6 ms·

What Happened to the Thiel Fellows

60 points by germinalphrase 10y ago

kesselvon 10y ago
Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out mythos a little too much.
- JohnStrange 10y ago
  Right, you don't need much education to successfully run a company and make shitloads of money from it, but you do need education (a lot, in fact) if you want to truly advance science or society.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  I don't think Thiel would disagree. He is talking about things that are not hard science/engineering. Just because you need to educate yourself you don't need an education.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Agreed, that said universities could do things a lot better in many ways.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking administrative and professorial class. When we outlawed IQ tests for employment, we became unable to train engineers and other high-IQ professions in house, as minds capable of doing these jobs are rare, companies need to pre-filter before investing resources. As universities are allowed to use such tests, we use education as a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, as we are outlawed from directly measuring these characteristics. Thus the education bubble. Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering alternatives an act of war?
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    > You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online. There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.
  - tensor 10y ago
    No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO, managers, etc.
  - glup 10y ago
    I think you're right that there is a sleight-of-hand in the modern higher educational system: given that most of the substantive knowledge is publicly available (e.g. I can download any textbook I want), they really offer something different than technical knowledge. I think that the real product is networks: if you attend a top university, you trade money to be placed with a bunch of very smart people with lots of social capital, and the credentials conferred upon graduation give you access to to other networks afterwards (professional, social, and more often than not, some hybrid of the two). Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.
- lawnchair_larry 10y ago
  Thiel has no war against education. Nobody would argue against education. The argument is that there are better, or at least, alternative ways to get an education. That for some fields, the traditional college system is outmoded. Education != college degree
- civilian 10y ago
  “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Twain
lambdasquirrel 10y ago
It's kind of a big claim, that the most important thing that people got from Thiel Fellowship was the network. If that's really and truly the case, then how is this different from the universities of old? I don't mean that as a challenge. I really do mean to pick it apart. You can argue that this one is more meritocratic. It's also blatantly clear that it had an admissions committee of one. Edit: And as someone else pointed out, you don't get the hard skills training that you get in university.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  I think university networks are overrated a bit. When you're just one of thousands of graduates you need to bring more to the table than just having the same alma mater. All your peers are trying to leverage the same connections to fit through a skinny pipe. For every one time I leverage my college network I have 10 where I leverage my network I built after college.
  - lambdasquirrel 10y ago
    That's true. Then what'd happen to the Thiel Fellowship if you were to scale it the same way? I think you can likewise make the argument that it's kind of an extra-fancy MBA.
- mcguire 10y ago
  The network is the important part, I'm given to understand, about YC. This article and the Thiel Fellowship are implicit admissions that it's not what you know, but who. And that entrepreneurs don't need to know things, only people. Whichmay go towards explaining why they tend not to address fundamental problems.
- zachlatta 10y ago
  Hey, I'm part of the program. The fellowship's community is one of the few places I've found people like me, my age, who are so obviously better than me that I feel out of place being in the same room. As with all communities, the quality of people vary (regardless of how you define quality), but the fellowship has the highest concentration of smart young people that I've ever experienced. I never went to university and don't have that as a point of reference, but I have a hard time believing I'd find a similarly concentrated group anywhere else.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
You have to think who says a 15 year old can't do Advanced Physics, Run a Corporation, Perform Some Surgery. There are definitely works for which hours of experience are necessary, but for most of the things we do today perhaps age is really not a factor.
- tensor 10y ago
  If experience isn't necessary for a task, you have to ask how hard it really is and how much it should really be rewarded.
jasonmp85 10y ago
> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure. I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself. But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college? I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's not. Not here.
- Ilverin 10y ago
  An alternative view is: "If you're already successful, everything you could learn at a college you can also learn out of college (see: the internet)".
  - azinman2 10y ago
    That would be an incorrect view. First, few are so motivated that they'd devote years to self-learning at the same scale as university provide. Next, it would be difficult to put together a cohesive curriculum for yourself because you don't know what you don't know. Relatedly, understanding the arc/trajectory to pick it difficult, and to do it all alone with no guidance means there's no one qualified that you can ask questions from on the daily. It also ignores the value of mentorship, learning from your peers, and being inspired and pushed by your environment. It also is isolating and does not give you any social benefits, business or personal networks.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Everything you say is true, but you can still do it if you're that way inclined. As long as you don't mind poverty and social exile :-) Career-wise this has been a terrible life choice for me and I advise people to go to college for precisely the same reason you do. On the other hand career and material gain are only one aspect of life, I can't say with conviction that I really wish I'd done anything differently.
saosebastiao 10y ago
The network is what really matters: you go from someone who knows professors and peers to someone who knows Peter Thiel and his peers. I'm sure there is some meritocracy involved too, but I'm willing to bet that as a Thiel Fellow, you would learn faster than a university would allow (school of hard knocks?), while still accomplishing less than a more experienced entrepreneur. Experience matters, and being a Thiel Fellow is just a riskier but potentially faster way of acquiring it.
zzzeek 10y ago
Brilliant technical minds denied the opportunity to gain awareness of the world through liberal arts exposure, are that much more easily pushed into working towards essentially sociopathic endeavors (like making it easier to sue media outlets wealthy people don't like out of existence).
- dang 10y ago
  As a former literature grad student I was liking where the first clause of your sentence was headed, but then you ruined it with the sort of denunciatory name-calling ("sociopathic") that the HN guidelines ask you not to do in comments here. We're trying for a discourse in which people don't hit each other with such sticks, so please don't bring them in to conversation.
  - glup 10y ago
    I took the OP to mean "lacking in empathy, contextual awareness, and premised on a specific—and potentially very damaging—notion of capitalism." Based on the interviews I've read and the description of the Thiel fellows, this seems like a fair characterization, if hyperbole. Rather, I think "sociopathic" is deficient in that it underplays the structural determinants of such behaviors, while placing judgment on the fellows themselves. That's not fair—they are basically high schoolers, often without the cultural capital and social analytical skills conferred by top schools.
    - zzzeek 10y ago
      I was going for the "lacking in empathy" description completely - and in description of specific endeavors, not individual people.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Seems to me the grandparent poster was using 'sociopathic' in a technical rather than pejorative sense, but it's true the word has become politicized. Perhaps 'hyper-individualist' would be a better representation of the philosophical dynamic at work.
- 10y ago
dkarapetyan 10y ago
> Abraham dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to run Milo, which sold to Amazon by the time he was 25. Milo was sold to eBay, not Amazon.
ThomPete 10y ago
The way I look at is that you need to educate yourself, you mostly don't need an education. All of those fellows are constantly educating themselves. I am pretty sure Theil would agree that some things do require an education such as hard science, medical or engineering. (Although it's certainly possible without)
soneca 10y ago
It looks like now more of a YC for necessarily young and solo founders than any substitute for college.
codingdave 10y ago
The real long-term business value of an Ivy League education is also the network. So if he really was trying to replicate that, he succeeded. But as someone who went to a non-Ivy school, and spent my 4 years getting an education that I truly feel has added a ton of value to my life, and to who I am... I just get offended at his attitude that college is for dunces. (And yes, it is my own problem if someone offends me, but that is a separate discussion). I will never claim that college is the right path for everybody, and I think that getting a job is the wrong reason to go. But the snide attitude that going to college actually makes you a lesser person, and recommending people drop out... that shows a deep misunderstanding of what higher education is really about.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sfthrowaway3776 10y ago
Also let's be real here -- I know a lot of the fellows and all the ones I've met definitely do not qualify as geniuses. Smart, motivated, sure, but when it comes to solving real hard problems whether in physics, biotech, or AI they are by far not the first people I'd turn to. There's a reason most of them are working on knockoff consumer apps or got shunted into programs like the google brain residency.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Can we change the title to "Entrepreneurship Factory" instead of "Genius Factory"? The article is definitely not about genius. Let's not cheapen the definition any further by misapplying it.
elevensies 10y ago
Anything that can create an alternative for universities is very valuable. Stanford tuition has doubled in the past 20 years -- so has the price of gasoline -- I don't see people suggesting government subsidized loans for gasoline.
dmourati 10y ago
Are these the blood donors?
gumby 10y ago
What a vapid puff piece. For example: > It became one of the most elite credentials for young entrepreneurs. Umm, really? "Elite" in the classical sense of "drawn out of the larger pool", sure, but in the sense of somehow being better than the run of the mill group, I don't see it. > none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Famously Michal Dell did to make his mum happy. Woz, under an alias.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
To me the premise to this argument was always incomplete. It's true that college does not matter "to some people". You can always find individuals that will be successful whether they go to college or not. There's a reason Thiel hand picked the people that would get his money. He picked the best he could find because he knew that they had a better chance to succeed. If he really wanted to prove his point, he would have picked them at random from those that were slated to go to college anyway. To me he has not proven anything, college is still important to the great majority of people and telling people differently does not help society worse yet it makes it more difficult on those that follow his advice.
brilliantcode 10y ago
Don't fix something that isn't broken. Can the institutionalized top down approach to education have room for improvement? Yes. The education to economic output per student ratio can always improve (I don't have a number for this). But the role diploma, degrees, certificates play as social credits that gives preferential treatment over the have-nots in terms of opening doors is understated.
glenra 10y ago
> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure. Steve Wozniak went back to school (UC Berkeley, using an alias) and finished a degree. Though I suppose he's kind of a special case.
danielam 10y ago
The trouble with modern universities is that they often conflate what are at least three separate concerns: intellectual formation/pedagogy, job training and research. Typically, when you ask someone why they want to go to college or why they did go to college, the automatic answer that they've been taught to give is "to get a job" (otherwise, you're going to "work at McDonald's"). The result, broadly speaking, is that these three concerns compete with each other, causing the university to suffer in the process.

