No it's not. The article seems to imply that if you pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people that it's surprising that they will be able get those people to invest in their ventures.
The article is also comparing this very small group with university student _on average_. If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
The article calls out the same thing is happening in colleges - Rhodes scholarships, incubators, scholarships galore - and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate).
No look, the point is that people widely lampooned Peter Thiel for encouraging smart and ambitious students to drop out. So many people predicted this was guaranteed to fail. And the Thiel Fellowships have been a resounding success. I was one of those people who didn't think Thiel Fellows would accomplish much and I was wrong.
Has it actually accomplished much for the fellows? A few posts up /u/prepend wrote this:
> and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate)
That may be an amazing success rate for generating startups, but it would also mean that 98.8% of the startups weren't successful. Was dropping out actually good for the fellows aside from a few? Couldn't many argue that for most of these "smart and ambitious" students it really did fail?
I'm not really taking a position here because I don't think failure alone means something wasn't worth it. Also I haven't followed Thiel's program that much so can't speak to the specifics. But given the numbers in this thread, I certainly wouldn't recommend students drop out.
That’s 11 multibillion startups. Not that everyone else was a failure.
Although even it meant 11 unicorns out of 900 and the rest were zero, those are amazing odds that many would gamble 1-2 years of their life on. Especially at 20.
But the article talks about how the others were also successful, just not multi-billion dollar company successful.
I’d be curious of the median (as well as other quantiles) earnings (less university costs) say over 10 years for the individuals involved compared to peers that didn’t drop out. Obviously this isn’t the sort of information that’s easy to obtain. But without it I don’t share your rosy outlook on the program. It seems to me like this easily could be a net negative for most of the students engaging in it.
You would be right if the choice set was drop out and never come back but have a 2% chance of becoming very wealthy or stay in school and have a higher chance of being middle class but much lower chance of becoming very wealthy.
The actual choice set is drop out and spend several years trying to become very wealthy and then go back to school and be delayed by those several years on the path well traveled, or just take the path well traveled right away.
It seems extremely unlikely to me that it would be possible for this to be a net negative on average at any point in time past the first few years. average[0.02(mega wealthy)+ N(success but not mega wealthy) + (1-N-0.02(regular path delayed 5 years)] should always be larger than average(regular path) and it should get more pronounced over time and the spread between regular path and regular path delayed 5 years will likely diminish over time.
On the society level, unless you are so cynical that you think all the benefit that causes the value of those companies to be in the billions is coming from some sort of market power abuse and none of it is coming from creating something that is so much better than what was there before that people are buying it in a big way, it would be a massive benefit as well because you just increased the conversion rate of ideas into product that benefits society by a massive multiple.
What's wrong with considering whether those who argued against something in the past may have been wrong? Unless, of course, you were one of those who turned out to be wrong.
If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to... that would be worth reforming a lot of things to improve on.
At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare.
First, I don't think that society is best when optimizing for adding as many dollars of value to society as possible. This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy.
Second, I don't think that unicorn startups are necessarily providing economic value to society. A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse.
> This is easy to measure, but there are a great many other incredibly valuable things that don't involve large visible changes in the economy.
Technically there is still an implicit money transfer in those cases, it's just the debt is settled immediately. Remember, money is an IOU – used when you promise to give something that you cannot deliver on right now.
Business seeks to deliver value at a scale that would make it impractical for all the debts to be settled in the moment, thus money (promises owed to the business) does become a reasonable measure of how well it is scaling. Things that are incredibly valuable to society do benefit from being scaled up to provide that benefit to more and more people.
> A company can become worth an absolute mountain of money while making society materially worse.
No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way. Every act comes with negative externalities, of course.
> No company becomes worth mountains of money without making society better in some way.
A pharmaceutical company that concludes that they can increase the price of their drug by 10x and only lose 3/4 of the sales is going to be a more valuable company. It will have increased revenue and profit and that will be reflected in its stock price.
This decision makes the world materially worse. It only looks like an improvement when we measure based on revenue and profit rather than the amount of health improvement that the business provides to the world.
