Drop Out and Innovate, Urges VC Peter Thiel

An anonymous reader writes "The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their ideas. 'Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation,' Thiel says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies.'"

Why under age 20?

[Cheerio Boy]

I mean seriously WTF is up with that? Just because I'm over 20 years of age means I don't have the ability to innovate? I'd rather see money given to people who at least have some life experience and haven't had a chance to ever try out their own ideas, dreams, and inventions!


Yes grumpy old man is grumpy.


And while there are a million ideas out there done by people regardless of if they completed school or not encouraging people to not finish going to school just puts barriers in their way for when they DO want to innovate.

Unless you're one of the individuals that can self-learn easily you're only making it harder on yourself if you leave school.