YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Horowitz

lines on the record: 195
first: 2024-02-08
most recent: 2024-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would register that for anybody still listening as a good. All right, good. I think covered it. As predicting the beginning, we did not get to the Q&A. So Ben, if you're up for it, we will continue collecting questions. And if there's popular demand, we will do one more. We'll do part three maybe next week and we'll do Q&A. And then we'll be six hours of content from us on this topic. And that'll probably be enough for a while. But we have enjoyed talking about it, and hopefully you've enjoyed listening to it.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's just a small number of programs, the really cautionary note here would be it's a small number of programs that pay for the whole thing, right? So it's federal student loans, it's federal research funding, and it's a couple of things in the tax law and a few other things. And so it's not like it would take, it would not take two years to figure out how to kill these things. From a legislative standpoint, it would take about two minutes. And so it feels like that. And look, maybe that never materializes because maybe these things just are so important and they have such existing credibility and, you know, they have so much political stroke and their graduates have so much power and so forth. And so maybe that never happens. Or maybe it's one of those things where there's a tipping point and at some point people are just like, I'm not going to tolerate this anymore.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. If the country took a sharper, maybe even a not so sharp right turn, then you could imagine an administration and a Congress going. Are we going to this?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bananas, you know, crazy hostile things that universities are doing. And so it hasn't happened, but you can imagine a point where it just basically half or more of the country just at some point puts its foot down and its elected representatives put their foot down and they're just like, we're just not doing this anymore. We're not paying for it anymore.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then the other thing I nominate is like, I, you know, and this sounds a little bit crazy right now, but like, I, you know, I don't think we're necessarily that far away from a full-fledged political revolt, which is the constituency of these places is just, it's not a majority society. It's a small minority in terms of the people who actually benefit from the system today in the voter base. And then a lot of these places become so politicized and they inject themselves so directly into national politics. Right. And so they sort of declared themselves. And you see this in every metric and every number distribution of professors' ideology and then all the social activism that happens and so forth. It's like overwhelming indications and then increasingly public, right? Since we're at the two hour mark, I'll just kind of be blunt. It's like, I mean, look, like right-wing media, for better or for worse, is just consumed with story after story after story of just like crazy.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The universities very much have to think hard about shoring themselves up on the value proposition in particular. I always think it's getting very weak for students. And that's a dangerous place to be in if you're in university.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like, I mean, I think that it's pretty fragile now, you know, in terms of the value proposition and that it's so expensive and got the cost relative to the value is so precarious. And just like as an example, like if the US government said we're not going to guarantee college loans anymore, that would be cataclysmic. And then if employers were like, We're not going to, you know, there's no SAT score, there's no grades that mean anything, there's no rigor. We're just gonna not value college degrees anymore. So there's things that are actually Reasonably close to happening that could collapse a system, or at least really alter it irrevocably. So I think that”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like much less important because they kind of sort of isolate themselves sort of socially and economically sort of wall themselves off from the general progress of society. And so is that, yeah, how would you think about that?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Policy think tank on wines shifts to the independent think tanks, you know, moral instructor part loses credibility, it just withers over time, social reformer withers, arguably happening already. Immigration agency. Maybe that continues. Maybe that's the ultimate business model is just have high paying immigrants. Sports leagues break out, go independent, become professional. Sports, as you're saying, adult daycare dating site, people just find other ways to live and date. So it may be that it just simply may be that just things just like unwind. And in the scenario, sitting here 50 years from now, these institutions still exist in some form, but they look increasingly just like, you know, kind of archaic and kind of, you know, kind of just like, I don't know, just like not. They're just, yeah, I don't know. It's like, you know, there's lots of institutions in life where it's just like, wow, you know, you drive down the street and there's a, you know, I won't pick on anybody, but there's a, you know, whatever. And you're just like, wow, that thing still exists. That's interesting. And they're just.