Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I always find it ironic that Thiel, who followed one of the most risk-averse career tracks possible after high school (top undergrad + top law school + top law firm = guaranteed six-figure salary), is so whole-heartedly encouraging kids to not follow in his footsteps.

I question what the risk-weighted expected return for these kids ends up being, and how that compares to more traditional career paths. Thiel himself at least had the fallback option of a traditional career in case his entrepreneurial aspirations didn't work out. It looks like most of these kids already have a top college acceptance in had before accepting Thiel's fellowship, which gives them a backup option in the very likely scenario their "dreams" don't pan out. For kids who didn't have such backup options, I'd really question the rationality of pursing something like this.

I do question the broader movement to push kids from college to startups. I had the option of dropping out during college to work for a startup, and in retrospect I'm tremendously thankful I didn't take the opportunity. There is just so much risk of permanently prejudicing yourself for traditional types of work, and it's just a fact of life that very few startups are going to be successful to the point that it would justify forgoing those other opportunities.

The cynic in me is inclined to believe that the only ones who really benefit from this push towards startups, in the expected return sense, are the VCs. The VCs can hedge their risk between a number of startups to maximize their expected return. An individual startup founder cannot do that. An individual startup founder who is 19, fresh out of college, and has no safety net can do even less to minimize his risk, and has a lot to lose in the likely event that he fails.

A lot to lose, like what? At most they're out a year or two of their time, when they're young. There's nothing to stop you from going back to college at 22.

Easier said than done. There's a lot more at play in their lives than "go to college again" and "don't go to college again."

I think the kids who get straight A's and get accepted to Princeton before doing Thiel's thing will be fine. What I'm worried about are the kids who hear Thiel talk about startups in lieu of college and spend high school hacking instead of taking AP classes and keeping up their grades. Colleges and graduate schools are very unforgiving about stuff like that.

First: spending high school hacking is not mutually exclusive with taking AP classes and getting good grades. Second: a lot of top colleges would actually be impressed with someone who had the initiative to pursue their own projects and have something unique to talk about in the application. So I don't think you need to worry too much about those kids.

It's so much easier to say that when it isn't your life you are talking about.

I started college when I was 20, having spent an extra year in high school (startup high school, they didn't have a graduating class the year I was supposed to graduate) and then worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for a year. Or actually, I worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for 3 months, then our funding got pulled and I worked as a software engineer for the parent company for 3 months, then the parent company realized their was no money in its primary line of business and pivoted to a completely different idea, then I continued working for them for another 6 months.

Had I not done that, I probably would've stayed a physics major in college, done well, gone to physics grad school, and then realized I hated it when I was around 26 and suddenly ended up with no experience doing anything else and no clue what I wanted to do, a far worse outcome.

I think that there is, in general, far too much fear in contemporary American culture. Fear that if you don't do everything perfectly and don't follow the sequence laid out as a "safe" career track, you will end up screwed for life. Yes, if you end up following your own path, you will get burnt by bad decisions at time, and you'll have to scramble to fix them, and some opportunities will close themselves off to you because you didn't pursue them. But you will also gain practice & confidence in dealing with those bad decisions, and learn how to fix them and that there will be other opportunities that open themselves up to you because you screwed up with what you thought you wanted.

I think you're kind of implicitly arguing as if there's some sort of guaranteed path available to somebody against which they can compare their lives. There isn't, and there never was. We hear more kvetching about it today because it can punch a much larger hole in your net worth via loans, but dropping out of two years of college with nothing in your hands is not a new phenomenon. You have to put your chips down somewhere, and it is irreducibly a gamble. Presumably these people putting off college for a year or two are going to go do something; should they manage to completely fritter that year or two away with absolutely nothing to show for it, it's probably not fair to blame that on "not going to college".

The article does cover the points in your second paragraph, but not until the very end.

It looks like most of these kids already have a top college acceptance in had before accepting Thiel's fellowship, which gives them a backup option in the very likely scenario their "dreams" don't pan out.

--The double-Irony is that you think the kid has a "fall back option" just because of his letter of acceptance. =D

Part of thiel's critique is that education is mis-priced. That the signalling is most of the value. He's also speaking from experience, having made money outside the content area of his training. So its not irrational or self centered of him to be saying: the content is not the value of a degree, per se. If you believe that, looking at other "content" to substiture or complement the "signalling" makes sense.

I mean that they have a fall back in the sense that they can always just defer their acceptance or re-enroll (if they dropped out) if their plans don't pan out. Colleges are generally pretty forgiving about things like that.

I'd be surprised if the fellowship terms didn't include something about irrevocably turning down the acceptance and officially leaving. (Which of course is not to say that they couldn't re-apply - I rather suspect they'll have a better shot the second time!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com