MI275: Thiel Fellowship & Startup Investing w/ Michael Gibson

6 Jun 2023 · 57 min

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In short

The Intrinsic Value Podcast - Episode MI275: Thiel Fellowship & Startup Investing w/ Michael Gibson

Episode Overview In this episode of The Intrinsic Value Podcast, Robert Leonard interviews Michael Gibson, founder of the venture capital firm 1517 and co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship. They discuss the inception of the Thiel Fellowship, the failings of the current education system, successful investments made by Gibson, and the future of autonomous driving technology through companies like Luminar.

Key Takeaways

Introduction

  • Guest: Michael Gibson, founder of the venture capital firm 1517 and author of *Paper Belt on Fire*.
  • Focus: Discusses the Thiel Fellowship, startup investing, and insights on entrepreneurship.

Thiel Fellowship

  • Background: Gibson recounts his meeting with Peter Thiel and the inception of the Thiel Fellowship.
  • Thiel Fellowship: A program providing $100,000 to young individuals under 20 who drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.
  • Objective: To challenge conventional education and empower young innovators.

Key Components

  • Courage and Commitment: Successful entrepreneurs possess intrinsic motivation that sustains them through challenges.
  • Sustaining Motivation: Founders must have compelling reasons to pursue their projects beyond just financial gain.

Critique of the Education System

  • Flaws: Gibson articulates the shortcomings of the current education system, arguing it stifles creativity and innovation.
  • Time as Proxy for Knowledge: Success is often measured by time spent in academia rather than actual skills or innovation.
  • Need for Reform: Emphasizes the importance of creating more effective educational alternatives for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Startup Investments

  • Successful Investments: Gibson discusses notable companies from 1517, including:
  • Luminar: A company focused on LiDAR technology for autonomous vehicles.
  • Austin Russell: Founder of Luminar, recognized for his innovative approach in the autonomous vehicle sector.
  • Other Notable Companies: Figma and Ethereum’s creator, Vitalik Buterin.

Luminar and Autonomous Driving

  • Technological Edge: Luminar's LiDAR technology provides advantages in distance and accuracy in various conditions, setting it apart from competitors.
  • Market Challenges: Discusses the competitive landscape, including Tesla's skepticism of LiDAR technology and challenges faced by various companies in the autonomous driving sector.
  • Future Outlook: Anticipates growth through increased partnerships with automotive companies and expansion into production-level contracts.

Conclusion

  • Future Endeavors: Gibson shares his excitement about inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs through potential programs and outreach efforts.
  • Book Promotion: Encourages listeners to read *Paper Belt on Fire* to explore deeper insights on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Additional Resources

  • 1517 Fund: [Website for investment opportunities](https://1517fund.com)
  • Book: *Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University*
  • Social Media: Follow Michael Gibson on Twitter at [@williamblake](https://twitter.com/williamblake).

Sponsors

  • CFI Education
  • Airbnb

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Transcript

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0:00You're listening to TIP. On today's show, I chat with Michael Gibson, who's the founder of 1517, a venture capital firm that supports college dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists with investments at the earliest stages of their companies. Michael has a unique background as he was a philosophy student who landed a job working for Peter Thiel at his hedge fund and was one of the minds behind the Thiel Fellowship, which is a very successful program. Michael's venture fund also became an early investor in Luminar Technologies, a now publicly traded company that builds LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles.

0:36In this episode, Michael shares his thoughts on why the education system is flawed and how his fund seeks to change this. He also discusses some of his greatest success stories as an early investor and the challenges he's faced along the way. We also talk about Luminar Technologies, his outlook for the company, and we talk about the competition it faces from companies like Tesla and Google. Michael's insights into the startup world and the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs is truly inspiring. And now a quick but very important housekeeping note that I want to share with you guys is we are hiring.

1:10So at TIP, we are hiring for a new podcast host, and actually it's going to be the host of this show. If you are interested in working at TIP and being a podcast host, you can find all the information at theinvestorspodcast.com slash careers and look for the option that says millennial investing host. There it says how to apply. It gives you a bunch more information about the role, answers a lot of frequently asked questions. And I just want to cover quickly a couple of the most commonly asked questions. And first is how to apply. So to apply, I ask that you email me. And my email is robert at theinvestorspodcast.com.