A pharmaceutical company raising their prices 10x indicates that there is some kind of scarcity. That may be scarcity of a natural resource that cannot be overcome, but in this case I expect the scarcity is in not having other people providing the same drug. So, we're back to someone withholding value that they could be providing to society.
What I expect you are really trying to get at is that society has created rules that prevents others from providing that value, thus creating artificial scarcity. That is definitely true, but that's on society who created those rules and not truly related to the discussion taking place.
> So, we're back to someone withholding value that they could be providing to society.
The point OP is making is that value to society and money are only loosely correlated. Sometimes it correlates well but often not so well. That’s because there’s externalities in any marketplace that aren’t captured by the marketplace itself.
So in the presented hypothetical case, the externality of “provide life saving treatment” is not captured in the costs side of the drug company’s balance sheet, so treating 75% fewer people for 10x more per unit cost makes the company look even more financially positive even though the change is a societal negative. And this externality shift in the balance sheet need not be a conscious “evil” decision. It could simply be market dynamics and competition playing out with the players not even realizing that they’re just making money from an externality and not providing any benefit.
Your argument that it’s the legal system is flawed on several counts:
1. The US (and many places) have regulatory capture so the legislation preventing future competitors is written by today’s competitors. So while it’s the law on one hand, it’s the current set of players that’s the real problem.
2. There’s no collective buying power in places where this is a problem (eg you don’t see the cost of penicillin being an issue in countries where single payer healthcare is a thing). We’re starting to see this with insulin where non profits and California are getting into the game, but it takes a while to ramp up production so even if the price does come back down, the companies involved have managed to make a lot of money in the short term at the cost of lives and financial health of many households.
Yes, that's right. Because others who could be playing cannot, in this case because society has decided they don't want more players, for whatever reason.
However, the original premise still holds true given the constraints the actors are operating in. The 10x represents the additional value offered to society to operate within those rules created by society.
So while, again, all acts have negative externalities, we cannot deny that society sees great value in having a limited set of players. In fact, society sees so much value that, in this example, it is willing to pay 10x more and accept that some people will not have access to drugs in order to maintain the benefits.
The discussion is about how the world is. Our feelings about the merits or failings of that world have no place in the discussion, and even if we were to share them what purpose would they serve? That is where you would find us going off the rails.
Sure, we could improve society by changing how intellectual property laws work and being far more aggressive about anticompetitive behavior. I'd like that. In the limit, this would mean perfectly correlating monetary value with human value and then we'd live in a world where it really was the case that every unicorn company was providing significant value to society.
But I don't think the presence of these broken systems means that we can conclude that every company that is worth billions is necessarily making the world a better place today. It is evidence in the other direction! Our society does not perfectly align wealth creation with providing value to society.
There would be no reason to make promises to these companies if they do make the world a better place in some way. A company worth billions cannot possibly get there without making society better.
But there are always tradeoffs. Something that makes society great in some way is also likely to make society not great in some other way. As before, every act comes with negative externalities.
See I just don't agree with this at all. We've clearly seen an example where a company can grow its net worth while making the world worse. It requires our current system of laws - but that's the world that we live in. This isn't a property of negative externalities. This is a property of social value being entirely disconnected from cash.
Saving a rich person's life and a poor person's life has the same value to society. But a rich person can pay far more money to have their life saved than a poor person can.
Said laws are created by society to benefit society. A pharmaceutical company is able to create an apparent 10x more value under such laws because they are delivering on the value of that regulated market along with the value of their product.
Of course, as before, no benefit is consequence free. We see in the example that said benefit means that some people may not have access to drugs, which negatively affects society in other ways. That doesn't mean society sees no benefit. There are always tradeoffs. Something can be a benefit and detriment at the same time.
Perhaps what you are trying to say is that you think that society should see better access to drugs as being a higher priority than the benefits it expects from the regulated market? But clearly society, which is free to repeal or change said laws as it sees fit, disagrees. Society will certainly never please all individuals. That's a tradeoff of having a society.
