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

“A few years ago, maybe it was five years ago, Henry Lewis Gates, who was the very famous, very talented professor of African American history at Harvard, called me up because he wanted to basically raise money from me and has this thing, the hip-hop archive at Harvard. And he said, Ben, I want to create a fellowship called the Horowitz Hip Hop Fellowship at Harvard. And I go, well, Skip, like if you call anything that, then everybody's going to hate me because Horowitz hip-hop sounds like really effed up. I said, but I have a friend Nas who deserves to have a hip hop fellowship named after him. And I'll call Nas and see if he wants to do it. And, you know, we go through that and we call it the Naz hip-hop fellowship. So then, you know, they want to have a big event at Harvard and invite NAS there, which I do. And I get a call leading up to the event from Lisa New, who some of you.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did film screenings and gatherings and meetups and barbecues and kind of tried to get to know the people that we wanted to recruit, know what would make for a good work environment for them by just spending like regular time. And then we started to go, okay, here's a place in the firm where we need this talent. We already know all the people. We know who's the best we've spent like we've invested the time and we're going to get them. And so then you come to the firm and our retention, our promotion rates and so forth are very good because we were always focused on the talent. We never cared about the New York Times because at that time the New York Times didn't care about it. And so like you just get to a very different outcome when you focus on a different customer. And I'm going to kind of tell the last part of the story just so I can map it back to the university.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Menelo Park at a restaurant called Stacks, which you know well, with Steve Stout, who kind of came from the entertainment industry is kind of in music in particular and rap music in particular. So dominated by African Americans. And I'm talking to him about it. And he says, Ben, do you know why there are no black people in Silicon Valley? Just like that. He says. And I said, no, why are there no black people in Silicon Valley? He said, look around. There are no black people in Silicon Valley. And like, literally, he was the only black person in all of the stacks is a pretty big restaurant. It's the only person. And so I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I looked up, you know, so United States is 14.3% black. But Palo Alto Menlo Park, you're talking 2%. And so right away you go, okay, this isn't even an attractive place to live or for whatever reason people haven't even moved here. So like maybe we need to start there. And so what did we do?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of process development, things that we really kind of lacked in technology. So we had a team to recruit veterans. And then the other kind of two that if you just looked at the numbers that were way lower, like blacks and Hispanics. And so we had teams for that. So I was in charge of that part. By the way, like note that because it's a talent program, we didn't hire anybody to run diversity. And these colleges to run the programs they have have like hundreds of people. But if it's just talent, then the people who are in charge of talent, which is like, of course, you know, the people who run the firm. Okay, so early on, we're probably 2010, 2011 now, I'm kind of working on this problem. And I'm getting kind of input from people I know who have recruited from those populations, who know them, who know the special skills that might exist, how to attract people and so forth. And this is a very funny story to me. So Matt Lunch.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is pre Me Too, pre George Floyd, pre what anybody cared about any of this stuff in Silicon Valley. And so what we kind of said was like, how do we get competitive advantage on town? And we thought, well, there are certain talent groups that don't get recruited and certain talent groups that are overrerupted in Silicon Valley. Computer science students from Stanford are heavily recruited, MIT students, so forth. So we started with, well, what about the second tier, the top students, the second, third tier universities in computer science? Can we go after those? And we put them on our list. The second one was veterans. Veterans don't make their way to Silicon Valley often, you know, because they just don't know that they're welcome there or whatever, you know, whatever reason. So that could be an advantage. And they tend to be good at things that we need, like very loyal, trained in leadership.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important metric, but that's not the important metric. The important metric is how many you let in. And so, you know, that's corrupting. Then the second corrupting thing is everybody knows about that checkbox. And so once the student arrives, now I'm like a little bit of a second class citizen because people are going to judge. Well, you could say, well, that's racist to say that. Well, yeah, but you set it up. Like people don't unsee. Like, I apply, I check, you know, my Asian box or whatever that I'm checking. I know there's other boxes. And then like I read the news. So I know like how that works. And so like that kind of whole design based on trying to achieve a goal so that the New York Times says I'm not racist as a trustee or a faculty or whatever gets you to that outcome. Now you contrast that. Like so how would you design it if you're designing for the customer? Well, I can tell you because like we started the firm and this was, it's important to know.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For students in populations where we're not doing a good job of recruiting them, right? Like very different ideas on how you would start the design. And so if you start the design with, okay, we need 14% black students, whatever percent Jewish students is percent white students, et cetera. And by the way, we've got legacy and this kind of thing, then that forces you into a methodology that is kind of whatever race or gender-based where you're like literally having them self-identify themselves on their applications and then trying to kind of funnel them through there. What's the problem with that? Well, there's a lot of like very weird side effects. Like first of all, if you look at graduation rates or outcomes or so forth for diverse students are much worse than for your main students. So like if you're designing for the student, you would never design it that way. That would be like an important.