Technological innovation requires risk and sacrifice, which may be very hard to do if you have an enormous debt burden to try to repay.

Question: Why do you encourage students with good ideas to take a break from college and pursue their passion?

Peter Thiel: Well the term we use is that people should stop out of school for two years.  The program is called "20 Under 20."  It’s under www.20under20.org.  The one advertisement I will get in here.  And it is a two-year fellowship program where we will pay people $100,000 for two years to pursue some particular passion, preferably in a technological area where they can work individually or in a team of up to four people in starting a company or joining some other early stage company.  We will encourage people to do this from California because that’s where we think we can help provide them with some mentorship. 

But we think that the idea of becoming an entrepreneur is something that is not taught very well in school and is something that people should try to do earlier on.  One of the concerns that I’ve had about the educational system is that the enormous amounts of debt it’s putting on people is actually constraining people’s ability to do things that are not as remunerative. And so people are sort of trapped in these sort of professional jobs and are not able to do things that are entrepreneurial or non-profit or just, you know, fun or socially useful and sort of are overly or narrowly constrained.  And I think technological innovation requires risk, it requires sacrifice and it may be very hard to do that if you have, you know, this enormous debt burden to try to repay.  It’s hard to start a great company if you bought a big house, and it may be hard to start a big company if you are burdened down with enormous amounts of student loans.

And so I think it’s there’s sort of a context that’s specific to our time that we think education needs to be rethought, that education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.

Recorded November 15, 2010
Interviewed by Victoria Brown

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler