Replit CEO Amjad Masad on What Young People Should Learn in the AI Era
Erik TorenbergAmjad MasadGagan Biyani
- Amjad Masad's core thesis is that the social function of young people is heresy — “the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs” — and today's college does the opposite: “it kind of beats any outside thought out of them.” The old bargain is dead: “You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt,” and the civilizational cost is losing the clear-minded outsider who asks what's beyond the city walls, per his “City and the Stars” parable.
- The most thesis-relevant disclosure: Masad says AI is now capable of doing machine learning itself — “RSI” / “cursive self-improvement,” “vibe research,” or “autoresearch” — and Replit is building a product on it. A late-life chess hobby led him to discover LLMs “actually suck at chess,” to train his first model, and to conclude ML is at the same inflection coding hit when Replit Agent came out in 2024, before “vibe coding” was coined. He's now working at Replit so “any business owner who has data can fine-tune a model.”
- Masad calls current teen-founder funding predatory: VCs are handing Stanford students “a million dollars, not even 50K...” pre-idea, locking kids into cap tables like music-industry contracts. Kanye's critique of record labels is his analogy; SAFEs help but “it's still somewhat predatory,” and a lot of startup formation is “premature optimization... the root of all evil” — envy-driven pre-commitment to ideas founders don't care about. His counter-signal: the right idea “kind of exploded into a startup on its own” — he says he actively tried not to start Replit.
- Gagan Biyani's Academy is positioned as the missing middle between a rigid four-year degree and a $50K teen startup check: two years of exploration with “no grades, no tests,” where Silicon Valley brings resources to students rather than forcing side quests underground. He wants the investor track “way underutilized” for teenagers — grants yes, ten-year commitments at 18 no — and argues a lower-stakes structure sidesteps the troublemaker problem: “You wanna build Facemash, go for it.”
- Masad predicts the nature of the firm changes next: Holacracy and GitHub's no-managers experiments “blew up in spectacular ways” because of a technology problem AI may now solve. Agents become the invisible bureaucratic glue, “AI can sort of judge your impact,” and he's already running Replit toward a “self-driving company” that “will run itself.” Track record note: he was “canceled” in 2025 for saying people shouldn't learn to code — a year later, he says, his critics say, “I don't read code anymore.”
- Biyani quantifies Silicon Valley's trust premium from his Oakland politics side quest: a verbal $50K nonprofit pledge lands somewhere between 20% and 50% of the time; in Silicon Valley, he estimates 75% to 100%, depending on who is involved — and that gap compounds because you can execute six weeks before the check clears. His transfer thesis: apply that trust to students and “they're gonna figure out the next version of Holacracy that actually works.”
- On values, Masad lands closest to Aristotelian virtue ethics: principles should evolve as the world changes, but remain grounded in a small set of core truths. He argues consequentialism is especially difficult as “we're entering the singularity” and “you can't really predict the future.” The “autistic genius” role may once have paid off, but “Silicon Valley is no longer this renegade thing... it's part of the establishment”; graduates must eventually “be in front of Congress,” not just speak in-group language. He criticizes Dwarkesh's post, which Bernie Sanders read, for failing in his view to create more understanding among outsiders.
1. College should manufacture heretics; instead it deletes them
- Masad opens with “The City and the Stars”: an AGI-governed utopia where people compress their memories and retrain for life, until a glitch produces a genuinely new person who asks, “What's out there? What's in the stars?” His point: it took a glitch to get a clear mind capable of questioning deeply held beliefs — and college today does the opposite. “It tells you you're stupid. We've figured everything out... get a job and be a perfect citizen.” But “that world doesn't exist anymore.”
- Even Silicon Valley gets indicted: “every culture is somehow a monoculture, even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley.” The job of the young is to try impossible things, because occasionally technology has changed and the impossible quietly became possible.
2. The ideal school: non-prescriptive, attendance-free, staffed with unconventional people
- Masad's redesign of 18–22 has three planks: freedom to meander (Jobs dropping into Reed's calligraphy class, which resurfaced years later as the Mac's fonts — “connecting things backwards”); space to build when obsession strikes (his own college banned you after six missed classes); and people quality — “if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded.”
