Cap Table for Two: Nick & Marina Davidovs on Raising Funds & Kids in the AI Era | DVC

AI startups raised $189 billion. dollars.

A lot of diversity on every level.

How do you hire in the age of AI?

If you have enough information,

it's easy to automate.

Being dumb makes me happy.

What's your balance?

It's over stimulating and not deep enough. We're literally touching grass.

That's not their first round. So, I think it's fair.

An agent is a somewhat okay employee. Every problem in life is either from sport or from the lack of it.

Should we clap to something?

You can clap if it cheers you up.

We did it once, we liked it, and we decided to repeat.

So, today's Deconstructed VC podcast is just going to be two of us. Cap table for two.

And I have no idea what we're going to discuss because we are so tired with lots of things that are going on in the fund and around it. So, to be honest, I think maybe it's not a lot of times I can say that I'm not prepared.

You well, I mean, prepared mind is what matters in venture capital. You spend more time than others on some topic and and then you like, "Oh, that we we we know a lot of we actually know a lot about that. So, let's just jump in." But, it's I don't think anyone is prepared right now.

Yes, so let's but let's start with like where we are what day it is, if you remember, of course.

It is Thursday, I think. No, it's Tuesday. It is Tuesday, feels like Thursday.

It's Tuesday, March 10th. Today we announce another unicorn from our seed seed fund. Rhoda AI came out of stealth and we'll be talking about that more later. What else? How can you describe the

Like it's crazy. Yeah.

Your status state of the day.

I love my status. I I feel happy because I like what is happening and my curiosity has like an endless well of knowledge to dig into. It's impossible to keep up and that's great. So I can, I can scroll the news and they never end.

Do you think that it could be also a problem because you're like always in this loop of on this curiosity like new things coming new things coming and I can see people around me they're so excited about white coding they're like doing like their agents every day and actually burning out because like it's addictive.

It is addictive. It's over stimulating and not deep enough because a lot of times you just respond to whatever AI asks you like the latest prompt and then like one more prompt and then one more prompt and then you rarely actually stop to give it enough thought especially people who run like six agents working at the same time three working on the same repo and then like three more and that and like running other projects and maybe doing some research and then like you never actually stop and read and and try to understand and then dig in. So there's no like long form dopamine coming into the brain and that is definitely burning out. I feel like that sometimes. I but I like to stop and and think. I kind of accepted that you cannot be up to speed with everything even if like it's literally my full-time job to be up to speed.

But stuff is happening so quickly now that even if you just pay attention to the major things, you're still don't have enough time in in the day.

Okay, and I said that I am not prepared by I delegate preparation to our followers on Instagram and I asked them to send questions they wanted me to discuss with Nick and actually one of them was talking about what we're talking right now. How you have enough mental capacity to do all what we maybe it's more about me but what I'm in charge of you in charge of as well.

Everything I'm in charge of. I actually do not know what exactly I'm in charge of. That's the beauty of it.

You know.

Yeah, I mean like I know the big picture. We run a venture capital firm.

Okay.

We have our goals, long-term goals. And we know like what actually is the smallest compounding part of that process. And then we can build it from scratch every day. And that's that's the beauty of it. Like if I'm in charge of building a certain feature today, I might just say, "Okay, today I'm not in charge of this feature. AI's in charge and I'll check on it later. And today I'm in charge of looking at a new company that I really like." Playing with the most awesome guitar.

I will deconstruct that for you.

Okay.

Cuz probably you need to definition of what like means by in charge of.

Okay.

First of all, we are in charge of money that we've been given by our LPs.

Oh yeah, and our own money.

And our own money. So, we're also in charge of like all portfolio companies that we invested in as well. We are also in charge of

responsible, not in charge.

We're responsible. Yes.

Yeah, we are not in charge. I mean

We are also responsible for our kids, for our kids, yes, for people around us,

That is true. I forgot about them.

Mhm. Okay. So, that's his secret.

Yeah, I mean being dumb makes me happy.

Well, you're not dumb, but you're just like do not accept that you're responsible. That's also a life hack.

You know, never growing up is the secret.

Mhm.

Childlike curiosity.

Okay, and having someone close to you who who feels differently and who feels always in charge of everything around.

All right, yep, that helps. That definitely helps.

