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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

• 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.
      • mjhay 3y ago
        > Than Rhodes scholars? Than Stanford’s incubator? Than the MIT media lab? Yes. You're essentially talking about academic organizations there, with diffuse industry involvement. That's a world away from direct access to a tech billionaire's network.
        • morelisp 3y ago
          They're also not that much bigger - Rhodes is perhaps 2x larger when you restrict it to the anglosphere. And it naturally doesn't include the investment money you're basically certain to also get from Thiel alongside the $100k award.
      • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        Look, turn the question around: how many of Thiel's "graduates" turned out to be university chancellors, notable academics or leaders in government or civil society?
      • SamBam 3y ago
        You keep mentioning Rhodes scholars. I think you have a very different idea about the purpose of a Rhodes scholarship than most of the scholars.
        • smelendez 3y ago
          Yeah, most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t want to pause for graduate study at Oxford. It’s like saying Y Combinator has failed to produce a single National Book Award nominee, or judging Juilliard by how many future dentists studied there.
        • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
          Current criteria for Rhodes Scholarship selection, which I think rather makes the point: # literary and scholastic attainments # energy to use one's talents to the full # truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship # moral force of character and instincts to lead, and to take an interest in one's fellow beings
  • morelisp 3y ago
    Thiel's program is designed to generate startups. It should not be surprising that it generates more startups than other programs designed to reward endeavors other than generating startups.
    • notahacker 3y ago
      Yeah. Another obvious point of comparison would be Ycombinator (or more specifically early Ycombinator when it took fewer startups with traction and more recent grads the YC partners really liked even if their ideas weren't fully formed) In comparison to that, Thiel's success rate looks a bit more ordinary. Rhodes scholarships etc on the other hand are a fair bit more successful at generating academics and researchers and mid level managers from backgrounds that don't usually become mid level managers, because that's what they're for
    • silverlyra 3y ago
      It really does seem that plain of a truth to me, too. What % of Rhodes scholars enter with dreams of founding a “unicorn”? Probably a negligible fraction of that same % of Thiel fellows, which I’d imagine is ~100%. That the non-Thiel group then goes own to found a negligible fraction of those companies isn’t awkward for colleges; it’s a reflection of the different values held by members of our society. Meanwhile, whose interests are served by future unicorn founders being plucked away from the liberal arts, or from the connections and experiences they would’ve had in college with people very unlike Peter Thiel?
  • marcinzm 3y ago
    Startups are not the one and be all goal of everyone's life. It is the goal of Theil's investments.
    • roenxi 3y ago
      If there are people who could be adding a billion dollars in value to their society and choose not to... that would be worth reforming a lot of things to improve on. At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare.
      • marcinzm 3y ago
        That's an interesting perspective. Economy above happiness. Economy above family. Economy above art. Economy above health. Economy above everything else.
      • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        >At the end of the day there is a lot of meat behind a real unicorn company. It is possible to do more for humanity than a billion dollar company - names like Gauss and Euler sprint to mind - but such names are rare. Are they? I notice you only picked mathematicians. What's the value to society of a Mozart, a Picasso, a Dostoevsky, a Michelangelo ... ?
        • prepend 3y ago
          Massive value. But I think those are also arguments against college as it’s not like the goal of college is to produce those. And of course it’s very difficult to evaluate the impact along these types of values. Saying college is good because Mozart is valuable and not STEM seems like a reach.
      • preciousoo 3y ago
        What an interesting way to see the world.
      • 3y ago
  • RHSeeger 3y ago
    > pick a very select group of people, and give them money and access to a network of very wealthy people > 11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate But completely unscalable. It seems perfectly reasonable to think you can take a select group of people give them resources that allow them to succeed (at a certain level) better than people who went to college. You could probably get similar results by just giving a select group of people a million dollars to start with. Or am I misunderstanding something about the situation.
    • prepend 3y ago
      11 billion+ startups in 10 years out of a thousand has already demonstrated scale. There are tons of people giving $1M to groups of people who don’t have these returns. Also, this is a comparison of working vs college. So it’s an opportunity cost experiment. Giving $1M to skilled management teams is completely different.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      You could probably get similar results by doing nothing. College, for all its trumpeting about better outcomes, has shown no actual change in the financial success of the population. Incomes have held stagnant the entire time. Thiel's experiment really just goes to reiterate what we already knew: That successful people are born that way.
  • nonameiguess 3y ago
    The Ivy League has produced most of the supreme court, most presidents, most senators. Very few of them ever led startups or became billionaires, but that is far from the only measure of success. That is aside from the fact that I don't see any way, fundamentally, to become something like a scientist or a physician outside of the university system. You can't run controlled experiments, especially if they require any kind of specialized lab equipment or human subjects, without fairly strict oversight, and you certainly can't go into a hospital and put yourself into rotation getting clinical experience with patients outside of being supervised by a teaching physician. There are other ways to meet these sort of dynamics outside of universities in principle. Guilds serve this purpose in some professions. But for many modern professions, the university system is the guild. It's where scientists train other scientists. It's how you get an apprenticeship. Nonetheless, not every profession is like running a business, where anyone with money is at least allowed to try.
    • hospitalJail 3y ago
      You can do science outside the system. That is easy. Go track something. If you can reproduce your own results, it will be interesting enough for others to join in. I've done this, I have a few hundred thousand followers that might lean tech/engineering. Getting accredited to be a Physician in the US is a political thing controlled by the Physician Cartel(AMA and ACGME). That line about Ivys and Presidents just seem to line up more with the political situation of Physicians. Heck, residencies and med school are all tied up in special points.
  • AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    > 11/900 is a pretty amazing success rate To it into perspective, his native country—Germany—only produced about double that number of unicorns over the same time frame, and he invested in many of those as well.
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• jackcosgrove 3y ago
  > 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. Don't elite colleges do the same? Select a small slice of society and give them opportunities beyond what society at large has? The difference between what Thiel is doing and what colleges are doing seems to be a difference in degree and not in kind. That difference in degree is exchanging a larger reward for a smaller pool of candidates. The same criticism of the Thiel Fellows could be leveled at college, from the perspective of someone who didn't attend college.
• deleted 3y ago
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• throwawayapples 3y ago
  > 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. At the highest-level universities, nearly every applicant is already exceptional before they're even accepted, and yet: Even if you carefully selected 100 or so people out of nearly any university, it's statistically unlikely that a Fields medal winner, Nobel prize laureate, or unicorn founder would come to fruition out of any of them, even if we allow more than a decade.