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me get into a thing that will illustrate the kind of customer problem and the systems thinking issue, which is, and I hate to get into it because it's controversial, but I'm not going to get into the controversial aspect, which is kind of this whole diversity equity inclusion and how these programs are designed. And I'll just contrast it with the way we designed our program, which we call it a talent program, but it's essentially the same sort of thing because we designed ours with the kind of potential employees in mind. And I think that the system that was designed for the university was designed more with the press in mind. So how can we have population that reflects America was kind of the goal as opposed to what's the best product opportunity?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anyway, with that in mind, we immediately launched into kind of one of the more pie in the sky ideas. But let's go back to the challenge of you're put in charge of one of these institutions tomorrow and you're responsible for the turnaround or the reform that needs to happen, which, by the way, and then look, you know, a lot of smart people at the trustee level and president level and donor level and so forth are trying to reform the existing schools. So I think it's talking about that. So Ben, let's talk about the fix the university kind of plan. Wrote an outline prepping this. And so if you want, I can go through it”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we'll have a follow up to this podcast five or ten years from now, and it'll have crossed the million dollar mark per student, right? And at that point, the economic side should become quite overwhelming. In the direction of one-to-one instruction. So, sitting here today, it sounds crazy that you would make this switch, but it's starting to sound sane. And so it's interesting to at least have like an index of potential competitive system that leads for the sanity check.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but like, it's also the reference, like, and look, the expectation I think has to be the two. Look, if nothing, if current trends continue, then tuition will keep rising at 3x, the rate of inflation or something like that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly, right? Well, by the way, it's also good, like, you know, one of the big critiques of academia, I think, from people like us is just that like when you go into academia, you're in this sort of bubble of a world. So if you're kind of coming up with new social science or theories or what have you, you're testing them among like you're kind of wrapped in people like yourselves. But if you go back and you say, well, Socrates' ideas at least have to stand up to his students in a much more direct way because it's a one-on-one. Like they're going to have questions with us where I think that if you're kind of elevate yourself to, you know, here I am, king of the class and, you know, I'm going to give you a grade. So you better not, you know, say anything nasty about my research. Like that's a very different kind of a thing, I think. So, you know, it could be helpful on both sides in a way. Although it does.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, exactly. And so there's this thing called the Bloom 2 Sigma effect, the researcher who did the work on this, his name is Bloom. So it's called the Bloom 2 Sigma effect. And it's kind of this great white whale of education, which is like, wow, we actually know how to make education much better than it is. It's just historically been economically impractical. There's just no way that you could afford to have a one-on-one for everything.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One on one tutoring. Oh, yeah, one-on-one. You know, this is also true with autistic kids. They've done similar research. And the one thing that works is one-on-one tutoring. Or the one thing that's proven. Of all the interventions, your interventions consistently, there is a professional UCLA Yvarlovas who. Who kind of proved that out. So it's very consistent across all types of students, interestingly.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they just don't. Most things you want to do, whether it's Head Start or this or that, or laptops in the classroom, you just name any number of things where people try to inject money or new practices into the classroom at any level. And basically, it's the null hypothesis keeps proving out over and over, which is they just don't change anything. And actually, it's funny the Gates Foundation actually, right? It was just very heavily involved in education philanthropy, actually put out a report a couple years ago where they kind of go through this in detail. And it's very kind of discouraging in the sense of, look, it's easy to say like a good teacher will do better, but it's much, much harder to say we're going to make a million teachers better, right? So even the things that work in the micro level, they just don't scale. There is one exception. There is one educational intervention technique that reliably generates better outcomes. And in fact, it generates what are called two sigma better outcomes. So two standard deviations. So it's an intervention that routinely takes kids who would score at the 50th percentile of outcome and moves them to the 99th percentile of outcome. And it's one-on-one tutoring.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is pretty good, right? And then, you know, even like the Greek philosophers like Socrates and all those guys, you know, their day job was, you know, what they did in the mornings was they did one-on-one tutoring to kids in Athens. And then in the afternoon, they hung out at the Agora and talked about things. But their job was actually tutoring. And that was obviously an amazing civilization. So there's a lot of specific historical precedent. And then there's this thing in the education research, which is really striking. So one of the things in education research generally is that it basically fails. Sort of all of the attempts to come up with systemic interventions to improve educational outcomes basically fail. And this has been the case for many decades.