This long article profiles some Thiel Fellows and raises the question of whether college is necessary for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.
The Real Teens of Silicon Valley: Inside the almost-adult lives of the industry’s newest recruitsBy Nellie Bowles
The California Sunday Magazine
PETER THIEL, the PayPal co-founder and radical libertarian, stoked San Francisco’s latest Peter Pan moment. In 2010, his foundation launched a fellowship that awards $100,000 each to 20 young people per year who skip or drop out of college. One of his slogans: “Some ideas can’t wait.” The fellowship attracted outsize attention, instantly becoming an elite brand around which other dropout teens began to rally. “The fellowship is a flag, like a beacon,” said Matin. “Even if you don’t do the fellowship, it legitimized our work.”
Danielle Strachman, the Thiel Fellowship’s program director, seconds this notion. “Peter Thiel, PayPal — these are things [parents] understand,” she said. I met her and Michael Gibson, the fellowship’s vice president of grants, in a conference room inside the Thiel Foundation’s sleek, modern headquarters in the Presidio, a former military outpost, many of whose old whitewashed buildings have been converted into startup space. When the fellowship was announced, “it was a media maelstrom,” said Gibson. “One of the biggest fears these young people have is being unintelligible to their parents — and to everyone, really. One of the things the fellowship did was make it intelligible.”
More than 430 people applied the first year. By 2014, thanks in part to a shortened application, that number increased to 3,100. “When the fellowship first started, it was young prodigies, geniuses,” Strachman said. “But there are so many people dropping out now, it’s more normal-looking teens.” Of the 84 fellows so far, only eight have gone back to college, and two of those later dropped out again. Alums include the founders of Streem (acquired by Box), Propeller (acquired by Palantir), and Flashcards+ (acquired by Chegg).
