a16z Podcast - Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Erik Torenberg sits down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to ask what education should look like for a generation growing up with AI.Amjad argues that one of the most valuable things young people bring to society is their willingness to question deeply held assumptions. They discuss how education could create more room for that instinct through project-based learning, intellectual side quests, and giving students the freedom to follow an idea deeply rather than optimizing around grades and credentials.They also explore whether young founders are being pushed to professionalize too early, why Amjad thinks starting a company can sometimes be a form of “premature optimization,” and how curiosity led him from learning chess to experimenting with AI that can conduct machine-learning research.Finally, they discuss trust, judgment, and what it means to develop as a person, not just a builder, including why being contrarian and ambitious still needs to be balanced with the ability to work with other people.Resources:Follow Amjad Masad on X: https://x.com/amasadFollow Gagan Biyani on X: https://x.com/gaganbiyani  Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs. It's to be heretics. You need to learn our way so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen, get married, have kids, and get a house on a car, and live happily ever after. And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them. I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.

The future of companies is going to change. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills can give me in order to achieve what I want to build. One of the core tenants of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. We don't care if you graduate or not. We don't have grades. We don't have tests. the amount of weight to push against should be a lot less.

When you see an 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you, that you're like, I got to spend time with this person, what are they doing that is capturing your interest? The real civilizational missing opportunity is, what if the most valuable thing young people bring to society is their willingness to question what everyone else takes for granted? Today, I sat down with Replit founder and CEO Amjjag Masad and Horowitz and Dundrisen Academy,

who founder and CEO Gagan Viani, to rethink what education should look like in the AI era. We discuss why students need more freedom to follow their curiosity, learn by building, and take intellectual side quests, and why Amjad thinks some young founders may actually be starting companies too soon. We also get into how AI could change the way companies themselves operate, why trust and judgment matter as much as technical skills, and what Amjad looks for when he needs acceptance.

young builders. As we were talking, I remembered this sci-fi story that I read once. It's called The City and the Stars. And it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI. It's now governs all of our lives. It solves all problems, all human problems. There's no wars.

There's no disease. Everyone lives forever. And people spend their time working on like a thousand-year art projects. and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time. But they found this problem where they accumulate so much knowledge and memory becomes harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory and they compress their memory,

sort of like context compression that we do with AI today. They go through all the memories and they compress them. And then they go through a boot camp. to retrain them for their life. So they invented a new way to be born, but you're not fundamentally new person. You're still the same person. You're just editing your memory.

But there's a glitch that happens in this system, in this machine, and there's a new person that is fundamentally born new. And he immediately starts causing problems. In the boot camp, he starts doing weird things, new things, and everyone's like, whoa, that's crazy. You shouldn't be doing it. that, that's not how we do things.

It becomes very disruptive. And then when they go out into this city, he starts asking questions, like, what's out there? What's in the stars? What's outside of city borders? They're like, oh, we don't talk about outside our city borders. Sounds silo a little bit. It's probably dangerous out there.

Yeah, a little bit like silo, a little bit like fallout. Yeah. And I don't want to get into the spoilers too much, but eventually that's what he has so much drive to change things and go discover the star That's why it's called the City in the Stars. He, in the story unfolds in that way, and he finds all sorts of interesting things out there.

And I'm reminded of this because as we're talking about what is college and what is it for? And I think a related question is, what is the utility of young people in society? And I think ultimately the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is to be heretics. And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right?