1:54Just send me a written sample about Warren Buffett because writing is going to be an important component of this role. You're going to be doing some writing and podcast hosting. So send me a sample of your writing about Warren Buffett. Send me a short audio file of you asking mock questions as if you were a podcast host. Send me a list of the five core values at TIP. And also just a note of where you reside. So if you're in the US, just tell me the state that you're in. And if you're international, just let me know what country you're in. So those are the requirements to apply. That's what I'm looking for.

2:29And again, you can email all of that to me at robert at theinvestorspodcast.com. A couple of the frequently asked questions I want to briefly touch on is that this is a full-time role and you do not have to be based in the US or Canada, but it is preferred. We will give preferential treatment to those locations, but it's not required. So it's a case-by-case basis, but generally we are looking for somebody in the US or Canada. There's a bunch more info on the site. A couple other benefits are you get to work with our team, STIG, tons of awesome people, interview world-class guests. You get to work from pretty much wherever you want, pretty much any hours you want.

3:08You get to set your hours, more or less. It's really a great role. If you're interested in applying, go to, again, and that's theinvestorspodcast.com slash careers, and look for the Millennial Investing host. All right. With all that housekeeping out of the way, let's get into today's episode with Michael Gibson. You're listening to Millennial Investing by The Investor's Podcast Network, where your host, Robert Leonard, interviews successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.

3:51Welcome back to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I am your host, Robert Leonard. And on today's show, I am joined by Michael Gibson. Welcome to the show, Michael. Hi, thanks for having me on. You have such a unique background. You studied philosophy before becoming a venture capitalist. And so I really want to start at the beginning of your experience working with Peter Thiel as you were one of the minds behind the Thiel Fellowship, which has been super successful in identifying and supporting young talent in the tech industry. So I was hoping we could start there. Share your story of how you met Peter Thiel and how this whole idea came about.

4:25Yeah, it is a series of unlikely events because as you mentioned, I thought I was going to become a philosophy professor. When you're 19 or 18, you can be quite impressionable. And I came across Some of my favorite writers at the time, the poet T.S. Eliot or the novelist Tom Wolfe, at the back of the book when you open up and you see the picture in the little paragraph biography, you know, when I was 18, I saw that T.S. Eliot had a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. And then with Tom Wolfe, he had a PhD in American Studies from Yale. So, in my mind, I was so naive. I thought, wow, these heroes of mine seem to pursue these postgraduate, these graduate degrees and maybe that would give me time to, I don't know, bone up on my knowledge of literature and philosophy.

5:10So, that sent me down that course and I came to love the subject matter for its own sake. So, I have a background in ancient philosophy and in moral and political philosophy. But really, I always wanted to be a writer. And after being in grad school for so long, God, I've lost track of the years. I had just grown tired of academia. I mean, even the subject matter itself philosophy had become exhausted as a subject for academic study. It just seemed like people were trying to add decimal points to already existing views. And I was in the basement of a bookstore and I'm just reading a collection of journalism from the 1960s that Tom Wolfe put together on the New Journalism.

5:49So, this was the style of writing that broke out in that time where these journalists realized they could use all the techniques of the novel and the short story to tell true stories, to share the emotional truth of something with people because it just have a richness to what you can do if you're using those tools of the trade in a way that you can't in typical journalism where it's like the pyramid, right? Where you read a normal daily news story, that's the who, what, why and where in the first paragraph and then no one finishes the article. So, I was reading that collection and I was like, I should just write and I dropped out And I got a job with a magazine that MIT owns called Technology Review.

6:27My girlfriend at the time lived in Boston. So, I had moved there and that magazine is based in Cambridge. So, I got lucky getting the job. But it was a baptism by fire into science and technology. And I just had to cover all sorts of different things. And one day, I was assigned a story to interview Max Levchin. Levchin is the former CTO of PayPal. And this was a retrospective article. I had to... I guess the magazine had awarded Max something like an award in 2002 or something. So, this was 2007, five years later. And as a retrospective piece, I'm asking him questions about the past. And I asked him this one where I said, hey, is there anything you would tell your younger self to do differently?

7:08So, PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002 for 1.5 billion. And Levchin told me, he said, I took the year off and I traveled the world, you know lived on a beach and it was the worst year of my life and so i just remember being on the phone and i'm like looking at phone like who is this guy it's like what do you mean it's the worst year of your life and he says all my friends were out there being productive starting companies and i was just consuming things and then i thought well who are your friends and that's where i was introduced to the what's become known as the paypal mafia so they were pretty famous then or maybe just famous.