Society is better for seeing the pharmaceutical market regulations it desires carried out. Yes, that does mean individuals who cannot access/afford drugs will be worse off, but thems the breaks of living in a society. Society can never cater to everyone. Someone will always be harmed by society.
After all, society can repeal the regulation if it wanted to – it created the regulations! But clearly it doesn't want to, because society recognizes it as a benefit and is willing to pay, perhaps as much as 10x more according to previous comments, to see that value delivered. That may not suit your or my fancy, but, again, society cannot cater to everyone.
Naturally, even society itself is both beneficial and detrimental, just like everything else. Tradeoffs, as always.
That’s just a “we’re in the best of all possible worlds” argument. The market should be shaped by people towards human aims. That means it’s useful to compare and contrast different regulatory captures and advocate for change. You’re basically saying there shouldn’t be discourse.
The market is shaped by human aims. The laws we speak of were not handed down by aliens. They were specifically created by society for the benefit of society.
There is no such thing as a best possible world. Not two people would ever be able to agree what that even is. Every benefit comes with a detriment. It's just a matter of what tradeoffs do you want to accept. Society has made its choice, seeing a regulated market as being more important than access to drugs for all (for now; that choice is fluid and able to change in the future should society change its views, but trying to predict the future is well beyond this discussion).
>At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare.
Are they? I notice you only picked mathematicians. What's the value to society of a Mozart, a Picasso, a Dostoevsky, a Michelangelo ... ?
Massive value. But I think those are also arguments against college as it’s not like the goal of college is to produce those.
And of course it’s very difficult to evaluate the impact along these types of values. Saying college is good because Mozart is valuable and not STEM seems like a reach.
This assumes that the more money a company makes, the more beneficial it is to society. Seems dubious to me. For example, there's a case to be made that the large social media companies are doing irreparable harm to our societies. In which case, even the most unproductive citizen does way more for humanity than those "unicorns" do.
As a guy whose startup is listed on NASDAQ I’m not sure I agree. Is cool that there’s a sustainable team dedicated to keeping my dream alive, and when things go well (eg airlines and supply chain running smoothly) it’s nice to take some credit. But in tens of impact it’s the open source users etc that I think of first, they aren’t really correlated to the billion dollars part.
There was a time where FTX, Theranos, and WeWork were all unicorns and none of them had real “meat.”
Uber is/was a unicorn and the gig economy has proven awful for society. (Underpay what amount to employees while giving them no benefits or recourse and at the same time destroying taxi companies that did)
Facebook was also a unicorn…
I think billion dollar companies that “do more” (eg. be a net good) for humanity are as rare as individuals who do, especially if they are profit driven.
Even more interesting to think about: if so, then do governments like Germany, which have severely restricted Uber, bear any responsibility for the lives not saved from alcohol-related traffic fatalities?
>could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society
Lets be real, I'm sure many of people here have jobs where they have to insist this is true, but that billion number is inflated nonsense. Most startups are not adding that much value to society. Maybe finding a way to middle-man extract that from society, yeah, but not adding it.
We talk about Peter Thiel here. He is in a different league, money and network wise, than your average scholarship or university incubator when it comes to start-ups.
Yeah, most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t want to pause for graduate study at Oxford.
It’s like saying Y Combinator has failed to produce a single National Book Award nominee, or judging Juilliard by how many future dentists studied there.
Look, turn the question around: how many of Thiel's "graduates" turned out to be university chancellors, notable academics or leaders in government or civil society?
> Than Rhodes scholars? Than Stanford’s incubator? Than the MIT media lab?
Yes. You're essentially talking about academic organizations there, with diffuse industry involvement. That's a world away from direct access to a tech billionaire's network.
They're also not that much bigger - Rhodes is perhaps 2x larger when you restrict it to the anglosphere. And it naturally doesn't include the investment money you're basically certain to also get from Thiel alongside the $100k award.
Thiel's program is designed to generate startups. It should not be surprising that it generates more startups than other programs designed to reward endeavors other than generating startups.
