Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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
He argues from the fact that a few people buck the trend and succeed despite dropping out of school. That does not mean they succeeded because they did not go to school. That's like Oprah getting up on her final show and saying she owed her success to her prayers to Jesus. Well tens of thousands of people around her prayed too and none of them were up there, so that logic should mean prayer failed in nearly every case rather than prayer is what made her succeed. Looking at the exceptions without looking at all the factors that actually made them exceptional is a big error here.
It is if you're a 20 year old trying to get a generic business loan from a bank for the next hottest social networking fad instead of $5-$20k of student loans at a state/community college. Hello bankruptcy. But I guess the idea behind this experiment is you'd get the money from a VC. And if a VC wants to give you huge amounts of money for a likely lesson in failure, I see no problem with letting them take the risk. You can always re-enroll after 2 years.
The fact that you become one of 20 people introduced to Peter Thiel's network, and get his support/promotion, is probably more valuable than the cash. Which is also why this isn't really a scalable replacement for college: he can do this for 20 people, maybe 50, but not thousands or millions.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Indeed.
My first innovative idea: Band together with the other 19 people and make use of the $2m you've been given.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.