8 ms·

Thiel's Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges

68 points by AlchemistCamp 3y ago

notfromhere 3y ago
Unless they’re hiring exclusively other Thiel fellows, a complete red herring. The type of deep knowledge to do things and not just form startups requires an actual education.
djha-skin 3y ago
The paywall situation on Hacker News is really getting out of hand.
- siva7 3y ago
  Some newspapers are even starting to annoy me after i payed for a subscription to buy another subscription just to remove the ads.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I learned this rule early in the internet, “paying doesn’t solve the problem.” I first tried to pay as I wanted to support. But it just let to more ads and more upsell and more bother. It was a more pleasant experience to not pay and see the basic ads than paying and getting bombarded with “dear prepend, buy a longer subscription/gift a subscription/change your password/do you love us/etc” Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more.
    - sagaro 3y ago
      This is so true in this world of A/B testing everything. When A/B tests are poorly designed and results are interpreted for a short time frame, in my experience it always leads to poor decisions which impact long term.
    - siva7 3y ago
      > Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more. That's why no subscription model will work in favour of the paying customer for newspapers, dating apps and so on. It was never a distribution problem as much as that once the money rolls in, the next question will always be the same: How do we increase revenue?
      - prepend 3y ago
        If there’s a dedicated decision maker they can fend off “how much more” by sticking to some design aesthetic of “build good thing, be happy with 60% margin.” But that’s pretty rare and hard to know as there’s also lots of single owner 4hourworkweekers trying to wring extra money out of subscribers and selling $3 shirts for $50 or whatever.
- lvass 3y ago
  Enabling firefox reader mode as soon as page loads fixes this one, as well as the vast majority of paywalled articles posted here.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hsuduebc2 3y ago
https://archive.ph/mdejQ https://archive.ph/mdejQ
doitLP 3y ago
https://archive.md/mdejQ https://archive.md/mdejQ
hef19898 3y ago
So, the lesson learned is that people hand picked and backed by Peter Thiel enjoy monetary success in the start-up world. Success that beats the average college graduate. Who would have thought... Edit: Gifted article https://wapo.st/40teoVn https://wapo.st/40teoVn Just realized I can actually do this ten times per month!
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  There is some scalability to this model. Political organisations could try to kick start the careers of aligned young people in politics. Spreading a few tens million of dollars across hundreds of promising people is worth it if you can get a good governor or senator out of it. Could a movie studio do well by writing big cheques to aspiring directors/writers with a tolerance for risk? In some ways the record labels already acquire talent in this kind of model, rather than relying on credentials.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Congratulations! You have invented networking.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    > Political organizations They do this. State parties have paid fellowship programs where you make a decent salary (by entry-level politics standards), and they train you to be an elite campaign manager. All the while, you live in the state capital and hang out with party members.
deleted 3y ago
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qeternity 3y ago
https://archive.ph/mdejQ https://archive.ph/mdejQ
deleted 3y ago
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sealeck 3y ago
No it's not. The article seems to imply that if you pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people that it's surprising that they will be able get those people to invest in their ventures. The article is also comparing this very small group with university student _on average_. If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
- prepend 3y ago
  The article calls out the same thing is happening in colleges - Rhodes scholarships, incubators, scholarships galore - and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate).
  - hef19898 3y ago
    We talk about Peter Thiel here. He is in a different league, money and network wise, than your average scholarship or university incubator when it comes to start-ups.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Than Rhodes scholars? Than Stanford’s incubator? Than the MIT media lab? Obviously Thiel is unique, but he’s only paying $100k vs the much larger sums from all these other programs. I think it’s worth debating the merits of the discussion whether than just saying “Thiel magic, college is still better and nothing else matters.” If it’s really just Thiel’s network then is the right move to make him the president of Harvard since that will have a greater reach?
      - marcinzm 3y ago
        > If it’s really just Thiel’s network then is the right move to make him the president of Harvard since that will have a greater reach? Networks don't scale like that. As in the people in the network have finite time and mental capacity to take on new relationships.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Since the article is paywalled I will comment based solely on the title No, it’s not awkward for colleges because any educated person should be able to comprehend that college is not a factory and outliers always exist. The fact that we’ve had successful people way before formal education existed should be enough to render the point moot. The only one affected is the general public which will instinctively undervalue education and use this piece of information to skip college and live a worse life on average
throw932490 3y ago
[flagged]
donpott 3y ago
Discussion on HN 21 days ago with 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807
gostsamo 3y ago
Flowers who are given special attention and fertilizers perform better than the garden variety. Surprising and awkward for all industrial farmers.
- prepend 3y ago
