The Question of Education

with @pmarca @zoink A wide-ranging Q&A all about education, from the purpose, past, and present of education; the economics of education (student loans & the debt crisis, government funding, cost disease, accreditation capture); tradeoffs of "hard" and "soft" degrees; and whether or not to drop out and go straight to field or startup. What's the best advice for students and others contemplating change in their careers... how do you get noticed?

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

• 0:00Sonal?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z Podcast. Today's episode is all about education. It's based on a conversation that took place last month between Marc Andreessen and Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, as part of an interview series they hosted for Back to School. And we're running it here as part of our post-Labor Day Back to School Week theme with Mark. Earlier this week, we also ran another Q and A he did on productivity, scheduling, reading habits, and more. This Q and A, which originally appeared as a video, covers the purpose, past and present of education, briefly touching on the current pandemic and its impact. It goes into the costs and economics of education, everything from student loans and

• 0:40Sonal?

  the debt crisis, government funding, industry cost disease, credentialing and accreditation capture, and more, to the trade offs of what's often been described as hard and soft degrees when it comes to making money and assessing skills objectively, to finally sharing lots of advice for students and others contemplating change in their careers, and especially how to show your work and get noticed. Well, throughout the episode, threading the tricky question of what to make of those who have considered dropping out, delaying, or skipping school to go straight to field work or startup. The conversation was actually inspired by students in the Figma Design Community who were contemplating the decision of whether to go back to school earlier this summer

• 1:22Sonal?

  and as part of their broader and free program to help make design accessible to all. For links to Figma's community of students and other resources, please see the show notes and go to figma.com/education. For more in our education series and archives, you can go to a6andz.com/education.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Well, let's start off with an easy one. What's the purpose of college?

• 1:46Marc Andreessen?

  Well, there's the overt purpose of college, and then there's the actual purpose of college. So, I mean, the overt purpose of college is fairly obvious. It's sort of this bundle of services. And it's, you know, the bundle basically is like, you know, some level of sort of some level of actual education slash skills training. We'll probably talk a lot about that today. And then it's, you know, basically this kind of four-year kind of, you know, adventure for young adults, you know, where they get to, you know, in theory, socialize with their peers and so forth, form networks. And then it's, you know, it's a dating service. It's a real, it's a real-life Tinder experience, Tinder LARPing, maybe.

• 2:24Marc Andreessen?

  And it's, you know, you know, and then it's a, it's a giant sports complex, you know, generally attached to a hedge fund in the form of the endowment. So it's, it's like some bundle of services. It's obviously the brand plays, that plays a big role. It's obviously a very important credential in today's society. That's the overt purpose. The sort of, you know, slightly more cynical view is that there is sort of an implicit purpose, which basically is, it's, it's basically, it's basically the way employers delegate personality testing that to, to somebody else. And basically, so they basically don't get in trouble for it. So in the, in the old days, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, employers used to actually do personality testing. And so if you applied for a job at Hewlett Packard as an example, or one of the big companies at the time, you would actually take like a battery of personality tests and they would actually test, they

• 3:09Marc Andreessen?

  would test your IQ, they test for intelligence, and then they would test for personality traits. And they'd be fundamentally trying to get to, in particular, they, they were trying to get to a personality trait called conscientiousness, which basically is sort of what it says, but it's basically like, you know, are you a self-starter? Like, there's actually two sides to conscientiousness. There's what's called industriousness, which basically is energy, self, basically being self-propelled. Then there's orderliness, which is basically attention to detail. So they're kind of trying to capture some set of both of those. It became some combination of kind of socially undesirable and illegal for employers to do those tests. And so basically those, the, the current theory kind of is that those have been outsourced to the colleges. And then, so basically, the implicit purpose of college, number one is, basically, it's an IQ test in the way in, in the form of

• 3:51Marc Andreessen?

  the SAT or the ACT. And then the other part is of colleges, what's called, they call it the sheepskin effect, which is basically the fact that you prove that you can actually finish the program. Yep. And that basically, it's basically an applied test of conscientiousness, this personality trait called conscientiousness, which basically is, basically, it's a predictive thing. If you can finish a four-year college degree, it is believed by employers that that is suggestive, that you can also finish many other tasks, that you'll be a responsible worker. The reason we know that's the case is because of what's called the sheepskin effect, which is somebody who goes to college for seven out of eight semesters does not receive seven eighths of the income of somebody who goes for eight out of eight semesters. They receive half the income of somebody who goes for eight out of eight.

• 4:35Marc Andreessen?

  And so there's basically the sheepskin effect is either that last semester is responsible for a full half of the skills and education that you receive while you're in college, or the skills and education are somewhat beside the point, they're just trying to see whether you can get over that four-year hurdle. And so the sheepskin effect is what psychologists refer to, or education experts kind of refer to, is like, it's basically the proof that you were able to complete the program. And so, anyway, then if you're an employer, this is why employers have indexed, right, so much on college degrees over the last thirty or forty years, is because it's just, it's the easy way to say, smart kid, can finish his work, done.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  So, when should someone go to college?

• 5:08Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so, I'm a believer, so I'm a pragmatist, and we'll have, you know, multiple, I think, parts of this conversation today, but I'm a pragmatist at heart. So my view is like, you basically, you have to, at the individual level, you should take the system kind of as it's constructed, like, you shouldn't try to like, fight to like, basically overturn the system, starting at eighteen, like, you should get in a position of maybe power and authority before you do that. And so, I'm a big believer, it's like, the system as it is today, American employers are very, very heavily, and Western employers generally are very, very heavily focused on college graduates. In fact, one of the really weird things that's happened in the economy that probably is a bad thing, but it has happened, is that there are just, there's been a steady increase in the percentage of jobs that actually require bachelor's degrees, including for jobs where you would think it wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't need that kind of requirement, but

• 5:52Marc Andreessen?

  it's just, it's because of how the system is evolved, that's kind of where we are. And so, so I think it's actually quite dangerous to give somebody the, somebody as an individual, the advice, don't go to college, like, in the current system that we have, that's basically saying, don't prove that you're smart, don't prove that you're industrious and conscientious, and then basically be prepared to settle for fundamentally lower income for the rest of your life, and I think that's extremely dangerous advice. So, so the general advice is basically, if you can go to college, go to college. That said, I think it's worth being very aware, right, of basically what that actually means, right? And we already discussed, you know, some of that in terms of like, what you're actually proving. And so, for example, if you go to college, the general best advice is, finish college, right? And as you know, like, one of the things that we've kind of fetishized a little bit

• 6:36Marc Andreessen?

  in Silicon Valley over the last, you know, twenty years, is basically this idea that dropping out, right?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been a benefit of, probably, to be very clear.

• 6:43Marc Andreessen?

  That's right. And so basically, like, again, it is true that, like, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people dropped out of college. It's also true that that's very bad advice for most people. Most of us, it turns out, aren't Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. And so, like, generally speaking, go to college, finish college. That said, be aware of what's happening. And then the other thing, which hopefully we'll talk about at length, but like, we sort of have this tendency in the public discussion in colleges, talk about, like, going to college. And we're already doing that. But it's like, okay, there's two big loaded kind of dependencies in there, which is, one is which school, right, matters like enormously. And then the other is which major? Which matters enormously. And I think there's, you want to kind of think about like a two by two matrix of majors and schools. And the outcomes are wildly different, depending on where you land in that matrix. Break down that.

• 7:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So basically, I think people focus way too much on whether to go to college. They don't spend nearly enough time focusing on what school and what major. And so basically, and here's where things get like super interesting. So basically, what you see is that for the sort of hard disciplines of like engineering and math, it actually turns out there's a fairly flat distribution of income by rank of college. And so generally speaking, if you go get like a, you know, electrical engineering degree, or a CS degree, or a math degree, and then you look at kind of earnings over time, that, you know, you get, you do somewhat better if you go to a school that's kind of high up the rankings. But you do fundamentally more or less the same over time across all the schools, which is like, an engineering degree is an engineering degree.