7:44Now, some of them have become extraordinarily famous. Probably Elon Musk is number one. But in 2007, it was pretty surprising to see someone building a rocket ship company and a electric car company. But other members of the PayPal mafia, it was like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, Steve Chen, YouTube, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp. I mean, the list is just wild. And so, it was like this group of really creative people who pretty much built the next generation of all the great internet companies. And then last in that list was this guy who's like a vague, vaguely public intellectual hedge fund manager, libertarian, Peter Thiel.

8:20And that's the first time I heard his name. And so, I learned more about him, just really fascinating individual, so much so that I thought it'd be interesting to work at his hedge fund. I reached out and never received a response actually. And then fast forward like another 18 months or so, and I had been doing some volunteer work for an organization that Peter had funded, this wild, crazy seasteading idea. And that organization... So, the nonprofit is devoted to trying to help people create communities on the ocean. So, these could be everything from like, you know, boats strung together to a floating platform at sea.

8:58And to get things going, they started a festival and I went to one of these. It's called Ephemerisle. It's in the Sacramento River Delta. And I was just there and met some people who worked for Peter. And they mentioned there was this opening for a researcher writer. And I was in LA. So, I was freelancing at this point. I was writing on the side. I was still writing for Tech Review a little bit. And then they mentioned this opening. I'm like, all right, well, I'm kind of interested. So, I get an interview and then another interview. And before I know it, I'm in a room with Peter. And we didn't talk finance at all.

9:31We talked philosophy. We talked about some of his interests. He's a student and I guess you could even call him a disciple at this point of the French philosopher, literary theorist, anthropologist, René Girard. So, we talked about this kind of stuff. We gelled and then Peter asked me if I would help him teach a class at Stanford Law School that winter. In the meantime, I could be an analyst at his hedge fund and I was like, okay, well, yeah, maybe I do this for a year, move to San Francisco, and then that'll be a very unique experience. And then I'll go back to my attic apartment and be the starving artist.

10:09So that's how I got hired, very unlikely. And then I show up to work. I can tell you the first day, it's September 27th, 2010. It's just as you would imagine in a TV show about a hedge fund, there's a trading floor and the stock ticker going around and CNBC on. And I sit down at this desk on the trading floor, and I'm thinking, how did I end up here? But a moment later, one of my colleagues walks over to my desk and he says, we got to go to Peter's house. Last night on the plane ride back from New York, we came up with this idea to pay people to leave college. We're calling it the anti-Rhodes scholarship.

10:45TechCrunch disrupts us today and Peter's being interviewed, so we have to announce the program. Like, all right, I'm in. I hate Rhodes Scholars. I think they're insufferable. So, whatever the anti-Rhodes scholarship is, I'm in for it. We go to Peter's house. We're waiting in the living room. Peter comes bounding down the stairs. We get in a car and now we're discussing, okay, what do we name this thing? How much money is it? Car takes us to the conference. We're backstage still discussing things. Then Peter's on stage being interviewed. And you can see it on YouTube. Sarah Lacey, the reporter is interviewing him.

11:15And he's talking about this program as if it's in the present tense. He's saying we're taking applications. You wouldn't know listening to the interview that this thing is being invented on the fly in the 48 hours before or even the morning of. So, I got home that night and just called my parents and I said, wow, this is my first day of work. I wonder what tomorrow is going to be like. So, at the time, the first name of it was Under 20, the Teal Fellowship. Now, it's just called the Teal Fellowship. But the program settled on$100 ,000 for 20 individuals a year, two key conditions. In that first year, you had to be 19 and under when you applied and you had to drop out of school or not be in school.

11:56And that was the really big newsworthy condition. And yeah, so I got swept up into that, ended up co-running that program with some other people in Peter for five years till 2015 and pretty crazy experience. So people ask me, how do you get a job in Silicon Valley on the investment side, venture capital? And if I relate this story, it's not good advice. I can say, go to grad school, drop out, become a journalist. You do these things. Series of unlikely events for sure, but a very cool story and such a cool program nonetheless. I want to dive into it a bit more because you've been a vocal critic of the education system since working with Peter Thiel, which is kind of interesting looking at your background of being fairly academic.

