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.

One of the simple reasons for raising $40 million is that we’ll have crypto founders, robotics founders, AI apps, classic SaaS, and all kinds of different people coming in. The promise that I think we can make is that you will learn how to be an AI-native builder with super-high agency, along with the people skills to understand the culture of Silicon Valley.

If we can accomplish those 3 things, I believe this will be the most valuable educational experience that anyone could ever have.

1. Why the Academy is in San Francisco

You have all these amazing partners, like Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, Stripe, and so many more. These students will have direct access to what it takes to build a company. Have you thought about buying Alcatraz and putting this there?

Gagan Biyani, welcome to Sourcery.

2. Why this Academy is different from college

Thanks for having me, Molly.

Well, we’re here at the a16z office. We were talking beforehand about how a16z Academy is the reverse order of that. Congratulations on the big announcement. What happened?

Today, we’re announcing the launch of a16z Academy. It’s a new post-high-school residential program in San Francisco for young builders who want to get jobs or start companies in the technology space.

Personally, I just think it’s 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 will show a positive and optimistic frame on what college could look like if it adopted some of the principles of an AI-native education.

How is it structurally different?

There are a ton of differences between what the school will offer and what a typical college will. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

First of all, it’s completely unaccredited, so we don’t have to follow the same accreditation rules as a typical college. We do have to get regulatory approval before we launch our paid programs, but it’s very different.

The differences are, first, that this program is highly experiential. Instead of focusing all of your time around classes and the top-down structure of a university, where everything is fundamentally about how many credits you take per semester, this is a project-based experience. 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.

They’ll get to do projects that they desire, and I have 3 different categories of projects. I think they’ll have research projects, learning projects, and building projects, or entrepreneurial projects.

3. "You Did What?" - Proof of work over grades

You can imagine a research project where someone is trying to learn everything they can about the restaurant industry, robotics, or hardware manufacturing. They’ll go and literally travel to the big manufacturing facilities around the country, or maybe even around the world, and deeply try to understand how it works while simultaneously studying robotics—the technical side of robotics—through both self-directed learning and online courseware or courses that we offer at the academy.

You can also imagine that they then decide, “Hey, I want to go and try to build a new type of robotic vacuum,” or, “I want to play with the new Hugging Face duck.” You can imagine a world in which this student is visiting factories in Shenzhen, or maybe they’re visiting factories in Austin or Los Angeles, and simultaneously studying online through our diverse network of faculty in robotics. They’re also building an actual robot from scratch.

This is the type of experience that we want to create for the student who comes to a16z Academy.

4. Started his first company at age 13

How does your career in education and building companies relate to partnering with Marc and Eric on this?

I think this is just a big part of my life’s work: to rebuild the education system for the future.

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.

Was it legal?

It was legal. It was a nonprofit, actually, but it made revenue and had a profit, kind of like the modern nonprofits that have more revenue than costs. It was a nonprofit because all the proceeds went to my high school, 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 was 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 grew up in Silicon Valley, and I didn’t have a single adult saying, “Hey, you’re 13 and you’re making $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.”

Instead, what ended up happening was that I still went to college. I didn’t go to college for entrepreneurship, and I didn’t know you could start startups at that time. I went to college and got a degree in economics.

Ever since then, I’ve been super passionate about how you could create a support structure for the young teenager, or the early 20-something, who wants to go and build things and has that itch that I had when I was younger. That experience of being a precocious young teen who was attempting to build things, but didn’t have the support structure or social culture that supported me, has stayed with me.

When I was first approached about a16z Academy, I immediately knew I wanted to do it. The next 6 months were just me doing whatever I could to showcase what I had and build the infrastructure necessary to get this off the ground.

I worked with Eric Torenberg, Marc 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, and ensure that we were on the same page around its potential.

We decided to make it a startup. It’s a for-profit venture that we hope will be successful and have investors. For me, this entire time has just been reliving what I wish I had when I was 13 and, candidly, when I was 18, graduating and finishing up my time in high school and thinking, “I had no idea that could be a career.”

I’m here to tell the world that one of the main goals of a16z 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.

5. Building a school for Silicon Valley

Through the structure, you have some incredible partnerships already. How do those tie into it, and what are they?

One of the first things that I talked about with Marc, Ben, and Eric was that we felt like this needed to be a Silicon Valley school. It’s not enough to just have Andreessen Horowitz. It was critical to us to bring in partners from every part of the tech ecosystem.

From day 1, the first thing I did after we kicked this project off was reach out to some of the top companies in tech: Anthropic, Coinbase, Meta, and Replit. We reached out to them and said, “Hey, we want to start this company with your support.”

That obviously took a few months. We had to build relationships with the right people, and we were very fortunate that a bunch of these companies decided to become founding partners.

That means these companies are going to help us by providing curricular support. We have an advisory group with them, so we can frequently get feedback on what types of 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 toward either starting a company or joining one of these companies.

We’re also providing compute credits, which is really important. One of the most interesting things today as a young person is that you have access to build things that none of us could in our generation. That access comes at a cost. It costs a lot of money to build things.

One of the main things a16z Academy is going to try to do is open the doors to ensure that you can get the money you need to do a science or research project, and provide access that’s not just financial, but also access to a network.

If you really want to learn what’s going on in the latest models, what better place is there than the academy, which has a direct relationship with the people creating those models? NVIDIA is a core partner of ours. We plan to ensure that these students get access to whatever the latest knowledge and information NVIDIA has around the future of AI.

