Youth originally meant that there were still many uncertainties in life, but now it increasingly resembles an asset that needs to be realized quickly.

Written by: Beating

Youth originally meant that there were still many uncertainties in life, but now it increasingly resembles an asset that needs to be realized quickly.

In September 2010, Peter Thiel's foundation announced a project called "20 Under 20".

They aimed to select 20 people under the age of 20, giving each $100,000 and two years to do things that "wait for graduation". The first list was released in May the following year, with 24 individuals actually selected. At that time, many media headlines read "PayPal co-founder gives $100,000 scholarships to keep them from going to college".

Scholarships to fund non-college education.

Sixteen years later, Marc Andreessen's a16z put out $35 million to start a new school in San Francisco, Horowitz Andreessen Academy, abbreviated as HAA. The first class will enroll 50 students, planning to open in the fall of 2027.

Paying to let people drop out and spending money to run a school aim at the same kind of anxiety, and the same age group.

VCs willing to spend money have become more anxious. They no longer care what a young person might become in the future, but force those who haven't left the school gate to prove what they have accomplished today.

Rewound Tape

Dropping out is never a new thing.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out at some point. But it is interesting to note when exactly dropping out began to be repackaged as a clear lesson in success.

The stories told by the individuals are actually very different from how they are later recounted by capital.

In his 2005 Stanford speech, Jobs mentioned that after dropping out of Reed College, he remained auditing classes for about 18 months and even took a calligraphy class purely because he liked it. At that time, no one knew what personal computers would look like, and he certainly couldn't predict that ten years later those fonts would be incorporated into the first generation Macintosh at the age of eighteen.

You cannot proactively connect the fragments of your life. Jobs said that only when looking back would you find the connections between them.

But in the later rewound narratives, dropping out was trimmed down to a precise early sprint.

By the end of 2011, Forbes launched the first "30 Under 30", officially welding youth and commercial returns into the same spreadsheet.

But is "the earlier the better" truly a foolproof trump card?

MIT economist Pierre Azoulay examined data from the U.S. Census Bureau and calculated that the average age of founders in the fastest-growing 0.1% of star startups across the country is actually 45. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is most enamored with youth, the focus of success has never landed on those under twenty.

Writing code and building products is always commendable. The subtlety lies in the change of direction. The issue is no longer whether you can succeed, but whether you are worth being forced to mature early.

It is undeniable that the Thiel Fellowship has backed super outliers. By 2022, the total market value of projects it supported exceeded $220 billion, with Figma, Ethereum, and Luminar among its portfolio.

The giants that emerged are real, and the temptation has consequently been institutionalized.

In the influencer industry, kidfluencers easily earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through short videos, prompting states to hastily pass laws to protect minor trust accounts; in the software world, high school students' commits on GitHub and builds on Twitter are directly linked to valuation multiples, converted into talking points for angel rounds.

Algorithms and platforms have shattered the threshold for "being seen," conveniently turning "being showcased" into a new KPI for minors. Likes, follower counts, and the ARR on the books vary in form but are all quantifiable, hastily ripening, and early labeled indicators.

"The earlier the better" has thus transformed from a rebellion of geeks breaking away from the system into a conspiracy for venture capitalists to demand financial returns from minors.

Collateral

The hard criteria for the Thiel Fellowship are no older than 22 and not holding a diploma.

At the time of application, you can be a registered student, but once selected, you must go through the withdrawal procedure. If you don't leave the school gate, you can't take the money.

It doesn’t force you to immediately register a company; the terms simply state an abstract requirement for "substantial progress." You may not have written a single line of runnable code, but you must have a definitive blueprint in hand.

At the investor's table, this certainty becomes the only collateral for you to exchange for a $100,000 check.

Thiel repeatedly describes higher education as an expanding subprime bubble. Many in Silicon Valley believe this rhetoric; a16z partner Chris Dixon wrote back in 2013 to denounce diplomas as traps that people pursue simply because others have one, too.

However, this time, Marc Andreessen is personally setting up a school, which makes his identity particularly nuanced.

In 2007, he pragmatically advised young people in his blog like an East Asian parent, suggesting they attend the best schools, filling up GPAs, research projects, and internships at big firms.

This current radical technology pope in Silicon Valley is himself the purest beneficiary of the university system.

Until he published "The Technology Optimism Manifesto" in 2023, he held growth, competition, and accelerationism as absolute justice, with the ivory tower included among the outdated resistances obstructing acceleration.

When this originally belonged to VC pitch meetings gets directly inserted into a university's admissions brochure, the borders of education are completely erased.

Narrow Gate

Sitting at the new school's admissions table are three seasoned veterans of the venture capital game: Marc Andreessen, Erik Torenberg, and operator Gagan Biyani.

The backgrounds of these three practically define the school’s character. Erik Torenberg’s On Deck is core to the venture capital circle, and in 2025, Torenberg’s podcast media company Turpentine was packaged by a16z, with him joining a16z as a GP; CEO Gagan Biyani founded Maven and Udemy, stumbled during the venture cycle, but has grasped the flow of traffic.

People who have been repeatedly kneaded by capital during the venture cycles turn around to define what constitutes a "good student" in Silicon Valley.

This school launched with an extremely standard Silicon Valley halo.

The school has raised a total of $42 million, with a16z leading a $35 million round. The official website features a lineup of top-tier companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVIDIA, Palantir, and Stripe, collectively referred to as "founding partners."

However, these companies are neither legally constituted co-investors nor do they provide any safety net for student employment or internships. More often than not, it is a tacit brand rubbing-off affair.

So, who can squeeze through this door?

The first line of the admissions page gives the answer: "We're looking for people who are already in motion."

