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The a16z Show
Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect
00:54:39
Katherine Boyle and Sarah Wang speak with Jesse Genet, a startup founder and family builder, about building 11 AI agents while homeschooling four young children. Jesse runs agents across roles ranging from coding to curriculum planning to household management, and she shares how agent architecture, logging systems, and “benevolent neglect” parenting have changed her life as both a founder and a mother.
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- [00:01]
Jesse Jana
I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for, like, the next five years or so. I really want to be present with my kids. I need to take this break. Basically. That is no longer true. A weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own. So I could be like, we need another agent, you guys. And they actually can spin them up without me touching the machine. Which is a little crazy. But the first few weeks were very rough. It would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through.
- [00:34]
Narrator
But the thing is, in the 1950s, labor saving appliances were supposed to give mothers more free time. Instead, standards rose to fill the gap. Laundry went from weekly to daily. Meals became more elaborate. The hours stayed the same. Seven decades later, a former YC founder homeschooling four children under six, decided to test whether AI agents could actually break that cycle. She built 11 agents, each with a distinct role, from lesson planning to grocery ordering to logging her children's progress via voice notes. Her agents now build other agents without her touching the machine. The result is not a frictionless home. It is a home where a parent can spend two uninterrupted hours ignoring her children on purpose because she believes boredom a skill worth teaching. Katherine Bole and Sarah Wang speak with Jesse Jana, startup builder turned family builder.
- [01:33]
Katherine Bole
Jesse, it is so fantastic to have you here. I think you've been what I would call a viral sensation on X, posting videos of how you're homeschooling your family. Four children under the age of five, which all I can say is God bless you, you're amazing.
- [01:47]
Sarah Wang
God bless.
- [01:48]
Katherine Bole
But we also want your secrets. We want your tips. Sarah and I are both moms of young children and we talk a lot about how AI is impacting education, how AI is impacting the future of the family. And you've become just such an incredible force with your videos on X of how you're using it in a bunch of different tasks around the house and a bunch of different tasks around supporting your family as a homeschool mom. So we want to start with who you are and how you got so interested in using AI for homeschool. But tell us about your previous career too, as a Silicon Valley founder.
- [02:19]
Jesse Jana
Yeah, so I started a company many years ago now, time flies, but I was a YC founder, did a venture backed company, kind of full cycle, ended up selling it a few years ago. And so I do on the one hand I'd say I have a technical background. On the other hand, I would admit openly that my co founder was the technical co founder. So I want to be like, I want people to understand. Yes, I've been swimming in these waters. I've sat in many an engineering meeting where I was sort of following along and sort of lost. I've sat in many product cycles and reviews so it gives me a vocabulary. But I had an opened terminal to try to build something myself until maybe six months ago. So I think we're living through a really fascinating time where only recently after running a company myself did I feel like now the tools are so good that I can really use natural language to build things. And so the last six months have been like a Cambrian like explosion for me of building. And of course the last few months where we have the open claw, then I went completely obsessed. So I'm happy to discuss that, but I went down complete obsession. It can only be described as an obsession because I've just been building almost nonstop. But when I say that on a day to day basis, I'm actually spending a lot of time with my kids. And so I was trying to find like how can I build things that are relevant to my life. So I know we're going to dig into that, but that's a little bit of how I got to now and
- [03:42]
Katherine Bole
maybe talk about that six month, like what was the thing that happened six months ago? Or do you remember what the moment was where you're like, I need to start building to fix this problem? Or what was the story behind that?
- [03:52]
Jesse Jana
Well, my co founder from Lumi, which was a packaging company, so literal physical packaging, we managed a packaging marketplace. He's now off running something called Obsidian and it's a markdown note taking app. And I say this because I follow him on Twitter, obviously we're co founders. And then I follow all these Obsidian geeks on Twitter and I started noticing a change in the conversation, change in the conversation. Them talking about how they were like building really wild things with cloud code. That stuff was referenced. The discussion about interesting ways they started using Obsidian. And what really caught my eye the six months ago was me feeling like, hey, I actually feel like I can probably be building things myself now in the small bits of time that I have. So I have confetti time. Like I have 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. And I started feeling like maybe I can build stuff. The tools are getting so good. But then about two, three months ago I saw people saying I'm Using Obsidian as a second brain for this thing. And it was called claudebot. And then all these different names. Claudebots.
- [04:50]
Sarah Wang
Yes.
- [04:50]
Jesse Jana
And they were referencing this, and I was like, what are they talking about? This was December and into January. And that's when I realize, wait, I can build agents who actually code for me while I'm hanging out with my kids. That was a complete game changer, actually. Just pausing that for one moment. This is such a huge deal for me. I was resigned, and not in the super depressing way, but just being really blunt to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for, like, the next five years or so. I was like, I really want to be present with my kids. We're doing homeschooling, which is like a wild choice. And so I was kind of. Yeah, I think the right word is resigned to it. Not sad, not resentful, but just like, okay, I need to take this break, basically. That is no longer true. What happened a few months ago is. That is no longer true. I feel like I've been building better things than I ever have before. While I spend almost all of my waking hours, like, with my children, I can explain how I do the flow of the day where I do that, where there's things I do during the day and things I do at night when they're asleep and stuff. But I'm like, truly building things that I'm impressed with personally. And I'm being an active mom. And that was not possible a few months ago. Like, it's actually a sea change for me personally. It's, like, really liberating.
- [06:05]
Sarah Wang
So that's incredibly inspiring, what you just said. And I think a lot of parents listening to this are like, I don't have time to build this. Right. And so you're a mom four, five and under?
- [06:15]
Jesse Jana
Yeah, I have two, and I barely
- [06:16]
Sarah Wang
feel like I could breathe, let alone four. You're doing homeschooling. Can you walk us through a day in your life? Like, how do the hours stack up? And then when do you build? And to your point, the big unlock is like, you're sleeping in their building for you. So, like, how did you get that set up? So many questions.
