Why a16z is Building a New School for the AI Era | Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Gagan Biyani to introduce the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy and discuss a bigger question: what should education look like when AI is rapidly changing the skills people need to build, work, and create? Ben and Gagan explain why they believe learning should be more focused on doing rather than studying about doing, with students building real projects, developing people skills, and working alongside companies and builders in San Francisco. The goal isn’t to replace college for everyone, but to create a different path for young people who already know they want to build. They also discuss why AI could make this an unusually powerful time to be young, how project-based learning changes when everyone has access to powerful tools, why failure can be valuable when it produces real learning, and what it takes to develop the judgment and people skills that can't simply be learned from a textbook.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  This should be the greatest time in the history of humanity to be young. This is like Thomas Edison's time, or Henry Ford's time, or so forth. But the challenge that we have is everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer exist.

• 0:18Erik Torenberg?

  Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z. And one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation across the board.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  It's critical for young people who don't have that billion-dollar idea to not settle for the million-dollar idea and instead go and explore more. We're building a new school for the AI era, and that means redesigning everything.

• 0:44Ben Horowitz?

  Let's go pursue it all, and let's get an output on that.

• 0:48Erik Torenberg?

  Picture HAA five years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful?

• 0:54Ben Horowitz?

  My hope is...

• 0:56Erik Torenberg?

  The education system we have today was largely built for the industrial age. What should it look like for the AI era? In this episode, I sit down with Ben Horowitz and Gagan Biyani to introduce the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy, a new school designed around learning by building. We discuss why AI is changing the skills young people need, why the academy focuses on projects and real-world experience, and what students can learn by being immersed in San Francisco alongside people building technology today. We also explore why Ben thinks this could be one of the best times in the history to be 18, and why judgment, people, and learning by doing may matter more than ever.

• 1:38Erik Torenberg?

  Well, Ben, Gagan, we have a big announcement today.

• 1:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:43Erik Torenberg?

  We are announcing Horowitz and Andreessen Academy.

• 1:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, we are, and we're very excited about that. Super pumped.

• 1:49Erik Torenberg?

  So let's get into the story of how this came to be, and let's talk about what it is. Ben, ever since I joined a year and a half ago, we've been working on bringing this to life. We found the perfect CEO and co-founder in Gagan, but you've been thinking about this at A and Z for years before. So talk about what was the impetus for why we wanted to make this happen?

• 2:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, we kind of came at it from a couple of different directions. So the kind of first thing was, one of the things we noticed is for young people, kind of college works really, really well if you want to be a scholar or kind of a professor or that kind of thing. But it's a little bit of a weird proposition if you just want to get a job or you have an idea to start a company. It's a very large financial investment and a very big time investment, and most of the stuff that happens in college isn't around that. It's around other kinds of things. And there's being a well-rounded person, this and that and the other. But if you ask an 18-year-old, why do they go to college? It's to get a job, usually. And that kind of doesn't always translate.

• 2:54Ben Horowitz?

  So that was kind of one thing where like, you know, I wonder if, you know, we got a lot of jobs, maybe we can help with that. And then on our side, from a hiring standpoint, I think that college really evolved a lot in the last, I would say, four or five years in terms of kind of the kind of students they're looking for and then what skills they have. And in our world, the skill sets needed are evolving so fast that it was just very hard for a kind of big system like that to keep up. So we still think college is great for probably most kids, but there is a certain kind of kid that wants to build something that already knows they want to go in specifically currently into technology.

• 3:40Ben Horowitz?

  And we have access to all the jobs. We know exactly what you need to learn. We know exactly the skills that you have to have. And so we thought, gee, like, that would be a great thing for us to add to the mix and provide.

• 3:53Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And we've individually been thinking about this for over a decade. You and your many businesses, I haven't co-founded, you to me, Maven, most recently, we did a search for who's the right CEO, and it just through the process became obvious that Gagan has, one, been thinking about this forever, but then, two, is one of the most just impressive entrepreneurs in the entire space over the past decade plus.

• 4:13Ben Horowitz?

