a16z 宣布创立 Horowitz Academy：重塑 AI 时代的高等教育与创业者培养

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.

Ben Horowitz: 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.

Gagan Biyani: Let's go pursue it all and let's get an output on that.

Jason: Picture HA 5 years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful? My hope is

Jason: well Ben Gagan we have a big announcement today.

Ben Horowitz: Yes.

Jason: We are announcing Harowitz and Jason Academy.

Ben Horowitz: Yes we are and we're very excited about that. Super pumped.

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

Ben Horowitz: Yeah, we kind of came out at it from a couple different directions. So the the kind of first thing was you know for well one of the things we noticed is like for young people um kind of college works really really well if you uh want to be a scholar or uh kind of um you know 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 expensive long-term proposition and it teaches you mostly things that have very little to do with what you're going to end up doing. And in the AI era that's becoming dramatically more so. And then on the other side Gagan has been thinking about this for a decade-plus. And so putting those two things together made it a really unique thing for us to add to the mix and provide.

Jason: Yeah. And you know, we've been individually been thinking about this for, you know, over a decade. You and your many business partners have talked about what would a college look like if you rebuilt it from scratch. Gagan, is there anything else you want to say about the the the

Gagan Biyani: Yeah, like he was it was kind of one of those things where you go like we have this idea and then we meet a guy he's like, I've been thinking about the same exact thing. And then with AI coming along, it was just like the gears just kind of set in motion for like something really really special.

Jason: Yeah. And I I think also you know we as a firm have also backed many you know things in the space. There's a lot of people trying to do micro-schools and boot camps and things like that. But they're either really small scale or they're just training you for a job in a narrow sense, not really providing that full collegiate experience or an alternative value prop that is truly truly competitive.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. So I think that you know we're kind of starting out um a little more specific and then we'll you know and really at the core is let's learn how to build a system. Yeah.

Ben Horowitz: Uh and you know I think that's just ends up being very different. The other thing that you know the other reason that nobody could build this kind of school before is like previously in software you had to spend four years learning all the underlying software engineering stuff before you could build any kind of system. But in the AI era you can actually start at the system. You can start at the architecture and work your way down. And that is so different than kind of the bottom-up model that you had previously. And so that means that you know an 18-year-old can actually build a system and then learn the pieces of it as they go, as opposed to having to learn all the pieces and then hopefully 10 years later getting to build a system. That's the world they're going to live in.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah, I I completely agree. We're building a new school for the AI era and that means redesigning everything. And I think what's really exciting about that is that it flips the whole model on its head. Instead of having to learn all the prerequisites before you can do anything interesting, you start with the interesting thing and then you learn the prerequisites along the way in context. And that's what I think is really exciting.

Jason: Yeah. and and students will have the opportunity to uh like when I when I was in college it was so divorced from from the actual practice of technology. Ben, talk about if you're 18 today, what would you think about this moment? What would you be excited about, you nervous about?

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. So I I would be thrilled to be 18. I think um it is like one of the best times in history to be 18 and and it's understandably scary because the world is changing so fast. But when the world changes fast, that creates massive opportunity for young people. Because all the people who know how the old world works, their knowledge is becoming obsolete. And the young people who understand the new tools and the new ways of doing things have a massive advantage. You can build things so much faster than ever before. What used to take a team of 50 engineers two years, one person can do in a weekend with the right tools. And so the leverage that a young person has today is just unprecedented in human history. And that means you can go after really big things much faster than we're used to.

Jason: Talk about how even though it's so easy to build um you still want to have experience, relationships, connections, spend time together. Why is that still so critical when the tools make building so easy? Talk a little bit about that.

Ben Horowitz: yeah so I I think that um you know the if if you're young and you see something that you go oh my god I think I'm the only person in the world who sees this and I have to go pursue it right now, like if you really have that billion-dollar idea, great, go do it. But for most people, what you have is a million-dollar idea or a feature. And if you go pursue that too early, you get locked into something small and you miss the opportunity to build the relationships, the network, the broad set of skills that will actually set you up for a 30-year career. Being around other brilliant people, learning how to work with them, building a network of people who are going to go on to do incredible things—that is the foundation for the rest of my career.

Jason: Yeah. We always talk about builder skills but also people skills. You've written a couple books on it. You you you um talk about all the time internally.

Jason: Is that something you knew uh when you were 18 or in college or how do you how do you learn people skills? how should we teach it to our students etc.

Ben Horowitz: Well look I think the main thing and is to be around people and and it it's you know people of often talk about you know leadership and communication and all that. But you can't learn that from a textbook. You can't learn that sitting in a lecture hall. You learn it by interacting with people, by being in messy human situations, by trying to convince someone to work on your project, by having a conflict with a teammate and figuring out how to resolve it, by trying to sell something to someone who doesn't want to buy it. It's the friction of human interaction that teaches you people skills. And that requires an environment where people are working together closely on hard things, not just sitting in rows listening to a lecture."

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. I think one of the I mean, absolutely one of the most important things we want is to develop people's skills.

Gagan Biyani: And uh one of the core tenants of developing a skill like that is osmosis.