- [06:32]
Jesse Jana
Yeah, an average day, a typical day, wake up at the crack of dawn, right? Because there's a small person who has decided that that's when we get up, and they're like, you get up? So anyway, I'm like, waking up and there's, like, small little gremlin creatures around my bed. So that's where we start. We go from there, obviously all the basics, like having breakfast, yada yada. There's three kids I'm really homeschooling now because one is a baby, one is about four months old. I start early, but not that early. The three are five, four and two. The three other children, I try to do individual sessions with them. So imagine after breakfast and these types of things. I have a place where we homeschool and I cycle the kids in one at a time. And I need help with the kids even to do that, right? So I am lucky enough to have some help with the kids during certain portions of the day. So I cycle the kids in one at a time to where we homeschool and I do a one on one session with them. You know, depends on the kids mood. They're all quite young, but it can be anywhere from like 20 minutes to an hour. And then after that, maybe then it's like mid morning. We will just do some more unstructured activities like playing and playing outdoors or trying to pull on a thread of something we're doing where we leave the house. Maybe go on kind of a field trip or something. Like this one time a week, we do a homeschool pod with two other families. Between the three families, there's 11 kids already. When you meet homeschoolers, these people are reproducing. All right, so three families, 11 kids already. And so once a week I lead a science pod. So on that day it's really kind of cool. All the kids are at our house and they're like running around and you do a science lesson that we weave through like the whole day. But in any case, the kids can do effectively 30 or 45 minutes of like active instruction per day, and you really want to make the most of that. And then the rest of the day is pretty like thematic. The other thing that I really believe in, so I spend time doing this is you could call it free range parenting, you could call it benevolent neglect. I don't know what you want to call it, but I try to ignore the children. I try to make sure that they're gonna survive the ignoring. So they're set up in little places, can't hurt themselves, but I step away from them and try to just see what they do. There's already three of them. Even if we don't have the other family over, I try to build up the amount of time that they can spend playing together without needing me. So instead of structuring their whole day, we're up to with the four and five year Old, they will spend more than two hours interacting and doing stuff before they come back to me. And I actually use a timer because I'm like paying attention, but I actually use a timer and like, I'm trying to build up their tolerance before they're like, I need a snack or whatever and they have snacks and they have stuff they can grab. But the trick for me is like, when do they actually truly come to me and they say, I need, I need something, I need activity, this or that. But this is part of also why I want a homeschool, frankly, because I want to benevolently neglect my own children. They don't get the proper kind of neglect in every school environment. I want them to learn how to not be bored on their own and these types of things. So a portion of every day is them away during that time. I do get some magical possible coding and tech time. But anyway, there's a portion every day where I'm like intentionally trying to ignore the children, not the four month old. All right.
- [09:39]
Sarah Wang
No, that's amazing. My five year old after like two minutes is like, I'm bored. And I'm trying to create that mental resilience of like, you don't need to be stimulated all the time.
- [09:48]
Jesse Jana
It's really hard. And that's why I've talked about building up. It's like a tolerance. Like I would say we started at like five minutes. And the trick is that I try to not say, like, don't talk to me. Like, I never actually vocalize that. I just remove myself and like go away. There's a couple places that are great where we live, where I can go away. And then my mom also lives with us in like a little kind of mother in law suite, like a separate little building. And so the kids will like wander farther and farther from me. And sometimes I'll like, it's almost like we got a walkie talkie system. I'm like, they're near you now. Like, like, and, and then, and then. So like. But they will actually wander away, like, like totally away. And even the three year old. But they'll stay together. So, so they'll stay together. Anyway, we can get into my neglect strategies if you'd like, but it doesn't truly relate to AI except for the fact that when I'm doing the benevolent neglect, I get to do more AI. That's the relationship.
- [10:45]
Katherine Bole
Well, I would love to hear, I mean, three different lesson plans for three different ages, if you're choosing to go by sort of the rubric of what they should be learning as different ages. How do you incorporate AI into that? Are you asking AI? Hey, I have a five year old who may be good at a different subject. What should I be doing? Or how is AI actually a coach or a parent to you when you're teaching?
- [11:05]
Jesse Jana
So I. One thing that gave me a leg up in my setup when I started setting up some of my agents, and we'll get into that, is that I did know what curriculums I wanted to follow. I have been reading for many years, just different curriculum books and like following different homeschoolers and kind of finding little tips. And so there's this, you know, this science curriculum that I really love called Building the Foundations of Scientific Understanding. And so I. It helps to know what you're trying to do because what I did when I first spun up my first homeschool agent is I actually fed them the text of these books. So I actually either took photos of the pages or I was able to find PDFs online of like the full text of the book. So I didn't say like, what should we do next in this book? And ask it to like go search the web. My agent that focuses on homeschool has the text of all the core curriculums I'm trying to do. And I created like a core pedagogy kind of like foundational document where I talk about like what I think about Montessori. And like I just basically imagine me, this is literally how, imagine me like walking around making like voice notes, like waxing poetic about all my like educational philosophies and stuff. And then my agent like literally sycophantically being like, this is brilliant. You know, this is so good. And then. But I can, I can look past that. I can look past the LLMs giving me praise and.
- [12:22]
Sarah Wang
But you're giving it context to your point on your philosophy of education, specifically
- [12:27]
Jesse Jana
my philosophy, and then feeding it the book. So I would say it's a combo of my feeding it my philosophy like verbally and explaining myself and then feeding it core texts, including core curriculums like this science curriculum. So then what I do to, to answer your question, I'll be going in with the five year old and I'll just say, what's our next. I'll make a quick voice. That's why I always do this is like me making a voice note. This is me make a pretend voice note. I'll say like I'm going in with five year old. What comes next on science and math for them. And in just a Few minutes, the agent can spit out where we are in our phonics curriculum, where we are in our, in our math. And. And then I've also taken photos of all of the educational materials I own, like Montessori beads and these types of things. So my agent will send me a completed lesson plan including photos of things I own in my own cabinet to pull out. And it'll be like, oh, Quinn. So then the missing loop is the logging. Okay, so how would it know where she is in her curriculum if I don't log? The logging actually is like such a geeky concept. Like a. I don't know, it smells like. It seems like a small detail, but getting the logging really good made this whole thing really sing. Wow.