  It was kind of one of those things where you go, we have this idea, and then we meet a guy, he's like, you know, I've had that idea for much longer than you've had that idea. And not only that, I've spent a lot of time trying to work and make it happen, but without necessarily the gigantic resource that you guys have, which is you're invested in 1,600 companies, and you have a fairly large place of employment yourself and so forth. So, you know, if you put those things together, then you have the potential for something really, really special.

• 4:47Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And I think also, we as a firm have also backed many things in this space. There are a lot of people who try to do something in this space, and it hasn't really cut through. There's some interesting experiments, there's some interesting outcomes, but nothing has really taken sort of a crack at it. And I'm curious why you guys think that is. I'll take a stab by saying, I think they focus a little bit too narrow. College is, of course, a bundle. It's a bundle dozens of things, including like sports leagues and hedge funds. You don't have to do the whole bundle, but you have to do not just sort of training people for the job world, but also, not just education, but also status and credential and brand. It has to be an indication that, oh, you know, you went here, thus I want to hire you, or I want to work with you. And it also has to be fun. It has to be something that people actually want to do.

• 5:30Erik Torenberg?

  And I think too many players just focus either just on the learning thing or just on some other hybrid and don't create the bundle that is the value prop that is truly, truly competitive.

• 5:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I think that we're kind of starting out a little more specific, and then we'll, you know, really ace that. But the core idea of it is, it's for people who want to build something and do something and make an impact kind of in the world, outside of, like I said, being a scholar. And to do that, be it in technology or in music or in any field, you kind of want to learn how to do it as opposed to just study about it. And so if you think of something like music appreciation or art appreciation or so forth, that's great, but like, we won't do that kind of thing. We would do the kind of thing where it's like, oh, you want to major in music? Let's write some songs. Let's do some things.

• 6:24Ben Horowitz?

  Let's understand that process and do that. And the same thing with technology, which is, oh, you want to be a technologist? Let's learn how to build a system.

• 6:32Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that's just ends up being very different. The other reason that now is actually the correct time to do it is if you look at the university system, it started out as this religious institution with the Jesuits and so forth, and then the Industrial Revolution came. And then all of a sudden, everybody needed kind of a higher level of the ability to learn things, the ability to being literate, et cetera, et cetera. And so the university system just exploded in the US, and the universities got much bigger, and there became many more of them and so forth. And that was really necessary to train the population to kind of enter the corporate world.

• 7:16Ben Horowitz?

  There was like, it's hard for people to understand now, but in 1700, there was no corporate world. That there was like a farm world that, you know, and then all of a sudden, we got these companies and all this kind of thing. And to exist in that environment, you've got to be able to, you know, read and write and do math and this and that and the third. And so things really changed from an educational standpoint in this country, which became a huge advantage. And to a large extent, the America that we have was built on the backs of our great universities. But we're hitting the AI revolution now, which is going to be, in our estimation, as transformational in terms of jobs, the way jobs are done, the kinds of jobs that are

• 7:57Ben Horowitz?

  available and so forth, as the Industrial Revolution was to the agricultural kind of society that came before it. And the idea that the training for the Industrial Revolution is going to map into the AI revolution is probably not perfectly. So there kind of needs to be a pioneer that shows the way, like, how do you train somebody into the new world? And there's many things that are different. And we've got all this technology as well. So rather than being in lectures for five hours a day or eight hours a day, depending on your curriculum, maybe it's better to have a kind of more contained instruction and more time with the tools, more time learning on an individual pace with AI and those kinds of things. And then also more structured social things.

• 8:42Ben Horowitz?

  So not like the social things, not necessarily, let's get rip-roaring drunk and go, although maybe some of that'll occur too. But kind of more structured social things, because we'll have the time, because we won't have so much time sitting in the classroom, listening to somebody talk. And so all these new ideas can come into play now, and the timing is, you know, I say, you know, for a young person now, that's the world they're going to live in.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I completely agree. We're building a new school for the AI era, and that means redesigning everything. And I think that actually, the other efforts, I agree with you, some of them don't go big enough. In order to truly deliver a college comparable experience, obviously, this is not college, it's not degree granting, but a college comparable experience that's good for a high school student, you have to have interpersonal, social dynamics. You need to have it residential in San Francisco. You need to make sure that it's connected to the employers who employ the best people. And so there's a bundle that's required that you have to deliver. And there's probably only two or three people who've ever even tried to deliver that bundle