• 8:10Marc Andreessen?

  And like, electrical engineers, or computer scientists, or programmers, or whatever, you know, to the extent that they're kind of always in demand, like, there's a market clearing wage for that skill set. And it kind of doesn't matter. Now, there are certain employers where they, like, will only hire people out of certain top engineering programs. But like, most employers across the economy hire out of very broad range of schools. And so, so like, anyway, so those are like the hard disciplines. We'll talk more about that. Then there's sort of the soft disciplines. And this is sort of, you know, kind of liberal arts humanities, you know, kind of all of the, you know, kind of all, you know, sort of, I'm going to say BA versus BS, right? So the BS degrees are like the hard degrees, the hard, the hard science and math and, and, and, and engineering degrees. The BA degrees, Bachelor of Arts, are usually the software, you know, sociology, or English Lit, or, you know, philosophy, or, you know,

• 8:53Marc Andreessen?

  a lot of these, you know, kind of humanities, liberal arts kinds of things. For those, there is a dramatic curve, which is you get paid much more with those degrees coming out of a top school than you do coming out of the average school or a lower rank school. To the point where you really kind of got to ask the question like, is a sociology degree from like, you know, the, from the lower two thirds of colleges, like, is it, at this point, is it actually worth anything? And the answer, you know, the answer there might actually well be, it may not be worth anything. Like, there, there may just simply not be jobs for those people who have that degree from, from those schools. And the, the, the, the conventional explanation for that, people could have different theories on this, the, the conventional explanation that the education experts kind of believe is that, um, basically, um, for the soft degrees, they're, like, for the hard degrees, there's definitely a skill, like, can you design a circuit or not? Can you solve an equation or not?

• 9:38Marc Andreessen?

  Can you write a computer program or not? For the kind of soft degrees, liberal arts humanities, everything's a little bit, you know, more open interpretation, you know, like, good essay versus bad essay kind of thing, it's a little bit more in the eye of the beholder. Um, and so, basically, the theory is that if you get one of those degrees from a top school, you also get the network.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  So, from an investment standpoint, if you're looking for ROI, you should, at any school, it sounds like, uh, hard sciences, you're saying, good investment, uh, sort of softer sciences or, or humanities, a bad investment unless you're going to a top-tier school.

• 10:12Marc Andreessen?

  Well, yeah, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And of course, this, this, this begs of, I can hear the howling kind of in the, in the, in the, in the audience already on this topic, like, this, this begs the question, right, of like, what is the purpose of a college education? Um, I would just say this, where I come from, which is like rural Wisconsin, it was just sort of obvious, which is the, the college, the entire point of a college education is the income that you make after you get the, after you, after you get, you get the degree. And so, I was, as a kid, like, I was never confused about that, right? And then the idea that there are all these intangible kind of things, um, about like, you know, whatever, social this and that, and, you know, kind of the, the, all the other, you know, I would say aspirationally, right, what the liberal arts people will say is, it's about how to live a good life, and it's about how to have the right values, and it's about how to this, you know, become like aware of the world and all these things. And like, and again, I've, I've tried not to take a position on that, you could, you could believe either sides of that.

• 10:56Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so, maybe, my point is, like, maybe there are non-economic reasons to get a liberal arts degree, and maybe there are non-economic reasons to get a liberal arts degree even at a college that's not top-tier. Uh, however... Even if you believe that, you should go into that eyes open of what the economic result of that is likely to be. And the economic result of a liberal arts degree from a lower end college is not likely to be what people think it is. And by the way, this factors, you know, this this factors then directly into the whole kind of concept of the student loan crisis, which is like a huge, basically, the student loan crisis is basically a two part crisis. But the the part of it is just like the most kind of, you know, kind of honestly tragic is basically kids that realize too late that they're getting the wrong degrees and or from the wrong school. And then they just don't have the income to be able to service the degree. And I and I think in that case, like, it's basically

• 11:41Marc Andreessen?

  like that. That's the part of the college system that like, honestly enrages me because I think it's basically taking advantage of naive kids and naive parents who basically have been sold this concept that colleges is good, even when that's not always the case.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  So if you were president of the United States, total control of Congress, you know, scary, but if you were, and you could do anything to address student loan crisis, what would you do?

• 12:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so first, I would resign instantly, which I think honestly would be That was off the table. Only responsible thing to do. Well, look, this is starting to so there I forget what it was. I think it's the governor of Kentucky, if I recall correctly, one of the governors a while ago came out because, you know, these are all, there's a big state level kind of component to this because they're all these state, you know, there are all these state colleges, universities that the state subsidizes for these states, excuse me, subsidized. And so I forget, I think it was Kentucky, the governor of Kentucky, I think, came out and basically said, like, we need to stop, basically, it's time for these state schools to stop teaching like liberal arts. Like, it's just not an economically like valid proposition. Because like, the degrees aren't worth as much. And, you know, of course, that that generated, I don't know, I don't know if he's followed through on that because that generated huge controversy because people people hate to hear that. But,

• 12:44Marc Andreessen?

  you know, look, at some point, that has, look, at some point, you have to have a question about value given, value received. In particular, look, I think people should be able to buy and pay for anything that they want. Like, you know, people want to go get whatever degree they want, and they want to pay for it, I'm all in favor. But like, we do have this like federal loan program, that is just basically is this monotonically increasing pile of debt. And, and by the way, like, the student loan program is like, it's this, it's basically this, it's this load, right, of like, trillions of dollars of debt on the American taxpayer. And so there's like, one question there. And then there's the other, like, impact on the students themselves, which is like, student loan debt, at least today, student loan debt is the one form of debt that you don't, can't discharge through personal bankruptcy. Right, and so these students aren't just basically getting victimized on behalf of society. They're also getting victimized like personally.

• 13:27Marc Andreessen?

  And it's like causing, you know, big, you know, especially this newer generation last 20 years. Like, there's a lot of kids running around like they've been very damaged by this. And so I think fundamentally, like, I think there has to be, at some point, there has to be the honest discussion about value given, value received, and then, and then the other side of it, which we might talk about. The other side of it is there, there has to be some examination into how we got a system that ended up with this kind of adverse outcome. And I, I think I know why that is, um, which is it's, it's a cartel. Um, uh, it's a government kind of sponsored cartel, and I think cartels are bad. And I think we need to kind of fundamentally reconsider the system, but.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  You can't just drop that without going into that. So what, what do you mean it's a cartel?

• 14:02Marc Andreessen?

  So viewed through an economic lens, um, so K through 12 in the US, right, is the monopoly, right? Um, and it's just a government, it's just a flat out government monopoly. It exhibits all of the.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  School and they have no option. It's compulsory education.

• 14:13Marc Andreessen?

  It's, it's literally compulsory, it's captive audience, it's compulsory education. It's, it's basically state, state, it's directly state funded, it's state run. You know, these are, these are government institutions, these are government schools. It shouldn't be called public schools, it should be called government schools, which is what they are. Right? Um, and so, you know, it's, it's, it's the government running a school, just like the government would be running a restaurant. Right? Um, you know, the question I always want to ask on these things is, how would you feel about eating government sushi?

• 14:36Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And then, you know, equivalently, how do you, you know, how would you feel about, you know, how would you feel? How would you feel if the Department of Transportation started making cars?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:43Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Would you, would you want to drive the official US government DOT manufacture, design and manufacture an automobile? Like, is that an attractive property? Do you think that would be a safe thing to do on the freeway? Right? Uh, you know, to the DM, the DMV, think about the DMV designing cars, right? And so like, basically, we, we have decided that like, we, we don't let the government, you know, make sushi. And we don't like the government make cars, but we let the government make schools. And we expect that we're going to get better results. And of course, we don't get better results because of course we don't. And the reason we don't is because it's monopoly. Right? And the motto, the motto of any monopoly, right, the motto of any monopoly is we don't care because we don't have to. Right? Like, it, it's just like the, the, the needs of the customers like don't matter at all to the monopoly. That's, that's the whole problem of monopoly. It's okay through 12 is a monopoly. It exhibits all those, all those characteristics.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And just to pause for a moment before we go on to non K through 12.

