
Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To "Stop Out Of School" - edw519
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of-school/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo
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Eliezer
Like a lot of Peter Thiel's smarter moves, this one is hard to explain without
an awful lot of background exposition. Think of people as having to pass
through a number of filters before they can do anything important with their
lives. As the system becomes increasingly rigid, it filters out almost
everyone. It's important to keep bypasses open at every point for people who
are capable of dissent and not easy to force into molds. Intervening at the
right filter point potentially has a lot of leverage.

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wheels
The interview is far more interesting than the segment on dropping out of
school. The section on economic disconnect silicon valley and rest of the US
and Thiel's thoughts on the maturity of the internet industry compared to the
evolution of the automobile industry and comparing that to hard-tech is worth
the price of admission.

Thiel always strikes me as something between the Buffet / Soros of the startup
world.

~~~
ujal
link to the interview <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQFLn65pxbQ> sound
quality is terrible though...

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danilocampos
This is outstanding.

Worst case scenario: You fail utterly, you're a whole lot smarter, and if you
really want/need to, you go back to school.

With the experience gained, you make a better decision about what you want to
study, because you'll know how you want to use it and you'll know what you
don't like doing. (I'd give anything to be able to go back in time and choose
CS instead of what I did study, back when I was 18, stupid, and locking myself
into college.)

More likely than not, you'll re-join college with awesome work opportunities
that carry through until after you graduate, where great prospects are waiting
for you.

On the other hand, you could build something amazing that alters the
trajectory of your whole career.

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Tichy
Couldn't there be some middle road: go to a school that is less expensive, and
not for too long? At least for a 3 year BSc... University can still be fun and
inspiring, and it is difficult to recreate the experience in another way. Also
if you are too old when you go to university, it won't be the same.

A lot of people seem to advocate not to quit one's day job, but work on
projects on the side. While personally I can't do that, it might be a lot
easier to arrange some spare time as a student. So why not go that route -
study, but do some interesting stuff on the side?

What does it cost for Americans to study in Europe? I think you can find here
(Europe) some universities that are good and don't cost the world.

A friend of mine is actually an assistant at a chair for entrepreneurship here
in Berlin. If you go to that university, they will try to nurture you into
doing a startup: <http://www.entrepreneurship.de/> (german site, didn't find
english page, sorry).

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andywhite37
Universities might be bloated, wasteful, and expensive, but I don't think I
would recommend to any kids that they skip college and take a major gamble for
only $100,000. Sure, one or two of these idea kids might make it big, but the
rest will do nothing. With a good college degree you can easily make $100,000
in less than two years.

~~~
mmt
_With a good college degree_

Differentiating between good and bad ones may be a large part of the issue.

 _you can easily make $100,000 in less than two years_

This where I have to disagree, especially if you're talking about $100k _net_
, that is, in addition to paying off the extra college costs for those (less
than) two years.

Moreover, I think the context of the OP is that the grant being offered is to
disrupt by building something of value. Ideally, at the end of the 3-4 years
(what it would take to finish college and earn the afformentioned $100k), one
is left with much more value in what one built and possibly even much more
money in the form of further investment. In the worst case, one is left with
extremely valuable, arguably more so than a degree and a couple years of
employment, experience.

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johnglasgow
He lost a few points in my book for saying new startups will not be able to
take on the big tech companies.

Imagine if the founders of Google took his advice.

~~~
nazariusk
Portals do not a tech company make.

Yahoo called itself a media company, and many others emulated their all-in-one
portal model with search as an after thought.

Google focused only on their index and their PageRank algorithm to provide the
best intent based search possible.

They weren't in a contest with the tech companies. They were just a feature to
Yahoo way back when.

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mcmc
Note the extra querystring arguments in the url:
?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

I wonder if replicating this stuff messes up techcrunch's metrics
significantly?

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tchae
Does anyone know the application process for this initiative? I've been
looking around and can't find a damn link anywhere to apply for this.

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known
Sounds rational to me.

