Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, Gives 20 Whiz Kids $100K Each—to Quit College

Peter Thiel thinks big. He co-founded PayPal, and later became Facebook's first outside investor and behind-the-scenes mentor. Besides helping guide the social-networking giant to world-wide success, he is an avid believer in big research projects.

Now he's focused on what he sees as a lack of innovation in the United States. Although the last 40 years have brought advancements in computers and the Web, Mr. Thiel is nostalgic for the 1960s, when people were still dreaming of putting a man on the moon. He describes the decade -- and the 200 years that preceded it -- as a "golden era" for technology.

"Innovation slowed down dramatically after the 1960s," Mr. Thiel told the New York Times. "We are not focused enough on getting back to a culture of innovation -- people are just trying to figure out ways to coast."

He also considers higher education an obstacle to innovation--a strongly held and very controversial position, but one where he's confidently putting his money. "Universities are like the General Motors of the 1970s," said Mr. Thiel, a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. "They're incredibly dominant, incredibly arrogant and impervious to change." He's requiring his "20 under 20" entrepreneurs (24 including some teams) to "stop out of college" while they pursue their dreams. (He seems to endorse the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg two-years-and-out philosophy.) Instead, Thiel will provide a wide mentor network of silicon valley entrepreneurs, who will share their scientific and business expertise.

His nonprofit organization, the Thiel Foundation, vetted over 400 candidates from all over the world. Each successful recipient was awarded a $100,000 grant to pursue entrepreneurial projects to help advance innovative scientific and technical ideas that can't wait until college graduation.

Now meet a cross-section of the Fellows who are pursuing a range of businesses, from alternative energy to education.

Biotech

Laura Deming plans to extend the human lifespan for a few more centuries--at the

very least. She started working in a biogerontology lab when she was 12, graduated MIT at 14, and now at 17 plans on speeding up current research by changing traditional funding incentives. With her fund, IP Immortal, Laura plans on commercializing anti-aging research by bringing therapies out of the lab and into the market sooner.

Alexander Kiselev is a 19-year-old immigrant from Moscow who is worried that scientific advances in the biosciences aren't developing fast enough. To spark a new age of discovery, he wants to make experimentation cheaper by creating affordable scientific instruments. With help from the open source hardware community, his first project will be an inexpensive high performance liquid chromatography system, a tool that helps biochemists analyze the components of a sample.

Darren Zhu has conducted research in a wide range of cutting-edge areas, from

molecular spintronics fabrication to therapeutic drug design. He is most excited about synthetic biology, a burgeoning field that engineers solutions to biological problems by using standardized genomic components. After he stops out of Yale, his first project will be to build a diagnostic biosensor, the initial step toward his goal of making synthetic biology easier to engineer.

Energy

Tom Currier, 19, tells Inc Magazine that he's been obsessed with energy since the age of nine, when he started his first company, ScanBoy, to help pay for magnets he used to explore magnetic energy. Since then, he's launched nine successful companies, and a non-profit in high school, which raised more than $140,000 to install solar panels on his hometown high school. Before he was a freshman at Stanford, Currier was beginning to research his next big project: a heliostat energy device to solve the world's growing energy crisis. Since then, he's filed three patents for his invention, and has launched Black Swan Solar out of his dorm room.

Jim Danielson is working on building a more powerful and efficient motor for electric

vehicles. He has already electrified a Porsche 924S, including power electronics of his own design. He is currently co-launching Makt Systems LLC, a startup to commercialize his research and design. Before becoming a Fellow, Jim co-founded the Electric Vehicle Club at Purdue and was president of Purdue Innovations, the university's entrepreneurship club.

Eden Full is the 19-year-old Canadian founder of Roseicollis Technologies, a solar energy startup that deploys her patent-pending inventions in established and emerging markets. Currently electrifying two villages of 1,000 citizens in Kenya, Eden's SunSaluter is a solar panel tracking system that optimizes energy collection by up to 40 percent for only $10. She began developing her social enterprise when she was 15.

Education

David Merfield and Nick Cammarata are working on OPEN, a project that aims to

flip the industrial-scale classroom experience. Instead of wasting time lecturing (content OPEN's online videos are better at providing), teachers using the platform will get to use class

time for more one-to-one tutoring with students on the hard problems. With a decade of programming experience, Nick has worked for Microsoft, Stanford, and Mozilla and is an active contributor to several open-source projects. David has designed web interfaces used by millions of people around the world. He has lived and was educated in England, Singapore, France, and the USA.

Will any of these young entrepreneurs turn their ideas into global businesses or transforming technologies? The odds are against it. But you can bet that they will they learn a lot from the experience. Just a peek into Thiel's iPhone contact list is worth two years of their time. Will they change our perception of a college degree as a prerequisite for success? We can now turn this into a Freaks and Geeks (thank you, Judd Apatow) reality show and find out.

Is Thiel's message really about the importance of networking?

Photos: Thiel Fellows, Thiel Foundation
Photo: Peter Thiel, Flickr, david.orban, creative commons