• 15:26Marc Andreessen?

  Sure.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Uh, what data would you point to that says that, because a lot of listeners are probably going, okay, well, I actually had a great K through 12 experience. What data would you point to that says, okay, K through 12 doesn't work?

• 15:35Marc Andreessen?

  Oh yeah, well, it's just spiraling prices, spiraling costs. So the great myth is that we've somehow slashed the funding for public education in the US over the last forty years. Like, that's just like false. We've like greatly expanded it. And so like the load per student, the dollars per student in real economic terms in the last like forty years, it's something like tripled in the US. And the results haven't moved at all. Like, they're just flat, right? And so massive price increase, no quality increase. Like monopoly, right? Like, yes, like, that's what you get. If somebody had a monopoly on cheese, that's the same thing you would get. You would get the same cheese every year, and it would cost more every year, right? And so it's the exact same thing. Now, and look, it is already saying like people get what they want.

• 16:14Marc Andreessen?

  If people are happy with the result, then, you know, fair enough. Like, if people are fine with this level of quality, then fair enough. And if they're fine paying more every year, fair enough. And they're fine, if they're fine having, you know, their taxes, taxes go up consequently, like, you know, fair enough. But like, that is the result of a monopoly. Is that that's the case.

• 16:32Marc Andreessen?

  For colleges, it's different. It's not, the government doesn't actually own or run the colleges, but it's a cartel. It's an oligopoly is the technical term. But when you think about it, it's a cartel. And it's a government orchestrated and blessed and sponsored and funded cartel. And this is really important. So there's basically, there's four basically streams of money effectively that end up going to the universities that are in the cartel. All the current universities. Well, so the state universities get like direct funding, right, from the states. But then there's the other funding to the state institutions. Then there's the funding to the so-called private institutions. It's air quotes, for those of you listening on a podcast version. And it's basically, number one, it's the student loan subsidies, right? And so none of these institutions would be viable, right?

• 17:16Marc Andreessen?

  If they had to provide their own financing, which is why you've got this federal, massive federal student loan program. And access to the federal student loan is based on accreditation, and the accreditation is run by the government, is enforced by the government. And so it's basically like, the challenge, the thought experiment would be try to start a new college today in the US and try to get it accredited to be able to get access to the federal student loan program. And like, I haven't tried to do that. I don't know, you know, do I say, the odds of success in that are quite low. Because the existing universities would view that as new competition, and they'd try to kill it. They tried to make sure it couldn't get access to federal funding. That's one. Second is there's all the federal research funding, right? And so for all these schools that do like science and engineering, there's always two sides. There's the teaching side and there's the research side.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:55Marc Andreessen?

  And so there's all the federal research funding. And again, that's a cartel. And then there's

• 18:01Speaker 01

  People in the government are, they are only going to give grants to people that they know or programs they know?

• 18:07Marc Andreessen?

  Well, they're either only going to do that because like that's that's sort of the reinforcing loop. And there's like a revolving door of kind of who runs these programs also that we could talk about. It's kind of the standard form of kind of implicit corruption that happens with these kinds of systems. But then there's also like, can you, I don't actually even know the details, but like, can you actually get research funding if you're not an accredited institution? Like, can the NSF actually issue the grants? And I don't know whether that's the case or not, but I wouldn't be shocked if they literally can't do it. Or if a bunch of people all of a sudden try to get access to that grant money, that they would put that rule in place. And so it's basically, I mean, look, here's the thought experiment. Like, what was the last major new research university that was created in the United States?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Not sure. Yeah.

• 18:45Marc Andreessen?

  Nobody knows. Because it's been so long, right? Like, it's been, I don't know. Like, I actually honestly don't know. It might be Stanford. Like, if Stanford was 1890, like, has there been one since 1890? Like, I don't know. And so like, that just kind of tells you, like, the market, the market, it's not a properly functioning market. Like, if there hasn't been a new entrant in 100 years, like, the market's not functioning properly. I mean, even in the car industry, we have Tesla, right? Like, you know, like, I think at some point, come on, like, somebody's, somebody's. And look, people have tried this, but like, it's indicative of how hard it is to do it, that there haven't been, they haven't been

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And then research funding?

• 19:20Marc Andreessen?

  Research funding. And then there's two forms of tax breaks. These institutions are all allowed to run as nonprofits. Which is a very specific kind of blessing that the government gives them. And there's two forms of tax breaks. There's tax breaks that are allowed to run nonprofit at the operating level. And they're allowed to run their endowments, invest them on a nonprofit basis. And so they not only have, they not only do not have to pay taxes on their actual operating income, they also don't have to pay taxes on their investment income. And again, like try, try to get a new university in place and not only get access to the first two that we talked about, but also get access to these tax braces nonprofit. And by the way, you just go to these universities now, these are big businesses, right? These are like, you know, they run these like giant sports programs, right? That like have like, you know, national audiences, they run these giant endowments, you know, that happens.

• 20:04Marc Andreessen?

  You know, some of these endowments are now thirty, forty billion dollars big, right? These are like, you know, huge hedge funds, you know, there's all these programs, there's like, you know, steadily rising, you know, kind of compensation to administration, there's, you know, all these things. And so like they have many of the hallmarks of a for-profit business, they just don't get taxed like one.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:19Marc Andreessen?

  And so anyway, so it's just, and so basically, and then it's the accreditation cartel that kind of reinforces all that. And so it has all of the same basic characteristics that you would expect, you know? It's a slightly less worse form of monopoly.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  So basically, K through twelve monopoly college system is an oligopoly that is jockeying position and trying to increase status and rank. And then would you say that's like the pure explanation for why price outpaces inflation?

• 20:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So then, yeah, so this is exactly, so these, this then is the front. So basically, there's a very clear formula for basically skyrocketing prices, right? And just to kind of put the, put the, put the issue on the table, on the track that we're on right now, the price of a four-year college degree in the United States is on its way to a million dollars, right? At the, at the top institution, a million, well, at the top institutions, it's already cleared a quarter million, right? It's already over two hundred fifty thousand, right? And as you're pointing like, it's escalating much faster than inflation. It's, you know, escalating extremely rapidly. And so like you just, all you, all you just need to do, you can, we can, maybe we could link to some of the charts, but like you just, you just project out the chart, it's just this linear rise in prices over time, far faster than inflation. You're just like right, and you can just kind of pick the year when it crosses over a million dollars.

• 21:29Marc Andreessen?

  And so, so on the one hand, college, a four-year college degree is going to cost a million dollars. On the other hand, a hundred inch flat screen TV that you can watch Netflix and play video games on is dropping, and it will ultimately cost a hundred dollars.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 21:42Marc Andreessen?

  Right, and so this is the very clear like compare and contrast, which is basically right. The colleges are like the ultimate, basically monopoly oligopoly, as we discussed. Flat screen TVs are like the ultimate, what they call perfect competition, right? There's just like, there's just endless competition to drive down the price, increase the quality of those things. And so we're getting the exact results that we would expect from the systems that were built. We're just like really angry about it, right? Because like we, you know, we think it's unfair and unjust, but like it, the system is running as designed. In both directions, the economic system that we have is running as designed. Yeah, so, oh, so, so, so, yeah, so then you basically say, well, okay, why, why on earth is this? This price just keeps skyrocketing and it's basically just, it's basically supply, supply meets demand, like any market. And basically what the government does in education is just like what they do in healthcare. And it's just like what they do in housing, is they basically have a two-part strategy for managing these markets.

• 22:27Marc Andreessen?

