This should be the greatest time in the history of humanity to be young. This is like Thomas Edison's time or Henry Ford's time or so forth. But the challenge that we have is everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer exist.
Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z and one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation across the board. It's critical for young people who don't have that billion-dollar idea to not settle for the million-dollar idea and instead go and explore more. We're building a new school for the AI era and that means redesigning everything.
Let's go pursue it all and let's get an output on that.
Picture HA 5 years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful? My hope is...
Well Ben Gagan we have a big announcement today.
We are announcing Horowitz and Jason Academy.
Yes we are and we're very excited about that. Super pumped.
So let's get into the story of how this came to be and let's talk about what it is. Ben, ever since I joined, you know, a year and a half ago, we've been, you know, working on bringing this to life. We found the perfect co-founder in Gagan. But you've been thinking about this at a16z for years before. So talk about what was the impetus for why we wanted to make this happen.
Yeah, we kind of came at it from a couple different directions. So the kind of first thing was, you know, for well one of the things we noticed is like for young people, kind of college works really really well if you want to be a scholar or kind of, you know, a professor or that kind of thing. But it's a little bit of a weird proposition if you just want to get a job or you have an idea to start a company. It's a very large financial investment and a very big time investment. And most of the stuff that happens in college isn't around that. It's around other kinds of things. And there's, you know, being a well-rounded person, this and that and the other. But if you ask an 18-year-old why do they go to college? It's to get a job usually. And that kind of doesn't always translate. So that was kind of one thing where like, you know, I wonder if, you know, we got a lot of jobs maybe we can help with that. And then on our side from a hiring standpoint, I think that, you know, college really evolved a lot in the last I would say four or five years in terms of kind of the kind of students they're looking for and then what skills they have. And, you know, in our world the skill sets needed are evolving so fast that it was just very hard for a kind of big system like that to keep up. So, you know, we still think college is great for, you know, probably most kids. But there is a certain kind of kid that wants to build something that already knows they want to go in, you know, specifically currently into technology and we have access to all the jobs. We know exactly what you need to learn. We know exactly the skills that you have to have. And so we thought, gee, you know, like that would be a great thing for us to add to the mix and provide.
Yeah. And, you know, we've been individually been thinking about this for, you know, over a decade. You and your many businesses, you know, having co-founded Udemy, Maven most recently. That was, you know, we did a search for who was the right CEO and it just through the process became obvious that Gagan has one been thinking about this for forever but then two is one of the most just impressive entrepreneurs in the entire space over the past, you know, decade plus. Is there anything else you want to say about the...
Yeah, like it was kind of one of those things where you go like we have this idea and then we meet a guy he's like, you know, I've had that idea for much longer than you've had that idea and not only that I've like spent a lot of time trying to work and make it happen. But without necessarily the gigantic resource that you guys have which is you're invested in 1,600 companies and you have a fairly large place of employment yourself and so forth. So, you know, if you put those things together then you have the potential for like something really really special.
Yeah. And I think also, you know, we as a firm have also backed many, you know, things in the space. There's a lot of people who tried to do something in the space and it hasn't really cut through. There's some interesting experiments. There's some interesting outcomes, but nothing has really, you know, taken sort of a crack at it. And I'm curious why you guys think that that is. I'll take a stab by saying I think they focus a little bit too narrow. You know, college is of course a bundle. It's a bundle of dozens of things including like sports leagues and hedge funds. You don't have to do the whole bundle, but you have to do not just sort of training people for the job world, but also or not just education, but also status and credential and brand. It has to be an indication that, oh, you know, you went here, thus I want to hire you or I want to work with you. And it also has to be fun. It has to be something that people actually want to do. And I think too many players just focus either just on the learning thing or just on some other hybrid and don't create the bundle that is the value prop that is truly truly competitive.
Yeah. So I think that, you know, we're kind of starting out a little more specific and then we'll, you know, really ace that. But, you know, the core idea of it is like it's for people who want to build something and do something and make an impact kind of in the world outside of, you know, like I said being a scholar and to do that, be it in technology or in music or in any field you kind of want to learn how to do it as opposed to just study about it. And so if you think of something like, you know, like music appreciation or art appreciation or so forth that's great but like we would do that kind of thing. We would do the kind of thing where it's like, oh you want to major in music, like, you know, let's write some songs, let's do some things, you know, let's understand that process and do that and it's the same thing with technology which is, oh you want to be a technologist, like let's learn how to build a system. Yeah.
