5 ms·

Thiel's Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges

42 points by xqcgrek2 3y ago

mensetmanusman 3y ago
It shouldn’t be: college doesn’t have to be the default mode after primary school for a functioning society. In fact, the future may be increasingly different due to the role college plays in collapsing demographics as currently implemented. A better future will probably normalize many age ranges of people in college getting educated when most appropriate.
- quantified 3y ago
  College is about learning many things. Trade schools are about learning other things. Thiel's program feels like a trade school for high-valuation entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with that.
- Consultant32452 3y ago
  College, particularly elite colleges, are good for status signaling but not good for moving the needle on a person's life outcomes. If you take someone bright enough to go to MIT and instead put them in a bog standard state school, they will tend to have the same life outcome as if they had gone to MIT. My sneaking suspicion is they would have similar life outcomes if they never went to college at all. The obvious exception being careers with regulatory requirements that involve degrees.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    > someone bright enough to go to MIT I'd argue that it depends on the person. Intelligence is certainly helpful, but it's not enough on its own, and it's not the only path to creating something valuable. I initially intended to take the university path. I got a full scholarship to the university of my choice, but quickly ran into all kinds of unexpected roadblocks - the short version of that story is that I had undiagnosed ADHD that first manifested itself in a destructive way when I left my parents' home. I ended up with severe depression, lost my scholarship, and failed out. Though it took a few years, I ultimately recovered from it and have built a life I'm happy with. This is relevant because I've kept up with many of the people I met in my short time in university. Most of the most intelligent people I met there have ended up in various "enterprise" settings. They make good money and I'm in no way slighting their accomplishments - but they originally intended to be entrepreneurs. They did very well in school, and got attractive employment offers upon graduation. Several of them said they were only going to work for others for a couple of years to built capital; almost twenty years later, none of them have followed through with that plan. On the other hand, some of the "frat guy" types I know spent most of their time socializing. They performed adequately in their classes, but not well enough to attract six-figure job offers right out of school. Several of them started businesses immediately upon graduation. They drew upon their network of friends from school to make those successful, and today they're in a better place than their peers who were more defined by their intellect in school. To put it another way - intelligence and academic success can be helpful, but it can also lay a subtle trap of moderate success that will prevent people who are otherwise capable of achieving ambition dreams from doing so. Meanwhile, having a strong social network composed of the "right kind of people" can multiply your reach.
    - Consultant32452 3y ago
      My understanding is that the biggest predictors of success is a combination of IQ and big 5 personality traits. You need high conscientiousness, low agreeableness, low neuroticism (high risk tolerance), and some openness. In my experience people who tend to do excellent at school also tend to be high in agreeableness. Agreeableness means you will go along with the path laid out in front of you, which explains all your high IQ engineer friends who took those convenient jobs straight out of college and stayed at that relative level of success. Low risk tolerance is another factor that makes a great engineer but doesn't lead to entrepreneur. My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted.
      - Ancapistani 3y ago
        My apologies for the delay in responding to this - I go through periods where I simply don't have time for HN :) > My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted. That's exactly my point! To be clear, I didn't mean "frat guy" in a derogatory way at all. I meant it as a shorthand for "people in my social circle who immersed themselves in Greek life." I was on a full scholarship and lived in the honors dorms, so the people in my social circle were uniformly very intelligent and capable people. If you want to optimize for "greatness" - whether that means financial success to you or building something of great value - then being willing to take risks is important. Being able to convince the people around you that the risks are worthwhile and that they should join you is essential.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
$100k to drop out of a top university, for a gifted person who could make the most out of that environment, does not actually sound like a good deal. Does it come with additional funding down the line? Those same people would have no problem raising $1M+ in funding when they complete their 4 year degree and decide on building a startup, no?
- dartos 3y ago
  In tech, at least, that degree probably won’t even be something VCs consider. Not worth finishing it up if your goal is to fund a startup. The connection and notoriety from PTs program would be just as good or better.