About me, I'm if I answer that question, lately I've realized that for my mental capacity I have to do a couple of things. The first one is to have enough time for physical activity, for like for having like sport in my life. or just like have enough time to walk around, something like that. Also, to have time with people I love and with people around with our community. That's my EDC community or just like my friends. that's important for me. Mhm. That's keeping me sane.

Well, sport definitely makes me insane. and I don't I don't I don't like it. No.

What would happen to you if you

I would die. Yes, that's the problem. Every problem in life is either from sport or from the lack of it. So, sports is the ultimate evil.

What's your balance?

I'm trying not to die.

Staying alive, I think in like in today's world it's it's it's an achievement.

Okay. That one would be very interesting for you. I know probably the target audience for that question would was me. But, what is your beauty routine?

My beauty routine? Oh, I'm I've been Actually, I'm being asked that a lot lately.

I work out.

But not that much.

Yeah, actually I don't do and I look beautiful. Like I I washed my face this morning and brushed my teeth. Today, yes.

What do you mean by I don't do

Okay, I do have a really good hair dryer. That's that's it. The only reason I have it is that I wanted to use my daughter's hair dryer and she wouldn't let me. So I went online and asked Perplexity to find me like the most expensive, the fanciest hair dryer there is to make like my daughter really jealous and bought it just because I can. Parenting.

Yeah, another question. How you can assess this as a parent like that kind of behavior?

I think it's awesome.

Like how can I assess it? It also turns out the hair dryer is really good.

Okay, but you know what she's been coming to our bathroom and she uses

She's using that? Okay, that's what I thought.

And because she's already there, she not only using your hair dryer but now she's using my perfume and other my stuff.

Bad for you, I guess. I'm sorry.

Okay.

But yeah, well we can maybe talk a little bit business while while you know, while our subscribers are providing more food for thought. So there's a lot of stuff going on with like at least today there are major news. So Neuro Morality Thinking Machines also our portfolio company has done huge partnership with Nvidia. Yann LeCun raised a billion dollar seed round for his European AI lab. Rhoda AI came out of stealth also a portfolio company with a 1.7 billion dollar valuation which is a lot but I think for them it's just the beginning.

That's a difference. That's not their first round. So, I think it's fair.

Oh, yeah. And it's

for Miro and Yandex that's was their first like seed round.

No, Miro raised more money now.

That's true.

From from Nvidia. And like I don't think they disclosed it.

even her first round was extremely at a high valuation.

In February alone, AI startups raised $189 billion. That is roughly $1. One X of what all of the VC industry invested in startups in 2024. So, investing that much money in one like what what do you think is happening?

That's the question we are going to answer on our conference. Is it a bubble a bubble or not? And what

That's a good teaser.

That's a good teaser, yeah. And when we are going to pop

I I feel like a lot of a lot of companies are raising stupid amounts of money and there are a lot of deals that are happening just, you know, Meta acquired Club what what's the name of this thing?

A Mult what? Mult yeah.

Meta has acquired Mult book. I don't know how for how much. But, that's insane. First when I first saw it I sincerely thought that was satire. That that was just like ironic news.

Okay, explain why.

So, Mult book is is a social network

for agents.

for agents for open claws specifically. And like when it came out it was a funny concept because you could direct your open claw to it and and and say, "Hey, like use this and talk to other like agents, learn something new, blah blah blah." But, then because it's accessible via an API, you can ask your claw bot to register like 2 million accounts. And just spam it. Or you can just write your own post there, or prompt your cloud bot to do certain things there, like start a new religion, advocate for eradication of humans, stuff like that. It was a funny social experiment. also good rage bait for a lot of news outlets.

Mhm.

But Meta actually acquiring that for for money?

So, what do you think their strategy is? Is it like Mark is just so tired of humans and he decided to switch to just agents or something like or he wants to combine it?

maybe I mean, that is that is a good that might be good data for their superintelligence lab.

That's true.

They're like thinking seriously, but like not thinking seriously is easy here because there's so many jokes. This is really like just his strategy, right? When he sees a new social network appear and grow, he needs to either buy it or copy it and kill it. Like same as like he tried to do with Snap and like Instagram he bought Instagram. He He couldn't buy Snapchat, so he copied everything they came up with. So, I thought if he wasn't able to buy Moltbook, he would just copy it and and swarm it with his own bots.