- Biyani's Berkeley version: many semesters with three jobs, often working instead of attending class, then taking time off for midterms. What was odd behavior 20 years ago is now becoming the student norm — “and the thing that's weird is that it's not encouraged yet. It's still not allowed.”
- All three converge on the same inversion: colleges should bring resources to students with traction, not force side quests underground — Torenberg cites a kid taking investor calls from the school bathroom who should be getting a demo day or other support instead.
3. Project-based learning becomes practical with AI
- Masad's contrarian history claim: learning things without knowing their utility “is a very modern invention, a very weird thing to have done in society.” He's explicit that he's not motivated by pure knowledge: “I'm motivated by skills — what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I wanna build?” Torenberg's basketball version: a stats class taught through the salary cap and player analytics would have actually landed — the Alpha School model.
- Biyani says educators always agreed on customized curricula but it was “practically impossible”; with AI, “it's actually impossible to imagine why you wouldn't do that.” Applying this to the Academy, he says coding students should build something they're excited about in Python rather than merely take a Python class, and every student can now do that without a bespoke syllabus.
4. The $1M pre-idea check is the music industry all over again
- Masad's warning: much of teen entrepreneurship is “premature optimization... the root of all evil” — kids motivated by envy of unicorn friends, pre-committing to ideas they don't care about. He's heard VCs give Stanford students “a million dollars, not even 50K... pre-idea,” so that “the moment you start your idea you already have a cap table.” His analogy is Kanye on record contracts; SAFEs, credited to YC and Paul Graham, help, “but it's still somewhat predatory.”
- The counter-signal to look for is gravity. “I tried not to start Replit, like actively not to start it, but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own... it's almost like, I guess I have to do it.”
- Biyani's structural fix: only a small number of teenagers should be raising money; give the rest two pressure-free years where “Silicon Valley will come to you,” with grants explicitly framed as temporary.
5. From chess hobby to “vibe research” to the self-driving company
- Masad's best example of curiosity compounding: he got into chess late, discovered that LLMs such as ChatGPT “actually suck at chess” despite rising ARC-AGI scores, trained his first LLM to play, and realized AI can now do machine learning. He calls this RSI or “cursive self-improvement,” and “vibe research” or “autoresearch,” which he thinks is Karpathy's term. He sees machine learning at a similar inflection to coding when Replit Agent came out in 2024, and he's building a Replit product so anyone with data can fine-tune models. “When I started playing chess, what are the hops you need to make to understand that's gonna lead me to build a new business line? It's just impossible.” Even meme subcultures pay: “I learn something about markets... and I have alpha.”
- His firm-structure corollary: Holacracy at Medium and GitHub's no-managers era “all blew up in spectacular ways,” but “it was a technology problem.” Agents could become invisible bureaucracy, AI could sort of judge impact, and humans could gain true autonomy — he's already changed how he runs Replit toward a “self-driving company.” Biyani, hedged but certain about the direction: “I genuinely don't have an opinion about where it's gonna go, but I know it's gonna change... a lot faster than you think.”
- Receipts on being early: Masad was “canceled” in 2025 for saying people shouldn't learn to code; he says some of the same people who opposed him now say, “I don't read code anymore, I just prompt.”
6. Trust economics, redeemed troublemakers, and virtue ethics for the singularity
- Biyani's number from Oakland politics: after a verbal nonprofit donation commitment, the money lands somewhere between 20% and 50% of the time; in Silicon Valley, he estimates 75% to 100%, depending on who is involved. Trust compounds, since you can make six weeks of progress before the check arrives. The Academy imports this by trusting students, reducing institutional weight, and making it easier to let them try things like Facemash. Masad's addendum: kids learning to hack on Roblox — he has discussed a talent sandbox with Roblox founder and CEO Dave — could be funneled into cybersecurity jobs or even government work rather than sent to jail. Biyani grew up using hackthesite.org and would point students toward school and corporate bounty programs.
