Tech Giants Back Andreessen Horowitz’s Alternative Tech Academy

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz launched an alternative school for rising tech talent, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (Sept. 22).

The idea is to keep budding entrepreneurs from dropping out of school to launch a company and instead attend the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, according to the report. The firm is investing $35 million in the two-year, unaccredited school, based in San Francisco and geared to students aged 16 to 22.

Despite its name, the academy will function as an independent business overseen by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the education technology platform Udemy, the report said.

Founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe, according to a Tuesday announcement written by Biyani. They will provide access to software and compute, and they will open their offices for lessons, the WSJ report said.

“The idea is to create an AI-native education offering so that these students can be ready for jobs at the top leading tech companies, or to start their own tech company,” Biyani said, per the report. “In the modern world, knowing how to build and ship things is even more important than it’s ever been.”

Students will spend up to 80% of their time on projects like building an AI model, creating a product or interviewing industry experts, according to the report. They can also part in “co-ops,” basically internships, with founding partners.

There is some skepticism around the new model, the report said. John Friedman, dean of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, told the WSJ that students will benefit from having industry titans speak to them, but there are advantages to schools with proven track records, experienced teachers, and environments where students can interact with others in different fields.

Meanwhile, Rutgers University and RWJBarnabas Health partnered to launch an innovation hub powered by Amazon Web Services, supporting AI development for what is slated to become one of the country’s largest public medical schools.

Dr. Amy Murtha, dean of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and founding dean of the future Rutgers School of Medicine, told PYMNTS in an interview published Monday (Sept. 21) that the promise starts with helping physicians handle the increasing complexity of their work.

“Some of those things will be really essential to improving care delivery and improving the physician’s ability to manage large complex data, that in healthcare continues to get increasingly more complex,” Murtha said. “So, it allows us to manage that data in a way that helps us to provide better care.”