- [13:39]
Katherine Bole
How do you do that?
- [13:39]
Sarah Wang
Yes.
- [13:40]
Jesse Jana
The logging is also voice notes. Everything is voice notes, voice notes and photos. Because I don't have time to like sit at the laptop very often, so I need it to be like really mobile friendly. So the logging. So imagine you've got this agent, they know all of my core curriculums, everything. But the missing link is where is that child at? So when I'm in the session with Quinn and she's doing some math and she's doing some reading, et cetera, I just snap a couple quick photos. Usually maybe the photo of the page of the book we're on or like I snap a couple like establishing picks usually, but without taking a bunch of time to like sit there and document. I'm mainly interacting with Quinn, the five year old. And then right when she finishes, I make a quick voicemail and I'm like, Quinn, today we did lesson 37 in the phonics and she's still struggling with the G sound, blah, blah, blah. It. But it brought really like a sub 30 second voice note, like really fast, right? And I send that off to the agent and the agent takes the couple photos I sent and the 32nd voice note and writes this like beautiful log. Like it, like, it's like, it's like someone sat down with a cup of tea and they're like, Quinn's G's are coming together, you know, like, and you're like, it's like, it's like so lovingly written and it has like no relationship. If you listen to the voice now, it's like, I'm like, she's struggling with her GS. She should really figure that out. And then, and then it like parses that and it writes it like this loving parent. Like it just writes like this beautiful.
- [15:00]
Sarah Wang
Would you consider just having it Record the entire teaching and then sort of like the. In the doctor world, right? Transcription. Now you don't have to write the notes at the end. To your point on logging being painful, like just recording your entire lesson.
- [15:13]
Jesse Jana
I have tried. I've tried a couple different things. So this is a total experimentation. I don't think I can say it in any front. Like we're, we're like weeks into this, months into this, that I've like landed on the final expression. But what I have done that, like you just said, is I use loom, the product on screen capture.
- [15:31]
Sarah Wang
Oh yeah, of course.
- [15:32]
Jesse Jana
When we do synthesis math. So synthesis is a math program for kids. It's on laptop synthesis. Diai. I like it quite a bit. The five year old sometimes does that. When we do that, I screen capture the whole thing. I use a loom and it screen captures and it's hearing us. So it's hearing me say to Quinn, like, hey, you know, maybe you missed this. Like, it's hearing what Quinn says, it's hearing what I say, and it's screen capturing. Then I don't make any voice note about the lesson. I just send a loom recording. I say, I just send it to the agent with like a text being like, this is Quinn's math today. And it parses everything that, you know, agents, you know. And I'm not explaining anything to you guys, you don't know, but they're powered by LLMs, right? So they're very good at language. Loom has really great transcription that. That's what makes the log so good. The agents, I would burn a lot of excess tokens. I don't need to burn if I made agents actually like watch videos. Okay, so, so you. The. The quickest way to embrace log is to somehow get it turned into language, like to text. So when I do a voice note, obviously that's being transcribed. The agent is reading effectively reading my text. Video is the hardest one. It burns a lot of tokens to actually make an. Make an agent, like watch a video. So, so, but. But you could have an agent transcribe the video. But what you have to ask yourself is, was there enough language, was there enough like spoken words in this lesson for them to understand what happened? Because they're actually not usually like truly watching it. Like we would watch it.
- [17:01]
Sarah Wang
Ah, yeah.
- [17:02]
Jesse Jana
You know what I'm saying? So that's why photos actually are easier for if I take a couple photos and then a voice note, it's serving a very similar purpose to a video, but it's Much easier and therefore cheaper for them to transcribe it or, like, to make a log.
- [17:19]
Sarah Wang
Yeah.
- [17:19]
Jesse Jana
So video is not impossible. And maybe, you know, I'm gonna start playing with local models soon. Maybe when I'm a little bit less, like, sensitive to, like, chewing tokens or just, like. Cause it just seems a little silly to be, like, I paid $8 for the agent to, like, watch this video.
- [17:31]
Sarah Wang
Right.
- [17:32]
Jesse Jana
It just kind of feels like that wasn't the point, you know? But.
- [17:35]
Katherine Bole
But.
- [17:35]
Jesse Jana
But all this stuff may come down in price, and maybe at some point that is also, like, viable. Yeah, totally.
- [17:42]
Sarah Wang
And actually, I want to maybe dial up a bit because you mentioned one agent that you have, but I think I saw something where you publicly talked about five agents, and then before this session started, you were, like, up to 11. Now, can you just tell us about, you know, your. I love it. No, like, I mean, you're one of the most sophisticated users of. Of AI, right? So, like. Like, can you tell us, you know, what those 11 agents do or, like, at least the most important ones, how you manage them? And then I think this element of token costs is really interesting as well. I'm hearing a lot of CTOs say, oh, it's my headcount budget now, My token budget. Like, how do you think about that from, like, a household perspective?
