2016, I spent about three years looking at why innovation in education had not happened. You could clearly see back a hundred years of people wanting to change what’s happening in education and upskill people, but the system just was not changing.

It took me a little while to realize that it’s a system. It’s alive. It’s like the post office. It’s not gonna change. It’s going to deliver junk learning as time goes on. And the question is, what’s the event that could help you create value around this?

I really looked at all these others that had tried and failed before me, and almost all of them had failed because there was no accompanying technology or event disruption. 

We all know the innovator’s dilemma: you need disruption. People are like, “Well, the internet is disrupted.” No, it didn’t. The internet didn’t really change education at all. Video disrupted? No, it didn’t. You got to replace the videos, but the system was still very powerful.

There were two big disruptions that made it possible to do the Nobel. COVID. COVID hurt on the way in, and on the way out. COVID hurt the existing school system because it basically shut down. It couldn’t deliver any learning. One parent said to me, “I don’t know what this is. The emperor has no clothes. He’s in my living room, and he’s not good looking.”

Suddenly what was happening in the classroom was evident to people in their own homes and they could see that it wasn’t working. Low tide moment. And on the way out, the pushback to come in person they did a bad job with that too. They rejected the power of online learning because their only sustainable point of defense is to be in person. So they rejected it. Montgomery County turned off its online learning. Complete rejection. So it hurt on the way in and it hurt on the way out. 

The second thing, I want to thank Ilya, who was the technical brain behind the LLMs. He was at Google in 2015, one of the founding members of OpenAI. The first industry disrupted by LLMs is education itself. The number one usage of LLMs is doing your homework. Usage drops when college is out, and spikes when college is in. So LLMs, that type of AI, has exposed college and high school as being a sort of rote retrieval of facts, not real innovative problem solving.

COVID did one. LLMs did the other. The system doesn’t even know how to spell innovation, much less execute it. It’s been the same model for 130 years.

[00:34:51] Ghazenfer:
Thank you for these awesome insights. One last question: with AI impacting every career and every profession, including the entry job market for youth out of college by the way, I do have one just graduated from college and out looking for a job how would you advise parents and youth at this time?

[00:35:15] Andrew:
Awesome question. There has never been so much opportunity for youth as there is right now. And I know the job market doesn’t convey that at the moment. The market for new hires has been clobbered recently.

However, the number one users of AI are college students. What they need to do is learn how to use AI not just to do their homework assignments, but to actually improve real business processes.

Youths are so fast with digital tools. So much is changing. Their ability to learn how to build, to code, to solve real problems is 10 times faster than an older person. Take that time weekends, evenings take a light course load. 

Get involved with a startup. Get involved, solve real business problems. Don’t just use AI to do your homework. Get out there and do something real. Have something that you can show and build in public. And this isn’t a three-week project. This is a year-long or two-year-long project.

Second, learn and get into a place where you master those durable skills: leadership, global leadership, collaboration, innovation thinking, design thinking, digital marketing, working on teams, working on global teams. Unbelievable opportunity for youth to get those skills that are hard for older people to learn.

Put that combination together: these kids will still come out of school and earn $100,000 to $150,000. They’re amazing. And it almost doesn’t matter what major you go in with. Every single industry except maybe prison or cops or plumbers, almost every other white-collar job will need young people with these AI skills, team skills, and desire to learn and grow fast. The whole world is open to them.

[00:37:53] Ghazenfer:
Thank you. So we have been talking to Andrew, who has shared such inspirational insights with us today. Andrew, where can people learn more about you and your work with Nobel Navigators?

[00:38:07] Andrew:
nobelnavigators.com. That’s our website. You can find us on Instagram at Nobel Community, and LinkedIn. You’ll find all the testimonies from our students from all over the world. We’re in 175 countries, amazing youth growing from learner to leader to coach.

Take back your kids from TikTok. This is an incredible time we’re in with AI. We can help these youth upskill and become incredibly powerful contributors at work, and also get the people skills that help them have a great and successful life as well.

[00:38:51] Ghazenfer:
Cool. Cool, cool. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. 

We do this in two ways. First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations. And second, by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs, and product owners to create innovative software products from SaaS platforms to web and mobile apps. A big part of our focus is healthcare, where we work with health tech companies to build secure and HIPAA-compliant products. 

If you would like to learn more about us or work with us, head over to technologyrivers.com and tell us more about your project. If you want to learn more about this podcast, head to ghazenfer.com, my first name.com, and you’ll find more information about the podcast and other information.

Alright, Andrew, thank you so much.

[00:39:51] Andrew:
Thank you, and thank you again for that validation. Thanks for the time today, and thanks everyone. For the listeners, I think we have a great future ahead of us. We just have to use the technology and not let the technology control us.

[00:40:04] Ghazenfer:
Thank you.