The venture capital Peter Thiel will give you $ 200,000. He only asks you that you have an excellent idea and that you are fully committing to that – and the technological entrepreneur of $ 26 billion thinks that the only way for young budding entrepreneurs to go while abandoning the college.
Since 2011, the Thiel Stock Exchange has equipped young people with money and an influential sales network. Until now, the programaries of the program have founded more than 11 unicorns with a combined value of more than $ 100 billion. Although not all college abandonments are successful in the program, it is launched like Ethereum and Plaid in the celebrity of the industry. The co -founder of Figma Dylan Field and the creator of the AI of the Lucy Guo scale – the youngest self -taught billionaire – are only two of the influential names that have started on the Thiel Stock Exchange.
It may seem intimidating that young professionals abandon their Ivy League schools after receiving six -digit wages after graduation. But Thiel in fact created the program from a deep cynicism towards the traditional education system for the 20 years, which he often called a “corrupt institution”.
“Higher education is the worst establishment we have,” said Thiel in the publication of this year’s share of entrepreneurs. “For these exceptional scholarship holders, we provide an alternative.”
These ex-fellows prove that abandonment can lead to serious success.
Dylan Field, co -founder and CEO of a company of $ 40 billion Figma
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Sitting in a dormitory at Brown University just ten years ago, Dylan Field, 19, designed Figma, a company offering a collaborative design tool that now competes in Adobe. However, things are not taken off before having abandoned the prestigious college after less than two years in order to receive a Thiel scholarship. His mother said CNBC In 2012, she “was not delighted”, concerned about the long -term impact not to have a university diploma on her future career prospects. But after the success of Figma’s rupture, it should no longer be so worried.
Last month, the triumphant IPO of Figma made a billionaire ground; He went from university with only $ 100,000 in his stock market pocket to raise a net value now at around $ 5 billion.
Aside from a breathtaking net value, Field said that the scholarship had given it something much more precious than what a university diploma would provide – interrupted time to focus entirely on the construction of its idea. With time and mentorship, they send you: “Go build something incredible,” said Field in the same interview in 2012. And he did.
“Here is this 19 -year -old, who had a lot of clarity on what he wanted to do – democratize the world of design and provide tools to everyone,” said Danny Rimer, a first investor of Figma, said Fortune last month.
Lucy Guo, co -founder of $ 29 billion Scale of the technological company AI
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Before Lucy Guo became the youngest self -taught billionaire woman, she was a student in Carnegie Mellon unhappy with what she learned in school. Guo said Fortune This, while at Pennsylvania College, she estimated that several days coding competitions taught her more than the teachers.
She therefore abandoned in 2014 and shortly after, the idea of the AI scale – a data labeling startup – with her co -founder, Alexandr Wang, whom she met by working in Quora. Meta recently acquired the company as part of an agreement of $ 14 billion which estimated the company at more than $ 29 billion. Guo left the company in 2016, and her 5% stake made her the youngest self -taught billionaire, detacing Taylor Swift, record holder.
By thinking about her success, she described the Thiel Stock Exchange the best thing that has ever happened to her. “You are the average of the five people you drag the most, and the Thiel scholarship surrounds you with ambitious and intelligent people who are all a little crazy.”
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha, co -founders of $ 2 billion Mercor
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Mercor, an AI hiring platform, is one of the greatest successes of AI, an AI hiring platform which tries to transform the Association of candidates. The company increased an assessment of $ 2 billion in February of this year, due to the high recruitment demand powered by AI. The three members of the co -foundation team – Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha – were recipient of the billionaire’s stock exchange.
While the AI is advancing at dizzying speed, the founders estimated that it was unlikely to hold it for four years of college and delay the construction of their startup. Midha, co -founder and chief of the Mercor’s exploitation, told The New York Times That it felt both an “extreme emergency” and an “existential fear” to let the Boom of the AI pass through him.
Adarsh Hiremath, co -founder and CTO of the IA company, also said that he received diminished yields of the experience of Harvard University after his first year at Ivy League. Instead, he chose to take the opportunity of the scholarship to “give it (to him) everything”.
Massive student loans and the lack of employment possibilities decrease college returns
The Silicon Valley has always idolized the dropout of the very efficient college, from Mark Zuckerberg to Larry Ellison. The scholarship is responsible for billions of people in commercial value that its alumni have created. Thiel’s blessing gives a credibility of the startup founder that the college simply cannot.
Beyond the entrepreneurial sphere, generation Z is struggling with decreasing yields of a degree and is looking for alternative means to establish a career. The price of school fees of the American college increased to an average of $ 38,270 per year, which makes the cost unmanageable for almost half of the Americans living in the Painie payroll. In addition, for some, the career may have disappeared; For men with a diploma, the unemployment rate is the same as for men who have not attended the university.
According to a recent survey by a recent survey conducted by their diploma, around 38% of graduates have limited their career growth that their diploma did not accelerate it. Thiel echoes this feeling, saying at the start of its program that the college became a distraction “because young people who leave university are struggling with student loans, who are starting to follow them in careers who pay well but who will not help our country.”
