Replit CEO Amjad Masad on What Young People Should Learn in the AI Era

Key Takeaway

Pick one curiosity-driven “side quest” today and turn it into a small project. Instead of consuming another tutorial, use AI as a coach to build something connected to an interest you already have—an analysis, prototype, game, dataset, or automation. Follow the thread until you can explain one surprising thing you learned. Deep, self-directed exploration builds persistence, judgment, and differentiated skills better than checking off generic credentials.

Episode Overview

Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, and Gagan Biyani discuss how education should evolve for an AI era: less prescription, more curiosity, project-based learning, and room for intellectual side quests. They also explore why young people should resist premature startup pressure, how AI may reshape companies, and why trust, judgment, depth, and interpersonal skills remain essential.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Replit CEO Amjad Masad on What Young People Should Learn in the AI Era from A16Z. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Ultimately, the utility of the young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is 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, it's actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them. I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.

The future of companies is going to change. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build. One of the core tenants of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. We don't care if you graduate or not, we don't have grades, we don't have tests. The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less. When you see an 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you, that you're like, I got to spend time with this person, what are they doing that is capturing your interest?

The real civilizational missing opportunity is what if the most valuable thing young people bring to society is their willingness to question what everyone else takes for granted? Today I sat down with Repl.it founder and CEO Amjad Massad and Horowitz and Andreesen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Vianney 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. As we were talking, I remembered this sci-fi story that I read once, it's called The City and the Stars. And it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI, it now governs all of our lives, it solves all problems, all human problems. There's no wars, there's no disease, everyone lives forever.

And people spend their time working on like a thousand year art projects and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time. But they found this problem where they accumulate so much knowledge and memory, it becomes like harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory and they compress their memory, sort of like context compression that we do with AI today. They go through all the memories and they compress them, and then they go through a boot camp to retrain them for their life.

So they invented a new way to be born, but you're not fundamentally 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 boot camp, he starts doing weird things, new things, and everyone's like, whoa, that's crazy. You shouldn't be doing that, that's not how we do things. It becomes very disruptive. And then when they go out into this city, he starts asking questions like, what's out there?

What's in the stars? What's outside our city borders? They're like, oh, we don't talk about outside our city borders, it's probably dangerous out there. Yeah, a little bit like silo, a little bit like fallout, 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, it's actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right? It tells you you're stupid, we've figured everything out, you need to learn our way, and we need to prepare you for the outside world so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen and go get married, have kids, and get a house and a car and live happily ever after.

But that world doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real civilizational missing opportunity is that person in The City and 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 spot in society. We have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of ideas that don't come out of Silicon Valley because there's a monoculture here.

There's a certain way of thinking. Every culture is somehow a monoculture, even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley. And so what do you need from young people? You need them to experiment. You need to encourage them to try impossible things. And every now and then, they're going to have a breakthrough that once we thought was impossible, and now it's suddenly possible because the technology changed, something changed. So college ultimately should be about that. Let's get these people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, first principle mindsets, and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs.

I think that's well said. 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 you could redo 18 to 22, but in 2026, how you'd think about it? Yeah, I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn.

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 the story with Steve Jobs, one of the most inspiring speeches he gave is the Stanford commencement speech. And he talked about connecting things backwards. The way Steve Jobs approached college, I think it's the ideal experience of college, where he's like, he went to Reed 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, they're like, oh, we should have proportionally spaced fonts. People should be able to select fonts. And that was a direct 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.

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. One of the things about my college that was really hard is, we had attendance. They counted attendance. If you didn't attend for 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 manically working really hard, give me the space to do it. Don't expel me. Don't yuck my yuck. Yeah, exactly. For sure. Exactly. And finally, the quality of people. I think if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded. If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those deeply held beliefs, I think you will be able to do that.

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 interesting, because now I look back, and I did enjoy that, but I feel oftentimes I look at that experience and say, well, what if the environment was supportive of this? 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 becoming the norm. And the thing that's weird, though, is that it's not encouraged yet.

It's still not allowed. And so for me personally, I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out. You should be able to use the college resources. You should be able to use the computer lab, the computes, the bio lab, whatever it is. You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be actively encouraging you. Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it.