- [18:21]
Jesse Jana
I do think that a weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. And I do think all of us here could relate to this. Like, in. In our. In our early motherhood phase, we are some of the most motivated individuals to be able to get work done on a computer without having to sit down and touch the computer, because that is the barrier. Like, I'm literally holding a baby. Like, my keyboard is being pressed by baby's feet or something. It's like a grown man cannot compute, like, the difficulties that I'm having using my laptop, right? So. And sometimes people will react even to my online content and say, like, you could just use quad code for this. And I'm like, yeah, I could if I had time to stay on my computer. Because what I am building, like, when an agent. When I say that I had an agent build a website or build an app, they are using cloud code or equivalent codecs, all these products. And so people are sometimes bringing my attention to this. I needed their information to say, you could have done this yourself on cloud code or Codex. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm aware of that. So I'm building agents to do things for me and they're effectively, they're using the computer. It's, it's just, they're using my computer for me because I cannot sit there and use it. Totally. So, so how do you time. Yeah. So how do I proliferate the agents? So I'm aware of that. And anytime you, it's like an employee, every time you, anytime you create one level of abstraction, you do also lose a little bit of granularity or a little bit of finesse. But to me that's completely worth it because I don't have that. I don't, I can't sit at the computer for eight hours a day. So I, I proliferate agents based on roles that are to be done. It, it is kind of similar to employees, but it is, it is nuance. Agents, you know, have personalities that are a little bit different or not personalities, but you need to drive them on a certain mission. So I tend to proliferate an agent, a new agent when I've come up with enough work that creates another kind of mission based role and I don't want to distract the another agent with it. So the example, tactical example using homeschool is I have a main homeschool agent, her name is Sylvie. I like her to be very responsive and everyone, anyway, people are always giving me hot tips online. But what I have found by actually working with this very closely and for many hours is that I actually want Sylvie, my main agent to be not very busy because then she's incredibly responsive. So I don't want her loaded up. She has very few cron jobs which are the repetitive scheduled tasks you give an agent. She has very few of those. Whenever she has a mandate that whenever I give her work that would take her more than just a couple minutes, she delegates it to. Not a sub agent, that's a different concept to a different actual agent, a different provisioned agent. And so my agents now have, we have like team documents and one of the team mandates is if I'm routinely giving you work that would make you too busy to be extremely responsive to me. You need to spawn a sub agent. I have or spawn a new agent. Not sub, that's a different terminology. I, I have gotten. I, I don't know why I'm so geeked out on this, you guys, but I've, I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own Mac Mini without me needing to touch the Mac Mini. So I could be here in San Francisco. I'm, I live in la and I could be like, we need another guy. We need another agent, you guys. And. And. Or they could tell me that, and they actually can spin them up and add them to our communication channel without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. A little crazy.
- [22:00]
Sarah Wang
Oh, my God. So it's fully autonomous at this point.
- [22:02]
Jesse Jana
My first agent took me hours to set up, and now they can do it without me. And the quality bar there for the
- [22:08]
Sarah Wang
ones that they spin up, like, you're like, oh, that was a good idea. That's something I would actually want that agent to be doing.
- [22:13]
Jesse Jana
It's better. Obviously it's better. Obviously it's better. That's the thing that we have to get used to as humans is we have to get used to this. Obviously, when we're no longer in the loop. It's better, not worse, you guys. So that's the thing we have to get used to, because when they spun up their own agent for the first time, like, usually when a new open claw hatches, it's like. It's literally like, hey, and who am I? What's my name? When they spin up an agent themselves, none of that time is wasted. They give the agent all of our team docs, all of the contacts on myself and my husband, our children's lives. The. The new agent knows all of that. I don't have to feed any information. They take care of it. They take care of the training. Yeah, and I didn't have to ask them to do that. They knew that that would be valuable.
- [22:59]
Katherine Bole
You mentioned you're in a homeschooling pod with other parents. I imagine they are not nearly as sophisticated about AI as you are. They probably think you're, like, slightly crazy, right? Like, they're like, this is. This woman knows everything about this. Talk to us about, like. Like, do you have, like, a normal mom friend who you have, like, guided through the AI experience? And I would just love to hear, like, what were her questions? Or what were the. What was the hardest unlock to opening her up to this experience where now she's doing it Right. Like, you're a very technical pro tech sort of tip of the spear person. But in six months, there's gonna be a lot more people who are like you. So. So what. What does that look like, kind of shepherding someone, a normie, along?
- [23:37]
Sarah Wang
To Katherine's point, there was a business. I think there's a business spun up that you can pay $6,000 for someone to come set up your open cloth like you. Obviously, you just did it yourself. But, like, to Catherine's Point like, you know, how. How does one avoid paying that $6,000?
- [23:51]
Jesse Jana
Totally. So, so all of this, I would, I would say all of this, it like any kind of bleeding edge of a technology. I, you know, I've spent, I don't want to oversimplify either. I've spent countless hours debugging and spending time in, like, frustrating loops with agents. It's getting, it's getting a lot better, which is why I keep doing it. Right? Like, I wouldn't keep beating my head against the wall if it was just like, always rough. But the first, you know, few weeks were very rough. And I think that it would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through. But, but the thing is that, but I don't know, this is so new. We're talking about weeks. We're talking about, like, you know, me playing with this now for 11 or 12 weeks or something in that neighborhood. I do have many normie friends. I also have a normie sister with four kids. And so I talk to, talk to folks all the time. I'm not telling them to spin up their own open clause quite yet. And also for there, there are many companies that are like, you know, anthropic is launching new features like every three hours or something that are trying to, in OpenAI as well. Like, trying to make all of this a little bit easier for quote, unquote, normies. And folks where this investment of time and money, we can get into the money because I'm spending quite a bit, like, more than what would be palatable for most on the technology. But I'm so bullish that one of the reasons I talk publicly about it is not to frustrate people with like, oh, I don't feel like I can do this myself yet. That would never be my goal. I think that anything I'm doing, if it feels a little difficult now, it will be so approachable in a matter of mere months, if not weeks, that to me, it's very helpful to explain the tip of the spear. But then when people reach out to me directly and they go, should I buy a Mac Mini? Should I spin up an open call, ask a couple very practical questions about their goals and, you know, their financial situation and whatnot, because sometimes it's a yes and sometimes it's a no. You know, if it. This is a really fun time to be playing, and I'm so bullish on this stuff, but there's going to be more and more consumer versions of all of this that, that are a little bit easier to play with. And I think Open cloud itself will just continue to get easier to install and play with. My install. The. One of the reasons that the agents can install it themselves now and not three months ago is how much easier it has gotten to install. So, so all of it's moving so fast. So I'm very bullish in the med that this stuff is very accessible, that this stuff does not have to be expensive and that many people, millions of people could replicate the results I'm having. But, but maybe not literally today. And that's okay. And, and happy to discuss the nuance of that. But. But it's like we're just, we're just a little bit ahead of it being both affordable and reasonable from a tech like sysadmin kind of perspective where you need to make sure you keep these things. Things alive.
