Amjad Masad wants a self-driving company but ignores the bill
By Imani Sutton · Reporting from Atlanta ·
Podcast
Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, wants to build a "self-driving company" where AI agents act as the "glue" of the organization and bureaucracy becomes an "invisible thing that's happening by machines in the background." On a recent episode of the a16z podcast, Masad and Gagan Biyani, CEO of the Andreessen Horowitz Academy, laid out a vision for a world where the traditional four-year college is replaced by "side quests" and project-based learning. It is a seductive pitch for a generation of students currently drowning in debt, but it replaces the public lecture hall with a private data center. Every "invisible" agent Masad describes is a line item on a compute bill, and every "side quest" in his new academy is a funnel into a venture capital cap table.
The invisible manager in the machine
Masad’s vision of the "self-driving company" is the ultimate expression of press-release futurism. He argues that AI can handle the "bureaucracy" so that people have "true autonomy to work on the things that they find like most interesting." But in the real world, bureaucracy isn’t just paperwork; it is the process of human accountability. When you automate the glue of a company, you aren’t making it invisible—you are making it proprietary. The "agents" Masad describes run on massive amounts of compute, likely hosted on Google Cloud or AWS, which in turn run on a power grid that is increasingly strained by the load of these very models.
At Replit, Masad is already implementing this, claiming the company will eventually "run itself." This is a convenient narrative for a corporation looking to optimize its labor costs, but it ignores who owns the infrastructure. If the manager is an algorithm, the manager is a decision made by a corporation. We are moving from a world where you can argue with your boss to a world where you have to submit a support ticket to an LLM. For the workers, the "autonomy" Masad promises looks a lot like being a gig worker for a self-driving spreadsheet.
From debt traps to cap tables
The strongest case Masad and Biyani make is against the current state of higher education. Masad correctly points out that today’s colleges can leave students "unemployed with a huge debt" while beating "any outside thought out of them." He’s right. The current model, where rent-seeking software like RealPage helps landlords hike prices around campuses and tuition outpaces inflation, is a failure.
However, the alternative proposed by Biyani’s "Academy"—which eschews grades and tests for "intellectual side quests"—is not a liberation; it’s a pivot. Masad calls the current VC practice of giving Stanford students $1 million "predatory," comparing it to the music industry. Yet, the Academy is fundamentally an Andreessen Horowitz project designed to identify talent earlier and more cheaply. Instead of a degree, these students are encouraged to build "unicorns" before they can vote. We are swapping the student loan for a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity). One traps you in debt; the other traps you in a cap table before you’ve even learned how to read a term sheet.
The high cost of a free side quest
Masad argues that colleges should give students "the compute" and "the bolab" to follow their curiosity. This sounds like the "first principal mindset" he admires, but compute is not a public utility like the water in my father’s pipes. It is a metered commodity. When a student goes on a "side quest" using Replit’s tools, they are consuming power and water in a data center somewhere in Loudoun County or Douglasville.
If the goal is to create "heretics" who question deeply held beliefs, we should be wary of an education system funded and operated by the very firms that profit from the students' output. Masad wants young people to be "disagreeable enough" to have interesting ideas, but only within the sandbox of the tools his company sells. The "heresy" they are looking for is just unpaid R&D.
True heresy would be asking why a power bill in the South is paying to cool a data center for a "self-driving company" while the people living next to it can't afford their own AC. It would be asking why we are letting venture capital firms design our schools to be feeders for their portfolios. If you want to change the future, don't just follow the "side quest" an algorithm suggests. Follow the load, read the rate filing, and ask who owns the switch.