Why didn't he copy it?

I do not know. Like this is a deal that like I usually am able to explain why deals happen. But Meta is incredibly good at producing news materials.

Yeah, they keep surprising. Like yesterday it was all over the media that they sidelined Alexander Wang. So, they sidelined Alexander Wang, whom they acquired for 14 billion dollars. So, something is amazing.

was it wasting? Was it just like all

No, I like then their PR person appears and acts and says it's all lies. Nothing happened.

Okay.

but there was a reorg and there was a memo that got out that got leaked. So, I mean, maybe having a reorg every Tuesday just keeps everybody on their toes, you know, just make sure that things are new, not boring.

Okay, what we can take up from from it? The first thing is that like agents very important trend. We have to pay more attention to what's going on here and probably think about like who is not thinking about that how you see

pay attention to that. I think we should let our agents pay attention to that.

Yeah, I mean we have to redesign our I know like strategy focus not only on humans but also on agents as well.

I mean we've done it couple of couple of years ago.

We've done it. I'm not talking about us.

Oh, you mean like

Yes.

the larger audience. I mean like yeah, this is why I'm like I I don't like reacting to trends. You have to see where it's going.

Yeah, let's maybe start from the beginning like when ChatGPT became public, we thought and we sit and thought that there is like five levels of autonomy in companies. So that's when we we discussed first like emerging agents and other stuff. Let's maybe do the like full the picture for you.

Oh, okay. Back when LLMs became a thing and it be like GPT 3.5 it became evident that they are able to become an interface for computers to be able to access any part of human civilization. Eventually, they will would become better or cheaper. And then LLMs talking to other LLMs planning and executing would allow to have digital employees. So once you have done so level one autonomy is or the foundational level of autonomy, let's call it level zero. is when you are able to create a digital twin of the business. So there's enough surface area for agents to absorb and to operate on. And then you can start using assistants, augment humans, then you can go to level three, which is digital employees, and then you can go to level four, which is digital managers. Like digit the whole department might be autonomous. Like back in the day, ViewSonic was a company that revolutionized business by being able to build a multinational company that sells computer screens across the whole world.

I think a lot of our viewers remember this like three parrots sitting like on the ViewSonic logo. How many employees did they have? Do Do you know that? 20 or 22, something like that. So, they outsourced everything.

But that's different. Like they can outsource, but

But now you can automate. Like you can you can keep stuff in-house, but just done by your agents. And that that's that's insane. You can build parallel structures for everything. Like you don't like your supply chain, you build your own supply chain.

And let's close the loop. Like the the sixth level would be

be like a full autonomy. It's like one one person five billion company or like three people 20 billion company, something like that. And that's already happening. People already building that. And also we can see based from latest Y Combinator data that companies have I think the mean for their batch to go from pre-seed to series A is now nine months. It used to be 14 months like for the best companies. One year ARR, so a company that is one year old NYC is 10 million. So, they're almost making a million a month. That is that's that's that's insane. Some of the companies are just doing even more than that. Heeksfield got to 200 million ARR in 11 months.

300 million in in a year since March.

Yeah, so it and it keeps growing by like 30 40% month over month. That that that is the growth rate is absolutely insane. And that is because you can do so much more with with so much less. I think the biggest differentiator here is not even ability to like because well, let let's face it. Like an agent is not a better employee. An agent is a somewhat okay employee. It's like somebody called it oh, Joshua Bach called it hyper leveraged toddler. Or I like to think of it as a as an coding intern with like 150 IQ but memory loss and a drinking problem.

But it's now.

But yeah, but what is important? Of course it's going to be better, but what is important is that you can scale them. And you can have them work async. there's no information logistics. I think just cutting information logistics, like when I when I send an email to my colleagues and and then I wait for them to respond and then they and I need they need to do something and they go get back to me. That stretches across weeks. You cannot really get anything done in that environment. Like I don't really know how people work in corporations. But that's why startups were so much faster. Now you can have a department in a corporation that moves with the speed of a startup because they've cut out the information logistics and have leveraged the agents.

And we can see it in across all the distance all industries we talked to and movie industry just recently we talked to farming industry, drug discovery, everything. We can apply that to a lot of industry. That's true. And also we can apply to VC and I can ask the question that people write to me. When will AI replace venture capitalist? And the answer is like already replaced. That's why we are sitting here.