Gagan Biyani: You need to immerse the student in the envi social environment in which these which the humans are. And specifically, I mean building things with other people, getting feedback, negotiating, pitching, recruiting. You can't just be a solo coder in a dark room. You have to learn how to communicate your vision, how to inspire people, how to deal with difficult personalities, how to align incentives. That only happens through constant, immersive social interaction in an environment where everyone is trying to build ambitious things.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. 100%. Related. Mark and I just commissioned this research report on Gen Z. And and one of the findings was that it's the generation that has the highest variance and fragmentation across the board. You have some young people who are extraordinarily driven, capable, learning at 10x the speed of previous generations, building companies at 17. And then you have other people who are completely lost, disconnected, overwhelmed by the chaos of the world. Traditional institutions are built for the median, which doesn't serve either group well. We want to create a place for the highest-agency, most ambitious young people where they can push each other and learn at the pace they're capable of. I'm very excited about it.

Jason: Yeah. The Let's talk about the importance of this being in California in the extended Bay Area. You know, Ben, you grew up in in in in Berkeley. Um,

Ben Horowitz: Republic. Absolutely.

Jason: Yes. Exactly.

Ben Horowitz: Which at the time was like 10,000 miles from Silicon Valley, even though it was only

Jason: like a half hour drive.

Jason: Yeah. And I I think it's so interest because you grew up in in California, so you know that it's not just sort of a a tech hub, but it's a whole culture. How do you see the geography playing a role here? Why does this have to be in the Bay Area, and what is the opportunity here?

Ben Horowitz: Well, I think the big thing is it's where most companies, great companies in America get started and then America is one of the greatest entrepreneurial engines in the world. And within America, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is the epicenter. The density of talent, the density of capital, the density of people who are working on the frontier of AI is higher here than anywhere else on planet Earth. If you want to build a career in technology, being in the physical proximity of the people who are defining the future gives you an unfair advantage. You can start your career right in that place.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. Yeah. San Francisco is your campus, right? The campus is not just the walls within the school, but it's the entire Bay Area ecosystem. The companies, the meetups, the hackathons, the founders, the investors. Every major technological shift of the last 50 years started here and then expanded out that way

Ben Horowitz: and litigated here.

Gagan Biyani: Yes. both metaphorically and literally.

Jason: Ben, talk about the decision to make this a separate company. We went back and forth on this for for a while of why Harwitz Academy should be its own standalone company rather than just an internal initiative within the firm, while still staying deeply connected with with the firm and you know at large.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. So I think the thing that the firm brings that's extremely unique is we are comprehensively connected to basically everyone in technology—from the early-stage founders to the Fortune 500 CEOs to the policymakers to the leading researchers. But a school needs its own dedicated leadership, its own culture, its own operational excellence. If it's just a project inside a venture capital firm, it won't get the singular focus that building a generational educational institution requires. It needs to be its own company, with Gagan and the team waking up every single day thinking about nothing else except how to make this the best educational experience on Earth. We're not about limiting ambition around here.

Jason: Totally. And and talk about why it had to be a for-profit or put differently. Another thing we said in previous conversations is when an institution is non-profit, the incentives get completely misaligned. They're serving donors, they're serving government grant makers, they're serving faculty tenure committees, and the student experience ends up being this disjointed product.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. So look I mean the the whole thing is if you're young it kind of goes back to our earlier conversation. If you look at traditional non-profit universities, who is the customer? The customer is the donor who gives the endowment, or the government agency giving research grants, or the faculty who want tenure. The student is almost an afterthought. When you are a for-profit company, the student is the customer. Period. It completely aligns our incentives: we only succeed if our students succeed, if they get amazing jobs, if they start transformative companies, if they build incredible lives. That simplifies the equation quite a bit.

Ben Horowitz: uh and you know what do they need and what's going to create the best life for them and so that simplifies the equation quite a bit.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. Yeah. the the profit motive forces us to deliver to the customer and our job at the end of the day is to make sure our students get massive value out of this experience. That relentless focus on student outcomes is a core tenant actually of the academy.

Gagan Biyani: yeah similarly One of the core tenants of the academy is is uh curiosity and and you know there's this quote uh education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire

Gagan Biyani: and um you know we're moving from this like kind of like push model to you know these grades and all this stuff you have to memorize, toward a pull model where students are pulled by their own curiosity. Like when Steve Jobs had this interest in calligraphy

Gagan Biyani: and that didn't seem like that would you know obvious what it would lead to but in fact it It of course led led to quite something extraordinary in the Mac typography. And Ben, you've always been interested in rap music.

Ben Horowitz: Yes.

Gagan Biyani: And you you were pursuing your interest at a very young age. I

Ben Horowitz: still am. Yeah.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. Exactly. And um it it maybe wasn't obvious at the time how that might lead to uh something, but it's it's made you a unique business person and made your life, you know,

Ben Horowitz: and a better storyteller, which is a key part of what I do. Um and so,

Ben Horowitz: yeah. know I I and that's definitely kind of important in the context of the academy and what we're trying to do in in terms of encouraging wide-ranging curiosity. You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. If you force an 18-year-old to only study things that have an obvious, immediate practical application, you kill the serendipity that leads to real innovation. Steve Jobs studying calligraphy or my obsession with hip-hop—those seemed completely useless at the time, but they ended up defining who we became. There are many places that can serve a standard rigid curriculum; we want to cultivate genuine curiosity.

