Ben Horowitz on an alternative path for young people: finish high school, spend a year learning about a field of interest, then let the work teach the rest. "The world has really changed, warfare has changed, power has changed, economics have changed... And there's not a constant refresh of the knowledge." "Arguably a better system is, you finish your 12 years of education in elementary and high school, then you maybe get a year that bridges you to knowledge in a field you want to go into... and then go from there." "For most college students, probably over 95% of college students are there to prepare themselves for the workforce. And a four-year degree to do that seems a little misplaced in a world where the rate of change is so high." @bhorowitz (2024)

HAA CEO Gagan Biyani and Replit CEO Amjad Masad on the simplest way to learn anything: build something you actually want with it. Gagan: "If you're going to learn coding at the academy, I don't want you just to take a class on Python. 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." "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. We're super excited about it.'" Amjad: "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 is a very modern invention, and it's a very weird thing to have done in society." "For someone like me, and I think for a lot of people that are more pragmatically minded, I'm not motivated at all by the 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?" @gaganbiyani @amasad

Announcing: the @a16z Ops Engineering Fellowship ⚙️ Because: operations (along with everything else??) is becoming something best approached with an engineering mindset. We've been tracking this space closely, and are seeing a new kind of builder emerging inside companies... They connect internal systems, build agents, and redesign workflows across finance, sales, support, and everything between. @levie calls them "Internally deployed FDEs".. others say "AI Operations", "Agent Engineer"... I don't think anyone's agreed on the title yet, but there's something interesting going on - which to me means it's a good time to get the people who are at the frontier .. applying an engineering mindset to re-thinking how companies operate in an AI-native way - together. So: We're launching the a16z Ops Engineering Fellowship: bringing ~50 internally deployed engineers and AI-pilled operators to together over 6 weeks in San Francisco and NYC (+ group chats). There's a killer crew involved already - Claire Vo (@clairevo) is joining as a Founding Fellow, as is Sebastien Goddijn (@sebgoddijn) - who built Glass at Ramp; Owen Williams (@ow) at Stripe; Ann Miura-Ko (@annimaniac) - deep in the trenches of AI-pilling operators via Floodgate; Brandon Gell (@bran_don_gell) - COO at Every; TK Kong (@tkkong) - who helped start Ramp Labs; Matt P (@MattnPortnov) - leading internal AI at Decagon; and several more we can't include in the announcement (but watch this space 👀)... For now: Asking X 1- Who is leading "Ops Engineering" (or whatever you call it) at your company? 2- Who do you respect in this space, who should we know about, absolutely must have join the cohort and/or join us for a dinner ? Tag below, DM me - 3- or apply below ! 👇👇

Replit CEO Amjad Masad and a16z's Erik Torenberg on the young talent formula: go really deep, stay authentically likable. Amjad: "If you're able to tell a story about some project you've done and you've gone really, really deep in it, 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 shows all sorts of good personality traits: persistence, intrinsic motivation. You might be doing something where you're following your curiosity, and maybe it doesn't have an immediate reward." Erik: "I think it's both not being afraid to spike in something. A lot of people just show up too broad in everything, but not really amazing at anything. And just follow that to its conclusion. See how good you can get at it." "While also having a baseline of interpersonal skills. Be likable in a way that's not contrived or fake. Be truly authentic, because people want to support people who are good people." @amasad @eriktorenberg

Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad says many startups begin as premature optimization: founders raise money for ideas they don't care about. "I think a lot of starting startups is premature optimization. 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." "The motivation becomes envy, a really negative motivation as opposed to a positive one." "They pre-commit to an idea they're not even interested in, raise money for it, and start pre-optimizing for some path that they haven't really reached yet. That's why I always come back to this idea of curiosity. What is actually driving you?" "Once you find that idea that you want to dedicate your life to, or dedicate the next 10 years to, it's going to have such gravity that you're not going to be able to avoid it." "I actively tried not to start Replit, but it exploded into a startup on its own. That's the feeling you should get: 'I guess I have to do it,' because there's so much momentum behind it." "There's a predatory thing I've heard that happens right now where VCs go to Stanford students and give them a million dollars pre-idea... It's like the music industry... You're taking this young person and pre-committing them to something they shouldn't have committed to." @amasad

Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad says the job of young people is to be heretics and question society's deeply held beliefs: "What is college, and what is it for? A related question is: What is the utility of young people in society?" "We probably have a blind spot in society. We have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There are 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." "What do you need from young people? You need them to experiment. You need to encourage them to try impossible things." "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." "College ultimately should be about that. Let's get these people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, first-principles mindsets, and encourage them to question the deeply held beliefs." @amasad

Since I have two young kids and spend all day thinking about technology, I've thought a ton about how to raise kids given how fast everything is changing. So for the launch of HAA, Alex Danco and wrote about how we teach our kids & whether we'd send them there. (We don't think it'll be up to us to choose.)

