Would We Send Our Kids to HAA? (Not Boring)

Packy McCormick and Alex Danco on the launch of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA) and what it means for how to raise and educate kids in an era when no traditional career path is safe.

Connections

Packy McCormick and Alex Danco respond to the launch of HAA — a program for college-aged builders in San Francisco run by Gagan Biyani (co-founder of Udemy) — not as tech bloggers analyzing a startup, but as parents asking a real question: would we send our kids there?

The central argument tracks with Kyle’s City Building and Alternative Education interests: HAA is “a Nashville for Nerds” — a residential environment designed to help ambitious young people find their peer group and build real things together, filling the same social-formational role college does but oriented around building rather than credential-accumulation.

Tyler Cowen’s observation is cited: the most valuable thing college provides nowadays is being more likely to get married and stay married — the peer group, the shared experience, the witnesses to adult life. HAA proposes to provide that same esprit de corps through real work rather than resort-like dorm living.

The larger argument is about parenting philosophy in an AI economy: with no safe career path existing into the 2040s and 2050s, optimizing for credentials is self-defeating. The better heuristic (from Packy’s 2022 essay) is to “expose your kids to a lot of things early, and then help them go as deep as they’re able to go on the things that excite them the most.” Obsession is the leading indicator of both mastery and resilience — whether it’s chess, puppeteering, or building companies.

Forrest Heath (Somos, Panandina) is quoted on never losing innate childhood curiosity, and Micky Malka (Ribbit Capital) on how the most successful young founders he’s seen are the ones who spent COVID on YouTube sucking in information — naive enough to think anything is possible, with time to figure it out.

The HAA a16z team’s actual experience working with 19-20 year olds gave them the empirical evidence: young people rise to responsibility when given the chance. The program is the institutionalization of that observation.

The HAA model

• Founded by Gagan Biyani (co-founder of Udemy) as CEO
• Backed by a16z (Horowitz Andreessen Academy)
• Residential, San Francisco — not a college or university; an alternative
• Target: college-aged people who are weirdly obsessed with building something
• Format: learn to build, live with a like-minded peer group, access experienced builders

Parenting observations

Packy’s neighborhood in Brooklyn: parents pay $65k/year per grade from Kindergarten to guarantee admission to a good high school — ~$650k total for a good high school placement. The authors note this makes no sense in a world where no credential path survives intact into the 2040s.

Taylor Swift is the illustration: her parents had no musical ambitions for her. She got obsessed with musical theater, walked into record labels at 11, learned guitar until her fingers bled, and was the youngest songwriter Sony/ATV had signed by age 14. The lesson: you can’t make your kids practice until their fingers bleed if they don’t want to — and you can’t make them stop if they do.