All of Silicon Valley seems to be coming together to launch a new alternative to college for teens dreaming of becoming the next big tech founder.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, announced Tuesday that applications are now open for the first class of the creatively named The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
The academy is a private, full-time, for-profit school based in San Francisco. It has raised $42 million so far, with a16z investing $35 million. Other investors include former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, according to Bloomberg.
The academy is a separate entity from a16z. Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani will serve as its CEO, while a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and general partner Erik Torenberg will sit on its board.
“The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They’ll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups,” Biyani wrote in a post on X.
The academy seems to be tapping into Silicon Valley’s obsession with college dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who went on to build massive companies without finishing school.
This also isn’t the first time Silicon Valley has tried something like this. Investor Peter Thiel launched his two-year Thiel Fellowship back in 2011, which now gives young people $250,000 to skip or drop out of college and instead build a company or non-profit. Even Elon Musk has spent years talking about creating his own university in Texas.
As for the The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, its main idea is to give young people the resources to build their own projects and access to some of the biggest names in tech.
Its 10 founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The companies will provide resources like hardware and computing power, help develop courses, and offer students opportunities to work with their teams. The academy says it has also lined up more than 50 hiring partners and more than 200 speakers and mentors.
Students will get a $5,000 budget for travel and research. The Verge reports that each student will also receive more than $50,000 in compute credits.
The academy’s website says typical day for a student could could include working on a humanoid robot, attending a fireside chat with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and then doing an independent study on calligraphy.
The school also says students will learn from people “shaping the future,” including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and podcaster Andrew Huberman. Courses include “AI Inference Engineering,” “Brand and Visual Identity Development,” and, “The Geometry of Luck.”
The first class will include about 50 students and start in September 2027. That one-year fellowship will be free, but students will have to live in the San Francisco Bay area while attending the academy and need to pay for their own housing. (You can imagine the kind of applicant pool that this initial class will be pulling from.)
The academy eventually plans to launch a two-year program in 2028, pending regulatory approval. Students in that program will have to pay tuition, which Biyani says will be comparable to an “elite private university.”