
Peter Thiel: $100k grant to 20 founders who drop out of school - iamelgringo
http://thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14:the-thiel-fellowship-20-under-20&catid=1&Itemid=16
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fauigerzigerk
I think it's a really stupid idea to link a grant to dropping out of school.
If an idea is worth a $100000 grant, why does it stop being worth that money
as soon as someone turns 21 or has a degree?

I did drop out of school and I don't regret it. Many dropouts are very
successful, many more are not. And to be honest, I would sue that guy if my
kids dropped out of a computational biology program to go write some social
picture upload site in PHP.

The odds of some web startup working are non zero. But the odds of doing
something more interesting later with that degree are also non zero.
Computational biologists can create social picture upload sites as well, even
when they're over 20 believe it or not.

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gdl
College-aged people are grown-up enough to live their own lives. I know it
would be painful to see one's child getting involved with PHP, but in the end
that should be their own choice to make.

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fauigerzigerk
Absolutely, I just don't want some rich guy bribing them to drop out. If they
develop a great passion for a startup idea, I will provide that grant myself
after a period of time and after a rigorous debate.

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Eliezer
What the heck do you think Peter Thiel's evil motives are here? He's trying to
help those people and disagrees with you about how best to help them.

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tdmackey
It will be interesting to see what comes of these grants.

I feel that the companies that were successful when their founders dropped out
of school were driven by a founder who believed so intently and was committed
to his idea that he was willing to drop out and pursue it despite the lack of
incentive to do so. Instead of the alternative where a halfway decent guy who
just isn't that happy at school goes off to pursue some startup because
someone gave him a decent amount of money which i suspect will end in failure
almost all the time.

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jscore
So basically $100k for some teens to build a bunch of RoR CRUD sites.

And ""Our world needs more breakthrough technologies,” said Thiel. "From
Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world's most
transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school
because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation. "

Don't know about the other companies beside Facebook, but it seems that
Facebook doesn't belong on that list of "breakthrough technologies"

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pcwalton
Facebook has some very interesting open source projects:
<http://github.com/facebook>

Particularly interesting to me is their static analysis tool for PHP written
in OCaml.

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zbanks
That just seems like a bad idea. Aren't successful dropouts an edge-case?

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gdl
Successful founders are already edge cases, and these grants won't be handed
out to the stereotypical "dropped out to play World of Warcraft" population.
If someone is capable and driven enough to attract these sort of awards, I
wouldn't expect their (dis)taste for formal education to have much effect on
their odds of success.

I think the real point here is that they are making bets on the young and
idealistic kids that haven't been tarnished by years of drudgery, beauracracy,
and being told that they can't do things. So they do whatever wild ideas
interest them, and if any one of those kids happened to be right about
something that more 'educated' people would consider idiotic, it's a massive
win. Kind of like the old DARPA approach or Google's 20% time. In that respect
going after dropouts would make a lot of sense, since those are going to be
the types that care less about following the establishment and will be more
likely to execute genuinely novel ideas.

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purpledove
I'm 30, and I've worked at various corporations, both small and large, for 5
years. I've never once been told "I can't do things". Not once. Rather the
opposite - I've worked with people who went on to found start-ups, and I've
learned a great deal from my colleagues.

The larger question is: should a person in a position of power be encouraging
young people to drop out of school? It strikes me as irresponsible.

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pragetruif
The funny thing is, I was willing to drop out of school to work at one of
those Thiel-network companies (I was interning for the summer, and my team
wanted me to stay), but they told me they wouldn't hire me full-time without a
degree.

I ended up dropping out anyways, but to do something else.

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Aegean
It sounds populist. Less than 20 year old is not a sweet spot for investing in
a founder. It's only good for media coverage.

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blaines
20 is arbitrary, I don't understand why they would choose 20, especially since
some of the people mentioned in the article have degrees or started after 20.
Also, I'd like to know when they got funded, it seems many of the [other]
companies that Thiel has invested in had founders over 20.

Elon Musk dropped out at age 24 - started Zip2.

Scott Banister started ListBot at age 20.

Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at age 20 dropped out at 20.

William Andregg no info.

Peter Thiel himself graduated (J.D. from Stanford in 1992)

Add info or submit corrections.

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hop
This could have a great return on investment and probably quiet many of the
naysayers when successful companies roll out of it.

He will likely have a lot of candidates responding to this (I sure as hell
would have in college) and be able to pick and choose the top of the crop. No
one else is proactively going after this huge talent pool.

And it could also be a lifesaver for would-be entrepreneurs that come out of
college with $80k of debt and forced to work for someone else.