- quantified 3y ago
  The gifted person can make the most out of any environment. If the impact that person desires is to build a valuable business, going to uni sort of dilutes their effort in many ways and sets them back a few years. Maybe that student had $100k+ in scholarship money? Maybe not.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > The gifted person can make the most out of any environment. This depends a lot on whether your talents cover a broad range of areas, or whether the they lie in very specific areas. In my experience the latter situation is far more common.
- qaq 3y ago
  Thats a very broad statement re: no problem raising $1M+ in funding when they complete their 4 year degree
- alphabetting 3y ago
  I was thinking about this last week around the news coverage of the kid who got rejected from 16 colleges and decided to go straight to working for google. Even without the $100k, I struggle to imagine many people finishing college and starting their careers will be better situated than he is 4 years from now. Definitely some edge cases and it ignores the loss of college memories which could be significant to some but I do think this will become more of a trend considering the recent trajectory of higher education.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
derbOac 3y ago
The article makes a fair point, but just like college, you have the problem of signalling value: does a degree/Thiel's program/award X only recognize potential, or also contribute to potential by drawing attention to the recipient? Regardless, is Thiel's model scalable, in any meaningful sense?
- j7ake 3y ago
  Colleges aren’t scalable either. Ask Harvard to hand out more degrees and you’ll see part of the value of a degree is signaling something you have that others don’t. It’s a zero sum game: the more people have Harvard degrees, the less valuable that degree becomes. Recall the Thiel fellowship targets people who would have gone on to a top university. So neither paths are scalable.
Ajay-p 3y ago
https://archive.ph/HiJFA https://archive.ph/HiJFA My only complaint with the American university system is the insistence on general education requirements. Is there another country in the world that does not allow students to step directly into their major field of study? I understand that the perception is that general education requirements build a "well rounded" student, but what if they don't want nor need those classes? The classes add to the cost of the education but amount to little more than memorization for tests, and students forget most of it afterwards. I question their value.
- philipov 3y ago
  That's what trade schools are for.
  - strangesmells02 3y ago
    Theres no trade schools for medicine.
    - trelane 3y ago
      There are, they just require a bachelor's first.
  - bumby 3y ago
    I think it's unfortunate that this comment is being downvoted because it underscores an important transition regarding university education in the US. At some point, the focus of college changed from that of understanding and contributing to culture to one geared to vocation. (I put the start around the Morrill Land Grant Act in the mid-1800s). If you go back a few decades, surveys showed the main goal of students was to "develop a philosophy of life." Now it's to "find a good job." And before people say it's because of a change of demographics, the largest influx of working-class students came after WWII and they still tended toward the former outlook for a few decades. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but we should probably take note of that change and the consequences of it.
- iakh 3y ago
muglug 3y ago
This is a bit like saying that Rhodes scholarships are challenging the status quo of academic advancement. A program for a select few works for them because a lot of resources can be channeled to a small group of bright people — but that system absolutely cannot scale. The Thiel Fellow program “works” because not that many people get to be Thiel Fellows.
- dmix 3y ago
  I don’t think the idea was for it to scale broadly? You could make a similar argument about higher education anyway, the current cultural mantra is that every single kid would benefit from university and should be the top goal broadly, which cannibalized a ton of useful industry and left tons of kids with $100k in debt and no life skills - yet still thinking they should have a university-type job, so they sit around depressed in their parents house and wash out into some low paying job like journalism or some unsatisfying gov job demanding 2 degrees. There’s a ton of smart go-getting kids across every country in the west who would have benefited from having someone tell them that there’s great options outside of college. It’s still going to be a niche but that doesn’t mean it’s a tiny one. It’s not just tech startup’s and programming either, there’s a million entrepreneurial type skills that can be developed just by going out in the world at 18 and taking a risk. This is more than just who Thiel invested in too, he’s still a VC, it was an idea (and marketing tool) as much as a specific investment program.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  It's not particularly surprising that there's a higher-than-baseline success rate for a program that selects people who are already best-positioned for success. Can't help but wonder what the value-add of the program is at that point. If a billionaire instead sets up a similar program for, say, parolees and sees higher-than-baseline success, then that's something to celebrate.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > Can't help but wonder what the value-add of the program is at that point. If the only thing you think is important is making society more equal, I guess I could see how you could come to that conclusion. That's a pretty weird way to think, though.