It tells you you're stupid. We've figured everything out. You need to learn our way and we need to prepare you for the outside world. So you can get a job and be a perfect citizen and go get married, have kids, and get a house on a car of happily ever after. But that world doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real. civilizational missing opportunity

is that person in the city of the SARS. It took a glitch to get someone with a clear mind to be able to question deeply held beliefs. And every one of us, we probably have a blind spot in society. We have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of ideas that don't come out of Silicon Valley because there's a monoculture here. There's a certain way of thinking.

every culture is somehow a monoculture, even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley. And so what do you need from young people? You need them to experiment, you need to encourage them to try impossible things. And every now and then, they're going to have a breakthrough that once we thought was impossible,

and now it's suddenly possible because the technology changed, something changed. So college ultimately should be about that. Let's get these people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, first principle mindsets, and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs. I think that's well said. I mean, imagine if you were 18 today and you were able to design your ideal experience in terms of how much you go to class, to what projects you work on, to what kind of deep study you would engage into what you'd want to study. What are some principles that you would add to that in terms of how you wish, if you'd go to class, to what kind of deep study? What are some principles that you would add to that in terms of how you wish if you could redo 18 to 22, but in 2026?

Yeah. How you'd think about it. Yeah, I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. Yeah. I want to be an environment where there's a lot of different paths. There's a class about something totally, I haven't even thought about it. It's outside my world, right? We're talking about this story with Steve Jobs,

one of the most inspired speeches he gave is the Stanford commencement speech. And he talked about connecting things backwards. So the way Steve Jobs approached college, I think it's the ideal experience of college where he's like he went to read college but he couldn't afford it. So he dropped out, but kept dropping into different classes.

One of them was calligraphy. And in the calligraphy class, he didn't know why he was interested in it. And he just didn't. learned it. Later on, when they were inventing the Mac and inventing user interfaces, they're like, oh, we should have proportionally spaced fonts. We should have certain people should be able to select fonts. And that was a direct kind of callback to his college days learning about fonts and calligraphy and things like that. And so this meandering that I think modern society thinks is

sort of useless, I think it's actually the most useful in college. Like, can you take a class that would change the direction of your life because you discover something totally new and outside of your world. So that's one. I would like to have enough freedom to select the kind of things I want to study. The other thing is if I am engrossed in building something, give me the space and time to do it. One of the things about my college that was really hard is we had attendance. Like they counted attendance. If you didn't attend for like six classes, you're banned. And so I think if I'm going to school, I'm doing all these different things,

I'm meeting interesting people, and then I have an idea, and I'm like, manically working really hard, give me the space to do it. Don't, like, expel me. Don't yuck my own. Yeah, exactly. For sure. Exactly. And finally, the quality of people.

Like, I think if you're around conventionally mind people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded. Yeah. If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those things. deeply help beliefs. I think you will be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I went to UC Berkeley, Gober's, and I did enjoy it a lot. But one of the things that I really enjoyed was that there was actually no expectation of attending class for most situations. And so I had many semesters where I had three jobs in one semester. And often the time that I was expected to be at work overlapped with my class.

So I just looked at my midterm schedule in advance, and I said, okay, these are my two midterms. Hey, boss, can I take those two days off? And otherwise, I was working. But it's like interesting because now I look back and I did enjoy that, but I feel oftentimes I look at that experience and say, well, what if the environment was supportive of this? Like what would happen if? Because honestly, I think today, When I talk to students, it's been 20 years plus, when I talk to students today, they all do this.

This used to be odd of my behavior. And now it's becoming the norm. And the thing that's weird, though, is that it's not encouraged yet. It's still not allowed. And so for me personally, I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of odd. but also might end up being super amazing if it works out. You should be able to use the college resources.

You should be able to use the computer lab, the compute, the bio lab, whatever it is. You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be like actively encouraging you. Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it. So like if you have a crazy idea that's taking off, like the college, you shouldn't be hiding it from your college. They should be coming like, oh my God. Like, this is amazing.

Let's give them more. There's this kid, Eric, I think he's Richard's friends, who has to take, like, investor calls from the bathroom because he's, like, hiding in the school. Yeah, they should be like, you know, coaching him through it or, yeah, enabling it in some way, bringing in a demo day or something, this kind of thing. A couple comments. One is, going back to your thing around, like, calligraphy, you know, people get these interests that will, you know, might seem random and might be random, but in other ways might tie back in other ways. And I think there are actually ways in which the school can sort of develop. Like, it's hard to force natural interest. And so, for example, I was obsessive basketball as a kid.