Just another front in Thiel's continued war against education. You need an education and experience in order to make the kinds of meaningful breakthroughs we need these days; the valley pushes the college drop-out mythos a little too much.

JohnStrange 10y ago
Right, you don't need much education to successfully run a company and make shitloads of money from it, but you do need education (a lot, in fact) if you want to truly advance science or society.
ThomPete 10y ago
I don't think Thiel would disagree. He is talking about things that are not hard science/engineering. Just because you need to educate yourself you don't need an education.
noir_lord 10y ago
Agreed, that said universities could do things a lot better in many ways.
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking administrative and professorial class. When we outlawed IQ tests for employment, we became unable to train engineers and other high-IQ professions in house, as minds capable of doing these jobs are rare, companies need to pre-filter before investing resources. As universities are allowed to use such tests, we use education as a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, as we are outlawed from directly measuring these characteristics. Thus the education bubble. Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering alternatives an act of war?
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  > You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online. There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.
- tensor 10y ago
  No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO, managers, etc.
- glup 10y ago
  I think you're right that there is a sleight-of-hand in the modern higher educational system: given that most of the substantive knowledge is publicly available (e.g. I can download any textbook I want), they really offer something different than technical knowledge. I think that the real product is networks: if you attend a top university, you trade money to be placed with a bunch of very smart people with lots of social capital, and the credentials conferred upon graduation give you access to to other networks afterwards (professional, social, and more often than not, some hybrid of the two). Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
Thiel has no war against education. Nobody would argue against education. The argument is that there are better, or at least, alternative ways to get an education. That for some fields, the traditional college system is outmoded. Education != college degree
civilian 10y ago
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Twain

lambdasquirrel 10y ago

It's kind of a big claim, that the most important thing that people got from Thiel Fellowship was the network. If that's really and truly the case, then how is this different from the universities of old? I don't mean that as a challenge. I really do mean to pick it apart. You can argue that this one is more meritocratic. It's also blatantly clear that it had an admissions committee of one. Edit: And as someone else pointed out, you don't get the hard skills training that you get in university.