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I love that part of that part of the thing. Okay, and then we'll close. We're at two hours. And so we'll close here quickly. But I think there's basically fifth. The fifth thing that could happen is just basically just the existing system could just devolve. It just unwind. And the way that it unwind is, so the credentialing agency credentialing function shifts to the employers, the education courses shift to, you know, a la carte internet options, research bureau shifts to the function shifts to the kinds of things we were just talking about.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is also credentialing. So then this also comes back to credentialing, which is one of the reasons why college campuses are, I mean, one of the reasons that college campuses are hot house for dating is just it's a lot of young people who are together physically. But another reason is because they all have a shared sense of identity, right? They all have a shared credential, which is they're all at X college, right? And so they've all been validated at least to some extent. And then by the way, that's also true later on in life. A lot of people look for a lot of people who are college graduates, only want to date other college graduates or only want to date people who went to certain kinds of schools or whatever. So the credentialing thing actually reflects itself into this other sort of area of actual real life, which is dating and then ultimately marriage and offspring. And so we should probably both not underestimate the actual utility of an existing college environment for that, but also think about like, well, yeah, for example, the credentialing agency, could your independent credential.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are certainly tools, although that physical proximity Is not something you can simulate online. Understanding is there's a lot of fake photos and whatnot. People look better in their photos, perhaps”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I would just observe there are new ways for people to date today that are much easier than we were in college. And so the dating site part of it might already be solved.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a dating site, you know, I'm just absolutely furious that the dating apps took off after I was dating, after I was finished dating. This is a hard one for me to comment on.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. Yeah, so that's a very good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't pre-announce, but yeah, there is a new idea in the portfolio that creates a place that is like a college dorm from a living perspective and has a community and so forth and so on. You pay rent there. But rent somewhere that you would in any apartment, but it kind of is a nice bridge from, you know, kind of coming out of high school or college or whatnot and into the world in a way where you're not just living by yourself somewhere lonely.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have a company. So we have a company where he would certainly not pitch it as adult daycare, but we have a company that's intended to provide a much more pleasant and interesting and enjoyable experience for, you know, especially people new in their lives and careers as adults from a housing and community standpoint.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just trying to think of the proposition to the parents who are paying for it, you know, at that point. Yeah. Like that seems hard.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, you know, the corporate campus for a lot of kids, you know, even post college, a lot of corporate campuses are kind of designed to perpetuate adult daycare.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like, I mean, some. Like the armed services have that function in a way where you, okay, you get to be 18, what are you going to do with your life? You go to the army, you go to college. It's kind of this community that you step into that's not your family, but you can't stay here kind of thing.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And then the two other ones, these are serious topics, but also a little bit fun. So adult daycare and dating site, right? And so the adult daycare, I mean, look, a lot of people just like graduate high school and go get a job, right? And so, you know, maybe that's overblown. Or maybe you could imagine like new design communities contexts, maybe even entire buildings where you have a sort of social cultural kind of matrix that people can plug into.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think need to be reformed, like in retrospect, this is one of those things where people 20 years from now are going to go like, I can't believe you guys did that, that's going to be bad.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really wild that they don't. South Park did the very hilarious episode on this called The National Crack Baby Association. And they went, but the funniest part was Cartman went to go see one of the kind of presidents of the universities. And he goes And he's dressed like an old Southern slave master, and he goes, How do you get away with not paying your slaves? And he goes, slaves, you mean our student athletes? And he goes, oh, yes, student athletes. And you're watching it and you're going, yep. That's exactly what's going on. Now, like I said, it's not all, like not all schools athletic teams make that kind of money and not all athletic teams, but the ones that do.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big time college sports, I think, has gotten to a point where it's clearly a moral and that it's very clearly professional sports where they don't pay the employees and that generates a colossal amount of money. And so I think you've got to fix that. And I don't know that you can Kind of like probably the right way to fix it is to spin it out and have it continue to be affiliated with the university, but not run by the university, but run kind of by owners of the various teams or something more akin to the NFL or the NBA, because that's what it is. And the athletes need to get paid. It's just crazy.