Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen attend the 2024 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony in Los Angeles. Marc Andreessen is the cofounder of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new Silicon Valley-funded educational venture.

“It’s San Francisco or nowhere,” the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new Silicon Valley-funded educational venture, declared in a Sept. 22 announcement. The school promises to turn ambitious students into successful entrepreneurs by connecting them with the city’s powerful tech elite.

The unaccredited institution’s founding partners include Google, OpenAI and Stripe. There will be no traditional grades, tests or homework. Nor traditional teachers. Instead, students will “learn from Silicon Valley’s most storied founders.”

The academy joins a growing number of private educational ventures that promise to turn youthful ambition into business success. In 2025, billionaire tech investor and Stanford dropout Joe Liemandt touted Alpha School’s existing network of private kindergarten through eighth grade and kindergarten through 12th-grade schools — which have largely replaced teachers with artificial intelligence — as “the end of school as we know it.” In New York City, Founders School has sweetened the deal with a provocative promise: make $1 million in profit by graduation or get your tuition back. The refund of the $150,000 per year tuition comes with conditions. So should our enthusiasm.

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These schools say they teach more than how to start a business or to be entrepreneurial. They promise to teach students what success looks like and who deserves it. But when becoming........

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