Alex K. Chen

The idea fell out of a conversation that was trying to understand the world, not improve it. In fact, I suspect that if we had set a goal of designing a new project we would not have been very successful. At the time, the Thiel Foundation had only one internal program, in philosophy; most of our work supported innovative nonprofits such as the Human Rights Foundation, the Seasteading Institute, SENS Research Foundation, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

How it happened was that I was in New York for several meetings and dinners and it turned out that Peter Thiel

, Jonathan Cain

, Luke Nosek

, and I were all ready to return to San Francisco at the same time so we flew together. While passing the time, we discussed Peter’s thesis that after more than a century of steady innovation in all areas of technology, the engine of progress had mostly stagnated in the early 1970s except for computers and telecommunication. We all agreed with the truth of the observation, but the cause was a puzzle.

A surge of regulations surely chilled innovation, but beyond that it was hard to blame pessimism or oil prices when the slowdown had lingered for decades. Stagnant wages were clearly an effect and not a cause. We decided that talent was the hidden factor. In the 1950s and 1960s, the smartest young people flocked to the frontiers of discovery. In the 1970s, though, they became doctors, in the 1980s they became lawyers, and in the 1990s they went to Wall Street. These were well-defined careers with brightly lit gates welcoming crowds down paths that were easy to follow.

What happened to the American archetype of quitting your job to invent something in your garage? Debt happened, we decided. I had previously lost a cofounder because of student debt payments, and we realized such debt made it hard to quit your job and start a company. Tuition had skyrocketed in the previous decades, and the burden of student debt had followed. Credential inflation had encouraged young Americans to earn more degrees than their parents just to keep the same standard of living.

At this point we realized we could make a difference. We could rescue a few people a year and give them permission to start companies before they took on the debt and career-tracking of college. We could also send a signal to their generation that college was a particular good with measurable costs and benefits and that postponing a career to make such a huge purchase should never be a default. We resolved to create a two-year fellowship, call it the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship, and give each fellow a grant of $100,000. Our plane landed at SFO and we announced it the next day.

We quickly looped in the two most impressive people we’d met at Ephemerisle who both had relevant experience. Michael Gibson

had stopped out of graduate school and Danielle Lynne Strachman

had started a charter school. We designed an application around two open-ended questions. I forget the exact words we used for the contrarian question, but the version I like is, What truth does the world overlook or deny? The fundamental question was, How do you want to change the world?

There was no need to buy advertising to announce our new program; scandal is free. If college might be overpriced, then its credentials were not priceless, and plenty of credentialed journalists felt the wound deeply. Their rage provided all the attention we could want, and hundreds of courageous teens applied.

We assembled more than a hundred of our friends from technology and science as volunteer mentors, and they helped us weigh the applications and identify about fifty finalists. To choose and commission a fellowship, we naturally created a Council of Elrond: Peter, Jonathan, Danielle, Mike, Deepali Roy

, and me. Our deliberations will remain private, but it’s fair to say they were fun.

Thiel Fellows went on to invent technologies, assemble teams, iterate, fail, and try again. You may know about Figma

, Luminar, FOSSA

, Ethereum

, Freenome

, Upstart, Augur, or Workflow (which is now part of Siri). Overall, they founded companies worth more than $90 billion, but that figure hardly captures the animations, computer languages, nonprofits, and venture funds, or the physics, biology, and software tools they devised. It also doesn’t capture the community of misfit dreamers they created.

So that’s how it began. If you want to learn more, try CNBC’s documentary “Transforming Tomorrow” and coverage by 60 Minutes and Nightline.

Laura Deming

Alexander Kiselev

Darren Zhu

Daniel Friedman

Paul Gu

Dale Jasper Stephens

Faheem Zaman

Nick Cammarata

Andrew Hsu

John Marbach

Tom Currier

Jim Danielson

Eden FG

Sujay Tyle

James Proud

Ben Yu

Sebastien Zany

Gary Kurek

David Luan

Clay Allsopp

Dylan Field

Kettner Griswold

Anand Gupta

Tony Ho

Spencer Hewett

Yoonseo Kang

James Koppel

Ryan Lelek

Ritik Malhotra Christopher Olah

Omar Rizwan

Tara Seshan

Noor Siddiqui

Charlie Stigler

Ilya Vakhutinsky

Taylor Wilson

Connor Zwick

https://www.facebook.com/jim.oneill.904/posts/2073708959432729?__cft__[0]=AZVgjs_qIjDckfJ19L0mvp5ciB0dj-vdk2KIb40fguaFuJrmz4cOVp0X9EFvhMparzDydenfvhXXLIP4lJdkNty1C7JqTunb5IDqb1U53UBUCBTZm1V4gMC5qvw2Da2-vE-84ifw5IWu8TizySI7VWiy&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation's network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators.

He is currently co-launching Makt Systems LLC, a start-up to commercialize his research and design.

Through Founders Fund as well as through his private investing, he has helped launch the next great generation of tech companies, such as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Quantcast, RoboteX, Causes, and Spotify.