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about that for a second because there's actually a lot of historical evidence, Ben, for what you just said. So if you go back in time, aristocratic education in prior societies, it was always one-to-one tutoring. Like the offspring of royal families were always tutored one-to-one. And then you have these amazing historical precedents. And Alexander the Great is kind of the apotheosis of this because his tutor was Aristotle.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so clearly, clearly. Well, the other thing that's really interesting is. Okay, if you're at $60,000 a year or like above. That's probably a little more than the cost of having a full time, like very smart instructor for your child or for your teenager or whatever, right? So you could literally assign every student like a really good instructor to teach them all these subjects full time. Like no other student, just one student. It would seem like you'd get potentially a better outcome with that method. So, like, once you get to that level of absurdity, it's probably time to take a look at it.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. But if you're looking outside in, like, it is a really key question. In other words, you've proven historically that you can do it at a lower cost structure because you were doing it at a lower cost structure. Right, the reason I bring it up is you can't find an institution, you can't find a university today that's trying to do what you're describing. Because you said they benchmark against each other. They're all on the same track. So you could kind of say, okay, that's some sort of inductive proof that it's not possible to do what we're saying because nobody's even trying. But the counter argument to that is, no, it is possible to do it, and we know it because they were all doing it 20 years ago.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, and it's one of these things where you can just look at what it cost 20 years ago and you can look at the fact the cost has risen much faster than inflation. And then you can just ask the question, are the results better than they were 20 years ago? Yeah. And so it's sort of by definition it's like okay, that's something you see in business also, which is just like, okay, what if we just went back to the cost structure we had 20 years ago or five years ago? Yeah.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They think that there's definitely an aspect of that. And I think that the university math is a little bit, if we can raise prices, then we will. And they kind of benchmark against each other. So student loan money pours in. Harvard raised their tuition. We can raise our tuition and, you know, just kind of cascades down the system. And that kind of translates into higher salaries, more administrators, more this, more that, and so forth. But yeah, it certainly needn't be that way. And I think the idea of lowering tuition is a good idea. I mean, if you were to, you know, we'll get into this, but if you were to start a university from first principles, like why would it cost $60,000 or $70,000 a year? Like, that's outrageous, or it seems outrageous, like to, you know, educate a student. Like their best.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Margins, you wouldn't be able to do anything with the money anyway. It might even cause problems because it would cause people to scrutinize what's going on. And so there's this thing where with a nonprofit, the expense statement.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the sort of quirks in the incentives of the whole thing see if this makes sense, is that one of the parties that's not a constituent to your point you just made is shareholders, right? So for-profit companies have shareholders, the universities are nonprofits, they don't. But the consequence, very interesting incentive consequence of being a nonprofit, which is a nonprofit, right? The whole point is that you're not for profit. You're not trying to generate profit. And so you're sort of implicitly trying to break even You have the opportunity to have rapidly ramping revenues because of subsidies, you then actually have every reason in the world to ramp expenses at the same rate, right? You have no exception whatsoever. You don't want to mess with.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, I think that's always a thing in every organization, right? Like one of your constituencies are your employees. But when your employees take precedent over your customers, that's usually the end of the business, right? Like this is kind of the pattern. In the private sector, you tend to go bankrupt a lot faster because there aren't government subsidies and tax credits. And there are so many goodies that the universities have access to and are part of their constituents that that's something that happens in business, but eventually over time in the long run, if the employees become more important than the customers, you get to the same end.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I could, just a couple of things on that. One is it begs the question of who your constituency is, because if your top constituency is the administrators to the extent that the institution is being run for itself, right, then obviously that's a direct threat.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about what AI is going to tell you what AI is really good at filling out forms, looking at forms, getting data out of forms, comparing that data to what the data should be, figuring out things, anomalies in the data that no human could, you know, it's amazing at that. And AI do all these administrative tasks. Couldn't you just get rid of like that whole thing or like whatever 95% of it? And then, you know, you're starting to get cost back where they are.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that's an opportunity for savings. And I think, like, if you just tighten your belt, you'd go, okay, like maybe we can do a 20% reduction there and so forth. But if you think about it a different way, I mean, to me, it's very analogous to, you know, we had a debate recently when the Biden administration hired 86,000 new IRS agents. And it was very partisan debate as it always is. Like, you know, why are these people coming after my money? Like, what are you cheating on your taxes? But that wasn't really the interesting thing. The interesting thing was anybody kind of in our business would go, well, you could have just hired seven good software engineers. And they would have done a far better job than 86,000 agents at figuring out who was cheating on their taxes because it's like it's a data, it's a forms problem. Like this is what computers are amazing at. And AI is people.