It really does seem that plain of a truth to me, too. What % of Rhodes scholars enter with dreams of founding a “unicorn”? Probably a negligible fraction of that same % of Thiel fellows, which I’d imagine is ~100%. That the non-Thiel group then goes own to found a negligible fraction of those companies isn’t awkward for colleges; it’s a reflection of the different values held by members of our society.
Meanwhile, whose interests are served by future unicorn founders being plucked away from the liberal arts, or from the connections and experiences they would’ve had in college with people very unlike Peter Thiel?
Yeah. Another obvious point of comparison would be Ycombinator (or more specifically early Ycombinator when it took fewer startups with traction and more recent grads the YC partners really liked even if their ideas weren't fully formed)
In comparison to that, Thiel's success rate looks a bit more ordinary.
Rhodes scholarships etc on the other hand are a fair bit more successful at generating academics and researchers and mid level managers from backgrounds that don't usually become mid level managers, because that's what they're for
> pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people
> 11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate
But completely unscalable. It seems perfectly reasonable to think you can take a select group of people give them resources that allow them to succeed (at a certain level) better than people who went to college. You could probably get similar results by just giving a select group of people a million dollars to start with.
Or am I misunderstanding something about the situation.
11 billion+ startups in 10 years out of a thousand has already demonstrated scale.
There are tons of people giving $1M to groups of people who don’t have these returns.
Also, this is a comparison of working vs college. So it’s an opportunity cost experiment. Giving $1M to skilled management teams is completely different.
You could probably get similar results by doing nothing.
College, for all its trumpeting about better outcomes, has shown no actual change in the financial success of the population. Incomes have held stagnant the entire time.
Thiel's experiment really just goes to reiterate what we already knew: That successful people are born that way.
To it into perspective, his native country—Germany—only produced about double that number of unicorns over the same time frame, and he invested in many of those as well.
The Ivy League has produced most of the supreme court, most presidents, most senators. Very few of them ever led startups or became billionaires, but that is far from the only measure of success.
That is aside from the fact that I don't see any way, fundamentally, to become something like a scientist or a physician outside of the university system. You can't run controlled experiments, especially if they require any kind of specialized lab equipment or human subjects, without fairly strict oversight, and you certainly can't go into a hospital and put yourself into rotation getting clinical experience with patients outside of being supervised by a teaching physician.
There are other ways to meet these sort of dynamics outside of universities in principle. Guilds serve this purpose in some professions. But for many modern professions, the university system is the guild. It's where scientists train other scientists. It's how you get an apprenticeship.
Nonetheless, not every profession is like running a business, where anyone with money is at least allowed to try.
You can do science outside the system. That is easy. Go track something. If you can reproduce your own results, it will be interesting enough for others to join in. I've done this, I have a few hundred thousand followers that might lean tech/engineering.
Getting accredited to be a Physician in the US is a political thing controlled by the Physician Cartel(AMA and ACGME).
That line about Ivys and Presidents just seem to line up more with the political situation of Physicians. Heck, residencies and med school are all tied up in special points.
> The article seems to imply that if you pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people that it's surprising that they will be able get those people to invest in their ventures.
Don't elite colleges do the same? Select a small slice of society and give them opportunities beyond what society at large has?
The difference between what Thiel is doing and what colleges are doing seems to be a difference in degree and not in kind. That difference in degree is exchanging a larger reward for a smaller pool of candidates.
The same criticism of the Thiel Fellows could be leveled at college, from the perspective of someone who didn't attend college.
> If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
At the highest-level universities, nearly every applicant is already exceptional before they're even accepted, and yet:
Even if you carefully selected 100 or so people out of nearly any university, it's statistically unlikely that a Fields medal winner, Nobel prize laureate, or unicorn founder would come to fruition out of any of them, even if we allow more than a decade.
I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful.
Initially I dropped out of college to work on internet startups in the 90s. I didn’t make a billion but I learned skills and made a good living and was definitely the highest earner out of all my college friends for at least 10-20 years.
But I went to night school and got an undergrad and masters and now work in a field with a lot of very educated people phd/md in a non-bullshit way. And I wouldn’t have had that opportunity without my degrees, even know I had the same skills and knowledge.
Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened.
