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Drop Out and Innovate, Urges VC Peter Thiel
An anonymous reader writes "The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their ideas. '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,' Thiel says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies.'"
I like to see people who no longer needs to demonstrate things to put their money where their mouth is.
Sorry kids but $100,000 really doesn't go as far as you might hope.
they'll understand why university comes in handy.
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
Here's what happens:
1) they take the money
2) they work hard for 3 months
3) the money runs out
4) their idea is worthless
5) they have no education
6) next 30 years they have no job
Great plan.
If the almighty buck is the only thing that motivates all humans, then I can see how executives think. In that case, a deep education is unnecessary. You can get rich with an idea and lots of elbow grease. But not everything is achievable this way. Some things need learning. Like finding the structure of the DNA, develop self-assembled structures, optimize carbon nanotube growth, develop drugs that can cross the BBB, design multicore CPUs, discover the inner workings of mitochondria etc. I expect to be flamed for the following statement: some of the stuff that needs lots of education is also more valuable than Facebook... or money.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Sure, why not? However, Thiel better be right about selecting people correctly for the program. Otherwise, you've "stopped out" for a couple of years, got a failed .com startup to your credit, and might have trouble getting back into or adjusting to university.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
If it's so risky to make the next generation of companies, it'd seem useful to have something to fall back on if those risks don't pan out. University degrees are of wildly varying quality but many established employers require them (not to mention immigration authorities).
Personally I don't think fellowships are what's needed to encourage innovation and risky startups. What's needed is a robust and reliable revenue model. It's not coincidence that most of the interesting programs coming out lately have been written for mobile phones and especially the iPhone, where there is at least in theory a somewhat functioning market that allows developers to make money. Sadly that's somewhat unique.
If you look at the big recent successes on the web, most of them have been fuelled to their success by enormous injections of venture capital. It's very questionable whether YouTube and Facebook could have been created without blank cheques from men like Thiel. Ultimately this isn't a sustainable way to create innovation. If the web had a working revenue model beyond ads, we'd see a thousand interesting new companies bloom.
Even if this is true for many talented developers, it's still irresponsible. Actually "urging" kids to stop their collage/university education mid-way is a zeitgeist decision, it only *may* be the right move *now*, but who's saying the tech sector isn't facing another blow 6 months from now (whatever the reason, like a larger economical problem or a large shift in priorities for the major tech companies). They've already put in the money and time into getting a formal education, and he's urging them to gamble it away? Selfish.
For the record, I word in programming, embedded, and some EE, and I don't have a degree. But then, I didn't *start* one either -- I didn't invest time or money getting half-way there and then drop out mid-way.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I mean seriously WTF is up with that? Just because I'm over 20 years of age means I don't have the ability to innovate? I'd rather see money given to people who at least have some life experience and haven't had a chance to ever try out their own ideas, dreams, and inventions!
Yes grumpy old man is grumpy.
And while there are a million ideas out there done by people regardless of if they completed school or not encouraging people to not finish going to school just puts barriers in their way for when they DO want to innovate.
Unless you're one of the individuals that can self-learn easily you're only making it harder on yourself if you leave school.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Here's the problem: we remember the success of dropouts like Gates and Zuckerberg, and forget that for each Zuckerberg there are hundreds of dropouts that are desperately seeking jobs at Burger King. And finishing college isn't necessarily a barrier to innovation: Larry and Sergei both finished their undergraduate degrees, and things turned out just fine for them.
I am officially gone from
If one of these drop-outs could figure out how to nuke Facebook and Twitter, they will be on to something. And I never want to hear about "apps" again. Back to Osmos...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Nothing could possibly go wrong there, right?
Maybe the problem is in
the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt
and we should try to fix that?
Call me socialist and all that, but I think education is just too important to be left to entrepreneurial greed.
Just what the world needs: MORE BUSINESS MAJORS!!! Woohoo....
So. Lemme get this straight.
Instead of coming out of college with a...DEGREE and a five-to-six digit debt, you're going to pay these people $100k to come out of college with just the debt?
The drugs really that good eh?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Star golfer and notable college drop-out Tiger Woods is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 athletes or teams of athletes aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Woods calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their sport. 'Some of the world's most exciting sports were created by people who stopped out of school because they had talent that couldn't wait until graduation,' Woods says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their talents either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of athletes.'"
You know, this has been tried before and it still doesn't sound like a very good idea.
