Max Ventilla

Max Ventilla is a serial entrepreneur turned investor best known for founding AltSchool, the Silicon Valley education startup. He earned a bachelor's degree in math and physics and an MBA from Yale's School of Management (Class of 2006, a "Silver Scholar"), having launched and sold an enterprise software startup while still an undergraduate. Before his venture career he worked designing databases for the World Bank and held roles in monetization strategy at Google and at Trader Classified Media.

In 2007 he co-founded Aardvark, a social question-answering service that used people's existing social and professional networks to answer subjective questions. Aardvark raised roughly $7.5M (a round led by August Capital) and was acquired by Google around 2010–2011. At Google, Ventilla became a founding member of the Google+ team and rose to Head of Cross-Google Personalization.

He left Google in April 2013 to found AltSchool, a network of "lab schools" in San Francisco and New York paired with a technology platform for personalized, student-centered learning. AltSchool raised about $200M from investors including Mark Zuckerberg's CZI, Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz. In 2019 the company rebranded as Altitude Learning and Ventilla stepped back from day-to-day leadership (becoming chairman); the schools' operations were handed to Higher Ground Education, and the software business was ultimately sold to Higher Ground in 2021.

Since October 2022, Ventilla has been a General Partner at Offline Ventures — an early-stage fund and product studio founded in 2020 by Brit Morin and Dave Morin (with Apple as an anchor investor and reportedly $250M+ in AUM). There he leads the studio side (Offline Studio / "Alpha Studio") as Head of Studio & Product Strategy, a model designed to spin up many new ventures per year from pre-concept through post-alpha.

• Stage: Seed and pre-seed, including company-creation inside a studio model — "start-ups should start differently," removing early obstacles via shared resources and rigorous product-market-fit validation before scaling.
• Studio approach: Offline Studio aims to start 50+ projects a year, advancing only those that hit strong performance metrics through prototype and go-to-market phases, often with corporate co-investment partners.
• Sectors: Consumer products and platforms, AI/product-led software, education, and marketplaces — reflecting both his operating history and his angel portfolio.
• Personal angel pattern: Backs early consumer/tech founders, frequently alongside top-tier investors (Sequoia, Benchmark, Felicis, Max Levchin, Dave McClure), writing into seed and early Series A rounds.