Practically, I’m not sure what to advise my kids. I’m leaning toward college because taking out loans and having 60% of the money go to admin staff and mega gyms is just overhead to opening more opportunity.
And I think the college route has a higher median outcome as I wrestle with was I lucky or will everyone with skill and obsession in an area be able to support their families.
> Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened.
It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter.
In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being.
In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.
But suppose we gave HR some other shortcut besides a college degree. Something that still attested to a similar level of work ethic and minimal qualification in a field.
If we just set the "college is important for well-rounded life experience blah blah" party to the side for a second and consider it strictly as a job-prep factory (because why else would an average schmuck spend that much on something if not for a good ROI), apprenticeships seem like an obvious better pattern for everyone.
1. They run for a similar length - multiple years
2. They attest to work ethic in the same way college degrees do
4. They train actual job skills and provide actual job experience, unlike (most) undergrad programs
5. And on top of it all, apprentices still get new life experiences, but probably more productive ones than Greek Life.
To me, it seems companies providing apprenticeship programs as a replacement for an undergrad program should lead to a better-equipped workforce and provide HR with better signal to filter by. Never mind that a successful apprenticeship could lead straight into a longer-term job offer in many cases, making things easier both for new worker bees and for HR.
I would think it would be more like the problem that colleges face in choosing who to accept. Companies offering apprenticeships obviously have limited resources for managing and running the program, but on the other hand perhaps apprentices can be "expelled" more easily than full-time employees.
Perhaps this is what that one financial firm was on to when everyone ridiculed them for their "Pay us to work for us" scheme (which does sound ridiculous, unless perhaps you can sell demonstrable educational and networking value from the program and can frame it as competing with what colleges offer).
> In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being.
I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." Another part is signalling value not to your employer, but to the employer's clients. If you're in law or consulting, the value of an elite degree is more to show the client that your firm's high billing rates are justified. A third factor is that some firms are like clubs, where a de facto caste system exists and people from lesser schools are discriminated against. It's morally wrong, but it happens in many of the elite firms and startups.
It takes only a few seconds to legitimately scan through the non-college achievements in order to get a feel for a candidate's true potential. So it should not a real blocker to anyone who is serious about hiring the best people.
>I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted."
I've been part of the hiring process at multiple companies over the course of a decade now, both at large companies and small ones, and not once has anything like this ever happened. A degree in the field has only ever been used as a filter at the start of the process, and in the small number of times there was a bad hire, no one ever used the candidates degree as an excuse because there was no need to: no one blamed anyone for the fact that a shitty employee was hired.
I was a programmer/am still sort of one. And I think a better filter is to be good at something and be able to look at the work of others and evaluate them quickly.
Or to have a work system that allows for lots of contributions to filter people’s work without requiring 40 hours of interviews.
The resume filter by education is used because it’s easy. Graduating from Harvard isn’t perfect. But it’s a fast way to filter out lots of candidates when you don’t have time.
> It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter.
An open exam process where anyone can take the test and receive a diploma for each individual class.
A bit like how professional certifications work.
That way, no matter the way you acquired your skills, you can try and get the same diploma.
Of course, you would also need to revise what skills and topics are tested to also provide exams for more practical topics usually ignored in colleges.
It probably varies per profession and industry, but in my experience the degree isn't often a good signal for screening, except possibly, in some cases, as a negative correlation.
> I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful.
A better question IMO is: Is college more useful than the alternatives?
College is a huge investment: tens of thousands of dollars, plus 4 years of full-time work.
When I went to college in 2007 (not in US, but I digress…) it made sense to go in for a 4-year degree because there were no alternatives. Coursera, Udemy, etc. did not exist. YouTube was just born. And to start with, we didn’t even have broadband in my house or school, that could stream video.
It’s a very different world today. The opportunity cost is too great. Even without being a Thiel fellow, there are many alternatives to what you can do with 4 years of your life that will set you up for success – not only educational opportunities but also starting a business, freelancing, etc.
In fact I think this is a ripe space for opportunities to build new institutions that provide value.
The value of college is not only education, but also community.
