Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To "Stop Out Of School"

Like a lot of Peter Thiel's smarter moves, this one is hard to explain without an awful lot of background exposition. Think of people as having to pass through a number of filters before they can do anything important with their lives. As the system becomes increasingly rigid, it filters out almost everyone. It's important to keep bypasses open at every point for people who are capable of dissent and not easy to force into molds. Intervening at the right filter point potentially has a lot of leverage.

The interview is far more interesting than the segment on dropping out of school. The section on economic disconnect silicon valley and rest of the US and Thiel's thoughts on the maturity of the internet industry compared to the evolution of the automobile industry and comparing that to hard-tech is worth the price of admission.

Thiel always strikes me as something between the Buffet / Soros of the startup world.

This is outstanding.

Worst case scenario: You fail utterly, you're a whole lot smarter, and if you really want/need to, you go back to school.

With the experience gained, you make a better decision about what you want to study, because you'll know how you want to use it and you'll know what you don't like doing. (I'd give anything to be able to go back in time and choose CS instead of what I did study, back when I was 18, stupid, and locking myself into college.)

More likely than not, you'll re-join college with awesome work opportunities that carry through until after you graduate, where great prospects are waiting for you.

On the other hand, you could build something amazing that alters the trajectory of your whole career.

Couldn't there be some middle road: go to a school that is less expensive, and not for too long? At least for a 3 year BSc... University can still be fun and inspiring, and it is difficult to recreate the experience in another way. Also if you are too old when you go to university, it won't be the same.

A lot of people seem to advocate not to quit one's day job, but work on projects on the side. While personally I can't do that, it might be a lot easier to arrange some spare time as a student. So why not go that route - study, but do some interesting stuff on the side?

What does it cost for Americans to study in Europe? I think you can find here (Europe) some universities that are good and don't cost the world.

A friend of mine is actually an assistant at a chair for entrepreneurship here in Berlin. If you go to that university, they will try to nurture you into doing a startup: http://www.entrepreneurship.de/ (german site, didn't find english page, sorry).

Universities might be bloated, wasteful, and expensive, but I don't think I would recommend to any kids that they skip college and take a major gamble for only $100,000. Sure, one or two of these idea kids might make it big, but the rest will do nothing. With a good college degree you can easily make $100,000 in less than two years.

He lost a few points in my book for saying new startups will not be able to take on the big tech companies.

Imagine if the founders of Google took his advice.

Note the extra querystring arguments in the url: ?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

I wonder if replicating this stuff messes up techcrunch's metrics significantly?

Does anyone know the application process for this initiative? I've been looking around and can't find a damn link anywhere to apply for this.

Sounds rational to me.