  They restrict supply, right? So the fact that you can't build, as we discussed, like you basically practically speaking, can't build new colleges and universities in the same way anymore. And then, and then subsidizing supply causes price, oh, sorry, restricting supply causes prices to rise naturally, right? Because there's more kids that want to go to school than can get in, so prices rise. And then on the other side, because prices are rising, that creates political pressure, which they resolve by subsidizing demand. Right, with taxpayer funding. And so it's, which also causes prices to rise. And so what they're doing on the supply side is causing prices to rise. And what they're doing on the demand side is causing prices to rise. And so there's, there's, there's twin forces propelling prices to the moon. And there's no sign of anything that I can see anywhere in the system. I, I see nobody pushing back on this. No, I'm sorry, I see nobody in a position of power and authority pushing back on this.

• 23:12Marc Andreessen?

  So I expect it to continue indefinitely.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Very tempted to go into, just very briefly, the parallels to healthcare and housing. Because that's, that's kind of a new idea for me, that they are parallel to education. I know that they are, in some places, increasing also faster than inflation. But what do you mean in terms of government restricting supply and subsidizing demand for healthcare and for housing, just briefly?

• 23:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, so for housing, it's basically the same thing. So for housing, it's, and specifically, right, it's housing all the places where people really want to live, right? So this is not really an issue in like, you know, we're, you know, rural Wisconsin or like rural Arkansas or something like this. This is an issue in like San Francisco and New York and San Diego and Seattle and, you know, Austin and all the places where people, you know, all the places where there's like lots of economic opportunity. It's always the same housing policy and the housing policy is don't build housing. Right, like, again, it's basically, these cities are like local monopolies. These cities are local monopolies over their own geography. They've got their local employers and so their attitude towards, you know, taxpayers. What's that? Stakeholders in the form of taxpayers that. Yeah, yeah, and then you've got this kind of warp in the market where basically the people who participate in local government are the retirees. And so you get this, there's kind of this very deep inherent conservatism to city governments, even in these very liberal cities.

• 24:20Marc Andreessen?

  And so the result basically is that, basically, in these cities, they've largely outlawed the construction of new housing. Yep. And there was a, it was just a great example of this. There's a guy named Robert Reich, who used to be the Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, who's become this like firebrand liberal activist. He's like an AOC kind of type, and he's been like railing on the increased cost of housing. You know, and kind of in public, and somebody just found, he lives in Berkeley, because of course he lives in Berkeley. And he, somebody just found a letter he and his wife wrote to the local planning commission, basically attempting to kill a new housing development down the street from his house, on the grounds that it would ruin the historic character of his Berkeley neighborhood. Right, which is like, which is in a microcosm, basically, the mechanism by which these cities are all basically not building new housing.

• 25:05Marc Andreessen?

  You know, they say things like, we don't want to ruin the character, they say things like, you know, this and that, construction and traffic, all this stuff. What they actually mean is like, this city is ours, and like, we don't want more people to move here. And again, like, it's not. That's got a restricted supply. Yeah, and so basically, the governments, basically, the city-level governments, basically, just like, they don't permit new housing to get built. So just as an example, San Francisco is a city with a population a little under, just slightly under a million people. Annual budget, by the way, is thirteen billion dollars, which is amazing, if you think about what you're getting for your money there. And then they authorize the average year about six thousand new housing units total. Right, and so think, you know, think about your company, or think about Figma, right, which is San Francisco-based. Think about how many people you're hiring, like, and all of your peer companies are hiring, all the big companies are hiring. And then think about the idea there's only six thousand new housing units a year, like, what, you know? It's like, what do you think is going to happen to prices, right?

• 25:51Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. You go through the roof. And then, and again, because the price of housing rises so fast, because of the restricted supply, that creates pressure on the politicians, right, who need an answer to, like, what is the government going to do about that? And so their answer is to subsidize demand. And that's in the form of all the federal mortgage programs, right? And then, and then that ultimately, right, is what led to the 2008 financial crisis. And that continues, right? We continue to subsidize housing in the US. And so again, it's these, it's these twin forces both driving, driving prices to the, and then the exact same thing is, healthcare is the exact same system. And then here's the significance to this, which is just like, okay, think about for a second. It's like education, healthcare, housing. It's like, what do those things all have in common? Like, it's like, why those three? Because if you look at like the chart of prices, like those three are like the three outliers.

• 26:35Marc Andreessen?

  And actually, it turns out, those three, those are the three indicators of a successful, thriving middle class.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:41Marc Andreessen?

  Right? What does it mean? Like, what's the difference? What's the difference in a country like the US between being middle class and lower class? The difference is, I own a house, right? In a nice place, like in a nice neighborhood.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:51Marc Andreessen?

  Like, I am able to send my kids to like, good schools, both, you know, primary and secondary. And I'm able to get, I have health insurance. Like, those are like, the three markers of middle class success. And these are the three parts of the economy that the government has decided that we need to send prices to the moon.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so if I was listening to this in 2009, when I graduated from high school, my sort of reaction would be, screw this, I don't want to participate in the system.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Sounds like your advice from earlier on was, you might want to reconsider that.

• 27:22Marc Andreessen?

  You should definitely, as a newly-minted high school graduate, you should definitely participate in this hopelessly corrupt system.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Though, I mean, maybe this leads to COVID-19. How does COVID-19 change this? Is this the wrecking ball here?

• 27:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so COVID-19, COVID, COVID has a bunch of implications for this. So, there's a meme that's been going around the internet that basically says, you know, video streaming services, Netflix, $10 a month, Hulu, $5 a month, you know, whatever, HBO Max, $20 a month, Harvard, $60,000 a year.

• 27:57Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so, there's this, the first thing is just like, okay, we're about to find, like, to the extent that colleges actually can't reopen in person, which I think is actually honestly the case for this, this year. Like, a bunch of them are trying, but I think it's basically hopeless with what I'm seeing on the policy side, on the health side right now. Like, we're about to find out, like, this is a good test of, you know, I mentioned earlier, like, what are the potential sources of value of college? Like, if the source of value of college is what you learn, then presumably, it has the same value if it's being streamed over video. Right? Right? But because we have no reason to believe that that is the primary source of value, because of things like the sheepskin effect, like, it now really raises the question of like, okay, is a video streaming service that costs $70,000, even if it has a Harvard name attached, right? Or a Stanford name attached? Like, is that actually a thing? Right?

• 28:40Marc Andreessen?

  And so, that, that, that's like, a very big and important kind of stress point. There are two other really big and important, I would say, stress points on the system, though, that are surfacing really quickly, which is, one is, these institutions are not designed to run for a year or multiple years with like no revenue. Like, they just, even the ones with the endowments are not designed to run that way. And most colleges and universities don't have big endowments. Most of them run on annual budgets, annual cash flow. And so, how many colleges, there's whatever, 3,000 colleges and universities in the US, something, how many can survive with basically a year with no revenue, or with like greatly diminished revenue? And like, we're about to find out. And I don't know the answer to that, but there are predictions that this splits as many as two-thirds of them in economic peril. Yeah, so there's an economist named Noah Smith, and he writes for Bloomberg, and he's

• 29:23Marc Andreessen?

  an economist. He has been studying this. If you check his Twitter feed and his Bloomberg writings, he's been looking at this in quite a bit of detail, and he's very concerned about it. So he's, that's the best analysis I know. But like, there's quite a bit of concern. Also, Clay Christensen, who was the creator of the disruption theory, who passed away unfortunately recently, he wrote books and published a whole bunch of papers on what he viewed as sort of an impending storm in education. He unfortunately passed away kind of right before COVID, so we don't know what he would think today. But I think he was already bearish on the economic future of a lot of these institutions for all the reasons we've discussed. And I think he would, I think if he were with us, if you read his work, you can kind of extrapolate forward. So, so there's that. And then, and then there's the overseas student aspect of this, which is like, super interesting, right? Which is overseas students, and in particular, students from places like China, play a disproportionately

• 30:08Marc Andreessen?

  important role in American colleges and universities because they pay full freight. Yep. They don't get all the, they don't get all the federal student loan access, and they don't get all the scholarships. They pay full load. And the reason they pay full load is some combination of value. They want the degree. But also, it's the way, if you're a rich, you know, Chinese parent, it's the way to get your kid a visa. You can basically buy a visa by sending them to an American college. Yeah, it's shut down. Yeah. And if you like, literally can't get here because travel is shut down, right? Like, you know, and if, and, yeah, and you know, there's been this- Or a graduate student you're being sent back. Yeah, exactly. A hundred percent. So there's been this big wrestling match. The Trump administration actually moved to prohibit overseas, you know, basically students with these visas from actually staying in the US if they weren't actually physically going to. And there was a huge fight over that. Universities objected and all that. And like,

• 30:52Marc Andreessen?

  and again, this is one of the political issues I won't take a stance on, but like- To the extent that foreign students can't physically be here to be on campus, it does raise the question of whether that they will continue to enroll in these programs. Like, they of all people are, they are the presumably least likely to pay $70,000 for the video feed. I just put it that way.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:09Marc Andreessen?