- Masad extends the discussion into discernment: knowing when to respect elders and when to disrupt comes from reps, trusting students to fail and learn, and understanding asymmetric upside versus downside. He coins “meta retard maxing” for knowing when to follow instinct and when it will drive you into trouble.
- Biyani also frames the Academy as human cultivation, not just technical training: interpersonal skills are an “absolute pillar,” and the goal is to produce positive influences in a positive-sum, high-trust culture where people grow as adults over two years.
- Masad's moral philosophy, arrived at by reading widely and rejecting utilitarianism: virtue ethics — act so you'd be proud “regardless of who's watching... regardless of the impact,” while allowing principles to evolve and keeping core axioms “as small as possible.” The kicker: “you can't be a consequentialist or utilitarian when we're entering the singularity,” because that requires predicting the future. The “autistic genius” role may once have paid off, but he says the Valley is now “part of the establishment”; he cites the deleted Sequoia SBF post and criticizes Dwarkesh's blog post, which Bernie Sanders read, for failing in his view to create more understanding among outsiders.
- What impresses Masad in an 18-year-old, in closing: “they dove really deep in something, they can teach me something” — depth signals persistence and intrinsic motivation — paired with respect and likability, because young-and-smart people can easily tip into thinking everyone is an idiot. “The most endearing thing is you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting.”
Full transcript
Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs and to be heretics. 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 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. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills it can 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.
When you see an 18-year-old who is really inspiring to you, and you're like, "I have to spend time with this person," what are they doing that is capturing your interest?
1. A Glitch Creates Heretics
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, and it now governs all of our lives. It solves all human problems. There are no wars, there is no disease, everyone lives forever, and people spend their time working on 1,000-year art projects and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time.
But they found a problem: they accumulated so much knowledge and memory that it became harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory and compress their memory, sort of like the context compression that we do with AI today. They go through all the memories and compress them, and then they go through a boot camp to retrain 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 a new person is fundamentally born. He immediately starts causing problems.
In the boot camp, he starts doing weird, 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. Then, when he goes out into the 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."
Sounds like "Silo" a little bit.
A little bit like "Silo." A little bit like "Fallout."
Yeah.
I don't want to get into the spoilers too much, but eventually that's what happens. He has so much drive to change things and discover the stars. That's why it's called "The City and the Stars." The story unfolds in that way, and he finds all sorts of interesting things out there.
2. Young People Should Be Heretics
I'm reminded of this because we're talking about what college is and what it's for. I think a related question is: What is the utility of young people in society? I think ultimately the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs and to be heretics.
Yeah.
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 still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real civilizational missed 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.
Every one of us probably has blind spots 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.
So 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 in something that we once thought was impossible, and now it's suddenly possible because the technology changed or something changed.
College ultimately should be about that. Let's get these people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, and first-principles mindsets, and encourage them to question deeply held beliefs.
I think that's well said. Imagine if you were 18 today and were able to design your ideal experience in terms of how much you go to class, what projects you work on, what kind of deep study you would engage in, and what you would 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?
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 are a lot of different paths. There could be a class about something totally unfamiliar, something I haven't even thought about. It's outside my world.
We were talking about this 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, is the ideal college experience. He went to Reed College, but he couldn't afford it, so he dropped out while continuing to drop into different classes. One of them was calligraphy.
Yeah.
In the calligraphy class, he didn't know why he was interested in it. He just did it and learned it. Later on, when they were inventing the Mac and inventing user interfaces, they thought, "We should have proportionally spaced fonts. We should have certain fonts. People should be able to select fonts." That was a direct callback to his college days learning about fonts and calligraphy and things like that.
This meandering that modern society thinks is useless, I think, is actually the most useful thing in college.
Yeah.
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 thing. I would like to have enough freedom to select the kinds 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 that we had attendance. They counted attendance.
Yeah.
If you didn't attend 6 classes, you were banned. So if I'm going to school, doing all these different things, 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 for not showing up.
Don't yuck my yum.
