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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.'"
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.
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
A good foundation is always going to be handy. The best (one of the best, at least) way to get a solid foundation in math/physics is in a formal learning environment. Sure, you're gonna learn things that you'll never use, but that's going to be true no matter what path of education you take. This way, you have a degree with which to get your first job -- the thing that *leads* to "Experience and provable capability". It also depends on the field. Many large, old-school companies won't look at you if you don't have the right piece of paper from the right kind of institution.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
"Piece of official paper" helps you clear some hurdles in placing you for that first job in your chosen field. It usually establishes what group of lowest common denominators you belong into. Without it, the other route is climbing the career path from menial jobs (e.g. tech support).
Now...certifications are a different thing and come in all kinds of flavors. I'm a CCIE. Even if I had cheated my way through all the tests and wouldn't in reality know jack about routers, it's still valuable for almost any business who uses Cisco stuff - if you employ someone with the cert you get better discounts. So with that in hand I can basically say in the interview "if you hire me, your infrastructure investment costs drop by X%, I require Y EUR of salary a month. Consider if it's worth it".
Now, that's a very vendor-specific thing. Highly-ranked but more generic ones like CISSP certification are in the same category as that university degree - helps you clear some hurdles and maybe helps convincing that you actually have some skills. Then there's of course all the entry-level stuff that are completely pointless (Microsoft certified solitaire experts come to mind)...
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!!!
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".
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.
Where, perchance, does a person get access to the concepts and math associated with Optical Physics, if not at College?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I believe some people need university to full get it. Some people don't. People who look down on those without degrees or those with degrees are just ignorant.
I don't think I would want to work for some old-school company that required a degree. Everything about it would imply everything they do is old and I'm probably not going to have as much fun.
Likewise I couldn't stand to work with someone who sees his company as bleeding edge and spends his time trying to as non-traditional as possible and dismissing people purely because they've gone to university and lack a butt load of experience.
It would just be nice to work with people who have common sense.
That solid foundation is great for personal growth, but not all that useful in business. The value of education should not be discounted, but if you goal is to make money, college is not the right place to be. This program recognizes that fact, and allows those who's goal is to make money to get on to the right track. Those who are in college for the right reasons will not be interested anyway.
It is not like colleges have exclusive rights to some mythical book that holds all of the worlds knowledge; past, present, and future. If someone was able to come up with the concepts and math behind optical physics before, someone can do it again.
If you believe your time is more valuable than using it to reinvent the wheel, you can pay someone for the information. College is one place to purchase that knowledge, but hardly the only vendor.
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."
I'm sorry, but that little certification and piece of official paper are getting you NOWHERE in my field, pal.
Experience and provable capability or GTFO. NO EXCEPTIONS.
How does someone start in your professions ? Does you have to be the son of someone practicing it, just like law and medicine used to be ?
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Right, because that cert and degree don't establish that you meet a certain knowledge baseline. It doesn't show that you've completed programs and courses of study that show you should be able to perform the job. It will likely get you the interview. THEN you get to demonstrate that you know something, and if you were diligent in your studies, you will.
I've seen self-taught guys that were very good at some things in their field, but utterly fucking SUCKED at others because they only focused on certain things and failed pretty hard when they tried to branch out. Get a formal education and you get a much broader foundation. Granted, this isn't always the case. Some self-taught guys are phenomenal and some idiots coasted through college, but quite frankly, saying that the degree isn't worth anything is just laughably fucking stupid on your part. I sense bitterness. Did you rack up tons of debt with a liberal arts degree and then get pissed when it didn't catapult you to the top?
In addition, going to college teaches you many meta-skills (e.g., budgeting your time, meeting deadlines, working in a team, performing research, communicating/selling your ideas in a formal manner, coping with bureaucracy and navigating institutional hierarchies) that are very handy in the workplace. You can learn all of these outside of college, but as previous poster suggests, a college degree establishes a high probability of baseline skills.
The "Piece of official paper" is more than a certification that you are a capable person in your profession, formal education is a requirement in most professional fields.
Would you hire the services of a "drop out" medic? A drop out dentist? A drop out lawyer? It seems to me that "drop out" stars are more of the exception than the rule and they tend to be confined to certain fields.
Dropping out of collage seems reasonable for developers because Software Development is an craft a trade, not a profession. Same goes for entrepreneurs, chancing upon a successful idea is not a formal profession. And believe me, it was chance.
Many successful ideas seem obvious in hindsight but they weren't so obvious back when they were conceived. And when you factor in the rate of failed enterprises you see that being an entrepreneur is a bad career choice. It just seem good because you only hear about the lucky ones not the unlucky ones who chased the wrong ideas.
Investors, on the other hand. Professional investors like Paul Graham of Y combinator. They love entrepreneurs. They may drop them like a hot potato if their ideas don't fly, but they love to attract young entrepreneurs because en mass, they are a good investment, even though only 1 in 10 succeeds, they get to cash in with the lucky ones and shrug off the cost of the unlucky ones like a snake shed their dead skin, then dance on top of these crushed dreams while rising their precious boys like trophies for the world to see.
Ok I got a little dramatic there but my point is:
a) Distrust people who make a career out of founding start-ups when they tell you to drop out of collage to raise a start-up.
b) I know you *just know* your idea is pure gold. The other 9 guys thinks so too. The rich guy saying he believes on you know doesn't actually mean *you* you, more like you, the concept. I don't mean to stop you but...
c) His backup plan are the other 9 start-ups, what's *your* back up plan? Like a football player, you need a secure career.
d) Secure -well paid- jobs are in the professional fields. Those fields need education.
e) Unless you're a a programmer, or a model, or a photographer, etc.
Don't listen to this asshole. Don't drop out of college..
But... the future refused to change.