The real reason Marc Andreessen is urging billionaires to homeschool their kids

Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen.

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

• Marc Andreessen told billionaires to homeschool their children at the Sun Valley conference.
• The legendary venture capitalist has bet heavily on edtech in recent years.
• “We’re on the front end of a pretty dramatic homeschooling boom,” he said in 2021.

Legendary venture capital investor Marc Andreessen has used this week's Sun Valley conference to espouse the benefits of homeschooling.

According to Puck's Dylan Byers, the a16z founder and Meta board member sat on a panel with Peter Thiel at the billionaires' summer camp, and both "strongly advocated that all the attending moguls homeschool their kids".

Andreessen also weighed in on the potential Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg cage fight, issuing a "full-throated endorsement" for what would be "a return to how humans have historically defended themselves," per Byers.

Musk and Zuckerberg have been been trading barbs online since Musk summoned Zuckerberg to a cage fight last month.

Meanwhile, it's not the first time that Andreessen has called for more homeschooling.

In 2021, he told Colossus' "Invest Like the Best" podcast that the pandemic was likely to spark a rapid rise in parents pulling their children out of classrooms, because the learn-from-home era showed them the potential flaws in the US education system.

"It certainly feels like we're on the front end of a pretty dramatic homeschooling boom," Andreessen said.

"It turns out some things have changed," he added. "So the current curricula is quite a bit different at a lot of schools – I know a lot of parents were just shocked, absolutely shocked at the stuff that was coming across."

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm set up by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has tried to take advantage of that potential growing trend by betting heavily on edtech in recent years, as part of what it says is an effort to build a "new learning economy".

It plowed $20 million into the collective learning startup Maven in May 2021, and it led a $4.75 million seed funding round for Odyssey, which provides parents with micro-grants.

Hence Andreessen's calls for more homeschooling at this week's billionaire summer camp.

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