anonyme-honteux 3y ago
That's the least surprising thing ever. Doing things is much easier when you start with more money and more contacts. Maybe that's a new thing for people who believe that "success" is a meritocracy, but it was already obvious for everyone else.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  This form of education doesn’t scale that’s the problem
throwaway_89282 3y ago
Many of these will be written down to zero. Of course, it will still have been a cheaper education in self-aggrandizement than your typical Ivy League.
stuartjohnson12 3y ago
This is super wrong. The Thiel Fellowship stopped betting on underdogs long, long ago. I invite anyone reading this comment section to select a random recipient from the last few years go and look at two things: 1. What stage was their company at when they received the fellowship? 2. What is their parents' career? Every person who receives the Fellowship has already raised millions of dollars, sometimes even tens of millions of dollars. Raising millions of dollars as a teenager isn't something you generally do without exceptional fortune or parents in the finance industry. Usually it's the latter. I once met a TF recipient who ran a successful property lending company. What was his father's job? Multimillionaire owner of a large and successful property investment firm. Not hating on the guy, he was pretty cool and nice and his business went on to be successful (and he was for sure a hard worker, intelligent and ambitious), but the Fellowship slapping their name on his back didn't really change how the cards were stacked. At the very least, it wasn't the thing that moved the needle to him dropping out. I would be greatly surprised if, in the last 5 years, the Fellowship was the tipping point for even a single person dropping out of college. Full disclosure on the conflict of interest though, I am a mediocre college dropout who was rejected post interview. I wouldn't have and still wouldn't turn down the $100k if it was offered. Money is great.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  I think your observation tracks correctly. The TF used to also be about all sorts of weird stuff. There were hardware companies, biotech companies, kids just randomly studying math. Now it's only software. To be fair those other pursuits are hard, but I don't think the TF really gave support besides $ in ways that are meaningful for those sorts of endeavors. And when they were funded the terms were structured like terms that make sense for software companies.
- jpadkins 3y ago
  you are correct, but this is also what top tier universities are doing. They are betting on (selecting) the winners. The actual education adds almost nothing, except for some networking benefits.
  - 3y ago
actuallyalys 3y ago
I guess it’s awkward if you were trying to argue that college is the best way for everyone to achieve entrepreneurial success, but I ‘m not sure that’s a common argument for college. Certainly, the people I went to college with didn’t have that as a primary goal. To be fair, it does seem extra challenging to identify 17 to 20 year olds who will go on to be entrepreneurial successes, and Thiel and his selection committee deserve credit for that. It doesn’t really confirm his broader ideas about college, though. Edit: stuartjohnson12 claimed in their comment that many recipients have already received funding and started building their business and/or have wealthy parents. If true, that makes the fellowship’s ability to identify people who will go on to succeed less significant.
Hizonner 3y ago
So Theil is responsible for inflicting Atlassian on the world? Another in his long list of crimes.
m3kw9 3y ago
There’s a bit of mistaken identity of correlation vs causation here. Obviously Thiel would hand pick only the ones he see that has already have some traction into the products before handing(investing) out 100g. So if you hand out 100gs for anybody to drop out it won’t work. You need to already be “there” to have this work and those are the ones that maybe too smart for college
- knicholes 3y ago
  What does it mean to be "too smart for college?"
  - mikrl 3y ago
    - you are prodigious in some area, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus self directed work and study - you are well connected and affluent, with an implicit path to success already laid out, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus just leaning into the nepo - you’re stupid and want to cope and seethe about it
  - blackmesaind 3y ago
    For example, I never went to college, but I can easily do calculus and science in my head. Some of us just naturally would exceed without needing to be lectured.
TrackerFF 3y ago
Given that there are around 12 million between age 18-24 that are enrolled in a higher education program, 20 million that aren't - AND that 95% of startup founders have at minimum a Bachelors degree - my naïve take on this is that the probability for success (if we define success as getting funding for your startup) is much higher for the college educated bunch, than the others.

