For two decades, Silicon Valley has told ambitious teenagers that college is optional and the fastest way to the top is to drop out and start building. One of the firms that profited most from that story is now offering a third path.
Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm known as a16z, said on September 22 that it is launching a school. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy will be a private, in-person program in San Francisco for people coming out of high school, and it is built on a promise its founders think no university can match: a direct line into the companies of the moment.
The school, incubated by a16z and backed with $42 million, will accept about 50 students into a founding class that begins in the fall of 2027. The first year is free. Admission will weigh what applicants have built, shipped or earned more heavily than grades, essays or test scores.
The partners give the venture its edge. Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe are founding partners, and students are promised roles at those companies through co-op placements, along with more than $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel and research budget.
The academy is led by Gagan Biyani, who co-founded the online-learning company Udemy before it went public and later started Maven, a startup backed by a16z. Marc Andreessen and the investor Erik Torenberg will sit on its board alongside Biyani.
The program will not grant a degree, and it is not accredited. There are no traditional grades, tests or homework. Instead, students take short classes from figures like Sam Altman of OpenAI and spend the rest of their time working on projects, the school has said.
The firm behind the school was built on betting early on people who would have gone to a dorm room anyway. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz founded a16z in 2009 and turned it into one of the largest venture firms in the world, managing tens of billions of dollars across funds, on the thesis that software would eat the world. Andreessen has spent years arguing that elite universities have become insular and expensive, and that American dynamism depends on builders, not credentials.
The design is a deliberate answer to a problem a16z has watched from the inside. For years the firm has funded founders who skipped college, and its partners have argued publicly that elite universities are slow and expensive. But the same firm has also watched entry-level hiring contract as AI tools absorb junior work, leaving new graduates without the jobs that once justified the tuition.
The academy pitches itself as the middle ground that has not existed before. A student can defer college or take a gap year, spend one year building with a network of operators and investors, and leave with a portfolio and job offers instead of a diploma. A two-year program is planned for 2028, pending regulatory approval, at tuition comparable to an elite private university.
That positioning puts a16z in direct competition with the institutions it has long criticized. The academy’s focus on proof of work reads as a rebuke to a system that filters on test scores and legacy, and its promise of placement at top companies targets the very outcome universities sell.
The academy enters a market that has already been contested. Minerva, a for-profit university, tried to replace the campus with online seminars and global housing; Lambda School, later renamed Bloom Institute of Technology, promised to train engineers and collect fees only after they found jobs. Most such experiments struggled to reach scale. a16z’s version is different chiefly because it comes with a network of investors and hiring partners that no education startup has matched.
It also extends the firm’s reach further down the pipeline. Venture firms have spent years moving earlier in a founder’s life, running startup schools and fellowships. A full residential academy turns that logic into a permanent institution, one that could feed a16z a stream of young founders it has already vetted.
The economics are unusual for a school. The $42 million comes from a16z and individual investors including Adam D’Angelo of Quora, Tobi Lutke of Shopify, Tony Xu of DoorDash and Garry Tan of Y Combinator. The funding covers several years of runway, and the two-year program’s tuition is expected to carry most costs once it launches.
Whether the model scales is the open question. The founding class is tiny, the first year is free, and the value depends on a network few schools can replicate. The academy is a for-profit venture, not a nonprofit university, and its founders have framed it as the start of an education company built for technology.
For the teenagers applying, the offer is a bet on a different kind of credential. They would trade four years of a degree for one year of building, a network of investors, and access to the companies that shape the industry. The school’s success will be measured by what its first 50 students become.
