1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: To your point about accessibility, you talked about the developed world that lacks people who can do certain things, and enabling them to do those things with AI or robots. That is one angle.

There’s also the developing world. Africa’s population is exploding. India’s population is still very high. It’s starting to go down, but it’s still a very large population with very large unemployment. These countries have massive unemployment. Even in China, though population decline has started, it’s still a very large population with significant unemployment.

For the foreseeable future—this coming decade, or two, or three—we’re not looking at a world population that shrinks to a much smaller level. The positive side of it is that everything becomes more available to people who couldn’t afford it—medicine, healthcare, education. These are the great positives of the AI revolution.

One of the things I’m very bullish about is AI-powered personalized tutoring, which can really impact education, and personalized healthcare at scale, robotic surgery—all of this is really exciting and fully additive. There’s absolutely no con [downside] to this—it’s completely pro.

But then other questions emerge through this process. What do we educate people for? Children who are just being born, or in elementary, middle, or high school, are going to step into a world with a very different configuration vis-à-vis work. What do you train them for? That’s a question that’s still unclear. I’ll let you weigh in on it.

David Evans: It’s absolutely something I think about very frequently. I’ve got a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old, and the benefit is that my kids still have eight or more years under my umbrella. There’re a lot of the question marks—what will the labor market look like? What will the jobs be like?

I built my career in software development, started coding at 14, got my first tech job at 19. My kids likely won’t be able to follow the same path. I got hired in the middle of the dot-com bubble when they just needed someone to write code. Now that kind of mass hiring is done by tools like Cursor, Replit, and other coding agents.

But at the end of the day, someone still needs to provide the guidance, the requirements, the context for software. When I think about what my kids need to learn—of course, the basics: reading, writing, math, and fundamental computer science. But what’s missing from the education system, and what we need to provide as parents, is contextual understanding.

I learned to be a senior engineer to analyze requirements and manage teams and broader context and architecture. I learned that by churning out code for the first three years of my career. My kids, if they choose to go into tech, most likely won’t do that. We need to find ways—as parents and through the education system—to replicate those experiences so they’re job-ready.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I think the education system will have to go through a significant change to adapt to this new world.

David Evans: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Alright, very interesting conversation, David. Thank you for coming.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures
1 2 3 4 5 6