Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

0:00Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs. It's to be heretics. You need to learn our way so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen, get married, have kids, and get a house and a car and live happily ever after. And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them.

0:23Gagan Biyani: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 tenets 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.

1:01Erik Torenberg: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 Replit founder and CEO Amjad Massad and Horowitz and Andresen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Viani to rethink what education should look like in the AI era. We discuss why students need more freedom to follow their curiosity, learn by building, and take intellectual side quests, and why Amjad thinks some young founders may actually be starting companies too soon.

1:44Erik Torenberg: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 remember this sci-fi story that I read once. It's called The City and the Stars. And it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI. It governs all of our lives. to solve all problems, all human problems. There's no wars, there's no disease, everyone lives forever. And people spend their time working on like a thousand-year art project and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time.

2:29But 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.

3:11and 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. Sounds silo a little bit. It's probably dangerous out there. Yeah, a little bit like Silo, a little bit like Fallout.

3:44Yeah. And I don't want to get into the spoilers too much, but eventually that's what he has so much drive to change things and go discover the stars. That's why it's called The City and the Stars. And the story unfolds in that way and he finds all sorts of interesting things out there. And I'm reminded of this because as we're talking about what is college and what is it for? And I think a related question is what is the utility of young people in society? And I think ultimately the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is to be heretics. And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right?

4:29It tells you you're stupid. We've figured everything out. You need to learn our way and we need to prepare you for the outside world So you can get a job and be a perfect citizen and go get married, have kids, and get a house and a car. Live happily ever after. But that war doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real civilizational missing opportunity is that person in the city of the stars. It took a glitch to get someone with a clear mind to be able to question deeply held beliefs. And every one of us, we probably have a blind spot in society.

5:12We 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.

5:51Let's get these people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, first principle mindsets, and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs.

6:02Erik Torenberg:I think that's well said. I mean, imagine if you were 18 today and you were able to design your ideal experience in terms of how much you go to class, to what projects you work on, to what kind of deep study you would engage into what you'd want to study. What are some principles that you would add to that in terms of how you wish if you could redo 18 to 22, but in 2026, 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.

6:43It'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. So the way Steve Jobs approached college, I think it's the ideal experience of college, where he's like, he went to read college, but he couldn't afford it, so he dropped out, but kept dropping into different classes. One of them was calligraphy. And in the calligraphy class, he didn't know why he was interested in it, and he just did it and learned it. Later on, when they were inventing the Mac, inventing user interfaces, they're like, oh, we should have proportionally spaced fonts.

7:23We should have certain font, people should be able to select fonts. And that was a direct kind of callback to his college days, learning about fonts and calligraphy and things like that. And so this meandering that I think modern society thinks is sort of useless, I think is actually the most useful in college. Like, can you take a class that would change the direction of your life because you discover something totally new and outside of your world? So that's one. I would like to have enough freedom to select the kind of things I want to study. The other thing is, if I am engrossed in building something, give me the space and time to do it.

8:04One of the things about my college that was really hard is we had attendance. Like, they counted attendance. If you didn't attend for like six classes, you're banned. And so I think if I'm going to school, I'm doing all these different things, I'm meeting interesting people, and then I have an idea and I'm like manically working really hard, give me the space to do it. Don't like expel me. Don't yuck my up. Yeah, exactly. For sure. Exactly. And finally, the quality of people. Like I think if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded. Yeah. If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those deeply held beliefs, I think you will be able to do that.

8:46Gagan Biyani:Yeah. Yeah. I went to UC Berkeley, go Bears, and I did enjoy it a lot. But one of the things that I really enjoyed was that there was actually no expectation of attending class for most situations. And so I had many semesters where I had three jobs in one semester. And often the time that I was expected to be at work overlapped with my class. So I just looked at my midterm schedule in advance and I said, okay, these are my two midterms. hey boss, can I take those two days off? And otherwise I was working. But it's like interesting because now I look back and I did enjoy that, but I feel oftentimes I look at that experience and say, well, what if the environment was supportive of this?

9:35Gagan Biyani:Like what would happen if, because honestly, I think today when I talk to students, it's been 20 years plus, when I talk to students today, they all do this. This used to be odd, my behavior. And now it's 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 compute, the biolab, whatever it is.

10:20Erik Torenberg:You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be like actually actively encouraging you.

10:23Gagan Biyani:Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it. So like if you have a crazy idea that's taking off, like the college, you shouldn't be hiding it from your college. They should be coming like, oh my God, like this is amazing. Let's give them more.

10:38Erik Torenberg:Totally. There's this kid, Eric, I think he's Richard's friend who has to take like investor calls from the bathroom because he's like hiding in the school. Yeah, they should be like, you know, coaching him through it or enabling it in some way, bringing a demo day or something, this kind of thing. A couple of comments. One is going back to your thing around like calligraphy, you know, people get these interests that will, you know, might seem random and might be random, but in other ways might tie back in other ways. And I think there are actually ways in which the school can sort of develop, like it's hard to force natural interest.

11:13Erik Torenberg:And so, for example, I was obsessed with basketball as a kid, but I was also the kid who would ask my math teacher, like, what's the point of this? Like, help explain it to me. And if she could have explained it to me, maybe I would have got excited about it. If she would say, hey, you know, you're obsessed with basketball, you need to understand the salary cap. Or actually, basketball is very analytical now in terms of like, people are using stats and data to evaluate players. And so if you don't understand this, you're not going to be a good student of the game. That would have got me really excited.