• 9:49Speaker 02

  in the last, let's say, 50 years. And the other thing, though, that those companies or efforts, I think, missed is it's a classic startup thing. Like, what do you do when you start a startup? You need a very, very unique, specific customer who has a burning desire for your product. And Ben, when we first met, I hadn't met that many of these, but over the last six months, as you know, I've spent all my time with these young builders. And there is a generation of young builders who are just fired up about creating things. And that is one of the core ingredients of this academy is that they exist, and we're building it for them. And I think that makes it different from other efforts,

• 10:33Speaker 02

  because we have a very clear demand, and also that that demand is elite. So it's not like it's demand from, you know, the far right, or the far left, or something where it's not perceived positively, like, these are the people who are going to employ, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the future. They're going to raise a billion dollars for their company eventually. Like, those are the people who need our product right now, and that's what I think is really exciting.

• 11:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And students will have the opportunity to, like, when I was in college, I was so divorced from the real world, and I was interested in technology, and I was reading about it, but here, you're going to have access to work at companies, intern at companies like Databricks, Nvidia, Stripe, dozens of others, and you'll be immersed in the A16Z sort of cinematic universe that is both economically, you know, practically from a career-oriented, like, very embedded in the actual work, but then also just, you know, exposure to people doing real things, interesting things, getting the osmosis of the Silicon Valley sort of spirit. Ben, let's talk about, if you were 18 today, how would you be thinking about your own

• 11:44Erik Torenberg?

  sort of growth or education, learning, like, what's it like to be 18 today? In terms of like, what do you think people should be excited about, nervous about?

• 11:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I would be thrilled to be 18. I think it is like one of the best times in history to be 18. And it's unfortunate, because I think because of the systems for getting people into work, currently, people are really nervous about their future. But if you look at it, this is, you know, this is like Thomas Edison's time, or, you know, Henry Ford's time, or so forth. It's kind of, you're going into a world that only you will understand, that like, people like me will have much more difficult time understanding the world than you will, and what's possible, and what you can do, and so forth.

• 12:34Ben Horowitz?

  So you're going to go in at a very young age, being more capable than people with 30, 40 years of experience. And that's, that's just amazing, because normally, you know, you've got to work your way up the corporate ladder, you know, spend, you know, 20 years kind of developing your status and credibility, whereas now you can come out right off the rip, using the new tools to basically solve almost any problem out there. And, you know, the funny thing is like, well, what are people going to do? It's like, well, are we out of problems? It seems like we have, all I read about is problems. There's problems everywhere. So now you can go out, you can attack them directly, either, you know, either yourself as the leader, or as part of a team.

• 13:18Ben Horowitz?

  But, you know, that, to me, is the thing that's really, really exciting. And I think it's, you know, it's funny, I, you know, I heard a lot about the industrial revolution transition, because, so my grandfather's father kind of immigrated the family out of Russia, because they were going to kill all the Jews, so they had to leave, you know, it's the pogrom period. And he basically was a slave here, in that he was in a sweatshop, he slept under his sewing machine, because they work, he worked so many hours, he like slept at the office under his sewing machine, he'd come back, you know,

• 14:00Ben Horowitz?

  on the weekends and so forth. And he made like very little money, and he was just, it was a very, very hard life for him. But, you know, my grandfather was able to get an education at CCNY, and he kind of became a teacher and had a kind of much better life, although it was also not nearly as good as my father's, who was the next generation coming out of it. And I think, you know, for this, when we look back, I think the young people today will be, look at us and, you know, their parents as, oh, you guys were sleeping under sewing machines, you know, and pretty bitter compared to like, what's going to be possible, and so forth. So I think it's a very, very exciting time.

• 14:43Ben Horowitz?

  But, you know, you want to be on the kind of right side of history, and you want to be future-forward. You don't want, I think the past is going to fade very fast, you know, much faster than we're used to.

• 14:55Erik Torenberg?

  Talk about how, even though it's so easy to build, you still want to have experience, relationships, connections, spend some time at some of these iconic companies, right? Because when you're just a kid, you might think, oh, I want to start a dating app idea, or pizza idea. But if you work at Databricks for better, as an example, talk a little about that.