12:42So let's dive into the mission behind the Thiel Fellowship a bit more and why you're paying people to drop out. What do you think is wrong with the education system? What is this program doing better? Yeah, I guess so maybe to tie up some themes about like, okay, I showed up to work that day and I thought I was unusual. Meaning like, here I am this dropout philosopher. Am I surrounded by experts in finance or technology? And it turns out I wasn't. Soon enough, I learned that there were a lot of people just like me. A lot of people on Peter's team, no one had a serious background in finance, there were people who were like nuclear engineers, statisticians, mathematicians, English literature scholars, but no Harvard MBAs.

13:27And so, what I learned in time is that there was something in Rene Girard's work in particular that became a bit of a heuristic that Peter would use when he thought about creativity and then who he backs, whether as a startup founder or who he hires. And what Girard became, one of the things he's famous for is his theories about witch hunts, crowd dynamics, the madness of the crowd, and in particular, how social disorder leads the crowd to sacrifice a scapegoat. In Girard's monograph on the scapegoat, he canvases world literature, mythologies. And what Girard discovered was that, you know, the type of person that's chosen as a scapegoat is a very interesting figure.

14:11They tend to either be the hero or the martyr. They tend to have extreme characteristics. And the other thing that Girard noticed is they tend to have a paradox about them, a polarity where they're both insiders and outsiders. So, for example, a famous example is Oedipus. There's a social crisis at hand. A plague is in Thebes destroying the city. So, there's a crisis and then Oedipus ends up being, you know, spoiler alert, is actually the reason for the plague's existence in essence becomes the scapegoat, but he's an insider and an outsider in that he thinks he's an insider because he was brought to the kingdom as a baby, but rather he left the kingdom as a baby and his parents thought he was dead.

14:53But, you know, everyone thinks he's an outsider because he came from this other place where he had been abandoned. So likewise, you know, it's like with entrepreneurship, for example, I think like there's a long history of immigrants making great entrepreneurs, great founders. And I think it's because of this insider-outsider dynamic. It's like you're a US citizen on the one hand, here you are in America making your way. But on the other hand, maybe you're fresh from another country. And now, even though you're here, you see things a different way, or you're willing to try on a different set of frameworks to see things.

15:25So, with Girard, you know, this insider-outsider thing, it's like you can't be so outside and foreign that you couldn't possibly be responsible for the social crisis at hand. But neither can you be an insider so much so that like no one would question your loyalty. Like the scapegoat is always the boundary figure who fits between the two worlds. And so, in my book, I wanted to portray the fact how I'm an insider and outsider. It's like, okay, I thought I was, you know, unique in the sense of, wow, what's this dropout philosopher doing on this trading desk? But Peter was like collecting these insider outsiders.

15:58So, I tell my personal story. I grew up thinking my dad was one person and then when I was 20, I discovered someone else was. So, it's like in my own family, I was an insider outsider. I'm certainly part of the family, but it turns out I have half siblings. So, in some sense, I'm not within the family. And then in the academic realm, to go back to your original question, yeah, it's like I found my way to the inside of the temple, I had seen some of the most prestigious departments of philosophy and I had seen that the temple was empty in some respects. So, when it came to this program, I think one of the advantages I had was that I had been on the inside and now I was on the outside.

16:39So, I was able to see some of the good things about higher education, but also some of the bad things. And in particular, what made the fellowship so powerful is I think creativity Creativity is a mystery. I mean, I've just rambled on for five minutes about one element that seems to be like maybe a cause, maybe a symptom, but we don't really... The creativity is very mysterious. But one thing we know about it is what stifles it. And the theory we had was that with higher education, things are just too slow these days. It's just taken for granted that you have to master years and years of knowledge before you're trustworthy enough to add some new piece of knowledge to reach that frontier and discover something new.

17:21And, you know, we just didn't believe that. We thought in the rising sap of their youth, you know, it could be the case that someone had already reached the frontier in science or tech. And if we just set them free, maybe they'd be able to make some progress. So, it was more about lifting those constraints and liberating people. So, yeah, long-winded take, but it's an important question because I think in my book, you know, to sound kind of like, I don't know, pretentious or something, it's like, Like I wanted it to be a meditation on creativity because it is so mysterious, how that relates to the individual, how it relates to institutions like higher education, how it relates to a creative cluster like Silicon Valley and its actual geographic location, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and then maybe as a nation as a whole.

