Today the Wall Street Journal reports:
Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever
More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education
That's the headline. What the article actually says is that Thiel backs about 20 kids per year and will do so again this year.
Why the lack of growth? The hundred grand is to start up a company, and Thiel says it's harder than you'd think to find good entrepreneurs even when you offer them a fistful of dough. And these high school kids don't have much education!
“We don’t believe education systems are working but that doesn’t mean we have a better way of education, so we’ve leaned into identifying talent and letting them figure it out,” Thiel says.
....“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.
So, anyway, that's 20 per year out of a freshman college enrollment of about 2 million per year, or 0.001%. I don't think Thiel is making much of a dent in the university-industrial complex.
a hundred grand is couch cushions money.
"Don't start a restaurant unless you have a million in the bank for that first year" is common advice.
Pretty much my first thought too-- seems about the modern-day equivalent of setting somebody up with a peddler's cart.
And we behold one of America's leading VCs in action, inspiring our youth to reach for the stars.
Oh, and WSJ does get extra points for headline bootlickery.
Oh, and WSJ does get extra points for headline bootlickery.
100%; why anyone would read this now-rag. It's barely left of Fox at this point, and hiding behind their proud history just makes them more reprehensible.
It's enough to start a basic internet-based business. If you can show some traction, you'll get more funding.
Sounds more like "Only 20 teenagers a year are rabid enough grifters to qualify for Thiel's approval."
Yeah having been involved in a few startups and funded one, $100K is, I dunno, maybe enough for a small café? In a good location. That doesn't serve meals.
It's nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt. Thiel is a sociopath, and an unusually reprehensible one.
Just prohibit employers from asking for education credentials.
Wonder if anyone has followed up on the previous recipients of Thiel's cash.
Unfortunately, they no longer have any blood in their bodies - such is the price of Thiel's favors.
Yes they have. And contrary to the claims made above, the kids seem toi have turned out OK.
226 kids have gone through the program so far. And their combined companies are worth ~$220B. That's billion, not million.
Names (or at least companies) you might recognize include Figma and Ethereum.
Most of that $220B is probably in Ethereum (ie power law returns) but that's the case in everything important that people do – we live in Extremistan as Taleb points out.
The comments in this thread simply reinforce the conclusion I arrived at some time ago. The single thing that unites "the Left" is a hatred of competence. The ur-text of the modern left is not _1984_, it's not _Brave New World_; it IS _Harrison Bergeron_.
The point of the Thiel fellowships was not to found some sort of alternative to college that would be taken up by large masses of US youth. It was simply to show that alternatives ARE available, that in spite of the best efforts of the credentialers, you can in fact still achieve great things in America without the permission of the Ivy League, and that if you are the sort of person capable of achieving great things, you should think about this.
Whenever I see Thiel's name popping up, the next thought is an automatic question-- how much has he been compensating the Tolkien estate and JRR's heirs for use of the names of his various ventures? And sometimes I ask myself about the ethics of self-professed anarcho-libertarians selling surveillance tools to governments. But yeah, competence is the real problem people have with the guy.
The edgiest, most proactive statement in that comment is also the least supported and briefest.
Yeah, we read some uncited, uninformed comments on a leftist blog mocking an polarizing right wing figure and now we confirm our longstanding bias that a broad and multi-dimensional societal, cultural, personal aspect of human nature comes down to just insecurity and resentment. Fascinating analysis.
No mention of Theil under Ethereum that I could find, and that was a group effort (and one made a killing in early Bitcoin, not because of Theil's largess). But hey, let's making sweeping broad generalizations about a whole group of people based on this because... that's smart or something? You went from a more or less fact to an insult without showing your work.
And it looks like you're saying we can achieve great things... if, if... the rich would be willing to help us out - big if, but I agree! They could start by paying a fair tax rate, to start with.
Tax the rich their fair share and make state schools free with the money?
Nah. The largesse of rich people works better.
"Ethereum"
Not a plus in my thinking.
