The college always seems like the next step after high school graduation. However, there may be better steps for your aspirations. If you are looking to go into business, you may do better focusing in right away on your unique ideas! Read more here!
Entrepreneur educates…
In the startup universe, college can be a distraction. Just ask Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook.
At the end of May, Thiel announced the first “20 Under 20″ Thiel Fellows: Out of more than 400 applicants, he picked two dozen of the best (accepting four more than originally planned) to receive a $100,000 grant, access to a network of about a hundred high-profile mentors and two full years to begin turning their business hopes into reality.
There’s just one condition: You can’t be enrolled in college at the same time.
The best part? There’s no pressure to pay it all back. “We’re not taking equity in any business,” says Thiel. “Most of the time people are constrained by money and social expectations to do things very quickly. … But buying people a few years encourages them to tackle bigger problems.”
College is a distraction?
It’s become something of one, because young people coming out of college are saddled with student loans, which start tracking them into careers that pay well but are ultimately not going to help our country and our civilization.
So you don’t think entrepreneurship can be taught?
You can’t teach people a specific way to change things for the better. I don’t believe people can become entrepreneurs as an aspirational thing. It’s like saying you want to be rich and famous when you grow up–it’s too abstract. The motivation is what’s important. There should be a problem you want to solve, and in the process of solving it, you might have to become an entrepreneur.
Really, no specific goals?
My hope is that all of these ventures will succeed, but in the long term, creating friendships and relationships is how you build something of lasting value. I have been involved in hundreds of businesses as an investor or advisor over the years, and I’m very optimistic that this is where we should focus.
Officially–does age matter?
My view is that there’s no time that’s the right time to be an entrepreneur. You don’t have to be young or old, or have experience or be fresh. People can become an entrepreneur at any point in their lives. What matters is you have an idea or potential business that has the possibility to change the world.
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