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To start, and like, okay, so what would you do to get cost at the university under control? And I think one of the kind of big things that we've learned, which is, you know, it's stunning when you hear it, but like it got there incrementally obviously, which is many of the kind of elite institutions, the number of administrators outnumbers the number of students. It's like.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what the hell were you optimizing for that let you think that your students wanted, like that was a good idea? And I think there were some market corruptions, right, where the government's providing loans to students. So that kind of led to upward pressure. And then there's other things like professors can get jobs in the private sector, which is a kind of a more scalable sector in terms of making money that could pay potentially a lot more than you could pay in academia, so that's why salaries happen and so forth. So there's a lot of factors that lead to that. But like at the end of the day, like, how the hell do you end up with a product that costs $300,000 and gets the average student a job that's worth $50,000? How are they ever going to pay back $300,000 if they only make $50,000 a year? Like, that's insane. And that's kind of where I think the product for the student has fallen apart. And so maybe that's a good place.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A small team, hopefully, that's focused on that. But I think you can easily lose the thread if you manage to noise levels or the press is probably the most distracting one, right? Because if the press calls us a name or says we're not doing our job, then all of a sudden like a huge focus goes over there and that if you're not careful, that'll distract from what you want for your kind of main customer. And that's, I think, to a large degree what's happened, which is why, like, cost, how is it possible that tuition has gotten so high?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think you have to kind of start with students and then everything on the list is a little bit in service of students to varying degrees. So the faculty are obviously in service of the students. The administrators are in service of the students. The alumni are to kind of give money to support the students. And they're kind of, you know, depending on what your issue is in attracting the best kind of brightest students and giving them an experience and a kind of product and a career, the things that they're looking for that's optimal, you know, you would kind of prioritize things to get you to there. And like there's always things that, you know, regulators are, you know, something that any business has got to mitigate or, you know, deal with and so forth. And that's not going to be a primary thing, but you have.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you were, you know, especially with your board experience, if you were placed in charge of one of these tomorrow, how would you rank these? Or maybe that's an unfair question. Maybe the question is, how would you even go about figuring out how to rank them?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sheer size of them, you know, you have people who have no concern about the students at all, like large pockets of the kind of university that are only focused on kind of one of the other things. And that's where I think it starts to lose its focus and degrade the product for the most important constituent, which I'd argue is students.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think companies do have a lot of constituents also, but they're, I would say, just a little So we have investors. We've got entrepreneurs, we've got employees of entrepreneurs, we've got our own employees, we have the press, we have society as a whole. Like all these things to consider in our kind of wealth management thing, we've got the kind of wealth management kind of clientele and all that kind of thing. But I think it's very clear to us, and we try to make clear to everybody in the firm, and I think everybody in the firm is very clear on it, that if we don't attract the best entrepreneurs in the world, that none of the other things matter. So it kind of is, okay, great. You have all these people who have an interest in it, but you got to get the main thing done and anything that compromises a prime directive has got to go and be subordinated. And I think that in the universities, partly because of”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it very much is. And universities have designed themselves from actually inception to have a big impact on broad society. That's one of the goals is they are trying to reform society, advance society. And so having put themselves in that position, they're naturally going to get scrutinized by society. So, how do you think about it from a leadership standpoint and a management standpoint and with your experience on the Columbia Board? But from a general leadership standpoint, how do you think about an institution? Look, we all know it's hard enough to just like run a company that just has customers and employees or customers, employees, shareholders, right? You do three, four constituents hard enough. How do you even think about approaching the job of leading an institution that has that many constituents?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Board of Trustees, alumni, donors, downstream employers who hire the graduates, parents who are very involved, of course, immigration officials, sports fans, regulators, politicians, the press, which is, of course, scrutinizes universities all the time, downstream policymakers who are influenced by the science and policy prescriptions coming out of the universities. And then number 15, society as a whole. So that was my whole.