  I think this is comparing different types of attention and fertilizers. It’s not comparing Thiel to orphans. It’s comparing Thiel to various other elite institutions and their formulas for making great people.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    "elite" lol, 99.999% of these elite people paid to win... and I have worked with plenty to realize that same amount squander it. Its scales because humans.
- Fissionary 3y ago
  Doesn't seem to work out that well for Softbank, so YMMV.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    Well, then Thiel is definitely more effective than SoftBank, but that still doesn’t say much about colleges.
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    What do you mean? It worked great for Adam Neumann! /s It’s always funny and surprising when people say “It’s a dog eat dog world!” and sets up a dog eat dog world and then get surprised when a dog eats another dog.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  Best comment. Made me snort.
prepend 3y ago
I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. Initially I dropped out of college to work on internet startups in the 90s. I didn’t make a billion but I learned skills and made a good living and was definitely the highest earner out of all my college friends for at least 10-20 years. But I went to night school and got an undergrad and masters and now work in a field with a lot of very educated people phd/md in a non-bullshit way. And I wouldn’t have had that opportunity without my degrees, even know I had the same skills and knowledge. Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. Practically, I’m not sure what to advise my kids. I’m leaning toward college because taking out loans and having 60% of the money go to admin staff and mega gyms is just overhead to opening more opportunity. And I think the college route has a higher median outcome as I wrestle with was I lucky or will everyone with skill and obsession in an area be able to support their families.
- disposition2 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, when you went back to school, did you go to school for computer science or a different degree / area of study?
  - prepend 3y ago
    For undergrad I did a business degree specializing in “computer information systems” as I couldn’t find an applicable CS degree. I was a full time architect with 10 years xp and learned really nothing directly useful in work. But the soft skills were kind of nice. Made some relationships too, but they’ve never helped me in work. For masters I went to a very reputable school in my field and studied something new. Learned a lot, but hard to know what’s helped and what didn’t. I think it gave me basic context knowledge in my new field. Made lots of relationships with students, not they helped with work. With faculty led to future work (teaching, volunteer work).
- BlandDuck 3y ago
  > Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.
stuartjohnson12 3y ago
Reposting my comment from the last time this was posted: 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.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  If that's the case, why would they even take the 100k?
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    It's free money and a networking opportunity with a bunch of other people almost guaranteed to win by their upbringing. Why wouldn't they take the 100k? The TF doesn't take an equity share in your company, they just give you the cash.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    They’re taking the access to Thiel’s network. The $100k may just be incidental for many.
  - 3y ago
mountainb 3y ago
Perhaps the issue is that universities in the 20th-21st centuries have been trying to do two things at once, and are doing both of them badly: one, they are supposed to reproduce elite western culture (whoops), and two, they are supposed to be preprofessional finishing programs for doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, and business executives. They do not do the first properly (and since the 1960s cannot even agree on what it means), and they mostly fob off the second to graduate schools and corporate training programs. So, the substance of the preprofessional training has devolved into an empty pile of credits that cost far too much money and time. At each stage in the chain, the schools blame the lower schools for failing to prepare students properly, and use that as an excuse to dilute standards further, which then causes more problems for the next stage in the chain. This has reached something close to its end point now. They can only reduce standards so much more now until all students are illiterates grunting prompts into chatbots. As to the first role, for example, the Byzantines in their universities focused on reproducing some combination of Christian orthodoxy and the Greco-Roman heritage of philosophy and history. They just taught the same curriculum over and over and over again without much modification (albeit with a lot of lurching back and forth between iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm) for roughly a millennium. Since the 60s, the permanent cultural revolution makes it so that every micro generation of professors has a new revolutionary program that it imposes, which is then followed by a new revolutionary program against the old revolution and so on and so forth. Universities are fundamentally conservative (with a small c), which has generated a very funny situation in which they have become totally dedicated to conserving the institution of permanent cultural revolution without any content. They have become dedicated to the procedure of cultural revolution, but no one can agree on the substance and content of that revolution.
wslh 3y ago
https://archive.is/mdejQ https://archive.is/mdejQ
jliptzin 3y ago
Colleges don’t create the unicorns, in fact it’s the opposite. The most driven, talented people choose which college to go to. By and large they’ll be successful no matter where they go (+/- luck factors), and even if they skip it altogether. College/advisors like Thiel serve as an accelerant. The fact that Thiel (a venture capitalist who invested early on in 20 something Mark Zuckerberg) is better at picking young unicorns than the average college admission board should come as no surprise. Especially considering he can be way more selective. I still wouldn’t skip my college years for anything though, it was the best time of my life.
chadash 3y ago
