BREAKING: a16z Launches The Horowitz Andreessen Academy with $42M in Funding Yes, a school. The Academy is an unaccredited, residential alternative to a 4-year degree in San Francisco, led by Founder & CEO Gagan Biyani (@gaganbiyani) (Udemy, Maven). Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) & Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) are on the board. Investors include Adam D'Angelo, Tobi Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo & Shyam Sankar. Applications open today for a Founding Class of roughly 50 students, starting Fall 2027. 1 year, no tuition, admitted on proof of work. Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit & Stripe are Founding Partners, with 30+ hiring partners behind them. We cover: › The $42M raise and the runway behind it › Portfolios, interviews and IQ testing in admissions › 75% to 80% project time and weekly pod check-ins › Tuition, partnerships and equity as the 3 revenue lines › Why the Academy is telling fundable 17-year-olds to wait "The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is we are not gonna prioritize your grades. We're gonna prioritize proof of work." 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Gagan Biyani, Founder & CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy (01:01) Why this Academy is different from college (04:44) Started his first company at age 13 (08:30) Building a school for Silicon Valley (11:55) Raising $40M for a School (14:06) "You Did What?" - Proof of work over grades (19:08) Should young builders really start companies? (22:37) Why this is different from YC and fellowships (27:35) The Academy is for young builders (31:33) Why schools need to embrace AI (37:18) How AI is changing education (44:17) What an AI-native curriculum looks like (48:51) Why high-agency students struggle in college (53:12) Why the best builders zigzag (1:02:19) Why you should apply even if you don't get in (1:04:36) Building a supportive environment for young builders (1:08:54) What the Academy program looks like (1:10:44) Why the Academy is in San Francisco (1:11:19) The people who shaped Gagan (1:14:41) Favorite book!

You had to learn to use a computer. What if it learned to be you? Introducing Sonder Labs, an applied AI lab building your digital twin. Today, we’re excited to share that a16z @speedrun is backing us. Our work starts with vision models small enough to live privately on your laptop - always on, seeing what you see. The more your twin learns about your workflows, priorities, and relationships, the less you have to explain. And when it sees a way to help, it prompts you before you prompt it. Ajit and I met deploying some of healthcare’s earliest LLM systems at Anterior. Working alongside nurses, we saw early what the rest of knowledge work is now confronting. There’s already more intelligence than we know how to use. We’re the bottleneck. The tools we use capture what we produce, but lose much of what makes it ours: the iterations and rejected options behind the final result, the taste that defines what good looks like, and the intent behind our decisions. And the work doesn’t stay still. Priorities shift, workflows evolve, and exceptions become routine. Your world can’t be described once. It has to be learned continuously. Generic models are powerful, but they can pull work toward the average. We’re betting on AI that helps people become more themselves: sharper in taste, bolder in judgment, and more distinctive in how they work. Thank you to @JoshLu for believing in our bet on open-weight models way back when it wasn’t obvious, and to @_CallMeMacy and @fromevanwang for keeping our feet on the ground and getting us in front of the right people. Oh, and we’re hiring! If you or someone you know is obsessed with on-device inference, teaching models how people work, or shaping how humans and AI work together, message us.

Need more reasons to apply for @speedrun 007? How about access to enterprise buyers and hands-on sales training? Sound too good to be true? It's not.

A billionaire once told me: When you feel stuck, go sit in the most expensive hotel in your city. Order a coffee. It works every time. Here's what that room does to you: