00:28:29 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:28:29] S0: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. And I think going back to your story, you had these sort of frivolous sort of fun examples of like hamsters and then you built these sort of small apps and at some point though, what I found compelling is you started thinking more about impacting the world in more meaningful ways. I know that you're known, I think if you Google yourself, you're known for some of the things that you've done in high school that are really powerful around STEM. So maybe you can share with our audience, where did that come about and how did you create that?
00:29:04 · Markie Wagner
[00:29:04] S1: High school, my obsession switched a bit from building things to thinking about institutions. So thought a lot about STEM. The origin story there was I went to a high school that was a public high school in kind of this East LA suburb that I grew up in And not particularly great. It wasn't the most academically challenging high school in the world. But I had a lot of friends there who would say, hey, there'd seniors. And they'd say, hey, I really want to go become an engineer. Or I want to go work on rockets or I want to go do these different things. Even though no one in our community had ever worked on early touch stuff like that, they had this dream of doing that. I knew who I was by the time I walked through the door of high school. I know I like building things. I knew I loved writing code. I knew I wanted to work on and in tech until forever. And so for me, I'd say, oh, great. Okay. You also know this thing that you want, like you're going to go do amazing, go after it. And they would return a year later and every single person that I met had totally dropped their STEM degree. They were all saying, Okay, engineering is not for me. I got started too late. I was on my back foot by the time I hit there. It's probably not meant for me. Everyone else had been taking APCS classes since partway through their high school experiences. How am I supposed to catch up? And to me, said, oh, how far ahead could they be, right? These things are going to even out pretty quickly. But for the person figuring out whether or not they should be an engineer, it's very overwhelming. It makes you say, oh, maybe this isn't for me. So in my mind, there was a really clear problem, which was that there was no infrastructure supporting people developing themselves and developing their understanding and way of seeing themselves as an engineer during high school. And that was leading to a huge amount of waste and lack of talent entering the industry and also mobility around those areas. So spent most of high school standing up the first STEM programs. My high school, neighboring high schools, my part of the county, that was just very, very all consuming. I was spending all my time on it outside of classes. And what that looked like was, okay, say you are a freshman or sophomore trying to stand up like 10 new classes at your high school. How do you even go about that?
00:31:17 · Markie Wagner
I had recruited my geometry teacher and the AP physics teacher at my high school who agreed, begrudgingly at first, but agreed to get trained in APCS, in engineering, in robotics. And I found Cal Poly Pomona has this amazing program called Project Lead the Way, where they will help teach teachers who have never been an engineer or a computer scientist how to then teach these programs and teach APCS. Because it's hard to pluck an engineer out of Google and convince them to teach at a local public high school, right? And so setting up those partnerships, working really closely with Project Lead the Way, and helping the staff and kind of superintendents and folks like that understand the impact of what would happen if we had released these classes. I think a lot of people said, there's barely any kids in Calc BC. What makes you think that we're going to have this flourishing STEM program? And I'd show them, right? I'd say like, okay, here are the people that are going to sign up. This is what they want to do. This is what's happening because these aren't in place. And that's why we should devote resources towards it. Getting local control funding for the computer labs, things like that. And so it was very operational. It wasn't requiring building too much stuff. It was a lot of curriculum writing, a lot of lobbying bureaucracy and working really closely with people to build partnerships and very intense, but it was different than what middle school looked like for me. And then by senior year, the first day of senior year, the first class I walk into is AP computer science principles taught by the loveliness of Glass, who was the same teacher that I had for geometry fresh. And the classes were completely oversubscribed. There were way more people who wanted to take engineering and APCS classes than we had even space for them, which was amazing and so cool. And it was also, I think, fiftyfifty gender parity waitlist. Like, it's pretty interesting that when you go from no CS to CS rather than like having this like lineage of kind of culture that comes with having a disproportionate CS program. I think lots of people know engineering is really cool. And just off the bat, it was equal, which is really interesting. And so today, so many kids, I think like thousands of kids have gone through these programs, which is so special.
00:33:28 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
And I know so many people who work at SpaceX and Tesla and Microsoft and Google and from my hometown that they said they would have never done it if they had like taken those classes in high school. And so I get emails probably every week from different people who've gone through it, which is very special. My teachers do a great job of hyping up the work that I did so long ago, but they're the ones doing the day to day of it now. So I think they're the real heroes of this story. And then that program expanded across lots of adjacent schools or the district, parts of the county, etcetera. So, yeah, it was really special. And that's kind of what those articles are talking about that you mentioned. [00:34:07] S0: Yeah. Well, that's a great example of a good quest. I would ask all of our listeners to think about what are the good quests that perhaps are in your community or based on your superpowers. I think that's a little bit of what you noted and that you can really impact. And so we've kind of walked through this sort of grade school, middle school, high school, and each time the sort of blast radius of impact and opportunity has increased exponentially. I'm curious as to what college was like. And college is a pretty structured environment. Was going to a four year college and completing that quest, like always in the cards for you? I'm curious when you're a builder and such a powerful unstructured thinker, what does college mean to you when you're in a sophomore, junior year and thinking about applying?
00:34:53 · Markie Wagner
[00:34:53] S1: After I read all those books, it became very clear to me that a disproportionate amount of the institutions that really characterized the past couple of decades were built out of Silicon Valley and adjacent to Stanford, basically. So I remember telling my family, I'm only going to apply to Stanford or I'm not going to go to college or something to that effect from very early on. And so in high school, the main story is that of the STEM program, but kind of at the same time and in parallel, after mobile, I was always still keeping an eye out for the next kind of wave that would get me excited in the same way that I felt when I held that first iPhone. And about halfway through high school, I had that moment when I was playing around with a super simple kind of template classifier classifying cats from dogs. And for me, I couldn't imagine how that worked. I thought that was just the most amazing, cool thing, a Vagil, that you could just train this model and it could predict on images that I'd never even seen before these different animals. And so that was that same moment for me. I was totally hooked. It was magical. There was that quote, sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. And playing with the silly AI notebooks, that was that moment for me. And so I remember diving in over the weekend and I became very convinced that many of the most important institutions and milestones and moments of history that will happen during my lifetime would be AI related in some way or another or deeply connected to progression in AI. And so decided that I wanted to become world class and do whatever it took to become world class in AI. And I think a lot of the story of what the colleges look like for me were centered around that goal and getting there and what I had wished for. And when I got into Stanford, I was actually only there for about a year and a half or so until COVID happened. But it was just diving and taking all the AI classes. And when I was in school, kind of broadly, I was always working. I was at Google and I was a researcher, an engineer there and at Waymo doing research on campus. So all of my time was spent doing AI stuff, essentially.
00:37:03 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:37:03] S0: Yeah. And so it sounds like, tell me if this is true, that you always had an inkling that you were going to found or you were going to create new institutions for lack of a better term. And you were also equipping yourself with those kind of concepts. So you equipped yourself with this education, your focus on AI, these internships that you did, but you always had this sort of through line of AI. And then maybe tell us a little bit about Delphi Labs and then what happened and how founding worked with you as both a consultant and an advisor. I just think that it's so obvious from your story you were going to found in some way or associate yourself with founders. How did that all unfold?