a16z Just Launched a School With OpenAI, NVIDIA & Anthropic

Instead of raising for 18 months, we raised for a few years. This was very intentional because there's a big difference between starting a school and starting an AI app. But one of the simple reasons for raising $40 million, we'll have crypto founders and we'll have robotics founders and we'll have AI apps and classic SaaS and we'll have different people coming in. And the promise that I think we can make is that you will learn how to be an AI-native builder with super high agency, with the people skills to understand the culture of Silicon Valley. And if we can accomplish those three things, I believe this will be the most valuable educational experience that anyone could ever have.

Thanks for having me, Molly.

Well, today we are announcing the launch of Horwitz Andre Academy. It's a new post-high-school program, residential in San Francisco, for young builders who want to get jobs or start companies in the technology space. And personally, I just think it's like kind of a dream. I think it's a dream for the students because it's a completely new take on what you could do post-college or post-high-school in the AI era. I think it's a huge opportunity for the world because we're going to design a new type of institution that is going to show a positive and optimistic frame on what college could look like if it adopted some of the principles of an AI-native education.

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of differences between what the school will offer and what a typical college will. I'll give you a couple examples. First of all, it's completely unaccredited. So, we don't have to follow the same accreditation rules of a typical college. We do have to get regulatory approval before we launch our paid programs. But it's very different. So, the differences are first, this program is highly experiential. So instead of focusing all of your time around class and the sort of top-down structure of a university is fundamentally how many credits you take per semester, this is a project-based experience because in the AI era, you can learn whatever you need to learn on the job. Therefore, it's much more effective for students to go and just build things. And so they'll get to do projects that they desire. And I have three different categories of projects. I think they'll have research projects, learning projects, and building projects or entrepreneurial projects. And so like you can imagine a research project where someone is trying to learn everything they can about the restaurant industry or about robotics or about hard manufacturing. You know, they'll go and literally travel to the big manufacturing facilities around the country or maybe even in the world and they will deeply try to understand how it works while simultaneously, you know, maybe studying robotics, the technical side of robotics, you know, via both self-driven learning but also via online courseware or courses that we offer at the academy. And then you can also imagine that they then decide, hey, I want to go and try and build like a new type of robotic vacuum or I want to play with the new Hugging Face duck, right? And so you can imagine a world in which this student is visiting factories in Shenzhen or maybe they're visiting factories in Austin or LA and simultaneously they are studying online, you know, and through our sort of diverse network of faculty, robotics, and they're also building an actual robot from scratch. And this is the type of experience that we want to create for the student who comes to Horwitz Andre Academy.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is just a big part of my life's work is to rebuild the education system for the future. You know, when I started my first company, I was 13 years old. I didn't even know it was a company. Technically, it wasn't actually.

It was legal. It was a nonprofit, actually, but it made revenue and it had a profit, kind of like the modern nonprofits that actually have more revenue than their costs. So it was a nonprofit because all the proceeds went to my high school and so I didn't make the revenue, but in all intents and purposes it was actually a business. I didn't have anyone telling me that this is a valuable endeavor. The school was mostly trying to shut it down the entire time. My mother is probably the only person in my entire life who was like, 'Gagan, you should keep doing this.' I didn't have a single adult — I grew up in Silicon Valley — I didn't have a single adult saying, 'Hey, like you're 13 and you're making like $10,000 over the summer. That's amazing. You should do more of that. Here's how you could do that. Here's how you can turn that into a career.' And so instead, what ended up happening was I still went to college and I didn't go to college for entrepreneurship, and I didn't know you could start startups at that time. You know, I went to college and got a degree in economics.

