Marc Andreessen on Higher Education and Tech Culture

This week on Upstream, we revisit my 2021 conversation with Marc Andreessen, Sriram Krishnan, and Arthi Ramamurthy on tech culture and education. We talk about alternative education models, lifelong learning, and the shortcomings of traditional higher education. Please enjoy the episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a good time. Hey, hey, hey, hey, uh, hey everyone, welcome to another exciting episode of Good Time, uh, the show which, uh, Aarti and I host every single night at 10 PM, uh, where we talk about Uh, what's happening in the world of tech, culture, and pretty much anything else that pops into our minds. We have a very exciting show for you tonight.

We try and have a special guest every night, but we also have the usual suspects. We have Marc Andreessen, uh, but our special guest, uh, is Erik Torenberg. And Erik's someone I've gotten to know pretty well over the last year or so, entirely online, virtually. He's one of the— yeah, I'd like to say he puts me to shame because he reads so much, he consumes so much. He's just like, prolific. He's always asking like really great questions and just always like very well thought through. But just as an introduction, he's an entrepreneur, investor, community builder. He's a general partner and co-founder at Village Global. Uh, he's also the founder of On Deck, and he's going to explain to us all what On Deck does. And we just had an acquisition or acquired another company, so he's going to talk about that as well. He also hosts one of the really popular podcasts out there, Venture Stories. And, uh, Shriram and I thought we should ask him about that as well because, you know, every podcast, especially the good ones, are such an art form. Like, we've been learning a lot just doing this Clubhouse and it's like chaos. It's just ad hoc and we don't do any prep, as Mark would constantly point out to us. And Erik's podcast is the exact other opposite. It's like really well done, gets great Great guests.

And so, um, I have been on it twice. I have been on it twice. So there you go.

Well, okay, maybe not so great guests, but welcome, Erik. We're so happy to have you here. I know you're like prolific on Clubhouse as well, so we're really excited to have you here.

Thanks for, thanks for having me. First time, uh, first time calling, long time listener, first time caller.

Yeah, yeah, welcome. Uh, tell us about, uh, On Deck. Like, that's one of the things that we were really curious about. I also saw your tweetstorm a couple days ago explaining to us what it was, and it basically started out with saying it's Stanford for adults, and that really got my attention. What does that mean? Explain to us what On Deck does.

Yeah, so that's, that's sort of, that's our long-term vision. I mean, if you look at what universities do, they serve as places where people find what they want to do, they learn the skills to get better at it, and then they make the most meaningful professional and personal relationships. of their lives. And so, what we're thinking about is, you know, why does that have to end at 22? And so, you know, why can't it be a lifelong activity? And so, Yandex started initially with this cohort model for people who were looking to start or join their next company. I started it when I was at Product Hunt, and I was looking to start or join my next thing. And it was hard to have a community of other people, you know, to find co-founders, bat around startup ideas. And so, we ended up having this sort of You know, imagine like a Y Combinator for founders before they have a company. And so, that works well. And we wanted to take this sort of cohort peer-to-peer fellowship model and apply it to dozens of other categories, like investors, creators, professional peer groups of any position you can imagine.

Yeah.

Basically, each category serves as the supply for another group's demand. Like founders need to hire people, raise money, get distribution. And it's really this broader idea of, you know, when you go back to Stanford, when you go to Stanford, you don't just meet people in your major, but you also meet people at the art school. You also get a network of MBAs, neuroscientists, and you benefit from that rich network and diversity. So the vision for On Deck, just to close real quick, the vision for On Deck is basically to serve people from as soon as they graduate to when they retire. So if you imagine the journey of someone, they graduate college, they get their first job as a designer, then they become a design manager. then they transition, find a new job as a product manager. Then they wanna build an audience by starting a very successful Clubhouse show like you guys have. Then they wanna start a company, angel invest. The idea is that there'll be programs for every step of their career path.

By the way, we have not made any money yet from our Clubhouse show. So Paul, if you're in the audience, feel free to send us a check. Erik, and I'm excited to have also Mark here because I think this is something which all of you have thoughts on. Taking a step back, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts and spoiler alert, me and Erik have prepped. I know he has a lot of thoughts on just education in general, right? I think, you know, we hear a lot about it on Twitter. We hear about Peter Thiel's perspective. We have seen the rise of models like Lambda. I'm just curious, just give us an overview of what's happening in education. What do you think is busted? And, you know, we'll go from there.

Well, we don't have 10 hours tonight. So, we'll have to summarize because there's so many. And, Marc, feel free to jump in. But, the quick punchlines here are basically— I'll focus on higher education. Basically, it's too expensive, it's too monopolistic, preventing competitors from bending that cost curve and making it cheaper.

