Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel wants young people to rethink higher education, encouraging them to skip college and start businesses.
The Thiel Foundation's fellowship program, which launched in 2011, chooses a cohort of 20 to 30 Thiel Fellows each year that receive funding and mentorship to launch their companies. This year, 22 entrepreneurs from across the globe were chosen to take part in the fellowship, with four hailing from Colorado.
During the two-year program, fellows receive $100,000 in grant money and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists. As part of the grant, the foundation does not take any equity in the companies. Thiel fellows must be under the age of 22 to apply and are required to drop out of school if selected.
“Each year, thousands of young people come to us with the best ideas in business and technology,” Jack Abraham, executive director of the Thiel Fellowship, said in a release. “Higher education is broken. After a year rife with scandal and the endless debt that follows those who attend, college is becoming even less attractive to young people who have ideas that are ready now.”
To date, companies created by Thiel Fellows are worth more than $8.2 billion, the foundation said in a release. That figure does not include Thiel Fellow-created Ethereum, a distributed computing platform whose cryptocurrency Ether currently has a market cap of more than $30 billion.
“Since its inception, the Thiel Fellowship has been supporting fearless entrepreneurs who want to do big things outside of a classroom and this group is no exception,” Allyson Dias, director of the Thiel Fellowship, said in a release. “This next generation of founders is dedicated to creating new things that solve real problems for real people.”
Check out the four Colorado entrepreneurs accepted into the program below:
Adam Pollack: Denver, CO
BoardRE is a mortgage company that upgrades any offer to a cash offer, giving every buyer who can afford a mortgage a better shot at winning their dream home.
Davis Foster: Boulder, CO
Scythe Robotics is building industrial-scale, computer vision-driven autonomous lawn mowers for commercial landscaping contexts. The company has remained quiet, despite raising $750K in a new round of equity funding in December that we covered in the Beat.
Kai Kloepfer: Boulder, CO
Biofire is building smart guns that use advanced biometric technology to enable radically safer ownership of firearms.
Mel Du: Denver, CO
Ramp USA is expanding mobility for wheelchair users by developing a conversion kit that turns a normal wheelchair into an easy-to-use, off-road capable electric vehicle.
