What do Figma & Ethereum have in common?
The new Thiel Fellowships have been announced. What is this, and what does it have to do with Figma and Ethereum?
What do Ethereum and Figma have in common?
They were both projects created out of the Thiel Fellowship.
What is the Thiel Fellowship you may ask?
Well this is a program conceived by Peter Thiel of our favorite fabled mafia- the PayPal Mafia.
Thiel being the same early Venture Capital financier of Facebook, AirBNB, LinkedIn and many Elon Musk Ventures including Open Ai and Space X
Look we have a video where we talk about how inspired we are by The PayPal Mafia
Peter Thiel conceived of a program where a college age person could be lured away from the unforgivable debt machine known as University.
Originally it was called the 20 under 20. Through the Thiel Foundation, the fellowship is intended for students aged 22 or younger and offers them a total of $100,000 over two years to drop out of school and pursue other work.
The idea is that for the $100k, the drop out would work on a self directed project which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement.
Selection for the fellowship is through a competitive annual process, with about 20–25 fellows selected. The newest Thiel Fellowship recipients by the way, have just been announced.
Our plan is to reach out to each and invite them on the Founder's Pack Podcast
So Figma and Ethereum came out of this Fellowship?
That is right, both Vitalik Buterin and Dylan Field dropped out of their respective school programs (University of Waterloo for Buterin and Brown for Fields) and started two projects that would be game changers.
Dylan Field actually wrote a LinkedIn post that details this. It’s pretty fascinating giving a blow by blow account of the history of Figma coming out of his Thiel Fellowship.
As part of this he shows his entire application including this Two Sentence Pitch:
(Figma) Two Sentence Pitch
What do you want to accomplish in the next 10 years?
Ten years from now I hope to be growing a disruptive, profit generating company that has made a significant contribution to the world.
What do you want to accomplish in the next 2 years?
Two years from now I hope to be growing a disruptive, profit generating company.
What do you plan to accomplish in the next 3 months?
During the next three months I will travel to Israel, spend two weeks with the Obama campaign and work in a product role at Flipboard. (2020 commentary: I didn’t end up working for the Obama campaign)
The final sentence of his application I like. It’s simple so I will share it.
Tell us, in just six words, why you should be a fellow.
I'm a hardworking, innovative risk taker.
I watched an interview with Thiel and he described the program as “not scalable”.
I think what he means is he can’t scale it. Not on his own.
After all, the American University System is nothing if not an inefficient time and money suck. Hoovering up post secondary education dollars and resources.
That is where the resources to scale this type of program are tied up.
Instead they are focused on a self washing system of accreditation and peer reviewed studies that cannot be replicated. Too busy to reform into something as interesting as Thiel Fellowship has provided.
The Science of Four Year Degrees?
At lunch several years ago I asked the outgoing Dean of Business of a Cal State school that I’m close with, “What is the science behind four years? What about that makes you degree worthy.”
Luckily for me, he is an honest man and his answer was true.
“Nothing!” Was his sharp reply.
His frustration was always that the governing bodies of this bloated institution at the state level, were demanding of courses the student must take.
Far from being self directed, focused, there are so many prerequisites all University Students must take- courses the individual student doesn't care about that they spend very little time over four years actually doing anything related to their field of “expertise”.
OpenAi’s Dall E 2 made these images for your pleasure
This complicated bureaucratic system that leads to a four year degree, now also often saddles the student with personal, unforgivable debt.
Relevant learning? That they are not saddled with. A significant venture after four years? No, no students won’t have that either.
Enter the Thiel Fellowship.
Similar to University, the potential Fellow applies as Dylan’s LinkedIn article shows.
From there they are not saddled with debt, but instead they are given money and mentorship and their time back.
They have the stamp of approval like Vitalik and Dylan do. Not a degree, but the distinction of having dropped out from Waterloo, a school with world class Computer Science, Architecture and Engineering programs. Fields? Dropped out from the Ivy League Brown.
So of course Thiel alone could never scale this, and Universities are steeped in bureaucracy and tradition. Engorged on the money of donors, government transfers and student tuition.
Yet they can’t afford to just give Fields or Buterin $100k each for 2 years of pursuit of some great science, business or social project?
If they did, who would feed the Bureaucracy?
Think I am being silly? Do you know that the ratio of Administrators in the California University System is 3 to 1 administrators to faculty? This odd phenomena is not limited to California.
Why do colleges need so many administrators?
Explanation 1 from research is that “Students need/want more services than in the past.” OK then.
“As most colleges have enrolled increasingly diverse student bodies and institutions respond to pressures to graduate more students, it's not surprising that colleges have hired additional staff members to assist with academic and social engagement.”
Does the Thiel Fellowship take equity? Nyet Comrade!
OK back to Thiel. Isn’t it corrupted by self interest? Doesn’t Peter Thiel win by owning equity in Thiel Fellowship companies?