How about fellowships to students or universities to support innovative new ideas a parts (just part) of the curriculum or area of study? If one is good, couldn't both be better?
Looking through the examples of drop-outs in the article, I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen? Mark Zuckerberg? Shawn Fanning is about as close as the list gets, although Napster really rides on top of the Internet's existing peer-to-peer architecture.
Maybe I am too much of a skeptic or believe too strongly in the value of education, but the way I see things, famous drop-outs were good at capitalizing on the successful research or work of people who stayed in school.
Palm trees and 8
Unless your teachers/college are awful, college is a pretty decent way to get at least a decent grasp of a wide range of subjects that relate to your field. You won't become expert in any area - you need to specialize by yourself - but you get a good foundation that helps you whatever you choose to specialize in and generally when you need to work with other professionals in your field. Four years of college and two years of work tends to be a better base for just about anything than six years of work. There is also a lot more that one can learn from college: If you spend four years there and don't gain useful contacts, friends, self-confidence, project management skills, etc. a lot faster than you do at work and generally the way you see your life isn't altered in any way, you're probably doing something wrong.
Also, if you truly have an awesome project and can't spare yourself time to do it - perhaps not full time, but a couple of hours a day - you are certainly doing something wrong. Perhaps you failed to convince the administrative staff that your project is important (and that they should thus support you)? Perhaps you didn't even try? If you just stated "I don't have time for this really important project" and gave up, either you didn't believe in the project anyways or your personality type might not be suitable for entrepeneurship. In either case, dropping out might be a really bad choice for you...
One last thing: Usually when a project can't wait for you to graduate first, it is because you think "This is so obvious that if I don't do it, someone else will".
I come from a country in which traditionally, education has been ever tax-funded (Germany). The quality of education has been very high.
I'm watching how fees are being introduced (for now at a very moderate level, at least compared to the U.S.). At the same time, the most vocal proponents of those fees are either taking part on private universities or consulting out to those.
My take on this is: it's very difficult to monetize a resource (education in this case) if it is cheaply available and high quality. So to prepare the ground for private enterprise, this resource has to be destroyed first.
And it doesn't matter that this goes at the cost of society at large. Those entrepreneurs just don't fucking care.
It's the same what's happening with rail in Great Britain, with water supply in many places (GB, south America).
He's a VC - he only needs one of his horses to come in to make money. Who cares if all the others crash and burn - he'll still own their ideas anyway...
They talking about taking a break. And considering the spiraling costs of university education - only to graduate with no job prospects (even if you have a marketable degree!) - taking a break to earn money to pay for school is quite a responsibly thing to do compared to racking up student loans.
These days going to college and graduating isn't as worth as much as when I went to school. Kids today are competing with college grads from all over the World. There are no safe and secure careers anymore and going to school for fine arts, liberal arts and sciences, although quite worthwhile in its own right will get you nowhere on their own unless you have some great connections.
A college education isn't as valuable as it was. Yeah, someone will post the "stats" about how the more education means more money, but those stats are old, outdated and were created before globalization really took off.
So, absolutely take break and so something really high risk like putting everything you have on the line while you're young - it's horribly rough when older and married. Every self made millionaire I know is on at least his 2nd marriage and all their kids are screwed up - Daddy was never home.
I mean my university was a complete waste of space. (Which I half jokingly refer to as Good Ol' FU. And yes, foreign language requirements have proven to be less than worthless for me.) I think I would have been better off dropping out half way through and doing anything else so it might be true for some quitting in the middle would be a good idea.(Since my degree is basically worthless. My joke is that at least toilet paper is good for something unlike my degree.) However I can understand for alot of people my situation is not the norm and dropping out would be a bad idea.(Although with the way prices on higher education are going it's worth it for fewer and fewer people.) On the other hand we are talking about young adults here. If they really need the education for whatever they could always go back. I mean a lot of colleges will let you take a sabatical. Can they do that? Take a sabatical for 2 or 3 years to see how that works out and if it doesn't just come back and finish their degree?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Given all the ranting about the value of an education, it's worth remembering a couple of things here. First, it's very similar conditions to an internship, which is also paying people to drop out of school for a short period of time. There's nothing keeping these people from reentering college at the end of the second year, even if things work out for them. And it's a pretty good deal. $100k goes far for a startup. And they get a mentor to help them make serious decisions.