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’re at these companies.

The other benefit of this type of partnership is that, hopefully—and of course, with each partner, we’re still working with them and figuring out what their contributions are going to be—we’ll have front-row seats to whatever is happening at the leading AI companies.

6. Raising $40M for a School

You've raised $40 million from some really amazing investors and angel investors, like Adam D'Angelo, Toby Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo, and Shyam Sankar from Palantir. What does that funding go toward?

Yeah, it's a great question. 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.

One of the biggest differences is that you need longevity. As a student, you have to know that this school isn't going to run out of money. One of the simple reasons for raising $40 million is to say, “Hey, we have enough money to operate.” In fact, we think we have enough money to get the school to profitability.

How do you get to profitability with a school?

Well, 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. There are multiple revenue streams for Andreessen Horowitz Academy. One is tuition, which we think is going to be the bulk of the revenue.

On top of that, we also have these corporate partnerships. As we grow those, hopefully they'll become a significant revenue stream, because these companies want access to the best students on the planet, and we think the academy is going to attract the best students.

Finally, over time, these students will create amazing businesses, whether they join businesses or start them. We hope to leverage the fact that the school helps them along this path to monetize through equity in businesses, et cetera. We think this can be a successful financial endeavor as well as something that's good for the world.

Even though it is for-profit and you're looking to make a profit on it, you're really thinking multigenerationally and about longevity for the long term. With that, as you mentioned, there are a couple of outcomes for the students. What exactly are they buying into? What are they applying for?

To be clear, today we're announcing the founding class fellowship. It's kind of a unique thing: a 1-year program that doesn't have tuition. The first program, starting in September 2027, that you can apply for today is this 1-year founding class fellowship.

This program is going to be a version of the eventual 2-year program that we'll launch, but it'll have some key differences, one of which is that it's only 1 year. When a student signs up for this program, they're signing up to spend a year deeply immersed in Silicon Valley: immersed in its principles, the builder-first mentality, high agency, and the interpersonal skills that we feel are critical to being successful in the Valley.

The second thing they're buying into is moving to San Francisco and being among a peer set of students who are the best builders on the planet. The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is that we're not going to prioritize your grades. We're going to prioritize proof of work.

As a student here, you know that everyone who shows up has built something. We have this funny phrase that we've been using recently: “You did what?” I love this phrase because when I was meeting these young builders and doing research for this company, I kept asking, “What did you do?”

There's this kid named Dar [?]. He's in Tennessee, and he's built an LLM for biology that's beating some of the leading models. He was 16 years old when we started this; he might be 17 today. He was building an LLM to design molecules, and now, by the way, they've pivoted into designing proteins because he's realized that's the market he wants to go after.

We have another student, L [?], who built a massive TikTok following as a teenager. L has also been super involved in building Alpha School and helping Alpha School become what it is today: a huge, extremely valuable school for young builders.

These students are doing incredible things. What this school is about is being around other students who are as incredible as you are, getting inspired, and seeing the benefits of the network effect on your motivation and your thinking that occur when you're around these students.

Then, of course, there's access to the network. There's a reason I didn't start this on my own. There's a reason this is not Gagan University. It's Andreessen Horowitz Academy.

I was listening to a podcast that Ben Horowitz did 11 years ago, and from the beginning, they had the vision that Andreessen Horowitz would create a network. Let me tell you, I've now seen from the inside how powerful it is. We've gone to all these great founding partners, and they're at the door in part because they believe in Andreessen Horowitz and what they bring to the table. As investors, a16z has just been phenomenal.

Our goal with Andreessen Horowitz Academy is to create our own network of mentors, faculty, podcast hosts, and various young people. We need some of them to be under 25, so we're going to find the best people under 25 and have them come around the school. Then we're also going to have the luminaries and people with more experience—or more gray hair, like I have.

Between those groups, our goal is to immerse these students among the leading minds of our generation. Those are the types of things these students are buying into. The promise that I think we can make is that you will learn how to be an AI-native builder with super-high agency and the people skills to understand the culture of Silicon Valley.

If we can accomplish those 3 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. Candidly, I'm envious of the kids who get to go and do this program.

7. Should young builders really start companies?

I want to talk about the state of education, but before we get to that, I feel like the biggest difficulty you're going to have is retention. Given the quality of the students you were just mentioning, all these VCs are going to be flocking around, trying to grab these founders or builders, or whatever they want to be, and fund them with money. How do you keep them focused?

Actually, this points to a real challenge that these types of young builders have today. These builders are getting access to VC dollars very early, and they're debating between 2 very awkward options.

One option is the traditional 4-year university route, where the culture and environment aren't designed for building. They're not designed for career readiness, and they're not designed for being immersed in Silicon Valley. On the other hand, you have angel investors or VCs giving out $150,000 to $250,000 checks on a flyer, hoping that this is the next Michael Truell, the founder of Cursor.

Personally, I believe that only a very, very, very small percentage of these builders should be starting companies right away. Something quite magical happens during your freshman and sophomore years—the first 1 to 2 years after high school. You go from a super-structured environment where every hour of your day is completely scheduled and you have parents driving you to and from school.

