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    Young Entrepreneurs Rule – Meet Peter Thiel's First "20 Under 20" Thiel Fellows

    Robin Wauters

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    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
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    Well-known tech executive turned high-profile investor Peter Thiel, former PayPal CEO and an early backer of Facebook, this morning announced the appointment of the first 24 Thiel Fellows.

    These are remarkable young entrepreneurs and creative minds that, as inaugural members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, will pursue “innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow”.

    During a two-year tenure, each of them will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from Peter Thiel’s obviously impressive network of people.

    Originally, the organization planned to award only twenty fellowships, but James O’Neill, who heads the Thiel Foundation, says the number of outstanding candidates far exceeded their expectations. Below are the names of the 24 ‘chosen ones’, who were selected from more than four hundred people – all younger than twenty – who applied to be Thiel Fellows.

    I’m not including their bios as it would make this post a bit long, but do yourself a favor and check out these extraordinary youngsters here.

    BIOTECH: Laura Deming, Darren Zhu and Alexander Kiselev

    CAREER DEVELOPMENT: Daniel Friedman, Paul Gu, Eric McKay and Dale Stephens

    ECONOMICS & FINANCE: Jeffrey Lim and Faheem Zaman

    EDUCATION: Nick Cammarata, David Merfield, Andrew Hsu and John Marbach

    ENERGY: Tom Currier, Jim Danielson, Eden Full and Sujay Tyle

    INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: James Proud, Christopher Rueth, Ben Yu and Sebastien Zany

    MOBILITY: Gary Kurek

    ROBOTICS: David (Jiageng) Luan

    SPACE: John Burnham

    I’d wager they’re all in for a life-changing, two-year experience that will be hard to match.

    Or do you think they should go to school instead? Discuss.

    Crunchbase

    Person: Peter Thiel
    Companies: Founders Fund, Clarium Capital, Bildaburg, Valar Ventures, Palantir Technologies, Halcyon Molecular, Stanford Law School, Geni, Facebook, Asana, Confinity, PayPal, Powerset

    Peter is Clarium Capital’s President and the Chairman of the firm’s investment committee, which oversees the firm’s research, investment, and trading strategies. He is also a managing partner at The Founders Fund. Before starting Clarium, Peter served as Chairman and CEO of PayPal, an Internet company he co-founded in December 1998 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002. Prior to founding PayPal, Peter ran Thiel Capital Management , the predecessor to Clarium, which started with...

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