What Happened After Peter Thiel Paid 271 Students to Drop Out of College?

Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year 'to start companies or nonprofits,' reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool 'is bigger than ever.'

So how's it going?

Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart...

Thiel and executives of the fellowship acknowledge they have learned painful lessons along the way. Some applicants pursued ambitious ideas that turned out to be unrealistic, for example. 'Asteroid mining is great for press releases but maybe we should have pushed back early on,' he says. Others were better at applying to be Thiel fellows than they were starting businesses, it turned out... They've also learned that lone geniuses with brilliant ideas aren't usually the kinds of people who can build organizations. 'It's a team sport to get something going and build on it, you can't just be a mad genius, you have to have some social skills and emotional intelligence,' says Michael Gibson, an early leader of the organization who is co-founder of a venture fund that invests primarily in those who don't have a college degree...

Thiel hasn't attempted to build a better education system, which program officials acknowledge has made it harder to develop talent in the program... Thiel fellows say they don't receive much more than funding from the program and have limited contact with Thiel, though access to a network of former Thiel fellows can be useful. 'Meeting some of the other members inspires you to think bigger,' says Boyan Slat, a 2016 Thiel fellow who is chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit developing technologies to remove plastic from oceans. Slat says he has spoken to Thiel 'three or four times.'
As a result, Thiel and other staffers have concluded they can't grow beyond the 20 or so young people chosen as fellows each year. 'If you scale the program,' Thiel says, 'you will have a lot more people who aren't quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them' — which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren't skilled at doing... About a quarter of the Thiel fellows eventually returned to college to finish their degrees, suggesting that even the dropouts see enduring value in higher education.

Thiel says they 'got way more out of it by going back' after launching their businesses.

'The other 75% didn't need a college degree,' he says.

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