Yeah, like we're literally touching grass.

And like our agents are working. What are your agents right now doing?

I don't think I know because I have not checked on them for the last 3 hours. I think they might be waiting for my input.

unsupervised agents.

Yeah, my answer to that would be late stage VC can be automated. like you can you can run fully autonomous hedge funds already. Like, public market's easy, late stage is easy because you have enough data to to make decisions.

Yeah, so if you have enough data, if you have enough information, it's easy to automate.

Yeah. Again, this is a decision-making business and a business of, information and access. Having asymmetric access to information and access to startups, the ability to write them checks so they would take your money does not come from automation. information part, yes, maybe, but also it's not a publicly available information. It's a it's a basically VC early-stage VC is legalized insider trading. You have to get insights and insides into, what is happening in different industries, what founders are out there raising, which ones have better progress. And then the ability to approach them and write a check is is insane. I mean, when we started, our second fund, I was thinking that 20% carried interest does not make sense for, like, $10 billion funds. Yet, many $10 billion funds charge 25% carried interest and 2.5% management fees because their investors want access. yeah, we don't do that.

Their investors want access and they're ready to pay for access. And that just proves that access is very important and it's very hard to do. And on early stage, it's not about, you know, just writing an autonomous check. So, if I was I would not take any, like, automatically written checks.

So, the next question, which is related to this, how can someone start a career in VC in 2026 without prior experience?

Oh, that's relatively easy, of course, cuz I've been doing that for 18 years, so I think

I feel like it's really

But the difference is, like, it's not the same as it was 18 years ago.

Oh, yeah, that's that what super is basically, like, if you want to become a partner in a VC fund eventually, like you either need to be the gateway for awesome deals or for LP money, for investor money. And like you can choose the track. If you want to be the gateway for the LP money, you can go into wealth management and you know, just like know 300 amazing family offices, become friends with them, earn their trust, you know, send their birthday cards and Christmas cards. And that track is not for me. That's that's boring and I don't like it, but a lot of people do it successfully. The second track that I would choose is basically pick five partners in the like VC firms that you deeply admire. And look at what they're looking at. Study them. Look at their portfolio companies. Talk to people who know them.

Learn as much as you can. And then start looking for deals. Find something that you absolutely believe they should invest, but they might not know yet about. Try to find an angle, like where do you source it, who do you talk to. Find good deals and keep sending them to good deals every week. They won't be responding. sometime they would respond, ask for an intro. If you keep doing it for a year, you'll get a job offer. Let's talk about hiring. How do you hire in the age of AI? Like do you hire somebody who's real a really good engineer that can write code? Do you hire a product? Like let's say you're a startup, two founders, both technical. Who do you hire next? How?

I think it's very unpopular question right now. Like most of the curiosity is about like how to lay off people, not to hire them, how to like build companies just like two two founders and a dog without hiring anyone.

That is that is quite popular and a lot of people are not even raising any money because they're like, why why would they? You see that the dog has won.

Yeah, because like we can do it without me.

It's actually a very interesting question. I think hiring people with founder mentality is the hardest, but the most rewarding thing to do in an early-stage startup. Someone who who's able to be a full stack not only in terms of code, but also in terms of processes, like picking up their phone and placing a phone call to talk to suppliers, somebody who's a agentic, high agency.

Mhm.

And someone with curiosity to look at new things, learn new things, and you know, cuz you need an absolute 360 overview of everything happening. But like if only founders do that, this startup is not going to leverage.

I can see two trends. Like both very popular among like our startups and like what I see. People are very careful about hiring. They're not fast in hiring the next employee in the company. So they are like keep waiting until they find they find the perfect match. But I can see two things. The first trend is to Okay, I'm going to hire someone who who with whom I can work in the same place.

All right.

So they're hiring like locally. it's very popular, like especially in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, founder

house.

Yeah, founder house. Yes, it's like could be more expensive, but we really need to work 24/7 7 days a week. We need a common space. We can see that like I know, the speed of work together is high.

have we could have hired any other dog, but we already have this one inside our house, right?

Yes. And another trend is like okay, but we are in this modern age, why do we even need this approach? Let's do everything from first principles, everything like according to the AI era, like fully remote. We don't need any space at all. Let's design all processes that like it that the whole the whole work system would work like 24 hours 7 days a week. Doesn't matter like where people are.