throwaway2016a 10y ago
I think university networks are overrated a bit. When you're just one of thousands of graduates you need to bring more to the table than just having the same alma mater. All your peers are trying to leverage the same connections to fit through a skinny pipe. For every one time I leverage my college network I have 10 where I leverage my network I built after college.
- lambdasquirrel 10y ago
  That's true. Then what'd happen to the Thiel Fellowship if you were to scale it the same way? I think you can likewise make the argument that it's kind of an extra-fancy MBA.
mcguire 10y ago
The network is the important part, I'm given to understand, about YC. This article and the Thiel Fellowship are implicit admissions that it's not what you know, but who. And that entrepreneurs don't need to know things, only people. Whichmay go towards explaining why they tend not to address fundamental problems.
zachlatta 10y ago
Hey, I'm part of the program. The fellowship's community is one of the few places I've found people like me, my age, who are so obviously better than me that I feel out of place being in the same room. As with all communities, the quality of people vary (regardless of how you define quality), but the fellowship has the highest concentration of smart young people that I've ever experienced. I never went to university and don't have that as a point of reference, but I have a hard time believing I'd find a similarly concentrated group anywhere else.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

You have to think who says a 15 year old can't do Advanced Physics, Run a Corporation, Perform Some Surgery. There are definitely works for which hours of experience are necessary, but for most of the things we do today perhaps age is really not a factor.

tensor 10y ago
If experience isn't necessary for a task, you have to ask how hard it really is and how much it should really be rewarded.

jasonmp85 10y ago

> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure. I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself. But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college? I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's not. Not here.

Ilverin 10y ago
An alternative view is: "If you're already successful, everything you could learn at a college you can also learn out of college (see: the internet)".
- azinman2 10y ago
  That would be an incorrect view. First, few are so motivated that they'd devote years to self-learning at the same scale as university provide. Next, it would be difficult to put together a cohesive curriculum for yourself because you don't know what you don't know. Relatedly, understanding the arc/trajectory to pick it difficult, and to do it all alone with no guidance means there's no one qualified that you can ask questions from on the daily. It also ignores the value of mentorship, learning from your peers, and being inspired and pushed by your environment. It also is isolating and does not give you any social benefits, business or personal networks.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Everything you say is true, but you can still do it if you're that way inclined. As long as you don't mind poverty and social exile :-) Career-wise this has been a terrible life choice for me and I advise people to go to college for precisely the same reason you do. On the other hand career and material gain are only one aspect of life, I can't say with conviction that I really wish I'd done anything differently.

saosebastiao 10y ago

The network is what really matters: you go from someone who knows professors and peers to someone who knows Peter Thiel and his peers. I'm sure there is some meritocracy involved too, but I'm willing to bet that as a Thiel Fellow, you would learn faster than a university would allow (school of hard knocks?), while still accomplishing less than a more experienced entrepreneur. Experience matters, and being a Thiel Fellow is just a riskier but potentially faster way of acquiring it.

zzzeek 10y ago

Brilliant technical minds denied the opportunity to gain awareness of the world through liberal arts exposure, are that much more easily pushed into working towards essentially sociopathic endeavors (like making it easier to sue media outlets wealthy people don't like out of existence).

dang 10y ago
As a former literature grad student I was liking where the first clause of your sentence was headed, but then you ruined it with the sort of denunciatory name-calling ("sociopathic") that the HN guidelines ask you not to do in comments here. We're trying for a discourse in which people don't hit each other with such sticks, so please don't bring them in to conversation.
- glup 10y ago
  I took the OP to mean "lacking in empathy, contextual awareness, and premised on a specific—and potentially very damaging—notion of capitalism." Based on the interviews I've read and the description of the Thiel fellows, this seems like a fair characterization, if hyperbole. Rather, I think "sociopathic" is deficient in that it underplays the structural determinants of such behaviors, while placing judgment on the fellows themselves. That's not fair—they are basically high schoolers, often without the cultural capital and social analytical skills conferred by top schools.
  - zzzeek 10y ago
    I was going for the "lacking in empathy" description completely - and in description of specific endeavors, not individual people.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Seems to me the grandparent poster was using 'sociopathic' in a technical rather than pejorative sense, but it's true the word has become politicized. Perhaps 'hyper-individualist' would be a better representation of the philosophical dynamic at work.
10y ago

dkarapetyan 10y ago

> Abraham dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to run Milo, which sold to Amazon by the time he was 25. Milo was sold to eBay, not Amazon.

