A wise man takes action immediately upon spotting the first subtle sign of an opportunity, without waiting for the entire day.
Recently, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, has done a very avant-garde thing: it has launched its own “university”.
The first intake of The Horowitz Andreessen Academy is only about 50 students. The school will open in September 2027, with a one-year school system, free tuition, and no university degrees awarded for the time being. A number of tech industry figures including Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Li Feifei are also listed in the faculty, guest speaker and partner network announced by the academy.
Four days ago, American Dynamism, under the a16z banner, partnered with US private equity firm Atlas Holdings to launch Foundry Management: sending tech entrepreneurs directly into industrial enterprises to identify problems and develop products from real production sites.
One project targets young people who have just graduated from high school; the other sends technical talents directly into factories. a16z is continuously pushing forward the timeline of its intervention in entrepreneurship.
a16z, a rather unconventional VC
In 2009, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s name was abbreviated as a16z — there are exactly 16 letters between A and z.
Before becoming professional investors, the two had years of experience in the Silicon Valley internet industry.
Marc Andreessen is the co-developer of Mosaic, an early internet browser, and later co-founded the browser company Netscape. Netscape was one of the most representative companies in the internet wave of the 1990s, and was acquired by AOL for about 4.2 billion US dollars in 1999.
Ben Horowitz also worked at Netscape. After that, he co-founded Loudcloud with Marc, which initially provided internet infrastructure services for enterprises, and later transformed into enterprise software company Opsware. In 2007, Hewlett-Packard acquired it for about 1.6 billion US dollars.
Before officially working as VCs, the two had fully gone through the entrepreneurial cycle from developing products and founding companies to having their companies acquired. After founding a16z in 2009, they also brought this entrepreneurial experience into the investment industry: they not only provide capital, but also help portfolio companies recruit talents, find clients, develop the market, and handle policy and organizational issues.
a16z’s first fund was only 300 million US dollars, and initially there were only two general partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, but it quickly gained a reputation.
One of its most representative early investments was to acquire the majority stake in Skype from eBay together with institutions such as Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan. In 2011, Microsoft finally acquired Skype for 8.5 billion US dollars. It was also in this year that Marc Andreessen wrote a sentence that later almost became a Silicon Valley slogan: “Software is eating the world.”
17 years later, a16z is far from the 300 million US dollar fund it used to be.
As of April 30, 2026, the disclosed assets under management of a16z has exceeded 1 trillion US dollars. In January this year, the company announced the completion of a new round of fundraising of more than 15 billion US dollars, covering multiple investment tracks including Growth, American Dynamism, Apps, Infrastructure, and Bio + Health.
But what really makes a16z stand out in Silicon Valley is not just that the funds it raises are getting larger and larger with more and more capital.
From the very beginning of its establishment, it has been trying to turn VC into a “platform business”.
According to a16z’s own statement, what venture capital firms can provide to entrepreneurs should not be limited to capital and board advice. Therefore, on the one hand, it recruits founders and engineers who have actually run companies and written codes to work as investors, and on the other hand, it builds a large operation team to specifically help portfolio companies solve practical problems in recruitment, marketing, policy, legal affairs, finance and other fields.
What a16z has always wanted to do is never just “invest in a good company”, but to participate in the growth process of a company as much as possible.
A “university” built for entrepreneurs
The Horowitz Andreessen Academy run by a16z is located in San Francisco, with full-time offline teaching mode.
Strictly speaking, however, it is not a university in the traditional sense.
According to the academy’s official website, it is a for-profit education company operating independently of a16z. Its CEO Gagan Biyani co-founded the online education platform Udemy, and later co-founded Maven, a platform focused on online synchronous learning.
a16z is responsible for incubating this project and has invested 35 million US dollars; Marc Andreessen and a16z partner Erik Torenberg have joined its board of directors. The academy has raised a total of 42 million US dollars in this round. In addition to a16z, the investors also include a number of Silicon Valley investors such as Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora, Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, and Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash. Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe are the 10 founding partners of the academy, which will provide support in computing power, curriculum design and internships.
The academy’s first program is called Founding Class Fellowship, which runs from September 2027 to August 2028 and plans to recruit about 50 students.
The first batch of students do not need to pay tuition fees, but they cannot get traditional university diplomas, and the courses they take cannot be directly counted as credits of other universities. At present, the academy has not obtained university accreditation, and students are required to cover their accommodation and daily living expenses in principle.
Its admission method is also different from that of traditional universities.
The academy’s official website puts it very directly: Admission will focus on “proof of work”, that is, what the applicant has actually done, not just what is written on the transcript. Application materials include a personal portfolio website, a short video, a high school transcript and an application essay; standardized test scores can be submitted if available, and recommendation letters are not required in the first stage.
There is no fixed form for works, which can be a piece of software, a product, an original research, a community, an event, or other projects that the applicant has actually led to complete.
According to the current rules on the official website, applicants need to complete high school education before August 2027; those who have already entered university can also apply, but their full-time university experience after graduating from high school cannot exceed two years. Fresh high school graduates will be given priority, and international students are also eligible to apply.
After entering the academy, students do not sit in the classroom listening to lectures every day.
According to CBS reports, the academy does not set traditional exams and assignments, and puts more emphasis on students completing projects on their own. The official website stipulates that each student must work full-time in an enterprise for at least 3 months during this year; in addition, each person has a budget of 5,000 US dollars for overseas research and travel, which allows them to stay in another country for three to four weeks to fully carry out projects outside the classroom.
The New York Post also disclosed that the academy’s founding partners will provide each student with more than 50,000 US dollars worth of AI computing power resources.
