Peter Thiel, who made $500K investing early in Facebook, created a $100,000 fellowship for students to drop out and start companies instead. The program has produced roughly $200 billion in business value, with dozens of alumni companies hitting $100 million-plus valuations.
Peter Thiel is the original founder of PayPal. He was the first investor in Facebook, put $500K into Facebook early on, which became hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars. He talks about college and he's like, costs just keep going up and up and up, but the value and the salaries that you make don't go up. And he says, I'm going to offer something called the Thiel Fellowship, which is $100,000 if you drop out of college and go work on something interesting. This thing is amazing. It worked out really well, didn't it? Basically $200 billion worth of business value that has come from this program. There's actually like dozens that are in like the $100 million range.
