Andreessen Horowitz wants to build founders from scratch, before college even gets the chance to shape them.
The venture firm is launching a school for high-achieving high school graduates, structured as a hybrid of a trade school, a startup accelerator, and Peter Thiel's Fellowship Program. Instead of funneling teenagers toward four-year degrees, the academy appears designed to teach practical skills and startup fundamentals directly, then plug students into a16z's network the way Y Combinator does for existing companies. Details on curriculum, funding, and admissions have not been disclosed.
The move inverts a familiar Silicon Valley story. The industry has spent decades romanticizing the college dropout - Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg - while still relying on elite universities to produce most of its talent pipeline. a16z's bet is that identifying promising teenagers before college, rather than pulling them out mid-degree, is a more efficient way to manufacture the next generation of founders. It also doubles as a talent-sourcing and brand play for a firm that has increasingly positioned itself as a media and ideology outfit, not just a check-writer.
Thiel tried a version of this over a decade ago, paying young people to skip college outright, with mixed, hard-to-verify results. Whether a16z's version produces founders or just well-networked twenty-somethings remains to be seen.