Practical Lessons Learned From Thiel Fellows

In today’s innovation-driven economy, traditional education often stifles entrepreneurial talent. Conventional school structures prioritize uniformity and passive learning—qualities at odds with the creativity and risk-taking that entrepreneurship demands. The Thiel Fellowship provides a bold alternative, empowering young innovators like John Andrew Entwistle and Joshua Browder to build groundbreaking startups by bypassing college. Their stories highlight the challenges of educating entrepreneurs within traditional frameworks and reveal why transforming learning environments to foster practical problem-solving and intrinsic motivation is essential for nurturing the next generation of innovators.

Educating Entrepreneurs: Limitations Of Traditional Academic Structures

Joshua Browder, the founder of DoNotPay, a company using artificial intelligence to help citizens and consumers overcome bureaucratic challenges by automating solutions for issues like parking tickets, provides a striking example of the gap between educational requirements and practical learning. In his final year at Stanford, several years into the development of his company, Browder faced a dilemma: attend a mandatory dance class or resolve a server crash affecting thousands of DoNotPay customers. This decision prompted him to leave Stanford—just months before graduation—to become a Thiel Fellow.

Founded by Peter Thiel in 2011, the Thiel Fellowship is a two-year program that provides financial support, mentorship, and a supportive peer network to young innovators who want to bypass or leave college and pursue entrepreneurial ventures, scientific research, or social movements.

John Andrew Entwistle, the founder of Coder.com and Wander, escaped the confines of conventional schooling and its restrictive structures at an early age. He launched his first company at 13 and transitioned to online high school to focus on his startups. By 20, having opted out of college, he joined the Thiel Fellowship, which he credits for offering essential peer support: “Where else could a 20-year-old leading senior engineers find peers with similar experiences to connect with?”

Educating Entrepreneurs: Cultivating A Mindset

Entrepreneurs like Entwistle and Browder embody a producer mindset, actively creating solutions and learning through real-world challenges—contrasting with the passive consumption of textbook knowledge in traditional classrooms. This intrinsic drive to innovate often clashes with standard educational expectations. Entwistle’s choice to transition to an online high school stemmed from his dedication to entrepreneurship. Likewise, Browder chose to leave Stanford rather than endure irrelevant coursework simply to obtain a degree.

However, traditional education holds merit. Both entrepreneurs recognize the value of providing foundational skills when clearly aligned with individualized objectives. Yet, entrepreneurship often struggles in traditional classrooms, flourishing instead in environments that emphasize active, hands-on problem-solving. Case studies may illustrate past solutions, but genuine learning occurs best when addressing one’s own daily challenges. Thus, effective educational approaches, whether conventional or alternative, must be tailored to individual student goals, readiness, and personal motivations.

Educating Entrepreneurs: A Question Of Character

Both Browder and Entwistle emphasize the importance of high pain tolerance for entrepreneurs. Browder employs the familiar simile of entrepreneurship being akin to “eating glass,” underscoring the resilience and problem-solving it requires. Entwistle concurs: “It’s tough. Most founders are optimists with high pain tolerance. Building companies young taught me humility—I assume every idea might be wrong until tested.” He views success as context-driven: “It’s not about being a ‘great entrepreneur’ but being the right person for a specific idea at the right time. I might not have thrived in the 1800s or with every idea today.” Therefore, educational institutions must cultivate resilience and adaptability, creating environments where students rigorously test ideas and learn constructively from failures.

Educating Entrepreneurs: Intrinsic Motivation And Engagement

A significant hurdle in traditional educational contexts is fostering intrinsic motivation, particularly when students perceive assignments as irrelevant or uninteresting. For instance, students often struggle to understand why they should prioritize writing essays on obscure historical figures over engaging in more immediately gratifying activities like gaming. In entrepreneurial contexts, however, intrinsic motivation emerges naturally through personally meaningful and practically relevant tasks. Browder and Entwistle were intrinsically driven to solve real-world problems, resulting in sustained engagement that far exceeds traditional classroom expectations. This is the challenge that educational institutions face: how to incorporate real-world, personally meaningful projects into curricula to enhance intrinsic motivation and promote deeper learning when the range of activities available to most students is comparatively narrow? While entrepreneurship illustrates what can be achieved, it does not readily serve as a model for achieving enhanced relevance in drier, more academic subjects.

Educating Entrepreneurs And Beyond: The Challenge

The experiences of Thiel Fellows John Andrew Entwistle and Joshua Browder highlight the urgent challenge that traditional educational institutions face in remaining relevant and effective. As these examples clearly illustrate, entrepreneurial innovation relies on iterative experimentation, practical problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation—conditions that are often absent from conventional classrooms. To adequately prepare entrepreneurs—and indeed all learners—for a rapidly changing world, educational institutions must adopt flexible, innovation-driven models that promote personal relevance, active learning, and adaptability.

Yet educating entrepreneurs serves as just one example of how the traditional educational model can fail to meet the diverse needs of individual learners. This broader transformation will require educational leaders and policymakers to consider how all curricula—not just entrepreneurial—can be made more intrinsically engaging and personally meaningful while also recognizing how formal structures like standards can contradict this goal. The entrepreneurial journeys of innovators such as Entwistle and Browder provide compelling evidence that fostering intrinsic motivation and active learning can unlock exceptional potential. The challenge lies in identifying authentic, real-world applications that offer pathways resonating with each student’s interests and aspirations while still enabling the development of essential skills so that their future selves are not constrained by the goals and aspirations of their teenage years.