In my senior year at the University of Utah, I sat in a classroom where business, science, and engineering students debated for two hours whether a novel computer imaging technology should go after the oil and gas market or the medical imaging market. I had led the design of the course the year before, as a junior in finance. Having never taught a college class, much less designed a curriculum, I found myself in way over my head. I started talking to everyone I knew, and several people I didn’t, including the former vice chairman of Corning, who had built that company’s first formal technology commercialization process.
The course was the heart of the Lassonde New Venture Development Center, the first program to come out of Pierre Lassonde’s first gift to the David Eccles School of Business in 2001. It was envisioned as a multi-disciplinary cohort of business, science, and engineering students working to build an engine to help generate spin-outs from technologies developed in labs on campus. Dean Jack Brittain asked Troy D’Ambrosio, an area entrepreneur, to head the program as executive director, and I was selected to be his first student director. Together we designed the program, heavy on guest lectures and peer teaching. Engineering students taught materials science. Marketing students taught how to size a market.
When I applied to MBA programs, this formation story became an essay that got me a ticket into a credentialing pipeline. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA), announced this week and covered by news media, seeks to sidestep the credentialing pipeline by offering the type of formation that I received in what was at the time an atypical experience at a public university. And it anticipates doing so in person, in San Francisco, with students encouraged to live near or with one another. That’s not unlike what we’ve built at Lassonde Studios, a residential builder community of over 400 beds at the University of Utah that helps students have transformative experiences in entrepreneurship.
I now lead that institute, the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, which makes the HAA my competition. I hope it succeeds anyway.
One thing that was remarkable about the announcement was how it described testing collaborators as “higher education’s most underrated function.” As an example, it describes the student who joins a club on a whim and ends up running it. In 2001, I was that student. What the club produces is something the announcement doesn’t name: mutuality, the desire and capacity to create value for others and not only yourself.
The design the HAA announced offers extraordinary access: Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Patrick Collison, and other leaders of the industry visiting to lecture, the greatest entrepreneurs, and investors of the last quarter century. As great as access is, mutuality doesn’t arise from it. It comes from responsibility to a community, and that responsibility has to be designed in.
After 10 years of experience with Lassonde Studios, our team has some views on why mutuality matters in communities of entrepreneurial education, and we’d like to suggest three mechanisms we hope HAA will consider adopting.
Student Leadership Creates the Position. “For students, by students” is one of our founder Pierre Lassonde’s guiding principles for the Institute, and it continues to be our North Star. I was given my first shot at a professional internship by Devin Thorpe, who ran a boutique investment bank in our community. He watched me lead the student business plan competition while he served as an expert at our workshops and as a judge, and hired me based on what he witnessed and not what I said in an interview. Today, student leaders at Lassonde still interact with industry professionals side by side, not seated opposite a lectern. Luminaries who meet students as an audience will not be able to build that same connection. The HAA’s unrepeatable asset is its founding class. Let that class build the institution.
Mentorship Turns Access into Formation. When I worked for Devin, he was exacting in how I built financial models. He showed me how to preserve relationships with people leading investments we turned down. And when I got lax on my daily start times, he taught me that consistency beats brilliance. Visiting luminaries can tell students lessons, but mentors working beside students catch them when they stop living them.
Ritual Marks What Gets Finished. Pierre Lassonde has his 10 Rules of Life, and one of them is “never miss an occasion to throw a party.” At our Institute, we look to rituals to celebrate thresholds: demo days, pitch events, meals with peers, and masters. Ending a venture deserves its ritual too. Closing up a venture because it’s not the right venture, or not the right time, or not the right team, and marking that closing in front of peers, helps remove the stigma that would prevent the next person from even trying.
Communities without mutuality are simply collections of consumers.
The founding class won’t pay tuition. Fortune reports the class “will be about 50 students starting Sept. 2027, and it’s tuition-free.” I’m all for initiatives that level the access playing field for high achievers. Earlier this month, in “Free Time Isn’t Free,” my second response to Paul Graham’s essay on university entrepreneurship centers, I argued that unstructured time is a purchased good and that somebody has to be willing to pay for it. HAA has paid for it (everything but housing — not exactly cheap in the Bay Area). But the real cost of this design isn’t money, it’s control. Giving students control to design and lead programs, to publicly end a venture, and to depend on each other early is harder for well-funded institutions like HAA, because the institutional resources are there to do those things for the students.
In my business school application essay, written 20 years ago, I called my student leadership experience at Lassonde “the most intense, exciting and life-altering educational experience I have had.” I hope HAA succeeds, for the sake of its students, and for the benefit of ours and every other learning community of builders. I look forward to learning from their experience.
