Facebook大股东Peter Thiel拿出200万美金,提供给20位20岁以下辍学创业的人使用。他希望能通过此举挖掘出像盖茨和扎克伯格那样的创业奇才,第一年的获奖名单已经出炉:

As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators.
第一批获奖人将着手开展创新型科学技术试验、实现创业梦想,在这两年的创业期间,每人能获得十万美金的援助,也能得到及时的技术支持。

More than four hundred people younger than twenty applied to be Fellows. Applications arrived from nearly two dozen countries, and from nearly two hundred high schools, junior colleges, community colleges, four-year colleges, and graduate schools. Many applicants never went to college, had already stopped out of school, were already working, or had already launched their own company. Many had a long personal history of entrepreneurship. They applied at a time of increasing debate about the cost and value of college and student debt.
有四百多名20岁以下的人申请了这笔资金,他们分别来自二十多个不同的国家,申请者中有高中生,有专科学校学生,有社区大学学生,有四年制大学学生,也有研究生,许多申请人是没有读过大学的,有早就辍学的,有已经工作了一段时间的,也有已经开办了自己的公司的。许多人已经有相当丰富的创业经历。眼下也正是大学的投入和产出广遭质疑的时候。

ABOUT THE THIEL FELLOWS
获奖人名单

BIOTECH
生物技术领域

Laura Deming wants to extend the human lifespan for a few more centuries—at the very least. She started working in a biogerontology lab when she was 12, matriculated at MIT when she was 14, and now at 17 plans on disrupting the current research paradigm by changing the incentives embedded in today’s traditional funding structures. Laura plans on commercializing anti-aging research, bringing therapies out of the lab and into the market sooner.
Laura Deming12岁的时候开始在一家生物老年化研究所学习,14岁被麻省理工录取,今年17岁,考虑通过改变传统的科学研究资助模式来打破古板的研究惯例。Laura打算将延缓老年化的研究成果商业化并引入市场。

Alexander Kiselev is a 19-year-old immigrant from Moscow who is worried that scientific advances in the biosciences aren’t developing fast enough. To spark a new age of discovery, he wants to make experimentation cheaper by creating affordable scientific instruments. With help from the open source hardware community, his first project will be an inexpensive high performance liquid chromatography system.
Alexander Kiselev,19岁,俄罗斯移民,他的想法是发明更便宜适用的科研器具,以加快科研脚步。他的第一个项目是开发一个物美价廉的液相色谱仪。

Darren Zhu has conducted research in a wide range of cutting-edge areas, from molecular spintronics fabrication to therapeutic drug design. He is most excited about synthetic biology, a burgeoning field that engineers solutions to biological problems by using standardized genomic components. After he stops out of Yale, his first project will be to build a diagnostic biosensor, the initial step toward his goal of making synthetic biology easier to engineer.
Darren Zhu在许多高科技领域都有过涉猎,包括分子自旋电子学、治疗性药物开发等。他最感兴趣的是合成生物学,这是一个新兴领域,通过使用标准染色体组成分来找到解决问题的方法。耶鲁大学毕业后的第一个目标是制造一台诊断性生物传感器,使得合成生物学更易操作。

CAREER DEVELOPMENT
职业规划

Daniel Friedman, Paul Gu, and Eric McKay are passionate about equipping people with the information to make better decisions. In some markets, high noise-to-signal ratios make it hard for the best to distinguish themselves from the lemons. With a wealth of talent in mathematics, programming, and social entrepreneurship, this trio plans to create a more efficient recruiting process driven by a peer-based evaluation system.
Daniel Friedman, Paul Gu和Eric McKay擅长培训和职业指导,在这个人才难以崭露头角的年代,这三个人打算以自己在数学、程序设计和创业方面的才能,设计一种建立在同等评估基础上的、更合理更高效的人才招募流程。

Dale Stephens flaunts non-conformity in most aspects of his life. At 19, he leads UnCollege, a social movement that applies the methods of unschooling—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised—to the realm of higher education. Now he is building a platform called RadMatter to revolutionize how we develop and demonstrate talent in the twenty-first century.
Dale Stephens是一个特立独行的人,19岁就领导了提倡将辍学在家接受教育的方法纳入高等教育范畴的UnCollege运动,因为他自己就是在家受的教育。现在他要搭建一个名为RadMatter的突破性平台,在这里人们可以用新的方式发挥才能。

ECONOMICS & FINANCE
经济金融

Jeffrey Lim wants to increase the amount of voluntary exchange and cooperation in the world by revamping some of our core economic and social institutions. He believes it’s time the means of exchange caught up with the Information Age.
Jeffrey Lim希望改善当今的一些核心经济社会机构,来增加自由交易与合作。他认为在信息时代,交易方式也应当与时俱进。

Faheem Zaman wants to decentralize banking in the developing world with a mobile payment system.
Faheem Zaman希望在发展中国家用移动支付系统来取代银行系统的地位。