And, you know, I think that just ends up being very different. The other thing that, you know, the other reason that now is actually the correct time to do it is if you look at the university system, you know, it started out as this religious institution with the Jesuits and so forth. And then the industrial revolution came and then all of a sudden everybody needed kind of a higher level of the ability to learn things, the ability to, you know, being literate etc etc and so the university system just exploded in the US and the universities got much bigger and there became many more of them and so forth and that was really necessary to train the population to kind of enter the corporate world. There was like, it's hard for people to understand now but like, oh in 1700 there was no corporate world like that, there was like a farm world that, you know, and then all of a sudden we got these companies and all this kind of thing and to exist in that environment you've got to be able to, you know, read and write and do math and this and that and the third and so like things really changed from an educational standpoint in this country which became a huge advantage and, you know, to a large extent the America that we have was built on the backs of our great universities, but we're hitting the AI revolution now, which is going to be, you know, in our estimation, as transformational in terms of jobs, the way jobs are done, the kinds of jobs that are available and so forth as the industrial revolution was to the agricultural kind of society that came before it. And the idea that the training for the industrial revolution is going to map into the AI revolution probably not perfectly. So there kind of needs to be a pioneer that shows the way like how do you train somebody into the new world. And, you know, there's many things that are different. So and we've got all this technology as well. So, you know, rather than being in lectures for 5 hours a day or eight hours a day depending on your curriculum, you know, maybe it's better to have kind of more contained instruction and, you know, more time with the tools, more time learning on an individual pace with AI and those kinds of things. And then also more structured social things. So, not like the social things, not necessarily let's get rip roaring drunk and go out. Although maybe some of that will occur too, but, you know, kind of more structured social things because we'll have the time because we won't have so much time, you know, sitting in the classroom listening to somebody talk. And so, you know, all these new ideas can come into play now. And the timing is, you know, I say, you know, for a young person now, that's the world they're going to live in.
Yeah, I completely agree. We're building a new school for the AI era and that means redesigning everything. And I think that actually the other efforts I agree with you some of them don't go big enough in order to truly deliver a, you know, college comparable experience. Obviously this is not college. It's not degree granting but a college comparable experience that's good for a high school student. You have to have interpersonal social dynamics. You need to have it residential in San Francisco. You need to make sure that it's connected to the employers who employ the best people. And so there's a bundle that's required that you have to deliver. And there's probably only two or three people who have ever even tried to deliver that bundle in the last, you know, let's say 50 years. And the other thing though that those companies or efforts I think missed is, you know, it's a classic startup thing like what do you do when you start a startup? You need a very very unique specific customer who has a burning desire for your product. And like Ben, when we first met, I hadn't met that many of these, but over the last six months, as you know, I've spent all my time with these young builders. And there is a generation of young builders who are just fired up about creating things. And that is one of the core ingredients of this academy is that they exist. And we're building it for them. And I think that makes it different from other efforts because we have a very clear demand. And also that demand is elite. So it's not like it's demand from, you know, the far right or the far left or something where it's not perceived positively like these are the people who are going to employ, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the future. They're going to raise a billion dollars for their company eventually. Like those are the people who need our product right now and that's what I think is really exciting.
Yeah. And students will have the opportunity to, like when I was in college it was so divorced from the real world and I was interested in technology and I was reading about it but here you're going to have access to work at companies, internet companies like Databricks, Nvidia, Stripe, dozens of others and you'll be immersed in the a16z sort of cinematic universe that is both economic, you know, practically from a career oriented like very embedded in the actual work but then also just, you know, exposure to people doing real things, interesting things, getting the osmosis of the Silicon Valley sort of spirit. Ben, let's talk about if you were 18 today, how would you be thinking about your own sort of growth or education, learning like how what's it like to be 18 today in terms of like what do you think people should be excited about, you nervous about?