18:05So I wanted the book to telescope out a little bit as the story progresses and go through those things. But through my work and the Teal Fellowship through 1517, the fund I operate now is like the higher education is the main one. And I'm really concerned that it is stifling creativity. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make peer feedback any less valuable. The tricky thing is finding qualified people who are interested and willing to help vet your investment ideas.

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19:16That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash intrinsic value community. Support for the show comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got your core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic option plays on the side. The point is you're engaged with your investments and public gets that. That's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul. Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, industry-leading yields on your cash with no fees or minimums.

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21:13And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. I saw in a talk you did nearly a decade ago now where you said there needs to be a better form of measurement of success? Because with college, it's basically just time. You spent the time of four years to get your degree. So that's kind of the definition of success. You could say, look, I committed this time to getting this degree, but you've talked about how there needs to be a better measurement for that. Yeah, that came out of some personal experiences where because I was visiting so many college campuses, I started to see commonalities.

21:53And the number one architectural feature that I found on every college campus just about was that clock tower. And it is a vestige of the medieval origins of the university. And so, that got me into reading up on the histories of universities and how they operate and so on. And then it dawned on me that, yes, we use time as a proxy for knowledge acquisition. It could be just like your courses are measured in hours, take hour-long exams. I mean, there's almost a fetishization obsession with the hour as this unit of measurement for knowledge. It's like, oh, how many credits have you taken in this field?

22:30And then with the fellowship, I started to see how experience could be overrated. You know, I met computer programmers who were 18, 19, and they have nine years experience. One young man I talk about in the book, he was so frustrated at MIT because they were forcing him to take all these lower level, medium level courses in computer science, but he could have tested out of all of them because of his experience and his abilities, but instead, they're forcing him to take those hours. So, then, you know, all right, so those things are lining up. And then I got into the economics research of, okay, why is college valuable and so on?

23:06And it's just so clear that there's something about marching around that clock tower that the labor market loves, that you were willing to sacrifice four years of your life to undertake a project at great cost and effort and to demonstrate that you're willing to complete assignments and follow orders. And so, the labor market and employers are just basically cheating. So, they outsource the screening, ranking and judgment evaluation on candidates to the universities and it just makes it easier for them to hire people. They're not hiring people mainly for the skills that they learn in the university.

23:41So, I think, yeah, to me, that clock tower became a symbol for all this stuff. And I wanted to... Like I gave that talk, Yeah, that's awesome that you look that up. That's pretty old out there. But it really struck me that we depend on the clock as a way to say how much knowledge someone has when it could be the case that, you know, maybe they learn something rapidly or maybe it took too long. Then there's the just, yeah, you could look at like chess players or athletes and even to some degree mathematicians and other fields is what you see is like more experience doesn't necessarily make you a better player.

24:14So, it's like there is a peak during people's careers at which they are the best or most productive or creative. And then sadly, there's a fall off. That would be in a theory where you think more and more experience matters. That would not be true. It's like the best chess players would be like 70 years old, but it turns out there's a prime for people. So yeah, interesting that all this stuff seems kind of neglected in the mainstream. People don't really want... I mean, it's sad and worth lamenting that we're not always our best throughout our whole life and that maybe there is a shorter window than we imagined when we might be at our best, but I think it is worth knowing.

24:53What are some of the biggest names or successes that our listeners might know or be aware of that have come out of the Teal Fellowship program? Yeah. So during my tenure, so from 2010 to 2015, we saw some extraordinary things. So probably the most famous person is Vitalik Buterin. He's the creator and inventor of Ethereum. We helped him launch that in 2013, 14. When I met Vitalik, when I was doing research for the book, I was shocked to learn because I was verifying dates that we had lunch with him five days after he had written the original draft of the Ethereum white paper. So that was wild.

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25:30We ended up giving him a fellowship a few months later. And I made one of the worst financial decisions of my life because I was on point helping Vitalik out. It would be periodic meetings because the Ethereum group at the time, there were a lot of contesting egos and different visions for things. And those wrinkles needed to be sorted out. But by, I guess it was the summer of 2013. I maybe could be 14. But when Ethereum launched, I was out there marketing it, pushing the initial coin offering, but I ended up not buying a single Ether myself for a couple reasons. But I regret that. I have a friend who made millions and Danielle, my co-founder, she's always joking.