And I think that ever since then, that experience of being a precocious young teen who was attempting to build things but didn't have the support structure or sort of social culture that supported me, I've always been super, super passionate about how you could create a support structure for the young teenager or, you know, early 20-something who wants to go and build things and has that itch that I had when I was younger. And so when I was first approached about Horwitz Andre Academy, I immediately, like within seconds, I knew I wanted to do it. And the next six months was just me doing whatever I could to try to showcase what I had and to build the infrastructure necessary to get this off the ground. And so I worked with Eric Torenberg, Mark Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz over multiple months to figure out how we were going to fund the academy, what the vision was going to be, ensure that we were on the same page around the potential. We of course decided to make it a startup. So it's a for-profit venture that we hope will be, you know, successful and has, you know, investors, etc.

And for me, this entire time has just been reliving what I wish I had when I was, you know, 13, and, you know, candidly when I was 18 graduating and finishing up my time in high school and thinking I had no idea that that could be a career. And I'm here to tell the world, like one of the main goals of Horwitz Andre Academy is to say not only can this be a career, but it could be the most impactful and rewarding career you could possibly have.

Yeah, one of the first things that I talked about with Mark, Ben, and Eric was that we felt like this needed to be a Silicon Valley school. It's not enough to just have Andreessen and Horowitz. It was critical to us to bring in partners from every part of the tech ecosystem. And so from day one, the first thing that I did after we sort of kicked this project off was I reached out to, you know, some of the top companies in tech. That's Anthropic, it's Coinbase, it's Meta, you know, Replit. And we reached out to them and said, 'Hey, like we want to start this company with your support.' And so obviously that took a few months. We had to build relationships with the right people and we were very fortunate that a bunch of these companies have decided to become founding partners. And so that means that these companies are going to help us by providing curricular support. You know, we have an advisory group with them so we can frequently get feedback on what types of young talent they're seeing in the market as well as what they want young people to learn so that everything we do in the curriculum has an eye towards either starting a company or joining one of these companies. And we're also, you know, obviously providing compute credit, which is really important. One of the most interesting things right today as a young person is that you have access to build things that none of us could when we were in our generation. And that access comes at a cost. It costs a lot of money to build things. And so one of the main things Horwitz Andre Academy is going to try and do is open the doors to ensure that you can get the money you need to, you know, do a science or research project, and the access, not just financial, but also access to network. You know, if you really want to learn what's going on in the latest models, what better place than the academy, which has a direct relationship with the people creating those models, right? Nvidia is a core partner of ours. You know, we plan to ensure that these students get access to whatever the latest knowledge and information is that Nvidia has around the future of AI. And so if you're going to build an AI-forward school, of course you need the leading companies in the space. It's also interesting that the leading researchers in AI are no longer at university campuses, they are at these companies. And so the other benefit of this type of partnership is that hopefully, and of course, like each partner, we're still working with them. We're still figuring out what their contributions are going to be, right? But our belief is by setting the foundation of them being founding partners, we will enable us to have front-row seats to whatever is happening at the leading AI companies.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that first, just to be clear, instead of raising for 18 months, we raised for a few years. This was very intentional because there's a big difference between starting a school and starting an AI app. And one of the biggest differences is you need longevity, right? And so as a student, you have to know that this school isn't going to run out of money. So one of the simple reasons for raising $40 million is to say, 'Hey, we have enough money to operate.' In fact, we have enough money, we think, to get to profitability on the school.

Well, yeah, it's, you know, this is a big spiky point of view, but we believe this school is going to be so valuable that we're going to charge for it. And so I think that there's multiple revenue streams for Horwitz Andre Academy. One is tuition. We think that's going to be the bulk of the revenue. On top of that, we also have these corporate partnerships and so as we grow those, hopefully that will become a significant revenue stream because these companies want access to the best students on the planet and we think that the academy is going to attract the best students. And then finally, I think over time these students will create amazing businesses, whether they will join businesses or start businesses. We hope to leverage the school's, you know, the fact that the school helped them along this way to monetize through, you know, equity and businesses, etc. And so we think that this can be a successful financial endeavor as well as a successful, you know, good for the world.

