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PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel says the key to quicker business innovation is skipping college. His foundation is handing out $100,000 to 24 people under 20 to drop out of college for two years and start companies. From the press release: "As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space."
Has he gotten $2 million worth of publicity from this stunt yet?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I wonder how many people with college degrees they will hire
That's forward thinking right there! Why beat the competition if you can pay them a pittance to fail outright early in life?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Seems like a gimmick, to me. You know, as opposed to an innovative idea.
For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.
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100,000 dollars really isn't that much money.
The net present value of a college degree in the U.S. is greater than $100,000 plus the two years of tuition saved. However, if you were going to drop out anyway, it's a good deal. Or, if you can drop out for a minimum period of time, take the gamble, then go back, it might be a somewhat good deal.
This is just stupid. Yes, some people will do better starting a company instead of going to college (myself included), but that is not the rule, that is the exception.
The vast majority will do worst if they drop college to start a company. Heck, most will crash and burn starting a company even after college.
The numbers of factor determining "success without/instead of college" is staggering, and it is not about $100k (heck, I did it with a quarter of that).
morcego
I mean, some of these kids already have degrees. One of them I read attended classes at a university since he was 10. Or how about this one:
"Andrew Hsu started doing research in a pathology lab when he was 10. By the time he was 12, he had matriculated at the University of Washington. Soon after, he graduated with honors degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. He was a 19-year-old 4th-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University when he left early this year to pursue his start-up, Airy Labs."
So this kid is under 20, but he already had 3 Bachelor's degrees and was a year from finishing a Ph.D. These kids are all smart and highly motivated, and it seems they're going to receive a significant amount of mentorship through this fellowship.
But just considering the failure rate of new startups, how would the Thiel Foundation look if 18/20 of their proteges are out of business in a year? My guess is the Foundation will be injecting money and talent into these ventures to avoid such a PR disaster.
Every time the college vs. no college debate comes up, examples of highly successful dropouts or people who didn't ever go to college are rolled out. The default assumption is that everyone is destined to be a successful entrepreneur. In his defense, he does mention further down in the article that not everyone is cut out for this.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up. Sending the message that everyone can do this if they just try is wrong in my opinion. It produces a lot of small business failures and subsequent bankruptcies as people keep trying to make their business float despite obvious signs it'll never work. It also produces a lot of rhetoric that standard employees are a bunch of lazy people who have no drive and can't cut it in the "real world." Also, there's only so many small businesses that the economy can absorb -- if everyone is out running a frozen yogurt shop or pizza place or small-time startup company, larger companies don't have a workforce. Finally, the entrepreneur class plays the rugged individualist card a little too much IMO when pushing for things such as reduced regulations on business. Example: States who try to enforce sick time requirements on medium-sized small businesses are labeled socialist and hostile to business.
I will be the first to admit I'm not an entrepreneur. I have a good job doing systems engineering work for a large employer, I work hard, and my contribution is valued (after all, they keep paying me.) A smaller company could run rings around this one, but there would be a problem making that transition:
- I can't sell. Period.
- I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be
- I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
For everyone else who isn't these things, the formal education route is the way to go. Just like your average unemployed factory worker would be ill-advised to cash out his retirement to go buy a Subway franchise, high school grads would be ill-advised to completely ignore the safer path to a decent living.
I discovered the internet in the 80's, at university, and totally fell in love with the whole concept of special interest news groups, email, and using ftp to get freely available software. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to create a "BBS" (the only term I could think of to apply to it at the time), which would provide a number of dial-up lines to allow the general public to connect to it. I began doing some research to figure out what the cost of running such an operation would be, starting with 16 phone lines, and working my way up from there once the company started to make a profit. I also inquired with the university about out how much it would cost to lease a connection from them, situated relatively close to the campus, and calculated the cost of laying down the necessary cable, and the start up costs worked out to be in the many tens of thousands of dollars. I wanted the service to be affordable, and was hoping to charge 5c per minute, or preferably even less. I didn't expect the phone lines to be in use all the time, so I estimated how busy I expected the phone lines to be, based on an amount I figured was reasonable from my experience with multiuser chat BBS's, and calculated that near the start of the 2nd year of operation, while making enough money to cover all of its own ongoing costs the whole time, it would have made enough on top of that to completely pay for the start up costs, and at that point would be completely self-sustaining and could start to grow.
