a16z Just Launched a School

<p>Gagan Biyani, Founder &amp; CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy (fmr Co-Founder of Udemy and Maven), joins Sourcery from a16z’s San Francisco office to unveil a new kind of school built for the AI era.</p><p>Backed with $42M from a16z and investors including Adam D’Angelo, Tobi Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo and Shyam Sankar, Horowitz Andreessen Academy is an AI-native, unaccredited residential program designed for some of the world’s most ambitious young builders.</p><p>Its Founding Class will bring roughly 50 students to San Francisco in Fall 2027 for a one-year, tuition-free fellowship. Instead of optimizing for grades, tests and credits, the Academy plans to optimize for proof of work, high agency and building real projects.</p><p>Students will learn alongside a network that includes founding partners Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe, with 75–80% of their time intended for projects and building.</p><p>Gagan and I discuss why AI is forcing education to change, why he believes traditional college still makes sense for most students, the rise of the “super IC,” why young founders shouldn’t rush to raise venture capital, what it means to become an AI-native builder, the importance of failure, and why Silicon Valley itself is central to the Academy’s model.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Gagan Biyani: </strong><a href="https://x.com/gaganbiyani"><u>https://x.com/gaganbiyani</u><strong> </strong></a></p><p><strong>Molly O’Shea:</strong> <a href="https://x.com/MollySOShea"><u>https://x.com/MollySOShea</u></a> </p><p><strong>Sourcery:</strong> ⁠<a href="https://x.com/sourceryy"><u>https://x.com/sourceryy</u></a> <br></p><p><br></p><p>𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊</p><p>YouTube: <a href="https://youtu.be/5JEjv-JlYo8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://youtu.be/5JEjv-JlYo8</a><br></p><p><br></p><p>𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒</p><p>• <a href="https://brex.com/sourcery"><strong>Brex</strong></a>—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, &amp; travel. <a href="https://brex.com/sourcery"><u>https://brex.com/sourcery</u></a> </p><p>• <a href="https://zonefrontier.com/"><strong>Zone</strong></a>—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: <a href="https://zonefrontier.com/"><u>https://zonefrontier.com</u></a>   </p><p>• <a h