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As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s buzziest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities—in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs.
The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud services. The list of guest lecturers reads like a Signal group chat many VCs would pay to join: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell, and White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, among others. It’s the fourth year Midha and Abbott have taught some version of this class. Once registration went live this year, the class’s 500 seats quickly filled up, with dozens of students on the waitlist and thousands more watching the lectures posted on YouTube.
On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz came to speak. I planned to attend, but at the last minute, a spokesperson for Midha told me the class was too full for journalists to come in.
Part of Stanford’s allure has long been access to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus sits just a few miles from Sand Hill Road, home to storied venture capital firms, and it’s not uncommon to see San Francisco startups like Cursor or Vercel recruiting from the school’s computer science clubs. CS 153 blends access to Silicon Valley’s top brass and education in an extreme way—which is precisely why some people have taken issue with it.
After a screenshot of CS 153’s guest lecture lineup went viral on social media this year, some critics argued that students should be spending their time in “real” classes, not attending a live podcast recording hosted by VCs. The word on campus is that other Stanford professors have chafed at what some see as a celebration of raw power.
“Protip for Stanford undergrads: beware the classes with guest speaker lineups that read like AI coachella,” said Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, in a post on X. “You’re basically paying $5k to listen to a live podcast series.”
“Everyone taking CS 153. Only 3 people in my Stanford functional analysis class today,” wrote Luke Heeney, a research fellow in economics at Stanford University, in another post. “Remember to eat your veggies.”
Midha has leaned into the mockery. He ordered 500 T-shirts that read "I took CS 153 and all I got was AI coachella," which he plans to hand out to students on Thursday. "The critics were unintentionally red teaming my system," he tells me, framing the debacle in the infrastructure language of an engineer. "I was like, huh, AI Coachella? Is that a feature or a bug? That's totally a feature. That's product market fit."
Midha and Abbott recently launched a new venture firm, AMP, which aims to supply AI startups with both capital and computing capacity. Midha disclosed at the beginning of the class that several guest lecturers run companies that he’s invested in, including Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, and Periodic Labs. But that access is part of the class’s appeal.
So what exactly do Stanford students learn about in AI Coachella? The class is largely about frontier AI systems, which many undergraduate computer science courses only touch on. Midha spent the first lecture of the year discussing the computing infrastructure that supports AI models. He argued that AI chips are not commoditizing, meaning their price is not decreasing over time. To prove his point, he shared internal charts he’d aggregated at AMP on Nvidia H100 prices increasing in the last 90 days.
“I kind of wanted to give the kids a cheat code. I have so much inside access and information,” says Midha, who is a Stanford alumnus himself. “I was like, okay, this is obvious to me. I should just give the students a chance to learn, instead of the VCs hoarding all the knowledge.”
The two students I spoke to in CS 153 said they are getting value out of the class. Mahi Jariwala, a sophomore, said it's been meaningful to sit in the room with successful investors and entrepreneurs and ask them questions—two weeks ago, she asked Black Forest Labs cofounder Andreas Blattmann how the company chooses partners, and why it recently turned down a partnership deal with xAI (he said BFL applies its safety guardrails evenly for everyone, and that sometimes results in losing out on important partners). Darrow Hartman, a junior, says CS 153 gives him a high-level view of the startup world and has helped him find like-minded peers. Both students acknowledged that this was their "fun class" this semester, alongside more rigorous courses.
To my surprise, Midha also wants to teach students about navigating life in the AI boom. In the first few minutes of his opening lecture, Midha became visibly emotional speaking in front of a slide that reads “Anj’s life scaling laws.” He told students about the importance of investing in personal relationships, not just work; Midha said he’s been too busy to ever go to the real Coachella. But Stanford is where he met his wife, as well as friends who later became cofounders. Midha tells me he started teaching the class during a flourishing period of his career, but a rough patch for his mental health.
“One of the good and bad things about Silicon Valley is that your work is so tied up with your identity that sometimes you can forget your place in the broader universe. I was depressed at the time, and felt I had wasted the best years of my youth,” he says. “Then Mike [Abbott] was like, hey do you want to teach this class with me? To borrow an analogy from the grid, we pulled our spare capacity and co-taught it … I was like, huh, this is really fun, and the kids love it.”
Midha says he’s been shocked by how many high-profile entrepreneurs have agreed to visit CS 153. He thinks they’re doing it for the same reason he is: working in Silicon Valley can be draining, and speaking to a room full of bright-eyed Stanford students can remind them why they started. “I think everybody, to some degree, feels a sense of nostalgia for their college days,” Midha said. “They want to give back and have a sense of meaning and purpose from mentoring the next generation.”
While AI Coachella embodies the current moment in Silicon Valley, its appeal to students is unquestionable. In 2026, when YouTube videos and AI tools can help people learn (and cheat), more and more people are questioning the value of a college education. Access might be Stanford’s best selling point.