Jason: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. And I think it's important that the builder mentality apply to uh interests that are not obviously about AI or building software. For students who have creative passions or diverse interests and wonder how that fits in, uh, this um, what might you say there?

Ben Horowitz: Well, I think look, I think that's um, again, difficult to teach in a classroom, right? Uh, and here's the thing that I always tell CEOs, um, is, you know, and look, a lot of them read my book, so I don't want to, you know, but that book doesn't teach you how to be a CEO in the sense that, you know, you can read every book ever written on how to play football. But like if you get into an NFL game and you're playing quarterback, like nothing in a book is going to teach you to deal with like somebody some 300 lb monster rushing at you while you're trying to like figure out who to throw the ball to. Like you actually have to do that in order to learn it. And I think that um you know, you kind of have to do it to learn it. And so a lot of what we're going to orient the academy about is like okay, can you put a team together? Can you do it? Um, and that's, you know, there'll be less on the line. It'll be more like practice than the game. Uh, but you know, that's that's the way you learn that you you kind of learn those decision- making. You know, what does it cost you if you hesitate on the decision? Like what is it what does it mean to not resolve a conflict? Like what are the consequences? Um, and you can't you can read about that.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. Um, and I can tell you about that, but until you know that feeling, you know, that that that horrible feeling, um, you're not really going to learn it to the level that you need to do it to like run a company or that kind of thing.

Jason: To that end, because of the tools are so good, our resources are so good, it's easier than ever to do something um, once you know what you want to do. And so, the constraint often comes on what's worth working on, how do you spend your time? If if you were uh, 18 today,

Jason: because there's, you know, there's so many different trade-offs. How would you think about?

Ben Horowitz: Well, I think you know a lot of it comes down to um you know what you're interested in, what your kind of skill set matches and you know what what's some problem that you know about uh that you can solve. And there are you know there there's there's so many diseases that are so destructive. There's um you know all kinds of uh challenges with the environment. There's real challenges in the integrity of our election system and so forth like is there a technological answer to that? Um you know and and so on and so forth or is there just a systems answer? Uh and you know depending on what problem you're like dang we need to fix that. And then by the way, what always happens with entrepreneurs is it's kind of like scientific discovery. You go to fix, you're like, we're going to go get to like a cure for uh you know, pancreatic cancer, but along the way you find, oh no, like we can solve this other thing uh that's also important because we discovered something there or or whatever. you know, most kind of scientific discoveries and entrepreneurial ideas end up being accidental in some way and that you're going to solve a hard problem and you find some other hard problem that's in the way of you solving that hard problem that ends up, you know, being the thing that that becomes the the idea. And that that's why I believe 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.

Jason: Yeah.

Ben Horowitz: You know, a lot of young people are not yet exposed to anything beyond what a teenage life in includes. And one of the real core values of the academy is we're going to expose you to a a much wider range of what happens in the real world.

Gagan Biyani: Yeah. And look to try and fail at a really hard problem the value is in the learning. So you people say oh Silicon Valley uh embraces failure. Well not all kinds of failure right the failure where you learn a tremendous amount and then you know you you've earned a secret.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah.

Gagan Biyani: By going out there trying to solve a hard problem and not being able now you know why that problem's so hard to solve. Okay. So then what are the subpros and you know what are the related problems and can you solve one of those and that knowledge that you earn by failing is what we value here and that's the same kind of thing that we would value at the academy is like what did you learn by doing?

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. Picture HA 5 years from now. What do you hope that we've achieved? How would you determine if we're being successful? Talk about what you envision. Well, I think that you know in five years there there's many things that would made it success. One is that you know we have graduates um who have great careers that they love um and have built like or has started really interesting companies. You know maybe they probably wouldn't be successful in that time frame or you know whatever you consider a success. Uh and that you know we've learned um as the academy to uh like what really works and can we kind of extend that and expand that so we can get more different kinds of students in. you know, maybe not just okay, technology is interesting to you, but you're really interested in these other things and get people who can solve all the problems of the world or, you know, become uh incredible creatives and, you know, the creative world is changing, too. Now, you know, when I talk to my creative friends, they're like, it's amazing because I have an idea about like a feeling that I want to convey and I can absolutely do it in every medium now. I don't I'm not just restricted to my thing. I can make a full-length feature film. I can make a movie. I can I can make a song. I can make a song. I can score a movie. Uh and so now like everything is possible. And so I think, you know, it's a just a wonderful time to be able to manifest um your ideas and get your ideas out in in every kind of medium. And we want to facilitate that across the board, not just, you know, kind of in our traditional uh lanes. Well, it's going to be incredible to to build that future out with both of you and all the students who join us.

Jason: All right.

Gagan Biyani: So excited. Yeah, very excited.

Ben Horowitz: Thank you.