42 points by xqcgrek2 3y ago

It shouldn’t be: college doesn’t have to be the default mode after primary school for a functioning society. In fact, the future may be increasingly different due to the role college plays in collapsing demographics as currently implemented. A better future will probably normalize many age ranges of people in college getting educated when most appropriate.

quantified 3y ago
College is about learning many things. Trade schools are about learning other things. Thiel's program feels like a trade school for high-valuation entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with that.
Consultant32452 3y ago
College, particularly elite colleges, are good for status signaling but not good for moving the needle on a person's life outcomes. If you take someone bright enough to go to MIT and instead put them in a bog standard state school, they will tend to have the same life outcome as if they had gone to MIT. My sneaking suspicion is they would have similar life outcomes if they never went to college at all. The obvious exception being careers with regulatory requirements that involve degrees.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  > someone bright enough to go to MIT I'd argue that it depends on the person. Intelligence is certainly helpful, but it's not enough on its own, and it's not the only path to creating something valuable. I initially intended to take the university path. I got a full scholarship to the university of my choice, but quickly ran into all kinds of unexpected roadblocks - the short version of that story is that I had undiagnosed ADHD that first manifested itself in a destructive way when I left my parents' home. I ended up with severe depression, lost my scholarship, and failed out. Though it took a few years, I ultimately recovered from it and have built a life I'm happy with. This is relevant because I've kept up with many of the people I met in my short time in university. Most of the most intelligent people I met there have ended up in various "enterprise" settings. They make good money and I'm in no way slighting their accomplishments - but they originally intended to be entrepreneurs. They did very well in school, and got attractive employment offers upon graduation. Several of them said they were only going to work for others for a couple of years to built capital; almost twenty years later, none of them have followed through with that plan. On the other hand, some of the "frat guy" types I know spent most of their time socializing. They performed adequately in their classes, but not well enough to attract six-figure job offers right out of school. Several of them started businesses immediately upon graduation. They drew upon their network of friends from school to make those successful, and today they're in a better place than their peers who were more defined by their intellect in school. To put it another way - intelligence and academic success can be helpful, but it can also lay a subtle trap of moderate success that will prevent people who are otherwise capable of achieving ambition dreams from doing so. Meanwhile, having a strong social network composed of the "right kind of people" can multiply your reach.
  - Consultant32452 3y ago
    My understanding is that the biggest predictors of success is a combination of IQ and big 5 personality traits. You need high conscientiousness, low agreeableness, low neuroticism (high risk tolerance), and some openness. In my experience people who tend to do excellent at school also tend to be high in agreeableness. Agreeableness means you will go along with the path laid out in front of you, which explains all your high IQ engineer friends who took those convenient jobs straight out of college and stayed at that relative level of success. Low risk tolerance is another factor that makes a great engineer but doesn't lead to entrepreneur. My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted.
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      My apologies for the delay in responding to this - I go through periods where I simply don't have time for HN :) > My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted. That's exactly my point! To be clear, I didn't mean "frat guy" in a derogatory way at all. I meant it as a shorthand for "people in my social circle who immersed themselves in Greek life." I was on a full scholarship and lived in the honors dorms, so the people in my social circle were uniformly very intelligent and capable people. If you want to optimize for "greatness" - whether that means financial success to you or building something of great value - then being willing to take risks is important. Being able to convince the people around you that the risks are worthwhile and that they should join you is essential.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago

$100k to drop out of a top university, for a gifted person who could make the most out of that environment, does not actually sound like a good deal. Does it come with additional funding down the line? Those same people would have no problem raising $1M+ in funding when they complete their 4 year degree and decide on building a startup, no?

