Why a16z is Building a New School for the AI Era | Ben Horowitz

This should be the greatest time in the history of humanity to be young. This is like Thomas Edison's time or Henry Ford's time or so forth. But the challenge that we have is everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer

exist. Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z. And one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation

across

the board.

It's critical for young people who don't have that billion dollar idea to not settle for the million dollar idea and instead go and explore more. We're building a new school for the AI era and that means redesigning everything. Let's go pursue it

all and let's get an output on that.

Picture HAA five years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful?

My hope is...

The education system we have today was largely built for the industrial age. What should it look like for the AI era? In this episode, I sit down with Ben Horowitz and Gagan Biani to introduce the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy, a new school designed around learning by building. We discuss why AI is changing the skills young people need, why the Academy focuses on projects and real-world experience, and what students can learn by being immersed in San Francisco alongside people building technology today. We also explore why Ben thinks this could be one of the best times in the history to be 18, and why judgment, people, and learning by doing may matter more than ever.

Well, Ben, Gagan, we have a big announcement today.

Yes.

we are announcing Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

Yes, we are. And we're very excited about that. Super pumped.

So let's get into the story of how this came to be and let's talk about what it is. Ben, ever since I joined a year and a half ago, we've been working on bringing this to life. We found the perfect CEO and co-founder in Gagin. But you've been thinking about this at ACNZ for years before. So talk about what was the impetus for why we wanted to make this happen.

Yeah, we kind of came at it from a couple different directions. So the kind of first thing was, One of the things we noticed is for young people, kind of college works really, really well if you want to be a scholar or kind of a professor or that kind of thing. But it's a little bit of a weird proposition if... You just want to get a job or you have an idea to start a company. It's a very large financial investment and a very big time investment. And most of the stuff that happens in college isn't around that. It's around other kinds of things. And there's being a well-rounded person, this and that and the other. But if you ask an 18-year-old, why do they go to college? It's to get a job, usually. And that kind of doesn't always translate. So that was kind of one thing where like, you know, I wonder if, you know, we got a lot of jobs, maybe we can help with that. And then on our side, from a hiring standpoint, I think that college really evolved a lot in the last, I would say, four or five years in terms of the kind of students they're looking for and then what skills they have. In our world, the skill sets needed are