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're certainly overtly religious ones, the ones that we've lost, I think, are maybe the ones that are kind of moral and ethical without being overtly religious, which is a real challenge in general. But anyway, so I'll keep going. So Sports League, I think you'd probably argue that the sports function could just be its own thing.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that would be very good in the sense that. In my lifetime, our society has degenerated no place more than right and wrong. Like there's no agreement on right and wrong anymore, is stealing right? Well, it's right if you're hungry. Okay, you know, there's certainly no right and wrong about marriage or these kinds of things. And I think that's caused a real degeneration of society, quality of life, you know, outcomes of the world. And so fixing that would be great. But I think the way we do it now is bananas. It doesn't fit into the current bundle, I would just say. So having an independent moral university be fantastic.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, no, no, no. Not even further back. I'm not suggesting going that far back. But no, to like the original Harvard business plan, which was like to instruct moral leaders, right? Instruct bastards and moral leaders. And you just have a, you can imagine an institution that just does that and just doesn't do all the other things that have been added on for the last 400 years.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of discussion and instruction about ethics and morality. Like I actually believe in that a lot. And I mean, look, I do it at work, right? One of the things we talk to employees about is we're in this situation, what are we going to do? Are we going to do what's transactional? Are we going to do what's long term? Are we going to do what's right? do what makes us money in the short term. And like that's like real moral instruction and with real consequence, that's going to have real impact and that like I've got to live with the consequence. They've got to live with the consequence. And in a way, it's a better context to do it than a university where you don't have any accountability, any moral accountability. So I think you're better off doing it almost anywhere than in a university.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, in some ways, university is the worst place to do moral instruction now that it's no longer like a religious institution. And if there's one thing I would take out of a university, it would probably be that. And look, I'm a big... Lever in kind of an intellectual”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just think it's not the right people to be doing it. Pastors and priests and so forth have come under fire. But in a lot of ways, they're much more the right people to be giving moral instruction because they actually spend time with their congregation. They deal with their actual trials and tribulations of kind of going off the moral path and how to get people back on it. And they're like hands-on. It's a tangible thing. Whereas, you know, in a university, a professor can spout off whatever the F he wants or she wants and then has no tie to that down the road. They don't live in their community. They don't have parents who go to the church and donate and so forth.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that the Think the university one is very, very tricky because it is counter to a lot of its other goals potentially, particularly marketplace of ideas, freedom of speech, freedom of thought.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see, policy think tank, there are policy think tanks that are not associated with universities. And so it's certainly a viable thing to do separately. People are doing that today. Moral instructor is my favorite one to think about breaking out separately, which is, you know, look, there are many social movements that are not associated with university. There are many social organizations, activist groups, churches, right? Like, you know, new religions old religions, which are maybe coming back a little bit right now. And so, yeah, like, I don't know, it seems like society has a lot of different ways to organize moral instruction that's not necessarily having it take place in a research university context.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I think, yeah, I think agreeing with you, I think. But yeah, I think there may just be a, I mean, look, there may be certain areas like, you know, particle physics or whatever where you still need government money. But I think a lot of the current complex actually might be fundable. The quality, the quality work happening, and it might be fundable separately.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost any PhD thesis in the last hundred years where he mapped bullion logic. It was the first time anybody did anything with Boolean logic, which is the algebra of zeros and ones onto a circuit. And that is the beginning of computers. For those of you who don't follow that kind of thing. And so there's real research that can obviously happen outside of the way the current university system works that's been very powerful. So, yeah, no, I think, look, I think that it would be great if there were a couple hundred of these in different categories. And it would be certainly something that, you know, I would love to put more money into. So I think that's a quite a good idea. Whether they make money or not, like I think they're very kind of philanthropically fundable.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think where was Alan Turing when he did his proof? That's a good question. And then, of course, Claude Shannon was a master's student, which isn't, I mean, a master's thesis, which is considered like nothing in academia, which is probably more important than.