College is about signaling. Yes, I deeply enjoyed my four years there and want the same for my kids. But at the end of the day, the most valuable thing I got out of it is a diploma. Peter Thiel investing in you is an even better signal for the specific task of trying to build a unicorn. Not only is he a billionaire, but all the other people who invest in startups know who he is. But getting a thiel fellowship is out of reach for most young people.
- randomdata 3y ago
  To be fair, getting a degree is out of reach for most people as well.
smurda 3y ago
Much of the personal development in college years takes place outside of the classroom, including deep friendships forged with others who are also growing up. Thiel himself was the beneficiary of his college network - he met the PayPal team through his Stanford roommate. It’s inauthentic for him to discount the power of these networks. College is broken in many ways. But a positive college experience adds more depth and richness to life in the long-term than a check from Thiel.
acjohnson55 3y ago
The Thiel Fellowship has been extremely successful, if judged by the top 10% of its participants. That has almost nothing to do with colleges, whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students, at a scale of over 15M students per year. There's a lot you can say to criticize higher ed, but this is an apples to oranges comparison. I'm reminded of Teach For America, which I did 15 years ago. I became a full time teacher with only 5 weeks of training. Most teachers go to 4 years of ed school. I firmly believe 2 things: TFA has produced some elite teachers, but it is not a scalable model because it is not better for most people. Similar argument for bootcamps vs college for training technologists. > There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today. Ethereum is a truly incredible and fascinating project, but at this point, I don't think anything that has come out of it qualifies as promising. Nothing from it has had a substantial impact on existing value chains of products and services. It's like the bustling economy of a techno-futurist hermit kingdom, but one which doesn't produce things anyone needs to survive (including its own subjects).
- randomdata 3y ago
  > whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students If that were the case, wouldn't we be able to point to some kind of evidence of that being the case? Nobody seems to know what these worthwhile outcomes are. It has even failed demonstrate the most popular college claim: That its graduates will make more money. In reality, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of college. Furthermore, if we compare the USA, where ~40% of its population is a college graduate, with its nearest neighbour Canada, where ~70% of its population is a college graduate, the median American without a college degree makes ~50% more than the median Canadian with a college degree. It seems the actual job of college is to act as the arbiter into certain supply managed careers (doctors, lawyers, etc.), ensuring that only the "top 10%" of students are permitted into those professions.
  - acjohnson55 3y ago
    It's certainly debatable how good a job college is doing, or even what the right metrics are, but my point is that it's attempting something on a completely different scale than the Thiel Fellowship.
flappyeagle 3y ago
It is not. People don’t generally go to college with the goal of becoming a billionaire founder. Diversity of choice and outcome is good. Not awkward.
QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
“Used as filter for employment” is a terrible burden to bear, but some institution has to do it. I don’t think college gets enough credit for bearing that burden while surviving and fulfilling its original purpose at all. Saying “college is a disaster, we should gate employment by (eg, written tests or billionaire hand picks or high school grades)” sounds to me like “Frodo is an emo mess while Sam is practical and thoughtful. Things would go better if we gave the ring to Sam”
wslh 3y ago
Is there some information about the filter criteria used by the Thiel Fellowship to select the recipients, beyond the obvious, age.
TradingPlaces 3y ago
There is no control to this experiment. What would have happened to those 271 kids had he paid their tuition to Harvard, and also opened up the same access to them? Also, what happened to the other 260 kids? I bet they would prefer that Harvard degree now
- etothepii 3y ago
  One assumes there are people that turned it down. I'm more interested in a story about them than a story about the ones that took the money. Especially since it sounds like it was simply free money. Though equally I'd be super interested in a story about those that did and still failed. I assume PT will "drop you" if you cease to be value accretive. Equally, I'd love to see a story about those that were offered YC and turned it down. This should happen, I assume more often since YC are taking 7% of your business while PT appears to be offering a triple gift (cash, status and time). There is a huge difference between those that make it without YC/PT and those that were offered the help and said, "Non".
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Previous discussion only a few weeks ago, with proper url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807
nytesky 3y ago
How many are profitable companies? Roping in endless investment when backed by Thiel seems vs building a going concern. Thiel is bashing college, some of these kids have prestige academics to begin with. Luminar‘S founder attended one of the top California schools (a private school in Newport Beach), was mentored in high school by a laser entrepreneur, and attended the UC Irvije Laser institute, while in high school. And elite private school education probably gets you to junior year of a state university academically and he was essentially in “college” at Irvine while a high school student. Coupled with wealthy real estate developer parents, sure skipping college to start a business is a viable path. What’s interesting to me is how many people end up in careers unrelated to their college major — yet basically Thiels path more or less doubles down on their career choice at 18 and locks them in.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers said of the fellowship: "I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college."