Maybe you've got your own car now, but for the most part, you're still super scheduled. You've got homework and tests, and you're hanging out primarily with other teenagers. Some of these young builders are on the internet and are experiencing the digital world through an adult's lens, but in the physical world, they haven't really experienced it yet.

We believe that eventually it'll be 2 years. The first program is going to be 1 year, but we believe that 1 to 2 years is a really good amount of time to go explore the world before you start a company.

Our advice is: Look, if you have an incredible idea, we're going to support you. We're going to help fund it and help find investors for you. We'll support you, and you can leave in 2 months or 3 months. I don't care.

However, for the vast majority of students, it's going to be valuable to spend 1 to 2 years deciding what you're going to do for the next decade. It doesn't make sense to go after the first decent idea you have. Startups are a 10-year slog, and most of them don't work out, so when you go after one, you have to be sure. You shouldn't just take money because it's there.

That's what the academy—one of the core tenets of the academy—is about: it's not about just investing in you from day one. Some of these people should go on to join companies, some of them should start companies, and some of them should take 2 or 3 years in industry and then start a company.

8. Why this is different from YC and fellowships

We're very supportive of all paths, rather than just going after the traditional 4-year path or raising a bunch of money and starting something when you don't know if you really care that much about the idea you're working on. I kind of want to discount the 4-year path for a little bit because I think this fits much more squarely alongside a16z SPEEDRUN, the Thiel Fellowship, YC, or even the Palantir Fellowship.

So, why the trade-off between those programs and this?

Yeah, those are all amazing programs. The ones that require you to start a company—for the vast majority of current Thiel Fellows, you're now in a situation where most of them are basically starting a company. That's why they're getting the Thiel Fellowship. That's also true for a16z SPEEDRUN, 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 normal program. In most of these cases, they're about starting a company.

We still believe in the exploratory nature of a post-high-school academic experience. I still think it's valuable to have a set of peers who are your age, whom you can hang out with and get to know, and with whom you can build lifelong relationships. 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, I very much hope that they build lifelong friendships.

I think that time to explore is super valuable. A lot of these programs do not really provide that. You're supposed to just know what you're going to do and go forward. By the way, that's awesome. There are some 16- and 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.

Raising capital for these kids is going to be easy. They should come into the academy thinking, “I can raise capital whenever I want. If I'm going to take someone's money, I better do it for the right reasons.” I think that's really what makes us different.

Finally, there's a difference between a structured program and no structure whatsoever. In a situation where all you get is $150,000 or $100,000 and you just go and explore on your own, there are a lot of challenges. I'm honestly such a fan of that. If that's your option, we'll talk one-on-one and figure out what the better option is, because it's going to be different for different people.

I will say that I think there are a lot of students for whom the camaraderie of a cohort, as well as the fact that they get 2 years with all these mentors coming in and explaining how their industries work, is going to be valuable. We'll have crypto founders, robotics founders, AI app founders, classic SaaS founders, and different people coming in. I think that exposure and the structure we're going to provide will still be far more enriching for most students than 2 years on their own.

9. The Academy is for young builders

We were talking about this before we started recording, but we both have a similar archetype where we found university very uncomfortable, just kind of wanted to graduate, and wanted to start building and working.

You graduated early, right?

I graduated early, and I was telling you that I'm pretty sure I took Udemy courses when I was in college because I was maxing out my credits. I was trying to get out of there as fast as possible. One reason was that I wanted to start a business as soon as possible. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Also, I was uncomfortable in college. I just wanted to start life.

I think this is, for the most part, what these types of people and students will want to do. What is the archetype that encompasses this?

I feel like we use the word “build” way too much, but it's young builders. It's young people who are constantly feeling the itch to go and produce things. That could be producing a podcast. It could be producing a website or creating a new service for people. It could be selling shoes secondhand, which is a huge business for young teens.

It's always a good starting career for teens.

Yeah, exactly. Somehow, dropshipping and reselling are a good start. For some people, they find dropshipping and reselling and want to stay in it. Those people are not going to be at the Andreessen Horowitz Academy. We're going to encourage you to go big, go bigger.

It's one thing to build what people call a lifestyle business. I think lifestyle businesses are fantastic. I'm a huge fan of people doing whatever is the right fit for them, but the goal of the academy very much is moonshots.

We're going to teach and provide a curriculum that's going to help someone who's been building. Maybe they've made half a million dollars over their high school career. There are actually a lot of students who do this now, which is crazy. Let's say they made half a million dollars. We're going to show them that sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Why don't you spend a couple of years thinking of an idea that has the potential to hit $1 billion in revenue, but may not make any revenue for the first 3 to 5 years?

These are the types of students we're looking for. It's really interesting because I was talking to a student earlier who was explaining why she was really excited about the academy and what we're doing. One of her core statements to me—which you and I would just think is normal—was that she spends a lot of time interacting with adults in her early career. One of the things she said to me was, “You actually talk to the students.”

You're laughing, but that's literally the definition of customer development. That's one of the first things we're going to make sure every academy student does. You need to talk to your customer.

As I've been talking to the students, I'll tell you, these kids know who they are. I was talking to a kid at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. A lot of these kids do go to top schools. They go to top high schools, they have the credentials, and they'll probably get into a top-tier elite university.

I was talking to him and said, “You seem super entrepreneurial. What are your fellow students like?” He said, “Almost all my fellow students are doing extracurriculars solely for the purpose of getting into college.”

Yeah.

