You know, it used to be, and actually I have a really good quote from Ben on this. Ben's like, 'It used to be that you had to go to the building on the hill to get the books.' You know what I mean? I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about, Ben.' But like, today, do you even need to, you know, leave your bedroom to get access to almost 100% of what was in that library?
The answer is no. At the same time, if you look at the way that we educate in this country, and really across the globe, we still treat it exactly the same. There's three things that to me make the academy different. One is this co-op model with a focus on Silicon Valley companies. Two, no grades, no tests, but you get to learn from the best practitioners in the world. And the third thing we call pursuits, or the space to get to pursue whatever you're passionate about, whatever you're curious about, and take it to its logical conclusion, you know, with the help of lectures, mentors who can help you get there.
Hello everyone and welcome back to MTS. Today is an exciting day. I am joined live by Gagan Bhatia, who is the co-founder of Udemy and Maven and now the founder and CEO of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. And also joining us is Erik Torenberg, who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And today they just announced the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy. This is a newly highly selective school in San Francisco for the most ambitious young builders. So Gagan, Erik, welcome to MTS.
Thanks for having us. It's an honor to be here.
I know this is an exciting day. I know you've done eight of these interviews. This is your first one. Erik, I wanted to get your perspective. This is an exciting time. It's 2026. Why now? Why launch a university in 2026? Why not a decade ago? What's unique about this time period?
Well, people have been trying to and wanting to, you know, for a long time. Even when Thiel came out with the Thiel Fellowship 20 years ago, people had an understanding of, hey, you know, these institutions aren't really preparing these students for the working world, or I should say there's a little bit of a gap between what people need in the working world and what just any education institutions can provide because things are happening so fast. And with AI that just, you know, is amplified orders of magnitude more. And so just the resources that people have at their disposal, the tools, the networks that young people can start now. They don't have to, you know, memorize a ton of, you know, bodies of knowledge to be impactful in the working world. We just thought that, hey, the opportunity is urgent, is immediate, but sometimes it's not even, you know, maybe this could have worked 10 years ago, but it takes a group of people that are willing to, you know, do things and the stars to align. And Gagan and I, we almost partnered on something in, you know, 2019 or 2021, like a few years ago, and the stars just didn't quite align. We got close but didn't quite align. And I actually give Gagan a lot of props and I think this is a meta example of like what makes Silicon Valley so great is sometimes, you know, when people, you know, we co-founder dated and it didn't work out and sometimes people are like, ah, you know, screw that guy or whatever, we remain friends and collaborators and allies. And now, you know, five years later with the help of, you know, Andreessen Horowitz and, you know, Horowitz and Andreessen, the stars have aligned. And so sometimes it's just this, the opportunity is there but it just takes the right ingredients. You know, Ben and Marc separately wanted to do this for years and they needed me and I needed Gagan. We all needed each other to make this possible.
That's pretty interesting. And Gagan, you have a very interesting background and a particularly useful background for what's actually being announced today. I'm curious to get your perspective on education as a whole. How has it changed and why is launching a new type of college necessary?
Yeah, I mean, I think everything's changed and not enough has changed, really, honestly. Like, I mean, everything has changed in the sense that the way that students, whether they be K-12 or higher education students, interact with school, it's literally like night and day from what it was like even when I was in school 20 years ago, and certainly when these schools were invented, you know, or industrialized. Industrialization's probably in the 1960s or so, you know, and then invented, you know, whatever thousand years ago. So like, and the things that have changed are the access to knowledge and the value that can be provided by an institution. So, you know, it used to be, and actually I have a really good quote from Ben on this. Ben's like, 'It used to be that you had to go to the building on the hill to get the books.' You know what I mean? I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about, Ben.' But he's right. You know, in order to learn the subjects of math, science, philosophy, whatever, you had to go to a place that had a massive library because that was the only way you were going to get access to information. Well, today, do you even need to, you know, leave your bedroom to get access to almost 100% of what was in that library?
The answer is no. At the same time, if you look at the way that we educate in this country, and really across the globe, we still treat it exactly the same. And so, I've, you know, made it my life mission to invent new ways to attack a market that I think is just honestly essential for humanity. Like, we have to get this right. It's super important for America. It's super important for young people everywhere.
Yeah. No, as you alluded to, it's a really unique moment in time, right? You now have the ability to learn anything. And this is not just in the United States. This is across the entire world. Anyone anywhere can learn anything. And then you have AI and anyone can build anything. I'm curious what you're starting to see amongst young people. Young people have more agency than ever before. You don't necessarily need a degree to get a job. You don't even need to be able to live on that hill where there's a library to get educated. What are you guys starting to see in trends amongst young people as a whole? I would love maybe you can start with you, Erik.
Sure. Well, I'll say right now there's just an immediate opportunity for people to contribute. Like when I was in college, we didn't have 18-year-old kids on Twitter building these incredible things or even just contributing to the discourse. I mean, MTS is one of the most important cultural intellectual institutions right now. And, you know, Theo is 12 years old. I mean, it's amazing.
I'm just kidding, right? A teenager. Start recruiting him.
Yeah, exactly. No, Sophia. I mean, the whole team, you know, young people, tremendously young people. And, you know, we got college dropouts on our team. We got college dropouts on MTS. And so that's just one example, but there are a number of examples of like, it's permissionless. You don't have to wait anymore to just build something incredible. And that's why you're seeing a lot of young people just, you know, go straight to the NBA as they say, and just contribute, you know, in terms of what they're building, in terms of their intellectual contributions, just across the board because a lot of the technology is so new, it kind of resets the board. And so if you're not coming in with preconceived notions about what this is, in some ways you have an advantage.