11:38Erik Torenberg:That's why I'm so excited about Alpha School. Yeah. 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.

11:47Gagan Biyani:The thing that's so hard is we all know, like the education sort of academic, the industry of education, if you will, or the academic canon of education is completely on board with this. Like they totally understand that it would be great if every student could have a customized curriculum. You know, and Joe Limon of Alpha School talks about this all the time. The problem is that practically it seems impossible. But actually, I think now is the moment when it's completely reverted. And it's not just impossible. It's actually impossible to imagine why you wouldn't do that. Specifically, like for me, if I think about the academy, right?

12:32Gagan Biyani: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. And 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 like project-based learning. There shouldn't be a buzzword for it because that should be the standard.

13:20The idea that you're learning something and you don't know the utility of it, I think is a very modern invention. as 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. And so there was this inversion for a long time of how we learn things. Like 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 and 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's able to motivate your learning by telling you what kind of skills you can acquire because of it.

14:25Erik Torenberg:Totally. Well, it's interesting because there is, you know, the critique that we're addressing that, you know, um, we're solving for, which is, Hey, there's, there's certain schooling environments where there's very little practical skills gained, or they don't train for the real world afterwards, even though they claim to, but then there's this also this opposite critique. And I'm curious if you guys, how we balance this, which is, Hey, some people are sort of professionalizing way too soon and not having childhoods or something, or not, you're not spending time to cultivate, um, intellectually or as a person.

14:54Erik Torenberg:There's still kind of this sort of ineffable quality that some people think you get at an experience like college where you're sort of, you know, meeting new people, getting new friends, you know, sort of going to party. I don't know what people are describing 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?

15:19Gagan Biyani:I think there's this like huge unfair choice that a lot of young people are provided today. It's either go and get a four-year, go to a four-year school where there's a lot of structure around what you should be doing. You're going to have to attend classes. You're going to do homework and tests and grades and all of that. And then there's another option, which is you can go and start a startup and someone will give you$50 ,000 tomorrow to start it. And the problem that I see is, look, I think there's lots of people who are still going to go to college and love it. And I think there are young people, even at 16, 17, who should be starting a startup.

16:03Gagan Biyani: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, it's fine, but the pressure of making a 10-year commitment at 18 isn't for most people.

16:44Gagan Biyani: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 and more and more. That's super exciting to me. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, 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.

17:24Where 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?

18:02And so that's why I always come back to this idea of curiosity. Like what is actually driving you? What is, you know, once you find that idea that you want to dedicate your life to or dedicate the next 10 years to, it's going to have such gravity. You're not going to be able to avoid it. You know, I mean, for me, you know, I tried not to start Rap Lit, like 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 there's, 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.

18:5150K is like a million dollars pre-idea. And it's like the moment you start your idea, you know, you already have a cap table. I think that's sort of like the music industry. And you're like, you know, Kanye talked a lot about this where it's like how predatory it is, where you find a young artist and you kind of lock them into a contract. They don't even understand that contract. Like luckily, I think in Silicon Valley, we have the safes, which are 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.

19:33Erik Torenberg: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, you know, like there are some people who are so career focused that really that's just like the only thing they think about is how to make more money or how to make this thing successful.

20:16Erik Torenberg:And so I think to your point, Goggin, sometimes people are funneled into these, you know, either of these paths. And I'm curious how you've thought about, is that something that you've always been just naturally or how can people both be like very pragmatic in their career, you know, as young people and yet also make time or make space or make interest for following their intellectual curiosity, even if it might seem 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 read a lot and explore a lot and see what's out there, what's interesting.

20:59And they feed on each other. It's a sort of recursive process where I accumulate enough knowledge and ideas from all the things I've explored that I really want to go build something with it now, right? And so, like, you know, for example, recently I got really into chess, which is like very late in life to get into chess. Like usually you get into chess when you're six years old. And my kid actually is six years old. He's getting into chess pretty soon. He's going to 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.

21:31And then I started training models. And I was like, why LLMs? Chattapiti actually sucks at chess. Oh, really? Yeah, and I was like, well, you know, 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, you know, some people are now called RSI or cursive thought improvement. So sort of a buzzword for AI being able to do ML.

22:13I realized that AI is actually now capable of doing ML. So the moment we were in like 2024, when Repl.ly agent came out, before Vibe coding as a term was coined, suddenly agents were capable of like coding. and coding 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 Karpathy'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.

22:59Or like any business owner who has data can like fine tune a model to kind of solve a certain problem. And so when I started playing chess, like what are the hops you need to make to understand that, oh, that's going to lead me to build a new business line for Replit. It's just impossible. But I just followed something that I was interested in and 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.

23:38I learned something about where the world is headed. And I have alpha.

23:42Erik Torenberg:You have an itch and you listen to the itch. And sometimes the itches, build something, learn something. And a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they learn over time to ignore nor in favor of, you know, going through these hoops. And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to listen to itches. Is it helpful to... I mean, not more than people do currently, but I think generally it's like, in order to lead, it's also helpful to know how to follow. But I think people spend their entire high school and, you know, and often college just learning how to follow.