  And they really were paying $70,000, like they were paying. And so if you look at the budgets of a lot of these colleges, like basically they're heavily dependent. They basically charge the foreign students full freight and then they basically, the domestic students are like the lost leader.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Domestic and foreign subsidies is what you're saying?

• 31:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, basically right. Yeah, exactly right, exactly. And so it's like if I'm, if I'm an administrator at one of these universities right now, and if I'm looking at a year of no foreign students and I'm looking at for a year of no physical campus, like, I don't know. By the way, also no sports program, right? So it's, it's, it's, yeah, no, so this is, this is what, this is what my old CFO used to call this, the shake and bake. Like, this is one of those moments in which everything has been thrown up in the air. And I think it's really, really unclear where this all ends. Now, by the way, the most, the most obvious thing that's gonna happen is just like a massive federal bailout. Right? And so the most, the obvious thing is just like the government will just decide to bail out the entire system because that's what the government does and of course the taxpayer will pay for it. And so maybe it will be okay in that sense. But, but again, like if there's like a massive federal bailout of all these colleges,

• 32:06Marc Andreessen?

  it, once again, it'll be like what happened with Wall Street in 2008. It'll just cause, it'll cause people to ask this question of like, wait a minute, like what are we paying for? And so I, I think that these, these topics, we will all get very dramatic over the next few years.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Would say that, you know, colleges are shutting down, people are not going as much. Do you see that, do you see that basically making us that degrees are equally valuable, more valuable or less valuable in 10 years, 20 years?

• 32:33Marc Andreessen?

  So very unclear, right, very unclear. Well, because there's, there's several dimensions to that question. Like, one is just like, do you, like, basically, do you believe there is such a thing as an online degree? Like, look, there, there's been remote learning for a long time. Like, there have been extension programs, like there, you know, night schools. And like, those degrees have never been worth the same. And so is the video version worth the same? Like, I would say unknown, but like, we're gonna find out.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:55Marc Andreessen?

  Like, it's, it's like an X-ray kind of test being applied to the system to see what's actually there. In a way that I personally, I'm very excited about like I'm, I think we should find out, but like we might not like the answer. So I think there's that question. By the way, the other interesting thing is in parallel, basically the, the SAT, ACT and GRE are all being ejected right now. They're all being basically pushed out of the system. And again, this is a political topic. I won't take a view on for the purpose of this discussion, but like there's the view, there's the view on the left that these, the standardized tests basically are biased and lead to, you know, sort of what they call a disproportionate outcomes. And so that to the extent that the theory that schools are an intelligence, that the admissions process is an intelligence test. To the extent that that is true, they're about to toss that out. Like they're just, they're just getting rid of that. Like, so the UC system has gotten rid of that.

• 33:39Marc Andreessen?

  Harvard has now dropped the GRE entrance exam for their physics program. Right. And so if they're not doing the GRE for the Harvard physics program, like they're just, it's going to be dumped across the board. And so like, that's also happening in real time. Yep. To the extent that college admissions was an IQ test that employers were relying on, that signal is also being erased right now. Is being deleted. And so we've got this kind of twin question kind of playing out in real time. Um, in terms of like what the app, and by the way, let's like, what's the value? Think about it from the employer's standpoint, like does the fact that somebody sat in front of a video stream for four years actually validate that like, you know, their conscientiousness like? It seems pretty conscientious to me. Well, it is unless, you know, I don't know, like, you know, it takes like 20 minutes to write a script that like moves the mouse right on a Mac. So they like fakes the fact that you're sitting there paying attention. So like, was that actually the,

• 34:23Marc Andreessen?

  was that actually the person or was that, you know, her zoom background?

• 34:27Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Like, that's not a question people have had to think about. And all of a sudden, like it's, it's a question. By the way, also this other fun thing is GPT three. So there's been this, uh, there's been a huge breakthrough this year in what's called natural language processing. And so there's this algorithm now uh, called GPT three that uh, basically will write, it'll basically, basically it can, it can basically write your, uh, your, uh, your entrance essay for you. Yeah, no. So it's like, okay, what kind of world are we living in? Like, what kind of world are we living in? If literally we're taking an educational format that was developed literally like when universities were first created, like it's like, but 800 years ago or something. 700, they were kind of standardized 500 years ago. I mean, university format was standardized before the printing press, right? Like it was basically, it's like, it's like, it's based on like, I don't know. It's like,

• 35:09Marc Andreessen?

  Old monasteries or something, right? And so like the idea that there is like, you know, the guy at the front of the room with like the 20 students and like there's, you know, talk, you know, meeting in person. Um, and then talking and then the way that they do the tests and all that stuff like, you know, in the new world, like, like, I mean, number one, would you ever build an education system today the same way with the technologies we have now? And obviously the answer is no, like you wouldn't build anything the same way. You build everything differently. But then there's the like, okay, we're now going to try to transplant this 500 year old model into these new technologies. In a way where we're not even going to be sure the people were actually sitting there, much less that they actually filled out the exam themselves or actually filled, or actually wrote the essay themselves. Like it is just going to, it's just increasingly going to provoke all these questions of like what the actual value is. And then aspirationally, you know, as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, like aspirationally, it means like this, this ought to be prime time for new models.

• 35:54Marc Andreessen?

  And we're, and we are, we maybe talk about those, but like, we are starting to see those emerge. We are starting to see alternatives emerge and some of them are very promising. Um, but like, I would say like, that we, we like to quote, uh, uh, uh, my partner and I like to quote Lenin, um, uh, uh, uh, as much as we can, um, because we're of course staunch capitalists. Uh, and it's funny, um, so Lenin once said about, he said, once said about social change. He said, uh, there are decades in which nothing happens. And then there are weeks within which decades happen.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Like on Twitter, I didn't know it was Lenin.

• 36:22Marc Andreessen?

  It was Lenin. Yeah. Yeah. And so, um, this feels like, this feels increasingly like there'll be more change in education and how we think about education and how we fund education. In the next five years than there have been in the last 50. And I think that's, I think it's going to be very distressing, but I think it's also exciting. And I think this might be prime time for, for new approaches.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  After decades or centuries of the same model perpetuating, we have a period of uncertainty and chaos. Um, for students that are looking at that and going, uh, maybe I should take a break from college and try that gap year or try some break or something, something else, some working, for example. You know, what would you advise them with if they are not going to subscribe to the view of like, just stick in, stick with it and, uh, get that degree?