26:10She notices like whenever I go out for drinks with the guy, he doesn't cover the tabs. She's like, how is that? You know, he owes you. But yeah, so I mean, Vitalik is, I don't know, one of a kind. He is just probably one of the most brilliant people I've ever met on the planet. I don't know his IQ. I'm sure it's in the stratosphere. But one of the things I noticed in the early days was he was just typing in his phone in Mandarin. And I asked him what he was doing. And he said, oh, you know, I'm communicating with the Ethereum developers in China. I said, well, how did you learn Mandarin? And he said he just taught himself.

26:41So that's pretty different type of mind than your typical 20-year-old. But it's sort of like meeting the LeBron James of something, you know, people are always asking me about, I guess because they have in mind, it's like their frame of reference is like their children or their cousin or themselves. Like, oh, when I was 18, 19, you know, there's no way I could do that. And then when you look at someone like LeBron and he started in the NBA when I think when he was 18 or 19, it's like so clear that the guy was just a different type of person. So, I think the same is true for someone like Vitalik.

27:11You know, another person we met in 2012 and helped launch was Dylan Field. Dylan started a company in 2012 called Figma. They just made news in this last fall because Adobe purchased Figma for$20 billion. When that started in 2012, it was just two guys in a dorm room pretty much and we helped him get underway. And Dylan is... I love him. He's the antithesis of the Steve Jobs archetype. I mean, Dylan is obsessed with product and design the way Jobs was and certainly because Figma is a design tool. But he's just the nicest, kindest guy I've ever met in Silicon Valley. He's just so sweet and compassionate.

27:54And I can't imagine him having a reality distortion field. So, if there was anyone whose success I think is wonderful and deserving, it's Dylan. And so, it's been fun to see him grow that company to the heights it's reached. So, those are a couple. Some other people are like Ritesh Agarwal started oil rooms in India. that's still going pretty strong. You mentioned Luminar Technologies, Austin Russell. We met him in 2012, fellowship in 2013. And I detail that relationship in the book. I portray that relationship and seeing Luminar grow. So, that was pretty cool. So, yeah, those five years and the program continues.

28:35So, Danielle and I, by 2015, Danielle Strackman is my co-founder at 2015. We hired her to help run the fellowship all two weeks after I started. And she's a former school principal. She founded a charter school in San Diego called Innovations Academy. That's still going today. And so by 2015, Danielle and I thought, wow, we're doing this nonprofit thing. We could be making money. We could be making investments. There's no one else who has this investment thesis of backing people without college degrees. Why don't we give it a shot? So we raised miraculously in my mind our first fund And we've been in business ever since.

29:11So, the fellowship has gone on. There are some successes after we departed too. I think, you know, Scale AI is one that's quite big. So, the program's, you know, still doing quite well. And we're making investments. About 85 % or 90 % of our investments are in companies led by people who don't have college degrees. The only time we'll break our thesis is if we meet a mad scientist who is just like doing something so weird that we call it science fiction tech. So we backed a quantum computer company, Atom Computing, in our first fund. So every so often, we'll do that. But yeah, here we are. Let's dive into that a bit more.

29:46And as a little recap, you left the Teal Fellowship and started your own fund, 1517, to use those same philosophies and principles from the fellowship on a wider scale to really impact more businesses and more founders. It seems like your philosophy and principles are unlike anyone else in the industry. So how has that been your advantage? And how has that really been a hurdle for you over the years? Which do you see more of? Has it been more of an advantage or a hurdle? And how has it been your advantage? It's an advantage in that I think it's just weird. We don't trust young people as a society.

30:19That may seem strange to say, but when you put it in terms of who grant-making bodies give money to, if you look at the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, or so on. It's like the average age of the recipients is like 38, 39. And what that means to me is that, well, as a society, these institutions don't trust younger scientists to do anything. So, even though we had scenes like Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs, there are these examples of people, entrepreneurs who didn't have college degrees and started things when they were young. There was also the counterexamples of people like Elizabeth Holmes.

30:54I can't tell you how many times people have said, oh, but have you seen the dropout? I'm like, all right, you keep believing that because we've been making money over here following our thesis. And I think we've developed our diligence and honed our pattern recognition for understanding character that I think we would have passed on Miss Holmes. I guess we weren't put to the test. But yeah, so it's like another stat that people love to share with me is that, well, if you look at a lot of successful companies, the majority are founded by people who are 35 and 40 or between 35 and 40. And my answer to that is, yes, that is true, but it's a bell curve distribution.

