Laura Deming is not your ordinary teen. At the tender age of 12, she began working in a biogerontology lab. At 14, she headed off to MIT for college. Today, at 17 years old, when most of her peers are only beginning to look at colleges, she's leaving MIT to join the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows -- a group of 20 teens hand-picked by The Thiel Foundation to pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin building the technology companies of tomorrow.
The brains behind the Thiel Fellows is Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital, a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, and early stage investor in Facebook. Back in September 2010, Peter fired a shot heard in ivory towers worldwide when he questioned the higher education model that was putting students deep in debt before they ever entered the workplace. Instead of dropping out, Peter's idea was to encourage students to "stop out" of school by offering $100,000, 2-year fellowships in which 20 students would be free to work on their entrepreneurial ideas and benefit from some of the best mentors Silicon Valley has to offer.
After reviewing over 400 applications, Laura and 19 other teenage applicants made the cut last month and are now on their way to Silicon Valley to participate in Peter Thiel's grand experiment. A few of the other Thiel Fellows include:
- Dale Stephens, the leader of UnCollege, a social movement that applies the methods of unschooling -- the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised -- to the realm of higher education. Now he is building a platform called RadMatter to revolutionize how we develop and demonstrate talent in the 21st century.
- Eden Full is the 19-year-old Canadian founder of Roseicollis Technologies, a solar energy start-up that deploys her patent-pending inventions in established and emerging markets. Currently electrifying two villages of 1000 citizens in Kenya, Eden's SunSaluter is a solar panel rotating system that tracks the sun to optimize energy collection by up to 40 percent for only $10. She began developing her social enterprise when she was 15.
- Gary Kurek has been developing mobility aids for physically disabled citizens for the last four years and is the 19 year-old founder of GET Mobility Solutions. Seeing his grandmother weakened by cancer led Gary to invent a walker-wheelchair hybrid that can provide power to assist its user according to how strong she feels at any moment. Gary is currently working on expanding the versatility of his mobility aids, making them lighter, foldable, and capable of navigating any home environment including staircases.
If you have a moment, I encourage you to read about all of the projects being pursued by the Thiel Fellows. They run the gamut from medicine to economics and technology to the humanities, and they overwhelm you with their spirit of optimism and ingenuity.
Whether Peter Thiel's grand experiment will get others to reconsider the wisdom of taking on college debt rather than pursuing their entrepreneurial ideas remains to be seen. I do know, however, that if Laura Deming gets her way, we'll all be here to see it. She plans to focus her Thiel Fellowship efforts on accelerating the commercialization of anti-aging research in hopes of extending the human lifespan.
If she succeeds, who knows -- what it means to be a teenager may take on a whole new meaning.
Here's The Thiel Foundation 20 Under 20 Fellows press release dated May 25, 2011 announcing the lucky 20:
COMMENTARY: Back in October 3, 2010, when Peter Thiel first announced that he was going to be paying $100,000 to highly talented and innovation college students willing to drop out of college, everybody thought he was crazy. Thiel said at that time,
“We need to encourage young Americans to take more risks. Traditional education steers young people away from entrepreneurship and into steady jobs. While they are able to get certain types of jobs with it, the problem is they can’t actually do anything that pays less in the short term and may have more value in the long run.”
In an interview with The Economist, Peter Thiel explains why he thought paying college students to drop out of college was so cool.
It does not surprise me that he received 400 applications. What young and ambitious college student wouldn't miss out on an opportunity to be selected by Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation and becoming a 20 Under 20 Fellow and win $100,000. This is the first angel to invest in Facebook, and co-founded PayPal.
I am particularly impressed with 19-year old Eden Full. Below she is shown erecting her patent pending SunSaluter tracking system that rotates solar panels to catch the rays of the sun and brings electricity to poor villagers in Kenya, Africa at a very low cost. I am happy to see that this crop young entrepreneurs are not into it for the money, but for social causes.
Here's a video of Eden Full speaking at TEDxYYC about her solar panel technology:
My main concern is that if these young entrepreneurs fail (and 60% of them probably will), that they might feel crushed by the experience. On the positive side, they are still young, and they can go back to college and finish their studies, or can bounce back up and try their luck at entrepreneuring again. Many venture capitalists actually prefer entrepreneurs who have failed at least once.
If Thiel's experiment proves succesful, and we won't know how successful for several years, this could start a new trend. Thiel's 20 Under 20 a fellowship lasts for a 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. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space. That $100,000 may seem like a huge sum for a 17-to-19-year old college student, but to Thiel that's nothing, if only one of his Fellows is successful.
Courtesy of an article dated June 9, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications Engage:Teens
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