06-reference

not boring haa alternative college

2026-09-23·reference·source: Not Boring·by Packy McCormick with Alex Danco
educationparentinga16zcareer-uncertaintytalent-development

Would We Send Our Kids to HAA?

Packy McCormick and Alex Danco co-write a personal essay reacting to the launch of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA), an a16z-backed residential program for college-aged builders in San Francisco founded and run by Gagan Biyani (Udemy founder). Rather than a standard "is this disrupting the university" think piece, the two write as parents asking whether they'd actually send their own kids. Their answer: they don't know, but they've landed on a parenting philosophy — expose kids to many things early, then help them go deep on whatever grabs them, because no career path (law, medicine, finance, even coding) is safe from AI disruption over a 20-year horizon. They cite Taylor Swift's early obsessive specialization and Tyler Cowen's point that college's main remaining value may be the peer group, not the credential.

Why this is in the vault

A rare personal-register piece from Not Boring's usual tech-strategy register, directly relevant to RDCO's own daughter-raising context and to the founder's broader thesis about the erosion of "safe" career paths under AI.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

The essay's central claim — "there is no set of schools and degrees that can guarantee a safe career into the 2040s and 2050s" — is the same structural read the founder already acted on when he rejected the traditional employment/safety frame in favor of building RDCO around agent capability (see project_income_seat_gap_400k). Their prescription (expose broadly, then go deep on whatever a kid is self-motivated toward, because the value is compounding curiosity and resilience rather than a specific credentialed path) is a useful external validation of the same optionality logic the founder applies to his own career, now reframed for his daughter (born ~May 2023, per user_family_context). It's a low-stakes but genuine data point for how the founder might eventually think about school/enrichment choices as she grows.

⚠️ Sponsorship

Two separate disclosures apply:

  1. Explicit paid sponsor block. The issue opens with a direct ad for Reducto (document-ingestion/OCR infrastructure, used by Scale AI, Harvey, Toast, Vanta), tied loosely to the essay's "how kids learn" framing ("if your business' models learn from big, complex files, let Reducto help teach them") and includes a migration-credit CTA. This is a standard Not Boring sponsor unit, unrelated in substance to the essay content, and doesn't bias the parenting argument.

  2. Structural conflict — undisclosed in the piece itself. Co-author Alex Danco works on a16z's New Media team (he references "working alongside some 19-20 year olds on the a16z New Media team" in the essay itself). HAA is an a16z-founded and a16z-backed institution. An a16z-affiliated writer co-authoring a warmly favorable personal essay about an a16z portfolio/house program is a structural sponsor relationship — the piece never states that Danco's employer is the entity being written about. Read the favorable framing of HAA accordingly; it is not an independent assessment.

The core argument

No career path is durably safe from AI disruption over a 15-20 year horizon (math, law, even medicine are all named as vulnerable), so the optimal parenting strategy shifts from steering kids toward "safe" credentialed paths to exposing them broadly and then supporting deep specialization on whatever they become self-motivated to pursue. Institutions like HAA are read as one instantiation of this logic — a "bundle of life experience" plus real stakes and a peer group of similarly obsessed young builders, in the tradition of what college friend groups and shared-hardship experiences already provided, but built explicitly around the belief that credentials matter less than curiosity, resilience, and the ability to make things.

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