• 15:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I think that, you know, if you're young, and you see something that you go, oh, my God, I think I'm the only one who really understands this, and it's compelling me to build a company, then that's, you know, that's phenomenal, that's Mark Zuckerberg, that's, you know, that's a kind of unbelievable opportunity, but also a rare one. And then I think, you know, most people who are young, or kind of the majority, would love to kind of understand that thing. And by the way, all Zuck's roommates from Harvard who didn't go to Facebook with him, really regretted that,

• 16:00Ben Horowitz?

  because he kind of invited them all to be employees, or, you know, many of them, and some of them didn't do it. And they're like, dang, that would have been so exciting. And so I think that, you know, there's just a great opportunity to kind of join up with people who have done that kind of thing, either, you know, at something that's further along, depending on, you know, if you really want to kind of learn and develop your skills and so forth, or, you know, maybe, you know, one of your classmates is doing something really exciting, like, you know, in the case of Facebook at the time. So, you know, I think there are many, you know, there's plenty of opportunities, depending on how powerful your new ideas are at that time. And, you know, sometimes they're not that powerful.

• 16:45Ben Horowitz?

  I didn't have a great idea when I was 18, so it's not, it's not that common. It took me a while to learn, you know, I'm not as quick as others on that, I guess. But if you get in, you know, the great thing for me is I got in at a company, Silicon Graphics, which had all kinds of innovation, and I saw what that was, and how you can really change things and so forth, and that kind of built a foundation for the rest of my career.

• 17:11Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. We always talk about builder skills, but also people skills. You've written a couple of books on it, you talk about it all the time internally. Is that something you knew when you were 18 or in college, or how do you learn people's skills? How should we, you know, teach it to our students, et cetera?

• 17:28Ben Horowitz?

  Well, like, I think the main thing is to be around people, and it's, you know, people often talk about, you know, particularly the millennial generation has this kind of loneliness epidemic, because they're so locked into their screens and so forth. I think one of the things that AI has the potential is just like, get us off of the screen. Like, we're not that far away from, I'm going to talk to my AI, and have him do the work, and deal with the damn computer, you know, like, and so that's going to free me up to really deal with people where there's going to be just tremendous value, being able to kind of know my peers, motivate them, kind of

• 18:11Ben Horowitz?

  get the best out of each other, do something larger than ourselves, and try and kind of move the future forward, and make the world a better place. And so kind of getting experience in that environment, where you're kind of working with others and learning, hey, you know, yeah, I mean, I, and, you know, college, by the way, has been great for this over the years, where you're like, oh, you come from Nebraska? I never knew anybody from Nebraska. Like, what is it like? What's it, just cornfields and shit? Like, what's going on? And, you know, you kind of get to know people. And, you know, probably one of the skills that I see missing the most, which I try and kind of impart in people on the firm, is like, let's just start with

• 18:54Ben Horowitz?

  who the person you're talking to is. Like, rather than just talking to somebody, hey, Eric, how are you doing, da, da, da, da, like,

• 19:02Ben Horowitz?

  Where'd you grow up? Where are you from? Like, oh, that's interesting. You've got, you know, this parent from this place, this other parent from the other place. You know, that's really good. What was that like? You know, how did they get along? So forth. And then you start to kind of understand people. And that opportunity in a business context isn't as obvious, you know, if you haven't. But you always do that when you get with a group of kids your age, like that's the first thing you ask them. You want to know, um, you know, do you get along with your parents? Do you hate your parents? You know, that, that kind of thing.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the, I mean, absolutely one of the most important things we want is to develop people's skills. And, uh, one of the core tenants of developing a skill like that is osmosis. You need to immerse the student in the social environment in which these, which the humans are. And specifically, I think it's a challenge. If you go off to college, you only interact with people your same year. You know, you finally maybe have a friend who's like one or two years above you or below you. One of the things I think the academy will do is we obviously want there to be deep social networks amongst your peers. We also are going to try and cohabitate you, like especially in the office,