Yeah, exactly.
For sure.
Exactly. And finally, the quality of the people.
Yeah.
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'll be able to do that.
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 in most situations. So I had many semesters where I had 3 jobs, and often the time I was expected to be at work overlapped with my class.
Mm-hmm.
I just looked at my midterm schedule in advance and said, "Okay, these are my 2 midterms. Hey, boss, can I take those 2 days off?" Otherwise, I was working.
Mm-hmm.
It's interesting because now I look back and I did enjoy that, but I often look at that experience and say, "What if the environment was supportive of this?"
Mm-hmm.
What would happen if...? Because honestly, I think today when I talk to students—it's been 20 years or more—they all do this. This used to be odd, my behavior, and now it's becoming the norm.
The thing that's weird, though, is that it's not encouraged yet. It's still not allowed. 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 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—
Yeah.
The computer lab, the compute, the bio lab.
Whatever it is.
You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should actually be actively encouraging you.
Right.
Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it.
Yeah.
So, if you have a crazy idea that's taking off, you shouldn't be hiding it from your college.
Yeah.
They should be coming to you like, “Oh my God.”
Yeah.
Like, “This is amazing. Let's give them more.”
Totally. There's this kid, Eric—I think he's Richard's friend—who has to take investor calls from the bathroom because he's hiding in the school.
Yeah.
Yeah. They should be coaching him through it or enabling it in some way. Bringing investors, demo day, or something—this kind of thing.
3. Learning Through Real Projects
A couple of comments. One is, going back to your point around calligraphy, people get these interests that might seem random, but in other ways might tie back in, and I think there are actually ways in which the school can develop that. 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 gotten excited about it. If she had said, "You're obsessed with basketball, you need to understand the salary cap," or actually, basketball is very analytical now in terms of people using stats and data to evaluate players, and if you don't understand this, you're not going to be a good student of the game, that would have gotten me really excited. That's why I'm so excited about Alpha School: it's a 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.
Yeah.
The thing that's so hard is we all know the education industry, 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 Lemond 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.
Mm.
Specifically, for me, if I think about the academy, if you're 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.”
Totally.
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 that's a very modern invention. It's a very weird thing to have done in society, that you would go into a statistics class and never learn that you could use it for basketball—
Yeah.
Or that you could use it for some of your other interests.
Yeah.
There was this inversion for a long time in how we learn things. You would go and learn some of these things, and you had no idea what the utility was or how you would apply them in the real world. For someone like me, and I think for a lot of people who are more pragmatically minded, I'm not motivated at all by the pure pursuit of knowledge.
Yeah.
I'm motivated by skills. What skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build and achieve my dreams?
Yeah.
Every now and then, you find a teacher who 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 that there are certain schooling environments where very few practical skills are gained, or they don't train you for the real world afterward, even though they claim to. But then there's also this opposite critique, and I'm curious how you guys balance this: some people are professionalizing way too soon and not having childhoods, or—
Yeah.
Or not spending time cultivating themselves intellectually or as a person otherwise. There's still this ineffable quality that some people think you get from an experience like college, where you're meeting new people, making new friends, going to parties. I don't know what words to use to describe it exactly. Studying the great books, et cetera. What do you think about the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills—
Yeah.
—of building a company or working at a company?
4. The Startup Pressure Trap
I think there's this huge, unfair choice that a lot of young people are provided today. It's either go to a 4-year school, where there's a lot of structure around what you should be doing. You're going to have to attend classes, do homework and tests, get grades, and all of that. Then there's another option, which is that 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 this: I think there are lots of people who are still going to go to college and love it, and I think there are lots of young people, even at 16 or 17, who should be starting a startup.
But I think there's an amazing, massive group of people who—for me, certainly, 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 with no pressure. Personally, I think the investor track should be way underutilized. 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 that it's temporary, that's fine. But the pressure of making a 10-year commitment at 18 isn't for most people. And the structure of college isn't for everybody either. For me, this middle ground of having 2 years where you can really explore and do whatever you want without the pressure, and Silicon Valley will come to you and provide you with all the information and resources that you need—when you have a cool idea, it's just more, more, more—that's super exciting to me.
