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This is a special post, written by me and Alex Danco together, where we’re going to throw tech blogging convention out the window and write about a personal topic.
Let’s get to it.
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Would We Send Our Kids to HAA?
Yesterday, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy officially launched; and if you haven’t seen it, please go check that out. Gagan Biyani (who founded Udemy) is a co-founder, and will be the CEO, and he wrote a manifesto here on what they’re doing and why. Tldr, it’s a program for young college-aged people (it’s not a college or university; it’s an alternative) to come to San Francisco, learn how to build things and be useful with a like-minded peer group of other ambitious kids, living in a residential setting in SF.
Now, in an early era of our lives as tech bloggers, the obvious way to write about this would be, “What an interesting idea; is this unbundling the university? Is this disruption? Is it some other mental model? And it would make for a great think piece. You know the type.
But the thing is, now we’re both older, and we’re both parents. So this hits different. It’s not just a theoretically interesting exercise for us; there’s a really literal question, “could we imagine our kids going to something like this?” (Gasp!)
Speaking for both of us, we both had a really good time in college. Danco went to McGill, up in Montreal (a great college city, arguably the best), Packy went to Duke, down in Durham, NC (maybe the greatest American city outside of New York). We both had really good experiences, and I think it’s reasonable to say that we both ended up as curious life-long learners that know how to pick up books and read them, and that appreciate whatever “soft” or “social” skills you pick up in a university setting that aren’t strictly utilitarian, but seem important.
Their plan for the Academy is interesting: they clearly aren’t just trying to make it an apprenticeship program. There’s definitely a “bundle of life experience” that’s coming together, in a totally different way than it comes together for most people in traditional college, but definitely valid. I’m not sure you would’ve arrived at something like this if a bunch of experienced professionals sat around and thought hard about “the future of the University” or something. It’s like that Paul Graham essay: “The way to find a good startup idea is definitively not to sit around thinking of startup ideas. It’s to solve a problem that you personally have.” In this case, the good folks at a16z have seen some pretty impressive young people become phenomenally useful (and interesting, and happy) jumping right into building, and the plan for HAA seems clearly to be, “get more people launched on that trajectory”, rather than something more abstract.
A large part of my appreciation for traditional college - but also, a reason why I might like HAA too! - comes from my (Danco’s) experience parenting. The thing about parenting is, before you become a parent you imagine a lot of the “hard parts” of being a parent (especially in the younger years) and you picture all of the typical stuff like changing diapers, teaching them skills, driving them to soccer practice, whatever.
Once you actually have bigger kids you realize those aren’t the hard parts at all. The hard parts are like, “are your kids resilient? Are they kind? Do they take initiative? Do they take responsibility?” and when you think back on it, the real purpose of all these classic rituals and institutions around growing up (e.g. playing team sports) is like, yeah it’s kind of about the sport, but it’s also about the life experience.
Some of the hardest parts aren’t about the kids at all. They’re about your own psychology as a parent. Parents in cities like New York and Toronto and San Francisco are competitive and worried. Kids like certain things, but are they the right things? Will they get our kids into good schools? Will they set them up for success? I (Packy) live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where parents (not us) pay $65k per year for every year from Kindergarten onwards, because those grades are attached to a good high school, and if you get into Kindergarten, your kids are practically guaranteed admission to that high school. You’re basically paying $650k to make sure your kid is admitted to a good high school, which should, but certainly isn’t guaranteed to, help them get into a really good college, at which point they’ll probably get a good job, at which point, they’re set for life. You don’t want to screw up your kids’ futures, right?
The challenge with that, though, is that who knows what a good job will be in fifteen years? Our parents didn’t send us to McGill and Duke to become bloggers.
But one of the things you learn raising kids is that it’s a lot easier to move with them than against them. If they can find something they love, your effort will go to getting them to stop doing it instead of getting them to start. My (Packy) son is obsessed with chess. Obsessed. If there’s no one to play with, he’ll set up puzzles and play against himself. We finally gave in and started letting him play on chess.com for an hour a day, and we have to pry his little fingers from the keyboard when the clock strikes 60. Our daughter? Couldn’t care less about chess. Absolutely loves gymnastics and music. If we give her a few minutes of YouTube, she’ll ask for the Michael Jackson Name That Song game and breeze through the back catalog. We’re starting puppeteering club at school soon, too, because she talks as her stuffed animals all the time anyway and she’s legit funny.