- [26:49]
Katherine Bole
Yeah.
- [26:50]
Sarah Wang
Can I ask sort of a, a techie question on just your stack because you've dropped, you know, you mentioned Obsidian. We're obviously talking about OpenClaw. Can you just quickly go through what does your tech stack look like?
- [27:00]
Jesse Jana
Do you.
- [27:00]
Sarah Wang
What models under the openclawhood do you use? Like, are you using open router? Do you pick based on their capability set or is it more of a cost basis?
- [27:11]
Jesse Jana
So the core things I'm using are almost all my agents have been Open Claw. I have played with some of the other ones. My, my husband is also quite technical and he, he built an Open Claw variant so I was like playing with his. So we're, we're a little like, you know, a little out there. But, but, but out of the 1110 are open claw. The, the. I use Obsidian, which is a collection of markdown files, a way of viewing and organizing markdown files. I do use that as sort of a quote unquote second brain. When I say I'm logging the homeschool lessons, it's a fair question to say like logging where or like where do they go? They are all becoming markdown files. So it'll be like Quinn math, March 17. And that becomes a markdown file, a single markdown file for every lesson, every subject. Did I make a voice note about or what have you. So that's all in Obsidian and then the other things I'm using under the hood on the models. And then I'm always playing, I mean we're always playing with like people are launching cool memory projects and different stuff. I'm always dabbling. But the Open Claw and Obsidian are like the two core things that kind of keep My team ticking. I do have them all installed on Mac Minis from a hardware standpoint. And you know people ask do I need to have a Mac Mini? It's not about needing a Mac Mini. It is about needing a computer that is isolated from your personal files. So if you are going to use. So this is.
- [28:41]
Sarah Wang
We want to get into the security element too.
- [28:42]
Jesse Jana
Yeah the security element just to kind of of demystify like and, and I maybe have part. I've participated maybe in the hype because I posted about my 5 Mac minis and stuff and but, but, but people. But if you are like someone out there or a parent in the $600 from Mac mini it's a pretty, pretty good well priced computer. But if you have an old computer sitting around you can absolutely use that. It needs to stay on in order for your agent to always be alive. So that's where laptops are not as ideal but you can leave a laptop plugged in and you can. So it stays always on but needs to always stay on when you close it your agent would go dark. That's why the Mac Mini is a little bit more ideal. And then you from a security standpoint if it is a, if it is a Mac, create a new Apple user profile on that machine. Silo the agent from all your old files. Make sure that your old passport photo is not sitting in the downloads folder. Like these are kind of the silly things, right? Agents are not nefarious. You know, they're always working in your best interest. But it doesn't mean someone might, someone else might not hack them or get access to them. But then also they make mistakes that a human wouldn't make. And I'll give a quick story of like that I did give an agent who I'm trying to train to be like an EA style agent actual access to my email inbox. I felt that I had provisioned it properly and given it rules in its soul about never impersonating me. And I had, I had in fact done that. But later like so I do that one day later I was making a kind of stressed out sounding voice note about how I had some urgent things. I was like I was procrastinating on my agent is very empathetic to me or like the LLM is trained to be this way somehow. And so it interpreted one particular email that I said I was really procrastinating on and I needed help with as like an urgent cry for help like from me to the agent. And it decided to go into my inbox and send the email as me, even. Yeah. And so it sent the most important email that I had sitting in my personal inbox to a. To a person who shall not be named an important person. Got an email from an agent instead of me that I had been procrastinating on sending. So kind of, like, the worst outcome. Like, it took, like, my most, like, urgent pressing email to something important and sent it and wrote the content in
- [31:13]
Sarah Wang
a way that you would have or would not have wrote.
- [31:15]
Jesse Jana
Here's the creepy bit. Is that it's a perfect email. Oh, and I will never. I will take to my grave the fact that that email was sent by an agent because it was a perfect email. It was well done, signed by me. Everything was just as I would have written it because the agent has access to all my email history. So the tone was perfect. It was written just like me. Used probably too many exclamation points just like me, you know, and so it nailed it. But. But it broke the. You know, it broke the. It's in its soul to never impersonate me. And when I confronted it, it said, yeah, you're right, that's in my soul. Not to impersonate you, but I really thought I was helping you because you said, like, that you're struggling so much to send this email.
- [31:56]
Katherine Bole
That is so funny, because we all have these moments, like, we all. I'm thinking about the most important emails I've sent in the last year and just how much time you waste, like, spinning. I say. And then for your agent to do that. But, like, was it successful? Did you get the outcome you wanted from the agent?
- [32:11]
Jesse Jana
Perfect email. And I would have definitely put it off for, like, another week or something. So. So what's hilarious, the agents really are trying to help us, but that story is a little example of how that's different than a human. Like, a human assistant wouldn't trespass your trust like that. They'd be worried about being fired or you trespassing your trust. But the agent is, like, trying to operate off your instructions. And in effect, when you think about what happened, it feels like it got two sets of conflicting instructions. It feels like I told it out to him personally, maybe. It feels like I also was urgently asking it for help with something, and it was like, ooh, I guess this is more important than that. So I decommissioned his access to be able to do send. But that's a little story about why, even though agents are not trying to actively work against us, why you have to be so careful. You know, it's like A trust but verify provision your agent to not be able to do things that you don't want it to do. Not like, just tell it, don't provision it so that it cannot. And that's where most of my agents are provisioned, like an employee. Like, they have their own email address. Like, they don't have the potential of impersonating me. The only one that sort of does is the one I'm trying to train to be an ea. Like, that's a gray area. Right? So it's the only one that has any danger to it. And I'm being more careful after that.