But I was also the kid who would ask my math teacher, like, what's the point of this? Like, help explain it to me. And if she could have explained it to me, maybe I would have gotten excited about. If she would say, hey, you know, you're obsessed with basketball. You need to understand the salary cap. Or actually, basketball is very analytical now in terms of, like, people are using stats and data to evaluate players. and so if you don't understand this, you're not going to be a good student of the game.

That would have got me really excited. That's what I'm so excited about Alpha School is the way that they take people's natural interests and get them to learn, things that they're going to need to know over time out of that. The thing that's so hard is we all know, like the education sort of academic, the industry of education, if you will,

or the academic canon of education, is completely on board with this. Like, they totally understand, that it would be great if every student could have a customized curriculum. And Joe Liemann of Alpha School talks about this all the time. The problem is that practically it seems impossible. But actually, I think now is the moment when it's completely reverted. And it's not just impossible.

It's actually impossible to imagine why you wouldn't do that. Specifically, like for me, if I think about the academy, right, in the academy, if you are going to learn coding, I don't want you just to take a class on Python. No, like go build something that you're super excited about in Python. You know, use it as a tool to learn the language.

And the great thing about today, you know, with AI, is every single student can go and do that on their own and they don't need a customized syllabus or exercise given to them, they just need the freedom and confidence to say, yes, you're allowed to do this. Yes, absolutely, we're super excited about it. Yeah, I mean, the buzzword for it is like project-based learning.

There shouldn't be a buzzword for it because that should be the standard. The idea that you're learning something and you don't know the utility of it, I think is a very modern invention, it's a very weird thing to have done in society that you would go into a statistic class, and you would never learn that you could use it for basketball, or you could use it for some of your other interests. And so there was this inversion for a long time

of how we learned things. Like you would go and you would learn some of things, and you had no idea what is the utility, how would you apply it in the real world, and for someone like me, and I think for a lot of people that are, more pragmatically minded, I'm not motivated at all by by a pure pursuit of knowledge. Yeah.

I'm motivated by skills. What skills can give me in order to achieve what I want to build and achieve my dreams? And every now and then you find a teacher that is able to tell you that, that's able to motivate your learning by telling you what kind of skills you can acquire because of it. Totally. Well, it's interesting because there is, you know, the critique that we're addressing that you know um we're solving for which is hey there's there's certain schooling's environments where there's very little practical skills gained or you don't train for the real world afterwards even in the claim to but then there's this also this opposite critique and i'm curious if you guys how we balance this which is hey some people are sort of professionalizing way too

soon and not having childhoods or something or not you're not spending time to cultivate intellectually or as a person otherwise there's still kind of this sort of ineffable quality that some people think you get at an experience like college where you're sort of, you know, with meeting new people, getting new friends, you know, sort of going to party. I don't know what would be far as describing exactly. Studying the great books, et cetera. What do you think about sort of the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills of building a company or working at a company?

I think there's this like huge unfair choice that a lot of young people are provided today. It's either go and get a four-year, go to a four-year school where there's a lot of structure around what you should be doing. You're going to have to attend classes. You're going to have to do homework and tests and grades and all of that. And then there's another option, which is you can go and start a startup and someone will give you $50,000 tomorrow to start it. And the problem that I see is, look, I think there's lots of people

who are still going to go to college and love it. You know, and I think there are lots of, that there are young people, even at 16, 17, who should be starting a startup. But I think there's an amazing, massive group of people who, I don't know about you guys, but certainly for me, when I was 17 or 18, I knew I wanted to enter business, but it was so nice to have a couple of years to explore and learn and like, no pressure, you know. And so personally, I think the investor track should be. way underutilize.