Right.

It doesn't prepare people for jobs as well as it could, and it's not serving as a good filter for employers. So, just to walk through those 4 really quickly. On the jobs front, we have too many people going to college and not enough jobs, not enough jobs for all the graduates. Only 50% of employed college graduates got jobs requiring a degree, and only 37% take jobs requiring a high school diploma. Just to paint a visual, in 2010, there were 100,000 people with bachelor's degree who became janitors, and 5,000 with master's who became janitors. You don't need to go to college to become a janitor. No disrespect to janitors. On the filter side, The startups used to give, uh, you know, startups used to give personality and IQ tests directly, but then it became sort of, um, you know, politically incorrect to do so. So they outsourced them, those to colleges. And colleges was where you proved, you know, IQ via the SAT and sort of broader conscientiousness via completing the 4-year program. And now that colleges are sort of starting to eliminate SAT programs or many graduate exams, They're pretending that eliminating these tests won't dilute the credential. But if you combine that with sort of grade inflation across the board, what does it really mean to get into college anymore? What does it mean to graduate? So that's the filter. On the expensive side, I mean, college debt is now, you know, over $1 trillion. Our government spends 3% of GDP on it, and that number keeps rising, while also the costs, you know, costs have increased 300% since 1980. And this is what happens when government restricts supply. Price escalates, quality remains stagnant. And not only that, our government also subsidizes demand with taxpayer funding, causes prices to rise even higher. And the last thing I would just say is on the competition side, you'd think with all these problems, there'd be all these emergent competitors. You know, people call Google and Facebook monopolies, and, you know, often, but they get disrupted every few decades. In education, the top universities have remained the same for centuries. Without new entrants posing much of a threat. I think Stanford was over 100 years ago. That's the latest new entrant. And it's because basically universities are sort of cartels. They benefit from tax exemption at the company endowment level. They get federal funding, federal funding for research, subsidies for student loans. And unless you're accredited, you don't get those benefits. And they oversee the accreditation board. And so, you know, we're not— it's very hard to compete. So all this explains the lack of innovation. Why disrupt yourselves when no one else can disrupt you? I don't know, Mark, if you'd add anything to that.

Yeah, Mark, before, I think my question for Mark is, first of all, Erik, I have to say that was the highest number of spicy sentences in the first few minutes from a speaker we have had on this show, right? Twitter is probably gonna go blow up. And, you know, I wanna come back to Erik, but Mark, I know you have a bunch of thoughts on this too. Erik, obviously a lot. But I'm first curious, how was Marc Andreessen in college as a student? You know, we want to hear about that.

I was a terrible student. I've got a job. My GPA was not high. So I had a lot of, including I think probably some of you guys. So I had, I don't know, a very different path than undergraduates did, or a lot of, a lot of like other sort of, you know, private colleges and the, you know, kind of the big Ivy League schools. So I went to a very large state school, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Just to give you a sense of the size, 50,000, right? And so just like really big. And by the way, like also kind of a fraternity kind of oriented thing. So they like to say they have the biggest Greek system outside of Greece. And so it's, you know, one of these things. So it basically was, it basically was this fascinating case study. And, and I was on the edge of those kind of, you know, almost entirely math, chemistry, physics, you know, computer science, electrical engineering. So almost entirely scientific and technical. So the liberal arts, the engineering side. And it was really a tale of— because you had, you basically had 2 kinds of class formats. You had the giant auditorium, you know, with like a top professor. And so you'd have classes with, you know, 500 or 750 or 1,000 students, you know, in a giant auditorium listening to some guy, you know, who you could kind of see through binoculars, you know, kind of lecturing from the, from the, from the middle of the, of the thing. And, you know, that was great, world-class. You know, one of the co-inventors of the transistor was a professor when I was there at the time. So, you know, so, you know, some of these guys were fantastic. But it was a pretty— it was a somewhat alienating experience. And then the other was the breakout sessions with the, with the TAs. And this was fascinating. So, and this actually became very controversial. So the TAs were immigrants to the country. Many of them didn't speak English really at all. And it became actually a scandal when I was there, not just at Illinois, but this became kind of an issue actually across a lot of the colleges at that time, which is basically they were using the TAs as something approaching— it was something approaching indentured servitude. It was like a very sort of weird labor situation where basically the price of entry to be a foreign student who got admitted to one of these schools from any number of countries was to be a TA. And you made like— I don't even know if you made minimum wage. I mean, it was really something. And it was like your job and you had to do it. And of course, you know, you're there for whatever it takes or whatever from some other country. Like, your interest in teaching, you know, sort of American undergrad grads who don't really care that much is not that high. And so I would say most of the TAs were, I would say, highly frustrated. And then there was like, as I said, kind of big labor kind of issues that came out of that. And I would say it was not that great of an experience for students. And so I kind of came out of it thinking like, wow, like, I don't know how to educate, at least undergrads. Now, you know, I have a lot much better experiences than that. I kind of, you know, private schools in particular. The other just kind of obvious, I think maybe hit to that, but I'll state more explicitly, it's just The current system is just not big enough, right? And so the number, if you just compare the number of seats at like top-end colleges, universities that can actually deliver a top-end education, and you sort of cross-correlate that to the 18-year-olds worldwide per year, it's off by several orders of magnitude. And it just doesn't make sense. It's like, it's actually really funny. We're at a historical period that's obsessed with inequity. And like one of the great inequities is that nobody will leave colleges, refuse to expand. And they refuse to go broad and they refuse to franchise and they refuse to go on the internet. And as a consequence, like these sort of the quality educations are just out of reach for even all those, right, all around the world.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's just this huge mismatch that can't possibly be met by building more, you know, schools in the traditional way. And so the only way to get them the education that they deserve and that they would benefit from is to adopt a totally new model. And it has to be tech and internet-based. There's like, I don't know them. And so I think Erik's have, you know, models like Erik's, you know, much, much larger than anything that we think of today as higher ed.