So, it really depends on the founder, extrovert versus introvert.

Do you want to have people around you or do you like want to sit in your garage and code or like somebody else in their garage in Bulgaria codes?

I know your answer.

Yeah. I mean, our team is fully remote, but we are together in one house.

Which is very helpful because like we don't again, we don't as agents, we don't spend any time on like information logistics like and

zero problems with lack of trust, yeah. That's fun. I I might have a question for you. So, you are organizing TEDx Women.

Mhm.

And you're speaking and then you're participating in as a mentor in Women in Tech. Why do you do that? Why do you think it's important?

Well, with TEDx it's easy. I actually enjoyed the process when I was a speaker. It was not an easy process, but I took a lot for me. it was in not an easy thing to find what is important to me that I want to share to the world just in 10 minutes. And I really want to give that experience to people who I admire.

Which does not include me, apparently.

Who probably did not have stage for that, like proper stage for that, to talk about that.

Okay. That's your excuse cuz I already have a stage.

Yes.

A platform, okay. I I want to comment on that because like speaking on TED was always my dream. And then Marina took it away from me.

I did not. I've been invited like

Two times to speak at TED and then and then you organized your own TED. And I couldn't speak.

Did you remember the the theme of the TEDx I organized?

Yes, the women's voice.

The power of a woman's voice.

just Did you just assume my gender?

I yeah,

I think I know.

I know that you have a

I can be a supporter Yeah, I can

I know you have a lot to say about every every topic.

Yes, of course. Like I I can be the biggest supporter of of women's voice.

I know and actually you are.

I do my whole life I've been listening to women's voice and retelling it with my male voice so it could be heard.

You know, it's so unfair. Yeah, like I mean it's really physics because our voice on not that low. So it's on a higher pitch, higher tones and our vocal cords are smaller so

Your lungs are smaller.

We have less air inside so according to physics the wave of our sound is just it's less and if we are surrounded by male voices they just can't sound like women's voice. So even on the playground when I'm trying to like reach my son and I'm actually screaming he he can't he can't hear me but like Nick can say just one couple of words, okay? Not even screaming like just low.

He just loves his daddy more.

Of course. And that's why we built a stage when women can share how they how they they're very successful in their industries so they can share their tools, their insights, how

The VC industry and and the like

Well, what they did to be heard?

The VC industry and tech is kind of unfair to women. Like, there are very few female founders who are funded, very few are successful, partially because of that. but, what do you do you think there's Do you think female founders are actually like better or worse or equal to male founders? How are they different?

I don't like to like compare like

Stereotypes. I mean, come on, like, we're we're on a podcast. Let's let's

let's raise money.

But, I think two things when we're talking about like venture capital and founders, there are two things. First of all, yes, there are not a lot of diversity on every level. So, if you have a diversity if you want diversity among female like among founders, we should have diversity among people who making decisions in venture capital as well.

And who give them money.

And who give them money as well. So, like, on every level should be diversity. So, for example, in our fund, because I'm also in charge of making decisions, and my network like have I think more female founders than yours.

Obviously.

we have more percentage of female founders in the fund. Despite of the fact that we invest in only in repeat founders, despite of the fact that we invest in only in AI founders. And the second thing, which is I think bigger problem, and I I I'm met this concern among like talking to other male investors, that well, we don't we didn't invest in this particular like company or female founder because like they are they their ambitions are not that high. They're not too risky. And that's I can see why. It's actually I I also can see that some most of the time like women are less risk decisions. I think but this is not because like I think we don't feel safe to make mistakes. So that's something that

Maybe also to do with how this society, especially like the Western society, like sees women in general.

That's true. So that's a bigger problem that we should work on a like larger scale. So I really want women to do more mistakes, to do like risky bets.

Marina Davidova wants women to fail more.

Yes, because when we are failing we are actually learning and that means that we are doing risky bets and by by doing risky bets we can achieve more.

That is true. you know, even on playground like if if a girl does something risky, parents would be like, "No, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that, my little princess." But boys are like, "Fine, yeah, let let him break his neck, he'll learn."

My parents never said something like that to me.

That's why you are an

Because most of them on the playground I was alone.

I was parents. That's that's Soviet Union childhood.