If you have a crazy idea that's taking off, the college, you shouldn't be hiding it from your college. They should be coming like, oh my god. This is amazing. Let's give them more. Totally. There's this kid, Eric. I think he's Richard's friend. He has to take investor calls from the bathroom because he's hiding in the school. They should be coaching him through it or enabling it in some way. Bringing investment. Demo day or something. This kind of thing. A couple of comments. One is going back to your thing around calligraphy.

People get these interests that might seem random and might be random, but in other ways might tie back in other ways. I think there are actually ways in which the school can develop ... It's hard to force natural interest. For example, I was obsessed with basketball as a kid, but I was also the kid who would ask my math teacher, what's the point of this? Help explain it to me. If she could have explained it to me, maybe I would have got excited about it. If she would say, hey, you're obsessed with basketball.

You need to understand the salary cap. Actually, basketball is very analytical now in terms of people are using stats and data to evaluate players. If you don't understand this, you're not going to be a good student of the game. That would have got me really excited. That's what I'm so excited about Alpha School is the way that they take people's natural interests and get them to learn things that they're going to need to know over time out of that. The thing that's so hard is we all know ...

The education academic ... The industry of education, if you will, or the academic canon of education is completely on board with this. They totally understand that it would be great if every student could have a customized curriculum. Joe Liman 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. It's not just impossible. It's actually impossible to imagine why you wouldn't do that. Specifically, for me, if I think about the academy, in the academy, if you are going to learn coding, I don't want you just to take a class on Python.

No, go build something that you're super excited about in Python. Use it as a tool to learn the language. The great thing about today with AI is every single student can go and do that on their own and they don't need a customized syllabus or exercise given to them. They just need the freedom and confidence to say, yes, you're allowed to do this. Yes, absolutely. We're super excited about it. Yeah. I mean, the buzzword for it is project-based learning. There shouldn't be a buzzword for it because that should be the standard.

The idea that you're learning something and you don't know the utility of it, I think is a very modern invention. It's a very weird thing to have done in society that you would go into a 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. There was this inversion for a long time of how we learn things. You would go and 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.

For someone like me, and I think for a lot of people that are more pragmatically minded, I'm not motivated at all by a pure pursuit of knowledge. I'm motivated by skills, what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build and achieve my dreams. Every now and then you find a teacher that is able to tell you that, that is able to motivate your learning by telling you what kind of skills you can acquire because of it. Totally. Well, it's interesting because there is the critique that we're addressing, that we're solving for, which is, hey, there's certain schooling environments where there's very little practical skills gained or you don't train for the real world afterwards, even in the claim to.

But then there's 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 spending time to cultivate intellectually or as a person otherwise. There's still kind of this sort of ineffable quality that some people think you get at an experience like college. where you're sort of meeting new people, getting new friends, sort of going to party, I don't know what people are ascribing, exactly.

Studying the great books, et cetera. What do you think about sort of the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills of building a company or working at a company? I think there's this like huge, unfair choice that a lot of young people are provided today. It's either go and get a four year, go to a four year school where there's a lot of structure around what you should be doing. You're gonna have to attend classes, you're gonna 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 gonna go to college and love it. And I think that there are young people, even at 16, 17, who should be starting a startup. But I think there's an amazing, massive group of people who, I don't know about you guys, but certainly for me, when I was 17 or 18, I knew I wanted to enter business, but it was so nice to have a couple of years to explore and learn and like no pressure, you know?

And so personally, I think the investor track should be way underutilized. 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, that's fine, but the pressure of making a tenure commitment at 18 isn't for most people. And then the structure of college isn't for everybody either. And so for me, this middle ground of having two years where you can really explore and you can do whatever you want without the pressure and Silicon Valley will come to you and provide you with all the information and the resources that you need.

And when you have a cool idea, it's just like more, more, more. That's super exciting to me. Yeah, I mean, I think 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 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 it 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 it just becomes, the motivation is envy and really negative motivation as opposed to positive. And then they pre-commit to an idea they're not even interested in and they raise money for it and they are kind of pre-optimizing for some path that they haven't really reached yet, right? And so that's why I always come back to this idea of curiosity, like what is actually driving you? What is, once you find that idea that you wanna dedicate your life to or dedicate the next 10 years to, it's gonna have such gravity, you're not gonna be able to avoid it.