68 points by AlchemistCamp 3y ago

Unless they’re hiring exclusively other Thiel fellows, a complete red herring. The type of deep knowledge to do things and not just form startups requires an actual education.

djha-skin 3y ago

The paywall situation on Hacker News is really getting out of hand.

siva7 3y ago
Some newspapers are even starting to annoy me after i payed for a subscription to buy another subscription just to remove the ads.
- prepend 3y ago
  I learned this rule early in the internet, “paying doesn’t solve the problem.” I first tried to pay as I wanted to support. But it just let to more ads and more upsell and more bother. It was a more pleasant experience to not pay and see the basic ads than paying and getting bombarded with “dear prepend, buy a longer subscription/gift a subscription/change your password/do you love us/etc” Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more.
  - sagaro 3y ago
    This is so true in this world of A/B testing everything. When A/B tests are poorly designed and results are interpreted for a short time frame, in my experience it always leads to poor decisions which impact long term.
  - siva7 3y ago
    > Once the algorithms learned that the most likely buyer is a previous buyer and how to increase incremental revenue it started sucking more. That's why no subscription model will work in favour of the paying customer for newspapers, dating apps and so on. It was never a distribution problem as much as that once the money rolls in, the next question will always be the same: How do we increase revenue?
    - prepend 3y ago
      If there’s a dedicated decision maker they can fend off “how much more” by sticking to some design aesthetic of “build good thing, be happy with 60% margin.” But that’s pretty rare and hard to know as there’s also lots of single owner 4hourworkweekers trying to wring extra money out of subscribers and selling $3 shirts for $50 or whatever.
lvass 3y ago
Enabling firefox reader mode as soon as page loads fixes this one, as well as the vast majority of paywalled articles posted here.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hsuduebc2 3y ago

https://archive.ph/mdejQ https://archive.ph/mdejQ

doitLP 3y ago

https://archive.md/mdejQ https://archive.md/mdejQ

hef19898 3y ago

So, the lesson learned is that people hand picked and backed by Peter Thiel enjoy monetary success in the start-up world. Success that beats the average college graduate. Who would have thought... Edit: Gifted article https://wapo.st/40teoVn https://wapo.st/40teoVn Just realized I can actually do this ten times per month!

