Say this on a discovery call tomorrow and nobody will blink: Skool is a billion-dollar company, Hormozi put in $100 million, a16z led the growth round.

Three claims. None of them has a primary source.

A 2026 audit of the record went after exactly those numbers. Four figures dominate the writing about Skool — a $100 million Hormozi investment, a $1 billion valuation, an a16z growth round and a founder net worth — and the authors report they could not source any of them: they opened the cited pages, followed the citations backwards, searched securities filings and found nothing underneath.

The detail that should bother you most: the "$100M Hormozi investment" appears only in a third-party headline, and that article's own body names no amount. The number lives in a headline. Nowhere else.

What Skool has actually confirmed

The confirmed set is short enough to fit in a text message.

Skool's own about page says it was founded in 2019 by Sam Ovens and Daniel Kang, is based in Los Angeles and employs 30 people. It sells at $9 or $99 a month. Hormozi announced the deal on January 10, 2024 as "the largest investment of my life," made through Acquisition.com. The purchase price and equity percentage were never published.

That's it. No venture round has ever been announced by Skool, no filing or press release supports one, and the only publicly confirmed outside money is Hormozi's stake. Skool does not appear in Andreessen Horowitz's public portfolio.

The other famous number is softer still. The 50/50 split between Ovens and Hormozi is a rumor with no primary source behind it — though you'll find it stated flatly, as in one explainer that calls it "widely assumed to be around 50/50 between Sam and Alex now."

The loop that manufactures a valuation

Here is the machine working in real time.

One analysis of the platform lists as a key takeaway that Skool's valuation is implied at $1B+ based on the 2024 a16z growth round at $17M MRR, and repeats the same reasoning in its glossary: an estimated enterprise value above $1 billion, based on the 2024 a16z-led growth round and revenue comparables.

A net-worth breakdown then prices Hormozi's personal stake at about $150 million, explicitly "credited for the venture round" while conceding that the valuation has never been made public and the figure is the author's own estimate drawn from that round.

A round nobody has announced produces a valuation. The valuation produces a net worth. The net worth gets quoted back as proof the round happened.

The revenue estimates underneath all of it don't agree either. One tracker puts Skool at an estimated $26.6M in annual revenue for 2025. Another analysis cites CompWorth and CB Insights at roughly $49.8M for 2026. The audit found a competing estimate at $79.9M. Spread: three times, depending on which blog you opened.

Even the start date drifts. Some write-ups date Hormozi's partnership to 2023, against a January 10, 2024 announcement.

Why this is your problem

Coaches pick the platform their community lives on partly on vibes, and vibes are built from numbers like these. Unicorn means safe. Billion means it'll still be here in three years. a16z means adults are in the room.

None of which tells you whether the product fits your members.

The thing worth noticing isn't that Skool might be smaller than people say. It might be bigger — no official valuation exists in either direction. It's that an entire industry built a confidence level on a figure that one headline writer appears to have supplied, and then nobody checked for two years.

The same industry sells certainty for $10,000 a quarter.

Next time a number lands in your feed with a dollar sign in front of it, click through. Then click through the thing it cites. You'll usually stop before the third hop.