• 20:24Speaker 02

  with other companies and individuals and projects and co-ops and internships that are with the quote unquote adult world. So that you can force yourself to, you're sort of, you can't have no choice. Like if you're trying to accomplish, let's say you're trying to build a new type of robot dog. And the only way to do it is to get a specific type of chip. And you don't know how to write a cold email. You're going to have to learn, right? And you're going to have all these people around you who are experts at this. So they're going to be like, oh, you should do that and you should do that, et cetera. And so I think that the combination of the osmosis of Silicon Valley, a peer network that's supportive and a, the project-based curriculum combined

• 21:07Speaker 02

  will dramatically accelerate people's skill development over something like, let me sit in a lecture talking about negotiations. Like, that's not how you develop people's skills. You develop people's skills because you're doing something you really care about and you need to get everyone on board.

• 21:26Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, 100%. Related, Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z. And one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation across the board. And so any sort of subculture or you're, they're, they're the most extreme at it. And so, for example, like there's so many, like back when we were at college, it was rare to have an 18-year-old who was already building startups, immersed in the startup world, um, you know, obsessed with sort of, you know, uh, this kind of thing. And now there, there are a bunch of them and we're going to harness them. But to your point, Ben, it's important about the people you surround yourself with. And so now it's higher variance than ever. To find your people, people who are builder, people who are resilient, people who are entrepreneurial, to being able to aggregate them in the same places is just huge.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're really excited. I, I've been so impressed by the talent that we've had a chance to meet. I mean, I didn't know a single person who was doing anything entrepreneurial when I was a child. And I started my first venture at 13. So the idea that we're going to collect, you know, 50, uh, in, at least in the founding class fellowship, 50 students who are all like actually builders. And there can be different kinds of builders. Like, like I want to be clear that this is going to be quite a broad definition of the word building, but all in one place. And for them to meet each other and spend a bunch of time riffing off each other, I'm very excited about it.

• 22:46Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. The, let's talk about the importance of this being in California, in the extended Bay Area. You know, Ben, you grew up in, in, in Berkeley.

• 22:55Ben Horowitz?

  People's Republic, absolutely.

• 22:57Erik Torenberg?

  Yes, exactly.

• 22:58Ben Horowitz?

  Which at the time was like 10,000 miles from Silicon Valley, even though it was only like a half hour drive.

• 23:08Erik Torenberg?

  And I think it's so interesting because you grew up in California. So you know that it's not just sort of a, a technical, you know, bastion, but also, you know, a cultural bastion, intellectual bastion. And so interesting because, and, and we're focused, you know, largely on the, on the builder element first. But people say, you know, college is for building a career, but also becoming, you know, pursuing knowledge and becoming a better person. And talk about why California is just, at San Francisco, is just such an important place for, uh, for, for this to be. What is the opportunity here?

• 23:35Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think the big thing is it's where most companies, great companies in America get started. And then America is one of kind of two places in the world where like a giant number of companies get started. And so everybody who has done that and knows how to do that, and all the people have worked at places like that, just a huge majority are here in California. So, you know, if you want to learn how to do that, or if you want to, um, go work with people who do that, then it's just like the most obvious place to put it. And, and like, you know, I, I went to college in New York and most of the people who came out of that

• 24:20Ben Horowitz?

  and went into financial services, like that was kind of the main employer. That was the main recruiter there and so forth. And I think for a program like this, you know, we're connected to so many companies, but probably, you know, well over 80% of them are like right in this area. And so it just makes it very, very convenient to, you come here, you've learned the area and guess what? You can start your career right in that place.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. San Francisco is your campus, right? The campus is not just the walls within the school, but it's the entire city. And, and I think that's very important. And the other thing I'll add is that, uh, if, if San Francisco is the campus, the cultural values of San Francisco, that many people don't talk about. You know, San Francisco is one of the places that embraces failure. If things don't work out, we'll still fund your next company. You know, it's Silicon Valley is one of the places that's positive sum. Everyone believes that if I help someone, I don't need to get anything in return. I'm going to pay it forward. And I know it's going to come back to me because that's the culture we live in. It's a super high trust culture. So I think that it's going to create a really, really calm, safe

• 25:33Speaker 02

  and positive environment for students that is also super ambitious. It's a rare combination. It's very hard to get right. And I think Silicon Valley and San Francisco in particular, really has figured that out.