spacebanana7 3y ago
There is some scalability to this model. Political organisations could try to kick start the careers of aligned young people in politics. Spreading a few tens million of dollars across hundreds of promising people is worth it if you can get a good governor or senator out of it. Could a movie studio do well by writing big cheques to aspiring directors/writers with a tolerance for risk? In some ways the record labels already acquire talent in this kind of model, rather than relying on credentials.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Congratulations! You have invented networking.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  > Political organizations They do this. State parties have paid fellowship programs where you make a decent salary (by entry-level politics standards), and they train you to be an elite campaign manager. All the while, you live in the state capital and hang out with party members.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

qeternity 3y ago

https://archive.ph/mdejQ https://archive.ph/mdejQ

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sealeck 3y ago

No it's not. The article seems to imply that if you pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people that it's surprising that they will be able get those people to invest in their ventures. The article is also comparing this very small group with university student _on average_. If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.

prepend 3y ago
The article calls out the same thing is happening in colleges - Rhodes scholarships, incubators, scholarships galore - and does not match the success of Thiel’s programs for generating successful startups (11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate).
- hef19898 3y ago
  We talk about Peter Thiel here. He is in a different league, money and network wise, than your average scholarship or university incubator when it comes to start-ups.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Than Rhodes scholars? Than Stanford’s incubator? Than the MIT media lab? Obviously Thiel is unique, but he’s only paying $100k vs the much larger sums from all these other programs. I think it’s worth debating the merits of the discussion whether than just saying “Thiel magic, college is still better and nothing else matters.” If it’s really just Thiel’s network then is the right move to make him the president of Harvard since that will have a greater reach?
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      > If it’s really just Thiel’s network then is the right move to make him the president of Harvard since that will have a greater reach? Networks don't scale like that. As in the people in the network have finite time and mental capacity to take on new relationships.

Almondsetat 3y ago

Since the article is paywalled I will comment based solely on the title No, it’s not awkward for colleges because any educated person should be able to comprehend that college is not a factory and outliers always exist. The fact that we’ve had successful people way before formal education existed should be enough to render the point moot. The only one affected is the general public which will instinctively undervalue education and use this piece of information to skip college and live a worse life on average

throw932490 3y ago

[flagged]

donpott 3y ago

Discussion on HN 21 days ago with 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807

gostsamo 3y ago

Flowers who are given special attention and fertilizers perform better than the garden variety. Surprising and awkward for all industrial farmers.

prepend 3y ago
I think this is comparing different types of attention and fertilizers. It’s not comparing Thiel to orphans. It’s comparing Thiel to various other elite institutions and their formulas for making great people.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  "elite" lol, 99.999% of these elite people paid to win... and I have worked with plenty to realize that same amount squander it. Its scales because humans.
Fissionary 3y ago
Doesn't seem to work out that well for Softbank, so YMMV.
- mcphage 3y ago
  Well, then Thiel is definitely more effective than SoftBank, but that still doesn’t say much about colleges.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  What do you mean? It worked great for Adam Neumann! /s It’s always funny and surprising when people say “It’s a dog eat dog world!” and sets up a dog eat dog world and then get surprised when a dog eats another dog.
spacecadet 3y ago
Best comment. Made me snort.

prepend 3y ago

I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful. Initially I dropped out of college to work on internet startups in the 90s. I didn’t make a billion but I learned skills and made a good living and was definitely the highest earner out of all my college friends for at least 10-20 years. But I went to night school and got an undergrad and masters and now work in a field with a lot of very educated people phd/md in a non-bullshit way. And I wouldn’t have had that opportunity without my degrees, even know I had the same skills and knowledge. Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. Practically, I’m not sure what to advise my kids. I’m leaning toward college because taking out loans and having 60% of the money go to admin staff and mega gyms is just overhead to opening more opportunity. And I think the college route has a higher median outcome as I wrestle with was I lucky or will everyone with skill and obsession in an area be able to support their families.

