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By T.A. McCann —

Skip College to Start a Company? Startup programs compared...

When I was on the board of Lake Washington Girls Middle School, and my daughter was 12, I had a wish. I hoped that when my daughter got to college age, she would have a real option to skip it and go straight into entrepreneurship. She didn't take it. She chose college, and it worked really well for her. She is now starting a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm proud of her, and I'm glad she had the choice.

That is the point of this post. I never wanted every kid to skip college. I wanted the option to be real for the ones who should. I also talked for years about starting a high school focused on entrepreneurship. I never did.

This week, a16z did a version of it...

The news

On Tuesday, a16z launched the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Tuition is free. Each student gets $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel budget. Admission is based on proof of work: what you built, shipped or earned. There are about 50 seats. There is no degree, no transferable credit and no federal aid. The first class starts in San Francisco in fall 2027. Gagan Biyani runs it, and $42 million is behind it.

Most of the coverage treats it as something new. It is the newest chapter of a story that started 15 years ago.

Thiel started this in 2011

The Thiel Fellowship is one of the originals. It launched at $100,000 to skip college and build something. Today it offers $250,000 over two years, with no equity. More than 300 fellows have come through, including Vitalik Buterin, Dylan Field, Lucy Guo and Austin Russell. One podcast puts the value created by fellows at more than $750 billion.

Peter Thiel was way ahead of his time. He was ahead in many kinds of investing, and certainly in investing in young people this way. He thinks in a contrarian way, and that often leads to change. In 2011, paying teenagers to leave school looked strange. Then came others. They got more interesting as they went.

  • 1517 Fund was started by two of the people behind the Thiel Fellowship. It backs dropouts and students with grants and pre-seed checks.
  • Z Fellows gives you $10,000 for one week. You don't have to quit anything. Cursor and Cognition came through it.
  • Neo Scholars gives you $25,000 and a semester in San Francisco. Ali Partovi mentored the Cursor founders for about two and a half years before he wrote their seed check.
  • Palantir put 22 high school grads into a paid fellowship instead of sending them to campus. That is a job program, not a founder program. It still shows where the labor market is heading.

The pipeline is also moving earlier. Alpha School in Austin does two hours of AI-tutored academics, then spends the afternoon on real projects. Their fifth graders ran an Airbnb, then a food truck. Acton Academy has 200+ campuses and runs Children's Business Fairs in 16 countries. (Alpha's results are self-reported, so take the numbers with a grain of salt.)

Why are VCs doing this?

I hear two theories.

The deal-flow theory. Get to the best people before the company exists. Erik Torenberg said venture capital is about discovering and cultivating talent, and he expects to invest in founders who come out of the school. Neo works the same way: find them early, mentor them, invest.

The education theory. This is the future of learning, and someone will build a very large business on it. Biyani calls higher education a $2 trillion industry.

I'm an investor, so I'm not neutral. My honest answer is that both are true, and they don't conflict. Good investors have always hunted for talent early. Now there is a better place to do it.

Why now

You can learn almost anything online, fast, with AI as your tutor. Especially technical entrepreneurship. Biyani told Sourcery that the leading AI researchers are no longer sitting on university campuses. About 75 to 80 percent of Academy time goes to self-directed projects.

Ten years ago, skipping college meant giving up the classroom and the network. Today the classroom is a laptop. The network is what these programs sell.

The comparison

I built this table to make the options easy to compare. The first three rows pay you to leave school. The next two replace or bypass college. Then come programs that run alongside school or a job, programs inside college and K-12 schools.

Look at the "What you get" column. The money is easy to compare. The terms behind it are harder, and they matter more.

Program

What you get

Who it's for

Leave school? / Where

Thiel Fellowship (2011)

$250K over 2 years, no equity

Age 22 or under, full-time on a project

Yes. Virtual-friendly, fellows are based all over the world

1517 Fund (2015)

$50K to $1M checks (equity); Medici grants from $1K (no equity)

Dropouts, students, high schoolers, deep-tech scientists

Not required. Format not stated

776 Fellowship (2022)

$100K over 2 years

Young builders

Reportedly yes. Format not stated

Horowitz Andreessen Academy (2026)

Free tuition, $50K compute credits, $5K travel

High school grads, or students after 1 to 2 years of college; about 50 seats

Replaces college. In person, San Francisco

Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship (2025)

$5,400/month for 4 months, path to a job

High school grads not in college

Yes (a job, not a startup). In person, New York City

Z Fellows (2020)

$10K (optional), one week

Technical builders of any age

No. Mostly virtual, final day in SF or NYC

Neo Scholars (2017)

$25K, equity-free, one semester

Technical undergrads, 20 to 32 a year

Semester off. In person, San Francisco

O'Shaughnessy Fellowship (2023)