Yeah. So I would be thrilled to be 18. I think it is like one of the best times in history to be 18 and it's unfortunate because I think because of the systems for getting people into work currently people are really nervous about their future. But if you look at it this is, you know, this is like Thomas Edison's time or, you know, Henry Ford's time or so forth. It's kind of you're going into a world that only you will understand. That like people like me will have much more difficult time understanding the world than you will and what's possible and what you can do and so forth. So you're going to go in at a very young age being more capable than people with 30, 40 years of experience. And that's just amazing because normally, you know, you've got to work your way up the corporate ladder, you know, spend, you know, 20 years kind of developing your status and credibility, whereas now you can come out right off the rip using the new tools to basically solve almost any problem out there. And I'm, you know, the funny thing is like, well, what are people going to do? It's like, well, are we out of problems? It seems like we have all I read about is problems. There's problems everywhere. So now you can go out, you can attack them directly. Either, you know, either yourself as the leader or as part of a team. But, you know, that to me is the thing that's really really exciting. And I think it's, you know, it's funny. I, you know, I heard a lot about the industrial revolution transition because so my grandfather's father kind of immigrated the family out of Russia because they were going to kill all the Jews. So they had to leave, you know, was the the pilgrim period. And he basically was a slave here in that he was in a sweat shop. He slept under his sewing machine because he worked so many hours. He like slept at the office under his sewing machine. He'd come back, you know, on the weekends and so forth. And he made like very little money and he was just it was a very very hard life for him. But, you know, my grandfather was able to get an education at CCNY and he kind of became a teacher and had a kind of much better life. Although it was also not nearly as good as my father's who was the next generation coming out of it. And I think, you know, for this when we look back I think the young people today will look at us and, you know, their parents as though you guys were sleeping under sewing machines, you know, and pretty bitter compared to like what's going to be possible and so forth. So I think it's a very very exciting time but, you know, you want to be on the kind of right side of history and you want to be future forward. You don't want to I think the past is going to fade very fast, you know, much faster than we're used to.
Talk about how even though it's so easy to build, you still want to have experience, relationships, connections, spend some time at some of these iconic companies, right? Because when you're just a kid you might think oh I want to start a dating app idea or pizza idea but if you work at Databricks for a bit say example talk a little bit about that.
Yeah so I think that, you know, if you're young and you see something that you go, oh my god I think I'm the only one who really understands this and it's compelling me to build a company then that's, you know, that's phenomenal that's Mark Zuckerberg that's you. That's a kind of an unbelievable opportunity but also a rare one. And then I think, you know, most people who are young or kind of the majority would love to kind of understand that thing. And by the way, all Zuck's roommates from Harvard who didn't go to Facebook with him really regretted that because he kind of invited them all to be employees or, you know, many of them and some of them didn't do it and they're like, 'Dag nab it. That would have been so exciting.' And so I think that, you know, there's just a great opportunity to kind of join up with people who have done that kind of thing either, you know, it's something that's further along depending on, you know, if you really want to kind of learn and develop your skills and so forth or, you know, maybe, you know, one of your classmates is doing something really exciting like, you know, in the case of Facebook at the time. So, you know, I think there are many, you know, there's plenty of opportunities depending on how powerful your new ideas are at that time. And, you know, sometimes they're not that powerful. I didn't have a great idea when I was 18. So, it's not that common. It took me a while to learn. You know, I'm not as quick as others on that, I guess. But if you get in, you know, the great thing for me is I got in at a company Silicon Graphics which had all kinds of innovation and I saw what that was and how you can really change things and so forth and that kind of built a foundation for the rest of my career.
Yeah. We always talk about builder skills but also people skills. You've written a couple books on it. You talk about all the time internally. Is that something you knew when you were 18 or in college or how do you learn people skills? How should we, you know, teach it to our students etc.
