Four sizes, four bets. Each one buys you a specific answer, and each one comes with the number that tells you to stop.
The one line
You said you can't stand in front of a room full of practitioners and be believed. That's the whole problem. I can, and I've done it for a decade — the rest of this document is scheduling and price.
You asked for four shapes: a one-off, a month, three months, six months. I've written them as bets rather than packages, because you told me you treat your investors' money as your own. A package asks you to believe. A bet tells you what you're buying an answer to, and what result means you walk away.
The Kunal question
He's the keynote, not the facilitator
You asked whether Kunal could lead this. My honest read: the word for him is prophetic, and that's a compliment. But prophecy is a stage act. A room of district technologists at two o'clock on day one, half of them stuck on an auth error, does not need a vision of 2030. It needs someone who has run a district PD day, watched it go badly, and knows how to recover the room.
Put Kunal on stage at Demo Day, where visionary is exactly the right register and the audience is primed for it. Keep him out of the build hours. Those two jobs look similar from outside and are almost opposite from inside.
Why this shape
You already made the argument
Software got easy; trust got hard. Outbound is a checkbox, not a strategy. Your market splits into the twenty percent pushing the envelope and the eighty percent who move once a peer has proved the path. And the precedent is sitting in your own network — Chris's tech team days were Google Apps PD, and the whole region flocked to those rooms.
Nobody is running that for vibe coding in schools. Not CUE, not CoSN, not ISTE. That lane is open right now and it closes the moment one of them notices.
You're creating your own league for people to play in.Me, on the call — hence the name
The league framing isn't decoration. It gives you a roster, a season, a demo day, and eventually a student division, which is the vocabulary that makes a district leader say yes to six months of unpaid effort.
The ladder
Four bets
Fees cover design, facilitation, recruiting, and documentation. Direct costs — venue, food, travel, participant stipends, practitioner co-lead honoraria — run separately at cost, estimated against whichever bet you take.
01
Scrimmage
Two days · 5 districts
Five districts, two to three builders each. Everyone arrives with a real bespoke workflow their district actually suffers through. Day one they ship it. Day two we harden it — auth, data layer, privacy review — and deploy on your platform before anyone leaves. I design and lead; a practitioner co-lead from your circle anchors credibility; your engineers attend as support, never as presenters.
The bet
Practitioners will build something real on your platform inside two days, given the right room.
Builders12–15
Lead time6 weeks
Fee$18K
Walk away if
Fewer than three of five districts have something working and deployed by end of day two. That means the format is wrong, not the audience, and you stop having spent $18K instead of $108K.
02
Preseason
One month · 5 districts
The scrimmage plus the three weeks that decide whether anything survives it. Two build clinics, weekly office hours, and a Demo Night on the last Thursday — thirty minutes, cameras on, each district showing what shipped, open to an invited audience.
The bet
What gets built in a room survives contact with an actual school year, and other leaders want to watch.
Sessions2 days + 3
Audience25–40
Fee$30K
Walk away if
Fewer than half the apps are still in use at day thirty, or Demo Night draws under fifteen outside attendees. Either result says the enthusiasm is real but shallow, and a longer season won't fix it.
03
Season OneRecommended
Three months · 8–10 districts
A two-day kickoff retreat, biweekly build clinics, a mid-season film study where districts tear down each other's apps, and a Demo Day in front of an invited room. Every district ships at least two. You also get the asset the shorter bets don't produce: a playbook you own outright — curriculum, facilitator guide, recruiting funnel, participant kit.
The bet
A cohort generates design partners and an audience without anyone running a sales motion.
Apps shipped16–20
Demo Day40–60
Fee$22K/mo · $66K
Walk away if
Fewer than two districts opt into module partnership on their own initiative by Demo Day, or the Demo Day room comes in under thirty. That's the signal that the league builds goodwill but not pipeline, and goodwill you can buy cheaper.
04
Franchise
Six months · two cohorts + students
Two overlapping cohorts, with Season One alumni returning as co-leads for Season Two. That's the mechanism that permanently solves your original problem: a bench of practitioners who can hold the room without you or me in it. Six months is also where your idea from Matt fits — a student division, a bake-off of the top five student-designed tools, judged and then actually used in classrooms.
The bet
The league runs without me, and the student story travels outside edtech.
Districts16–20
Fee$18K/mo · $108K
Prepaid$96K
Walk away if
Fewer than three Season One alumni will co-lead Season Two without being paid to. If nobody wants to run it, you've bought an event series, not a league, and event series die when you stop funding them.
These fees are my opening numbers, not a rate card. If the shape is right and the number isn't, say so — I'd rather run the right season at the wrong price than the wrong season at the right one.
Cold math
What Season One costs per answer
Targets, not projections. I'd rather write down numbers you can hold me to than describe a vibe.
Districts on the roster8–10
Builders trained and shipping20–28
Apps live on your platform16–20
Leaders in the Demo Day room40–60
Districts converting to module partnership2–3
Cost per design partner, at $66K$22K–33K
One fully loaded rep working the phones costs more than the whole season, converts on a longer clock, and leaves nothing behind when they quit. This leaves a playbook, twenty deployed apps, and sixty people who have watched their peers build on your platform.
Boundaries
What I won't do
—
I won't sell your platform inside the room. Nobody is asked to buy anything during a season; access is free for the cohort and commercial conversations happen after, initiated by them, with me absent.
—
I won't recruit my county's twenty-eight districts into cohort one. It seats from your NorCal contacts, your Peninsula district, Matt's network, and my own roster.
—
I won't promise procurement outcomes. I'll put targets in writing and let you kill the engagement against them, which is worth more than a promise.
—
I won't run it thin. If we can't seat four committed districts four weeks out, we move the date rather than fill chairs.
Terms
The wall around my day job
I run AI strategy for a county office serving twenty-eight districts. That's exactly why this is worth something to you, and exactly why it needs papering.
Contracted through BlackSage Media, on personal time, with no county resources, lists, brand, or hours involved.
Permanent recusal from any county evaluation, recommendation, or procurement touching your platform.
Local districts join only through their own initiative, with written disclosure on both sides.
Disclosed to my supervisor under outside employment policy before I sign anything.
A cohort run by someone with an undisclosed vendor relationship is worthless to you within a year. One that's papered correctly is worth something for a decade.
Your move
What I need, and by when
A bet. My recommendation is Season One; your instinct on the call was the scrimmage, and the scrimmage is a genuinely good place to start.
Sandbox access and synthetic student data, two weeks before day one, so the curriculum runs against the real thing.
One engineer in the room both days — answering questions, not presenting. Highest-leverage thing you contribute.
Two introductions: your NorCal districts, and Matt.
Six weeks from a yes puts a scrimmage in early October, before districts disappear into the fall. Seven weeks puts it after, and the room gets materially harder to fill.
Cleanest path: run the scrimmage standalone, decide three weeks later whether to roll into Season One with the scrimmage fee credited. You risk $18K plus costs to learn whether the format works. I risk having to be good in front of a room, which is the part I want.
Tell me which one and I'll come back inside a week with the session design, the recruiting list, and a real cost estimate.
One more thing
Seven questions, three minutes
Before you answer any of this in prose, I built you a short companion — seven questions about what you actually want out of a room like this, including a blunt one about the numbers above.