For me, I tried not to start Rappler, actively not to start it, but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own, right? And that's the feeling you should get. It's almost like, I guess I have to do it, right? Because it's like there's so much momentum behind it. And I think a predatory thing that happens right now where I've heard that VCs go to Stanford 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 already have a cap table.

I think that's sort of like the music industry. And you're like, 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 and they don't even understand that contract. Like luckily, I think in Silicon Valley, we have the SAFEs, which are a great contribution by YC and Paul Graham. But it's still somewhat predatory because you're taking this young person, you're pre-committing them to something they shouldn't have committed to. 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 very curious why they read across history and economics and culture and politics and you spend a lot of time on memes. You sort of pursue your interests there. So going back to this critique, you're neither sort of divorced from the economic real world, but you're neither that nor a automaton. 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. And so I think to your point, Gagan, sometimes people are funneled into either of these paths.

And I'm curious how you've thought about, is that something that you've always been just naturally or how can people both be very pragmatic in their career as young people and yet also make time or make space or make interest for following their intellectual curiosity, even if it might seem random or alien from that. Yeah, I think that I sort of tend to oscillate between having an itch to build something and having an itch to like read a lot and explore a lot and see what's out there, what's interesting.

And they feed on each other. It's just sort of a recursive process where I accumulate enough knowledge and ideas from all the things that I've explored that I really want to go build something with it now, right? And so, for example, recently 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, six years old, is getting into chess pretty soon. It's gonna be beating me. But I didn't know why I was interested in it.

I got interested in it. And then I started writing programs to solve chess. And then I started training models. And I was like, why LLMs? Like Chattopadhyay actually sucks at chess. Oh really? And I was like, well, where the ARC AGI score is getting up there, these models are almost AGI, but why are they bad at chess? They hallucinate moves and all of that. And so I went into training an LLM 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, some people now call it RSI or recursive thought improvement. It's a sort of a buzzword for AI being able to do ML. I realized that AI is actually now capable of doing ML. So the moment we were in like 2024, where Rappler agent came out, before vibe coding as a term 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, you could call it vibe research, you could call it auto research, I think that's McCarthy's term. But I spent a lot of time in that world. And then now I'm working on something on Rappler to bring that to the world, where anyone can become a machine learning researcher, or any business owner who has data can find your own model to kind of solve a certain problem. And so when I started playing chess, like what are the hops you need to make to understand that?

Oh, that's going to lead me to build a new business life for Rappler. It's just impossible, but I just followed something that I was interested in, it kind of resulted in something. And invariably it does, at least for me. But even memes and culture, I get interested in some random subculture in the internet. And I learned something about the world, I learned something about society, I learned something about markets, I learned something about where the world is headed. And I have alpha. You have an itch and you listen to the itch, and sometimes the itch is build something, then the itch is learn something, and a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they learn over time to ignore, ignore, ignore in favor of going through these hoops.

And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to listen to itches. Is it helpful to? Not more than people do currently, but I think in general it's like, in order to lead, it's also helpful to know how to follow. But I think people spend their entire high school, and often college, just learning how to follow. Just learning how to, if someone says something, you do it. And I think it'd be, yeah. My belief is that the future of companies is gonna change.

Like I think, in Silicon Valley, there's been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms, of how companies work. If you remember, Holacracy. Holacracy, Medium did that. GitHub did the, like, no managers. They all kind of blew up in spectacular ways. But I think it was a technology problem. Like I think now, you can have agents kind of function as the glue within these organization, and 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 most interesting.

And the AI can sort of judge your impact. I don't have fully formed thoughts about this, but I see it in our company where I've changed how I run the company. I would call it this idea of a self-driving company. Eventually, the company will run itself. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny, because I genuinely don't have an opinion about where it's gonna go, but I know it's gonna change. I know that everything we're doing now is just, feels so different. Yeah. And in starting the academy, I've been spending all this time, you know, I built the Pitch Deck in Repl.it, thank you.

And I've, you know, been using Clod and Chachaputi. 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. And if you're not, like, natively understanding of it, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard to make that shift, yeah. Yeah, or if you're learning the ways of the past.

Correct. Then you're kind of locked into a way of thinking and a way of working that actually will put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future. Yeah, back to that following point. I do think learning how to follow is very important. Well, let me phrase it in a different way, which is you wanna be disagreeable enough such that you have interesting ideas, you're a contrarian, you're not just going through the motions, you're following your own curiosity. But we both know, all know people who are so disagreeable that they can't work with anybody, that they're just so alienating to people.