“And I do extracurriculars because I enjoy it.”

It's a subtle difference. The difference between those 2 types of students is not obvious on a piece of paper.

Luckily, the academy has the resources to interview all of our students and actually dig into what they've built. As a result, we plan on recruiting the students who are doing it because they love it. That's really important.

10. Why schools need to embrace AI

But, okay, so here's some friction. This generation apparently hates AI. At commencement ceremonies, they're booing AI when they're starting their new year. Even this school year, I heard from a friend that her daughter had just joined Columbia, and the moment AI was brought up, they all booed. There's so much negativity toward it. How do you then build a school around that? Do you expect backlash?

I think those are 2 completely different questions. On the first one, a school that embraces AI is a school that embraces reality and the future. AI is here, and it's coming. It's coming even stronger than it is today.

I believe that most students who dislike AI are not going to be a fit for the academy. Most students are not going to be a fit for the academy. We're only taking 50 students in our founding class fellowship. Maybe eventually we'll get to 500. Maybe we'll be at 1,000. I don't know. But there's only a small set of students who need to be a fit for this thing to work.

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. We're not just about the 50 kids who show up to our school.

We're going to try to be out there talking about how this can be a force for good in education. So what does that look like? What does AI used in a positive way look like in education? Well, first of all, you have to let kids use it to build things, right?

Really, you're not going to ban it like New York—

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?

There will, of course, be limitations on that. They can't just token-max to the moon. But 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 really valuable to be a middle manager who was communicating with the executives and then orchestrating a group of humans to move in a certain direction. Now we have the rise of the super IC, right? My company, Maven, is entirely built on this. 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.

We're using that same philosophy now for a post-high-school education. 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. 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?

The other parts of AI doomerism—some of it's real, right? 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—the average student who gets access to Instagram or TikTok as a child may not be using it in the correct way, right? These things are just tools.

Personally, for example, I have a rule that if you're writing a document, the first draft should be written by you. You sit down and 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 and much more results-oriented. But within my company, that's how I run the company.

The reason is because I still want you to think through the problems that you're dealing with. Of course, everything I write now, I plug into my AI companion and have it help me think through the problem more. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't. 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? I have access to a calculator today. I know it's a very, very trite example, but I have access to a calculator today. If I'm looking at a spreadsheet that my employee shows me—the projections for their new product initiative—and 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 5% improvement in conversion rate is going to affect our growth rate in 2 years, I have no business being CEO of this company.

It's the same thing with AI. If you are going to have AI do a bunch of things for you or with you, you need to understand what it's doing. Creating a cohabitation with AI is critical for that, and that's what we're going to try to create. Hopefully, we'll show other universities how, instead of having an AI war at their university, they can have AI harmony.

11. How AI is changing education

Yeah. I think the problem with most universities is they sit so far away from where their students get jobs or where their careers progress. If you're at a university and you have no partnership or real connection—just job fairs and 5 points of removal from the students and where they go next—I think that creates a lot of bifurcation, friction, and confusion for these students because they're not hearing it from their future employers. They're not hearing it from the companies they could build next because they're just so far away and dislocated.

I was recently walking around Stanford for the first time.

I can't believe it took me that long.

I was like, “This school is beautiful.” If I had no agency, I would totally go here. If I didn't know everything I knew about the world and could actually focus and sit and have a formal education, I would absolutely go here. But sitting in a classroom and being in a time-bound thing makes me very uncomfortable. I just want to go build things and do things and discover and that kind of thing.

Walking around, I saw a classroom teaching coding, and we were kind of joking because I think coding and software engineering now are a history class because we have these tools with AI.

I absolutely believe we still need education. People should go to college. They should get formal degrees, to some extent. A lot of people should. Education should still exist. I don't think we should delete college at all.

But there needs to be some sort of narrative change in what happens afterward. Just because you get an education, AI is not going to remove your job. AI is just a tool at work. The jobs will change, but you'll need to learn the tools on the job and learn how they can help you study more.

I'm going on this little bit of a tangent because I think it's really awesome how close you sit to future job growth, to using AI in a functional way, and also, to your point, being a case study for future universities.

You have all these amazing partners like Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, Stripe, and so many more.

These students will have direct access to what it takes to build a company, what goes on in the inner workings of those companies, and direct access to having a job. And so if you build an academy around AI and your output is jobs, that kind of negates the whole AI takes away jobs narrative that is flooding the market and creating all the scare tactics around AI.

One of our founding partners was helping us build the curriculum, and then we have 30-plus hiring partners. One of them is Shopify. Obviously, Tobi Lütke and my friend Archie, who I worked with at Udemy and who is now at Shopify, are both investors in the academy.

You cannot start a CPG company today without using Shopify, essentially. Tobi and Shopify are using software. Software ate CPG, but CPG still exists. We're still using, like, what is this, Cascade Mountain from Butte Falls, Oregon?

Not an ad.

Yeah, they're not sponsoring this at all, but this still exists. This is a new brand 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. If that happens, that doesn't mean the rest of the world is going away; it means the rest of the world is changing.

I hope that more schools—and there are some, right? Vanderbilt, Northeastern, and ASU are innovating like crazy and embracing the future. I hope more schools do that. As those schools do it, hopefully the academy will be the beacon, the example. That's one of our goals with this thing: to show what embracing AI can mean for education.