dartos 3y ago
In tech, at least, that degree probably won’t even be something VCs consider. Not worth finishing it up if your goal is to fund a startup. The connection and notoriety from PTs program would be just as good or better.
quantified 3y ago
The gifted person can make the most out of any environment. If the impact that person desires is to build a valuable business, going to uni sort of dilutes their effort in many ways and sets them back a few years. Maybe that student had $100k+ in scholarship money? Maybe not.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > The gifted person can make the most out of any environment. This depends a lot on whether your talents cover a broad range of areas, or whether the they lie in very specific areas. In my experience the latter situation is far more common.
qaq 3y ago
Thats a very broad statement re: no problem raising $1M+ in funding when they complete their 4 year degree
alphabetting 3y ago
I was thinking about this last week around the news coverage of the kid who got rejected from 16 colleges and decided to go straight to working for google. Even without the $100k, I struggle to imagine many people finishing college and starting their careers will be better situated than he is 4 years from now. Definitely some edge cases and it ignores the loss of college memories which could be significant to some but I do think this will become more of a trend considering the recent trajectory of higher education.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

derbOac 3y ago

The article makes a fair point, but just like college, you have the problem of signalling value: does a degree/Thiel's program/award X only recognize potential, or also contribute to potential by drawing attention to the recipient? Regardless, is Thiel's model scalable, in any meaningful sense?

j7ake 3y ago
Colleges aren’t scalable either. Ask Harvard to hand out more degrees and you’ll see part of the value of a degree is signaling something you have that others don’t. It’s a zero sum game: the more people have Harvard degrees, the less valuable that degree becomes. Recall the Thiel fellowship targets people who would have gone on to a top university. So neither paths are scalable.

Ajay-p 3y ago

https://archive.ph/HiJFA https://archive.ph/HiJFA My only complaint with the American university system is the insistence on general education requirements. Is there another country in the world that does not allow students to step directly into their major field of study? I understand that the perception is that general education requirements build a "well rounded" student, but what if they don't want nor need those classes? The classes add to the cost of the education but amount to little more than memorization for tests, and students forget most of it afterwards. I question their value.

philipov 3y ago
That's what trade schools are for.
- strangesmells02 3y ago
  Theres no trade schools for medicine.
  - trelane 3y ago
    There are, they just require a bachelor's first.
- bumby 3y ago
  I think it's unfortunate that this comment is being downvoted because it underscores an important transition regarding university education in the US. At some point, the focus of college changed from that of understanding and contributing to culture to one geared to vocation. (I put the start around the Morrill Land Grant Act in the mid-1800s). If you go back a few decades, surveys showed the main goal of students was to "develop a philosophy of life." Now it's to "find a good job." And before people say it's because of a change of demographics, the largest influx of working-class students came after WWII and they still tended toward the former outlook for a few decades. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but we should probably take note of that change and the consequences of it.
iakh 3y ago

muglug 3y ago

This is a bit like saying that Rhodes scholarships are challenging the status quo of academic advancement. A program for a select few works for them because a lot of resources can be channeled to a small group of bright people — but that system absolutely cannot scale. The Thiel Fellow program “works” because not that many people get to be Thiel Fellows.

dmix 3y ago
I don’t think the idea was for it to scale broadly? You could make a similar argument about higher education anyway, the current cultural mantra is that every single kid would benefit from university and should be the top goal broadly, which cannibalized a ton of useful industry and left tons of kids with $100k in debt and no life skills - yet still thinking they should have a university-type job, so they sit around depressed in their parents house and wash out into some low paying job like journalism or some unsatisfying gov job demanding 2 degrees. There’s a ton of smart go-getting kids across every country in the west who would have benefited from having someone tell them that there’s great options outside of college. It’s still going to be a niche but that doesn’t mean it’s a tiny one. It’s not just tech startup’s and programming either, there’s a million entrepreneurial type skills that can be developed just by going out in the world at 18 and taking a risk. This is more than just who Thiel invested in too, he’s still a VC, it was an idea (and marketing tool) as much as a specific investment program.
the_snooze 3y ago
It's not particularly surprising that there's a higher-than-baseline success rate for a program that selects people who are already best-positioned for success. Can't help but wonder what the value-add of the program is at that point. If a billionaire instead sets up a similar program for, say, parolees and sees higher-than-baseline success, then that's something to celebrate.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Can't help but wonder what the value-add of the program is at that point. If the only thing you think is important is making society more equal, I guess I could see how you could come to that conclusion. That's a pretty weird way to think, though.