At the end of that second year, what happens? Even if the business flops, they can go back to school, but this time they have considerable marketable job experience and a prestigious award which is very useful for life after school. And they probably will be a little more appreciative of the value of an education. Those that don't return, probably wouldn't have finished anyway. Sure, the idea is risky for a college student, but not that risky.
The dropouts who are highly successful are very much the exception rather than the rule. Generally the pattern is their good fortune is overwhelmingly obvious before they drop out. Meanwhile, thousands more drop-out thinking they are going to make it rich and end up going no where for the rest of their career. This is not an endorsement of the intrinsic value of the education, but the reality of a *lot* of companies that make a 4 year degree a requirement before they'll even forward your resume to the department looking for a candidate. In my case, I interviewed during college for what was advertised as full-time summer, part-time rest of the year position. The employer made it obvious that I would have to drop out of college to prove I was dedicated to them to be considered for hire. I declined and now make 3 times the salary they offered (they offered low by real-world standards, even if it seemed a little high relative to intern level positions).
In this particular case, they are expected to drop over a one-time commitment of only $100k? In VC terms, that is nothing at all, you can't start anything with that. The cases I know of personally start in the millions, and generally people who have degrees and experience allowing them to pick their career back up if everything goes bust. In salary terms for a 'grunt' job, that may amount to little more than 1 years pay of the job you agree to lock yourself out of to pursue your idea. If he were *really* committed to a person's idea being valuable, he wouldn't care what their education was and he would put more than $100k into it.
The fact that he specifically targets people in university with the condition of dropping out seems almost vindictive to the institution. If he things things are broken with the system, screwing over the majority if not all of 20 students is not a good approach to inciting positive change.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school"
Yes, and lots of the floors of the world's McDonalds are wiped by people who "stopped out" of school too.
If you're considering dropping out, I'd suggest you take a look at the statistics. In the last four decades, only one out of 300,000,000 drop outs became Bill Gates.
If you're going to drop out, at least you want to have some fun before the "drop out" part http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tune_In,_Turn_On,_Drop_Out
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The flawed logic is this.... if the ideas "couldn't wait" to be done by the end of college that means that someone else would do them first. Which means that you aren't encouraging any real innovation here simply because it will be done by someone else if you don't do it at the earliest time you think of it.
Good to see he practices what he preaches.
People who treat university like vocation school will get what they deserve - I did.
University isn't just a place to learn. It's a place to network. It's a place where you can find like-minded individuals to hang out with, and a place where you're forced to interact with unlike-minded individuals - and not always to your detriment.
Handing a bunch of kids a pile of money is borderline irresponsible. Ideas are all good and well, but it takes a hell of a lot of experience or luck to parley them into money.
And how am I going to learn all the complex math needed to realize my idea without finishing university?
Sure, you can learn some of it yourself, but you really need a professor you show you what's important and what's not, and how to understand certain concepts.
what about the cost of a degree? lots of jobs don't need one and take some with a degree was not in a related field. I how you end up PHB that don't have a clue about IT but are the people running it.
"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"
Some of the world's best unemployed people, low-end job workers and burgerflippers are people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation.
Just because 2 people were lucky enough to pull it off, means NOTHING.
open to older people has ideas are nice but some real work to go with the idea some times is better and can lead to makeing the idea better or telling you that it will not work that well.
I have alt idea pay for a apprentices system for IT work that can give to people experience that is cheaper then a 4 year B.S. and lets them do real work as well letting them try out idea with people who have been in the field for some time.
1. Find lawyer.
2. Sue Peter Thiel for age discrimination
3. Profit
VCs like Thiel are getting more desperate to find young, talented, ignorant people to control, so they have to "generate leads" by this kind of promotion. Young entrepreneurs who already have business sense won't be fooled by this kind of offer. However, if you are really young, really smart, and really naive, you just might go for it and end up owing Thiel 50% of your idea.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Old people (over 20) need not apply! Show your entrepreneurial bent by suing this scum-bag Peter Thiel for discrimination. Why not investigate the hiring practices of his companies? Hint: you'll find lots of age discrimination there!
The real problem with college education is that it is so expensive. How many people now owe not only tens, but HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars in government college loans? And BTW, those are not tax deductible, you'll have to pay taxes on your income first and pay the debt out in after-tax money.
The true culprit in this is the gov't giving loans to people who shouldn't be getting them in the first place and gov't regulating the entire market of education and education loans.
How can 200K USD loan be justified to a 'social studies' major? How can a 200K loan be given to somebody with no collateral of any kind? How can 200K loan be given to a kid really?