It's funny: whenever you say "academy," I'm just imagining a very royal-looking brick building and people in uniforms, but I'm sure this is going to be the Silicon Valley version of that.

It's not going to be anything like that.

Yeah, T-shirts and sneakers, probably.

T-shirts and sneakers. And everyone's going to be reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Everyone will read The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Probably they've already read it by the time they come, honestly.

12. What an AI-native curriculum looks like

Probably. So, as we talk about the curriculum, how do you envision that?

Yeah, the curriculum is one of the most fun parts, I will tell you, because when you redesign something from scratch while thinking about the AI future, it kind of blew my mind—the things that we decided to do. One of the most important things is that you want to preserve 75% to 80% of students' time for doing work on projects and building things.

Instead of having a curriculum where you have a required number of classes every semester or every quarter, and you have to do problem sets for those classes, take tests, and do a bunch of homework and reading, our classes are the reverse. We're still going to have classes on topics like product sense, AI architecture, negotiating, interpersonal skills, and so on. But those classes are going to be didactic only. You will come to class, learn what you learn, and then go build your projects.

Your projects will be applied versions of what you learned in school, but they will not be direct. The reason they need to be indirect is because, in college, have you ever gotten an assigned project like, in a Business 101 class, "Write a business plan"? They'll give you a direct set of parameters for everything you need in the business plan, along with a list of businesses that you can create. By the end of that, there's no creativity, no building, and no agency.

One of the most important things we need to do is design a school that creates and encourages high agency. To create high agency, you have to let students make their own decisions. This is a critical component. So how do you let students make their own decisions while still providing some scaffolding, so people don't just do nothing or go completely off the rails and do things that might be illegal or inappropriate? We certainly don't want that either.

What you have to do is create a regular check-in structure and a mentor structure. Then you have a class schedule that works around the idea that you're creating an environment where students feel like they always have to be building great things. Every week—and we might do this multiple times a week; we're going to test things out with the founding class and work with them to figure it out—you're going to go in front of your entire pod.

Imagine you have a group of 8 students. You're going to tell them what you did the last week and what you're going to do the next week. That's on top of having class a couple of days a week, maybe half the day. You'll spend the rest of your time doing all these different challenges. You'll tell people what challenge you're going to take on, and then you'll report back to everyone about what happened with that challenge.

It's one of the most powerful things in the world. Once you enter the real world, that's how the whole real world works. There is nobody telling you that you have to do anything. You have to decide if you want to apply to that job. You have to decide whether or not you're going to show up to work every day. If you don't, there are consequences, but that's it. It's very simple.

We're designing this to provide enough structure so that students are learning and able to apply themselves, while also ensuring that they're building a lot. I think this sort of peer feedback, with a mentor present to ensure that we're constantly pushing students, is going to be a really interesting modality.

By the way, just to be clear, this is not new. This modality—Oxford still operates under it to this day. There are many other schools around the world that have started to operate in this way, and of course YC, Speedrun, and these other programs have similar modalities. We're taking inspiration from those. We're taking inspiration from Alpha School, which is probably one of the best high schools in the country, and from Montessori. We're creating a builder-focused curriculum that encourages students to work on their own projects and learn the skills they need to be effective on the job.

13. Why high-agency students struggle in college

So funny. Before we were talking, Chris and Katie and I were discussing Alpha School, and we were like, "Where did those kids go after they graduate high school? They're going to get bored by college. Where do they go?"

Yeah. I don't know if it's the first class, but a big class of Alpha students who I've now become friends with are going to college right now. I know one at UC Berkeley and one at Stanford, and they have just started. I'm going to be tracking this like a hawk. I'm going to be meeting with them and understanding what's going on because I agree: I think it's going to be very difficult to go from an environment where you had high agency and were building things.

For me, it was really hard. I found college to be—just to set the context, I think I got a 1490 on my SATs. I got 800s on almost all of my SAT IIs. I got 5s on every single AP; I think I might have had one 4. I was a 3.7 unweighted student. I went to one of the top public high schools in the country. I was a good student.

But throughout high school, I started to focus more of my time on building, which is why I didn't get a 4.0. To get a 4.0 today at the top high schools, you have to give up building things because you have to spend all your time in books, studying, doing all this inane homework, and so on. The smartest kids are questioning this, and they're not doing that.

These builder kids—the specific type of kids that we're talking about—don't always get into the top schools. I got rejected from every single school I applied to except for the University of California system. I went to UC Berkeley, and it was stifling. It was very difficult for me. I realized quickly that I had to completely design my own path.

But I was doing it listlessly, without direction or any peers. I didn't know anyone who was doing the same thing. I had 7 jobs in 3 years. I mostly had jobs overlapping with classes because I could get an A, and I got As in those classes. I knew no one doing it, so I did it poorly.

I agree: these Alpha students are going to come out of high school with this level of agency and this understanding of self-directed learning. They'll know that they can learn things much faster than average, save time, spend 2 or 3 hours a day on schoolwork if they're on the honors track, and spend the rest of their time building things. They're going to realize quickly that there aren't a lot of people in college who are doing that.

That's why I think they're going to come to a16z Academy or try to get into it. Hopefully, we can scale enough to accommodate all of them because I think the first class is going to be really hard to get into. Our goal, obviously, is to scale it enough that we can make this available to more people.