We are seeing, and will continue to see, many new online and IRL ventures that provide community and learning to young people, which will serve them much better than colleges.
I'll repost an older comment of mine here on the Humanities and their struggles:
Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine.
Two things stuck out to me the most:
1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark'.
The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead.
A lot of people have stories where they got no respect in their 20s at all, and then they made change X and into their 30s they started getting a lot more respect.
But another huge factor in all this is that 20-year-olds just get pushed around a lot, especially in our workplaces.
Colleges are both broken and functional on many different ways, with different results for each kind of value you want to take from them.
They are certainly up for improvement, but throwing everything away and starting back from first principles almost never work for something that complex. "What first principles should it follow" is an open problem by itself.
For undergrad I did a business degree specializing in “computer information systems” as I couldn’t find an applicable CS degree. I was a full time architect with 10 years xp and learned really nothing directly useful in work. But the soft skills were kind of nice. Made some relationships too, but they’ve never helped me in work.
For masters I went to a very reputable school in my field and studied something new. Learned a lot, but hard to know what’s helped and what didn’t. I think it gave me basic context knowledge in my new field. Made lots of relationships with students, not they helped with work. With faculty led to future work (teaching, volunteer work).
Voting absolutely has to be paper based, or at the very least leave a physical audit trail. Voting, as it is, works for millions of people on a regular basis, billions actually. And none of the shenenigans going on have anything to do with medium used, and everything with people in power deciding to make voting as hard as possible. There is nothing intetnet tech can bring tonthe table that would improve voting.
So, the lesson learned is that people hand picked and backed by Peter Thiel enjoy monetary success in the start-up world. Success that beats the average college graduate. Who would have thought...
Political organisations could try to kick start the careers of aligned young people in politics. Spreading a few tens million of dollars across hundreds of promising people is worth it if you can get a good governor or senator out of it.
Could a movie studio do well by writing big cheques to aspiring directors/writers with a tolerance for risk?
In some ways the record labels already acquire talent in this kind of model, rather than relying on credentials.
They do this. State parties have paid fellowship programs where you make a decent salary (by entry-level politics standards), and they train you to be an elite campaign manager. All the while, you live in the state capital and hang out with party members.
The Thiel Fellowship has been extremely successful, if judged by the top 10% of its participants. That has almost nothing to do with colleges, whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students, at a scale of over 15M students per year. There's a lot you can say to criticize higher ed, but this is an apples to oranges comparison.
I'm reminded of Teach For America, which I did 15 years ago. I became a full time teacher with only 5 weeks of training. Most teachers go to 4 years of ed school. I firmly believe 2 things: TFA has produced some elite teachers, but it is not a scalable model because it is not better for most people. Similar argument for bootcamps vs college for training technologists.
> There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today.
Ethereum is a truly incredible and fascinating project, but at this point, I don't think anything that has come out of it qualifies as promising. Nothing from it has had a substantial impact on existing value chains of products and services. It's like the bustling economy of a techno-futurist hermit kingdom, but one which doesn't produce things anyone needs to survive (including its own subjects).
> whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students
If that were the case, wouldn't we be able to point to some kind of evidence of that being the case? Nobody seems to know what these worthwhile outcomes are.
It has even failed demonstrate the most popular college claim: That its graduates will make more money. In reality, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of college. Furthermore, if we compare the USA, where ~40% of its population is a college graduate, with its nearest neighbour Canada, where ~70% of its population is a college graduate, the median American without a college degree makes ~50% more than the median Canadian with a college degree.
It seems the actual job of college is to act as the arbiter into certain supply managed careers (doctors, lawyers, etc.), ensuring that only the "top 10%" of students are permitted into those professions.
It's certainly debatable how good a job college is doing, or even what the right metrics are, but my point is that it's attempting something on a completely different scale than the Thiel Fellowship.
Perhaps the issue is that universities in the 20th-21st centuries have been trying to do two things at once, and are doing both of them badly: one, they are supposed to reproduce elite western culture (whoops), and two, they are supposed to be preprofessional finishing programs for doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, and business executives. They do not do the first properly (and since the 1960s cannot even agree on what it means), and they mostly fob off the second to graduate schools and corporate training programs. So, the substance of the preprofessional training has devolved into an empty pile of credits that cost far too much money and time.
