http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=19
Read also this article I found on Bloomberg, the guy is good and I share his opinion on risk taking. Nowadays, especially in Europe, people are way to risk averse and do not trust young entrepreneurs enough to help good biz-ideas fly.
"Facebook Inc. investor and board member Peter Thiel plans to make 20 grants of as much as $100,000 apiece to teenagers who have promising ideas for technology businesses.
The investor’s Thiel Foundation will award as many as 20 grants to individuals or small teams of entrepreneurs by the end of 2011, Thiel said today during a technology conference in San Francisco. Some partners at the Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel, will act as advisers and mentors to the grant winners.
The grants are aimed at removing some of the barriers, such as heavy course loads and high college costs, that young people face as they try to create businesses, Thiel said in an interview. He was one of the first investors in Facebook, which like Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc., was founded by a person who hadn’t completed college.
“We need to encourage young Americans to take more risks,” Thiel said. Traditional education steers young people away from entrepreneurship and into steady jobs, he said. “While they are able to get certain types of jobs with it, the problem is they can’t actually do anything that pays less in the short term and may have more value in the long run.”
Thiel contributed to Facebook’s $500,000 first round of funding in 2004, when founder Mark Zuckerberg was 20. Zuckerberg hadn’t completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard University when he began Facebook."