• 25:46Erik Torenberg?

  And I, I think another way of also phrasing is like, if you want a stake in the future and, or help, help determine it, help, argue it, help build it, a lot of it happens in San Francisco, whether it's the future of our AI, whether it's the future of money, whether it's the, the future of biotech. So many of these technologies, but also the conversations surrounding those technologies are litigated here or started here and then expanded out.

• 26:11Ben Horowitz?

  And litigated here.

• 26:14Erik Torenberg?

  Yes, both metaphorically and literally. Ben, talk about the decision to make this a separate company. We went back and forth on this for, for a while of why Harvard and Jason Academy, we wanted to both be separate, but also connected. And that's why we kept the brand the same. And also it has to be a strong brand that signals to students. But talk about that decision a little bit and how you see it interfacing with, with the firm and, you know, at large.

• 26:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I think the thing that the firm brings that's extremely unique is we are comprehensively connected to basically every opportunity in tech. There's, and, and, you know, by the way, you know, we're working to make those partnerships kind of explicit around the graduates of the academy. If you go through this program, if you do well, there are opportunities, like, you know, many opportunities for you. And so that, that was the real strength that we brought, I thought. But, you know, this is its own idea. Like we're an investment firm. This is not an investment idea.

• 27:21Ben Horowitz?

  This, I mean, it's an investment in the future of the country, but it's, uh, you know, it's, it's an academy, uh, which we're not. And so it really needed to be separate and have its own life. In addition, I don't think that this idea is limited to technology. Like, as I said, I think it's very interesting for music. It may be interesting for medicine. It could be interesting for a variety of things because every profession is undergoing a massive change. And so we wanted it to be able to grow and expand, you know, as we got it working and so forth. So it didn't make sense to be kind of a kind of piece of the firm.

• 28:06Ben Horowitz?

  Or that would have limited its ambition quite a bit. And, you know, we're, we're not about limiting ambition around here.

• 28:14Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. And talk about why it had to be a for-profit. Or put differently, another thing we said in previous conversations is the customer's got to be the student. And right now, sometimes in, in certain institutions, there's kind of, they try to serve too many customers and, and it kind of ends up being this disjointed product.

• 28:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so look, I mean, the, the whole thing is, if you're young, it kind of goes back to our earlier conversation. If you're young, this should be the greatest time in the history of humanity to be young. But the challenge that we have is everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer exist. And so, you know, we have to, somebody's got to super serve that client. And, um, and look, I think my hope is that as we kind of show this model, as we build this model, as we create it, we're not the only ones that will have it.

• 29:15Ben Horowitz?

  Like this isn't an idea where we're going, okay, we're going to create a monopoly on this thing. It's like, no, please copy us. Please Harvard, copy us. Please everybody, copy us. Because, you know, somebody's got to do the innovative work to get the breakthrough. But then that's going to change the world for, you know, every young person, uh, in this country and, you know, maybe, maybe beyond. So. That's the idea that we don't, you know, we don't care about

• 29:45Ben Horowitz?

  serving the alumni or serving the donors or serving the, you know, the parent. Like this is about the young people and, you know, what do they need? And what's going to create the best life for them? And so that simplifies the equation quite a bit.

• 30:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, the profit motive forces us to deliver to the customer. And our job at the end of the day is to make sure that young people who attend the institution go off and do great things because that creates the brand that creates the flywheel that allows us to continue to stay in business. And I think that's very unique in education that we have such incentive alignment. And I think it's, it's a core tenet actually of the academy.

• 30:29Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Similarly, one of the core tenets of the academy is curiosity. And, you know, there's this quote, education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. And, you know, we're moving from this like, kind of like push model to, you know, these grades and all this stuff you have to cram to this pull mall, which is like, what are you nationally curious about? And what can you go build or pursue in that space? And it may not be obvious that all the time of what it will lead to. Like we were talking about how Steve Jobs had this interest in calligraphy. And that didn't seem like that would, you know, obvious of what it would lead to. But in fact, it of course led to quite a lot. And similarly, Ben, you've always been interested in rap music.