• 37:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I was teasing Dylan in the run-up to doing the session, there's this concept of gap year, and I was teasing Dylan that like where I come from, there is no such concept. And so I've always thought gap year is like this rich kid thing, because like only rich kids can afford to take, like the whole idea of a gap year, oh great, a year of vacation, like boy, that's A lot of people use gap years to work, too. Okay, so then there's that, yeah, maybe it's a process of maturation, you could argue there's a process of maturation, maybe, or yeah, maybe stockpiling money to live on, and then of course, you know, there's countries like Israel where there's like mandatory military service, right? And so that's, you kind of get a, whatever it is, two-year gap year, whether you want it or not, right? And arguably, right, arguably, that's good, right, for a number of reasons, not least of which is maybe you're actually mature when you get into college, maybe you actually get more out of college, maybe you're two years older and maybe more disciplined and more motivated,

• 37:51Marc Andreessen?

  you know, kind of having been in the real world for a while. And so, yeah, so I can see all those arguments. And then I think there's the very specific form of that argument, which is the one that you bring up, which is like, okay, if I'm not willing to pay the X thousand dollars for the streaming service, like, okay, what should I do instead? And I think that is like, you know, obviously, the purpose of this video, but also like an incredibly compelling and important question. So a couple of things, so one is there are actually like new programs, and so the one, and I'm actually not invested in it, but like the guy who runs it is a friend of mine, so there's Lambda, there's this thing called Lambda, which is basically like an entirely new way to basically get, it's essentially the equivalent of a computer science bachelor's degree, basically in a year, with a different economic, with no loan, it's actually a free program, and then there's what's called the income share agreement. And so there's that program, which is well worth looking at, there's Udacity, which is

• 38:35Marc Andreessen?

  a company that we're involved in, that has sort of a nano credentialing approach, where you can kind of pick up skills, and there's credentials attached to them, and there's a bunch of employers that are very excited about those skills now. You know, there's Coursera, which is another company that's done a lot to push forward kind of online college education recently. And then there's all these existing kind of, like I said, extension programs and night school programs and so forth, that maybe all of a sudden are more relevant. There's kind of like all the new education methods, and so the thing to do might literally be to like do one of these other things instead, right? And so basically, like, take the year, and like, let's hypothetically, like, let's even say you're going to college for music or something like that, maybe take the year and go take the Udacity or Coursera or Lambda thing and basically become a computer scientist for the next year, right? And then basically, like, and then go back to school, finish your music degree, and now you're a musician who also knows computers. There are those kinds of options.

• 39:19Marc Andreessen?

  And then the other option is to actually build something, right? Which is where Figma comes in, but the way to think about that, so, take a brief digression on kind of how to think about that and come back to this gap year idea, so. So basically, like, one of the interesting things about the Internet is, basically, it turns out, one of the things that's becoming very clear is, there are actually, as far as the Internet is concerned, there are, like, actually, two kinds of professions. There are the professions that have the characteristic we call "you can show your work," right? And so, where I can, whatever it is that I do in my profession or in my field, I can actually show the results online in a way that's, like, very clear and compelling and, like, you know, sort of fully valid. And then there's the professions where, like, I just can't, like, it just doesn't make sense. So, like, and I would say, like, professions where it's hard to show your

• 40:03Marc Andreessen?

  work, like, heart surgeon is like a profession where it's hard to show your work, right? Like, you know, maybe you could, maybe you could get permission from the patient with HIPAA and everything else to stream a video of heart surgery, but, like, who can even evaluate that other than other heart surgeons? And I don't, like, that's not really how heart surgeons advance their careers. And then, I don't know, you know, you know, how would, you know, somebody doing, you know, there's lots and lots of fields, I won't pick on fields, but there's lots and lots of fields that might be lower value, in which it's really hard to show the work, or it's harder to see the value. But then you have these fields, and computer science has kind of always been the leading one on this, I would say, or maybe, like, writing has been the main one, but now computer science more recently, which is, like, this is the whole thing with, like, open source software, right? Like, open source software, like, you literally show your work, like, you write software code, and then the software code actually goes on the Internet, and everybody can see it, right? And you have, as you, as you, as you know well, but there's this system called

• 40:48Marc Andreessen?

  GitHub that a lot of people choose to use to kind of put their software, and then GitHub actually has, like, an internal ranking and rating system for software code and for programmers. And so, you can actually build a, you can build an actual professional reputation as a software developer on GitHub without ever actually being face-to-face with another human being. And so, there are people all over the world today who are basically taking advantage of this, you know, to be able to basically build these incredible track records as a software developer, make themselves more employable, right? Because the employers, and, like, my venture firm, like, we recommend that our employers basically spend as much time on GitHub looking for good programmers as they do on LinkedIn, or as they do going to, to, to, like, you know, college, you know, college, college fairs or whatever. And so, it's like, software development, you can show your work, obviously, creative writing, anything that involves, you know, written expression, you can show your work. You know, increasingly, by the way, the performing arts, you know, video, music, right, all these

• 41:33Marc Andreessen?

  things, animation, you can show your work, you know, basically for free, which didn't used to be the, I mean, it used to be, if you were, like, going to be a professional animator or something, you might make a short film in, like, you know, film school, but, like, you'd have to get that, like, short film put, like, on this, like, weird conference circuit and exhibited to, you know, convention circuit, and it'd be exhibited to, like, eighteen people, you know, at, like, midnight or something, and now you can, like, put it on YouTube. And, like, you know, if it takes, all of a sudden, you're, you know, you actually just, like, literally become, like, a star, uh, based on it. And then that has real professional credentials, um, you know, kind of attached to it. And then there's like, then there's everything like Figma gets it, then there's sort of all aspects of design, right? And so basically, basically all aspects of design, both the creative forms of design and then also the engineering forms of design.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:11Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so if, there's a real argument that this should be prime time for people who have the kinds of skills where they can show their work to basically buckle down and make something.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  But take maybe in build a portfolio instead of, uh, seeing on Zoom classes perhaps?

• 42:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and then, and then basically like in some fields of like design, it may be literally a portfolio. It may be literally the design portfolio. Um, and then it may also be actually build a working product. Right? Um, so actually like design and build a software application like all the way to completion, right? Or, or by the way, or join a startup, right? The, the way this is as a team, join a startup or form a startup, right? Um, and basically have like, you know, you know, get together with like your, you know, your four friends or meet four people on the internet who are also interested in the same thing or, you know, whatever, or through a Figma user group or something. And then all of a sudden you like have a joint project and you're, you're able to, you know, and you, you literally may never, it's a great thing about the internet. You may never meet, right? Like you, you may never physically meet, but it's actually feasible now to actually do the work, potentially all the way to completion and then really show it off. And this is just, this is like an avenue for career success that just literally was like basically impossible.

• 43:10Marc Andreessen?

  You know, 20 years ago, it's actually interesting in the creative arts, um, I don't, if you don't know the story, uh, South, this is actually South Park. This is actually the story of South Park. Uh, so South Park was the first viral internet video. Um, this is actually, this is actually a big, this is actually really funny. So, um, uh, Trey Stone and Matt Parker in 1993. And there was no video on the internet in 1993. Um, it was like a brand new idea to do that. They were these, I don't know, whatever, art school kids or whatever. They got hired by an executive, a Hollywood executive to make basically a funny and very dirty, um, basically Christmas card, Christmas card video. Um, and literally using cardboard, cardboard animation. And it was, you know, it was literally the kids, the characters in South Park. And it was just this like really filthy little cartoon. Um, and it went like super viral on the internet in like 1993.

• 43:52Marc Andreessen?

  And it was like another whatever, I don't know. It was like, that was what? That was 10 years before YouTube, right? That they did this, but it went viral literally as a quick time download. And then literally based on that video, they got the contract to make South Park the TV show, which has now been on the air for like 20 years. Mm hmm. And it's, you know, it's giganticly successful. And so like they in a lot of ways were like the origin story for this kind of thing. And I, and that, that's the kind of idea where it feels like we're still on the very front end of that. Well, it's like the best career advice in the world. Okay. So the, the best book on, on a career advice that's ever been written is Steve Martin wrote his autobiography and it's called Born Standing Up. And he's basically said the entirety of all career advice that you can ever get basically distills down to one thing, which he says, be so good they can't ignore you. Mm hmm. Right?

• 44:37Marc Andreessen?