Yeah, I mean, in programming we have this concept of premature optimization. I think the saying is, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” That's how bad people think it is: you start optimizing a program that isn't eventually relevant or consequential.
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, a lot of their friends are raising a lot of money, and some of them are becoming unicorns. It just becomes about envy—really negative motivation—as opposed to positive motivation. Then they pre-commit to an idea they're not even interested in and raise money for it, and they're 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. For me, I tried not to start Replit—actively not to start it—but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own. That's the feeling you should get. It's almost like, “I guess I have to do it,” because there's so much momentum behind it.
I think there's a predatory thing that happens right now. I've heard that VCs go to Stanford students and give them $1 million, not even $50,000. $50,000 is like $1 million pre-idea. The moment you start your idea, you already have a cap table.
I think that's sort of like the music industry. Kanye talked a lot about this—how predatory it is, where you find a young artist and lock them into a contract, and they don't even understand that contract.
Luckily, I think in Silicon Valley we have SAFEs, which are a great contribution by Y Combinator and Paul Graham. But it’s still somewhat predatory because you’re taking this young person and pre-committing them to something they shouldn’t have committed to.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really interesting because you’re an interesting person to bring on this podcast and the academy more broadly: you’re both an entrepreneur and a builder, a hacker and a tinkerer, and very pragmatic, but you’re also an intellectual. You’re also very curious, widely read across history, economics, 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 divorced from the economic, real world nor an automaton. There are some people who are so career-focused that that’s really the only thing they think about: 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.
I’m curious how you’ve thought about this. Is that something that you’ve always been, just naturally, or how can people both be very pragmatic in their careers as young people and yet also make time, space, or room for following their intellectual curiosity, even if it might seem random or alien from that?
Yeah. I think I tend to oscillate between having an itch to build something and having an itch to read a lot, explore a lot, and see what’s out there and what’s interesting, and 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?
For example, recently I got really into chess, which is very late in life to get into chess. Usually you get into chess when you’re 6 years old. My kid is actually 6 years old and is getting into chess, and pretty soon is 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 and started training models. I was like, why do LLMs like ChatGPT actually suck at chess?
We’re at a moment when 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.
Then I went into training an LLM to play chess, and I spent a lot of time exploring how to train models. I’d never trained a model before that. I realized that some people now call it RSI, or cursive self-improvement—a buzzword for AI being able to do machine learning. I realized that AI is actually now capable of doing machine learning.
So the moment we were in, like, 2024, when Replit Agent came out—before “vibe coding” as a term was coined—suddenly agents were capable of coding, right? And coding fundamentally changed since then. I think we’re at a similar moment when it comes to machine learning.
I think machine learning—what you could call vibe research, or autoresearch, which I think is Karpathy’s term—I spent a lot of time in that world. Now I’m working on something at Replit to bring that to the world, where anyone can become a machine learning researcher, or any business owner who has data can fine-tune a model to solve a certain problem.
When I started playing chess, what are the hops you need to make to understand that that’s going to lead me to build a new business line for Replit? It’s just impossible, but I followed something that I was interested in, and it kind of resulted in something. Invariably, it does, at least for me.
But even with memes and culture, I get interested in some random subculture on the internet, and I learn something about the world. I learn something about society. I learn something about markets. I learn something about where the world is headed. And I have alpha.
You have an itch and you listen to the itch, and sometimes those itches lead you to build something or learn something. A lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they learn over time to ignore it in favor of going through these hoops.
Right.
And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to listen to itches and follow itches.
Is it helpful to—
I mean, not more than people do currently—
Right.
I think generally, in order to lead, it’s also helpful to know how to follow.
Right.
But I think people spend their entire high school years, and often college, just learning how to follow. Just learning how to: someone says something, you do it.
5. The Self Driving Company
Because my belief is that the future of companies is going to change. In Silicon Valley, there have been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms and how companies work.
Hmm.
If you remember—
Holacracy.