Maybe other academies will open, too. Who knows? Hopefully, they'll be inspired by this. I hope that we can collectively build a sort of post-Alpha opportunity. But I also think that it's not just Alpha School kids. There are kids all over the country who are operating the same way, who have just figured it out and are misfits at their schools.

We want them to come to a place that embraces what they're doing, and we want their parents to be supportive of them. Honestly, I think they are. I think a lot of these parents understand that their kid has incredible upside potential and that it's very difficult to achieve that upside potential if they go to an environment that's stifling.

And so our goal is to create enough structure that they can feel confident that their kid has a good chance, a good future, and a brand that people will recognize in the industry, while simultaneously embracing who they are and what they want.

14. Why the best builders zigzag

Wow. I know we talked about this too, but I resonate with your story so much because I experienced the same thing in college. I was maxing out my credits. I was thinking, “How do I get out of here and start life as soon as possible?” because I felt like everyone else wasn’t doing the same thing. I was maxing out my credits. I had an internship at Google’s incubator, I started a company, and I was doing freelance work on top of that. My entire day was blocked out and scheduled. I really wanted to start.

I’m curious: for super-high-agency autodidacts like yourself, how should people know whether they should apply? What would that look like for them?

Well, can we talk about something real quick?

Sure.

Many people listening to this podcast may think that you and I are unique. Certainly, you’re one of a kind. I’d like to think that I have my own unique traits, but 1 thing I’m curious for you to talk about is this: when you entered the adult world, how many other people like you did you find? As you interview some of the top CEOs and experts in their fields, I’d love for you to share a little bit about what you’ve learned about this culture and group of people. Do the most successful people look like the straight-A valedictorian who went to a top Ivy League school, or do they look like you and me, or somewhere in between? I’m curious what you’ve seen.

I mean, there’s no cookie-cutter answer for that at all.

Well, when you entered the adult world, you became really well connected. You know tons of amazing people. I guess what I’m asking you to talk about is that we’re not the only people who are like this. The adult world is full of people like us.

I will say that it was really hard for me to find people in college who were like me and had the same mentality. I was taking graduate classes as a sophomore; I had just gotten into those classes. It was cool—people were opening doors for me. I was extremely ambitious and very curious, and I had a great time.

I went to NYU and got in for art, but I wanted to get into college for that, and then I shifted to entrepreneurship immediately and focused on business. I took a ton of business classes and Coursera finance classes because they wouldn’t allow me. I did all this stuff and worked my way to get ahead, and then I entered the adult world very quickly. I was in New York, so I was already there.

My peer group was doing similar stuff, but it was more cookie-cutter: get the banking internship, do this, get in line, and start the climb in the professional world. I did not think that was going to be for me. I’m much more of a zigzag-and-figure-it-out person. I wanted to try as many things as possible to figure out what I ultimately wanted to do.

Once I really entered the adult world, it was hard for me to find those peers. I ended up having more friends who were older than me because they had experienced more things later on. I had a lot of founder friends, and I had a much better time finding friends who were founders. As I’ve interviewed some of the top founders in the world, so many of them—Alex Garp, who is dyslexic, for example—didn’t graduate from college. Some changed their careers halfway through. Some started their billion-dollar companies when they were 30 or 40, whatever. Some started in graduate school or dropped out of school.

There was no main archetype, no cookie-cutter example, for any of these founders. The only things were high agency, ambition, perseverance, and relentless curiosity. You will meet a founder and their brain will open up because they’ve thought of everything. They’ve taken every course they can and talked to as many people as possible, but there’s just a totally different level. You’ll feel it and see it.

I think the humanness of this is much different because you also need to know what you don’t know, and you should not be so naive about it. The issue with a lot of early founders or younger people is that they think 1 idea is the billion-dollar idea, and they just want to go after that. They block out the world.

In order for a lot of these people to become who they are, they were sponges. They were no-ego sponges of information. I think you get this a lot from Marc Andreessen and how he speaks, and from Ben Horowitz too. Not to pump their own books, but I read their books. They’re great—really great. It’s that real sponge kind of mentality.

Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. 1 thing that strikes me is that the people who have the most job security are those who zigzag. The people I’ve seen be most successful are those who do that because they are these high-agency individuals, and we’re surrounded by them in our social circles.

These high-agency individuals do not rely on a track. The tracks are getting blown up all the time, right? When a track gets blown up, the problem is that you have no control and no ability to figure out what’s next. Learning the skills of high agency and the skills of being an AI-native builder actually make you kind of bulletproof.

When I got to the Valley—and, by the way, I technically grew up in Silicon Valley, in Fremont, California—but I had no idea what the Valley was. When I say I got to the Valley, I mean when I moved to Palo Alto and San Francisco, eventually San Francisco, and really started meeting people like this. Now I’ve had 15-plus years of watching people’s careers, and I’m amazed at how much more secure their lives are than the lives of the people I know who decided to follow the classic consulting and investment-banking tracks.

The reason is that Silicon Valley, as a magnet for good people, always has work for good, smart, hardworking people who are AI-native builders. You might change companies 3 or 4 times over 15 years; you might change 10 times over 15 years. But if you have high agency and can build, you’re essentially bulletproof. That’s something I think is underappreciated about the Valley: how many different ways there are to be successful here. That was kind of what I was getting at.