Vaguely reminiscent of the excitement around "microfinance" programs last century, which were going to see thousands of small businesses blossoming in developing countries, because all the budding third world entrepreneurs were lacking were startup capital and banking facilities.
https://afsa.org/whatever-happened-microfinance-cautionary-tale
VERY different in some other countries. Different in several material ways. Not actually a relevant comparison at all.
The size of the bank account has little correlation to intelligence, or perception. It's hubris.
Another guy who made a lucky bet on a start-up a decade or two ago, and now thinks he's King Homer.
https://youtu.be/uGM-dY4TzqA?si=MEjfn1atSAA4nwmd
Very much so. I took a class from Thiel, long ago, and in it he had a sort of relentless antagonism towards Middle Eastern oil barons--he'd keep bringing them up, talking about "rent seeking behavior" and how there was a big difference between lucking into vast wealth because there happened to be oil underground in your land, and generating vast wealth because you created some useful thing.
Which struck me as sort of a bizarre thing for Thiel to latch onto: Thiel's big break was with paypal, which was sold to eBay for like a cool billion at the top of the dotcom bubble just a couple of months before the credit card companies figured out secure online transactions. In other words, Thiel got really, really lucky. Had the bubble popped early or had paypal been a few weeks behind schedule, or had the credit card people flagged more publicly that they had a solution in the works, paypal never sells for much of anything, and none of us ever hear about Thiel.
Anyway, dude's a loon. I recall his speech at the RNC years ago, where he was bemoaning that the US military didn't use the latest and greatest tech for launch control of our nuclear arsenal and instead used some 1980s system. Like it would make sense to be able to launch a nuke from the president's iphone or something, or there was some gee-wiz value in having hackable software controlling our cache of world-enders.
Maybe someone could recruit Thiel to support nationalizing extractive industries?
Peter Thiel is a doomer.
https://x.com/mrexits/status/1761655741117833671?s=20
You know what they say about a fool and his money...
Come And Get It?
This is just the Old Economy Steve of "angel" investing. Thiel's a piece of shit and this is just performative shitbaggery.
But he's certainly making connections with vessels full of youthful blood.
https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.html
Older entrepreneurs are fewer in number than younger ones, but are more likely to succeed. Partly this is because they have more industry experience and are therefore much better able to judge how likely a business plan is to succeed, partly it's because they have more wealth and better credit scores which allow them to get startup financing on better terms.
All the talent in the world isn't going to do much for you if haven't got a clue what you're doing. Thiel would do better to seek out some middle-aged people who are sick of the grind and let them pitch him some ideas.
Thiel should say he's doing it for 2x10 kids because that way it looks clever and hip because it's math and seems to say there's probably a lot more of them.
2x10^1 kids.
That's it, every kid a little individual, chewing through his own bootstraps the way god intended.
Everyone has crazy ideas at some point. Even smart people. Peter Thiel is no exception. And he is very smart. He also has some crazy ideas.
Being smart is no guarantee that you will make a lot of money, nor is making a lot of money a guarantee that you are all that smart. Life isn't that simple.
In any case, Thiel is in my neighborhood. I don't know him personally, but I know people that know him. He is quite smart. And has crazy ideas.
This particular one doesn't seem as crazy as it might. First of all 20 people at 100,000 is 2 million a year.
That seems like a lot to most of us, but to Theil it isn't. He could invest his money in CDs and still throw off a lot more cash than that. I assure you, he does better than that.
And, it only takes one of these kids to create the next Kinkos, which eventually sold to FedEx for millions and millions, for Theil to make money on this thing, since you can bet he isn't "giving" them the money so much as making a (write-offable) investment in them, acting as a VC. (Don't know, but I'm guessing he kind of hates VCs)
"(Don't know, but I'm guessing he kind of hates VCs)"
I mean, it's certainly possible, but he operates/founded severak venture cap funds (Founders Fund, Valar Ventures, and Mithril Capital), so I doubt it.