a16z launches Horowitz Andreessen Academy for 18-year-old talents

On September 22, a16z announced it will found the Horowitz Andreessen Academy in San Francisco, aimed at young people who have just graduated high school or have only attended one or two years of college, and it also accepts international applicants. The first cohort is expected to enroll about 50 people, entering in September 2027, with a one-year program and full tuition waiver. The project has raised $42 million in startup funding, of which $35 million comes directly from a16z itself.

The resources students receive include over $50,000 in computing credits provided by partner companies and a $5,000 travel and research budget, at the cost of going to a partner company to work full-time for at least 3 months during the year. The first 10 founding partners include Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe.

But according to the plan, subject to regulatory approval, the school intends to shift to a two-year program starting in 2028 and charge tuition comparable to elite private universities, which Fortune estimates at about $60,000 to $90,000 per year. At the same time, it does not have formal education accreditation, does not award academic degrees, cannot apply for federal financial aid, and does not promise full-time jobs or paid internships after graduation. An institution that claims to recognize the value of college plans to charge high tuition comparable to Harvard's, yet what it gives is not a formal diploma.

The way this school operates cuts student time into three parts: Pursuits are self-directed projects, where students can start companies or do frontier research; Courses are modular short classes ranging from two days to four weeks, including hardcore technical courses such as AI research and models, as well as a course called The Geometry of Luck; Co-ops are full-time placements inside companies. The annual schedule is roughly concentrated study in San Francisco from September to April of the following year, an overseas study trip in May, and an internship at a company from June to August.

The admissions method best reveals the underlying logic: it completely skips transcripts and standardized tests, looking only at so-called proof of work, meaning what products applicants have actually built, what projects they have launched, how much money they have earned through their own abilities; even applicants under 18 can apply directly. Selecting people by what they have made is the classic logic by which venture capital screens early-stage startup projects, and now it has been transplanted unchanged onto 18-year-olds.

The official website lists more than 200 mentors and speakers, including Jensen Huang, Fei-Fei Li, Sam Altman, and Travis Kalanick, but most serve only as guest lecturers. CEO Gagan Biyani admits that lecturing in the traditional sense is not mainly what they plan to do; those truly confirmed to personally teach courses are hands-on executives such as Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky.