Imagine that you’re a senior in high school and a man approaches to you with this proposition: He’ll give you $100,000 and mentorship to start a company. The only catch? You can’t go to college.
Do you take him up on it?
Well, for the past four years that’s exactly what Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, has offered high school students across the country.
Out of this year’s 550 applicants, only 20 were chosen this year to become a part of the Thiel Fellows Foundation. Of that group, one quarter are women — a better percentage than last year when only four of the 22 participants were female.
This is a unique opportunity for students, especially considering the growing wealth gap between those with high school degrees and college graduates. Interestingly, despite the lack of higher education, past fellows have contributed to the economy by creating over 182 jobs and adding $87 million in economic action. In the first year of the foundation, five fellows returned to school but since then, Thiel has a perfect record.
Undoubtedly, being a Thiel Fellow becomes more appealing when once you start looking at the success of former program participants. For instance, Dan Friedman is now the co-founder of a company called Thinkful which works with mid-career professionals who want to switch to technical careers. Another, Laura Deming, is now a venture capitalist focusing on anti-aging projects. And Paul Gu is the co-founder of Upstart, a financial company.
This year’s applicants are just as impressive. This year, many proposals focused around bitcoin, machine learning, and hardware, but also include creating a tool kit to help investigative journalists, using technology to improve the hospital-patient relationship, curing cancer, and conducting research on streamlining satellite development. To meet this year’s fellows, click here.
With college becoming an expensive option, Thiel’s offer is a tempting alternative. The opportunity he gives these students is a once in a lifetime chance and is challenging both the role and the importance of higher education. The question is, then, would you apply?
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Tag: Peter Thiel
How the America of Tomorrow Will Look
Do you think technology is improving our world? Or are you more of a Luddite and believe that we’d be better off without technological advancements?
Almost two-thirds of Americans believe tech innovation will result in a better future, while one-third think people’s lives will get worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.
Regardless, the rapid pace at which Silicon Valley is driving change is a force to be reckoned with. Technology has brought about a seismic shift in everything from transportation and real estate to the broadcast industry and dating. To illustrate where we’re headed, the New York Times asked some of the tech world’s biggest luminaries about what we can expect, and how often we’ll see drone-filled skies or Google Glass users on the street.
The lineup: Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and inventor of the first widely-used internet browser Mosaic; Ev Williams, the founder and chief executive of Medium.com and co-founder of Twitter; Susan Wojcicki, head of YouTube; Sebastian Thrun, co-founder and chief executive of Udacity, an inventor of driverless cars and a founder of Google X; Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn; Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social; and Peter Thiel, an investor and co-founder of PayPal.
Here’s a glimpse at what they had to say:
It’s hard to imagine a time when cell phones were obsolete, but it took less than a decade to make them commonplace. Therefore, Andreessen thinks we can expect the same for everything from drones to remote education in the not-so-distant future. “Hundreds or thousands of drones flying to and fro for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Getting a top-end college education without going to a physical campus. Cars driven by computers instead of humans.”
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Williams agrees the subtext of any major tech advancement will be convenience. “Phones and computers will automatically do anything tedious that doesn’t require brainpower, like signing up for a web site or app. The march of technology is the incessant march of convenience,” he said.
Implantable chips are not just a Hollywood depiction of what our future holds. Both Shih and Thrun believe that implantable devices will be a mainstay in our lives. “Implantable chips that monitor the number of steps we take, hours we sleep, all of our vital signs, blood chemistry and beyond,” Shih said. “The chip data will be used to adjust our medications, offer suggestions to change our behavior and automatically send an ambulance — self-driving, of course.”
Tech innovation has reshaped the way we eat, how we travel and how we interact with one another. As for which industries the tech world plans to tackle, Williams points to higher education while Hoffman believes the banking industry is on the horizon. “Consumer banking. Tech will unbundle banking for loans, payments, asset management and so on,” Hoffman said. Shih adds that the auto industry — whether it’s driverless cars, auto parts or auto insurance — will be a major focus for Silicon Valley as well.
As for novelties, we laugh at the mention of a Sony Walkman, but it seems the iPod will soon follow suit. Hoffman thinks we’ll also say goodbye to the computer mouse and city cars (“The computer mouse will soon be replaced. Think touch, swipe, rich hand gestures.”), while Thrun simply points to keys.
Though not tech related, Thiel contends playing with the pigskin will be a pastime we leave behind. “Football. We realize it is very harmful for you, but we haven’t yet reached the tipping point where it becomes broadly unacceptable to condone,” he said.
Of course, predicting the future is a tricky game. We’ve managed to survive the Mayan doomsday prediction of December 21, 2012, and we’re certainly not jetting around in flying cars. But if the major advancements made over the last decade are any indication, we’re headed for an interesting ride.
Check out the full Times infograph here.
These Billionaire GOP Donors Support the Idea of a $12 Minimum Wage. Will the Party Follow?
Could common political ground between Democrats and Republicans be on the horizon? It looks like some influential conservative donors are shifting their ideology ever so slightly to increasing the minimum wage — a legislative issue that Democrats are pushing for as we near the midterm elections. In January, wealthy Silicon Valley executive and conservative donor Ron Unz put forth a California ballot measure that would raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016. His perspective was this: raising the minimum wage would put more money in the average Americans’ pockets, which in turn would make them less reliant on government aid. Now Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and GOP donor, is weighing in on Unz’s plan, saying, “I actually think that it’s a very out of the box idea — but it’s something one should consider seriously.” Thiel, who has donated millions of dollars to GOP causes over the year, including $1 million to the anti-tax group Club for Growth and nearly $4 million to the Endorse Liberty PAC in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2012, agrees with Unz’s assumptions that a higher minimum wage could reduce people’s dependency on welfare. “Given how low the minimum wage is — and how generous the welfare benefits are — you have a marginal tax rate that’s on the order of 100 percent, and people are actually trapped in this sort of welfare state,” he said.
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The idea of a minimum wage increase has been a hot topic of late. President Barack Obama called on Congress to work together to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015 in his State of the Union address, saying that the move would raise the income of millions of working families. “It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets,” he said. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 — which is used in about 30 states that don’t mandate their own — translates to a $15,000 annual salary, which the President noted is well below a living wage in many areas of the country.
Recently, House Democrats filed a “discharge petition” in an attempt to dislodge their bill that increases the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, which would move the vote to the floor. While it seems unlikely that the petition will get the required votes, some Republican lawmakers have said that they are open to discussion on the issue. Others stick to their opposition, citing a bipartisan Congressional Budget Office report that says that raising the minimum wage would cost the economy 500,000 jobs. Democrats, on the other hand, cite another aspect of the same report — that raising the minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. OK, so maybe legislators aren’t finding their common ground quite yet. But if there’s one certainty in politics it’s that politicians follow the money. If major conservative donors continue to push for a minimum wage increase, we might hear some GOP lawmakers singing a different tune.
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