Holacracy. Medium did that.
Yeah.
GitHub did the no-managers thing.
Mm-hmm.
They all kind of blew up in spectacular ways.
Yeah, they did. Yeah.
But I think it was a technology problem. Now you can have agents function as the glue within these organizations and have the bureaucracy be this invisible thing that’s happening by machines in the background. Then people have true autonomy to work on the things they find most interesting, and AI can sort of judge your impact.
Hmm.
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, and we call it this idea of a self-driving company. Eventually, the company will run itself.
Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I genuinely don’t have an opinion about where it’s going to go, but I know it’s going to change. Right? I know that everything we’re doing now just feels so different.
Since starting the academy, I’ve been spending all this time using these tools. I built the pitch deck in Replit—thank you—and I’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT. I’m using all of these services as a way to speed up my work and imagining how that changes an entire organization.
The thing that I know, the thing I feel very certain about, is that it’s all going to change. It’s going to change a lot faster than you think, and if you’re not natively understanding of it, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard to make that shift.
Yeah. Yeah, or if you’re learning the ways of the past, then you’re kind of locked into a way of thinking and a way of working that will actually put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future.
Correct.
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—
Yeah.
You want to be disagreeable enough that you have interesting ideas, that you’re contrarian, that you’re not just going through the motions, that you’re following your own curiosity. But we all know people who are so disagreeable they can’t work with anybody. They’re just so alienating to people.
Yeah.
So maybe another way of following, or just making following broader, is that you want to—and need to—learn how to work with people. You need to learn how to navigate systems. You need to learn to get what you want, or get what the optimal outcome is.
Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s this important thing about respecting the elders, in a way, but also truly understanding that they haven’t figured everything out.
Yeah.
I do think respect is very important. Going into a company, you should respect what they’ve already built, but you should also feel that a lot of things are inadequate and go change as many things as you can.
So at Replit, I named all the conference rooms after the greats in our industry, in computer science and tech. We have a Marc Andreessen room, obviously—the inventor of the browser, as you might know.
Of course.
But yeah, we have Linus Torvald, Robert Noyce, all these people.
What I try to tell people at the company is, “We respect the past, but we’re unapologetically going to change it, and people are going to be mad at us.” I don’t know if you remember, but in 2025 I was canceled for saying you shouldn’t learn how to code anymore.
Yeah, totally.
It was only a year ago. And now the same people who went against me are like, “Oh, I don’t read code anymore. I just prompt and buy code.”
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how many things I’ve been wrong about or right about that were 5 or 10 years early. I think the thing that I love about Silicon Valley is that people just move forward. They’re okay with it. They accept the takes, you know what I mean? That’s the other thing that I love about the culture of the Valley.
So I spend a little bit of 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—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.
In local politics, 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 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? Verbal commitments don’t have weight. In Silicon Valley, I think it’s probably 75% to 100%—
Yeah.
Depending on who you’re talking to and who you are.
Yeah.
The difference in how you operate is that I can confidently continue to move forward on my business if I know that the money’s coming. By the time you’ve delivered that check, I’ve made 6 weeks of progress, right? Now, all of a sudden, your check is more valuable 6 weeks later.
Right.
The reverse is also true. If you do not have trust, then all of a sudden you’re like, “What if this donor is upset about this thing? Let me do this thing differently.” Blah, blah. And you’re not fulfilling your mission.
Right.
You’re worried. You have anxiety and stress about this thing. I think that is something that Silicon Valley offers—
Mm-hmm.
That can be applied to school.
In what way?
Trusting students to do what they want to do and follow the threads they want to follow is something that I think we can uniquely offer. 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. You can’t just go around being mean to everyone or lying. It’s not that permissive.
Yeah.
But if we start trusting young kids, students, and young adults to follow what they want, and then we empower them, even if we think what they’re doing is crazy, they’re going to build that future you’re talking about. They’re going to figure out the next version of Holacracy that actually works.