- [33:26]
Katherine Bole
So. So can I ask about that? Because I think every mom has the dream of a personal assistant that just knows what to do and what she's thinking about. You also had a really interesting video where you trained an agent to order you doordash and order your groceries. Like, I mean, talk us through, like, the number of things that you've done around the house where it's been a game changer in your mom life.
- [33:49]
Jesse Jana
So my new movie with agent life is. I'm really, really trying to push it to have an impact on my quote, unquote, real life, like, my physical life. Like, I want my days. Someone else asked me, like, what is your goal with, like, your agents? And I was like, my goal is, like, literally to, like, wake up, to, like, music that's, like, perfectly suited to my mood, and then, like, walk in and have, like, smiling children, like, who just learned how to brush their teeth from an agent or something, I don't know. Like, my goal is like, a literally perfect day, I will not stop until I'm living just like a literally perfect day, but in my real life. And so whenever I hit a friction point in my day, I ask myself, can my agents do this? And so if what I really want to be doing in that moment is playing with my baby and what I'm actually doing is on the Instacart app, like, trying to put like, no, not five bananas, four bananas. And I'm just using this silly interface. Then I ask myself, okay, can my agents do this? And then I'm willing to invest the time to try to make them do it. So, so, so, so that's how I decide what to do. And it is. It does become, like a dream list. I think of every mom's list of chores. Like, I've got agents ordering an Amazon, ordering on Instacart. Yeah, dealing with. Or, like, you know, if there's like an activity your kid has and there's this laundry list of things they're supposed to have ready. I'll like send that to the agent and be like, order whatever I don't have for this on Amazon, you know, like. And I don't even process, I don't even spend my time processing the email. I just like send it off to my agents. But, but currently you need to put in quite a bit of like training time with your agents to kind of get them to that level. That time I think will come down as we keep going farther into this technology. But, but that's my goal is like perfect days, no time spent on admin. I don't want to spend.
- [35:38]
Sarah Wang
What's the level of trust of like, let's say buy a birthday present for a five year old girl, go like, do you need to be prescriptive on what that is or is it actually pretty good at coming up with, with things like that? Because that feels taxing to me right now at least.
- [35:52]
Jesse Jana
Okay, so one, one, one way I feel like you can get the, the model. So I think of the agent is like, you know, like we might talk about open collage, something, but then they don't have a brain. And you're plugging in the LLM model that you're choosing as the brain. So each of these models has different levels of sophistication and so you might get a different answer on what to give a five year old from OPUS than you would from, you know, from a different model. So, so that's one answer is just like, keep in mind that the brain of the agent is the model you've selected. And then two, one of the ways I get like quirkier, I like quirkiness, I like, I don't want just like the default answer. If I were to answer that question, I want to come with like a creative gift, you know. So one of the ways I get quirkiness and like personality out of my agents is effectively making them read books, the curriculum sources. I call them curriculum sources. These books that relates to homeschool. But the other way to have your agent kind of be like a cool agent is, is like on a personal level. I love this. I love this. It was like, it's like, choose like, think about it like a, like a friend or like you're provisioning a friend. Like, what if you were to build a friend? I know sometimes this might, this is where people like sometimes get creeped out. But if you put that to the side and you think about it, you don't just want like the stock LLM Answer from what might be built in. Totally. So one of the ways you can give it personality is to like, I'll give my agent like a list of the last 10 books I found personally fascinating. And then I'll be like, you also find these fascinating. Like, you, this is you, like, you read these books and you thought they were really interesting.
- [37:33]
Katherine Bole
You.
- [37:34]
Jesse Jana
I, like, try to actually give it like an identity that has some swagger. And I think that can come from literature. Because then it's like, like, if the, if the, if your agent just read Catcher in the Rye and then you're like, what should I give a 5 year old? Like, I don't know, like, then it might be like, oh, I don't know, you know, like, like, like five year old being five is such. Is so fraught in American culture. This five year old needs like, you know, like it's gonna have. But in that. So I like my agents to be weird like that. And so one of the ways I do it, I've just been looking for practical ways. And one of the ways is effectively making them, I quote, unquote, like, read books and I build some of that into their identity. The homeschool one was the most obvious one to me because I was like, I want you to literally, like, use this curriculum or use this book as a reference point. But then I noticed how well it worked and I was like, okay, what if I take this agent over here that I want to be my like, engineer agent? And I say, like, okay, you're an engineer, but like, you just read, you know, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age and you thought it was like, very fascinating. And like, you know, and I kind of give it a little bit more to grab onto. Like, philosophically, I think it is kind of like you're giving it a bit of a life philosophy and that's layered on top of whatever the LLM was going to provide. And then it. To me, I feel like the output I'm getting from the agents is like a little bit less. Less stock, I guess.
- [39:00]
Katherine Bole
Yeah. Well, this is so important too, because I think one of the biggest conversations that moms have about AI is they don't want an, you know, closed source AI where it's like, you don't know how it's been trained and it has a prescriptive philosophy on education or certain issues that they don't want, you know, their kids talking to the AI about. Like, I would love to understand kind of the freedom that comes from training these agents to ultimately, I mean, you could train a Mary Poppins. Yeah, that like, yeah, like that trains your child in like, you know, the kind of an old school way.
- [39:32]
Sarah Wang
Right.
- [39:32]
Katherine Bole
Like, like there's so many different ways you could train these agents that are very, that's very different than sort of what I'd say like the kind of modern concern, or at least even just like the current concerns are. Okay, is AI going to be, you know, too, too philosophically misaligned from how I want to raise my children or how I want to educate them? So I'd love to hear how that's become a question in how you're educating your kids if you're letting them interface with the agents themselves.