Do I think my daughter will be a professional song guesser or puppeteer? I don’t know man, the world is getting weirder, anything is possible, but I doubt it! Do I think that being really good at those things will develop her confidence and sense of self and her memory and performance skills and her trust in her own gut? I do!
Do I think my son will become a professional chess player? Unless his brain is 99% his mom’s and only 1% mine, I’m afraid he’ll hit a ceiling, just as if a son of mine probably isn’t going to play in the NBA. But during his first chess tournament last year, he came into the auditorium where I was waiting after his first match and I couldn’t tell if he’d won or lost because he looked so happy. (An eight-year-old kicked his five-year-old ass, it turns out.) He’s learning that if he works really hard, he can get better at stuff that seems really hard. It’s right there in his Elo. Resilience and relentlessness seem like good traits for him to hone.
It’s funny writing this now, now that I know the kids. In 2022, when Dev turned 2 and Maya was just 2 months old, I wrote an essay called How Do I Teach These Kids?! about how we were thinking about raising those two little blobs given how fast everything was changing.
Things are changing even faster now, and parents are rightfully worried and confused about what exactly they’re supposed to do to give their kids a good life. Pushing them to get really good at math seems silly, when AI is currently tornadoing through all of the field’s hardest open problems. Math is useful in investment banking too, but are the kids going to be better modelers than 2040 ChatGPT? Should you push them to become a lawyer? That seems risky! Even if senior partners and their relationships remain valuable, are they going to need armies of highly-paid whippersnappers drafting docs and finding precedent? Doctor? Probably your best bet, given licensing requirements. But do you dare risk their future on such a specific path? And what if they don’t want to become a doctor?
Continue through this maze, and you’ll keep hitting dead ends. There is no safe career path today, let alone one that will remain safe for twenty years, which means that there is no set of schools and degrees that can guarantee a safe career into the 2040s and 2050s.
This seems really scary. It is freeing!
We can stop pretending that we can plan our kids’ lives and follow them into whatever lights them up.
In that 2022 piece, when I knew even less than I do now, I synthesized all of the research and conversations I’d had into a paragraph:
Expose your kids to a lot of things early, and then help them go as deep as they’re able to go on the things that excite them the most. It doesn’t matter what those things are; cultivating curiosity and depth is the point.
I’m surprised at how well that’s seemed to work in practice. Our kids are a lot more motivated to learn skills in service of some other thing they really want to do than because we tell them they have to learn something.
Tyler Cowen points out, recently, that the most valuable thing you get from college nowadays is being more likely to get married and stay married. A strong group of friends that gets established together, witnesses life events together, and follows each other through the ups and downs of adulthood is just one of the most valuable things you can have, even if for no other reason than making you accountable to yourself. College friends make great witnesses.
One thing that’s definitely true, though, is that you forge your closest friends and most valuable peer groups by going through real, shared experiences. College is certainly designed as one, although in recent years, some of it has gotten a bit too cushy and resort-y for our taste. Esprit de corps is best forged in non-ideal physical environments, not in luxury accommodations.
To that end, working on real things is a great way to forge those kinds of connections, experiences, and appreciation for the best things in life. One of Gagan’s points in his essay, which is absolutely true, is that most kinds of “real work” mean making things, and college traditionally comes up pretty light in that department.
Kids come with this unbelievable gift that they don’t know certain things are impossible, and so they try to figure out how to do fantastical things. The longer you can keep that alive, the better. I (Danco) have had the pleasure of working alongside some 19-20 year olds on the a16z New Media team who have been unbelievably impressive in terms of the responsibility they’ve taken on, their maturity, and their growth as interesting people. “There’s no way I could’ve ever handled responsibility like that when I was that age”, is the obvious thought. But on the other hand, people have a way of rising to the occasion. Maybe more young people should simply be given the opportunity to try hard things? That’s how we’ve done it, through most of human history.
When I (Packy) wrote about Somos and Panandina founder Forrest Heath last year, we talked about this. He said:
I’d say the thing I’m grateful for, and I don’t really have the ability to take much credit for it, is just somehow I never lost my innate childhood curiosity.