Yeah. So, just to be clear, today we're announcing the founding class fellowship. So, it's kind of a unique thing. It's a one-year program and it does not have tuition. So, the first program starting in September 2027 that you can apply for today is actually this one-year founding class fellowship. And this program is going to be a sort of a version of the eventual two-year program that we'll launch. But it'll have some key differences. One of which is being one year. When a student signs up for this program, they're signing up to spend a year deeply immersed in Silicon Valley. Immersed in the principles of Silicon Valley, the builder-first mentality, high agency, and interpersonal skills that we feel like are critical to being successful in the valley. The second thing they're buying into is they're moving to San Francisco and they're going to be amongst a peer set of students who are the best builders on the planet. Like the big difference between going to the academy and going to college is we are not going to prioritize your grades. We're going to prioritize proof of work. So, you know, as a student here, everyone who shows up has built something. And we have this funny phrase that we've been using recently. It's like, 'You did what?' And like I love this 'you did what' phrase because it's when I was meeting these young builders, you know, and doing research for this company, I was like, what did you do? Like there's this kid, his name's Dar. He's in Tennessee. He's built an LLM for biology that is beating some of the leading models. He's 16, he was 16 years old when we started this, right? He might be 17 today, but like 16 years old, he's building an LLM to design molecules. And now, by the way, they've pivoted into designing proteins, right? Because he's realized that's the market he wants to go after. We have another student, L, built a massive TikTok following as a teenager. Has also been super involved in building Alpha School and helping Alpha School turn into what today is a huge, extremely valuable school for young builders. You know, kind of a similar vibe. And so these students are doing incredible things. And what this school is, is you're going to be around other students who are as incredible as you are and get inspired and see the benefits of the network effect on your motivation and on your thinking that occurs when you're around these students. And then of course there's access to the network. You know, there's a reason I didn't start this on my own. There's a reason this is not Gagan University. It's Horwitz Andre Academy. And one of the things, you know, I was listening to a podcast that Ben Horowitz did 11 years ago, right? And from the beginning, they had the vision that Andreessen Horowitz would create a network. And let me tell you, like I have seen now from the inside how powerful it is. We've gone to all these great founding partners. They're at the door in part because they believe in Andreessen and Horowitz and what they bring to the table. And as investors, A16Z has just been phenomenal. And so our goal with the Horwitz Andre Academy is to create our own network, right? And create our own network of mentors and faculty and podcast hosts and various, you know, both young people. We need some of them to be under 25, right? So we're going to find the best under-25-year-olds and we're going to have them come around the school. And then we're also going to have the luminaries and people with more experience or gray hair like I do. And between that group, our goal is to immerse these students amongst the leading minds of our generation. And so those are the types of things that these students are buying into. And the promise that I think we can make is that you will learn how to be an AI-native builder with super high agency, with the people skills to understand the culture of Silicon Valley. And if we can accomplish those three things, I believe this will be the most valuable educational experience that anyone could ever have. One that most of these mentors are going to be jealous of. And candidly, like I'm envious of the kids who get to go and do this program.

Yeah. Actually, you know, this points to a real challenge that these types of young builders have today, right? These builders are getting access to VC dollars very early. And they're sort of debating between two, I think, very awkward options. You know, one option is the traditional four-year university route where the culture and the sort of environment is not designed for building. It's not designed for, you know, career readiness. It's not designed for being immersed in Silicon Valley. And then on the other hand, you have, you know, angel investors or VCs that are giving out $150,000, $250,000 checks on a flyer hoping that this is the next, you know, Michael Truell or something, right? Who's the founder of Cursor? And personally, I believe that only a very, very, very small percentage of these builders should be starting companies right away. Like there's something quite magical that happens in sort of your quote-unquote freshman and sophomore year, the first one to two years after high school, which is that you go from like a super structured environment where every hour of your day, right, is completely scheduled and you have parents driving you to and from. Maybe you've got your own car now, but for the most part, you're still super scheduled. You've got homework, you've got tests, etc. And you're hanging out only with teens primarily, right? And so yeah, some of these young builders are on the internet and they're experiencing the digital world through adults' lens, but in the physical world they haven't yet really experienced it. And so we believe that, you know, eventually it'll be two years. The first program is going to be one year, but we believe that one to two years is a really good amount of time to sort of go and explore the world before you start a company. And so our advice is, look, if you have an incredible idea, we're going to support you. We're going to help fund it. We're going to help find investors for you. Like we will support you and go leave. You can leave in two months, three months. I don't care. However, for the vast majority of students, it's going to be valuable to spend one to two years deciding what you're going to do for the next decade. You know, it doesn't make it's not actually the right thing to go after the first decent idea you have. It's, you know, startups are a 10-year slog and most of them don't work out. So, when you go after it, you got to be sure and so you shouldn't just take money just because it's there.