Yeah.
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It's coming at it from two angles. Like one angle is you have the capability now to do anything. You can literally open up your laptop, use Replit, you know, Claude Code, whatever, and just build something that was like 50 people needed to build, you know, 10 years ago. But there's also the other side, which is the world is also coming to you. And, you know, with things like MTS or, you know, X and podcasts, etc., you can now understand almost all of the same context that any sort of insider has. So, you know, like most of the information you and I know is now literally in the public sphere. Like we communicate about it over X oftentimes, and that means that it's also much easier for someone to come from the outside, whether that outside is just another country, right, or another state, or whether the outside is from a different age range, to enter the conversation and start contributing.
And let me jump in on that because there are three things, among others, that to me make the academy different that sort of tie into this more real-world connection. One is this co-op model that you see at places like Waterloo and others. And we've adapted it, you know, strictly with a focus on Silicon Valley companies. You know, Nvidia, Replit, Meta, Google, you know, many dozens of others have agreed to be founding partners and hiring partners where our students are going to be able to work there and really just get frontline access into, you know, what it's like to work at an iconic company across different companies, different roles, etc. So, that's one, the co-op model. Two, on the courses, remember, no grades, no tests, but you get to learn from the best practitioners in the world, both on a technical level, but also on an intellectual level. So obviously, you know, if you're interested in, you know, building companies or building products or just learning how to sell, you know, all the skills that you'll need in the startup world, we've got world experts. But even on just intellectual topics that you would learn in college, like I studied, you know, economics, right? But, you know, I did a lot of Econ 101, 201, etc. And here, you know, you'll get to talk to Larry Summers or Tyler Cowen or Robin Hanson or, you know, any number of these sort of economists who are participating in the real-world discussions. And I typically felt, well, there's so many, you know, great things about, you know, let's say my college experience, that it was divorced from the real world. And people typically mean that to talk about career, which is really important, but I also mean intellectually. Like I was, you know, learning about things, but there's a public intellectual discourse, and it's worth, you know, being able to learn enough to contribute in it and contribute directly in it, and there's a lot of skills gained from that. And the third thing we call pursuits, but is really just this idea that in college and when you're young, it's an amazing time to experiment, especially around your curiosity. But often, you know, in school at any level, you're just flooded with things to do. And so you don't have the time or the space to get to pursue whatever you're passionate about, whatever you're curious about, and take it to its logical conclusion, you know, with the help of, you know, lecturers, mentors who can help you get there. So those are a few ways in which I think this is just really rooted in the real world. And then lastly, I will say, is you engage with adults. Like at our lectures, we're going to have, you know, people from our companies, people from Silicon Valley who also want to learn too. And when I was in college, at least, I really engaged with the students and then the professors, but there wasn't like this broader community or broader, you know, set of adults that I was engaging with.
Yeah. I say people often go to college for the network. It's not just the education and what you're going to learn, but it's about the people that you're going to meet. And what's really unique about the Horowitz Andreessen Academy is the partners that you guys have, the types of people that are going to be mentoring these students that they can learn directly from. You shared a few, but wanted to get your perspective. Can you share a little bit more what is a day in the life as a student? Who are they interacting with?
Yeah, I mean, a day starts with your pursuits. So the number one sort of core unit of an academy student is we will help them figure out what they want to pursue. They might have five pursuits at one time. They might have three. They might have, you know, 18. Who knows? Someone will push the limits on this, I'm sure. And the idea is that each of these pursuits can be like learning a subject. It can be building a thing, building a robot or building a new type of AI or LLM. Or it can be, you know, going and doing research in the field with people. And I think that opens up the need for what the school needs to offer. The school has to become a network because if you say you want to go learn calligraphy or you want to learn AI, you know, how an inference stack works, right? Like what is inference and how do you go about both building it on the back end and then also engaging with it on the front end as a developer or an engineer, you know, you need access to the people who are building those things. You need to go check out the factories and the labs where this is being made. And so our goal with the academy, you know, we launched with, I don't know, 300 or so, 250 or so people in our network. I mean, we have thousands, right? So eventually we'll populate this with hundreds, thousands, hopefully, of luminaries in every subject, not just tech, but hopefully it'll be somewhat biased towards tech or will be really strong in tech that they can go and access. And so these people will come by for guest lectures, right? We've got Jensen Huang, we've got Patrick Collison, Travis Kalanick, Sam Altman, Mira, yeah, Fei-Fei, you know.
Those are some pretty okay mentors in college.
Not bad. I think I've heard of them.
Well done, Erik. Team effort.
Yeah, I think so. You're going to have those people who are going to come in, you know, give lectures, maybe do a fireside chat. But I think the magic of the school is that not only will you get the opportunity to learn what those people are thinking about, what's on the cutting edge, and what the main leaders are thinking about, but there's literally like a whole bunch of other people going to come in and offer courses. I mean, if you look at the people who are teaching full-on courses, it's wild. Like, you know, Max Mullen, who I've known for a little while, was one of the first people I pitched on being an instructor, and he's going to teach you how to build a team. And this guy co-founded Instacart, right? He built a three-sided marketplace. He built three different types of teams, right? And he's going to come in and teach you how to build a team. Then we've got Steven Sinofsky, who's the president of Windows. He lived through like four different generations of technology. He knows more about technology than almost anyone. And he's a student of that game, and he's going to come in and teach about the history of technology so you can understand a little bit of that. And then we've got people like Logan Ury. Logan Ury is a behavioral scientist from Hinge who talks about dating. This is like one of my favorites.
