Students cash in by dropping out
If you offered most undergrads $100,000 to drop out of school, they’d probably happily spend it all on booze, fast fashion and selfie sticks.
A group of young Canadians, however, are leaving the ivy behind with cheques in hand to kick-start technology-oriented business ventures.
“I’m very excited,” Mississauga native Cathy Tie told the Star on Friday. The 19-year-old is leaving the University of Toronto after only one semester to develop a company that seeks to improve the accuracy of genetic testing.
“I think the Thiel Fellowship is a great program,” she said.
Tie is one of four Canadians to win this year’s Peter Thiel Fellowship, an annual program that offers $100,000 (U.S.) in funding and two years’ worth of mentorship to 20 young entrepreneurs willing to drop out of school to focus on their fledgling businesses.
“The mission of the fellowship is to empower young people to take an alternate path in bringing a great idea into the world,” says Jack Abraham, the fellowship’s executive director.
“There is an alternate path to college and, in some ways, if you choose to take that path — which not everyone will or can — it can actually lead to more learning than you would get even in the university system.”
The program, founded in 2010 by billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, has offered 80 fellowships to date.
“The world has seen such a tremendous amount of improvement from people who have chosen to drop out of college and start companies, whether that’s Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Sergey Brin,” Abraham says.
Chosen from a pool of more than 2,800 applications — more than four times the number received last year — all of the Canadian winners are under the age of 22.
Tie, a graduate from Glenforest Secondary School, began her undergraduate studies in bioinformatics at the University of Toronto in September 2014. She took a leave of absence after one semester to move to San Francisco to devote her time to developing Ranomics — a company focused on improving the accuracy of genetic testing.
“There’s a huge gap in our knowledge of genetic variance,” Tie says. “We’re creating this database of all the variations of hereditary cancer genes right now so the next time we sequence a patient, we know exactly how their individual genetic makeup will translate into their disease risk.”
Tie says her entrepreneurial parents are thrilled with the news. She’s still unsure, however, about whether she’ll return to school.
“I really do enjoy the entrepreneurial community here in San Francisco with biotech, so it’s really hard to say right now,” she says.
“There’s so much that I’ve learned . . . I’ve grown so much personally and professionally just over three months. It’s been an incredible journey.”
The other Canadian winners are: Simon Tian of Montreal, Harry Gandhi of Waterloo, Ont., and Liam Horne of Cambridge, Ont. Tian has founded a company that designs wearable technology to help people perform day-to-day tasks.
Gandhi is developing contact lenses that can monitor glucose levels in diabetics.
Horne has co-founded PiinPoint, a software company that aims to help retailers set up shop in the right location by analyzing demographic de- tails, traffic patterns and spending habits. “It’s going to give us peace of mind to know that PiinPoint, and myself, can just go about doing what we’re doing,” Horne told The Canadian Press on Friday.
In a statement announcing this year’s winners, Thiel noted that, “college can be good for learning about what’s been done before, but it can also discourage young people from doing something new, especially when it leaves them in debt.
“Each of the fellows charts a unique course, but together they have proven that young people can succeed by thinking for themselves instead of competing on old career tracks,” he added. With files from The Canadian Press