Right. Let me ask you a question. It might be tricky, but what are you going to do with the troublemakers? Invariably, there are going to be people who are breaking things. Zuck famously built Facemash, which was really controversial. I hacked into our university—
Someone might almost get expelled.
Yeah. What do you think of that? Obviously, there are things that really cross some kind of red line—
Yeah.
On criminality, but—
Oh, for sure. Yeah, just to be clear, you have to draw a line somewhere, right? There’s no question. If you do something like violate our sexual harassment policy—
Yeah.
Or you’re super mean to someone in front of everyone, there are going to be rules, of course.
Yeah.
We have to create a culture of trust and positive-sum interactions.
Right.
At the same time, I think that one of the core tenets of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely.
Mm-hmm.
We don’t have grades. We don’t have tests. The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less, and so a lot of these challenges—these things that people do—it’s like, “You want to build Facemash? Go for it.” Who cares, right? I’m willing to defend your right to do that, and I’m also happy if someone asks me on a podcast to say, “Yeah, that was a weird idea. I don’t know what that kid was thinking. I didn’t love it, but you know what? They got to do what they had to do.”
That’s how people are going to be. I’d say the same thing: if you create an environment of trust, allow that to happen, and design it so that they don’t have an anti-authoritarian mindset, then I think you open up a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunity.
Yeah. I also think 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 who hacked into some government thing and is getting 2 years in prison. He was in an interview talking about how he learned to hack on Roblox. Apparently, there’s 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 funnel them into cybersecurity jobs.”
Mm.
Or even the government. Instead of sending these kids to jail, take them to work at the NSA or somewhere. We need cybersecurity talent right now. Why are you putting them in jail?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and there’s a line. There are kids who are hacking who are probably doing things that I wouldn’t be comfortable with.
Of course.
But there are also kids who are doing it for reasons and in ways that are honestly fine.
Right.
If we can just have a little 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 was called Hack The Site. It was hackthesite.org. I don’t know if it’s still around.
Mm.
It was a website that had vulnerabilities built in.
That’s cool.
It’s like Capture the Flag—
That’s cool.
Right?
Yeah.
I think we’re digging deep into one aspect of it, but you can have a bounty program in the university, right?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
That’s cool, yeah.
Or I can encourage the students to go do the bounty programs at all the other schools—
Right.
Or all the other companies, because most companies have a bounty program.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think, going back to your point about when to trust the elders versus when to disrupt, there’s this general trend in terms of what’s really important to gain: discernment. All rules and heuristics really depend on the context and the case.
The way to get discernment is by having reps and trusting students to fail on their own, to make decisions, and to learn from it. You coined “technopurism” on this podcast.
Mm.
The thing I’ll coin is “meta retard maxing”—when to retard max versus when to go on pure instinct, versus when that will drive you into trouble. I think it really relates to 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: giving them more opportunities to choose a path. You succeed, fail, and learn from it.
Yeah.
6. Cultivating Good Adults
Here’s my last question. There are some people who would say something like, “Hey, remember when Thiel launched his fellowship and a lot of people were mad?” And they were like, “College, you learn how to be a good person.” It’s something beyond this technical skill set, but even beyond this intellectual development. People imagine Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society, I don’t know. But there’s sort of this cultivation. We’re 18 or 19—you’re becoming a person.
I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about how we see, in the Bay Area, this environment that is both hyper-career-oriented but also hyper-intellectual. What is this cultivation of values, morals, ethics, or just becoming an adult? What do we say about that?
Yeah, it’s actually interesting. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to refugee camps. I’ve been to billionaires’ houses.
You’ve been to Omkhar’s house.
I’ve been to Omkhar’s house. 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. There are some real idiots out there who’ve made a lot of money. 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 breeds really amazing human beings.
Interpersonal skills are an absolute pillar of the Academy. We want our graduates, attendees, fellows, or whatever we’re going to end up calling them—we want the people who attend the Academy to be positive influences on society and the world. I think that’s one of the missions of the Academy: to create a positive-sum world. So I actually think we absolutely believe in a 2-year period where you’re going to grow as a human being. You’re going to meet other people, and we’re going to 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 for 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. I think developing that sense in university is very important, and I think being a well-adjusted person is important.
