'We believe in college': inside Andreessen Horowitz's $42m unaccredited academy that will charge Harvard prices without degrees

Andreessen Horowitz is betting that college can be remade as a venture-backed product. On Tuesday, the firm backed a new San Francisco academy led by Gagan Biyani, the Udemy cofounder, and put $42 million from a16z and other investors behind a one-year program that calls itself an alternative to the usual path.

The pitch is blunt. Students will get no degree, no accreditation, no federal aid, and no job guarantee. The founding class, expected to be about 50 students in September 2027, will pay no tuition, but it will get $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel budget. The school then plans to ask regulators for approval to turn that into a two-year program in 2028, with prices Biyani says would sit somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000 a year.

This is not being sold as a retreat from higher education. Biyani says, “we believe in college,” but not in the idea that young people in San Francisco should have to show up with a startup already in hand. The school is aiming at what he calls “pre-idea founders,” and its homepage leans hard on the idea that students will be around big names from the tech world, from Sam Altman and Jensen Huang to Satya Nadella, Mira Murati, Fei-Fei Li and Travis Kalanick. Most of those people are expected to come as speakers, not teachers.

The teaching setup is more layered than the marketing. Some people, such as Max Mullen and Steven Sinofsky, have agreed to teach multi-session courses. Others will hold office hours. The course list stretches from “The Craft of Selling” to “AI Inference Engineering” to “Origins and Innovations in Digital Computing 1940–2025,” but Biyani says instruction is not the main product. The main product, he said, is giving students room to pursue their own goals.

The year is split into campus time in San Francisco, travel abroad, and a summer co-op at partner companies. A16z’s network does a lot of the heavy lifting here: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe are among the named partners, though Biyani says not all will hire students. Another set of firms, including Databricks and Boom Supersonic, have not promised jobs either, only interviews or consideration. The academy is leaning on proof of work for admissions, while still asking for transcripts and test scores. That is a very Silicon Valley sentence.