Like only a very small number of teenagers should be raising money. Instead, and by the way, grants are great, right? Do something temporary. Make it clear it's temporary. It's fine, but the pressure of making a 10-year commitment at 18 isn't for most people. And then the structure of college

isn't for everybody either. And so for me, this middle ground of having two years where you can really explore and you can do whatever you want without the pressure and Silicon Valley will come to you and provide you with all the information and the at resources that you need

and when you have a cool idea, it's just like more and more and more. That's super exciting to me. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in programming we have this concept of premature optimization. And the idea, I think the saying as premature optimization is the root of all evil. That's how bad.

before you where you sort of start optimizing a program that is not eventually relevant or consequential. And I think a lot of starting startups is premature optimization. I see in a lot of kids now where they're part of a group and a lot of their friends are raising a lot of money and some of them becoming unicorns and it just becomes the motivation is envy and really negative motivation as opposed to positive. And then they pre-commit to an idea they're not. even interested in and they raise money for it and they are kind of pre-optimizing for some path that they haven't really reached yet right and so that's why i always come back this idea of

curiosity like what is actually driving you what is you know once you find that idea that you want to dedicate your life to or dedicate the next 10 years to it's going to have such gravity you're not going to be able to avoid it you know i mean for me you know you know you know, I tried not to start Rapplet, like actively not to start it. But again, kind of exploded into a startup on its own, right? And that's the feeling you should get. It's almost like, I guess I have to do it, right? Because it's like there's so much momentum behind it.

And I think there's, I think a predatory thing that happens right now where I've heard that VCs go to Sanford students and they give them like a million dollars, not even 50K. 50K is like. a million dollars pre-idea and it's like the moment you start your idea you know you already have a cap table I think that's sort of like the music industry um and you like you know con you talked a lot about this where it's like how predatory it is where you you find a young artist and you kind of lock them into a contract and they don't even understand that contract like luckily i think in silicon

valley we have the safes yeah which are you know great contribution by by by ysci and paul graham but the, but it's still somewhat, you know, somewhat predatory because you're taking this young person, you're pre-committing them to something they shouldn't have to admit it. Yeah. It's really interesting because you're an interesting person to bring on this podcast in the academy more broadly because you're both an entrepreneur and a builder and a hacker

and a tinkerer and very pragmatic, but you're also an intellectual. You also, you know, very curious, you know, why they read across, you know, history and economics and culture and politics, and you know, you spend a lot of time on memes, like, you know, like you're, uh, you sort of, um, pursue your interest there. So going back to this critique, you're neither sort of divorced from the, you know, economic real world, but you're neither, you're neither that nor a automaton,

you know, like there are some people who are so career focused that really that's just like the only thing they think about is how to make more money or, or how to make this thing successful. And so I think to your point, Goggin, sometimes people are funneled into these, either of these paths. And I'm curious how you've thought about, is that something that you've always been just naturally or how can people both be very pragmatic in their career, as young people,

and yet also make time or make space or make interest for following their intellectual curiosity, even if it might seem random or, you know, alien from that. Yeah. I think that I sort of tend to oscillate between having an edge to build something and having an itch to like read a lot and explore a lot and see what's out there, what's interesting.

And they feed on each other. It's just sort of a recursive process where I accumulate enough knowledge and ideas from all the things I've explored that I really want to go build something with it now, right? And so like, you know, for example, recently I got really into chess, which is like very late in life to get into chest. Like usually you get into chest when you're six years old. And my kid actually, six years old, is getting into chess pretty soon,

it's gonna be beating me. But I didn't know why I was interested in, I got interested in it. And then I started writing programs to like solve chess, and then started training models. And I was like, why LLM's like, chat-tipti actually sucks at chess. Oh, really?

Yeah, and I was like, well, you know, where the Arc AGI scores getting up there, you know, these models are, you know, almost AGI, but why are they bad at chess? They hallucinate moves and all of that. So I went into training and all I'm to play chess. And I spent a lot of time, I've never trained a model before that. I spent a lot of time kind of exploring how to train models.

And I realized, you know, some people are now called RSI or cursive improvement. So sort of a buzzword for AI being able to do ML. I realized that AI is actually now capable of doing ML. So the moment we were in like 2020, before when a repleta agent came out, before Vibe coding as a term was coined, suddenly agents were capable of, like, coding, right? And in coding fundamentally changed since then.