At each stage in the chain, the schools blame the lower schools for failing to prepare students properly, and use that as an excuse to dilute standards further, which then causes more problems for the next stage in the chain. This has reached something close to its end point now. They can only reduce standards so much more now until all students are illiterates grunting prompts into chatbots.
As to the first role, for example, the Byzantines in their universities focused on reproducing some combination of Christian orthodoxy and the Greco-Roman heritage of philosophy and history. They just taught the same curriculum over and over and over again without much modification (albeit with a lot of lurching back and forth between iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm) for roughly a millennium. Since the 60s, the permanent cultural revolution makes it so that every micro generation of professors has a new revolutionary program that it imposes, which is then followed by a new revolutionary program against the old revolution and so on and so forth. Universities are fundamentally conservative (with a small c), which has generated a very funny situation in which they have become totally dedicated to conserving the institution of permanent cultural revolution without any content. They have become dedicated to the procedure of cultural revolution, but no one can agree on the substance and content of that revolution.
Reposting my comment from the last time this was posted:
This is super wrong. The Thiel Fellowship stopped betting on underdogs long, long ago. I invite anyone reading this comment section to select a random recipient from the last few years go and look at two things:
1. What stage was their company at when they received the fellowship?
2. What is their parents' career?
Every person who receives the Fellowship has already raised millions of dollars, sometimes even tens of millions of dollars. Raising millions of dollars as a teenager isn't something you generally do without exceptional fortune or parents in the finance industry. Usually it's the latter.
I once met a TF recipient who ran a successful property lending company. What was his father's job? Multimillionaire owner of a large and successful property investment firm. Not hating on the guy, he was pretty cool and nice and his business went on to be successful (and he was for sure a hard worker, intelligent and ambitious), but the Fellowship slapping their name on his back didn't really change how the cards were stacked. At the very least, it wasn't the thing that moved the needle to him dropping out. I would be greatly surprised if, in the last 5 years, the Fellowship was the tipping point for even a single person dropping out of college.
Full disclosure on the conflict of interest though, I am a mediocre college dropout who was rejected post interview. I wouldn't have and still wouldn't turn down the $100k if it was offered. Money is great.
I did that the last time you posted this comment. What I found was even sadder. Some (many?) of the companies are what I would call "hustles" -- keto drinks, home-made cosmetics. Their success I suspect lies on the initial effort put into networking and marketing. (There's nothing wrong in that, of course, it's just not interesting from a tech-startup pov.)
I'm not sure this is the case. My perception is that the majority of the things that get funded are legitimate tech companies working on genuinely interesting of products. For example, take the 2023 list:
All of these are real tech companies. What's less real about the hustle is the fact I picked a random entry off the list and checked his instagram, and sure enough there's a photo of him taking flying lessons as a teenager. Check the company stage and sure enough he's already raised just under $7M after being backed by Y Combinator 2 years prior. Cool guy, smart guy, clearly worked hard and built something valuable. I don't hold it against him in the slightest. I don't hold it against YC or the program managers for the TF either - they clearly picked the guy most likely to build a billion dollar company.
But did the Fellowship make him a winner? Absolutely not.
It's free money and a networking opportunity with a bunch of other people almost guaranteed to win by their upbringing. Why wouldn't they take the 100k? The TF doesn't take an equity share in your company, they just give you the cash.
Much of the personal development in college years takes place outside of the classroom, including deep friendships forged with others who are also growing up.
Thiel himself was the beneficiary of his college network - he met the PayPal team through his Stanford roommate. It’s inauthentic for him to discount the power of these networks.
College is broken in many ways. But a positive college experience adds more depth and richness to life in the long-term than a check from Thiel.
What do you mean? It worked great for Adam Neumann! /s
It’s always funny and surprising when people say “It’s a dog eat dog world!” and sets up a dog eat dog world and then get surprised when a dog eats another dog.