And that's what the academy, that's one of the core tenets of the academy is actually that it's not about just investing you in from day one. Some of these people should go on and join companies. Some of them should start companies. And some of them should take two or three years in industry and then start a company. And we're very supportive of all paths rather than just going after the traditional four-year path and or like raise a bunch of money and start and, you know, who knows if you really care that much about the idea you're working on.

Yeah, I mean, you know, those are all amazing programs. The ones that require you to start a company, and for the vast majority now of Thiel Fellows, you're now in a very, very, like most of them are basically starting a company. That's why they're getting the Thiel Fellowship. And that's also true for A16Z Speedrun, for example, which of course is going to be a partner of ours and we will help students get into that when they're ready, or YC's, you know, the sort of normal YC program. In most these cases, they're about starting a company. And we still believe in the exploratory nature of a post-high-school academic experience. Like I still think it's valuable to have a set of peers who are your age that you can hang out with and get to know and that you can build lifelong relationships with. You know, we're going to be physically in San Francisco. The students are hopefully going to choose housing options that are co-located with each other. And as a result, you know, I very much hope that they build lifelong friendships. I think that time to explore is super valuable. So, a lot of these programs do not really provide that. You know, you're supposed to just know what you're going to do and go forward. And by the way, that's awesome. Like, there are some 16, 17-year-olds who know what they want to do and they're going to go and start that specific company. That's great. It's way less than the number who are currently raising rounds. I mean, raising capital for these kids is going to be easy. They should come into the academy thinking, I can raise capital whenever I want. I better, if I'm going to take someone's money, I better do it for the right reasons. And I think that's really what makes us different. And then finally, like there's a difference between a structured program and no structure whatsoever. Like, you know, in a situation where all you get is, you know, $150,000 or $100,000 and you just go and explore on your own, it's hard to, there's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of amazing, I'm honestly such a fan of that, that like if you, if that's your option, like we'll talk one-on-one and we'll figure out what the better option is because it's not, it's going to be different for different people, right? But I will say that I think there are a lot of students for which the camaraderie of a cohort as well as the fact that they get two years where they have all these mentors coming in that are coming and explaining how their industry works, right? We'll have crypto founders and we'll have robotics founders and we'll have, you know, AI apps and classic SaaS and we'll have different people coming in. I think that exposure and the structure we're going to provide is still going to be far more enriching for most students than two years on their own.

Yeah. You graduated early, right?

Yeah. And I think this is, you know, the most part what these types of people and students will want to do, but like what is the archetype that encompasses this?

Yeah. I feel like we use the word build way too much, but it's young builders, right? It's young people who are constantly feeling the itch to go and produce things. And that could be producing a podcast. It could be producing a website, right? Creating a new service for people. It could be selling shoes secondhand, which is like a huge, you know, business for young teens.