I approached someone I happened to personally know who worked in the loans department for a bank to give him an unofficial pitch for my idea. I wanted to approach it as a business loan, and that seemed reasonable to myself and the other fellow that I had recruited into helping me do the research.
He thought it was really innovative, but he thought that my estimates on usage were very high, since this sort of thing was wholly unproven, and said that I would probably not be able to get a loan for the amounts that I would have needed to start up.
*sigh*
If only...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
First session of our orientation course in our first year, our professor from industrial engineering (our dept) dept, who was flying to m.i.t. to deliver lessons and back from time to time, (one of the youngest professors in this country back then) had told us that we would only remember 4% of ALL that we were going to learn during the course of next 4 years of academic education. and ALL of that would only serve the purpose of giving us a 'formation'. a formation of scientific/engineering mind.
he was right. despite we were studying in a university that sent academicians to teach in a lot of respectable universities of the world, despite we were a university that was geared more towards practical (applied) education, (a few of my classmates are in top 4-5 people of some fortune 10 companies now), the next 4 years of education was really in that manner. after a while, you come to learn - this is the reality of an education system that has descended from scholastic roots, and there are few universities and colleges exempt from these around the world, and these are considered radical.
so in short, even our education system, even if it is conducted with a 'modern' approach, is, 96% inefficient. we load 96% crap into brains of people, only to give a formation that is worth 4%.
it is stunning that, up until this point, noone was able to bring a method that would give 100% formation without loading 96% crap.
but hey - education and textbooks are lucrative businesses. so, our youth has to endure 96% crap.
Much better kids get some basic education in high school, then directly go about doing what they want to do, and learning in the process. times have changed. we had to shell out $50-90 on a single textbook to get to what would be considered advanced information back then - now we have google, and unfathomable amount of information that it indexed, thanks to what crowds put on the web. and yeah, what you can get from web, can be as good as what is put into textbooks. (and at times, more advanced and deep than you would want in a coursebook).
it is time to reform.
Read radical news here
That's precisely how most people see their degrees and why we need to get rid of the concept of most jobs needing a degree. Liberal educations used to be hardcore... closer to modern engineering majors in work loads than what we have today. 100 years ago, a liberally educated student could claim competence in classical languages, math, basic science, music, economics, rhetoric and writing. In other words, such a graduate actually was a good candidate for a serious career in government or the private sector because it took a "somebody" to make it through such a diverse and rigorous program. Today, they're a $50k+ second high school diploma (where a high school diploma back then was equivalent to a B.A. today).
As to this guy, he has a B.A. and a J.D. from an elite university. If anyone can actually comment on the wisdom of this more normal path (his choices in majors, if not university, is closer to what most Americans choose in college), it's him.
Lottery winner gives people money to quit their jobs and start playing the lottery instead.
I've been in the IT industry for about 12 years without a degree and let me tell you. All the BS about college not being important for programmers is just that...BS! What I learned in the first 2 classes, Discrete Math and Computer Architecture, almost makes it worthwhile alone. Can you code without knowing how to solve recurrence relations or Djikstra's algorithm? Sure, but it's damned nice to have those additional tools in your kit. It's also handy to address a problem with a tested solution some math geek wrote a grad paper on 50 years ago rather than spending a month trying to figure it out yourself.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
As a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel benefits from a larger pool of potential innovators to work from. Even better if they're college-age whiz kids who will work for pizza and beer. He's very skilled and knowledgeable at identifying winners, but he's also operating under a huge capital blanket that allows him to spread his bets and mitigate his losses.