$100K over 12 months, no equity

Adult builders, no credentials needed

No. Entirely remote, open worldwide

Dorm Room Fund (2012)

$40K to $250K (equity)

Student founders, run by students

No. Campus hubs in the Bay Area, New York, Boston and Philadelphia

UW Buerk Center

Certificate, competitions ($87,500 in 2026 Dempsey prizes)

UW students

No. In person, Seattle

Babson College

Required first-year course where you start a business

Undergrads

No. In person, Wellesley, MA

Alpha School (2014)

2-hour AI academics, afternoons on real projects

K-12 students

Comes before the decision. In person, flagship in Austin

Acton Academy (2009)

Learner-driven school, 200+ campuses

K-12 students

Comes before the decision. In person, local campuses

Terms change. Check each program's page before you apply. Some, like O'Shaughnessy for 2026, have already closed their application windows.

Most people should not drop out

Here is the part that gets lost in the headlines. The people running these programs mostly agree.

Biyani says college is still right for most students. Fortune's headline on the Academy was "We believe in college." Partovi says most students aren't ready to drop out. That is why Neo is a semester, not a leap.

My daughter's story is the one I see most often. She took the academic path, and it was right for her. Plenty of people do.

My own story is mixed. I went to college on a swimming scholarship, so I didn't end up with much debt. Swimming and engineering together were a key part of my college experience. I'm really glad I studied engineering. It gave me an engineer's mindset, and I still bring it to my entrepreneurial journey.

But when I went to college, I had no idea programs like these existed. At the time, I don't think they did. Today, high school students have far more options. If this menu had been there when I was 18, I might have taken one of these options.

That is the group these programs are for. They know what they want to do, and they know it early. For them, waiting four years can be expensive.

So I don't think the answer is "everyone should quit." I think the answer is more doors, and better signs on them.

Some people should go to trade school and get straight to work. (One caution: Quartz points out that the recent jump in trade-school enrollment is largely a demographic mirage, and apprenticeship capacity is still short.) Many should go to college and use it well. A few should take the $250,000 and go.

And a group in the middle gets ignored. They choose college and build the skills inside it. UW's Buerk Center awarded $87,500 to student startups this year. Babson was just ranked No. 1 for undergraduate entrepreneurship for the 30th year in a row, and every first-year student there starts and runs a business. I wrote about five reps any student can start on campus without a program or permission.

I've met people from every group. The ones who do best are not the ones who picked the "right" path. They picked one on purpose and started doing the work.

The gap after the cohort

Look at the equity terms in that table again. The Thiel Fellowship takes none. Z Fellows offers $10,000 that converts to stock at your next priced round, at a $1 billion valuation cap. Dorm Room Fund invests on a SAFE. 1517 gives grants with no equity or IP, and writes equity checks too.

If you are nineteen and this is your first company, those differences matter a lot. Most people in that spot don't have the vocabulary to compare them. They don't know what a SAFE is, what dilution does to their stake, or what a cap table is. Then a lead investor hands them a term sheet. But focusing on ownership and dilution at this stage of your entrepreneurial journey is not right either. Focus on skills, network, momentum...

I call this the startup fluency gap. It is the distance between doing the work and having the words to talk about it with investors, advisors, and your first hires. Most of these programs give you money, a network, and a brand. Few of them teach the language. That is why we built Lev Learn. It is a free, plain-language guide to startup vocabulary. It covers more than 150 concepts across 11 topics, including fundraising, product, hiring, and legal. It is written for founders who want to understand the conversation, not nod through it. Here is how it defines product-market fit: the point at which a product satisfies a real need for a specific market well enough that demand begins to pull the company along, rather than the company pushing the product.

If you want to start now, read these three concepts first. Learn how to run a customer discovery interview. Find a design partner. Try founder-led sales. And know the stages the programs are funding: pre-seed, seed and Series A.

If you are still choosing between the doors in that table, start there. It costs nothing, and you don't need an account.

If you are past choosing and building, that is what Lev is for. Lev is an AI co-founder that works the whole arc with you: customers, positioning, pricing and the pitch. The same terms show up inside the product as you work on tasks like market sizing or fundraising, so you learn the word while you use it.

The programs in this post solve the "before." They find you, fund you and connect you. The "after" is the hard part. Someone still has to show a nineteen-year-old with $25,000 how to become a founder.

What I'd like to hear

If you are in one of these programs, or turned one down, or chose Babson or UW or a trade instead, I'd like to hear why. And if you are building something and want a co-founder that never sleeps, try Lev. Send me the story: tam@helpshare.com.

References and further listening

Podcasts

Articles and blog posts on the Academy

Articles on the other programs

On college and the trades

My own posts

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