I took Thiel's class at Stanford and I can tell you that Thiel is kind of a nut. He has a lot of very smart, very on point things to say -- however he is either

I took Thiel's class at Stanford and I can tell you that Thiel is kind of a nut. He has a lot of very smart, very on point things to say -- however he is either gravely misinformed or pretty much delusional in his views of broader academia and its role in the proliferation of technology. You can see this tangibly from his founders fund investments in the bio sciences sector. Thiel views everything through the lens of incentives and grossly "overfits" this methodology to academic research arguing that the incentive to publish and be peer reviewed is responsible for the break down of truly ground breaking research. So instead he throws money at equally delusional (but somewhat qualified) PhDs in advanced fields for which he seems to have little grasp for. You see the same patterns in the people selected here -- ideas that sound "cool" as if from a sci-fi novel but tangibly very distant from real markets and profits. I doubt his fund gets deal flow from serious silicon valley technology firms.