Now, to answer your other question about applying: anyone who’s ambitious should apply. The reason they should apply is that they should at least take the time to think about, “What would I do if I were just building for the next 2 years?” Even if they don’t get into the academy, the application process will be fun, it will be extremely challenging, and that will be its own education in what they could do to optimize their college experience.

If you apply and don’t get into the academy, the process of applying, creating a portfolio—which is 1 of the things we expect our applicants to do—and talking about what you want to build and what you’ve built will encourage you to reframe your college experience. At the very least, you can have a college experience similar to the one you and I had. In the best-case scenario, you get in.

We’re not going to say no just because you came to building at 18. If you built something really cool and have talent, we might still let you in. I think there will be a lot of students like that. Then there will be students who started at 13, and it won’t matter because, as you and I both know, a lot of great entrepreneurs started their first company in their 40s.

You don’t have to start your first company at 18, 19, or 20. You can start whenever. As a result, our goal is going to be looking at slope and not experience. We want to know that you are constantly learning, that you’re a sponge, that you’re someone who has a penchant for building things and has done builder-like things.

15. Why you should apply even if you don't get in

We’re going to be totally open-minded to the idea that maybe you were a USAMO participant, so you spent all your time on math and only discovered building in your senior year or something. That’s okay. We’re absolutely going to focus on high IQ and high EQ, so we plan on doing IQ testing, personality testing, and writing tests as part of the second half of the interview.

The first part of the application is a lot easier. It’s just submitting a portfolio and submitting your information, kind of similar to college. After that, we’ll have an in-person interview. The point I’m making is that if you’re a young person today and any of what we’re saying resonates with you, if you’re even curious, I think you should apply and follow along. What we’re doing is at least going to bleed into your life in some positive way.

16. Building a supportive environment for young builders

I know we have a few minutes left, but a large component of this—and the founder-builder journey, too—is failure. How are you going to be teaching the students about failure?

You know, I don't have kids myself. I have lots of friends with kids, and I've been watching what happens when a kid falls and hurts themselves for the first time, or the third time, or the hundredth time. One of the things that's really great about Silicon Valley is that I failed, right? I have big failures.

At Udemy, my co-founder and I had a falling-out, so I left the company. And, by the way, the company ended up being run by other people, and we just sort of watched it from the sidelines. We're very proud of that story, but it was also hard. Then I started Sprig, which raised a ton of money and didn't work out. And now Maven, which is obviously a success, we're promoting my VP of product to be CEO of that company. And now, of course, I'm still raising money for a16z Academy.

One of the greatest lessons of the Valley is that it's not about your failure; it's about your success. When students fall proverbially, like the child or toddler who trips over something and falls on their face, or when they fail at a project, we're going to congratulate them and help them learn from it. I don't believe in this mentality of making failure cool. Failure is not cool. Failure sucks.

Yeah.

Right. Failure sucks. You should do everything you possibly can not to fail. And yet, if you fail, it's okay. Get up and try again. Let's go. What's next?

The “it's okay” part is also important. We need to create a positive-sum, supportive environment. There have been multiple people who have invested in my companies. They've lost money on Sprig. They're still investing in Maven. They still invested in a16z Academy, right? That's one of the things that's amazing about the Valley. It's not worried about the times you fail; it's worried about what you've done right. And just to put a cap on that.

Culture is a critical part of schooling.

It's not talked about a lot. You will not see it on most college websites. You won't see it even on our website. It's going to be hard to explain this in written words, so here in a podcast I can kind of share.

Silicon Valley has an extremely powerful culture. I've traveled all over the world. I've been to refugee camps. I've volunteered in Cartagena. I've been to Palestine. I've been all over sub-Saharan Africa, as well as parts of Asia, India, Bangladesh, and so on. I will say that some of the best humans I've ever met in my life live here in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. The reason is because the culture is about people helping each other.

We plan on creating an extremely positive-sum culture—we call it positive-sum culture—in the academy, where if you're on top today, you may not be on top tomorrow. So you better be nice to everybody. And if you're not on top today but you think you're going to be on top eventually, you've got to be nice to the people who are on top today. Don't take them down through envy or ego fights or anything else.

Positive-sum is a critical part of the Valley. It's one of the reasons I love being here. As someone who cares about the philosopher side of school, not just the builder side, we want to create philosopher-builders who have that positive-sum mentality. The culture of Silicon Valley is part of that.

I'm curious. Well, I guess before that, is there anything we didn't talk about that you want to touch upon?

17. What the Academy program looks like

I think one thing is that we're launching the Founding Class Fellowship, and it's going to start in September 2027. It's 1 year, and there's no tuition. Just to be clear, there's no tuition, but you will have to pay for your room and board, right? We don't offer that. We will have a bunch of partners that we think are great options, and we've found some really good options that are more affordable in San Francisco. But there is still a cost there.

Then, of course, in 2028, pending regulatory approval, we are hoping to launch the 2-year program. The 2-year program will have tuition that is equal to or more than the top-tier private elite universities. I think it's important for us to clarify that the goal of this program is to build a high-value institution, not an elite institution, that delivers so much value that the students think it's absolutely worth that tuition. I think that's really important to share as clarity for this announcement.

The other thing is that the academy is going to be a living and breathing thing. It's going to adapt with AI. As AI changes and evolves, I think one of the core tenets of Silicon Valley is that companies are adaptable. We expect the academy to adapt.