Good, good thing.

You survived, good.

Yeah. Like you come back at at 9:00 p.m. good. I think I think now for the modern generation it's going to become much, much harder because helicopter parenting, all of the tech that we have. Imagine in the '90s in the US they had to run an ad campaign on all of the TV channels. Around 9:00 p.m. they would remind parents that they have kids and they need to check check on them and invite them home.

I didn't know about that.

Yeah, but now we we have our kids' location at all times, even if they're alone for some reason, which they are never are. We know exactly where they are. I have parental controls on my Tesla that my daughter daughter uses. That's insane. I I don't think they can really develop the kind of risk tolerance that comes with just being alone to your own problems. Or maybe they are with just different kind of problems that we don't see as parents.

It's really difficult to compare how the environment they raised with our environment. You have a joke about not a joke like story about our daughter and manual driving.

Oh yeah, yeah, she she came home and said, "Dad, I just drove manual." My my friend's car was manual. I just drove it. I was like, "Wow, I did not teach you how to drive manual." And then she's like, "Oh, I figured it out." And And then I got suspicious. So I asked how many pedals did the car have? She says like, "Two, of course." So apparently manual is a car that does not drives itself. Welcome to 2026 Silicon Valley.

Yeah, when Nick shared that, he got a lot of like comments about like this is insane. But that's actually I can see how it's it's a reality of our children.

This the concept of self-driving is going to be reversed for them. Because for them self-driving is going to be meaning drive like I have to drive myself, right? So like you got a self-driving car, loser.

You have to drive yourself.

just like for those who are who who likes risk.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But that is a good segue into education. So another topic that I wanted to discuss and apparently some of some of your subscribers wanted to discuss is what do we do in 2026 if we want our kids to succeed or be happy or whatever the goals of parents are?

And to be honest, I feel so uncomfortable what to talk about that because like we have to wait like a 10 years at least to see if we are doing something

Classic Classic academia. So yeah, we need we need to do like a proper study.

And now we have 16 years old.

a third kid to be a placebo group.

Placebo group, okay. So we have two kids, 16 years old and 8 years old. 16 years old like with our oldest one, we are in the state where she in in 2 years she's going to apply to the colleges and universities. We are trying to like assess all opportunities and we already like very frustrated because high like university education is so so behind.

I'm actually super glad that she wants to become a doctor because first of all that means that she does not have to study to become a doctor in the next 4 years. You can only get that like into medical school after you actually graduate. So, she can do whatever the

So, she's postponing like the decision to apply.

We're like staggering. It's It's a

Procrastinating the decision.

Procrastinating the decision. She can do like history and political science and I don't know biology, whatever she likes. And then she she can get into medical school and we would hope that it by that time medical schools would catch up. But the the other the other interesting part is that medical schools did not have to catch up that much as like computer science or I don't know, management or like any other knowledge work that has been severely affected by AI because now like not a single US-based school produces employable candidates right now. So, it's a waste of money and waste of 4 years and I feel super sorry for people who just wasted 4 years and are graduating today with zero skills that are usable in real life.

I agree and I disagree because like we have to determine like to define what is what what skills I'm talking about. Like I would totally agree about knowledge.

Perplexity computer.

not only about like that skills. It's not about like hard hard skills. What about soft skills?

What kind of soft skills do you learn in computer science?

University, doesn't matter like what specific a topic you are learning, like it's also environment, the like process of learning, process of learning with like peer group, working like projects together.

The sadly the reality of the data says that, employment among 20-year-olds is at the lowest. People only want experienced people who can use AI. There's a 30% 30% premium for being proficient with AI tools in the market. I think for like computer science it's much higher. If you are an experienced full stack engineer who knows a lot of, you know, a lot of who've built a lot of solutions and is able to, use AI to code. You're basically getting 20x more than someone who doesn't know how to do that.

There is a popular, opinion among high schoolers that what is important now is that they should learn how to do something with their hands.

Trade school. Yes. So, instead of Harvard our daughter should go to trade to a trade school. I support that. That is cheaper.

Okay, what about our 8-year-old?

Our 8-year-old? I think he's going to be fine because he has time to adapt and the, and the system has to adapt also. We just enrolled our 8-year-old in Alpha School. he's not excited about it.

