Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is launching a private school in San Francisco, aimed at turning high school graduates into founders.

The firm is investing $35 million into the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, which will be an independent, for-profit business and expects to welcome its first class of “unusually ambitious young people” next fall.

“There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,” said the announcement (opens in new tab). Instead, students will be encouraged to “build” in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They’ll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco.

“The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era,” Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy.

The school plans to launch a paid, two-year, unaccredited program starting in fall 2028, pending regulatory approval. The firm said it will file an application for that “soon” and expects “to charge an annual tuition similar to that of an elite private university.” Stanford costs around $68,000 a year (opens in new tab).

The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship (opens in new tab), a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students.

A spokesperson for the academy said the campus will be in “the heart of San Francisco” and will “likely be centrally located in a neighborhood near other technology companies,” declining to share the exact location.

Silicon Valley has long glorified skipping college or dropping out to pursue the startup lifestyle. Programs like the Thiel Fellowship — launched by investor Peter Thiel in 2011 — encourage this, offering young people $250,000 to build a company instead of going to school. Similar gateways include short incubator programs like Y Combinator and Z Fellows, which attract college-age entrepreneurs.

The announcement of the academy comes as AI has made many question the value of a college degree and has complicated the prospects for post-grad jobs.

The AI boom in San Francisco is already generating success stories, like the twentysomethings who founded Cursor and Mercor, which quickly rocketed to multibillion-dollar valuations.

In a podcast (opens in new tab) with Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg, Biyani said the school will be a for-profit institution because it “forces us to deliver to the customer.”

The announcement directly addresses parents who might be reluctant to see their ultrasmart kids skip college: “You were always right about how special your child is. We built the academy to prove it.”

“Today’s students are growing up in a completely different world with new capabilities,” Biyani wrote. “The kind of world where teenagers can learn from intelligent machines how to train a robotics model from terabytes of newly open-sourced egocentric video or envision a new business in the morning and earn revenue by sundown.”

He said the San Francisco location would be “a really, really calm, safe and positive environment for students that is also super ambitious.”

The first cohort can include college students, including international applicants, but the school will prioritize 2028 high school graduates. The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty.

Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.

The academy spokesperson said it “will be an in-person, residential program, and we’ll offer co-located housing options for students. Students will also have the opportunity to secure their own housing, but we will highly encourage them to live among their peers.” Biyani said in the podcast that learning how to send a cold email and build people skills is one of the big differentiators for this program.

Horowitz said on the podcast that part of the motivation for the academy was understanding that AI is reshaping the future of work. Rather than teaching students to answer questions, they’ll be asked, “Can you build something interesting?”

“Then you’re a main character and not an NPC,” Horowitz said, referencing nonplayer characters in video games who follow a preprogrammed storyline. “If you want to be a main character, we can help you do that. If you want to be a cog in a machine, then this isn’t going to be the best place for you.”

The group said the decision to switch the order of the venture capitalists’ names was made to signify that the academy is affiliated with, but separate from, Andreessen Horowitz.

As for any companies or ideas that come out of the academy, the venture firm will not take a stake, and the “students own 100% of the intellectual property they create at the academy.”

“They may choose to eventually take on outside investment, but it’s not currently a requirement,” the spokesperson said.

Andreessen Horowitz has been one of the biggest backers of the AI boom, putting billions into OpenAI, Cursor, and other companies.