That is fascinating. Also, I love that picture. I would say, you know, we coming from India, we had a lot of our friends and, you know, friends a little older than us go through the TA and the RA system. And I think your description of that, you know, really rings true from my chatting with them in the mid-'90s.

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I wanna go back to Erik. So Erik, okay, first of all, I have to say, love the data point, you know, just love that kind of scene setting that you did. Could you just talk to us about if you had to kind of summarize the alternative approaches? You have one, you have Austin with Lambda School, you have, you know, the Thiel Fellowship, which I think, you know, is way more exclusive. Could you sort of walk us through like what are some of the alternate models that you see which is not going to Harvard or Stanford?

Yeah, first I just wanna build on Mark's point really because it's, the hypocrisy is so frustrating. So Harvard, Stanford, I think they peter out at like 6,000 or 7,000 students. But it doesn't seem to be a reason why they couldn't, you know, 3x the size, if not 10x, right?

Mm-hmm.

If it were any normal business with the entire world trying to get in or trying to become customers, you'd increase enrollment. If you're offering a great product, more people should benefit from it. And I think what it shows is that one main goal of this university or these universities are about stats. And Thiel likes to use the nightclub metaphor, in that they don't gain their power from how many people benefit from it, but from how many people can't access it. And it's sad because learning itself is such a positive-sum activity, and these networks should get more valuable as they get bigger. But for whatever reason, they're clamping down. And if someone in the audience has a great explanation for it, I would love to hear it, because I don't see why.

Yeah.

they don't 2x or 3x their enrollment.

Yeah, I would say like there's a fantastic, actually you just mentioned something, just to build on that, there is a fantastic Peter Thiel video slash quote, which I can link to afterwards, where he says something like, the sure way to get all of Stanford's alumni, faculty, current students all mad at you is just to propose you're going to triple Stanford's enrollment the next year.

Unless it's for their children. It does. I think they're making the wrong trade-off. You know, I think optimizing for status at the expense of utility, I think the networks get more valuable. If Harvard can get all the people that go to Stanford and all the people that go to Princeton, I think it would be even more valuable. But that's a bit of a separate topic. Surim, to get back to your original question around sort of, you know, what's the future, what are we seeing? If we look at college as, it's a bundle of many things, but if you look at it as a bundle of education, network, and credential, over a decade ago with MOOCs, we started to unbundle the education. The education came online. You ended up with—

Do you want to explain what a MOOC is for viewers who may not know?

Yeah, so it's basically just online courses. So the stuff that you had to originally go to Stanford to attend, Basically, we put it online. Massive open online courses. I'm not sure exactly what the acronym stands for. But the— but so, and that didn't have as big of a disruption as people thought, because basically the completion rates were too low. Because it's not just about the content, it's also about accountability for the content. And so now there's this new movement towards cohort-based courses, which is what we're doing and many other people are doing, where you get the benefits of the MOOC, which are, you know, radically decreased price, and work on your timetable, but on your own time, but you also benefit from the peer-to-peer accountability in the same way that you go to a Barry's boot camp or whatever fitness class to see other people ahead of you and get that accountability. But so, yeah, bundled education, network, and credential. So basically, we're seeing an unbundling at every level of the stack, right? MOOCs did unbundle the education component. We're seeing accelerators, fellowships, You know, peer-to-peer network, professional networks, unbundling the network component for certain careers. The credential one is actually the hardest to unbundle. And we really saw that with COVID COVID really showed that the emperor has no clothes because the education was already unbundled. You weren't getting the network anymore, so it was effectively unbundled. And they were still charging the same price. And so it became so obvious that you were paying a quarter million dollars for a piece of paper. And it showed just how valuable that piece of paper is, that credential, that signal. But for the reasons I mentioned earlier, the filter is getting worse. And we're also seeing digital filters get better. So the first iteration of this was skill-specific credentials that were, you know, in fields where you could show your work, like development or design. You have platforms like GitHub and Behance that can show how good you are for you instead of you needing to have this— this degree. And that works for certain fields. It doesn't work for all of them. Where I'm really excited, this is a medium to long-term thing, is peer-to-peer credentials. You know, it's around, Arati, if I trust your judgment and you say, you know, this person is the best young person you've worked with, that means way more to me than a Harvard degree. And there are probably hundreds of people for whom I trust their judgment. I just don't happen to know that list of people. And so, I'm excited for platforms that can enable that. And then, we mentioned Lambda earlier. What Lambda is doing is it ties education to employment. So, they help you learn how to be a developer, and then they help you get a job. And they're financially incentivized to do so with a totally different business model. You go for free and then pay at the end. And, yeah, I think we're going to see that for a number of different fields. And then, lastly, what we're doing is lifelong education.

Right.

And so, I think the people in the space that are going to win are people who unbundle, you know, a certain element of the experience and then try to re-bundle some of the other ones on top of it, but in a sort of digitally native way.

I love this because, you know, I know this is, you know, this is kind of a hot topic on Twitter which gets people heated. And I have a question which I think comes up a lot in discussion, but—

Yeah, I just wanted to say, so Erik, like the one part, the last part that you said really struck a chord with me where you said, you know, If you— the only thing you need from this peer-to-peer community thing is you need basically somebody else who you trust to be able to vouch for a person. And, you know, it looks— it feels so intuitive and obvious because when we hire in our, you know, in our day-to-day jobs and companies and stuff, that's, you know, kind of like we— of course we have like a whole recruiting process and channels and stuff, but part of it, like a big appeal to this is also like your network and who you trust and who they can refer and who they bring to the system. Like, this is already how we've been doing this intuitively without really thinking through how we can apply this for, you know, scaled education and just like, you know, just continuous education that's lifelong. So it's fascinating that you took something that's just like super intuitive that we do organically and made it a platform and made it a community-centric product.

I say what Erik has done, I think what Lambda School and others have done is just like amazing. Erik, okay, I'm gonna ask you something which I think you and Mark might have strong views on. I would say one of the questions which comes up when, you know, people in tech especially talk about decentralizing education is one is that the college experience is not just about getting a job, that it is a formative time for young people where you hang out with your peers, you figure out who you are as a person. And there is something about that community, you know, collegial life, you know, and Mark's kind of just done things you regret doing at the time. But that time period, which you can't replace with just the sort of unbundling. The second theme I would say, which is connected to that, is the point of college is not to get you a job. It's also to go get a holistic education, say with the liberal arts or with sports and all these other things that may not just be, you know, learning how to be a computer scientist. Now, I know you probably have a strong take on this. How do you think about that?

I think you're exactly right. I think, you know, how do you unbundle getting wasted and getting high? And I'm just teasing.

But no, you're right. By the way, just so you know, our Indian colleges are really boring. Like, yeah, we'll get into that just a bit.

Sorry.

I think that was just to be clear. Please don't make this about everyone else. This was just a—

No, no.

You know, it's funny.

I mean, Clubhouse in one way for many people sort of like Is to solve the use case of the late-night, 3:00 AM dorm room conversation, where you're just talking about really interesting topics. Shreem, you're exactly right. And that's why I said unbundle and then re-bundle. And so, yeah, you have to— it's about sports and dating and friendship and community. And that's why it's not— for example, when COVID is over, we plan to be— and we used to be 100% in-person. But we're probably gonna be 80 to 90% digital and have epic— the 10% that's in person is epic retreats where people really get to know each other. We'll have our own versions of prom or institutional sort of activities, our own version of sports or things where people bond over. Everyone's been— not everyone, a bunch of people have been begging us to do some version of on-deck dating. We'll do something there that, in a safe way, where people can get to know each other. But no, I think, Sreev, you're exactly right. Even those 3 things I mentioned— education, credential, network— it's a lot more than that, both in the cynical way when you talk about like tax shelter hedge fund, but also in the very real way, which is, you know, it's a coming-of-age experience. And it's, you know, there's a lot of serendipity, both, you know, interpersonally and more broadly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I would say, you know, we were discussing, you know, just our own education on the little back channel that we have.

earlier.

And, you know, one of the things which kind of struck us was how different the education system here in the United States is from the one that we grew up in back in India. So I actually want to throw to Aarthi for just a little bit. You know, Aarthi, can you walk us through what your regular schedule was like from school through college? And just so folks, you know, like, if you think of academics and college, if I was playing pickup basketball Aarti was Michael Jordan. So, Aarti, do you just want to kind of walk us through what the Indian education system looks like for that time period?

Yeah, sure. I mean, just so you know, I just want to caveat very heavily here. We have a lot of listeners who are from India, who are Indians, and so this may not be reflective of everybody, but this was definitely my time and how my, you know, my education and upbringing was. So it doesn't broadly apply. I'm definitely not trying to stereotype this, but, you know, I think the broader context, at least for Indian education system, is You know, India is a very populated country. There are lots and lots of people competing for very few spots, and this applies for education as well, where the top colleges have only a certain number of seats, and there are lots of, you know, 10x, 20x the number of people competing for that same, you know, those few seats at these colleges. And so it just basically becomes a rat race, and what really happens is, at least for me, was It just starts pushing up earlier and earlier in your age group and range where, you know, by the time you're 12, 13 years old, you kind of start prepping for what you kind of want to do. And, you know, your higher education or middle school to high school is all about like, how do you get yourself into a really good college? What does that mean? So you start taking like extra lessons, you start figuring out like where you want to apply. I've seen like really crazy things where, you know, parents would just like totally uproot themselves to move closer to these like really big colleges so that, you know, they could just, you know, have a shot at getting their kids through there. And so mine was, you know, I think starting like, you know, 10th grade. I actually know very little about the American education system because I was not, you know, I didn't study here. And so, you know, in 10th grade in India, basically what you start doing is You finish school Monday to Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday, pretty much like most of the day, you kind of take these extra lessons. And we make it— for me, we would just like bicycle from one place to the other and get these like tuition classes to like learn stuff. It's usually entirely STEM-based. So you would do chemistry, physics, math, whoever took biology, biology, which I didn't. I hated it with a passion. You know, you kind of take these 3-hour-ish classes followed by homework, followed by tests. So I remember doing this for years and years until we made it to college. And then there was this like brief respite. And then you realize that you still have this rat race to figure out like where you would land a job in. And, you know, this is, you know, I've seen like a few folks, you know, over here. I think my cousin brother is actually here on this Clubhouse for the first time, and I think we all went through this very tough experience. And it's very, very different to what I've seen here, at least just superficially viewing it. And I think, you know, the point here is like part of it is you kind of get forced into this because it's just scarcity and you just have to like make it through to get to like the top colleges. Part of it, you know, I think Shriram and I were talking about this on like it kind of preps you for later in life in a really weird way. The stresses are different, the pressures are different. but you kind of get a hang of like just being able to handle pressure, especially, you know, just the stereotype of like your Asian parents trying to expect like the very best from you. That was definitely my experience.

I have to say, you know, my DMs are blowing up. I think Aarthi describing 12th standard exams, which is a phrase that all the folks who grew up in India will know very well, it is one week where your entire life is determined and you prepare for that since like age 7 onwards. Uh, I think we just triggered about like several hundred people here. I've been getting a zillion DMs from everybody, uh, who grew up in India. It's intense.

Are you gonna share your numbers at any point?

Yeah, what— yeah, go on.

Wait, what numbers? Like GPA numbers?

Rank in class numbers.

Oh, um, we had this thing.

I'm kidding.

I just—

I want to move on, but I just— to embarrass Arati, and who will kill me right after the show, Some anecdote, Adi and I have known each other for over 20 years. I think some of you know. Back when I met her, you know, when she was in college, you know, she won an award for being the first student ever to not miss a single class across several years of college, right? Which just— I mean, not one. She had not missed a single day, a single session across multiple years. Wow. And the college actually gave her an award for that. which I don't think has ever been mentioned before. I just want that to be documented online forever. But anyway, that's good. I just want to kind of get— I'm so dead. Okay, so, okay, this is amazing. Okay, thank you so much, Erik.

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