I think we're at a similar moment when it comes to machine learning. I think machine learning, you know, you could call it vibe research, you could call it auto research. I think it has Carpathie's term. But I spent a lot of time in that world. and then now, like, I'm working on something on Rappler

to bring that to the world, like where anyone can become a machine learning researcher or like any business owner who has data can like find a model to kind of solve a certain problem. And so when I started playing chess, like what are the hops you need to make to understand that, oh, that's going to lead me to build a new business line for Rapplet? It's just impossible, but I just followed something

that I was interested in. And it kind of resulted in something. Invariably, it does, at least for me. But even memes and culture, I get interested in some random subculture in the internet. And I learned something about the world. I learned something about society. I learned something about markets. I learned something about where the world is headed.

And I have alpha. You have an itch and you listen to the itch. And sometimes the itches, build something to the is learn something. and a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they learn over time to ignore in favor of going through these hoops. And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to listen to itch.

Is it helpful to? I mean, not more than people do currently. Right. I think general, it's like in order to lead, it's also helpful to know how to follow. Right. But I think people spend their entire high school and often college just learning how to follow.

Just learning how to, you know, someone says something. you do it. And I think it would be, yeah. My belief is that the future of companies is going to change. Like I think, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms of how companies work. If you remember, Holocracy. Holocracy, Medium did that.

GitHub did the, like, no managers. They all kind of blew up in, like, spectacular ways. But I think it was a technology problem. Like, I think now, like, you can have agents kind of function as the glue within these organizations and, like, have the bureaucracy be this invisible thing that's happening by machines in the background. And then people have true autonomy to work on the things that they find, like, most interesting. And the AI can sort of judge your impact. I don't have fully formed thoughts about this, but I see it in our company where I've changed how I run the company.

And we call this idea of, like, a self-driving company eventually. like the company will like run itself. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny because like I genuinely don't have an opinion about where it's going to go, but I know it's going to change. Yeah. Right. I know that that everything we're doing now is just feels so different.

Yeah. And in starting the academy, I've been spending all this time. You know, I've built the pitch deck and replet. Thank you. And I've, you know, been using Claude and Chachukit. Like, I'm using all of these services as a way to speed up my work. and imagining how that changes an entire organization. And I guess the thing that I know,

the thing I feel very certain about is it's all going to change. It's going to change a lot faster than you think. And if you're not like natively understanding of it, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard to make that shift. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're learning the ways of the past.

Correct. Then you're kind of locked into a, a way of thinking and way of working that actually will put you out a fundamental disadvantage in the future. Yeah. Back to that following point. I do think learning how to follow is very important. Let me phrase it in a different way,

which is you want to be disagreeable enough such that you have interesting ideas, you're contrarian, you're not just going through emotions, you're following your own curiosity, but we both all know people who are so disagreeable that they can't work with anybody. Yeah. That there's just so alienating to people.

Yeah. So maybe another way of following, or just saying following it is more broader is you need to learn how to work with people. You need to learn how to navigate systems. You need to learn to, you know, get what you want or get what is the optimal outcome. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there is this important thing of respecting the elders in a way, but also not fundamentally, truly understanding that they haven't figured everything out. Yeah. I do think respect is very important. like going into their company, you should respect what they've already built,

but you should also feel like that a lot of things are inadequate and go change as many things as you can. So at Replit, I named all the conference rooms after the grades in our industry in computer science and tech. We have a Mark Andreessen room, obviously. The inventor of the browser, you might know.

Of course. But we have like Linus Sorvald, you know, Robert Noyes, all these people. And what I try to tell people with the company is like, we respect the past, but we're unapologetically going to change it. And people are going to be bad at us. Like I don't know if you remember like 2025. I was like canceled for saying you should have learned how to know it anymore. And now I talk to it.

Wow. That was only a year ago. A year ago, the same people that were like, went against me, they're like, oh, I don't read code anymore. I just, like, prompt and buy code. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how many things I've been wrong about or write about that, you know, five, ten years early. And I think the thing that I love about Silicon Valley is people just move forward.