We're putting our name on this. We're going to make it the greatest educational experience of all time, if we can. We're going to do our best. In doing so, we are also going to adapt and evolve. Expect this to be a situation that is evolving with the times.

Have you thought about buying Alcatraz and putting this there?

I'm not sure I want to. We have the exact opposite motif, right? A lot of—

Great real estate.

Maybe Treasure Island. I've seen all these memes on X about what if you built Treasure Island into this amazing place. No, this has to be in San Francisco. This is going to be in the heart of San Francisco. I think that's really important. We want the students to be exposed to the city itself.

18. The people who shaped Gagan

As we close out, I have to ask you: as you've been building throughout the years, I do think performance is a measure of who you surround yourself with, and this is definitely a testament to the school, the academy. But who were those people for you who kept you motivated, and what were the biggest lessons you learned from them?

Yeah, look, I was super unique. I grew up in Fremont, California. I went to Mission San Jose High School. Anyone who knows high schools knows this school. It's one of the top in the country, but it's weird because it's in the top, but the teachers and the administration were kind of at war with the students.

It was not a good school. From a school standpoint, academically speaking, the school did not provide a good education, and it did not have a very effective administration, I think. It was a really unique experience, and through that I met some of my best friends, who are still my friends to this day.

My peer group started in the third grade, and I live a 15-minute walk from my best friends from high school. That will not be the case for the majority of the academy, but for me, my friends Niraj and Vik, and a bunch of friends I met in speech and debate along the way. I've obviously met a bunch of entrepreneur friends.

I remember being on Sand Hill Road. Marco and Jonathan at Thumbtack, and Logan and John were going around, and we were pitching at the same competitions. There have been a bunch of people over my life, but the greatest gift I had is that I had a solid base of people who were my ride-or-die since I was young.

One of the goals of the academy is to make sure that if you don't already have that, you can get that at the academy, or you can get a second wind of it. If you're like me and you already have it, you can get a second group at the academy who are like you. I love that question because, personally, for me, it's been so valuable to be rooted with a group of friends who believe in me and care about who I am and what I do, no matter what.

Whether I've had a great year in the business world or whether it's been a terrible year for me—and I've had both—they've been there for me that whole time. Shout-out to my MSJ crew. It rolls really deep.

I'm sort of one of those guys. I don't know if you've ever watched the NFL. Do you watch—

I used to—

Football. Okay. So, in the beginning of the NFL's most public broadcasts, you'll see the football player name their college or high school.

They get to choose what they say. I'm one of those kids who will always stand for my high school, Mission San Jose High School, as opposed to my college. Obviously, as I've said, I did appreciate what I got from Berkeley, but I just didn't think it was up to snuff. My high school was the place where I grinded, where I had my best friends, and where I made the deepest connections that built me into who I am today.

I want to provide that for people in college, or I want to provide that version for people who, instead of college, go to a16z Academy.

Incredible. Great answer.

Thank you.

19. Favorite book on AI and climate change

I forgot to ask you: What are your favorite books?

Yeah, we were geeking out about books, too. And we're in this gorgeous library talking about AI doomerism. Yeah. I've been an anti-doomer from day one.

One of my favorite books, which is not very well-known, is called Not the End of the World. I found it through Bill Gates, actually, so it has gotten some press. It was written by a researcher based at Oxford, by the way, who now runs an institute. I think it's in London. Maybe it's in both locations.

Her name is Hannah Ritchie, and she wrote this absolute banger of a book that talks about climate change. It says two things, and this is why the book did not become popular: Being nuanced does not go viral. It sucks because, as you can tell from this conversation, I'm very nuanced. I'm actually pro-college, right? I believe in it. I believe in the institution.

I've talked about colleges that I love, and at the same time, I also believe in innovation. I believe AI is going to change the world, and I also think that can be a good thing. This book says that climate change is a very serious problem and that we are actually on track for climate change not to end the world. To hold those two truths together is very hard for people, but it's true.

Do you remember when we had the ozone crisis? When we were kids, we'd get these pamphlets about how Australia was going to burn off because the ozone layer was disappearing. You don't hear about that anymore. Have you ever heard about the ozone in the last 15 years? You know why? Because we solved it. We fixed the ozone layer, Molly. We fixed the ozone layer. It's crazy, right?

Pollution in China is going down, right? We have fixed so many of the world's problems because we make a big deal about them. We do the documentaries as a society. We talk about how things are going crazy. We'll do that with AI, and then we will figure out how to integrate it into society.

The great thing about Not the End of the World is that it is a book about realistically facing the reality of the problems. We were pretty close with climate change. We are still pretty close. Even today, if we don't keep going on our trajectory, there could be major problems. At the same time, if you follow the parabola of how societies go from no development to strong development, you see the peak of negative climate impact—the peak of carbon emissions—and then you see that almost every major Western society is now, on a per-capita basis and on an absolute basis, reducing its global carbon emissions.

America is actually polluting way less today than it did 10 to 15 years ago. Hannah goes through all of this and says that China and India will go through the same evolution. I believe the same thing will be true for AI. I believe in an optimistic future. It's why a lot of my favorite books talk about the realities of the problem and then embrace them, rather than just saying the world's going to end.

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie is a great book.

Fantastic. I'm so glad I asked that question.

Yeah.

Well, Gagan, thank you so much. This was fantastic. Congratulations on the announcement, and apply to the Andreessen Horowitz Academy.

Thank you, Molly.