For a while, some people played the role of being this autistic genius person, and maybe at some point it paid off. I remember the Sequoia blog post about SBF—that’s gold. They deleted it; you can find it on archive.org. I don’t think it works anymore. I think Silicon Valley is no longer this renegade thing. We’re kind of an institution. It’s part of the establishment in many ways.
We also have to interface with the world, right? People need to understand that we have a responsibility, that we’re not just talking amongst ourselves. Bernie Sanders read Dwarkesh’s blog post. I criticized Dwarkesh for the kind of language he used, and people who don’t understand this technology aren’t going to learn more from it. That blog post, in my opinion, did not create more understanding in them. If you don’t understand it, you probably learn the wrong lessons from that thing.
I think it’s important that we create—or this Academy creates—well-adjusted adults who can not only speak the in-group language, which is important, but can eventually be in front of Congress.
Is there anything, lastly, you want to say about the cultivation of values, or the idea of being a good person? Is there anything there that you feel school or a school environment contributes to, or do you think we’ve spoken about it?
We mentioned the great books. It’d be good to teach some of these things. I spent a lot of time studying ethics and morality on my own. I read a lot of, for example, the utilitarian corpus, and I ended up rejecting that. I don’t think that’s the way of the world.
I found my moral compass by reading widely, introspecting, and truly coming to certain conclusions about how I want to act in the world. Ultimately, the way I would describe myself is closest to virtue ethics from Aristotle. The idea is that I should act in a way that I would be proud of, regardless of who’s watching or not watching, and regardless of the impact.
In a weird way, if you’re virtuous and you have certain principles, the net effect of that is that you are utility-maximizing, I think, if you have the right principles. You also need to change over time, and you need to figure out where the world is headed and make sure you’re fitting in it in the right way.
All of this is to say that I think there is value in the liberal arts, in reading some of this stuff, and in trying to understand how you feel about how you want to act and how you want to present yourself.
Well, one thing that made me more sympathetic to your argument, in terms of it being axiomatic, is that the world is changing so much that it’s hard to have rigid principles in a world that is changing, or a whole philosophy that is rigid.
Right. Weirdly, the opposite is true as well: you can’t be a consequentialist or a utilitarian when we’re entering the singularity and you can’t really predict the future, because that’s based on predicting the future.
Yeah.
It’s a tough time. I think you need to have principles that are evolving over time. I think you have some ground principles, ground truths, that you hold dearly, and they should be as axiomatic, as small as possible.
In closing, we’re grateful for your support of the Academy. We’re excited to have people building on Replit, potentially interning at Replit, potentially being funded by you. As a last question, when you see an 18-year-old, 20-year-old, or 16-year-old who is really inspiring to you, and you think, “I’ve got to spend time with this person, or be involved with them in some capacity,” what are they doing that is capturing your interest? What are you looking for in young talent?
I think the first thing is that they dove really deep into something. They can teach me something. I think I can be interested in anything. If you’re able to tell a story about some project you’ve done and you’ve gone really, really deep into 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’s always really impressive, and it 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. I think, like you said, being contrarian and having really important opinions is valuable, but it’s very easy, if you’re smart and young, to think everyone’s an idiot.
Yeah.
Including me. I’ll see young people and they’ll talk to me like I don’t understand anything. But I think it’s important to respect the person that you’re talking to. Having good interpersonal skills is important. Otherwise, people don’t want to be around you.
Yeah.
I think that's important.
Totally. Yeah, I think it's both not being afraid to spike in something. A lot of people just struggle because they're too broad in everything but not really amazing at anything.
Right.
And just follow that to its conclusion and see how good you can get at it. And while also having a baseline of interpersonal skills, or just the right—
Be likable. Yeah.
Yeah. Be likable, and in a way that's not contrived or fake. It's truly authentic because people want to support people who are good people.
But the most endearing thing is that you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting.
Totally. Yeah. Awesome. Amjad, thanks for taking the time.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.