Sure, the kids have some of the blame, they clearly aren't calculating what the repayment would look like after graduation, but who can blame them? Nobody is teaching them even the basics of economics and nobody is explaining to them anything about money or work, the school system is not doing it and it looks like the parents aren't doing it either.
Once you start giving tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to kids as loans to give the money to universities/colleges, the universities/colleges will then expect that kids CAN rake up that debt and transfer that dough to the universities coffers. This has to stop. The gov't must stop destroying the future of young generations by giving them rope to hang themselves with.
Of-course the gov't must also stop doing all kinds of other things hurting the future generations, like borrowing money, which is taxes on those future generations (taxes with interest). The gov't must stop printing dollars, as this will destroy the currency and gov't and economy altogether and what are those future generations going to do then? How much time will it take them to restore all of that?
--
So actually, somebody saying: drop out and do your own thing, this somebody may just be right. If you drop out and DO something else, you may get more experience by doing it and you may end up better off financially, as you'd be working before your peers would be and you wouldn't have all that insane debt paid for very questionable education.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, that's it, Thiel. Spend $100,000 to make sure 20 potential future competitors never get anywhere, and have no degree to fall back on. When their dreams crash, they'll be your coding slaves because no one else will want them. Good strategy.
The translation is:
Anybody want a peanut?
"The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook"
More like Co-FUNDER, not co-Founder. Last I knew the guy gave money, he didn't give code, or come up with the idea/concept, or am I mistaken?
I how you end up PHB that don't have a clue about IT but are the people running it.
Let me guess, you didn't get a degree.
Seriously, nobody who ever worked at a company and studied thinks that companies are a good idea. Essentially the only thing they are useful for is to kill creativity and to waste resources.
Let the people study in piece and what's more important, give them _time_ to be able to realise their ideas. Such an environment gave us Unix or many programming languages.
The basic problem is like this. If you do something on your own, you get the idea, work on it, and eventually it gets done. In a company you get an idea, then you need to ask for permission to work on it, writing proposals and making presentations while trying to find someone in management who accepts your idea. After spending more resources on promoting your idea than implementing would have cost, the project is cancelled.
... that ("...entrepreneurs aged under 20...") it is blatantly illegal to discriminate in this way based on age?
I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen?
Gates was there at the very beginnings of the microcomputer, with the Altair 8800 in 1975.
The first generation micros ran Microsoft BASIC. In 1977, Microsoft added FORTRAN to the mix and in 1978, COBOL. In 1979 Microsoft released MBASIC for the 16 bit Intel 8086. In 1980 the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
The PC without development tools or software support is a circuit board in the lab. It does not change anything.
The MS-DOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
If you insist on talking about something "transformational," why not consider the mass-market oriented disk based operating system that sold for $40 retail list ?
The OEM Windows system install?
Yeah, I'm sure you were just BORN with 900 years experience and huge NATURAL talent in whatever SHIT it is that you do, ASSHAT.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why exactly does it take risk? They could simply work on evolving current technologies and concepts instead of taking huge risks. It's better to have a lot of middle class people working for a normal employer then it is to have 18 people working for mcdonalds and 2 being super rich at their own companies...
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
Yes, like Einstein, Bohr and Schrodinger; oh, wait...
This sort of logic is far too similar to the nonsense behind claims like "Smoking can't be so bad - I had an uncle that smoked like a chimney and lived until he was 90". Idiots like that are hurting the lives of young people.
Here we go again. As expected there are dozens of anecdotes from people who dropped out or never went to college, and succeeded in spite of not getting a degree. The saddest part is reading those comments that show they don't know what they missed, and think they didn't miss a thing. Think science is easy, or perhaps it's just a matter of getting lucky with an idea that turns out to be a winner. Yeah, you could win the lottery too.
I think most people agree that education is worthwhile. The question is, does the average university provide a good education? Is a degree worth anything? Many people seem to think not. Let's push the question back further. Is a high school diploma worth anything? If college is of doubtful benefit, then why is high school not doubtful? Why not drop out after 8th grade?
I also love the age discrimination. So, I have to be under the age of 20. Why? Because that age is young enough to be naive enough to go for something like this? I can't take Thiel up on this offer if I get a degree in 4 years, which can be done before I turn 22, just 1 more year. Just 1 more year. Ahh, but time is money, 1 more year is TOO LATE! Actually, thanks to all sorts of options available in high school, I can start college with a bunch of credit, and graduate in 3 or even 2 years. How about that? Earn my 4 year college degree while I am still 19. I guess people who can do that are too smart to jump at this perilous offer.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
wow, you forgot to mention your 32 gigabyte /etc/hosts file!
