Tim Draper runs Draper University, which invites faculty from Stanford, Berkeley, and other major schools to observe its unconventional methods: beanbag classrooms, flexible schedules, and team-based projects. Only half the innovations work, but the successful ones reshape how students learn. He believes traditional universities prepare students for a past that no longer exists.
Chapters
I'm really interested to hear more. You are a disruptor in the educational space. That's what you are doing with Draper University, is causing other universities and colleges to really think about education and entrepreneurship in a different light. Are there schools that you have worked with, or ways that you think in which we can work with schools to kind of make that accessible to them as well, to make the Silicon Valley and this entrepreneurial education at Draper University accessible?
Yeah, we've had students come here from ASU, from Cal Poly, from Stanford, from many other places where they got credit for coming to Draper University in their own school. But in addition, we've had the dean of the business school at USC and the head of CalArts and a bunch of different professors from Stanford and from Berkeley and from Penn State. They come from all over to see what is it that's going on here. And they're very curious and they're saying, well, wait, what is this? There's a survivor training thing or there's a— You're teaching future? It's team-based? What are all these beanbags in the room? Why are you letting the students sleep until 10 and work until 10? Why are you doing all this stuff? Hopefully it will have a major effect on education throughout the world where people kind of go, yeah, hey, we need to start getting more creative. We need to try stuff. And, you know, the stuff we try, I don't know, half of it works and the other half doesn't, but the half that works might really have an effect on one of the students. And we hope that that really does stick and help those students live a more prosperous and happy life.
So on that note, what is your future for Draper University and what we're building? If you could see it go in any way, what do you think the future of our program is?
So we're trying to do a couple of things. One is we're trying to encourage more creativity throughout the world. The second piece is that we want to connect your education to your career or whatever it is. We want you closer to what your career is. And we want you to be prepared for all the change that's going to be happening over all these years. Change is accelerating, not just change is happening, change is accelerating. So every decade there is going to be more change than the change that came the decade before. And that requires people to start thinking in a more flexible way, and they have to be more open to new ideas. And new jobs, and new thinking about jobs, and how we should be— maybe new ways of being governed, maybe new ways of having product arrive at your door. There are a lot of interesting new things that are going to happen, and I want Draper University to lead the charge in getting people prepared for that future. I keep looking at schools today and I'm thinking, God, you're preparing us for the past. You're not preparing us for anything that could be coming in the future, but you're doing a really good job of preparing us for the past. The past is already gone. We've got to be thinking, boy, this future, it's going to change. There's something called Moore's Law that says that $1,000 worth of compute power doubles every 18 months. Now, that's great, and it means that as an entrepreneur, you can take advantage of something that's twice as good as whatever the entrepreneurs that were starting a company the year before were doing. But more importantly, there's going to be that much change, and think about doubling, doubling, doubling. You double 3 times, that's 8 times as powerful. You double 4 times, it's 16 times more powerful. So people's imaginations need to start thinking geometric— with geometric change rather than linear change. And if you think geometrically, you think, wow, 15 years out, that might be 12 doubles. We could be in self-driving flying cars. We could be moving in many new directions. We might be off the planet. There are a lot of things that might be happening that we will take for granted when they finally happen. I mean, I grew up before cell phones, and boy, have they changed the way the world works.
Yeah.
What a surprise that you can just push a button and somebody comes and picks you up and push another button and they deliver you your dinner. There are going to be changes way beyond any of our imaginations and we want to be prepared for them. We want students to be prepared for them and we want schools, other schools to emulate what we do. And whether that— we do that in some franchise model or whether we do it by just having— leading by example, any of those outcomes are fine for me.