Yeah, exactly. Somehow like the dropshipping and reselling is a good start. Now, for some people, they find dropshipping and reselling and they want to stay in it. That's not for, those people are not going to be at the Horwitz Andre Academy. We're going to encourage you to go big, go bigger, right? You know, it's one thing to build a, you know, people call them a lifestyle business. I think lifestyle business is fantastic, right? I'm a huge fan of people doing whatever is the right fit for them, but the goal of the academy very much is for moonshots, right? So, we're going to teach and provide a curriculum that's going to help someone who's been building, you know, maybe they've made half a million dollars over their high school career. And there are actually a lot of students who do this now, which is crazy. But like let's say they made half a million dollars. Well, we're going to show them that sometimes you got to go slow to go fast. And like why don't you spend a couple of years thinking of an idea that has the potential to hit a billion in revenue, right? But may not make any revenue for the first three to five years. And so these are the types of students. And honestly like it's really interesting because one, I was talking to a student earlier who was explaining why she was really excited about the academy and what we're doing. And one of her core statements to me, which you and I would just think this is normal, but you know, because she spends lots of time interacting with adults in her early career. And so one of the things she said to me is like, you actually talk to the students.

Yeah. You need to talk to your customer, right? And as I've been talking to the customer, I'll tell you, these kids know who they are, right? I was talking to a kid at Illinois Math and Science Academy, right? And by the way, a lot of these kids do go to top schools, right? They go to top high schools. They have the credentials. They'll probably get into a top-tier, you know, elite university. And so I'm talking to him and I'm like, 'Hey, you know, you seem like super entrepreneurial. What are your fellow students like?' And he's like, 'Almost all my fellow students are doing extracurriculars solely for the purpose of getting into college.' And I do extracurriculars because I enjoy it.

Yeah. I mean, I think that I'll take those as two completely different questions actually. On the first one, a school that embraces AI is a school that embraces reality and the future. Like AI is here and it's coming. And like it's coming even stronger than it is today. And so I believe that most students who dislike AI are not going to be a fit for the academy, right? Because, you know, and by the way, most students are not going to be a fit for the academy. I mean, we're only taking 50 students in our founding class fellowship, right? Maybe eventually we'll get to 500. Maybe we'll be a thousand. I don't know. But there's only a small set of students who need to be a fit for this thing to actually work. And so, it doesn't matter that most of their peers are AI doomers. We want the AI boomers. We want the folks who are looking for an AI-optimistic future. And we want to show the world that there is an AI-optimistic future, right? We're not just about the 50 kids that show up to our school. We're going to try and be out there talking about how this can be a force for good in education. So, what does that look like? What does AI in a positive way look like in education? Well, first of all, you have to let kids use it to build things, right? The world really, you're not going to ban it like New York, you know? We could talk about New York in a second because there's good and bad with that decision actually, but yes, we are definitely not going to ban it. We are going to completely embrace it. In fact, not only embrace it, we're going to give them more credits and money so that they can go and build with AI, right? And of course, there'll be limitations on that and they'll have to do it within, they can't just token max the moon, but you know, we're going to teach them how to leverage AI in a way that is positive for creating things because that's what AI allows you to do. It changes the dynamics at work. It used to be that it was really valuable to be a middle manager who is communicating with the executives and then orchestrating a group of humans to move in a certain direction. And now we have the rise of the super IC, right? You know, my company Maven is entirely built on this, right? Well, all we do at Maven is teach people how to become super ICs because they're middle managers right now and they need to shift. And so we're just using that same philosophy now for a post-high school. You should come in and learn how to orchestrate 30 agents at a time. 50 agents, I don't know, orchestrate agents that are orchestrating agents that are orchestrating agents, right? Building that architecture is hard. It's complicated. And you need to come to a school that's actually going to teach you that so that you can be in the top 1%. We don't just want to get you a job at one of these companies. We want you to be one of the highest performers at these companies. Right? So the other parts of AI doomerism, some of it's real, right? Like there are challenges if you just allow students unfettered access to AI. The average student, and this is where we'll talk about New York, right? The average student who gets access to Instagram or TikTok as a child may not be using it in the correct way, right? Like these things are just tools, right? However, well, actually, let me continue on that. So, I personally, for example, have a rule that if you're writing a document, the first draft should be written by you. You sit down, you write it. I don't think we're going to make that rule at the school. The school is going to be much more open. It's going to be much more, you know, results-oriented. But within my company, that's how I run the company. And the reason is because I still want you to think through the problems that you're dealing with. And then of course everything I write now, I plug it into my, you know, AI companion and I have it help me think through the problem more. And sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't. But well, it always helps a little bit. It's just whether or not I use everything it says. So I'm not not using AI. AI is a critical part of every workflow, but I'm using it in a way that makes sense, right? Like I have access to a calculator today, right? This is the easiest example. I know it's very, very trite, but like I have access to a calculator today. But if I'm looking at a spreadsheet that my employee shows, that's the projections for their new product initiative. If I cannot immediately identify how this is going to affect the bottom line of our business because I don't have an intimate understanding of our P&L and how this, you know, 5% improvement in conversion rate is going to affect our growth rate in two years, I have no business being CEO of this company. And it's the same thing with AI. If you are going to have the AI do a bunch of things for you or with you, you need to understand what it's doing. And so creating a cohabitation with AI is critical for that and that's what we're going to try and create and hopefully we'll show other universities how they can instead of having like an AI war at their university they can have an AI harmony.