Encouraging more people to drop out of college and go startup is good advice for a tiny tiny minority of people who will go on to found the Next Big Thing, and terrible advice for the vast majority who will end up living in their parents' basement and working at the local comic book shop.
But it is *always* good for Peter Thiel, venture capitalist, who stands to make a pile of money for risking a little cash, and isn't anteing up his entire future.
School is really over-rated for those of us who can self-learn, if we wanted an education we can easily have that from a library or google. So then the only purpose of school is for social aspects; and the fact that going to school usually helps you land a job somewhere. But if you have a solid business idea and the required funding, I don't see any value in delaying your business. In fact, great harm as business is about timing, whereas school will always be there.
I learned basic calculus in high school. I just completed a course in my first semester of college in multi-variable calculus. I didn't go to most of the lectures because I've grown to learn most heavily from books. It was a more efficient use of my time to learn what I needed to learn on my own, so I skipped the lectures and studied. In theory, if I were sufficiently motivated, I wouldn't need to go to college to become an aerospace engineer. Honestly, I think I would learn best in an apprenticeship.
In any case, your argument is reducto ad adsurdum and has the simple fallacy that you omit the possibility of motivated self learners that hit the books.
I'd go for the fellowship if it had more money attached to it.
Don't come unless they call you. If it's right to drop out (and it hardly ever is) it'll be bloody obvious--like $millions of dollars up front, VCs begging to fund you, serious deals making it hard for you to get good grades.
JMHO.
my grandfather, a very successful bizman in the 50s told me to become a professional (doctor) cause, he said, so many biz guys fail...I've seen so many fall by the wayside he said to me
So, we need to avoid the fallacy of not counting those who don't make it..
The question to ask is, what fraction of people who drop out are successful, and what fraction have their lives ruined... vs college
And it's not coke.
I think what Thiel is trying to change is the trend for 'smart' people to just go to college. Like a lot of people have said here, there are lots of people in college who should never have been there in the first place. It might be that the sharpest and most entrepreneurial minds should be out starting companies. Hell some of them might end up employing the college buddies they left behind, and in that case everyone comes out a winner. Too many people are heading to college because other alternatives are not as attractive.
As long as we live in a capitalist society, we need people like Ellison, Gates and Zuckerberg (and all those who didn't become as well-known as they) to take the chance of failing and lead the way.
you DO know that gates bought MSDOS and didnt actually write it ?
Kildall's relationship with IBM seems to have gone off-track from the start and CP/M-86 was - let us say - not quick out of the gate.
Everyone and his brother was trying to clone CP/M for the 8086.
The obvious upgrade path for the business-oriented micro.
Microsoft promised to deliver something serviceable in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC.
There was no need to re-invent the wheel, just hammer it into shape.
If your parents are funding your college education then you have an even more serious problem.
The fact of the matter is how can you secure a line of credit from the bank for your business when you owe student loans and have no college degree. Without a degree the bank assumes your stupid. They want to see MBA's with great credit scores, partners, and homes and other forms of colateral they can take away if you can't pay back.
The days of 1999 where an napkin with an idea can get you a check for 1 million dollars are over.
I have a brilliant idea and competitors are stealing it. I need to work 2 jobs to payback my student loans first. My wife simply wont let me risk everything for an idea when I can get $10/hr guaranteed money (shit pay).
Get your degree and yes someone may take your idea. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars and several people to make it happen. I mean what would you do if you had a potential VC on the side of the country want you to fly in for a talk? Can you afford to even fly down?? yeah ... maybe I am bitter.
http://saveie6.com/
The NBA and NFL are encouraging young people do drop out of college or university, in internal memos calling it "dumbing out," to take a stab at the tiny number of incredibly lucrative positions within their respective organizations. They also encourage the same population of potential doctors, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, etc., to waste time playing these sports while in college, instead of doing what they should be doing, studying. In effect, they're offering them lottery tickets. Of course, the stupid ones take the proffered false hope, so who am I to complain?
Yes. Because the project you're supposed to work on magically costs nothing.
The cost of living in costless.
Going to live freegan and dumpster dive for your meals eh?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!