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It’s too early to say whether billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s experiment in paying bright teenagers to start companies instead of going to college is a smashing success, but the Thiel Foundation is officially committed to a second year of the “20 under 20” Thiel Fellows program.
Applications for the next class of young people with great ideas open today. “Every moment in history happens only once,” Thiel said in a statement. “If you have a good idea, the time to work on it is right away.”
Thiel is certainly one to act swiftly on good ideas. He was the first to back Mark Zuckerberg as an investor in Facebook; that early investment ballooned in value, landing Thiel on Forbes’ lists of the World’s Billionaires and the Forbes 400 with a recent net worth of $1.5 billion. And he’s only 43.
Thiel is using some of his fortune to pay a small group of super-focused students, all under age 20, $100,000 each for two years. I recently met several of this impressive bunch. One, David Luan, spent two years at Yale (on full scholarship) and had summer jobs at a military contractor where he worked on building robots. When he got the Thiel Fellowship, he discontinued his Yale studies. Now he’s working with another Thiel Fellow, Darren Zhu, on a robotics startup called Dextro, which he hopes one day will handle all sorts of mundane tasks in order to free people up to work on more important problems.
For starters, Luan and Zhu are tackling the world of biotech labs, building a benchtop robot that will help coordinate and automate lab tasks. “It’s basically an arm on rails,” Luan explained. Biotech, he added, is an area that’s ripe for innovation and biotech labs are ripe for further automation.
For the current class of Fellows, 400 applications came in from 22 countries, said Thiel Foundation head Jim O’Neill. He’s predicting even more applicants this year, as news of the fellowship spreads. Applications will be open until Dec. 31.
One thing that’s quite different from a typical college campus: How dedicated the current fellows are to their startup projects. The challenge, says O’Neill, is sometimes getting them to stop working. “They are sort of working so hard that they need us to organize fun social events.”
“One person even said, ‘Please organize them and make them mandatory.’”