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, end up working. And they've spent out some very, very interesting companies already, some of which we've invested in, by the way. And then there's the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, which is another one, right? Our friend Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Channer, you know, trying to cure disease, like all disease, you know, which is an incredibly great ambition and not something you would necessarily do in a company, but something that'll probably have a lot of commercial results coming out of it as well. So, yeah, look, I think we're definitely at a point where Philanthropy can do it. The other thing is, right? Like there was research before the current complex and got us some pretty interesting results like say the theory of relativity kind of came out of that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Shan's Institute. It's called PICI or its initials. Parker Institute Cancer, something. I can't remember, but I'm on the board of it. But they fund researchers to do kind of breakthrough work on cancer. And they do have, they've got both, they spin the ideas out into there's a venture model. So they spin them out into companies and the institute invests in them. They do generate patents. So like it is, you know, it's originally he, I mean, he made an incredibly generous $250 million, I think, donation to start maybe bigger than that, probably bigger than that. But anyway, some enormous amount of money. But his vision has always been that like it will become self-sustaining over time because the things that it's doing are so incredibly important. And I think that's probably right. Like I do think it's going to.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The high quality work, or he said, Look, maybe it should be a venture capital model, it should be for profit, and you just basically make money, it's a long dated revenue thing where you're making money in the long run on commercial product development and on patent licensing coming out the other side. And you should actually just apply a VC mindset to that. So anyway, so it really, and then, oh, and then I'll just mention like, so our friend Patrick Collison has, you know, is funding philanthropically program, you know, to do independent medical research associated with Stanford called ARC, but set up as a separate thing. We know well the folks at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that does specific grant funding to individual young researchers in the biomedical field and has set out standing results with that. So there are new cuts on this that people have.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do the actual quality work. And then he said, and then he makes it further made a further argument that he said, look, you don't always know that there's going to be commercial applications for research, but a lot of times there is. And so, if you have some material science breakthrough or something, like that patent is probably going to be super valuable. And by the way, universities are in the business of patents and patent licensing, and they get revenue streams from that, even though it's not their main thing. And so he's like, look, you could either have these new, you could either have new nonprofit research institutes that would have to be funded with philanthropic dollars, but maybe it's not, you know, maybe that's actually tractable because it's just not that much money.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, depends on the field. 100 professors or something like that, 200 maybe by field. And then it's some number of grad students. And then it's the research budget for those people. And he said, look, and so I was like, well, why doesn't the government just fund that? Like, why fund the other? And he says, that's like 10% of the money. And I was like, well, then why spend the other 90%? He's like, well, you know, because like it's not enough. Like it's this weird thing of like it's not enough for the government because there's like too many mouths to feed. There's too many constituents. There's too many congressmen that have universities in their districts. There's too many people who get tenure, who expect this. There's too many incumbent colleges that have research programs, even if they're not productive. They don't cancel them. And so he said the system is kind of.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what he says. He says, Look, whether it's right or not, it's actually secondary to whether it would even matter if it was right. And this, by the way, is a guy who has run a major, he ran a major at one point major government research funder. And so this is a guy who was in a position to be able to hand out the money. So this is not like some sort of anti-establishment guy. This is like somebody who's been on the inside seeing how all the sausage is made and running it himself. And he said, he said, look, he said, look, the practical reality, this is his argument. The practical reality is in any given field of research, and it's anything from quantum physics to any good psychology, anything else, computer science, whatever. He said, look, there are five institutions that are on the leading edge. And everybody in each of those fields knows who those five institutions are. And those five institutions generate, you know, essentially all of the useful output that actually moves the field forward. But so it's just five institutions. It's whatever number of therefore.