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Founder

Paul Takisaki, founder of MeritPlaybook

Paul Takisaki

AI research methodology applied to scholarship discovery

I didn’t come from financial aid. I came from AI research. I built Ask Three AI, a tool that runs the same question across several AI models at once to cut the hallucinations a single model makes on its own. When my own family started the college search, I pointed that same methodology at scholarship discovery, spent weeks cross-referencing institutional merit policies at our target schools, and realized every family needs this. My background is 20 years at Verizon. I started at a mall kiosk, got promoted twelve times, and ran teams that generated over $1B in revenue. I studied at Bellevue University and completed the Harvard Program on Negotiations. I’m not a certified financial planner. I’m not a financial aid officer. I’m the guy who points disciplined AI research at a category that’s still running on Google searches and PDF spreadsheets. That’s the whole credential.

How Ask Three AI led to MeritPlaybook

I built Ask Three AI because any single AI model makes things up. Different models make different mistakes. Run the same question through several at once and the disagreements show you exactly where to verify and where to trust. That’s the whole methodology. Use the disagreements as signal. Surface the contradictions, resolve them against a real source, and keep the answer that survives the cross-check.

I built that tool because I was tired of single-model AI being treated like a search engine instead of a research instrument. MeritPlaybook runs on the same foundation, but the engine behind it is a lot more robust than the public Ask Three AI tool. It runs multiple research passes against current school policies, scholarship requirements, deadlines, stacking rules, and renewal conditions, then grounds each finding in the school’s own published aid pages whenever it can. When a rule is clear, the playbook tells you what to do. When a rule is unclear, it labels it and gives you the exact question to ask the financial aid office. The methodology came first. MeritPlaybook is what happened when I pointed it at a category that badly needed it, and hardened it for this specific problem.

The scholarship research problem

The whole category runs on one assumption, that the hard part for families is finding scholarships. It isn’t. The hard part is figuring out which scholarships are actually worth pursuing, in what order, against which target schools, and whether each one will displace the institutional aid your student already qualifies for. A 1.5 million-scholarship database doesn’t help with that. The 200 generic awards a free matcher spits out don’t help with that. Twenty browser tabs and a Google Doc don’t either.

I saw this firsthand with my own family. Every aid office publishes its policies in PDFs that contradict each other from school to school. Every database lists the same low-yield awards in roughly the same order. Every search result is either a thinly-rewritten listicle or a database wrapper. Nobody reconciles the contradictions for one specific student facing one specific list of schools. So I reconciled them myself. Spent weeks cross-referencing institutional merit policies, built a stacking analysis no scholarship database produces, and handed it to my own family before I ever thought about charging for it. That document is what became MeritPlaybook.

Background

I spent 20 years at Verizon. I started at a mall kiosk, got promoted twelve times, and led teams of more than 1,000 people running an organization that generated over $1B in revenue across my tenure. I left through a Voluntary Separation Program to build AI products full-time.

I studied at Bellevue University. I completed the Harvard Program on Negotiations. Today I run Takisaki Strategy alongside MeritPlaybook and write about AI research methodology at paultakisaki.com.

What I don’t claim

The honest version of the credibility story matters more than the marketing version. I’m an AI research specialist who applied a disciplined multi-system verification methodology to a category that’s still running on Google searches and PDF spreadsheets. That’s a real credential and a real differentiator.

I’m not a certified financial planner. I’m not a financial aid officer. I don’t predict scholarship awards, I don’t guarantee outcomes, and I don’t claim to know more about your school’s institutional aid policy than that school’s financial aid office does. Every playbook is checked against current school policies, scholarship requirements, and published aid rules before it ships. Every recommendation links back to the school’s own published policy pages so you can verify it yourself. When a rule is unclear, the playbook labels it instead of pretending it’s certain. The product is the playbook, not my resume.

MeritPlaybook applies the same multi-system research methodology to your student’s schools, profile, and final bill, delivered under 5 minutes. See a real sample playbook or start your own.