And I think this is something that I like, when I met your kids and they’re just playing around and imagining stuff on the playground in Brooklyn, it’s like, everyone was kind of like that at some point, right? Like, almost all of us had some way we were playing with imaginary forts and imagining a future that didn’t exist or imagining a world that didn’t exist and kind of putting our headspace into it.
And I think for some weird reason—both me being kind of stubborn and a bit skeptical of a bunch of different things, and honestly, I think just random chance—I never got that beaten out of me. And I kind of was always, like, finding my own weird path to sort of come at stuff.
Tangentially, that meant that I wasn’t really competing against the system of, ‘Get higher SAT stores, get into the right college and, check all the right checkboxes.’ And I think there’s this sort of, like, innate builder kind of curiosity in me that I never lost. If anything, I’ve kind of compounded it.
In a recent conversation with David Senra, Ribbit Capital’s Micky Malka talked about this, too, about what young people will do given naivete, a desire to do something, and time to figure it out:
But the more time I spend with them [young founders], the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is because the oldest of the generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question.
The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and and build companies, they find that first they’re naive, so they think anything is possible.
We’re talking about founders here, but you can find the same pattern in exceptional outcomes in any field.
Taylor Swift’s dad was a stockbroker and her mom worked in marketing at a mutual fund; they had no grand musical ambitions for their daughter. But she got obsessed with musical theater, then with country music, and started lobbying her parents to take her to Nashville. When they did, on Spring Break at age 11, she walked into record label offices by herself to give them demos of her singing and try to get signed. They didn’t sign her. A lot of people in Nashville could sing. She needed more skills: guitar and songwriting. 12-year-old Taylor learned a few chords from a computer repairman, and she wrote her first song shortly after. Story goes she practiced guitar so many hours a day that her fingers bled and cracked and her mom had to tape them up. Her parents drove her to New York for voice lessons. They got her a slot singing the national anthem at a 76ers game. At 14, the family moved to Nashville so she could go for it. Sony/ATV signed her to a publishing deal that year, the youngest songwriter they’d ever signed. Two years later, in 2006, she released her first single, Tim McGraw.
If you’re a parent, you know that it’s impossible to get your kids to practice anything until their fingers bleed if they don’t want to themselves. You also know how hard it is to get them to stop if they do.
There has never been a better time to be a kid who wants to figure something out. I think the best we can do as parents is help them figure out what that something is, and then give them every opportunity to pursue it. At some point, that means letting them outgrow what you can do for them finding other people who are as obsessed as they are.
That’s how I read what Gagan and the team at HAA are doing: creating a place for young people who are weirdly obsessed with building something to surround themselves with other young people who are, too, and an environment in which they can more easily access the skills and experienced people they’ll need to do it. A Nashville for Nerds. It’s taking kids seriously, and adding real stakes early.
So could I imagine sending Dev or Maya to HAA?
No idea. It’s not going to be up to me. Personally, I’d love for them to go to Duke, to have the experience that I had, but they’re their own people. If I need to pry their fingers off of making things that the world needs, it would be awesome to have a place where they can go as hard as they want surrounded by other people their age who push them to go even harder, and I’m glad Gagan and team will have twelve or fourteen years to make it great by then.
But I also hope that there are dozens of options like HAA at that point, for all manner of passions. For songwriting, puppeteering, engineering, mountaineering, imagineering, and for pursuits that we can’t imagine today. I hope today’s great universities redouble their commitment to what makes them great, to support those kids, like me, who haven’t figured out what they want to be when they grow up by the time they’re eighteen. Some people, like Jamie Beaton, might just want to keep learning forever, and I hope that we’ve created enough abundance that they can.
A good future is a world in which, in the words of Isaac Asimov, kids have the agency, curiosity, and support to pursue Whatever They Wish.
So, maybe the right way to think about it is, a dozen years from now when our oldest kids start making those kinds of choices, it really won’t be up to us at all. If we’ve done our jobs right, wherever they go to college - or HAA or something like it, or something else entirely - will be whatever they make of it. And we’ll be delighted to send them off.
Thanks to Danco for co-writing with me - it’s always a treat.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
Well done guys... Turns out it really does matter....
Wonderful piece. Thank you. Lots of good wisdom! Very excited to see the HAA experiment.