Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

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.

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

• 0:00Amjad Masad?

  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 and 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.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:33Amjad Masad?

  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 it give me in order to achieve what I want to build.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  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 have tests. The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less.

• 1:01Erik Torenberg?

  When you see an 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you, that you're like, I gotta spend time with this person, what are they doing that is capturing your interest?

• 1:08Amjad Masad?

  The real civilizational missing opportunity is...

• 1:13Speaker 03

  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 Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-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 exceptional young builders.

• 1:57Amjad Masad?

  As we were talking, I remember 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 governed 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 project 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, it becomes like harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory

• 2:42Amjad Masad?

  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 bootcamp to retrain them for their life. So they invented a new way to be born, but you're not fundamentally a 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 bootcamp, he starts doing weird things, new things. And everyone was like, whoa, that's crazy. You shouldn't be doing that, that's not how we do things. It becomes very disruptive.

• 3:27Amjad Masad?

  And then when they go out into this like city, he starts asking questions like, what's out there? What's in the stars? What's outside our city borders? They're like, ah, we don't talk about outside our city borders.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Sounds silo a little bit.

• 3:40Amjad Masad?

  Probably dangerous out there, yeah. A little bit like Silo, a little bit like Fallout.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:44Amjad Masad?

  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 stars. That's why it's called The City and the Stars. And 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?

• 4:29Amjad Masad?

  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 and a car, live happily ever after. 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 stars. 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 spots in society.

• 5:12Amjad Masad?

  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 do, 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 mindset, first principle mindset,

• 5:57Amjad Masad?

  and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs.

• 6:02Erik Torenberg?

  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 could redo 18 to 22, but in 2026?

• 6:25Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Erik Torenberg?

  How you'd think about it?

• 6:27Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn.

• 6:33Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Amjad Masad?

  I want to be in 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 inspiring speeches he gave is the Stanford commencement speech. And he talked about connecting things backwards. And so the way Steve Jobs approached college, I think is 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 did it and learned it. Later on, when they were inventing the Mac, inventing user interfaces,

• 7:20Amjad Masad?

  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 is actually the most useful in college. Like, can you take a class that would change the direction of your life because you discovered 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.

• 8:04Amjad Masad?

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Don't yuck my yum.

• 8:29Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 8:30Amjad Masad?

  Exactly. And finally, the quality of people. Like, I think if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Amjad Masad?

  If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those deeply held beliefs, I think you will be able to do that.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I went to UC Berkeley, Go Bears, 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,

• 9:28Speaker 01

  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, my behavior. And now it's become 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 go, 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.

• 10:13Amjad Masad?

  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.

• 10:20Erik Torenberg?

  You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be like actually actively encouraging you.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it. So like if, 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.

• 10:38Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. There's this kid, Eric, I think he's Richard's friend, who has to take like investor calls from the bathroom because he's like hiding in the, in the school. They should be like, you know, coaching him through it or yeah, enabling it in some way. Bring me a best demo day or something, this kind of thing. A couple of comments. One is going back to your thing around like calligraphy. People get these interests that, that will, you know, might seem random and it 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 obsessed with 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 got excited about it.

• 11:23Erik Torenberg?

  If she would say, hey, you know, you're obsessed with basketball. You need to understand the salary cap or you, 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. And that's what I'm so excited about Alpha School.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Erik Torenberg?

  Is the way that they take people's natural interests and get them to learn you know, things that they're going to need to know over time out of that.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  The thing that's so hard is we all know, like the education sort of academic, the, 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. You know, and Joe, Joe Lemon 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?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  In the academy, if you are going to learn coding,

• 12:39Speaker 01

  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 AIs, 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.

• 13:12Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. I mean, this, um, you know, 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 very weird thing to have done in society that you would go into a statistic, statistics class and you would never learn that you could use it for basketball or you could use it for some of your other interests.

• 13:40Amjad Masad?

  And so there was this inversion for a long time of how we learn things. Like you would go and you, you would learn some of the 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, I'm not motivated at all by, by, by a pure pursuit of knowledge.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:07Amjad Masad?

  I'm motivated by skills. What, what skills can it 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

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Amjad Masad?

  tell you that, that's able to motivate your learning by telling you what kind of skills you can acquire because of it.

• 14:25Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. Well, it's interesting because there is, you know, the critique that we're addressing that, you know, we're solving for, which is, hey, there's, there's certain schooling environments where there's very little practical skills gained or you don't train for the real world afterwards, even though they 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, 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, uh, meeting new people, getting new friends, uh, you know, sort of going to party.

• 15:06Erik Torenberg?

  I don't know what people are describing exactly, you know, studying the great books, et cetera. What do you think about sort of the, this, the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills of, of building a company or working at a company?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  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 underutilized. Like, 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 your, a 10 year commitment at 18 isn't for most people. And then the, the structure of college isn't for everybody either.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  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, more, more. That's super exciting to me.

