a16zReplit CEO Amjad Masad on What Young People Should Learn in the AI Era
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The Purpose Of Young People 0:00
Amjad Masad opens by describing college as something that should let young people question deeply held beliefs, calling this being heretics. He says today's colleges do the opposite, beating outside thought out of students and preparing them to be perfect citizens who get jobs, get married, and buy houses, a path that no longer guarantees success since people can graduate with debt and still be unemployed. He references the science fiction story The City and the Stars, about a future city run by an AGI where people live forever and fill their time with thousand-year art projects, until a glitch produces a person born genuinely new, who disrupts the boot camp meant to retrain memories and eventually pushes past the city's borders to discover what lies beyond. Masad connects this to Silicon Valley, arguing that every culture, even the most radical one, is still a monoculture with blind spots, and that society needs young people with clear, first-principles minds to attempt impossible things and occasionally break through.
Steve Jobs And Meandering Paths 6:00
Asked how he would redesign college at 18 in 2026, Masad says he would want an environment that is not prescriptive about what to learn, citing Steve Jobs's Stanford commencement speech about connecting things backward. Jobs dropped out of Reed College but kept dropping into classes, including calligraphy, which later shaped the Mac's proportionally spaced fonts. Masad argues this kind of meandering, which modern society treats as useless, is actually the most valuable part of college, since a single unrelated class can redirect someone's whole life. He also wants space and time protected for building things, recalling that his own college counted attendance and would ban students after missing six classes, which conflicts with the reality of working intensely on an idea.
Attendance And Peer Environment 8:31
The host shares that at UC Berkeley he juggled three jobs a semester and simply told employers which two days he needed off for midterms, treating class attendance as optional, a habit that was once unusual but is now common among students. Masad says colleges should actively support rather than merely tolerate this kind of side-questing, offering resources like compute or lab space when a student's independent project starts taking off, rather than forcing them to hide it, mentioning a student named Eric who had to take investor calls from a bathroom to avoid being noticed by his school.
Learning Tied To Real Interests 11:00
The host recalls being obsessed with basketball as a kid and wishing a teacher had connected math to things like salary caps or basketball statistics. Masad says the academic world already agrees customized, interest-driven curricula would be ideal but has always considered it practically impossible, until now, when AI removes that barrier. At the Academy, he says, a student learning to code shouldn't just take a Python class but should build something they are excited about, using the language as a tool, since AI now lets any student pursue that without a custom syllabus.
The Two Bad Extremes 15:00
Masad describes an unfair choice facing young people: either a highly structured four-year school or a startup path where someone hands an eighteen-year-old fifty thousand dollars to commit years of their life to an idea. He argues the investor track is overused, that grants for temporary exploration are fine but a ten-year commitment at eighteen isn't right for most people, and that a middle ground of two pressure-free years to explore is what's missing. He warns against "premature optimization," where students start companies out of envy over peers becoming unicorns rather than real curiosity, and criticizes VCs who reportedly offer Stanford students a million dollars pre-idea, comparing it to predatory record-label contracts, while crediting Y Combinator's safes as a less predatory model.
Following Curiosity Into Chess 21:00
Masad describes oscillating between building things and reading widely, saying the two feed each other. He recently got into chess late in life, started writing programs to solve it, then trained models, and noticed that large language models like ChatGPT are surprisingly bad at chess despite high benchmark scores. This led him into machine learning research himself, which he connects to a new trend some call recursive self-improvement or "vibe research," where AI now handles machine learning tasks the way coding agents already transformed programming. He says he never planned for this chess interest to matter for Replit, but it is now feeding into a project letting business owners fine-tune models on their own data.
Companies Without Managers 24:00
Masad predicts the structure of companies will change fundamentally, noting past experiments like holacracy at Medium and GitHub's no-manager model, which failed not because the idea was wrong but because the technology wasn't ready. He believes AI agents can now serve as the glue holding organizations together, handling bureaucracy invisibly so people have real autonomy over what they find interesting, describing his own goal of building a "self-driving company." He closes this stretch by naming Replit's conference rooms after computer science pioneers like Marc Andreessen and Linus Torvalds, using it to illustrate a balance of respecting what elders built while still believing much of it remains inadequate and open to change.
Silicon Valley Forgives Bold Predictions 28:00
Amjad Masad recalls being publicly criticized about a year earlier for saying people shouldn't learn to code, and notes that many of his critics now openly admit they no longer read code and just prompt AI to write it instead. He says he loves that Silicon Valley culture lets people move forward after being wrong or early, rather than holding grudges against bold takes.
Trust as a Civic and Business Asset 29:01
Masad describes volunteering in local Oakland politics as a "side quest" that has proven surprisingly transferable to business, especially in showing him the value of trust. He contrasts nonprofit fundraising, where a verbal pledge might only have a 20 to 50 percent chance of actually arriving, with Silicon Valley norms, where a verbal commitment is honored 75 to 100 percent of the time, letting people act on trust and gain weeks of progress before money even changes hands. He argues schools should apply this same principle by trusting students to pursue what they want, even ideas that seem strange, since that trust is what lets people build genuine new things.
Handling Troublemakers and Young Hackers 32:00
Asked how to deal with students who push boundaries, Masad says real red lines like harassment or cruelty still matter, but his planned academy avoids grades and tests, which removes much of the pressure that drives rebellious behavior in the first place. He references a young hacker who learned skills on Roblox and ended up facing prison time, and suggests that instead of jailing such kids, institutions like the NSA or cybersecurity employers should channel their talent, an idea he says he discussed with Roblox's founder. He also recalls a childhood hacking practice site called hack the site, comparing it to a bounty program, and suggests students could take part in existing corporate bug bounty programs.
Becoming a Grounded, Ethical Person 36:30
Reflecting on whether education should shape character and not just skills, Masad says some of the kindest, most grounded people he's met are in Silicon Valley, though not everyone there deserves respect. He says interpersonal skills and being a positive influence are core to his planned academy, and that a good reputation in San Francisco carries real value since people trust you with money and responsibility. He describes shaping his own moral compass through wide reading and introspection, ultimately landing closest to Aristotle's virtue ethics, acting in ways he'd be proud of regardless of who's watching, while still holding a few small, firm principles in a rapidly changing world. Closing out, he says what impresses him most in young people is genuine depth in something they've pursued, paired with authentic likability rather than arrogance or contrived charm.
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