“The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom. If you're 22 or younger and working on a cool project or company, we want to hear about it. Fellows receive $100,000, spread out over two years. We do not take equity in your company.”
As Maxine Cunningham, one of our recent pitch competition founders said “I left my school and they’ve done nothing for me but ask for money since.”
So the sample size of Thiel’s Fellowship is small. 251 Companies since 2011. Two ultra mega home runs our of 251 fellows is not validation, is it? Consider the two however.
Ethereum? Its the foundation of most blockchain projects and technology. A boom regardless of the crypto portion of the Blockchain world.
The platform was conceived with the concept of a “smart contract” as an enhancement over big daddy Bitcoin that launched the Blockchain revolution. To name but one unique characteristic.
Figma? It changed the way all apps - mobile and web- were designed. It offered the world an alternative to the bloated and painful design tools used by User Interface and User Experience designers - and was an unstoppable force that it’s largest competitor - Adobe- finally just bought for $20 Billion to replace much of its own heavy design toolset.
If those were the only examples that came out of the Thiel Fellowship, I’d say that you would declare this a hallmark ringing of a bell example to figure out how to scale the program.
Yet The Degree Granting Debt Creating Machine could never. It has too much anchored in the old system.
In December 2013, a Wall Street Journal article summarized the Thiel Fellowship up until that point:
"64 Thiel Fellows have started 67 for-profit ventures, raised $55.4 million in angel and venture funding, published two books, created 30 apps and 135 full-time jobs, and brought clean water and solar power to 6,000 Kenyans who needed it.”
Naturally there are critics who shared insightful warnings like Jacob Weisberg (who?), Weisberg the American political journalist, who served as editor-in-chief of The Slate Group criticized Thiel's proposal for its utopianism and attack on the importance of education.
Oh contraire - whoever you are Jacob - this is education.
Education is doing, and pursuing a mission.
Thiel’s Fellowship is focused upon getting great people and minds unshackled from a ‘sit in this chair and listen to a dust bunny evangelize theory about something that may or may not be true.’
The one room school house of yesteryear has hardly been impacted by oh say the technology of the last 20 years.
Youtube itself offers endless education opportunities to students who just need to search.
Embraced by ‘higher’ education?
Hardly. Instead, please sit here and take notes. Stop typing on that Chromebook, its distracting everyone from listening to the unpaid intellectual slave Graduate Student making $0 filling in for the professor you were supposed to be learning from.
Threatened Much?
The Mass Educators with vested self interest in the ancient ways — and little introspection looked down their snoots at Thiel.
Former Harvard University President Larry Summers stated "I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college.
Ok Sir Larry, it’s not like the biggest thing to come out of Harvard in recent decades aside from being infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party — was Facebook.
Another drop out funded by Thiel.
I digress. The Thiel Fellowship should be studied and replicated.
It won’t be, however. If it is, it will be by a Founder. Not a bureaucrat or civil servant.
So instead let's admire the fruits of the Thiel Fellowship’s labor. This is just some of the honor roll:
Laura Deming (2011) – founder and partner at Longevity Fund
Dale J. Stephens (2011) – founder of Year On, formerly UnCollege, a gap year program with training in work skills and life skills]
Dylan Field (2012) – co-founder and CEO of Figma
Taylor Wilson (2012) – the second youngest person to produce nuclear fusion
Ritesh Agarwal (2013) – founder & CEO of OYO Rooms
Austin Russell (2013) – founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies and the world's youngest self-made billionaire as of 2021
Vitalik Buterin (2014) – co-creator of Ethereum
Stacey Ferreira (2015) – co-founder of Forge, a platform for gig workers
Simon Tian (2015) – creator of the Neptune Pine, a crowd-funded smartwatch
Cathy Tie (2015) – founder of Ranomics and Partner at Cervin Ventures
Boyan Slat (2016) – founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup
Iddris Sandu (2018) – co-founder of Spatial Labs
Joshua Browder (2018) – founder & CEO of DoNotPay,[29] an automated legal firm
Erin Smith (2019) – creator of software to detect Parkinson's Disease
The new class features 20 members including Victor Cardenas from San Francisco, CA who is working on Slash. Slash lets entrepreneurs who are 13-years-old or older open a business bank account without an LLC in less than 10 minutes.
Samarth Athreya from Burlington, Ontario, Canada is working on Axiome which is pioneering single-molecule biosensors for novel drug discovery and diagnostic applications.
Reiss Jones of Manchester, England has started Macro Energy. Macro is building a way to produce a cheap and accessible carbon-negative energy source.
How about Michael Ioffe from Portland, OR building Arist. Artist helps leading companies build skills at scale by delivering bite-sized learning via SMS, Slack, and MS Teams.
You can see the full list here.
Which of these will be the next Ethereum or Figma?
Maybe none, but clearly the outcome will be greater for these students and the world than issuing another $200k in an unforgivable debt laden piece of parchment paper for their mantle.
I’m kidding, who could afford a mantle after college with $200k in debt.