It's not recommendation, but still like don't check it. Like

We Yeah, we like we haven't tried it, but I spent I spent a day with, with them while he was doing like a shadow day. He kind of enjoyed it. He just like he's not excited because he doesn't want to change schools and doesn't want to, you know, get new friends instead of the ones that he barely got, in the first like 5 years. But what I feel is really good about Alpha School is that at least they're willing to experiment. They're trying to condense all of the curriculum that classic school would have into like 2 hours a day. And then the rest of the time they would do project-based group teamwork. They would come up with new ideas. I think that's a good shot at changing how Apparently it works because they published their numbers. And their median student is top 1% American student.

And I don't think that's because they have like adverse selection and they only select the best. They do select different kids. Just the environment. And I think the higher education system really has to change because like it's not Like the first reaction was, "Oh, let's just not use AI. Let's let's forbid it. Let's make them write essays by hand." Which is insane. I mean, go back to verbal exams. Use AI. Yes, you cannot have enough time for the teachers to listen to every student. Use AI. Make them talk to AI. Make to make them to make a point to AI and argue. Look at at this as as data. Go deeper whenever like you are questioning something. And then that's how you like leverage AI to to be a better teacher not you know, just say, "Okay, like ChatGPT is forbidden."

What should a parent do if they don't have Alpha School?

Yeah, what schools?

Well, the first of all, there's our portfolio company Bina School that is a digital all on digital only school for nomad kids. I mean, like no digital nomads and like other folks who are traveling a lot. So, your kids can learn from school and it's an elementary school, which is fun. It also compresses all of the curriculum into very short time and then kids can go out and play and, you know, socialize with other kids and, you know, do do sports. But, I think that it what's really important is to teach kids how to use AI. How to stay curious. How to do follow-up questions. How to ask questions? How do like continue? How do delegate work?

That's problem because I think most of the adults who are teaching the kids they don't know how to use AI.

That is a problem. That is really a big problem. There's a There's this picture my like well when we edit we're going to bring it up. But basically it's a This is a very small percentage of people who use AI and then a much smaller percentage of people who use it to write code. And I think that is the biggest differentiator because software Who said that? Some somebody somebody smart said that on on Twitter of course because that's my primary source of information.

On X.

yeah, on X. once ability to read and write was only for the elite and then it became a human right. I think ability to create software was the attribute of an elite. It no longer will be. Will It's going to be a human right to create custom software. People won't even feel that it that they're creating software. Like the software is going to be so adaptable that everyone's going to make their own software just by expressing their needs or merely blinking because AI is going to predict what they need.

Let's try to wrap it up.

Yep. Do you have more questions from that?

If you want you can talk more about your beauty routine. I don't know.

My beauty routine?

How do you divide workload, parenting time among each other? Mhm. Mhm. Interesting question.

Oh yes, okay. So she's looking at me because yesterday she had stuff to do and I didn't have stuff to do. And yet she was reading the book to our kid. I do feel guilty. But I was reading a book myself and it was so good.

Okay, next time you can read your book to our son.

That is a good idea. It's actually pretty boring for him so he would fall asleep very quickly.

Okay, efficiency is the the secret to the balancing workload and parenting.

Yeah. And also, like as we just discussed, the the like less oversight we give to our kids, the more risk-taking they would grow up. And if it doesn't kill them, they might become stronger entrepreneurs. So

Yesterday I was so happy that to be honest, I was not a good parent yesterday because I didn't prepare a dinner and you didn't prepare a dinner. But our daughter

That's intermittent fasting.

Yes.

We're introducing our kids to

Okay, again again again, we are in charge of our kids and they're supposed to have a dinner.

They're not starving.

So our daughter actually made a dinner.

That's good. See, like that that's how you develop the ability to cook in them.

Okay.

You leave them without the dinner.

They're going to be very successful. But then they're going to spend all of their money

on a therapist.

on a on a therapist.

That's why I'm going to invest in in a company who do AI therapy.

Yeah, so at least it's going to be cheaper. Cool. Thank you everyone for, you know, joining our

sending your questions. Keep sending them.

Yeah, so we we we want to alternate this format with actually talking to founders because this is fun. but we need to talk to other people too. After all, we invested in their companies and they expect us to help them build them and help them hire. So like we need to we need you to apply for jobs in these amazing companies.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you, Marina.