Venture capitalist Peter Thiel will give you $200,000. He only asks that you have a great idea and fully commit to it—and the $26 billion tech entrepreneur thinks the only way for young, aspiring entrepreneurs to go all-in is by dropping out of college.
Since 2011, the Thiel Fellowship has been equipping young people with money and an influential business network. So far, the program’s fellows have founded over 11 unicorns with a combined worth of over $100 billion. While not every college drop-out entering the program has been successful, it’s launched the likes of Ethereum and Plaid into industry stardom. Figma cofounder Dylan Field and Scale AI creator Lucy Guo—the youngest self-made female billionaire—are just two of the influential names that got their start from the Thiel Fellowship.
It may seem daunting for young professionals to ditch their Ivy League schools after being promised six-figure salaries after graduation. But Thiel actually created the program out of a deep cynicism toward the traditional education system for 20-somethings, which he has often called a “corrupt institution.”
“Higher education is the worst institution we have,” Thiel said in the release of this year’s batch of entrepreneurs. “For these exceptional fellows, we are providing an alternative.”
These ex-fellows prove that dropping out can result in serious success.
Dylan Field, cofounder and CEO of $40 billion company Figma
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Sitting in a Brown University dorm room just a decade ago, then-19-year-old Dylan Field conceived Figma, a company offering a collaborative design tool that now rivals Adobe. However, things didn’t get off the ground until he dropped out of the prestigious college after less than two years in order to receive a Thiel fellowship. His mother told CNBC in 2012 that she “wasn’t thrilled about it,” concerned about the long-term impact of not having a college degree on his future career prospects. But after Figma’s breakout success, she shouldn’t be so worried anymore.
Last month, Figma’s triumphant IPO made Field a billionaire; He went from being a college-dropout with just $100,000 in his pocket from the fellowship to amassing a net worth now standing at about $5 billion.
Aside from an eye-popping net worth, Field said that the fellowship gave him something far more valuable than what a college degree would provide—uninterrupted time to focus entirely on building his idea. With time and mentorship, they send you off: “Go build something amazing,” Field said in that same 2012 interview. And he did.
“Here was this 19-year-old, who had a lot of clarity about what he wanted to do—democratize the world of design, and provide tools to everyone,” Danny Rimer, an early Figma investor, told Fortune last month.
Lucy Guo, cofounder of $29 billion tech company Scale AI
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Before Lucy Guo became the youngest female self-made billionaire, she was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon unhappy with what she was learning at school. Guo told Fortune that, while at the Pennsylvania college, she felt days-long coding competitions taught her more than the professors did.
So she dropped out in 2014 and soon after came up with the idea for Scale AI—a data labelling startup— with her cofounder, Alexandr Wang, whom she met while working at Quora. Meta recently acquired the company in a $14 billion deal that valued the company at over $29 billion. Guo left the company in 2016, and her 5% stake made her the youngest self-made female billionaire, dethroning record-holder Taylor Swift.
Looking back on her success, she called the Thiel Fellowship the best thing that has ever happened to her. “You’re the average of the five people you hang around the most, and the Thiel Fellowship surrounds you with ambitious, smart people that are all a little crazy.”
Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha, cofounders of $2 billion AI company Mercor
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One of the biggest AI successes bolstered by the Thiel fellowship is Mercor, an AI hiring platform that is attempting to transform the candidate-matching process. The business ballooned to a $2 billion valuation in February of this year, due to big demand for AI-powered recruitment. All three members of the cofounding team—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha—were recipients of the billionaire’s fellowship funding.
As AI advances at dizzying speed, the founders felt it was unwise to stick it out through four years of college and delay building their startup. Midha, cofounder and COO of Mercor, told The New York Times that he felt both an “extreme urgency” and “existential dread” about letting the AI boom pass by him.
Adarsh Hiremath, cofounder and CTO of the AI business, also said he was receiving diminished returns from the Harvard University experience after his first year at the Ivy League. Instead, he chose to take the fellowship opportunity to “give it [his] all.”
Massive student loans and lack of job opportunities are diminishing college returns
Silicon Valley has always idolized the high-achieving college dropout, from Mark Zuckerberg to Larry Ellison. The fellowship is responsible for the billions in business value its alums have created. Thiel’s blessing gives a startup founder credibility that college just can’t.
Beyond the entrepreneurial sphere, Gen Z has been grappling with the diminishing returns of a degree, and are looking for alternative ways to establish a career. The price of U.S. college tuition has increased to an average of $38,270 a year, making the cost unmanageable for the nearly half of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. Plus, for some, the career edge may be gone; for men with a degree, the unemployment rate is the same as it is for men who did not attend college.
About 38% of graduates feel like their student loans have limited their career growth more than their diploma has accelerated it, according to a recent survey conducted by Indeed. Thiel has echoed that sentiment, saying at the inception of his program that college has become a distraction “because young people coming out of college are saddled with student loans, which start tracking them into careers that pay well but are ultimately not going to help our country.”