Well look I think the main thing is to be around people and it's, you know, people often talk about, you know, particularly the millennial generation has this kind of loneliness epidemic because they're so locked into their screens and so forth. I think one of the things that AI has the potential is just like get us off of the screen, right? Like we're not that far away from I'm going to talk to my AI and have him do the work and deal with the dang computer, you know, like and so that's going to free me up to really deal with people where there's going to be just tremendous value being able to kind of know my peers, motivate them, kind of get the best out of each other, do something larger than ourselves and try and kind of move the future forward and make the world a better place. And so kind of getting experience in that environment where you're kind of working with others and learning, hey, you know, yeah, I mean, and, you know, college, by the way, has been great for this over the years where you're like, oh, you come from Nebraska. I never knew anybody from Nebraska. Like what is it like that? What's it just corn fields and like what's going on? And, you know, you kind of get to know people. And, you know, probably one of the skills that I see missing the most, which I try and kind of impart in people on the firm is like, let's just start with who the person you're talking to is, like rather than just talking to somebody. Hey, Eric, how you doing? D, like, where'd you grow up? Where are you from? Like, oh, that's interesting. You've got, you know, this parent from this place, this other parent from the other place, you know, that's really good. What was that like? You know, how did they get along? So forth. And then you start to kind of understand people and that opportunity in a business context isn't as obvious, you know, if you haven't, but you always do that when you get with a group of kids your age. Like that's the first thing you ask them. You want to know, you know, do you get along with your parents? You hate your parents, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah. I think one of the I mean, absolutely one of the most important things we want is to develop people's 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. And specifically, I think it's a challenge if you go off to college, you only interact with people your same year. You know, you finally maybe have a friend who's like one or two years above you or below you. One of the things I think the academy will do is we obviously want there to be deep social networks amongst your peers. We also are going to try and cohabitate you like especially in the office with other companies and individuals and projects and co-ops and internships that are with the quote unquote adult world so that you can force yourself to you're sort of you can't have no choice. Like if you're trying to accomplish 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 going to have to learn, right? And you're going to have all these people around you who are experts at this. So, they're going to be like, 'Oh, you should do that and you should do that, etc.' And so, I think that the combination of the osmosis of Silicon Valley, a peer network that's supportive, and the project-based curriculum combined will dramatically accelerate people's skill development over something like, 'Let me sit in a lecture talking about negotiations.' Like that's not how you develop people's skills. You develop people's skills because you're doing something you really care about and you need to get everyone on board.
Yeah. 100%. Related. Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z. And one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation across the board. And so any sort of subculture or they're the most extreme at it. And so, for example, there's so many like back when we were in college, it was rare to have an 18-year-old who was already building startups, immersed in the startup world, you know, obsessed with sort of, you know, this kind of thing. And now there are a bunch of them and we're going to harness them. But to your point, Ben, it's important about the people you surround yourself with. And so now it's higher variance than ever to find your people, people who are builders, people who are resilient, people who are entrepreneurial. To being able to aggregate them the same place is just huge. Yeah, we're really excited. I've been so impressed by the talent that we've had a chance to meet. I mean, I didn't know a single person who was doing anything entrepreneurial when I was a child and I started my first venture at 13. So the idea that we're going to collect, you know, 50 in at least in the founding class fellowship, 50 students who are all like actually builders and they're going to be different kinds of builders like I want to be clear that this be quite a broad definition of the word building, but all in one place and for them to meet each other and spend a bunch of time riffing off each other. I'm very excited about it.
Yeah. Let's talk about the importance of this being in California in the extended Bay Area. You know, Ben, you grew up in Berkeley.
Which at the time was like 10,000 miles from Silicon Valley, even though it was only like a half hour drive.
Yeah. And I think it's so interesting because you grew up in California, so you know that it's not just sort of a technical, you know, bastion, but also, you know, a cultural bastion, intellectual bastion. It's so interesting because and we're focused, you know, largely on the builder element first, but people say, you know, college is for building a career, but also becoming an, you know, pursuing knowledge and becoming a better person. And talk about why California is just in San Francisco is just such an important place for this to be what is the opportunity here?
Well, I think the big thing is it's where most companies, great companies in America get started and then America is one of kind of two places in the world where like a giant number of companies get started. And so everybody who has done that and knows how to do that and all the people have worked at places like that just a huge majority are here in California. So, you know, if you want to learn how to do that or if you want to go work with people who do that, then it's just like the most obvious place to put it. And look, you know, I went to college in New York and most of the people who came out of academia went into financial services like that was kind of the main employer that was the main recruiter there and so forth. And I think for a program like this, you know, we're connected to so many companies, but probably, you know, well over 80% of them are like right in this area. And so it just makes it very very convenient to come here, you learn the area and guess what? You can start your career right in that place.