disposition2 3y ago
Out of curiosity, when you went back to school, did you go to school for computer science or a different degree / area of study?
- prepend 3y ago
  For undergrad I did a business degree specializing in “computer information systems” as I couldn’t find an applicable CS degree. I was a full time architect with 10 years xp and learned really nothing directly useful in work. But the soft skills were kind of nice. Made some relationships too, but they’ve never helped me in work. For masters I went to a very reputable school in my field and studied something new. Learned a lot, but hard to know what’s helped and what didn’t. I think it gave me basic context knowledge in my new field. Made lots of relationships with students, not they helped with work. With faculty led to future work (teaching, volunteer work).
BlandDuck 3y ago
> Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened. It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter. In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being. In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.

stuartjohnson12 3y ago

Reposting my comment from the last time this was posted: 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.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
If that's the case, why would they even take the 100k?
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  It's free money and a networking opportunity with a bunch of other people almost guaranteed to win by their upbringing. Why wouldn't they take the 100k? The TF doesn't take an equity share in your company, they just give you the cash.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  They’re taking the access to Thiel’s network. The $100k may just be incidental for many.
- 3y ago

mountainb 3y ago

Perhaps the issue is that universities in the 20th-21st centuries have been trying to do two things at once, and are doing both of them badly: one, they are supposed to reproduce elite western culture (whoops), and two, they are supposed to be preprofessional finishing programs for doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, and business executives. They do not do the first properly (and since the 1960s cannot even agree on what it means), and they mostly fob off the second to graduate schools and corporate training programs. So, the substance of the preprofessional training has devolved into an empty pile of credits that cost far too much money and time. At each stage in the chain, the schools blame the lower schools for failing to prepare students properly, and use that as an excuse to dilute standards further, which then causes more problems for the next stage in the chain. This has reached something close to its end point now. They can only reduce standards so much more now until all students are illiterates grunting prompts into chatbots. As to the first role, for example, the Byzantines in their universities focused on reproducing some combination of Christian orthodoxy and the Greco-Roman heritage of philosophy and history. They just taught the same curriculum over and over and over again without much modification (albeit with a lot of lurching back and forth between iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm) for roughly a millennium. Since the 60s, the permanent cultural revolution makes it so that every micro generation of professors has a new revolutionary program that it imposes, which is then followed by a new revolutionary program against the old revolution and so on and so forth. Universities are fundamentally conservative (with a small c), which has generated a very funny situation in which they have become totally dedicated to conserving the institution of permanent cultural revolution without any content. They have become dedicated to the procedure of cultural revolution, but no one can agree on the substance and content of that revolution.

wslh 3y ago

https://archive.is/mdejQ https://archive.is/mdejQ

jliptzin 3y ago

Colleges don’t create the unicorns, in fact it’s the opposite. The most driven, talented people choose which college to go to. By and large they’ll be successful no matter where they go (+/- luck factors), and even if they skip it altogether. College/advisors like Thiel serve as an accelerant. The fact that Thiel (a venture capitalist who invested early on in 20 something Mark Zuckerberg) is better at picking young unicorns than the average college admission board should come as no surprise. Especially considering he can be way more selective. I still wouldn’t skip my college years for anything though, it was the best time of my life.

chadash 3y ago

College is about signaling. Yes, I deeply enjoyed my four years there and want the same for my kids. But at the end of the day, the most valuable thing I got out of it is a diploma. Peter Thiel investing in you is an even better signal for the specific task of trying to build a unicorn. Not only is he a billionaire, but all the other people who invest in startups know who he is. But getting a thiel fellowship is out of reach for most young people.

randomdata 3y ago
To be fair, getting a degree is out of reach for most people as well.

smurda 3y ago

Much of the personal development in college years takes place outside of the classroom, including deep friendships forged with others who are also growing up. Thiel himself was the beneficiary of his college network - he met the PayPal team through his Stanford roommate. It’s inauthentic for him to discount the power of these networks. College is broken in many ways. But a positive college experience adds more depth and richness to life in the long-term than a check from Thiel.