The other side of this equation is the kid who takes him up on the bet. For every one that's actually successful, there may be 10 or 100 grant recipients who fail, and hundreds of thousands of grant applicants who take up Thiel's challenge but don't end up qualifying for the grant anyway. So, this is ultimately a losing proposition for many, as is often the case.
It is really important that young people recognize that the handful of startups that succeed enormously, distorted by the myopic lens of the media, are vastly outnumbered by the carcasses of miserable failures, many of which were well-planned, well-executed, but simply not in the right place at the right time with the right connections. And here's the rub: The two most talented pools of business innovation fellows come out of Stanford and MIT... which not only teach the necessary skills to make successful ventures, but also put those students in an environment conducive to building the right networks of people with fresh ideas that they can get off the ground before anyone else. Notice I didn't say "get there first"... Many get there first, and then don't know what to do from there, and never get truly off the ground.
Consider on a smaller scale the movie review websites Cinemablend and Ain't It Cool News... There are seas of film websites that come and go, but these two were able to monetize successfully simply by virtue of being among the first to get there, and they both rely on a relatively endless supply of free labor. But even they are working constantly just to stay in place. I know a guy who runs a film website with huge traffic and he can barely pay himself, let alone his 50 tireless volunteers.
Apple was there early. Google was there early. Facebook wasn't there first but they were in the right place (both Harvard and Stanford) at the right time, and they made some key innovations that no other social networks had thought of (most people who want to find former classmates go to Facebook. It's funny what one single field of data can do... but Facebook thought of it, and implemented it well).
So it's really critical to have a backup plan because the fact is, the market is so saturated that statistically most of you will never be a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, etc. It would be great to see it, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Peter Thiel is another story... because no matter how many of you lose, he still wins.
In those courses and in the courses for your field of study, you will see how much many professors' opinions color what they're tching you. (and if you're not careful, how much disagreeing with those opinions can affect your grades). For subject matters with which you have experience be prepared to forget the lessons the real world has taught. You're in the the fiefdom of ego known as higher education now. Here you are taught to ask questions - but only the right ones. You are taught to think for yourself - but only approved thought.
I am switching majors to one outside of my profession. In this way i have a better chance of learning something beyond how to respectfully agree with those who often have less real-world experience than I do; and a lesser chance of realizing the limitations of thought inherent in what I am being taught.
Perhaps somewhat ironically I do think this would have been a good learning experience out of high school and wish I had done it then. I realize some of the problem I am having is brought on by my own perspective. If I had less experience, I would not see the things I do. If I did not see them I would not be inclined to question them. Anyone with half a brain will reconcile the narrow experiences and views of college with those seen in the wider world, as they gain experience - but it's a lot harder coming at it from the other direction. Not impossible - but certainly not pleasant either.
a pedestrian grasp of social inequality recognizes the chances of his investment "paying off" are remote. the donation is the whimsy of a rich and powerful man who obviously read a few social science or crowdsourcing articles and became incensed to offset his tax burden through some form of experimental donation.
100,000 dollars is alot of money, certainly, but it isnt anywhere near enough to build and sustain an innovative technology company. startups typically work with around 1-2 million dollars. afterwards you'll need to take into account your level of social "power." How well are you connected with bankers, lawyers, and the technology industry as a whole?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Hey, I have a innovative idea. How about a website where whistle blowers can send information, this information can then be verified and published online. Want to help me out?
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. -Mark
Well, regardless of right or wrong, it will be interesting to see the outcome of the people who take him up on his offer...2 yrs out...10 yrs out...20 yrs out. It's a good social experiment.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The purpose of College is not to learn how to do coding, although most people in CS or Engineering will undoubtedly pick some up along the way. College is not about how to do stuff, but learning how stuff works, learning how to learn, and learning a little bit of a wide variety of fields (thus the need for the electives and first couple of years of prerequisites).
If you really just want a code monkey, you should get someone from a trade school. Someone with a college degree in Engineering doing coding is being underutilized. They should be creating specs, engineering a solution, perhaps building a working model and then handing it down to the junior techs to develop.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.