Tech leaders launch college alternative in San Francisco for ‘ambitious young builders’

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hopes to shape the next generation of tech leaders through a tuition-free alternative to college. 

Instead of slogging through exams and worrying about grades, students of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy in San Francisco will start companies and build artificial intelligence products. The founders plan to open the academy in fall 2027. 

Admissions for the yearlong, unaccredited academy, which was announced on Tuesday, is currently open to high school students and some college students. The program, which is described as a “highly selective school in San Francisco for the most ambitious young builders after high school,” plans to offer students a travel and research budget as well as “$50,000+ of compute credits,” according to a blog post announcing the academy. 

In lieu of semesterlong courses and an established curriculum, the academy’s educational model will be built around short classes, work experience at tech companies and guest lectures from well-known entrepreneurs such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive.

The school hopes to start a two-year program in fall 2028 after securing regulatory approval, wrote Gagan Biyani, the academy’s CEO and co-founder of online education companies Udemy and Maven. 

“The focus of The Academy is on building — which we believe is the most valuable thing humans can do to learn to become a productive, curious and happy adult,” Biyani wrote in the Tuesday blog post. 

The school’s founding partners include some of the largest tech companies in the world: Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and Palantir.

Biyani wrote that the school will be based in San Francisco because of the city’s density of tech talent, which is the “kind of place where you might run into the next billion-dollar entrepreneur over lunch or dinner.”

The academy has raised $42 million in investments from the eponymous VC firm and other funders. 

This story was originally published by EdSource.