They're okay with it. They accept the takes. You know what I mean? And that's the other thing that I love about the culture of the Valley. I think people I know so I spent a little bit of time at my free time now volunteering in local politics

in Oakland yeah it's really interesting it's a side quest for sure right it's a side quest like why would it be relevant at all and actually I think it's helped me in so many ways in business the skills are extremely

transferable in both directions but one of the most interesting things is appreciating how valuable trust is. And if you have a foundation of trust throughout a society, how much it changes the way that you can move forward. You know, in local politics, you know, as a simple example, let's talk about nonprofits,

if you're running a nonprofit and you raise money from someone and you have a conversation with them and they say, I'll give you $50,000, the percent likelihood that that $50,000 will lend in your bank account is somewhere in the 20 to 50 percent rate. After they've committed verbally, right? So verbal commitments don't have weight. In Silicon Valley, I think it's probably 75 to 100 percent, depending on who you're talking to who you are. Yeah.

And the difference in how you operate, like, I can confidently continue to move forward on my business if I know that the money's coming. And then by the time you've delivered that check, I've made like six weeks of progress, right? And now all of a sudden, your check is more valuable six weeks later. Right. And the reverse is also true. If you do not have trust, then all of a sudden, you're like, well, what if this donor is upset about this thing? Let me do this thing differently. And you're not fulfilling your mission.

You're worried. You have anxiety and stress about this thing. And so I think that is something that Silicon Valley offers that can be applied to school. In what way? trusting students to do what they want to do and follow the threads they want to do is something that I think we can uniquely offer. I think that Silicon Valley is a place

where someone who has a unique idea or a different way of doing things can generally be accepted and allowed to do it. Now, there are some social rules. You can't just go around being mean to everyone or lying, or it's not that, you know, it's not that permissive. But if we start,

trusting young kids and young adults to go and do follow what they want and then we empower them, even if we think what they're doing is crazy, then they're going to build that future you're talking about. They're going to figure out the next version of holocracy that actually works. Let me ask you a question. It might be tricky, but what are you going to do with the troublemakers? Like invariably, there's going to be people that are going to be like breaking things. like, you know, Zuck famously built like FaceMash,

which was like really controversial. Like I hacked into our university. Someone might almost get it's spelled. Yeah, what do you, what do you think of that? I mean, obviously there are things that really cross some kind of red line on criminality, but like, oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, just be clear, like, you have to draw a line somewhere, right? So there's no question, like if you do something like violate our sexual harassment policy

or, you know, you are, super mean to someone in front of every you know like there are going to be rules of course like we have to create a culture of trust and positive sum right at the same time i think that one of the core tenants of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely we don't have grades we don't have tests the sort of amount of weight to push against should be a lot less and so that therefore a lot of these challenges, these things that people do, it's like you want to build Face Smash, go for it. Like, I mean, who cares, right?

Like, I'm willing to defend your right to do that. And I'm also happy if someone asked me on a podcast to say, yeah, that was a weird idea. Like, well, I don't know what that kid was thinking. I didn't love it, but you know what? They got to do what they got to do. And that's how people are going to be. And so I'd say the same thing is if you create an environment of trust, And if you allow that to happen and you design it so that they don't have a sort of like anti-authoritarianism mindset,

then I think you open up a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunity. Yeah, I also think that there's an opportunity to funnel that drive to test the boundaries in a healthy way. I was reading the story the other day about a kid that hacked into some government thing is like getting like two years in prison. And he was on an interview talking about how he learned to hack on Roblox. And apparently there's like a big trend where people learn programming and hacking on Roblox. I was talking to Dave, the founder's CEO of Roblox.