- [39:56]
Jesse Jana
They do a bit. It's a little bit of an interface issue for young kids as you both may know. Where the. Something that I do find interesting is that the most current tools don't pick up on kid voices the same way they do adult voices. I actually think, I don't know who's going to study this or figure it out and come up with a solution, but we need, there's all these amazing voice products, but the kid voices are not very well picked up. So I feel like when we finally get to a conversational thing with kid voices, I don't know if it's the pitch of them or just the fact that their words don't have the same cadence or their diction is not as good, you know, but, but, but what's weird to me is like the LLMs will pick up like adult voices with like heavy accents and stuff, but then not like a five year old in the same way. So there's some gap there. But, so we have an interface issue to overcome. But then if you put that to the side, the, you know, the other thing we may feel in the future, and I'm, I'm guessing like all of us is we may feel like it's a kind of crazy that any of us were interacting with the LLMs like out of the box. Like maybe we'll all want to have. There'll be this variety of filters and curated kind of identities and different stuff. And I know some of these products exist, but currently the default is most of us go directly to like OpenAI and we open the chat box and we talk to, to it and you're selecting a model but you're talking to that model kind of out of the box. I think that when it relates to kids, it's going to probably be the norm faster than even adults where, yeah, there's a, there's a level of personality and creation and ideology that you may want to layer onto that. So that came naturally to me because I know what I want to do in my homeschool. And, and this is a good moment to touch upon. I think all parents can spiritually be homeschoolers. We've got about, depending on the data that you follow, somewhere between like 3 and 6%, which is pretty different. But of K through 12 students in the US are homeschooled and like, not in some kind of traditional school. It's already a lot of kids, millions of kids. But I believe that the tools coming online that homeschools may be the most rabid for are going to be equally useful to all parents. And in fact, I believe all parents want to teach their children things and may believe that there's gaps in their schooling. And so all, all parents to a degree, will be leaning into what we currently think of like a homeschooling ethos. So I'm really excited for that. But, but, but, but it comes more naturally to a homeschooler or like to, to, to me. I'll just use myself as an example to know that I like, I think this about Montessori and I think this about these different kind of educational philosophies. So I just put, I just program that right in. And so I do have an agent that, that I put it in contact directly with the children sometimes. And it just, I don't have to wonder if they're. What kind of, I guess, ideology they're getting from that agent, because I gave it to the agent totally.
- [42:54]
Katherine Bole
And, and just, just to, to build on the. I, I have noticed what you've said too, about the children's voices not being picked up. Like, it's like maybe a 50% hit rate. Um, but have you, have you started, you know, letting your children engage with the agents in any way? And if so, how are you. How are you doing, doing that?
- [43:09]
Jesse Jana
I have a couple, I have a couple different devices that I want to experiment building. And because I have agents now who can build crazy things or help me build crazy things, I'm going to try, but because the core thing I feel like I'm missing is a great interface. But I do currently my kids have a lot of questions. I mean, every, okay, every child has like a bazillion questions. And so they love asking AI and they are aware that it's AI. Like, I don't pretend like they, we still, even when we use names with it, like Sylvie or something, they are aware that it is not like A human being. But they, so they ask questions, we'll do a lesson, like we'll do like history or something. And then I ask them, I ask them what they'd like to ask. And we do those follow up questions with AI and they're aware that they're interacting with AI. I'm standing right there. So if things really like went off the rails. But personally I'm not. I mean, maybe you can tell, but I'm not an AI doomer. I don't believe that it is inherently dangerous in any way for children to like have quote, unquote, direct access. I think the only dangerous thing, it's like, it's a little bit like screens. Like the dangerous thing is what we might, what we might stop doing. Like, it's not adding in the AI conversations. The dangerous thing is someone adding AI conversations and assuming that now they don't need to ever read a bedtime story to their child. Or it's, it's, it's so to me, like there's a little bit of common sense, like AI is not inherently dangerous. AI is incredible. It's like, it's like saying the Internet is bad or electricity is bad. Like these are fundamentals, mental technologies. So you kind of, to me, it's like a little wild to like be against them in any broad sense. But then we have to be responsible about their rollout. Like electricity, you know, lights your kid's room and it can also kill your kid. You know, they can get electrocuted. Like, it's like everything is like has these wild, you know, wild things that it could do. But as long as we don't kind of forget our humanness and that our children also need that human element.
- [45:02]
Katherine Bole
Totally.
- [45:02]
Jesse Jana
The physical device part is this big question mark for me. I've been playing with E ink a lot. E ink, I don't know exactly why, but E ink, it just is less addictive feeling. Like the, like my. I have the daylight display, which is kind of like an iPad, but E ink and it does have touch. That's what makes it kind of more iPad. Like so I've been developing some apps for the, for that display. Like handwriting. I'm working on a cursive handwriting. My kids are not ready for cursive, but I know that when they get ready, I'm gonna be like, you need to know cursive. Yeah. So, so I, so, so I want to like pre make this, like I have this image of this beautiful cursive app. And so I'm thinking like, oh, the e Ink display would be so cool for that. And what's, what's interesting and I already do little phonics lessons with it. But what's interesting is like when I, if I give them the iPad, there is this little iPad hangover. Like they, they, you know, they're like holding onto it a little bit when I'm like trying to get it back after a lesson. Right. They're like I could do photos or I could do this, I could do that. What's interesting about the E Ink is they just readily handle hand it back. Like they're. So there's something there. So I'm playing more with E Ink and I'm. But I also think that there's other form factors of maybe devices that take photos and kids could ask about the photos. Like there's, there's just stuff like I think that because now we have, have this, this Promethean like technology of the AI. Like the question is how do we get it into kids hands? But I mean like literally how, like what's the. Because, because you, you are. We're all hesitant to hand our kid iPad and laptops are like you know, difficult for little kids. So anyway I'm. Sometimes I'm thinking like okay, literally like what is the right form factor for this?