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the way that I think about how to get started is sort of the question that we left off at the end of the last podcast, which is sort of the okay, the last discussion we went through all the issues, and then we kind of left angling. All right, what do you do about them? So this is the What Do You Do section. I wanted to start by talking about this, you know, the way we try to always do this in business is to try to start with like, okay, before you figure out what you're going to do, it's like, okay, what exactly are your goals? And then, of course, the very nice question, you know, from what are executive goals is sort of the question of what exactly are your goals for who, right? Who are you trying to satisfy? Who are the customers? You know, last time we listed out the 12 functions in the modern American university, which you can hear all about on that last episode. And then what jumps right out of the list of sort of the 12 functions of the modern American university is, you know, the university's way they run today, they certainly have a large number of different constituents. So I made a list. I came up with, I think there's like 16 or 18 on the list. I'll list them real quickly. Students, faculty, administrators.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, originally, yes. And then a small number later, a small number of secular scholars. And, you know, in the US, the universities have become sort of, vote for a broad-based expectation that people go to college, you know, as we talked about last time. But even if you could send every 18-year-old in the U.S. to college, the U.S. is still only 4% of the population. So 96% of kids, actually probably more than that every year, 18-year-old kids are outside the U.S. And most of them are in places that don't have, you know, physical colleges, universities. And so there's a general scaling problem, which probably needs to be addressed separately from the existing system anyway. So we're going to dive in a lot to all of that. And then we have a lot of great Twitter questions, which we are going to get to at the end. Or if we go super long, part three. We'll do part three.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, part of the context for all this is that universities historically only were ever built to train a very small percentage of the 18-year-olds in the world each year. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the number of people who turn 18 per year worldwide, it's like an extraordinarily large number. It's many, many tens of millions. And so the sort of current higher education system was never built and is not built to accommodate that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the crisis in higher education. And by the way, those startup opportunities would probably be appearing anyway because the higher education system just can't reach most kids who need to get educated around the world. And so there would probably be startup opportunities even without issues. But it may be that if universities can't fix some of their issues, ultimately that there will be opportunities to build new institutions, new companies, new nonprofits, maybe new research entities, and maybe do more of the things that universities have historically done.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generating graduates and research process, of course, is kind of the seedbed of everything in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and everything that we do every day. So these are important topics. The other thing worth noting is, you know, we're not just doing this to kind of criticize, we're trying to see if we can be constructive. And in particular, we're trying to take a look at the issues not through sort of a moment in time hot in the news, you know, kind of perspective, but rather sort of a structural standpoint. So we're analyzing universities as if they're systems and their structures and they have incentives and they have ways of doing things. And those ways of doing things have built up over a long time. And just the nature of large organizations and systems that build up over a long time is sometimes they accumulate problems and sometimes they need change and improve and reform. So that's why we think it's a good thing to look at. The other perspective that we have is that there are clearly startup opportunities emerging. And we're going to talk quite a bit today, both about what the existing institutions could do to maybe improve their situations, but we're also going to talk about some of the startup opportunities that are kind of flowing.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did an episode about a week ago on university. So the prevailing kind of issues in the universities, the sort of crisis that they're going through, very important to, I want to reiterate kind of why we did that one, which I'd encourage people to listen to actually first, if you haven't heard it before, this one, this is part two, but also kind of why we're doing it. So we're sort of discussing kind of this rolling crisis that a lot of the universities, particularly the American universities, are going through right now. Very important to understand two things from our standpoint. One is the reason we're digging into this topic is really actually twofold, and we'll talk about both parts today, which is these are incredibly important institutions for the country and for the people of the country. And, you know, by extension for the world. So it's really critically important that what happens in American universities goes well. And it's a very big problem, not just for them, but for a lot of the rest of us when they don't go well. And look, Ben and I talked about this last time, but our personal stories obviously involve, we're here where we are because of the great experiences that we had at universities. And then, you know, the university both teaching process.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cost just risen much faster than inflation. And then you can just ask the question Are the results better than they were 20 years ago?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one educational intervention technique that reliably generates better outcomes, and in fact, it generates what are called two Sigma better outcome. So it's an intervention that routinely takes kids who would score it to 50th percentile of outcome and moves them to the 99th percentile of outcome.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can we have a population that reflects America was kind of the goal as opposed to what's the best product opportunity for students in populations where we're not doing a good job of recruiting?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source