Podbit · The a16z Show
Middle management is disappearing at Kavak. The new org is flat, senior, and hyper-empowered — each team blends engineering, AI, and operations. Some humans build agents, some work for agents, and some serve the physical world. It's a structure that didn't exist 2 years ago.
Where this was said
At 22:55 · chapter starts 19:45
Gabriel asks the question that is on every executive's mind: how do you actually change your organization to work this way? Alejandro's answer is the Jedi Academy — a 6-week internal training program he designed and continuously updates. The name is half-joke, but the program is serious. Executives, engineers, finance staff, and mechanics all go through the same curriculum. At the end of 6 weeks, every participant ships a production-ready AI agent [1] — Alejandro Maza Ayala "Jedi Academy: 6-week AI training for all staff: Kavak's internal Jedi Academy trains every employee — from CEO to mechanics — to build and …" 20:00 . The content cannot be outsourced to Stanford or any external provider because the field moves faster than any accreditation cycle. The philosophical message delivered to all staff was equally clear: Kavak is going this direction. Employees can train and grow with it, or they can find a better fit elsewhere — but there is no option C where the company stays the same. Alejandro credits this clarity with actually strengthening Kavak's culture rather than creating anxiety.
Kavak launched the Jedi Academy, an internal program where every employee — from CEO to mechanics — completes a 6-week training and ships a production-ready AI agent. The message to staff was blunt: train and adapt, or this may not be the right place for you.
Kavak's internal Jedi Academy trains every employee — from CEO to mechanics — to build and deploy AI agents to production in 6 weeks.
Audience-building isn't a shortcut — it's a 3-year content grind before the product even exists. The speaker reveals that his monetisation success was entirely downstream of years spent tweeting daily and creating content, not talent or luck.
Building a monetisable audience on Twitter costs just 5 minutes a day — but it has to happen every day for years. The time barrier is low; the consistency barrier is where most people fail.
Sam built Algrow, a SaaS for finding viral content formats, with zero coding experience using ChatGPT and Cursor. Six months later: 10,000 users, $14K/month in revenue.
Sam's first MVP threw an application error on its very first user — and he shipped it anyway. The core idea worked, and that was enough to validate the product and keep users coming back.
Sam joined Discord voice chats, muted himself, and silently screen-shared his product. Users in the chat started tagging him asking what the tool was. No pitch needed — curiosity did the selling.
Most founders post links in Discord and immediately get banned for self-promotion. Sam's approach was the opposite: build rapport, help people with the tool, let word of mouth do the work.
Find where your ICP lives. Listen before building. Validate with DMs and Loom recordings. Build in public with users inside your own Discord server. Turn early adopters into advocates with free access.
Instead of fearing the self-promo ban in large Discord servers, create your own private server for your product. You funnel in ideal customers and build a relationship that email can't replicate.
Algrow helps creators find and replicate viral video formats, starting at $25/month. It analyzes subscriber counts, average views, and trending formats — and can even generate the videos with AI.
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