Innovators
1 Curated Dialogues
Gagan Biyani
Key Views & Dialogues
a16z Just Launched a School With OpenAI, NVIDIA & Anthropic
Andreessen Horowitz Academy plans a 50-student, tuition-free fellowship for September 2027, followed by a two-year program in 2028 pending regulatory approval. Its $40M runway backs an unaccredited model monetized through tuition, corporate partnerships, and equity tied to student ventures. The key test is whether proof-of-work admissions and 75–80% project time create a talent pipeline despite competing VC checks and universities.
View summary (7)
- Gagan Biyani is launching Andreessen Horowitz Academy — an unaccredited, residential, post-high-school program in the heart of San Francisco, backed by $40M raised deliberately for “a few years” of runway rather than 18 months. His reasoning: “there’s a big difference between starting a school and starting an AI app” — students need to know the institution won’t run out of money, and he thinks the raise is enough “to get to profitability on the school.” The promise is to develop AI-native builders with super-high agency and the people skills to understand Silicon Valley.
- The business model is unapologetically for-profit with three revenue streams: tuition, corporate partnerships, and equity connected to businesses students join or start. The founding class fellowship (September 2027, one year, 50 students, applications open now) is tuition-free apart from room and board; the two-year program planned for 2028 pending regulatory approval will charge “equal to or more than the top-tier private elite universities” on the bet that it’s “a high-value institution, not an elite institution.”
- Biyani says founding partners include Anthropic, Coinbase, Meta, and Replit, and calls NVIDIA a core partner; Molly also names Anduril, OpenAI, Palantir, Stripe and others. The wider partner network supplies compute credits, curriculum input, and hiring connections. Biyani’s structural argument for why this beats universities: “the leading researchers in AI are no longer at university campuses, they are at these companies,” so the academy can offer “front-row seats” to leading AI companies.
- His most contrarian call is against the young-founder funding frenzy: VCs are giving young builders “$150,000 to $250,000 checks on a flyer hoping this is the next Michael Truell,” but “only a very, very, very small percentage of these builders should be starting companies right away.” That’s the wedge versus the Thiel Fellowship, YC, and a16z SPEEDRUN, which are generally oriented toward people starting a company now — “startups are a 10-year slog and most of them don’t work out… you shouldn’t just take money because it’s there.”
- Pedagogy is built around the “rise of the super IC”: students learn to “orchestrate 30 agents at a time… agents that are orchestrating agents,” with 75–80% of time on self-chosen projects and classes that are “didactic only.” Admissions run on proof of work, not grades — the internal filter phrase is “you did what?”, exemplified by a 16-year-old in Tennessee building a biology LLM to design molecules, later pivoting to proteins.
- On reports of students booing AI at commencements and a friend’s report from Columbia, Biyani is unbothered: “we want the AI boomers,” and self-selection is the feature — most students should not fit a 50-person class. He says AI is here and coming more strongly, and the academy will embrace it by giving students resources to build with AI, subject to limits. The eventual scale could be 500 or 1,000 students, but he does not know yet.
- The talent-pipeline thesis is concrete and trackable: Alpha School students are now starting at Berkeley and Stanford, and Biyani expects the transition from a high-agency environment to college to be difficult — “I am going to be tracking this like a hawk.” The addressable market is the builder-misfit archetype nationwide, screened through portfolios, interviews, and planned IQ, personality, and writing tests, judged on “slope and not experience.”