ThomPete 10y ago

The way I look at is that you need to educate yourself, you mostly don't need an education. All of those fellows are constantly educating themselves. I am pretty sure Theil would agree that some things do require an education such as hard science, medical or engineering. (Although it's certainly possible without)

soneca 10y ago

It looks like now more of a YC for necessarily young and solo founders than any substitute for college.

codingdave 10y ago

The real long-term business value of an Ivy League education is also the network. So if he really was trying to replicate that, he succeeded. But as someone who went to a non-Ivy school, and spent my 4 years getting an education that I truly feel has added a ton of value to my life, and to who I am... I just get offended at his attitude that college is for dunces. (And yes, it is my own problem if someone offends me, but that is a separate discussion). I will never claim that college is the right path for everybody, and I think that getting a job is the wrong reason to go. But the snide attitude that going to college actually makes you a lesser person, and recommending people drop out... that shows a deep misunderstanding of what higher education is really about.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sfthrowaway3776 10y ago

Also let's be real here -- I know a lot of the fellows and all the ones I've met definitely do not qualify as geniuses. Smart, motivated, sure, but when it comes to solving real hard problems whether in physics, biotech, or AI they are by far not the first people I'd turn to. There's a reason most of them are working on knockoff consumer apps or got shunted into programs like the google brain residency.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Can we change the title to "Entrepreneurship Factory" instead of "Genius Factory"? The article is definitely not about genius. Let's not cheapen the definition any further by misapplying it.

elevensies 10y ago

Anything that can create an alternative for universities is very valuable. Stanford tuition has doubled in the past 20 years -- so has the price of gasoline -- I don't see people suggesting government subsidized loans for gasoline.

dmourati 10y ago

Are these the blood donors?

gumby 10y ago

What a vapid puff piece. For example: > It became one of the most elite credentials for young entrepreneurs. Umm, really? "Elite" in the classical sense of "drawn out of the larger pool", sure, but in the sense of somehow being better than the run of the mill group, I don't see it. > none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Famously Michal Dell did to make his mum happy. Woz, under an alias.

WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

To me the premise to this argument was always incomplete. It's true that college does not matter "to some people". You can always find individuals that will be successful whether they go to college or not. There's a reason Thiel hand picked the people that would get his money. He picked the best he could find because he knew that they had a better chance to succeed. If he really wanted to prove his point, he would have picked them at random from those that were slated to go to college anyway. To me he has not proven anything, college is still important to the great majority of people and telling people differently does not help society worse yet it makes it more difficult on those that follow his advice.

brilliantcode 10y ago

Don't fix something that isn't broken. Can the institutionalized top down approach to education have room for improvement? Yes. The education to economic output per student ratio can always improve (I don't have a number for this). But the role diploma, degrees, certificates play as social credits that gives preferential treatment over the have-nots in terms of opening doors is understated.

glenra 10y ago

> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school. Bill Gates didn’t go back. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go back. To go back would imply personal failure. Steve Wozniak went back to school (UC Berkeley, using an alias) and finished a degree. Though I suppose he's kind of a special case.

danielam 10y ago

The trouble with modern universities is that they often conflate what are at least three separate concerns: intellectual formation/pedagogy, job training and research. Typically, when you ask someone why they want to go to college or why they did go to college, the automatic answer that they've been taught to give is "to get a job" (otherwise, you're going to "work at McDonald's"). The result, broadly speaking, is that these three concerns compete with each other, causing the university to suffer in the process.