So maybe another way of following, or just following it as more broader, is you need to learn how to work with people. You need to learn how to navigate systems. You need to learn to, you know, get what you want, or get what is the optimal outcome. Yeah, I think there is this important thing of respecting the elders in a way, but also not fundamentally, truly understanding that they haven't figured everything out. I do think respect is very important. 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 you can.

So at Ruplet, I named all the conference rooms after 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. Of course. But, yeah, we have like Linus Sorvold, 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 bad at us. Like, I don't know if you remember, like 2025, I was like, canceled for saying, you shouldn't learn how to code anymore.

Totally. And now I talk to, wow. That was only 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. 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. Oh, I'm sorry. In Oakland. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a side quest for sure, right? It's a side quest, like why would it be relevant at all? And actually, I think it's helped me in so many ways in business. Interesting. The skills are extremely transferable in both directions. But one of the most interesting things is appreciating how valuable trust is. And if you have a foundation of trust throughout a society, how much it changes the way that you can move forward.

You know, in local politics, you know, as a simple example, let's talk about nonprofits. If you're running a nonprofit and you raise money from someone and you have a conversation with them and they say, I'll give you $50,000, the percent likelihood that that $50,000 will land in your bank account is somewhere in the 20 to 50% range. After they've committed. After they've committed verbally, right? So verbal commitments don't have weight. In Silicon Valley, I think it's probably probably 75 to 100% depending on who you're talking to and who you are.

And the difference in how you operate, 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. And the reverse is also true. If you do not have trust, then all of a sudden you're like, well, what if this donor is upset about this thing? Let me do this thing differently.

And you're not fulfilling your mission. You're worried, you have anxiety and stress about this thing. And so I think that is something that Silicon Valley offers that can be applied to school. In what way? Trusting students to do what they wanna do and follow the threads they wanna 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. But if we start trusting young kids and young adults to go and follow what they want and then we empower them, even if we think what they're doing is crazy, then they're gonna build that future you're talking about. They're gonna figure out the next version of holacracy that actually works. Let me ask you a question. It might be tricky, but what are you gonna do with the troublemakers?

Like invariably there's gonna be people that are gonna be like breaking things. Like, you know, Zuck famously built like FaceMash, which was like really controversial. Like I hacked into- Someone might almost get expelled. Yeah. Yeah, what do you think of that? I mean, obviously there are things that really cross some kind of red line on criminality, but like- Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, just 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 are super mean to someone in front of everyone, you know, like there are gonna be rules, of course.

Like we have to create a culture of trust and positive sum. 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 wanna build FaceMash, 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 gotta do. And that's how people are gonna be. And so I'd say the same thing is if you create an environment of trust, and if you allow that to happen, and you design it so that they don't have a sort of like anti-authoritarianism mindset, then I think you open up a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunity.

Yeah, I also think that there's an opportunity to funnel that drive to test the boundaries in a healthy way. I was reading this story the other day 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 Roblox. And apparently there's like a big trend where people learn programming and hacking on Roblox. I was talking to Dave, the founder and CEO of Roblox. I was like, it'd be really cool to have some kind of sandbox for these people to play in and then discover talent and then funnel that into cybersecurity jobs.

Or even the government, instead of like sending these kids to jail, like take them to work at the NSA or work at like some, we need cybersecurity talent right now. Like why are you like putting them in jail, you know? Yeah, 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 fun. And if we can just have a little bit more permissiveness, I think we can create a lot more opportunity for them.

And repurpose that talent, as you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, one site I was really into growing up called Hack the Site. It was hackthesite.org. I don't know if it's still around. It's like a website that has vulnerabilities built in. That's cool. It's like Hacker's Flag, right? Yeah. And so, I mean, I think we're kind of digging deep into one aspect of it. But like, you can have a bounty program in the RCT. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Or I can encourage the students to go do the bounty programs at all the other schools.

If all the other companies, because most companies have a bounty program. Yeah, absolutely. 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 feel on their own, to make decisions, to learn from it.