anonyme-honteux 3y ago

That's the least surprising thing ever. Doing things is much easier when you start with more money and more contacts. Maybe that's a new thing for people who believe that "success" is a meritocracy, but it was already obvious for everyone else.

m3kw9 3y ago
This form of education doesn’t scale that’s the problem

throwaway_89282 3y ago

Many of these will be written down to zero. Of course, it will still have been a cheaper education in self-aggrandizement than your typical Ivy League.

stuartjohnson12 3y ago

This is super wrong. The Thiel Fellowship stopped betting on underdogs long, long ago. I invite anyone reading this comment section to select a random recipient from the last few years go and look at two things: 1. What stage was their company at when they received the fellowship? 2. What is their parents' career? Every person who receives the Fellowship has already raised millions of dollars, sometimes even tens of millions of dollars. Raising millions of dollars as a teenager isn't something you generally do without exceptional fortune or parents in the finance industry. Usually it's the latter. I once met a TF recipient who ran a successful property lending company. What was his father's job? Multimillionaire owner of a large and successful property investment firm. Not hating on the guy, he was pretty cool and nice and his business went on to be successful (and he was for sure a hard worker, intelligent and ambitious), but the Fellowship slapping their name on his back didn't really change how the cards were stacked. At the very least, it wasn't the thing that moved the needle to him dropping out. I would be greatly surprised if, in the last 5 years, the Fellowship was the tipping point for even a single person dropping out of college. Full disclosure on the conflict of interest though, I am a mediocre college dropout who was rejected post interview. I wouldn't have and still wouldn't turn down the $100k if it was offered. Money is great.

throwawaymaths 3y ago
I think your observation tracks correctly. The TF used to also be about all sorts of weird stuff. There were hardware companies, biotech companies, kids just randomly studying math. Now it's only software. To be fair those other pursuits are hard, but I don't think the TF really gave support besides $ in ways that are meaningful for those sorts of endeavors. And when they were funded the terms were structured like terms that make sense for software companies.
jpadkins 3y ago
you are correct, but this is also what top tier universities are doing. They are betting on (selecting) the winners. The actual education adds almost nothing, except for some networking benefits.
- 3y ago

actuallyalys 3y ago

I guess it’s awkward if you were trying to argue that college is the best way for everyone to achieve entrepreneurial success, but I ‘m not sure that’s a common argument for college. Certainly, the people I went to college with didn’t have that as a primary goal. To be fair, it does seem extra challenging to identify 17 to 20 year olds who will go on to be entrepreneurial successes, and Thiel and his selection committee deserve credit for that. It doesn’t really confirm his broader ideas about college, though. Edit: stuartjohnson12 claimed in their comment that many recipients have already received funding and started building their business and/or have wealthy parents. If true, that makes the fellowship’s ability to identify people who will go on to succeed less significant.

Hizonner 3y ago

So Theil is responsible for inflicting Atlassian on the world? Another in his long list of crimes.

m3kw9 3y ago

There’s a bit of mistaken identity of correlation vs causation here. Obviously Thiel would hand pick only the ones he see that has already have some traction into the products before handing(investing) out 100g. So if you hand out 100gs for anybody to drop out it won’t work. You need to already be “there” to have this work and those are the ones that maybe too smart for college

knicholes 3y ago
What does it mean to be "too smart for college?"
- mikrl 3y ago
  - you are prodigious in some area, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus self directed work and study - you are well connected and affluent, with an implicit path to success already laid out, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus just leaning into the nepo - you’re stupid and want to cope and seethe about it
- blackmesaind 3y ago
  For example, I never went to college, but I can easily do calculus and science in my head. Some of us just naturally would exceed without needing to be lectured.

TrackerFF 3y ago

Given that there are around 12 million between age 18-24 that are enrolled in a higher education program, 20 million that aren't - AND that 95% of startup founders have at minimum a Bachelors degree - my naïve take on this is that the probability for success (if we define success as getting funding for your startup) is much higher for the college educated bunch, than the others.