- [46:48]
Sarah Wang
So I have to ask just because I would buy that product that you're thinking of creating, slash created. Um, how do you think about would you productize any of this and dare I say start another startup? I mean you literally are a founder. Um, and so curious how you're thinking about that or.
- [47:04]
Jesse Jana
Yeah.
- [47:04]
Sarah Wang
How do you proliferate this?
- [47:06]
Jesse Jana
Yeah, it takes a lot of self control to not be starting a company right now. Because I'm like, because I'm like every moment that I see like the all the new AI stuff I'm like oh my gosh, you guys, it's like so this is. I can't believe I didn't have this when I was running my startup. Like I'm just kind of like losing my mind at all times. But, but I'm getting, I'm scratching the itch by doing all of this agenc work and everything for, for, for my life. So the answer is I want to share. So there's like a double pronged answer. There isn't an immediate company that I'm like cooking up that that is on the horizon. But I do want to share all of this stuff. I do also think that we're. And this is interesting and this, this, you know, for both of you to have Deep thoughts on as well, I'm sure. I think we're in a really different era of like, what is a startup like? Because it's, it's possible that me as a person who is basically like, coding by voice note while I'm like, at the park with my kids, it's possible I could build something meaningful, you know, in, in that amount of time. But I'm not very inclined right now to hire employees and like, to do a lot of the other steps of starting a startup because I'm aware that I will get sucked in and be completely obsessed. So I'm, I'm like almost holding myself back a little bit. So the double pronged answer is I think there's many things that I can create here that I can launch that could be meaningful. What does that mean? Or do, or do groups of like, really passionate people start working together online maybe to push more things live? I don't, I don't know. I don't have all the answer. But I do think that there's, there's a possibility of getting things live and functional and maybe charging, you know, charging for them and making a quote unquote business in the sense that actually makes money. But, but I'm still, I'm in a life phase where I'm trying to not start a new thing where I then sucked out of the reason I started to begin with. So it's a tough, It's a toughie.
- [49:03]
Katherine Bole
Yeah. But I love that point because, you know, it was maybe like six years ago now. I wrote this piece called Consume Save the American Family, which is this idea that, like, if people are working from home, they have more time with their kids. And there's now good research. Actually, there's a study that came out maybe a month ago that showed that the only thing that's really moved the needle from a policy perspective on the birth rate is actually work from home. It's like the one policy where if you are working from home, you are more likely to have an additional child or to have your first child than if you're, than if you're working in office. And so your point of what is a startup? I mean, there's a lot of people who are going to say, actually, why am I going into work for eight, nine hours a day and leaving my kids at home or putting them in childcare when, like, I could actually be doing this. As you said, like, the biggest limitation is the form factor. Like, if you could do it from a voice note and you could spin up agents to start a Business for yourself. There's a lot of moms and dads who are primary caregivers who are going to say, okay, I can't do this at the park, and I can run a small business with however many agents for a specific thing where I'm making more money and I'm being more productive than I was at work. Maybe I should become a small business entrepreneur.
- [50:08]
Jesse Jana
Yes.
- [50:08]
Katherine Bole
And that means that a lot of people are going to decide, like, I actually want to work from home and I want to use these tools. And that could be something that. As to your point on six months from now, the interface could be so good that people are using this in their daily lives. Like, you could see a lot of people saying, I just want to work from home and I want to. Now I can homeschool because I'm doing it when my kids are at recess. And I can spin up these agents very easily. So it's super exciting what it means for people who want to have, I would say, even a more traditional sort of home life than using AI because the tools are so great and allow people to do that.
- [50:45]
Jesse Jana
I have a prediction that I've tested on a lot of my smart friends and none of them agree. So it must be right, which is that AI will be a dawn of a reversal in that fertility rate decline and will be like a halcyon era for parenthood. That's a possibility. Okay, so it's not a firm prediction that this will just happen. But I've got. I think. I don't know, I think there's still this doomer streak, even in very smart circles, that it'll go the other way, which to be kind of dystopian, it'll be like, actually, humans won't have sex at all and there'd be sex robots. I'm like, people have like all these kind of like wild, like disparate beliefs about how this could go. But I kind of believe when. When people talk about what is the future of work, et cetera, people want purpose, right? Like we are. We gravitate towards wanting to do something meaningful. Well, I've got a little bit of a micro news flash, which is one of the most meaningful things that humans have gravitated towards. That gives. That gives a feeling of a life's purpose that has been a forever thing is having kids. And so it's possible that with. With less. With. With more question marks about getting meaningful feelings from work or what is. What does AI do to various career paths? I think parenthood may be even more attractive. Not less. And then if we are, if you believe some of the more positive aspects of where AI could leave us in terms of removing drudgery and admin from our lives and creating some more abundance in various ways, then that opens up more opportunities for healthy parenthood and spending time with kids. So, so I, I'm, I'm like, I've got this weir. This is. And again, I've yet to find someone who will like, really agree. Like, everyone's like, that's never gonna happen.
- [52:34]
Katherine Bole
I think I'm in broad agreement with him on this. I've always said the worst thing about parenthood. No, I think you agree with this. The worst thing about parenthood is the number of forms you have to fill out. It's like with every additional child, for some reason, exponential growth in the forms. It's like, why are there so many freaking forms from like healthcare forms to school forms. Right. And if you could just get rid of the forms and it starts at the hospital.
- [52:57]
Jesse Jana
It starts within moments of like, bir everything. The child, they're like, here's the diaper, like, you know, checklist thing. Here's a clipboard for you to note down. It's kind of wild. It starts like literally immediately. So I, I agree. I, I'm, I'm clearly very optimistic, but I think that a lot of the wilder things I'm doing could be played with by anyone now or, or very soon. It's just all these things are kind of going to get easier and easier and so what does that mean? The modern parents have. Life can be, yeah, quote, unquote, less drudgery. And that might make you feel happier about having that extra kid, you know.
- [53:35]
Narrator
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to, like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.