The curriculum of this school also has a strong Silicon Valley style.
The courses listed on the official website include technical and industrial courses such as *AI Reasoning Engineering*, *Infrastructure in the AI Era*, *Inside AI Machines*, *Driving the Next Industrial Age*, as well as less common content in traditional universities such as *The Geometry of Luck*, *The Mathematics of Getting Rich*, and *The Science of Long-lasting Relationships*.
What it teaches is not just how to make an AI product, but also how to form a team, how to sell products, how to understand the market, and even how to handle interpersonal relationships.
What is more eye-catching than the curriculum is the lineup of guests and mentors behind the academy.
The list released on the academy’s official website includes Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, and Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber; in addition, there are Li Feifei, co-founder and CEO of World Labs, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Mira Murati, founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, and Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, etc. Students will eventually have access to more than 200 speakers and mentors.
The list does not only include heads of technology companies. Former NBA star Andre Iguodala is also on the list — he has won 4 NBA championships and was elected the 2015 Finals MVP; in addition, there are neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, philosopher Agnes Callard and economist Tyler Cowen.
What is even more “curious” is Bryan Johnson. In addition to founding the brain-computer interface company Kernel, he has frequently made headlines in recent years for his Blueprint anti-aging program: he once tried to receive plasma transfusions from his 17-year-old son, and this year he publicly announced that he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis.
What this school really wants to provide is not just a few courses, but a complete set of Silicon Valley resources: people, companies, computing power, internship opportunities, and access to this circle.
This is easily reminiscent of another famous educational experiment — the Thiel Fellowship.
In 2011, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, launched the Thiel Fellowship. According to the current rules of the program, young people aged 22 and under who have not obtained a university degree can receive 250,000 US dollars in funding within two years, and the program will not take equity in their companies; if they are already studying in university, once they accept this fellowship, they need to leave school and devote their time to entrepreneurship, research or their own projects.
Different from the Thiel Fellowship, The Academy retains the access channel to traditional universities. It even suggests that applicants apply for universities at the same time. If they get offers from both sides, they can apply for a one-year deferral of admission to the university. All intellectual property rights created by students during their time at the academy belong to themselves. The Academy does not take equity or take a cut, and a16z has no priority to invest in companies founded by students later.
TechCrunch has a very vivid description of this: it is a bit like Y Combinator and Thiel Fellowship “had a child together”.
YC has turned entrepreneurship training, mentors and the Silicon Valley network into an acceleration system; the Thiel Fellowship encourages young people to skip university and devote themselves to their projects as soon as possible; The Academy is between the two: it retains the peer, social and growth environment in traditional universities, and integrates enterprises, entrepreneurship and technical practice into the education process at an earlier stage.
Ben Horowitz said: “The training that worked for the Industrial Revolution isn’t going to map perfectly onto the AI revolution.” The talent cultivation method formed in the era of the Industrial Revolution may not be fully applicable to the AI era.
Tools, working methods and entrepreneurial thresholds are all changing, and the way to cultivate people also needs to be retried by someone.
According to the current plan, the academy also hopes to launch a two-year program from 2028 and apply for corresponding regulatory approval. At that time, the tuition fee is expected to be in line with that of top private universities in the United States.
Problems come before companies
The Academy finds entrepreneurs in advance, and Foundry finds entrepreneurial opportunities in advance.
On October 2, the American Dynamism investment division under a16z and US private equity firm Atlas Holdings jointly launched Foundry Management. American Dynamism mainly invests in manufacturing, national defense, aerospace, robotics and other fields, and newly raised 1.176 billion US dollars this year; Atlas has long-term investment in industrial enterprises and completed the fundraising of a 6.45 billion US dollar fund in 2025.
The two sides have provided their most core resources respectively: a16z provides the technical entrepreneur network and capital, and Atlas provides real industrial scenarios.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Foundry plans to recruit about 10 technical entrepreneurs in the first batch, and let them directly enter the industrial enterprises invested by Atlas. These enterprises cover industries such as metal, papermaking, packaging, automotive supply chain, energy and logistics, with a total annual revenue of about 26 billion US dollars.
These entrepreneurs do not need to set up a company first, nor do they need to bring ready-made products with them. They will work together with enterprise management, engineers and front-line staff to find problems from the production process, and then use technologies such as AI, computer vision, automation and robotics to develop solutions.
The solution will be verified in the enterprise first. If the same problem appears repeatedly in different enterprises, it proves that it is not just a customized demand, but has the opportunity to be further developed into a standardized product, and finally an independent company will be established. Foundry will help recruit staff, form the company and raise funds. The technical entrepreneur will serve as the founder and CEO, and a16z and Atlas can also participate in subsequent investments.
What Foundry really changes is the starting point of a company.
Usually, entrepreneurs first come up with ideas, make products, and then go to the market to verify the demand. Foundry, on the other hand, puts technical talents into the industrial site first, so that real demands are exposed first, and then judges whether there are opportunities worth turning into a company.
Arye Barnehama, who is in charge of the Foundry project on behalf of Atlas Holdings, said: The real difficulty in many industries in the physical world is not necessarily that the technology cannot be developed, but that technical entrepreneurs are too far away from the site to know exactly what to make.
Foundry pushes the intervention point of VC to before the formation of the company. But this kind of “moving forward” attempt is not exclusive to a16z.
Similar models have appeared in China’s venture capital circle very early.
In 2008, Legend Star launched the “Entrepreneur CEO Special Training Class”, which was even earlier than its official launch of early-stage investment. It first searched for and cultivated tech entrepreneurs, and then helped projects move towards the industry through investment and incubation, and gradually formed the