  It's basically, it's just like everything else washes out. It's just like the work is so good that like they, they can't resist. They have to hire you. They have to get you under contract. They have to whatever it takes. And so that, you know, for people, for people with talent, and there are a lot of people with talent in the world, you know, basically like, like show it off, like be, be so good they can't ignore you.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  One thing that I hear from a lot of students who are considering taking some time away from college, whether it's working or building their portfolio or all these examples of work, you know, thinking about alternative approaches to education is, okay, well, I don't love the idea of going on Zoom classes all day long, but I also don't love the idea, you know, unstructured time because I'm not somebody that has a lot of structure to myself and not very disciplined. And, you know, college is a way for me to surround myself with people that are inspiring me, that are encouraging me to progress in this way. As somebody who is like extremely intellectually curious, very disciplined about your time, what, what tips do you have for students around that topic?

• 45:32Marc Andreessen?

  Ah, okay. So there's, there's the big, there's, there's actually been a breakthrough on this front. It's called Google Calendar. So, so we talked earlier, we talked earlier about, there's actually, this actually gets into psychology. This is very interesting. So there's this personality trait called conscientiousness. It has what are called two facets, which is there's industriousness, which is raw energy. And a lot of people have, you know, a lot of people, the kind of people you're talking about, a lot of people end up in college have a lot of industriousness. But then there's the other side of it, which is orderliness, right? Which is basically like, do you line up against basically expectations, right? And so like, and literally it's orderliness is like, it's like a core part of your personality where it's like, do you make your own bed in the morning, right? Do you like wash your dishes after you have a meal, right? Like is your house like kept up? Is your lawn kept up? Is your car clean, right?

• 46:15Marc Andreessen?

  And like a lot of people, like, by the way, including me, like listening to, a lot of people listen to the video and like, oh shit, like, you know, my car's a mess. Right, like if your car is a mess, like you probably are like low, low orderliness. Because it like honestly, it doesn't take that much time to like keep your car neat, right? So it's, it's like, it's like a basic, or your, or your bedroom needs, so it's like a base, it's a basic test. And so you've got a lot of people basically who are, for the, for this question, a lot of people who are like, they're smart and they're creative, right? And they're actually industrious and they're ambitious and aggressive and they want to do things. Um, but they're just not, they're just not, they're just not inherently all that orderly. And like you said, basically, one of the things the college does is it basically opposes the structure. It basically can paper, and by the way, a job does this also, right? Job, job can pose orderliness also. Um, you know, with things like schedules and deadlines and things like that. And so, yeah, so there, there is this like fundamental challenge, which is now you're on your own.

• 46:58Marc Andreessen?

  Like basically, what, what basically is your, is your proxy for whatever level of orderliness, orderliness you don't naturally have? And most of us don't have enough. And by the way, I include myself, like me without a calendar is a disaster. So like I, I include, I include myself in this and my, my, my, my current bedroom, it left to its own devices are both just disasters also. So like I, I sympathize with this. Um, and so literally the best advice I've ever gotten is literally, it's literally Google Calendar. And so it's literally, you know, pick your choice, but like Google's, Google's a good one and it's free. Um, and basically the, the best advice basically is schedule everything. Yeah. Right? And again, this is the part where everybody immediately starts howling because they're just like, oh my God, that's the opposite of how I want to live. But it actually turns out the answer is actually schedule everything. And here's the key is you start by scheduling all the stuff that you actually want to do. Right? So you start by scheduling your free time, right?

• 47:41Marc Andreessen?

  And so it's like, I'm not going to work from whatever, like for me, it's like, I'm not going to work from like seven to eleven at night. Okay, seven to eleven at night are free time. Like that's just how they're scheduled. Right? But then I also schedule 11:00 PM bedtime, right? Like, so that's like, you know, and then there's that. And then I schedule wake up time and then I schedule, okay, then I schedule if I'm going to work from like eight to five. I actually schedule what I'm going to do. And then by the way, I don't, I, I have a to do list, but like generally the goal is keep things off the to do list, put them on the schedule. Right? Um, and so it's basically like get everything off that damn, off that damn list, get it on the calendar in a slot. Right? And then basically it's like during the work day or the work period or whatever it is, just, you know, this is easier said than done, but like just do those things. Yep. But do those things knowing that that will end at whatever time you choose to have it end.

• 48:21Marc Andreessen?

  And then you will go get to do the other things that you want to do, spend time with friends or with your spouse, with a partner, go for a run or you know, watch TV or whatever. Like literally schedule, watch TV, right? Schedule, play video games. Right. And then, look, this isn't like a silver bullet because like you, you still have the challenge of like adhering to the schedule. Yep. But I just find for me, the big breakthrough was like, it's a lot easier to like force myself through a lot of stuff I don't want to do if I know that there's a big block of time coming up down the road. It's like my reward for doing those things, which is like, I actually get to do what I want. And so I think, I think that's, that's, it's, it's the best method anybody's found so far.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  As we come to the end of this conversation, so I want to be respectful of your time. I'm curious, a lot of people that are watching this are likely entrepreneurs or people that want to be entrepreneurs. And they're likely wondering, okay, well, but will he put his money where his mouth is? Will Mark or Andreessen Horowitz, would they actually fund me if I, you know, end up dropping out or focusing for a year on a project and ends up going well? You know, by some definition, or it seems promising. Would the me dropping out of college, would that be used, you know, would that be a reason why they wouldn't fund me? How do you think about that? Or how do you respond?

• 49:24Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So that I would say the, the good news on that is we don't really care. Like I can't even, I don't think we've ever had a discussion. I don't think we've ever had a discussion of did this person finish college?

• 49:35Marc Andreessen?

  I don't think we've ever had a discussion about, there, there is some signal you do hear a lot. It's like, okay, the, the, like the people who went to the programs that are like unusually good. You know, the conversation we had earlier, like there, there are certain, for example, computer science programs that are just like outstanding and are known to be outstanding. And it's just clear in the data that they're outstanding. And so, um, you know, there, there, there is some, some edge that is a case. There are cases where there is an edge to, to kids who've gone to certain schools for sure. But yeah, did you finish? Not necessarily, um, uh, you know, did you, it's, so that's the good news is that's not so much, that's not so much the factor. And by the way, the other thing, like we never, we, we have no idea what anybody's SAT scores are. We have no idea what, I mean, I guess we do know what their GPA is, but. Actually, it's funny. We always worry about the kids with perfect GPAs as founders. Cause it's like, are they kind of too orderly? Like, are they too, are they too, are they too much rule followers? Right?

• 50:20Marc Andreessen?

  It's, it's like, on the one hand, they demonstrated that they're like really smart and really conscientious. On the other hand, it's like they demonstrated they love following rules. Right? Cause they've gotten, it's like, you, you really want your entrepreneurs you fund to be like rule followers? Like, is that a good idea as a venture capitalist and stuff? So anyway, but like, we don't, we, we never, we never look at SAT scores or ACT or GRE or any of that. That's the good news. The bad news is we're looking at everything else, right? And everything else is basically like, it's basically like, it's basically like, what have you actually, it is what have you actually done? It's like, what, what, what are, what, what, what reason do you have? What reason do we have to believe that you actually have the skills and experiences and basically capacity to be able to do all the stuff that's going to be required to build a company? And the thing that we always point out, and this gets, this, this topic also gets kind

• 51:03Marc Andreessen?

  of hotly contentious in a, in a real hurry, but the thing we always point out is, a lot of entrepreneurs, especially these days, venture capital's become this very kind of public concept, like, people used to not even really, I never even knew about it until I came to Cali, like, I never even heard of it until I moved to California, but now, now everybody knows about it. And so there's this view of like, somehow the threshold of being like a successful entrepreneur is raising venture capital. I always point, and you can, you can talk, you know, you can talk to any, you know, you're a great case study of this, but you can talk to any founder who's actually built a successful company. Raising venture is the easy part, right? Like, the VCs are like, sitting there, like, we sit there every day, like, waiting for, like, the next Mark Zuckerberg to show up, like, what's that?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Your job to give out money.

• 51:39Marc Andreessen?

  The job, exactly right. It's the job to give out money, and like, the big problem we have is, we don't have enough people coming in who like, have all the skills and attributes, you know, to be able to build these companies. And so like, we're, we're just, we're in constant despair, that there aren't enough people for us to fund who have those skills and attributes. The reason for that is because you raise the money from us, that only begins all the actual work, right? Because all the actual work is building an actual product that somebody will actually pay for, figuring out a way to actually sell it to them, actually collect the money, actually service the customers so that they actually have a good experience and they're referenceable, actually tell their stories so that anybody will even know that they exist, you know, run a finance, you know, function so that they don't like, lose all the money, run a legal function so they don't get sued all the time, right? All the things involved, recruiting, like, actually get anybody else to ever work with them, right?

• 52:23Marc Andreessen?

  It's like a really like, fundamental thing. And so the, the, the, the, the challenge we always have is trying to explain, including to entrepreneurs we meet with, the challenge always is like, look like, you know, we love you, but like, honestly, like, they're, you know, we just have not yet seen in you that you can, that you can do some set of those things. And of course, we can take flyers on some of those things, like, some of the time, and nobody ever comes fully formed, but like, we can't just take like, a raw flyer on, on, on, on anything. Now, that said, the number one thing that causes a first time founder to get funded is a working product. Right, so the the general rule of thumb is like if you're just like a brand new kid in the industry and like you haven't built anything and you show up for venture funding, generally you're going to be very disappointed because like there's a million of you like, great, your your mother loves you, like, you know, there's another thousand of you like

• 53:07Marc Andreessen?

  right down the street, like, I don't know what to do with this. But like, if you're a kid, nobody's heard of, and you show up with like facebook.com and it's working, right, like, that's, that's like, that's a thing, right, that's important. And so this this goes, this is why I like the Steve Martin thing so much, right, be so good they can't ignore you. The way to be so good they can't ignore you for venture capital is come in with a working product.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  You're an A16Z portfolio company listening, or you want to be an A16 portfolio company? Should you require a college degree when you hire somebody?

• 53:33Marc Andreessen?

  So that is a very rapidly changing topic for the reasons we've discussed. I think Google actually just dropped the requirement altogether for college degrees and probably the most of the other major employers are going to follow. That is a really good question. It it begs, again, it begs the question of what was it good for in the first place, right? And especially, like I said, once they finish dumping the SAT ACT, like, it'll be interesting to see kind of what happens to that part of the signal. If these, you know, people can't actually go to college, go to campus, it'll, it begs the question of what's going to happen to the to the conscientiousness metric. And then, and then really, the question is like on the other side, right, it's like, okay, like, what, what then will employers actually be looking for, right? What what is the thing that they'll be evaluating and judging? And so, and we've talked about a lot of this, but I think it's going to

• 54:16Marc Andreessen?

  be like, okay, ultimate credentials, like, I think there's a real opportunity here. Obviously, as I said, Udacity is one of our companies, and this we're excited about, but there are others like Lambda. There will be new credentials that will be taken very seriously. Google, by the way, Google is also, I haven't seen the details, they've actually announced a certification program. It's actually interesting. Google's been doing these math competitions forever as a sourcing mechanism, so they have these math and coding puzzles. And at least in theory, they'll hire the winners of those, kind of, essentially, essentially sight unseen, I think. And so, the new version of that, they're kind of standardizing that. So they've got this like coding credential, I saw something where it's like $300 or something. And if you can like basically pass this coding test, they'll basically consider it to be the same thing as a as a bachelor's degree in computer science. And so, like, they may, in other words, like, an employer creating their own

• 54:58Marc Andreessen?

  credential is something that I think is going to happen. So, new external credentials, new internal credentials. And then I think employers, like, as I said, we've been encouraging our companies to focus a lot on this show the work thing.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:09Marc Andreessen?

  And so, like GitHub, in particular, GitHub used to be one of our companies, now all by Microsoft. GitHub, in particular, has become a major credential, independent of all the rest of this for hiring software developers.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Your suggestion to an entrepreneur would be? Look for people that have a great, you know, basically GitHub presence or portfolio versus people necessarily went to like the most amazing school and finished.

• 55:32Marc Andreessen?

  Well, think about, think about the pros and cons, right? Because the question is like, okay, for the show your work stuff, it's like, okay, that presumably that actually is a good IQ test, right? Because like, you know, basically people have to be smart to like write good code and have to do a good design. So, so that's like, that probably has it embedded. Is there a conscientiousness test embedded in there? Maybe, right? You know, or maybe, maybe it's an artist who's just like really a disciplined, but got like one, you know, had one really creative thing. And maybe they're going to be a great artist, but maybe you wouldn't want to actually have them work for you. So there's like a, you have to kind of, again, you have to kind of probe in on like, okay, what, what actually do you know? You know, that said, look on GitHub, people are building real track records on conscientiousness. So, you know, on GitHub, you can actually see like how much code they've made and over what period of time and how many check-ins. And it's like, you know, it's like, number of lines of code is not like the metric that we measure good software by, but like, if somebody's checking in code every day

• 56:17Marc Andreessen?

  for five years, right? Like, and it's code that is building like a successful project at scale and you can kind of see the quality of the work. Like, at that point, you've proven more than any college degree could possibly prove. Well, so I guess I'd say this, if you're specifically, this is a more specific form of the question, what should a software developer do? The question is unquestionably, the answer is open source, right? Unquestionably, the answer is go basically create an open source project or go become a member of an existing open source project and make, you know, successful, high-quality, sustained contributions to that project over time. And that's like, that, I think at this point, I think that's clearly a better credential than getting a computer science degree. And I've hired people like that myself, like that, that, that makes tremendous sense. And of course, the great thing now, you can do that from all over the world. And so I think that's great. And then I'll defer to you on the design front, and you probably know more than I

• 57:00Marc Andreessen?

  do, but like, I think a very similar phenomenon is starting to happen for sure. And there are, there are designers who have gotten hired entirely on this basis who have done very well. Actually, you probably know this, video games, you know, there's this whole, there's video games, then there's whole community of basically, basically amateur, basically game designers who, you know, what are called mods and levels, and which are basically user-generated, basically sort of expansion packs for these games. And actually, the game companies have been hiring more aggressively recently out of that modder community. And again, independent of any, of any credentials. So that's probably another great example.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  So this conversation is pretty wide ranging. If you relieve a student listening that's either considering college or they're in college right now with, you know, a quick piece of advice, what would it be?

• 57:43Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, look, I mean, if you're in college, like execute on the opportunity. So like, I mean, honestly, you know, take the hardest, you know, take the hardest course load you can, like, you know, try to get a good GPA, but like basically try to get the skills, right? Try to get as many of the skills. By the way, you know, cross disciplinary, we haven't talked about, but like, you know, look, if you're, let's put it this way, if you're going against my advice of getting an English degree or something from a substitute, you know, from a substitute college and you need to settle up with all this debt, like at least start taking coding classes, like start, start to like, start to like layer in the skills and take full advantage of the opportunities. And so, yeah, you know, maximize that. And then if you're looking for these alternate paths, and this is why I started with a recommendation that kids go to college, which is like, if you're taking these alternate paths, like just be very clear eyed about what you're actually getting, right? So if, you know, with these new credentials, you know, with, or with the work that you're going to do, like the kind of thing that you're going to work on, like, so for example,

• 58:28Marc Andreessen?

  if I'm, if I'm going to work on open source, would I be better off making minor contributions to five projects or like a major contribution to one project? Like make, make, this is the second one, make a major contribution to one project because that really demonstrates what, what employers are looking for and just be, kind of put yourself in the mind of what, how somebody's going to be evaluating you three or four years down the road and then basically apply against that.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Awesome. Mark, thank you so much. Uh, this has been a really fun conversation.

• 58:52Marc Andreessen?

  Good. Thank you, Dylan.