The school defines agency (proactivity) as having taken practical action towards things of interest, and admissions prioritize proof of work as the most significant criterion.

Interestingly, the credentials from the old system have not been entirely abolished.

The first round of screening eliminated recommendation letters and application essays, requiring personal portfolios and videos; but at the same time, high school transcripts and standardized test scores remain indispensable.

They seek your outlier talent while unwilling to abandon the filters of the system.

The conditions offered by the school sound like charity; the first cohort pays no tuition, students retain all project IP, the school does not take equity or a share of revenue, nor do they seek preferential rights.

It is not a traditional university but an early-stage incubator with extremely high thresholds, specifically picking ready-made talents.

The school’s intentions are hidden in privacy clauses. During the application phase, the platform collects your code repositories, papers, business plans, and revenue; during your study and after graduation, it continuously tracks your project progress, offers, salary levels, and fundraising amounts.

The first 50 slots, along with top-notch mentors and a corporate matrix, are forming a new form of prestige certification.

Ultimately, it is merely replacing the old Ivy League diploma with a new badge certified by top VCs.

Recasting

John Marbach was the first person to receive a Thiel Fellowship check in 2011.

That year, he dropped out of Wake Forest and created a collaborative email tool called Glider, successfully enrolling in Y Combinator; later, Google put out a free competing product, leading to his company rapidly losing its path.

In 2013, Marbach decided to return to school to finish his studies, at the cost of giving up a $50,000 opportunity that was not yet secured.

When the venture capital circle reviews this incident, they often think the cost of failure in entrepreneurship is simply the project dying and investors losing everything. But years later, when Marbach talks about that money, he completely reframes it beyond winning and losing.

He says that after leaving school, he realized that the hardest hurdle in dropping out was actually the people around him:

"It’s really hard to create your own peer group."

You can create a company with code, but you can't recreate a class in a vacuum.

"The experiences of those college years," he says, "are unique in a lifetime."

Zooming out, we find that within the Thiel Fellowship, two groups of people have always stood:

One type is absolute outliers like Vitalik Buterin, who built Ethereum from scratch; but more often, individuals like John Marbach and Eden Full, who even after creating solar devices, ended up going back to Princeton to finish their mechanical engineering degrees. Tara Seshan from the class of 2012 insisted on completing her undergraduate degree before claiming her prize, reasoning that she wasn't prepared when she graduated high school and that university provided her the time to mature, make friends, and make mistakes.

Dropping out is one way to go, returning to school is another.

In the investor's model, switching majors partway through, starting a student publication that no one reads, or conducting foundational research with no commercial output in five years, are all unrecoverable sunk costs.

But what about a twenty-year-old?

The most expensive part of education lies precisely in its allowance for an individual to stay a few more years without a product-market fit.

Finding PMF for a company is better sooner than later.

Not so for individuals.

Prescription

Traditional universities are indeed gravely ill.

The average tuition for private universities across the U.S. is as high as $45,000; among those who obtain a bachelor’s degree in 2024, nearly half graduate with debt, with an average debt of $29,560, and the total student loan debt in the U.S. surpassing $1.66 trillion.

Universities are essentially going along with the flow. Since everyone comes to find jobs, universities straightforwardly turn education into a publicly calculable ROI, with a Gallup survey showing that sixty percent of students admit to enrolling primarily to secure a high-paying job.

Universities have themselves transformed education into a calculable return venture, which precisely provides Silicon Valley with a reason to break in.

But is the remedy devised by Silicon Valley truly miraculous?

Project-based learning is not a new invention; WPI and Olin College have been doing this for decades. What HAA is really doing is merely trapping a person's exit in the two narrow paths of "either start a business or go to a high-growth tech company."

Moreover, Silicon Valley has its share of history with failed educational endeavors.

The previous wave of projects claiming to disrupt higher education was called Lambda School, which raised tens of millions of dollars with the motto "pay tuition after you find a job" and ultimately faced heavy penalties for allegedly exaggerating employment data.

Even earlier, Minerva sold a campus-less global study program, while the Austin University co-founded by Palantir sold an anti-political correctness ideology.

The current HAA is selling tickets to Sand Hill Road.

Same soup, different spoon.

If this so-called new education merely replaces GPA with ARR and substitutes obedience to professors with compliance to investors, then it is merely transferring the same group of young people from one conveyor belt to another.

Temporarily Useless Years

Old schools stubbornly cling to exam papers, while Silicon Valley promotes GitHub commits and six-figure ARR. On the surface, it is a clash between old and new rules; underneath, it remains the same logic of asset selection.

They are both impatiently compressing an eighteen-year-old into a few strings of easily comparable metrics.

However, the most valuable aspect of this period is precisely its unfinished nature. There is no pressure to monetize, no need to anxiously monitor retention rates and growth curves daily.

When a16z et al. price "already in motion" as an entry ticket, the business world is actually colluding to deprive young people of the power to hesitate and make choices ahead of time.

Does an eighteen-year-old who has not yet found a lifelong interest, who has not yet built a code repository, and who has not yet generated even a bit of buzz on social media still deserve a quality education?

The HAA admissions page does not answer this question. It probably does not need to, for in the funnel of venture capital, the focus is on conversion rates and hit rates; it was never intended to be an inclusive facility, only a narrow gate left for outliers.

Even if this school genuinely produces a few unicorn founders in the future, it only proves that this selection machine accurately picked those 1% who have already sharpened their knives.

It proves nothing about common sense regarding growth.

School should be another place. It should at least allow a newly adult individual to comfortably spend a few years in a state of "not knowing what is useful yet."

If a society no longer permits even twenty-year-olds to "waste" a few years to dawdle, experiment, and look at the world aimlessly, then it is truly regrettable.