In 2011, Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, and one of Silicon Valley’s most contrarian thinkers launched an experiment that shocked the education establishment.
He offered 24 students under 20 years old $100,000 each to drop out of college and spend two years building something instead.
The program was called the Thiel Fellowship. Critics called it reckless, elitist, and anti-education. The results told a different story.
The Bet Against College
Thiel’s thesis was simple and provocative: higher education is a bubble. Students take on massive debt for a credential that doesn’t guarantee outcomes. Meanwhile, the most talented young people waste their most creative years sitting in lecture halls instead of building.
“We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing,” Thiel said. “Tuition has been rising faster than inflation for decades. People are taking on more and more debt. And the returns are getting worse.”
His solution wasn’t to reform education. It was to bypass it entirely.
What the Fellows Built
The Thiel Fellowship has now produced over 200 fellows across multiple cohorts. The results are staggering:
- Vitalik Buterin — Thiel Fellow, founded Ethereum. Created an entirely new category of technology. Ethereum’s market cap has exceeded $200 billion.
- Austin Russell — Thiel Fellow, founded Luminar Technologies. Became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when the company went public.
- Dylan Field — Thiel Fellow, co-founded Figma. Adobe attempted to acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private acquisition in tech history.
- Ritesh Agarwal — Thiel Fellow, founded OYO Rooms. Built it into one of the world’s largest hospitality chains, valued at billions.
- Laura Deming — Thiel Fellow at 17, founded the Longevity Fund. Pioneered venture capital investment in anti-aging research.
- Paul Gu — Thiel Fellow, co-founded Upstart. Built an AI lending platform that IPO’d with a market cap exceeding $10 billion.
These aren’t outliers in the traditional sense. They’re evidence of what happens when you give talented young people capital, freedom, and a mandate to build — instead of a syllabus.
The Criticism — And Why It Misses the Point
Critics made predictable arguments:
“Only privileged kids can afford to drop out.” Fair — but the fellowship specifically provides $100,000 in funding. The real privilege is being able to afford $200,000 in student debt.
“This only works for geniuses.” The fellows weren’t selected because they were geniuses. They were selected because they had something they wanted to build and the drive to execute. Many had no prior business experience.
“Education has value beyond job preparation.” Absolutely. But you don’t need to pay $200,000 and spend four years to read great books and think deeply. You can do that for free, on your own time, while also building something.
The deeper point Thiel was making wasn’t that education is worthless. It was that the current system is broken — it optimizes for credentials over competence, compliance over creativity, and grades over outcomes.
What the Thiel Fellowship Reveals
The Thiel Fellowship proved several things:
- Age doesn’t determine readiness. Some of the most impactful companies of the last decade were started by people under 22.
- Building beats studying. You learn more by shipping a product to real users than by completing four years of coursework.
- The credential is the output, not the input. A working company with revenue is a better signal than a degree from any university.
- Structure helps, but traditional structure hurts. Fellows had mentorship, funding, and community — but no exams, no GPAs, and no mandatory classes.
The CSE Approach
We’re not the Thiel Fellowship. We can’t give everyone $100,000. But we share the same core belief: the best proof of education is what you build.
The Thiel Fellowship was designed for a tiny elite — 20-30 people per year. CSE is designed to make the same philosophy accessible to more people.
Our structure:
- Learn by building — not by attending lectures
- Graduate by shipping — not by passing exams
- Prove yourself with revenue — not with a GPA
The graduation requirement at CSE is $10,000 MRR. Not because revenue is the only thing that matters, but because it’s the hardest thing to fake. It means you built something real, found people who want it, and convinced them to pay for it. Repeatedly.
Peter Thiel asked: what if we let talented people skip college and build instead?
CSE asks: what if we made a school where building is the education?
The future of education isn’t about choosing between learning and doing. It’s about recognizing they were always the same thing.