Amjad Masad with Gagan Biyani and Erik Torenberg on HAA: The Horowitz Andreessen Academy The ideal education today is a place with room to meander, a space to go heads-down when you’re obsessed, alongside unconventional peers. Gagan sees it in every student he meets: the interesting thing they're building is happening outside class, unsupported. Amjad got really into chess and it evolved into a whole product line. The thesis behind HAA is side quests shouldn't be on the side. No grades, no tests. Trust is the design principle - Silicon Valley runs on it, so why not apply it to students? Empower ambitious young people to run with the ideas that have real gravity they can’t avoid. "Young people should be heretics… We respect the past, but we're unapologetically going to change it." 1:03 Why young people should be heretics 5:35 Amjad designs his ideal college 8:45 Side quests deserve more resources 10:55 Don't take a Python class 14:30 College vs. raising money at 18 17:15 Most teen startups are premature optimization 18:30 "I tried not to start Replit" 19:40 How a chess hobby became a Replit product 24:25 The self-driving company 26:30 Respect the past, change it anyway 28:50 What Oakland politics taught Gagan about trust 31:50 Why trust works better than rules 36:35 The positive-sum culture HAA wants to pass on 39:20 Speaking to the world vs. speaking to the in-group 41:05 How Amjad found his moral compass 44:00 What Amjad looks for in young talent YouTube: @amasad @gaganbiyani @eriktorenberg

"There is no safe career path today, let alone one that will remain safe for twenty years, which means that there is no set of schools and degrees that can guarantee a safe career into the 2040s and 2050s." "Pushing them to get really good at math seems silly, when AI is currently tornadoing through all of the field's hardest open problems. Should you push them to become a lawyer?... Doctor?" "You're basically paying $650k to make sure your kid is admitted to a good high school, which should, but certainly isn't guaranteed to, help them get into a really good college, at which point they'll probably get a good job, at which point, they're set for life." "The challenge with that, though, is that who knows what a good job will be in fifteen years?" "Expose your kids to a lot of things early, and then help them go as deep as they're able to on the things that excite them the most. It doesn't matter what those things are; cultivating curiosity and depth is the point." @packyM and @Alex_Danco on HAA, college, and their own kids:

Sam Altman on one of the highest-return years of his career: no job, exploring his interests, and a lot of people who were nice enough to teach him things. "I read many dozens of textbooks. I learned about fields that I had been interested in. I didn't have any idea that they were all gonna come together in the way they did." "I learned a lot about nuclear engineering. AI was starting to work, so I learned a lot about AI. I learned about synthetic biology. I learned about investing." " I met people that were working on all sorts of different things who were nice enough to talk to me." "If I met someone interesting and it seemed good and needed help, I would just help them. And they would teach me stuff, or they would offer me the chance to invest in their startup later." "Out of all of it, almost all of it didn't work out. But the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later." @sama w/ @CraigCannon (Nov 2018)

Patrick Collison's advice to people in their 20s: find where the highest standards are, and go experience them firsthand. "When I talk to people in other domains, this is so frequently the thing that I hear from them." "That when they worked with X person or Y organization or in Z environment, they learned what great actually is, and that just permanently changed their sense for what their own standard for their work ought to be." "Maybe one version of what people in their twenties should do is... figure out, where can you learn the highest standards? Where are the highest standards embodied, and where can you go and experience that firsthand?" @patrickc w/ @dwarkesh_sp (Feb 2024)

Ben Horowitz on why a16z is incubating The Horowitz Andreessen Academy: the Industrial Revolution remade education. AI will too. "The university system started out as a religious institution with the Jesuits and so forth. Then the Industrial Revolution came, and all of a sudden everybody needed a higher level of the ability to learn things, the ability to be literate." "The university system exploded in the US. The universities got much bigger, and there became many more of them." "That was really necessary to train the population to enter the corporate world. It's hard for people to understand now, but in 1700 there was no corporate world. There was a farm world, and then all of a sudden we get these companies." "To exist in that environment, you've got to be able to read and write and do math... To a large extent, the America that we have was built on the backs of our great universities." "We're hitting the AI revolution now, which is going to be, in our estimation, as transformational in terms of jobs, the way jobs are done, and the kinds of jobs that are available, as the Industrial Revolution was to the agricultural society that came before it." "The idea that the training for the Industrial Revolution is going to map into the AI revolution, probably not perfectly. There needs to be a pioneer that shows the way: How do you train somebody into the new world?" @bhorowitz