• 31:05Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 31:06Erik Torenberg?

  And you were pursuing your interests at a very young age.

• 31:08Ben Horowitz?

  Still am, yeah.

• 31:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, exactly. And it maybe wasn't obvious at the time how that might lead to something, but it's made you much more authentic and interesting as a business person and made your life, you know.

• 31:19Ben Horowitz?

  A better storyteller, which is a key part of what I do. And so, yeah, I, and that's definitely kind of important in the context of the academy and what we're trying to do in terms of, yeah, like, let's go pursue it all.

• 31:38Ben Horowitz?

  But then let's, you know, and, but let's get an output on that.

• 31:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Ben Horowitz?

  So not, you know, it's much more oriented, we want to be more oriented around, oh, did you build something interesting? Then, oh, could you like memorize these questions? Because look, we do have tools that can answer those questions very well now. It's funny, if I was talking to Dan Bonet, who is a great professor of computer science at Stanford cryptography. And his take on AI was you kind of have two choices, right? You can ban it.

• 32:19Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, that won't work. Or you can make the problem so hard that you can't solve them without AI. And I think that's, you know, his orientation is amazing there. And what he's seeing is, oh, I've got students solving things that no student in history could have ever solved, like that I can't even, like I could never solve myself. And, but that's what's possible, right? And so you want to kind of have that orientation where it's like, well, what can you solve with the tools? And what can you do?

• 32:51Ben Horowitz?

  You know, what can you do that's like breakthrough? Cause now everybody's got an opportunity to create a breakthrough. And that's, that's super exciting because, you know, then you're, then you're a main character, not an NPC, right? Like that, that's kind of what the academy is about is like, hey, do you want to be a main character? If you want to be a main character, like we help you do that. If you want to be a cog in a machine, then this is not going to be the best place for you. But, you know, there are many places that concern that.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think it's important that the builder mentality apply to interests that are not obviously about AI or building. So take calligraphy for example, you know? It's one thing to say, hey, why don't you go study calligraphy and respond like, and sort of answer questions on a test about how to, you know, I know nothing about calligraphy, but like how to draw, you know, beautiful letters. And it's another thing to say, like, hey, why don't you learn enough calligraphy to write a Islamic poem, you know, beautifully displayed in the academy? And so for every pursuit that we, you know, Ben, you earlier talked about music, for

• 34:03Speaker 02

  every pursuit of knowledge that our students have, we are going to reframe that into how do you do something with it? Create a challenge, a project, anything that's fun and interesting that allows you to go pursue it. And I think that is, that ethos will allow them to learn skills that are not relevant to jobs, obviously, like even, you know, horticulture or, you know, learning how to kite surf, whatever it is. But it allows them to do it in a way that ensures that they actually learn the skill. It's very, very hard to learn most skills if all you're doing is cramming for a test.

• 34:44Erik Torenberg?

  All the people's skills, there's a few different dimensions, right? Like some people make the analogy, you know, founders like, you know, being a movie director, like you've got to, you know, sort of, you know, create script, bring all, you know, get to get all the actors involved and then, and then make it happen. Other people, you know, compared to like a nightclub promoter, like you have to get people excited about things, you have to bring them in, you have to sell, you have to sort of negotiate, et cetera. At the same time, there are people who are charismatic, but also crash out, you know? And Ben, you talk a lot about the inner game of managing your own psychology of, you know, you know, you've worked with a lot of, you know, still work with a lot of like very idiosyncratic people. And so how do you, as a kid, learn this? What might you say there?

• 35:25Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think, look, I think that's, again, difficult to teach in a classroom, right? And here's the thing that I always tell CEOs is, you know, and look, a lot of them read my book, so I don't want to, you know, but that book doesn't teach you how to be a CEO in the sense that, you know, you can read every book ever written on how to play football. But like, if you get into an NFL game and you're playing quarterback, like nothing in a book is going to teach you to deal with like somebody, some 300 pound monster rushing at you, where you're trying to like figure out who to throw the ball to. Like you actually have to do that in order to learn it.