31:30And so while most investors are focusing at the center of that bell curve, we are the only ones all the way on the left-hand tail helping people get started. So it's been an advantage in that respect. I guess the disadvantage is that it's like we're playing with one hand tied. So most investment firms have their job is just to make great investments and they don't care where they find them. The fact that we limit ourselves to only backing people without degrees, I mean, that just limits the pool of potential investment quite a bit. So, when we interact with other venture capital funds, there's always this sort of moment where everyone's like, oh, you got any great deals?

32:08Is there anything you can share with us? And it's always one-sided with us. We make investments and then we're happy to talk about them. But we never meet other funds who say, Hey, here's this dropout we met. You got to meet this person. So, yeah, we don't get a lot of help from the industry. The name 1517, yeah, names are important. The name of my book, the name of our fund. 1517 refers to our geeky reference to the Protestant Reformation, not because we're religious or Protestants, but because Martin Luther was protesting the sale of indulgences. These were pieces of paper that the church sold at great cost.

32:43You know, people could buy them and what it meant was you were absolved of sin, you weren't going to hell. And Luther was quite angry about this, that the church was making money, you know, forgiving people. So, he nailed his theses to the church door in 1517 on Halloween, as tradition has it, although I guess that's up for debate. But for us, what we saw is that there's a piece of paper that our, at least America is obsessed with. Most people think you're going to hell if you don't have it and you have to pay large sums to get it and it's called the diploma. So, we like to say we don't believe in indulgences.

33:14And when I was thinking about naming the book, what I realized was that there are a whole bunch of institutions that rely on paper. And this ties into a question you raised before, which is in the university setting, you have a diploma and that diploma is supposed to signal something of value about you as a person. And we rely on these authorities, universities to one, authenticate that that piece of paper is real, that it's not counterfeit or fraudulent or whatever, but also to underwrite the signal that it's meant to send to the wider world. And what I've seen over the last 40, 50 years is that the performance of a lot of our key institutions has been in decline, especially these institutions that depend on paper and its authentication and signaling system.

33:59So, it could just be another example would be the dollar. You know, the Federal Reserve prints dollars on paper. We rely on them to authenticate these dollars is real and to validate that they signal something of substance, of value, never mind that it's being inflated away or something like that. So, the authorities in these institutions, in my mind, have become less trustworthy and reliable. In the university setting, I think degrees have signaled less and less of value. What do they really signal to the wider world isn't quite clear. And then what's more now, a lot of these degrees are in essence like fraudulent pieces of paper where quite frankly, I think that zero skills are learned in a lot of degree programs and colleges right now are getting away with it.

34:44It's interesting I find in the debate about higher, the student loan crisis and the Biden administration's efforts to forgive loans. One of the key things missing in the whole discussion is who's responsible for all this debt and the worthless degrees and the lowest wages that people can't pay off their debts with and And it's the universities. So yeah, in my mind, the paper belt defines this region in the Northeast that from Washington, DC to Boston, where all these paper-based institutions reside, symbolically at least. So in Washington, they print money, regulations, visas on paper, Delaware, corporate on paper, New York, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Madison Avenue, advertising all on paper.

35:24And in Boston, the pinnacle of American higher education, Harvard and MIT print their diplomas on paper. And so, I wrote an essay and I eventually put it on LinkedIn where I said, my mission in life is to light the paper belt on fire. And my editor saw that. She said, wow, let's go with that title. That's provocative. And I find it tends to polarize people. But the point is that these institutions are failing. They're in decline. Maybe we can reform them. I hope we can replace them with something new. I think the Teal Fellowship and what we do at 15, 17 points the way in education. I think there's a long way to go.

35:59But then I think we need to look at some of these other institutions too, and whether we can replace or reform them as well. Preston Pyshenko Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

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39:23That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. Now I want to talk about some of the successes that you've had with 1517 and some of the companies. And let's start with Luminar. It's such a cool company, and it's a cool story that you highlight in your book. And you talked about Austin Russell. So let's talk about the company and Austin and what drew you to both of them. I met Austin for the first time at an event we held in 2012. We had decided that we had received so many applications for the Teal Fellowship that it was a shame that we couldn't interact and mingle with more of the candidates rather than just, let's say, the finalists or even the fellows.

