ABOUT US

Most business stories start in a boardroom.
Ours started in a van parked outside San Francisco.

Back then, Spencer Handley was living out of that van building a multimillion-dollar music education company from his laptop. Adam Carney was doing something equally unlikely: he had dropped out of college to build one of the world’s largest yoga teacher training schools, turning an idea about eastern spirituality into a business that reached tens of thousands of students across the globe.

When the two met, they immediately recognized something in each other, a kind of creative savant-ness. Both had dropped out of traditional education, not because they couldn’t handle it, but because it couldn’t handle them. They shared a belief that education should feel more like a startup, fast, alive, and removed from the cobwebs of bureaucracy. 

Between them, they’d built companies that had done tens of millions in sales, trained thousands of creators, and most importantly, proved that unconventional people can change entire industries when given the right environment.

So in 2022, they decided to take on their biggest challenge yet — higher education. Together, they founded 20/80, a licensed U.S. higher education institution designed to completely remake college. 20/80 became a creative engine for students who want to master real-world skills in design, entrepreneurship, and the new AI economy.

People are often shocked when we tell them that two college dropouts founded a legitimate degree program. They think we’re joking. They say our degree programs look too good to be true.  

At 20/80, we believe the future won’t reward  memorization or credentials. It will reward creativity, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and the ability to think across systems. That’s why our programs are built like startups: lean, real-world, and radically practical.

20/80 is a college built by two college dropouts who believed they could out-innovate the system that once told them they wouldn’t make it.

Spoiler: we did.