For almost 2 decades now, Peter Thiel has been crusading against colleges and higher education, calling it a scam no less. His eponymous Peter Thiel scholarship encouraged smart kids to forego higher education to found startups that largely ended up being middling at best. Only 11 out of the 290 fellows founded startups that reached unicorn ( $1 Billion +) valuation – notable among them being Ethereum, Figma and Scale AI. Critics of Thiel’s fellowship have argued, among other things, that transformative change, the kind that expands the horizon of what is possible and moves the needle for humanity as a whole, can only come from Deep Research. The next big thing would come from a lab, not a co-working space.
And the best example of that is the Thiel funded startup, OpenAI. Look at their top people, everyone (with the notable exception of the CEO, Sam Altman) has a PhD and years of research experience. Meta was recently in the news for poaching execs from OpenAI and other AI startups with packages of over $100 million – again almost all PhDs.
In other words, Thiel’s own investments tell a different story than his ideology. OpenAI, perhaps the most consequential company of this decade – and one Thiel helped fund – wasn’t built by dropouts tinkering in a garage. Now yes, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is himself a college dropout. But let’s be clear, he’s not the guy building models. He’s the guy hiring the people who spent a decade doing the science. Altman dropped out of Stanford but surrounded himself with PhDs, researchers, and ex-academics who actually push the frontier. His success isn’t an argument against higher education; it’s a case study in knowing who to bet on.
If there’s a lesson in all this, and I am told all Linkedin posts need to conclude with learnings, it’s that shortcut thinking rarely leads to long-term impact. Chasing valuations might get you a headline, but changing the world requires depth, discipline, and a stubborn commitment to the long haul. The most transformative technologies of our time -mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, LLMs -didn’t come from dorm rooms or co-working spaces. These innovations weren’t built by people who did a 4 week crash course on programming. They came from people who stayed the course, put in the years, and did the hard, often thankless work of real research. So no, kids (or parents of kids if you are listening, although high school kids are increasingly creating LinkedIn profiles apparently) shouldn’t drop out. If you truly want to build the future, go get the education, grind in the lab, and stop looking for the fast lane to billion dollar exits.
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