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rdl
I'd rather see a new university which figures out a way to support founders
starting startups AND grant them some kind of credential (in case it fails).
Unfortunately much of the world is credential-based (especially Asian
parents...), so being able to award a degree would make a difference in who
could participate. Plus, if someone's startup fails, or he just realizes he'd
rather do something other than startups, the credential makes getting a
regular job much easier, preserving options. And of course immigration often
depends on a degree, and using educational visas to get people into the USA in
the first place would be a great hack.

I think a 5-6 year program to get a SB in tech entrepreneurship, where 1-2
years are spent doing smaller projects and some regular classes (as applied to
those projects), and then 4 years in a co-op program with your startup and
students from the first 1-2 years, would be ideal. Maybe even grant a SB/SM in
6-8 years.

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psyklic
Olin College is one pioneering example. However, the main problem with the
startup education + credential approach is that the barriers to such a school
offering an _accredited_ credential are overwhelming.

However, imo traditional universities also support founders and grant them a
credential. Students typically have a lot more free time than if they were
employed (depending on their major). It's just that the student would also
have to be incredibly resistant to peer pressure.

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rdl
Olin College was amazing; I wish I'd been a year or two younger so I could
have been part of the founding class.

They did backpedal a bit on the "free for everyone", unfortunately.

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vaksel
I think this is stupid...most founders who dropped out of school..did so only
after they got traction, an saw that the business was going somewhere.

I'm not sure...but I don't think any of the big name founders(you know those
that are always brought up as examples) ever dropped out of school before
actually finishing their product...and seeing early traction

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sscheper
Really like this part:

"Because education seeks to impart past knowledge, when you are trying to
create a technological breakthrough, you have to create new knowledge, and
there is no way to teach that. There was no course at University of Arizona on
‘‘how to cure aging.' Hopefully, this program will allow others to work on
ambitious projects themselves, before they've taken on a crippling amount of
student debt,”

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_delirium
I'm curious how he expects people to study "how to cure aging" without first
becoming "knowledgeable in biology". Scientific breakthroughs are rarely made
by people who aren't familiar with the existing state of the science they work
in ("past knowledge").

There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that
past knowledge (Einstein spent about 10 years studying physics in a sort of
unofficial study group before he set off in his own radically new direction).
But surely you have to pick up at _least_ the equivalent of an undergrad
science degree worth of past knowledge somehow. Thiel sounds sort of like a
messianic-futurist religious figure if he really thinks otherwise.

It's possible it'll work anyway, because presumably his grants don't actually
require people who receive them to refrain from studying past knowledge. ;-)

edit: It looks like that quote is actually from William Andregg, not Peter
Thiel. Andregg doesn't seem to take it too literally, though, because his own
company's job openings have pretty detailed past-knowledge requirements ("The
chemist should have a deep theoretical as well as practical familiarity with
essential analytical techniques such as NMR, LCMS, elemental analysis, UV-Vis,
and others. An understanding of surface chemistry/analysis, and experience
working with nucleic acids in monomer, oligo, long, single stranded, and
double stranded forms would also be valuable.").

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Eliezer
> There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that
> past knowledge

And the amount of damage done by universities is now so severe that I've
switched from telling people "Don't try following in my footsteps" to telling
them "Okay, maybe you _should_ get the hell out of school."

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_delirium
I guess I haven't found much outright damage myself, though maybe I got lucky.
Whether it was the best or most cost-effective way to learn stuff (not
counting the employability value of the degree) is another question, but my
comp. sci. degree imo was a reasonably useful way of learning some CS basics.
Some of the choice of topics was arbitrary and would've been different at
another school, but it's all stuff I should eventually have learned anyway.

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bhiggins
cargo culting

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todayiamme
Why? I'm toying with idea of applying, but why is it cargo culting?

I would love it if someone allowed me the time and the intellectual freedom to
make things instead of filling in tiny, dark circles on a piece of paper as
proof that I'm worthy enough of a future as judged by some vague overlord.

I want to learn and understand things thoroughly, but I will not learn
anything to pass some exam. So, for someone like me, but smarter and more
driven, this might actually be a net win. I fail to understand how this might
be a cargo cult.

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blaines
You should apply. Out of curiosity, what's your age? Have you dropped out?

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todayiamme
18\. I'm yet to enter college as I took this year off to figure stuff out and
work on something...

On the other hand, I doubt that I will apply. I just don't think that I'm good
enough for such programs, and why add more noise?

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coffeemug
It's your job to apply if you feel you could put the grant to good use. It's
their job to pick the candidates that qualify based on their internal
criteria. Don't try to do their job for them - they're much better at it than
you. At best, you're depriving them, yourself, and the world from a potential
breakthrough. At worst, you'll get a polite rejection letter.

~~~
todayiamme
I guess, you're right. I will do it.

Thank you.