• 36:08Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that, you know, you kind of have to do it to learn it. And so a lot of what we're going to orient the academy about is like, okay, can you put a team together? Can you do it? And that's, you know, there'll be less on the line. It'll be more like a practice than the game. But, you know, that's, that's the way you learn that. You, you kind of learn those decision-making, you know, what does it cost you if you hesitate on the decision? Like what is it, what does it mean to not resolve a conflict? Like what are the consequences? And you can't, you can read about that.

• 36:45Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Ben Horowitz?

  And I can tell you about that. But until you know that feeling, you know, that, that horrible feeling, you're not really going to learn it to the level that you need to do it to like run a company or that kind of thing.

• 36:59Erik Torenberg?

  To the end, because of the tools are so good, our resources are so good, it's easier than ever to do something, once you know what you want to do. And so the constraint often comes on what's worth working on? How do you spend your time? If you were 18 today, because there's, you know, there's so many different trade-offs, how would you think about?

• 37:17Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think, you know, a lot of it comes down to, you know, what you're interested in, what your kind of skill set matches and, you know, what, what's some problem that you know about that you can solve? And there are, you know, there's, there's so many diseases that are so destructive. There's, you know, all kinds of challenges with the environment. There's real challenges in the integrity of our election system and so forth. Like, is there a technological answer to that? You know, and, and so on and so forth. Or is there just a systems answer?

• 38:00Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, depending on what problem you're like, dang, we need to fix that. And then, by the way, what always happens with entrepreneurs is it's kind of like scientific discovery. You go to fix, you're like, we're going to go get to like a cure for, you know, pancreatic cancer. But along the way you find, oh no, like we can solve this other thing. That's also important because we discovered something there or whatever, you know, most kind of scientific discoveries and entrepreneurial ideas end up being accidental in some way in that you're going to solve a hard problem. And you find some other hard problem that's in the way of you solving that hard problem

• 38:42Ben Horowitz?

  that ends up, you know, being the thing that, that becomes the, the idea.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  And that's why I believe it's critical for young people who don't have that billion dollar idea to not settle for the million dollar idea and instead go and explore more.

• 39:00Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of young people are not yet exposed to anything beyond what a teenage life includes. And one of the real core values of the academy is we're going to expose you to a much wider range of what happens in the real world.

• 39:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And look, to try and fail at a really hard problem, the value is in the learning. So, you know, people say, oh, Silicon Valley, embrace this failure. Well, not all kinds of failure.

• 39:29Ben Horowitz?

  Right? The failure where you learn a tremendous amount and then you know, you, you've earned a secret.

• 39:37Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Ben Horowitz?

  By going out there, trying to solve a hard problem and not being able, now you know why that problem's so hard to solve. Okay. So then what are the sub-problems? And, you know, what are the related problems? And can you solve one of those? And that knowledge that you earn by failing is what we value here. And that's the same kind of thing that we would value at the academy is like, what did you learn by doing?

• 40:02Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Picture HAA five years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful? Talk about what you envision.

• 40:12Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think that, you know, in five years, there's many things that would make success. One is that, you know, we have graduates who have great careers that they love and have built like, or has started really interesting companies, you know, maybe they probably wouldn't be successful in that timeframe, or, you know, whatever you consider a success. And that, you know, we've learned as the academy to like, what really works and can we kind of extend that and expand that so we can get more different kinds of students in, you know, maybe not just, okay, technology is interesting to

• 40:55Ben Horowitz?

  you, but you're really interested in these other things and get people who can solve all the problems of the world, or, you know, become incredible creatives. And then, you know, the creative world is changing too. Now, you know, when I talk to my creative friends, they're like, it's amazing because I have an idea about like a feeling that I want to convey, and I can absolutely do it in every medium now. I don't, I'm not just restricted to my thing. I can make a full-length feature film. I can make a movie. I can, I can make a song. I can make a song. I can score a movie. And so now, like, everything is possible. And so I think, you know, it's just a wonderful time to be able to manifest

• 41:39Ben Horowitz?

  your ideas and get your ideas out in, in every kind of medium. And we want to facilitate that across the board, not just, you know, kind of in our traditional lanes.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's going to be incredible to, to build that future out with both of you and all the students to join us.

• 41:52Ben Horowitz?

  So excited. Yeah, very excited. Thank you.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in

• 42:41Speaker 03

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