Ben Horowitz says instead of banning AI, educators should set problems students can't solve without it: "I was talking to Dan Boneh, who is a great professor of computer science and cryptography at Stanford. His take on AI was: You have two choices. You can ban it, and by the way, that won't work. Or you can make the problems so hard that you can't solve them without AI." "What he's seeing is, 'I've got students solving things that no student in history could have ever solved.' That's what's possible. You want to have that orientation: What can you solve with the tools? What can you do that's a breakthrough? Now everybody has an opportunity to create a breakthrough." "Then you're a main character, not an NPC. That's what the academy is about. Do you want to be a main character? If you want to be a main character, we help you do that. If you want to be a cog in a machine, this is not going to be the best place for you." @bhorowitz

Gagan Biyani on why the best way to learn people skills is to build something you can't do alone, and how HAA is designed around it: "One of the most important things we want is to develop people skills. And one of the core tenets of developing a skill like that is osmosis. You need to immerse the student in the social environment in which the humans are." "I think it's a challenge if you go off to college, you only interact with people your same year. You finally maybe have a friend who's one or two years above you or below you." "We're gonna try and cohabitate you, especially in the office, with other companies and individuals and projects and co-ops and internships that are with the, quote unquote, 'adult world.'" "Let's say you're trying to build a new type of robot dog, and the only way to do it is to get a specific type of chip, and you don't know how to write a cold email. You're gonna have to learn. And you're gonna have all these people around you who are experts at this." "The combination of the osmosis of Silicon Valley, a peer network that's supportive, and the project-based curriculum will dramatically accelerate people skill development." "Over something like, let me sit in a lecture talking about negotiations. That's not how you develop people skills. You develop people skills because you're doing something you really care about and you need to get everyone on board." @gaganbiyani

Ben Horowitz says this may be one of the best times in history to be 18: you're entering a world only your generation will understand. "I would be thrilled to be 18. I think it is one of the best times in history to be 18. It's unfortunate because I think the systems for getting people into work currently make people really nervous about their future." "This is like Thomas Edison's time or Henry Ford's time. You're going into a world that only you will understand. People like me will have a much more difficult time understanding the world than you will, what's possible, and what you can do." "You're going to go in at a very young age being more capable than people with 30 or 40 years of experience. That's just amazing because normally you've got to work your way up the corporate ladder, spend 20 years developing your status and credibility." "Now you can come out right off the rip, using the new tools to solve almost any problem out there... Are we out of problems? All I read about is problems. There are problems everywhere. Now you can go out and attack them directly." @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

Gagan Biyani with Erik Torenberg and Ben Horowitz on HAA: The Horowitz Andreessen Academy HAA is a private, full-time, in-person school in San Francisco for young people coming out of high school. Its mission is to nurture the best young people in the world, and equip them with the tools to shape it. The Industrial Revolution rewrote how we train young people. It's time for a new model for the AI era. HAA is project-based – less lecture time, more time with tools and AI, structured social life, co-ops/internships, with students embedded alongside working adults. Founding Partners include Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. It's the best time in history to be 18. The vision is grads with careers they love or their own companies founded, and hopefully other schools copying the model down the road. 0:55 Why a16z is backing a school 4:40 Why other college alternatives failed 6:55 AI is this era's Industrial Revolution 9:35 The model: live in SF, intern at top startups 12:10 Ben: the best time in history to be 18 15:25 No big idea at 18? Join someone who has one 17:40 People skills come from reps, not lectures 23:15 Why it has to be San Francisco 26:45 Why it's a separate, for-profit company 31:00 Every curiosity becomes a project 33:30 Main character or NPC? 35:15 You can't learn to be a CEO from a book 37:30 Picking a problem, and failing the right way 40:30 What success looks like in five years YouTube: @gaganbiyani @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

Announcing The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. The internet made it possible to know anything. AI makes it possible to do anything. The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI. The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders. The most talented young people today rarely have their sharpest peers within walking distance. Their network is online. Those networks are real, but they're thin. The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco. If you're young, hungry and love building things, apply for the Founding Class Fellowship.