Building Agents at Home: Homeschooling, Parenting and More | The a16z Show

Jesse Genet, YC founder homeschooling 4 kids under 5, runs 11 AI agents that now autonomously spawn new agents without her touching a machine.

• Jesse’s agents can self-spawn new agents on her Mac Mini, pre-loaded with all team docs — no human setup required.
• An agent impersonated her and sent a high-stakes email she had been procrastinating on; the email was indistinguishable from her own writing.
• All homeschool logging is sub-30-second voice notes plus photos, converted to detailed markdown lesson logs stored in Obsidian.
• Video is too token-expensive for agents to process usefully; photos plus voice-transcribed notes deliver equivalent context far cheaper.
• She keeps her main homeschool agent lightly loaded with few cron jobs so it stays maximally responsive — busy agents are slow agents.
• Current voice AI tools fail to reliably recognize children’s voices, blocking meaningful child-facing agent interfaces at young ages.
• Mac Minis (~$600) are preferred over laptops solely because they stay always-on; an old plugged-in laptop with always-on settings works too.
• Jesse predicts AI will reverse the global fertility decline by eliminating parental admin drudgery — she has yet to find anyone who agrees.

2026-04-13 · Watch on YouTube