How many are profitable companies? Roping in endless investment when backed by Thiel seems vs building a going concern.
Thiel is bashing college, some of these kids have prestige academics to begin with. Luminar‘S founder attended one of the top California schools (a private school in Newport Beach), was mentored in high school by a laser entrepreneur, and attended the UC Irvije Laser institute, while in high school.
And elite private school education probably gets you to junior year of a state university academically and he was essentially in “college” at Irvine while a high school student. Coupled with wealthy real estate developer parents, sure skipping college to start a business is a viable path.
What’s interesting to me is how many people end up in careers unrelated to their college major — yet basically Thiels path more or less doubles down on their career choice at 18 and locks them in.
There is no control to this experiment. What would have happened to those 271 kids had he paid their tuition to Harvard, and also opened up the same access to them?
Also, what happened to the other 260 kids? I bet they would prefer that Harvard degree now
One assumes there are people that turned it down. I'm more interested in a story about them than a story about the ones that took the money. Especially since it sounds like it was simply free money. Though equally I'd be super interested in a story about those that did and still failed. I assume PT will "drop you" if you cease to be value accretive.
Equally, I'd love to see a story about those that were offered YC and turned it down. This should happen, I assume more often since YC are taking 7% of your business while PT appears to be offering a triple gift (cash, status and time).
There is a huge difference between those that make it without YC/PT and those that were offered the help and said, "Non".
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers said of the fellowship: "I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college."
College is about signaling. Yes, I deeply enjoyed my four years there and want the same for my kids. But at the end of the day, the most valuable thing I got out of it is a diploma.
Peter Thiel investing in you is an even better signal for the specific task of trying to build a unicorn. Not only is he a billionaire, but all the other people who invest in startups know who he is. But getting a thiel fellowship is out of reach for most young people.
Colleges don’t create the unicorns, in fact it’s the opposite. The most driven, talented people choose which college to go to. By and large they’ll be successful no matter where they go (+/- luck factors), and even if they skip it altogether. College/advisors like Thiel serve as an accelerant. The fact that Thiel (a venture capitalist who invested early on in 20 something Mark Zuckerberg) is better at picking young unicorns than the average college admission board should come as no surprise. Especially considering he can be way more selective.
I still wouldn’t skip my college years for anything though, it was the best time of my life.
“Used as filter for employment” is a terrible burden to bear, but some institution has to do it. I don’t think college gets enough credit for bearing that burden while surviving and fulfilling its original purpose at all. Saying “college is a disaster, we should gate employment by (eg, written tests or billionaire hand picks or high school grades)” sounds to me like “Frodo is an emo mess while Sam is practical and thoughtful. Things would go better if we gave the ring to Sam”
Since the article is paywalled I will comment based solely on the title
No, it’s not awkward for colleges because any educated person should be able to comprehend that college is not a factory and outliers always exist. The fact that we’ve had successful people way before formal education existed should be enough to render the point moot.
The only one affected is the general public which will instinctively undervalue education and use this piece of information to skip college and live a worse life on average
I learned this rule early in the internet, “paying doesn’t solve the problem.”
I first tried to pay as I wanted to support. But it just let to more ads and more upsell and more bother. It was a more pleasant experience to not pay and see the basic ads than paying and getting bombarded with “dear prepend, buy a longer subscription/gift a subscription/change your password/do you love us/etc”
Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more.
This is so true in this world of A/B testing everything. When A/B tests are poorly designed and results are interpreted for a short time frame, in my experience it always leads to poor decisions which impact long term.
> Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more.
That's why no subscription model will work in favour of the paying customer for newspapers, dating apps and so on. It was never a distribution problem as much as that once the money rolls in, the next question will always be the same: How do we increase revenue?
If there’s a dedicated decision maker they can fend off “how much more” by sticking to some design aesthetic of “build good thing, be happy with 60% margin.”
But that’s pretty rare and hard to know as there’s also lots of single owner 4hourworkweekers trying to wring extra money out of subscribers and selling $3 shirts for $50 or whatever.
The article is also comparing this very small group with university student _on average_. If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.