You coined, you know, technical criticism on this podcast. The thing I'll coin is meta-retard maxing. When to retard max versus when to go on pure instinct versus when to sort of like, when that will drive you into trouble. And I think it relates to like, when there's asymmetric upside versus asymmetric downside, you kind of need reps. And I think that's a lot of what project-based learning, or just giving people more control over their time is the idea of just giving them more opportunities to choose a path, succeed, fail, learn from it.

Yeah. Here's my last question. There's some people who would say something like, hey, you know, remember when Teal launched his fellowship and a lot of people were mad at it, they were like, college, you learn how to be a good person. Like, it's something beyond this technical skill set, but even beyond this intellectual, people imagine like Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society, I don't know, but there's sort of this like cultivate, you know, we're 18, 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 hyper-career oriented, but also hyper-intellectual, but what is this sort of cultivation of values or morals or ethics or just like becoming an adult?

What do we say about that? Yeah, 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 to all those houses. I would say that some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most grounded people I've ever met are here in Silicon Valley. And it's not everyone. I mean, there are some real idiots out there who've made a lot of money. Like, don't get me wrong, I don't have respect for everyone who's made money.

That's not the truth. But the positive-sum, high-trust ecosystem actually, I think, breeds really amazing human beings. Yeah. And interpersonal skills is an absolutely essential part of the academy. Like, we want our, you know, graduates or attendees or fellows or whatever we're gonna 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 gonna spend two years and you're gonna grow as a human being.

You're gonna meet other people and we're gonna create an environment where you can see the benefits of the culture that I think many people don't pay attention to but is very much here in San Francisco. I think having a reputation of being a good person here actually is very valuable. People trust you with their money, people trust you with governing your company and so on and so forth. And I think developing that sense in the university is very important. And I think being a well-adjusted person is important.

I think that, you know, for a while, like, you know, I think, you know, some people play the role of being like this autistic, genius person. And maybe at some point, it paid off. Like, I remember the Sequoia blog post about SBF. That's like gold. They deleted it. You can find it on archive.org. And 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 Dvorkic's blog post. And I criticized Dvorkic for kind of the language. And it's like, people who don't understand this technology, are they're gonna, they're not, that blog post, in my opinion, did not create more understanding in them. It actually, it probably, if you don't understand it, probably could, 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 the in-group language, which is important, but can, you know, can eventually be in front of Congress.

Is there anything, I guess lastly, you wanna 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? We mentioned like 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. 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 wanna 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 the idea is that actually don't, like I should act in a way that I wouldn't be proud of, regardless of who's watching or who's not watching or regardless of the impact.

And I think in a weird way, if you're virtuous and if you have certain principles, the net effect of that is that you are utility maximizing. I think if you have the right principles and you need to also change over time and you need to kind of figure out where the world is headed and make sure you're fitting in it in the right way. But all of this to say is that I think there is value in the liberal arts and kind of reading some of this stuff and trying to understand how you feel about how you wanna act and how you wanna present yourself.

One of the things that just made me more sympathetic 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, or a whole philosophy that is rigid in a world that is changing. Right. And weirdly, the opposite is true as well, where you can't be a consequentialist or utilitarian when we're entering the singularity and you can't really predict the future because that's based on predicting the future. And so it is a tough time.

I think you need to have principles that are evolving over time. I think that's, you have some ground principle, ground truths that you hold dearly and they should be as axiomatic, as small as possible. Yeah. In closing, we're grateful for your support of the academy. We're excited to have people building on Repl.it, potentially interning at Repl.it, 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 spend time with this person or be involved with them in some capacity, what are they doing that is capturing your interest?

Or what are you looking for in young talent? I think the first thing is that they dove really deep in something, they can teach me something. Yeah. And I'm interested in, like, I think I can be interested in anything. And I think if you're able to tell a story about some 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. Most people get bored easily, most people do the traditional thing. But did you actually follow a thread all the way through?

That's always really impressive and that shows all the time. sort of good personality traits. Persistence, intrinsic motivation, you might be doing something that is really, you're following your curiosity and maybe doesn't have an immediate reward. And I think that, 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, including me. Like, you know, I'll see young people, I was 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. 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 broad and everything, but not really amazing at anything. 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- Be likable.

Yeah, be likable and in a way that's not like contrived or fake or, you know, it's truly authentic because people want to support people who are good people. But the most endearing thing is you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting. Yeah, and totally, yeah. Awesome, Amjad, thanks for- Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family.

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