Thiel Fellowship Winners 2018: 20 Thiel Fellows Announced

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The Thiel Fellowship winners for 2018 have been announced, adding 20 more people to the foundation’s inspirational history of encouraging young people to pursue alternative education paths.

Thiel Fellowship Winners 2018

The 20 Thiel Fellows were announced on Friday, entering the 2018 class. The Fellowship program has been around since 2011 and the idea is to encourage young, talented people to pursue big dreams and maybe even start their own businesses instead of attending college.

“The environment for entrepreneurs is the best it’s ever been,” said Jack Abraham, executive chairman of the Thiel Fellowship. “This year’s class proves that there’s still a hunger for individuals seeking unconventional approaches.”

Each Fellow receives $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network, which includes a number of prominent technology founders, investors and scientists. “College isn’t for everyone, and it certainly isn’t for everyone fresh out of high school,” said Allyson Dias, director of the Thiel Fellowship.

“Leaving behind the safety of the classroom and choosing to build a business instead isn’t easy or glamorous,” she added. “But our Fellows have found what we suspect to be true more broadly: young people learn best by doing things in the real world.”

The Thiel Fellowship has been highly successful as companies created by the foundation’s Fellows are worth more than $3 billion companied as of today. This figure excludes Thiel fellow-created Ethereum, which is a distributed computing platform that developed cryptocurrency Ether, which har a market cap of about $50 billion as of June 22.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2018/06/thiel-fellowship-winners-2018-fellows/.

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