• 17:10Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. I mean, um, I think, you know, in, in programming, we have this concept of premature optimization. And the idea, I think the saying is premature optimization is the root of all evil. That's how bad people think it is. Where 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. And 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 are becoming unicorns. And they get, it just becomes, and 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.

• 17:54Amjad Masad?

  And they raise money for it and they are kind of pre-optimizing for some path that, um, that they haven't really reached yet. Right? And so that's why I always come back to 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, I, I tried not to start Rappel. Like actively not to start it, but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own. Right? And that's, that's the feeling you should get. It's almost like, I, I, I guess I have to do it, right? Because it's, it's like, there's so much momentum

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:40Amjad Masad?

  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.

• 19:04Amjad Masad?

  And you're like, you know, Kanye talked a lot about this, where it's like how predatory it is, where you find a young artist and you kind of lock them into a contract. They don't even understand that contract. Like luckily, I think in Silicon Valley, we have the safes, which are, you know, a great contribution by Y C and Paul Graham. But the, but it's still somewhat, you know, somewhat predatory, because you're taking this young person, you're precommitting them to something they shouldn't have admitted to.

• 19:33Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. It's really interesting, because you're an interesting person to bring on this podcast and 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're 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, you sort of pursue your interests there. So going back to this, 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 how to make this thing successful.

• 20:16Erik Torenberg?

  And so I think to your point, Goggan, sometimes people are funneled into these, you know, 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 like very pragmatic in their career, you know, as young people? And yet also make time or make space or make interest for following their intellectual curiosity, even if it might seem, you know, random or, you know, alien from that?

• 20:43Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I think that I sort of tend to oscillate between having an itch to build something

• 20:52Amjad Masad?

  and having an itch to like read a lot and explore a lot and see what's, 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, I got really into chess, which is like very late in life to get into chess. Like usually you get into chess when you're six years old. And my kid, actually, is six years old, is getting into chess pretty soon, is gonna be beating me. But, but I didn't know why I was interested in it. I got interested in it and then I started writing programs to like solve chess. And then I started training models.

• 21:34Amjad Masad?

  And I was like, why L L M's like, Chat G P T actually sucks at chess.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 21:39Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. And I was like, well, you know, where the R K G I score is getting up there, you know, these models are, you know, almost A G I, but why are they bad at chess? They hallucinate moves and all of that. And so I went into training an L 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 now call it R S I or curse of improvement. So it's sort of a buzzword for A I being able to do M L. I realized that A I is actually now capable of doing M L.

• 22:17Amjad Masad?

  So the moment we were in like 2024, when Raplet Agent came out, before vibe coding as a term was, was, was coined, suddenly agents were capable of like coding, right? And encoding fundamentally changed since then. I think we're at a similar moment when it comes to machine learning. I think machine learning, where, you know, you could call it vibe research, you could call it auto research. I think that's Karpathis' term. But I spent a lot of time in that world. And then now, like, I, I'm working on something on Raplet to, to, to bring that to the world, like where anyone can become a machine learning researcher

• 22:59Amjad Masad?

  or like any business owner who has data can like fine tune 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 gonna lead me to build a new business line for Raplet. It's just impossible, but I just followed something that I was interested in and it kind of resulted in, in, in something. And invariably, it does, at least for me. But even memes and culture, I, you know, 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.

• 23:43Erik Torenberg?

  You have an itch and you listen to the itch and sometimes the itch is build something, the itch is learn something. And a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they, you know, they learn, they over time to ignore, ignore in favor of, you know, 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 it.

• 24:00Amjad Masad?

  Is it helpful to?

• 24:02Erik Torenberg?

  I mean, not, not more than people do currently, but I think generally it's like, in order to lead, it's also helpful to know how to follow.

• 24:09Amjad Masad?

  Right.

• 24:09Erik Torenberg?

  But I think people spend their entire high school and, you know, and often college just learning how to follow. Just learning how to, you know, someone says something, you do it. And I think it'd be, yeah.

• 24:19Amjad Masad?

  My belief is that the future of companies is gonna 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.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Holacracy?

• 24:34Amjad Masad?

  Holacracy, Medium did that.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:37Amjad Masad?

  GitHub did the like no managers. They all kind of blew up in like spectacular ways. But, 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 A I can sort of judge your impact. And so 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.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny, because like I genuinely don't have an opinion about where it's gonna go, but I know it's gonna change, right? I know that, that everything we're doing now is just feels so different. And in starting the Academy, I've been spending all this time, you know, I've built the pitch deck in Raplet, thank you. And I've, you know, been using Claude and Chat G P T. 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 gonna change. It's gonna change a lot faster than you think.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And if you're not like natively understanding of it, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard to make that shift.