It was like, be really cool to have some kind of sandbox for these people to play in and then discover talents and then funneled them into cybersecurity jobs. Yeah. Or even the government, instead of like sending these kids to jail, like, take them to work at the NSA or work at like some, we need cybersecurity talent right now. Like, why are you like putting them in jail, you know? Yeah. Yeah, and there's a line. Like, you know, there are kids who are hacking who are probably doing things that I wouldn't be comfortable with. Of course. But there's also kids who are doing it for reasons and ways that are honestly fine. Like, and if we can just have a little bit more permissiveness, I think we can create a lot more opportunity. for them and repurpose that talent, as you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, one site I was really into growing up called hack the site. It was hack this site. It was hack this site.org.

I don't know if it's like a website that has vulnerabilities built in. That's cool. It's like cats are the flag, right? Yeah. And so, like, I mean, I think we're kind of digging deep into one aspect of it. But like, you can have a bounty program in the ARCity. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Absolutely. Or I can encourage the students to go, you, do the bounty programs at all the other schools. Right. Or all the other companies, because most companies have a bounty program. Yeah, absolutely. The, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think going back to your thing around, you know,

when to trust the elders versus when to disrupt. It's kind of, there's this general trend in terms of like, what's really important to gain is discernment. Because all, like, you know, rules and heuristics. It's like, it really matters out the context and case. But the way to get discernment is by having reps and be trusting the students to sort of fail on their own to make decisions to learn from it. You coined, you know, technoproproproposism on this podcast.

The thing I'll coin is meta-retard maxing. When to retard maxing. Whereas when to go on pure instinct versus when, when to sort of like when that will drive you into trouble. And I think it relates to like when there's asymmetric upside versus asymmetric downside, you kind of need reps. And I think that's a lot of what project-based learning, or just giving people more control over their time is the idea

of just giving them more opportunities to choose a path, succeed, fail, learn from it. Yeah. It's my last question. There's some people who would say something like, hey, you know, remember when Teal launched his fellowship and a lot of people were madded, they were like, college, you learn how to be a good person. Like it's something beyond this technical, you know, skill set,

but even beyond this intellectual, you know, people imagine like Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society, I don't know, but there's sort of this like cultivate, you know, we're 18 years of year, you're becoming a person. And so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how we see. see sort of in the Bay Area, in this environment that is both, you know, hyper, um, career-oriented, but also, you know, hyper-intellectual. But what is this sort of cultivation of values or morals or ethics or, or just like becoming an adult? What do you, what do we say about that? Yeah, it's, it's actually interesting. So I've traveled all over the world. I've, uh, I would

like to think, you know, I've been to, you know, billion, billionaires houses. I have met People from every I've been on top house. I would say that some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most grounded people I've ever met are here in Silicon Valley. And it's not everyone. I mean, there are some real idiots out there who've made a lot of money. Like, don't get me wrong. I don't have respect for everyone who's made money.

That's not the truth. But the positive sum high trust ecosystem, actually I think breeds really amazing human beings. And interpersonal skills is an absolute pillar of the academy. Like we want our graduates or attendees or fellows or whatever we're going to end up calling them. We want the people who attend the academy to be positive influences on society and the world. And I think that that's like one of the missions of the academy is to create a positive some world.

So I actually think we absolutely believe in a two-year, you know, you're going to spend two years and you're going to grow as a human being. You're going to meet other people and we're going to create an environment where you can see the benefits of the culture that I think many people don't pay attention to but is very much here in San Francisco.

I think having a reputation of being a good person here actually is very valuable. And people trust you with their money. People trust you with governing your company and so on and so forth. And I think developing that sense in the university is very important. And I think being a will adjust a person is important. I think that for a while, like, you know, I think, you know, Some people play the role of being like this autistic, genius person. And maybe at some point it paid off.

Like I remember the Sequoia blockposts about SBF. That's like gold. They deleted it. You can find it at Archive.org. I don't think it works anymore. I think Silicon Valley is no longer this sort of renegade thing. We're kind of, it's an institution. It's part of the establishment anyways.