Yeah. You know, I just don't think we're seeing it. I mean, at least

Right now, and I'm not saying that I can predict the future. What I can say is even if the future is a doomer future, you better be in the top 1% because that's going to be the people who — and that's, you know, the people who graduate from the academy are going to be in the top 1%. And you better be in the top 1% because those are the people who are going to be the most needed. And so if you do believe in doomerism, you know, even more of a reason to consider this. But I don't believe in the doomerism narrative. I agree with you. And we're not seeing it. I mean, my friends at the leading AI companies are all working as hard as ever. And you know, I personally have been working as hard as ever. I believe that the — and by the way, they're all hiring, right? Like, go to their jobs page.

And the talent war is raging in Silicon Valley. So I think the other thing that's really unique is like there is this economic phenomenon that has occurred over the last couple decades where, you know, Marc Andreessen wrote the famous essay, 'Silicon Valley is eating the world.' And like I do believe — sorry, software is eating the world, not Silicon Valley, because software exists everywhere. But software is eating the world, and what I think is true about that, AI will do the same. AI will eat the world. And as AI eats the world, that doesn't mean the world is not going to exist. This is an incorrect interpretation. What actually will happen is that we'll just redesign things for AI. So I'm sure you — through — I know you live in LA. Like you might have friends who are either influencers — and sorry to stereotype, I'm just giving you some LA — I love going to LA and this is why, because it's a different culture. But like you might have friends who do drop shipping or influencers running lifestyle businesses in, you know, CPG or whatever. And maybe you also, I'm sure, know lots of tech folks. But my point there is that those businesses have been completely changed by AI, and they were completely changed by the internet, right?

One of our hiring partners — through our founding partners were helping us build the curriculum, and then we have like 30-plus hiring partners. One of them is Shopify, and obviously Toby and my friend Archie, who I worked with at Udemy and is now at Shopify, are both investors in the academy. And you know, you cannot start a CPG company today without using Shopify, essentially, right? And so they're using software. Software ate CPG, but CPG still exists. Like we're still using — like what is this, Cascade Mountain from Portland, Oregon? Like —

But like, you know, this still exists. Like this is a new brand that's, you know, based on the new world order of direct-to-consumer that the internet has reshaped. And I believe AI will do the same thing to the rest of the world. And so if that happens, like that doesn't mean the rest of the world's going away. What it means is the rest of the world's changing. And you know, I hope that more schools — and there are some, right? There's Vanderbilt and Northeastern and ASU that are innovating like crazy, and they're embracing the future. And I hope more schools do that. And as those schools do it, hopefully the academy will sort of be the beacon, like the example. That's one of our goals with this thing, to show what embracing AI can mean for education.