• 26:08Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. Yeah, or, or, or if you're learning the ways of the past.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:13Amjad Masad?

  Then you're kind of locked into a, a way of thinking and way of working that actually will put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Back to that following point, I, I do think learning how to follow is very important.

• 26:27Erik Torenberg?

  Let me, let me phrase it in a different way.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:28Erik Torenberg?

  Which is you want to be disagreeable enough such that you have interesting ideas, you're contrarian, you're, you're not just going through the motions, you're following your own curiosity. But you, we both know, all know people who are so disagreeable, they can't work with anybody.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:40Erik Torenberg?

  That there's just so alienating to people. So maybe another way of following, of just saying following it is more broader is, you know, 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.

• 26:53Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think there is this important thing of respecting the elders in a way, but, but also not, not fundamentally, truly understanding that they haven't figured everything out.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:14Amjad Masad?

  I, I do think respect is very important.

• 27:18Amjad Masad?

  Like going into a 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, as you can. So at Raplet, I, I named all the conference rooms after the, the greats in our industry in computer science and tech. We have a Mark Andreessen room, obviously, the inventor of the browser, you might know.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 27:47Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, we have like Linus Torvald, you know, Robert Noyce, all these people. And what I try to tell people at the company is like, we respect the past, but we're unapologetically going to change it. And people are gonna be mad at us. Like, I don't know if you remember, like 2025, I was like canceled for saying you should have learned how to code anymore. And now I talk to.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  That was only a year ago.

• 28:16Amjad Masad?

  A year ago. And now the same people that were like pointing against me, they're like, oh, I don't read code anymore. I just like prompted by code.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how many things I've been wrong about or right about that, you know, five, 10 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, you know, so I spend a little bit of time, my free time now, volunteering in local politics.

• 28:51Amjad Masad?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, 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, it's helped me in so many ways in business. The, the skills are extremely transferable in both directions.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  The percent likelihood that that $50,000 will land in your bank account is somewhere in the 20 to 50% range. After they've committed verbally, right? So verbal commitments don't have weight.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  In Silicon Valley,

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I think it's probably seventy-five to a hundred percent, depending on who you're talking to, who you are.

• 30:05Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And the difference in how you operate, like,

• 30:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:28Amjad Masad?

  Right.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And the reverse is also true. If you do not have trust, then all of a sudden, you're like, well,

• 30:39Speaker 01

  what if this donor is upset about this thing? Let me do this thing differently, blah, blah. 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.

• 30:57Amjad Masad?

  In what way?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  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. Like, you can't just go around being mean to everyone or lying. Or it's not that, you know, it's not that permissive.

• 31:25Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:44Amjad Masad?

  Let me ask you a question that might be tricky, but,

• 31:49Amjad Masad?

  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 Face Mash, which was like really controversial. Like, I hacked into our university.

• 32:06Amjad Masad?

  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.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, just to 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 a super mean to someone in front of everyone. You know, like, there are going to be rules, of course. Like, we have to create a culture of trust and positive sum.

• 32:34Amjad Masad?

  Right.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  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 therefore, a lot of these challenges, these things that people do, it's like, you want to build Face Mash, 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, that's how people are going to be.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:39Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I also think that there's an opportunity to funnel that drive to test the boundaries in a healthy way.

• 33:51Amjad Masad?

  I was reading this story the other day about, about a kid that hacked into some government thing and is like getting like two years in prison. And he was on an interview talking about how he learned to hack on, on Roblox. And apparently, there's like, like a big trend where people learn programming and hacking on Roblox. I was talking to Dave, the founder of Roblox. It was like, it'd be really cool to have a, some kind of sandbox for these people to play in and then discover talents and then funnel them into cybersecurity jobs.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:26Amjad Masad?

  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?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 34:56Erik Torenberg?

  And repurpose that talent, as you mentioned.

• 34:57Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I mean, one site I was really into growing up called Hack the Site. It was hackthesite.org. I don't know if it's still around. It's like a website that has vulnerabilities built in.

• 35:09Amjad Masad?

  Like, it's like Catcher in the Flap, right?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:12Amjad Masad?

  And so, like, I mean, I think we're kind of digging deep into one, one aspect of it. But like, you can have a bounty program in the university.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Or I can encourage the students to go do the bounty programs at all the other schools.

• 35:27Amjad Masad?

  Right.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  If, or all the other companies, because most companies have a bounty program.

• 35:31Amjad Masad?

  Yes.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 35:33Erik Torenberg?