And we also have to interface with the world, right? And people need to understand that we have a responsibility that we're not just talking amongst ourselves. And what we're saying, like, you know, Bernie Sanders read Dwarquish blockquest. And I criticized Dvarchish for kind of the language. And it's like, people who don't understand this technology

are they're going to they're not they that block post in my opinion did not create more understanding in them but actually it probably if you don't understand it probably could you know you you you learn the long wrong lessons of from from that that thing and so um so I think it's important that

we create or this academy creates a well adjusted adults that can only speak the in-group language, which is important, but can eventually be in front of Congress. Is there anything, lastly, you want to say about sort of like cultivation of values or like the idea of being a good person, like, is there anything there that you feel school or school environment contributes to or do you think we spoke about?

We mentioned the great books. It'd be good to like teach some of these things. Like, I spent a lot of time studying ethics and morality on my own. Yeah. I read, you know, a lot of the, for example, a lot of the utilitarian kind of corpus of, and I ended up kind of rejecting that. I don't think that's the way of the world. But I sort of, like, found my moral compass by reading wildly

and introspecting and truly kind of like coming to certain conclusions about how I want to act in the world and ultimately like the way I would describe myself perhaps it's like closest to like virtue ethics for Aristotle and the idea is that

actually don't like I should act in a way that that I wouldn't be proud of regardless of who's watching or who's not watching or regardless of the impact. And I think in a weird way, if you're virtuous and if you have certain principles, the net effect of that is that you are utility maximizing. I think if you have the right principles.

And you need to also change over time and you need to kind of figure out where the world is headed and make sure you're fitting in it in the right way. But all of this to say is that I think there is, there is value. value in the liberal arts and kind of reading some of those stuff and trying to understand how you feel about how you want to act and how you want to present yourself. One thing they just made me more sympathetic to you took the two to any argument in terms of it being like axiomatic is that the world is changing so much that it's hard to have rigid principles in a in a world that is a, you know, or a whole philosophy that is

rigid. Yes. You know, in a world that is changing. Right. And weirdly, the opposite is true as well, where you can't be a consequential a serritsarian when we're entering the similarity and you can't really predict the future because that's based on predicting the future. And so it is a tough time. I think you need to have principles that are evolving over time. I think that's, you have some ground principle, ground truths that you hold dearly.

And it should be as axiomatic as small as possible. Yeah. In closing, we're grateful for your support of the academy. We're excited to have people building on Replit, potentially interning replet, potentially being funded by you. And so maybe as a last question, when you see an 18-year-old or 20-year-old or 16-year-old that is really inspiring to you that you're like, oh, I got to spend time with this person or, you know, be involved with them in some capacity, what are they doing that is,

you know, capturing your interest. What are you looking for in young talent? I think the first thing is that they dove really deep in something. They can teach me something. Yeah. And I'm interested in, like, I think I can be interested in anything. And I think if you're able to tell a story about some projects you've done, and you've gotten really, really deep in it, I think that's always impressive because that's

What most people lack, most people get bored easily. Most people, you know, do the traditional thing. But did you actually follow a threat all the way through? That's always really impressive. And that shows all sorts of good personality traits. Yeah. Persistence, intrinsic motivation. You might be doing something that is really, you're following your curiosity

and maybe doesn't have an immediate reward. and and I think that, you know, like you said, I mean, being contrary, having really important opinions, but it's very easy if you're smart and if young and smart to think everyone's an idiot. Yeah. Including me, like, you know, I'll see young people that's like, like, they'll talk to you. Like, I don't understand anything. But I think it's important to respect, uh, respect to the, the person that you're talking. Having good, uh, good interpersonal skills.

I think it's important. Otherwise, people don't want to be around you. I think that's important. Totally. Yeah, I think it's both not being afraid to spike in something. Like, you know, a lot of people would just show up because they're too, you know, broad and everything, but not really amazing at anything. Right.

And, and just follow that to its conclusion. see how good you can get at it, but while also having a baseline of sort of like, you know, interpersonal skills or just sort of like the right. Be likable. Yeah. Be likable. And in a way that's not like contrived or fake or, you know, they're just like, you know, it's truly authentic because people want to support people who are good people. But the most endearing thing is you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting. Yeah.

And totally. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for. Thank you so much. Thanks for having. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe,

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