Thiel fellows have achieved shocking success, enough to merit a reconsideration of our current approach to college. A recent book, Paper Belt on Fire, by one of Thiel’s colleagues, fills in the backstory of the fellowship and refines the argument against traditional higher education.
The most notable Thiel fellow to date is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. As of this writing, Ethereum has a market capitalization of about $200 billion
Austin Russel, a 2013 Thiel fellow, took Luminar Technologies Inc. public in 2020, valuing the company at $8.5 billion, while Paul Gu helped Upstart go public at a $4.8 billion valuation.
Lucy Guo co-founded Scale AI.
Beyond the dollar signs, there are many other innovative companies being built or supported by Thiel fellows.
There are more Rhodes scholars every year than Thiel fellows and, depending on the course of study, the scholarships can easily pay well over $100,000 to keep students in school. They also offer access to larger networks of more powerful people than Thiel can arguably offer. There are many other prestigious scholarships and fellowships to identify the highest-potential students. All of them put together can’t match the kind of entrepreneurial success before age 35 of Thiel fellows. In addition, nearly every college today has entrepreneurial institutes, incubators or other programs to support student ventures while the founders continue taking classes. Again, none have achieved anything like the success of the Thiel Fellowship.
A surge of regulations surely chilled innovation, but beyond that it was hard to blame pessimism or oil prices when the slowdown had lingered for decades. Stagnant wages were clearly an effect and not a cause. We decided that the hidden factor was talent. In the 1950s and 1960s, the smartest young people flocked to the frontiers of discovery. In the 1970s, though, they became doctors; in the 1980s they became lawyers; and in the 1990s they went to Wall Street. These were well-defined careers with brightly lit gates welcoming crowds down paths that were easy to follow.
What happened to the American archetype of quitting your job to invent something in your garage? Debt happened, we decided. I had previously lost a cofounder because of student debt payments, and we realized such debt made it hard to quit your job and start a company. Tuition had skyrocketed in the previous decades, and the burden of student debt had followed. Credential inflation had encouraged young Americans to earn more degrees than their parents just to keep the same standard of living.
At this point we realized we could make a difference. We could rescue a few people a year and give them permission to start companies before they took on the debt and career-tracking of college. We could also send a signal to their generation that college was a particular good with measurable costs and benefits and that postponing a career to make such a huge purchase should never be a default. We resolved to create a two-year fellowship, call it the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship, and give each fellow a grant of $100,000. Our plane landed at SFO and we announced it the next day.
Thiel Fellows went on to invent technologies, assemble teams, iterate, fail, and try again. You may know about Figma, Luminar, Upstart, Ethereum, Freenome, Fossa, Augur, Polkadot, or Workflow (which is now part of Siri). Overall, they founded companies worth about four hundred billion dollars, but that figure hardly captures the animations, computer languages, science journals, nonprofits, and venture funds; or the physics, biology, and software tools they devised
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-19/thiel-s-unicorn-success-is-awkward-for-colleges
https://greyknight.co.uk/peter-thiel-and-the-16-unicorns-the-legacy-of-thiel-fellowship/
Thiel fellows have achieved shocking success, enough to merit a reconsideration of our current approach to college. A recent book, Paper Belt on Fire, by one of Thiel’s colleagues, fills in the backstory of the fellowship and refines the argument against traditional higher education.
The most notable Thiel fellow to date is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. As of this writing, Ethereum has a market capitalization of about $200 billion
Austin Russel, a 2013 Thiel fellow, took Luminar Technologies Inc. public in 2020, valuing the company at $8.5 billion, while Paul Gu helped Upstart go public at a $4.8 billion valuation.
Lucy Guo co-founded Scale AI.
Beyond the dollar signs, there are many other innovative companies being built or supported by Thiel fellows.
There are more Rhodes scholars every year than Thiel fellows and, depending on the course of study, the scholarships can easily pay well over $100,000 to keep students in school. They also offer access to larger networks of more powerful people than Thiel can arguably offer. There are many other prestigious scholarships and fellowships to identify the highest-potential students. All of them put together can’t match the kind of entrepreneurial success before age 35 of Thiel fellows. In addition, nearly every college today has entrepreneurial institutes, incubators or other programs to support student ventures while the founders continue taking classes. Again, none have achieved anything like the success of the Thiel Fellowship.
https://thielfellowship.org
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ten-years-ago-we-created-thiel-fellowship-jim-o-neill/
A surge of regulations surely chilled innovation, but beyond that it was hard to blame pessimism or oil prices when the slowdown had lingered for decades. Stagnant wages were clearly an effect and not a cause. We decided that the hidden factor was talent. In the 1950s and 1960s, the smartest young people flocked to the frontiers of discovery. In the 1970s, though, they became doctors; in the 1980s they became lawyers; and in the 1990s they went to Wall Street. These were well-defined careers with brightly lit gates welcoming crowds down paths that were easy to follow.
What happened to the American archetype of quitting your job to invent something in your garage? Debt happened, we decided. I had previously lost a cofounder because of student debt payments, and we realized such debt made it hard to quit your job and start a company. Tuition had skyrocketed in the previous decades, and the burden of student debt had followed. Credential inflation had encouraged young Americans to earn more degrees than their parents just to keep the same standard of living.
At this point we realized we could make a difference. We could rescue a few people a year and give them permission to start companies before they took on the debt and career-tracking of college. We could also send a signal to their generation that college was a particular good with measurable costs and benefits and that postponing a career to make such a huge purchase should never be a default. We resolved to create a two-year fellowship, call it the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship, and give each fellow a grant of $100,000. Our plane landed at SFO and we announced it the next day.
Thiel Fellows went on to invent technologies, assemble teams, iterate, fail, and try again. You may know about Figma, Luminar, Upstart, Ethereum, Freenome, Fossa, Augur, Polkadot, or Workflow (which is now part of Siri). Overall, they founded companies worth about four hundred billion dollars, but that figure hardly captures the animations, computer languages, science journals, nonprofits, and venture funds; or the physics, biology, and software tools they devised
赚钱的机会很多，不需要这样
互联网高科技持续发展，多少热钱都涌入硅谷。大家都在等next可以下金蛋的鹅呢。
能被人家看上，肯定就是潜在的大鹅。
我老公的两个发小就是一个芝加哥挺大的buyout的私募投资人。也没说跟人家从小一起长大，好朋友性质，跟人家联络聊天，人家就会帮助投资了。
现在投资的都是IB之类的banker。走正常程序。。。
因为你可能对于孩子创业成功率的信心不足，都认定了不太可能成功，才会说先读书，再创业。
但是如果孩子做了一两年矿工，收入不错，突然要创业了，你会支持吗？
估计还是risk太大了， not in your comfort zone.
类似信息，可以帮助孩子挑选出有前途的startup公司. Information is always powerful.
我家老爷子八十年代就在做VC，没那么神。
拿自己积蓄创业（我公公就是中年创业，虽然最后也成功了）？或者人到快退休，拿自己的退休金创业？
这个风险评估，应该是越老，风险越大啊。。。人家给钱的可能性越小。
Q华、P王不能望其项背
那个还是活了几年的startup。startup没有做大的，其实就是给VC打工而已。