Something interesting is happening in education. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is backing the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new school in San Francisco designed around AI, real-world projects, mentorship and technology-company experience.
Its founding class is expected to begin in September 2027 with about 50 students in a one-year, tuition-free fellowship. But the interesting part is its admissions philosophy: instead of focusing primarily on grades, the Academy places significant emphasis on proof of work, what applicants have actually built, researched, launched or led.
Think about what this could mean for young Nigerians. Instead of simply saying, “I want to become a software developer,” you could build an app. Instead of saying, “I am interested in AI,” you could create an AI tool. You could launch a website, conduct research, build a community, create an automation, start an open-source project or solve a real problem affecting people around you. Your project does not need millions of users. What matters is being able to show the problem you identified, what you built, how you built it, what you learned and what happened after you launched it.
AI makes this even more interesting because individuals now have increasingly powerful tools for researching, coding, designing, prototyping and experimenting. But simply knowing how to use ChatGPT or another AI tool is not the achievement.
What you create with it is. A portfolio showing a real product, research project or useful solution can communicate your abilities far more clearly than simply writing “I am passionate about technology” on a CV.
The Academy's model puts this idea at the centre: don't only tell people what you want to do, show them what you have already done.
The Academy is also unusual because students will spend at least three months working inside a company, with listed hiring partners including OpenAI, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Stripe, Coinbase, Palantir and Replit.
International applicants are welcome, and the founding fellowship has no tuition, although students remain responsible for living expenses. The early application deadline is November 5, 2026, while the regular deadline is January 15, 2027, provided places remain. But you don't have to attend this Academy to learn from its approach.
Start building your proof of work now. Pick one real problem, spend 30 days researching and building a solution, document the process and publish the result. Build another project. Improve it. Create a portfolio. The Academy is still a new experiment and has no long-term graduate record yet, so nobody can say whether this model will replace traditional university. But it raises an important question for the AI era:
If technology makes it easier for individuals to build, should education focus more on what students can actually create?
What do you think, would you encourage a young Nigerian to pursue a path like this, or is traditional university still the safer route?
