Episode #96: a16z's College Alternative, Running From the Luxury Bus, Is the Music About to Stop?

Charles Hudson (0:00)

I think right now what we're playing is this gigantic game of musical chairs. And I think there's a set of firms who are essentially have their hand on the chair, and they're just like, well, no, whatever the music stops, I already have a chair. I think the real danger in musical chairs is if you don't have your hand on a chair, you're at risk. But I think there's a set of firms in our industry who have a chair. And no matter how this turns out, they're gonna remain in business because of their brand, because of their performance, because of their relationships with LPs, for other reasons. And I think that's very different. I think then you can be like, we're just gonna go full maxi, and we're just gonna keep dancing because we don't need to be ahead of the music stopping.

Mia Farnham (0:37)

It's the week of September 21st. Welcome to The Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.

Welcome to The Learning Corner by Precursor. I'm Mia Farnham, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will be talking with the articles and good reads that caught our team's attention over the past week. Our first piece comes from the Wall Street Journal, written by Catherine Binley and also probably a million other threads that you saw on social media. This piece in particular is titled The Tech Elite is Funding an Alternative to College. Andreessen Horowitz is putting $35 million behind the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an unaccredited two-year program in San Francisco for students aged 16 to 22, led by Udemy co-founder Gagan Biani, with Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI signed on as founding partners, offering compute, software, and access to their offices. The pitch is essentially, don't drop out to start a company, come to school with us instead. With up to 80 percent of students' time spent on project-based learning, like building an AI model or shipping a product, plus co-ops with those partners who've joined on. The founding class starts a tuition-free one-year program in fall of 2027, and the full two-year version, pending regulatory approval, will carry tuition in line with elite private universities. There was so much chatter on this in the past 24 hours, and skeptics like Brown University's John Friedman pointed out that proven track records and learning alongside people whose paths look nothing like yours still matter. But Eric Thornburg framed the logic plainly from his point of view, quote, venture is the discovery and cultivation of talent. And that's what universities are too. Obviously, I wanted to pause for your thoughts and reactions to the news and just the trend of education should be changing more broadly.

Charles Hudson (2:24)

I think this is going to be an interesting experiment. I think the history of VCs trying to disrupt education has been difficult, particularly for folks who've tried to come in and tech enable everything, that the track record of those ventures hasn't been great. In some cases, the things they pioneered or tried out ended up making their way into other institutions. And so, I don't know, I went down the rabbit hole of the Montessori school thing in the New York Times. And I think education is one, other than health care, I might argue education is even more sensitive issue for families than health care. I think this school has one thing going for it that most of the other attempts at education reform or like new models haven't had. I think before people were like, yeah, maybe dissatisfied with the status quo, but the status quo still feels like the most safe, predictable, reliable way to become a successful person. And I think with a lot of the AI doomerism and a lot of the, I think, not just doomerism, justified skepticism or questions about what does this mean for humanity and education, there's a window to try things that are more radical, both within the system and outside of it. And I think in some ways, my hope for this school is that I talk to a lot of younger folks who they prefer project-based learning. They like being hands-on. They learn by doing, not learn by being lectured to or talked to. They want to get their hands dirty. Not every student, but I think for students who learn that way, this could be a really great opportunity to get that hand. I think that's a message that's percolating its way through higher education more broadly. I think anytime Andreessen Horowitz puts her name on something, it's going to attract attention. It's going to attract attention both from their fans and from their haters. It's interesting, we're in campus, and I think that team is, in my opinion, doing amazing work to make on ramps to higher education affordable and accessible for people who couldn't do it before in a way that doesn't leave them saddled with debt. And I personally like models where you don't have to destroy the existing ecosystem. So for me, the big experiment will be how much does the, can I call it the BAA or the BHA?