  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 about the context and case by case. And the way to get discernment is by having reps and trusting the students to sort of fail on their own, to make decisions, to learn from it. You coined, you know, techno privilegeism on this podcast. The thing I'll coin is meta-retard maxing. When to retard max versus when to, like, when to go on pure instinct versus when, when to sort of, like, when that will drive you into, into trouble. And I think it really relates to like, when there's asymmetric upside versus asymmetric downside. You kind of need reps.

• 36:17Erik Torenberg?

  And I think that's a lot of what project-based learning is, or just giving people more control over their time is the idea of, of just giving them more opportunities to choose a path, succeed, fail, learn from it.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:31Erik Torenberg?

  Here's my last question. There's some people who would say something like, hey, you know, you know, remember when Tio launched his fellowship and a lot of people were mad at it? They were like, college, you learn how to be a good person. Like, it's something beyond this, 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 eighteen year, you're becoming a person. And so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how we see sort of in the Bay Area, in this environment that is both, you know, hyper 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?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's actually interesting. So I've traveled all over the world. I've, I would like to think, you know, I've been to refugee camps. I've been to, you know, billionaires' houses. I have met people from every, I've been out of drugs.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  I,

• 37:31Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 37:56Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And interpersonal skills is an absolute pillar of the academy. Like, we want, we want our, you know, 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 sum 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

• 38:42Speaker 01

  that I think many people don't pay attention to, but is very much here in, in, in San Francisco.

• 38:50Amjad Masad?

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

• 39:27Amjad Masad?

  And maybe at some point, it paid off. Like, I remember there's Sequoia blog post about SBF. That's like gold. They deleted it. You can find it on archive.org.

• 39:40Amjad Masad?

  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 in many ways. 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 Dvarkes Block List. And I criticized Dvarkes for the language. And it's like, people who don't understand this technology,

• 40:22Amjad Masad?

  they're gonna, they're not, that block post, in my opinion, did not create more understanding in them. But actually, it probably, if you don't understand it, probably, you know, you learned the wrong lessons from that thing. And so I think it's important that we create, this academy creates well-adjusted adults that can only speak in group language, which is important, but can, you know, can eventually be in front of Congress.

• 40:58Erik Torenberg?

  Is there anything, lastly, you want to say about sort of like cultivation of values or like the sort of 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?

• 41:14Amjad Masad?

  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.

• 41:25Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Amjad Masad?

  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 widely 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 from Aristotle. And then, and the idea is that actually don't like,

• 42:10Amjad Masad?

  I should act in a way that I would 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 and the right way. But all of this to say is that I think there is there is value in the liberal arts and kind of reading some of this stuff

• 42:53Amjad Masad?

  and trying to understand how you feel about how you want to act and how you want to present yourself.

• 42:59Erik Torenberg?

  One thing that just made me more sympathetic to to your 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 world that is, you know, or a whole philosophy that is rigid in a world that is changing.

• 43:18Amjad Masad?

  Right. And weirdly, the opposite is true as well, where you can't be a consequential utilitarian 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 like ground principle, ground truths that you hold dearly and they should be as axiomatic as small as possible.

• 43:55Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. In closing, we're grateful for your support of the academy. We're excited to have people building on Replit, potentially interning Replit, 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 gotta, you know, 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? Or what are you looking for in young talent?

• 44:21Amjad Masad?

  I think the first thing is that they dove really deep in something that can teach me something.

• 44:26Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Amjad Masad?

  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 project you've done and you've gone really, really deep in it, I think that's always impressive because that's what most people lack. And most people get bored easily. Most people, you know, do the traditional thing. But did you actually follow a thread all the way through? That's always really impressive and that shows all sorts of good personality traits.

• 45:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Amjad Masad?

  Persistence, intrinsic motivation. You might be doing something that is really, you're following your curiosity and maybe it doesn't have an immediate reward. And I think that, you know, like you said, I mean, being contrarian, having really important opinions. But it's very easy, if you're smart and if you're young and smart, to think everyone's an idiot.

• 45:38Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Amjad Masad?

  Including me. Like, you know, I'll see young people and I was like, like, they'll talk to you like I don't understand anything. But I think it's important to respect respect to the person that you're talking to. Having good interpersonal skills. I think it's important. Otherwise, people don't want to be around you. I think that's important.

• 46:01Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. Yeah, I think it's both not being afraid to spike in something. Like, a lot of people just show up because they're too, you know, broad in everything but not really amazing at anything.

• 46:09Amjad Masad?

  Right.

• 46:10Erik Torenberg?

  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 interpersonal skills or just sort of like the right.

• 46:21Amjad Masad?

  Be likable.

• 46:22Erik Torenberg?

  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.

• 46:33Amjad Masad?

  But the most endearing thing is you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting.

• 46:37Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Awesome. On the job. Thanks for.

• 46:41Amjad Masad?

  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

• 46:45Speaker 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 a 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.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  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 this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.