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you get tenure? You publish papers that you may or may not have written or whatever. So there's that. And then there's a friend of mine, and I won't name him, but he's a very experienced guy who's been in the sort of leadership positions across this entire spectrum. And he always, whenever he and I talk about this, I'm always going on about the replication crisis because I think it's such a scandal. And he's like, look, it's not even the problem. He said, the problem is 90% of the research is just useless. It's just not helpful. And again, this is a guy.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, how do you get a grant? You publish a research result that seems to validate additional investigation. How do you get that result? Well, you get it legitimately or you do data mining.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the other is like government funding of research. It's like the government companies won't fund basic research because it doesn't have an end commercial target. But the government will because it presumably has this long-term perspective. And so you get my experience is you get like tremendous pushback out of the gate on this conversation. Having said that, I think there are a bunch of very interesting things that you could maybe explore as ways to do research outside of the university context. And by the way, some people are doing this and we can talk about them. So there's a couple of issues with the current research complex we talked about last time. So one is just there's a massive replication crisis. And so depending by field, up to 75% of the research in a lot of fields doesn't replicate.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have no idea. And that's what makes research different than development, right? The reason this term research and development is because development has a specific goal to ship a product and make money. Research is like trying to come up with new knowledge. And so it's like, okay, and then the argument goes, you know, the modern research university was constructed. The research part of it was constructed originally by Vannevar Bush and his peers 70, 80 years ago to provide a kind of environment in which that kind of basic research can happen. And there you get into ideas like tenure, like why do professors have tenure? A big reason for that is so that they're free to do whatever research they want. They're not risking getting fired if they quote unquote don't deliver something, let's say practically useful.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, to your point, if you then link that to the credential, then they would see the cause and effect, and then that would be very clear. We mentioned Lambda school, like this is basically, we're basically describing Lambda school in a lot of ways. So this makes sense. Okay, third is the Research Bureau. So this one freaks people out because anytime you bring up, is there a different way to do research fund research? Basically, everybody in the sort of research complex, you know, generally they freak out because basically the Steelman case against any change to how research is funded is basically you don't understand the whole point of like research, the whole point of basic research is that it doesn't have an end goal in mind and identified and it can't because how do you know you're doing some research experiment in physics or some new math theorem or whatever and like higher biology decoding the genome and how do you ever know like yeah maybe there's a commercial use case for this thing 30 years from now but like”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a very specific market. Like, you'd have to kind of. Identify those and get them through. Yeah, interesting.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I always wonder with these things. I always wonder if people should be more specifically sort of addressing that category. And I don't even know, you know, I can't even say that's not even that big of a category or something, but like basically self-motivate, intrinsically motivated. And just like not try to appeal to the people who need more structure and more pressure”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't say if your life is really fun. You know, if you've got lots of money, and you know, look, when you're young, life is incredibly fun. Everything is new. Every movie is amazing. Every experience is incredible. So like I'm going to take those years and I'm going to fucking sit in a classroom listening to somebody drone on about, you know, whatever the Iliad. Like, I don't want to do that. So I think that's right. Whereas on the other hand, if your life is kind of, you know it's misery without getting something out of this experience, then that's a little more motivating.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. And so, or it's this weird thing, which is it's almost like the more privileged, the more privileged the student, the more pressure needs to be put on them or something like that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that, I guess my response to that would be I think there might just be two different kinds of students. There might be the ones that are actually super strong, it's super intrinsically motivated as the psychologists say, where they're just like, you know, and then you, by the way, you talk about yourself as an example of this, which is like, I was a bus boy, I didn't want to be a bus boy. I was a dishwasher. I didn't want to be a dishwasher. And like, we're going to go do this because we know we need to do this because we're doing it for intrinsic. We're doing it for ourselves. Like we're doing it for intrinsic reasons. And so those students exist, but then there is this other kind of student that arguably more populates, especially the upper ranks, ironically, of American education, which is where they actually need to be like, and not even being pressured, just maybe overstating it, but maybe it's, let's just say they need to be in a highly structured environment.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source