acjohnson55 3y ago

The Thiel Fellowship has been extremely successful, if judged by the top 10% of its participants. That has almost nothing to do with colleges, whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students, at a scale of over 15M students per year. There's a lot you can say to criticize higher ed, but this is an apples to oranges comparison. I'm reminded of Teach For America, which I did 15 years ago. I became a full time teacher with only 5 weeks of training. Most teachers go to 4 years of ed school. I firmly believe 2 things: TFA has produced some elite teachers, but it is not a scalable model because it is not better for most people. Similar argument for bootcamps vs college for training technologists. > There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today. Ethereum is a truly incredible and fascinating project, but at this point, I don't think anything that has come out of it qualifies as promising. Nothing from it has had a substantial impact on existing value chains of products and services. It's like the bustling economy of a techno-futurist hermit kingdom, but one which doesn't produce things anyone needs to survive (including its own subjects).

randomdata 3y ago
> whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students If that were the case, wouldn't we be able to point to some kind of evidence of that being the case? Nobody seems to know what these worthwhile outcomes are. It has even failed demonstrate the most popular college claim: That its graduates will make more money. In reality, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of college. Furthermore, if we compare the USA, where ~40% of its population is a college graduate, with its nearest neighbour Canada, where ~70% of its population is a college graduate, the median American without a college degree makes ~50% more than the median Canadian with a college degree. It seems the actual job of college is to act as the arbiter into certain supply managed careers (doctors, lawyers, etc.), ensuring that only the "top 10%" of students are permitted into those professions.
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  It's certainly debatable how good a job college is doing, or even what the right metrics are, but my point is that it's attempting something on a completely different scale than the Thiel Fellowship.

flappyeagle 3y ago

It is not. People don’t generally go to college with the goal of becoming a billionaire founder. Diversity of choice and outcome is good. Not awkward.

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago

“Used as filter for employment” is a terrible burden to bear, but some institution has to do it. I don’t think college gets enough credit for bearing that burden while surviving and fulfilling its original purpose at all. Saying “college is a disaster, we should gate employment by (eg, written tests or billionaire hand picks or high school grades)” sounds to me like “Frodo is an emo mess while Sam is practical and thoughtful. Things would go better if we gave the ring to Sam”

wslh 3y ago

Is there some information about the filter criteria used by the Thiel Fellowship to select the recipients, beyond the obvious, age.

TradingPlaces 3y ago

There is no control to this experiment. What would have happened to those 271 kids had he paid their tuition to Harvard, and also opened up the same access to them? Also, what happened to the other 260 kids? I bet they would prefer that Harvard degree now

etothepii 3y ago
One assumes there are people that turned it down. I'm more interested in a story about them than a story about the ones that took the money. Especially since it sounds like it was simply free money. Though equally I'd be super interested in a story about those that did and still failed. I assume PT will "drop you" if you cease to be value accretive. Equally, I'd love to see a story about those that were offered YC and turned it down. This should happen, I assume more often since YC are taking 7% of your business while PT appears to be offering a triple gift (cash, status and time). There is a huge difference between those that make it without YC/PT and those that were offered the help and said, "Non".

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Previous discussion only a few weeks ago, with proper url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37941807

nytesky 3y ago

How many are profitable companies? Roping in endless investment when backed by Thiel seems vs building a going concern. Thiel is bashing college, some of these kids have prestige academics to begin with. Luminar‘S founder attended one of the top California schools (a private school in Newport Beach), was mentored in high school by a laser entrepreneur, and attended the UC Irvije Laser institute, while in high school. And elite private school education probably gets you to junior year of a state university academically and he was essentially in “college” at Irvine while a high school student. Coupled with wealthy real estate developer parents, sure skipping college to start a business is a viable path. What’s interesting to me is how many people end up in careers unrelated to their college major — yet basically Thiels path more or less doubles down on their career choice at 18 and locks them in.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers said of the fellowship: "I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college."