40:08So, we decided to put together more or less like a makeshift conference where we invited a lot of the people who had applied and Austin had been in our orbit. We held it at the Mission High School in San Francisco. We had just rented out a high school. What was weird about it was the high school is so hell-bent on getting everyone to college that there was all this pro-college propaganda everywhere. But Austin approached us and he's an interesting individual where he had been doing research and playing around in photonics and laser laboratories in Irvine as a teen. And UC Irvine has a very famous photonics laboratory and Austin's type of lab rat snuck in and started mixing it up with professors and stuff when he was just a high school student, not even part of the college.

40:54And so, when we first met him, he had some ideas about how to generate higher power lasers to do different things. And we always have this question when we meet back then fellows, but now founders is, you know, the question is, is someone crazy or crazy awesome? Sometimes it's not always easy to tell the difference. With Austin, we thought, oh my God, this guy with his lasers, because he thought he could do, you know, it could be like power transmission or maybe even diagnostics or, you know, what he settled on at the time, at the very beginning was using LiDAR systems to replace cameras in Hollywood, especially for movies that use special effects and green screens.

41:32And we did diligence. We had people from the physics department at Stanford that we knew, some physicists who interviewed him and he checked out. They're like, hey, he's doing some wild stuff, but he's not outside the bounds of sanity. So, we're like, okay, yeah, we give him a fellowship. And then pretty quickly around that time, you know, not there long after the mania for driverless vehicles started to pick up. That stemmed from Google's first, I think, coming out of the DARPA challenge in the 2000s. But by 2012, 2013, now the wave had started to pick up just because a lot of advances were being made on the software side for, you know, the software that would be used in a perception system for some vehicles.

42:13But Austin's key insight, he saw a huge opening was because Silicon Valley seemed to be so obsessed with the software and the computation, he realized that a lot of advances in the hardware had to come about. It's like, yeah, I don't care how fast your computer can get. I think the quality of the eyes and the data coming in matters. And that was what Austin saw. He teamed up with a mentor of his to co-found Luminar and they were on their way and it took them some time. But there are constraints within the world of perception technologies that they knew they had to overcome these constraints in a way to meet the needs and meet the needs of, you know, what a car company would need in order to operate a driverless car.

42:55And so, some of those constraints are like the distance that the system can see or the conditions under which it can operate or, you know, can it distinguish its own lasers from, you know, some other system that's shooting lasers at it. I mean, there's so many things that have to be done. And so, you know, it took them some time, they were operating in stealth, but they were making progress. And we were alongside the whole time, doing the best we could to offer advice and strategy. By 2017, 2018, it had become full-blown mania because you had Elon Musk giving announcements saying that Tesla, there could be a fleet of robo-taxi Teslas by 2021.

43:32You had Uber and Lyft building whole department. I think Uber bought the whole Carnegie Mellon robotics team out of the campus. And those companies were positioning themselves A lot of their future cash flows were premised on this idea that they were going to have robo-taxis. So that when you look at the valuation of any startups in the autonomy space from 2017, 2019, pretty astonishing. And Luminar just kept pushing forward. They were always on the outside in terms of they weren't backed by Sequoia. They weren't backed by Kleiner. We believed in them all the way. And they always just believed that they were building a technological competitive advantage and they had it.

44:14And so now, you know, here we are. So I do document in the book like, okay, what is it like a little bit to work with this company? And then I was there the day they went public on the NASDAQ in December 2020. But, you know, underneath that is just this really tremendous story. I mean, that company deserves a book on its own because it was just like a tremendous heroic effort to innovate in a way that would sustain that competitive advantage. Now, that said, of course, it's like you have Elon Musk still saying that we don't need LiDAR. He's going to have just camera. They're going to use video cameras.

44:46That's the belief that the computers are just going to become so powerful that it won't matter that the data is so spare. I worry about nighttime vision with cameras, not as powerful as LiDAR in nighttime conditions, or they can be fooled and spoofed easier. So, I think he's got some obstacles in his path. And then there are some other LiDAR companies that have emerged. maybe InnoViz, Ava is another one. And I think it's fair to say just based on public information out there that Luminar is still far ahead in terms of the technology. And now in terms of the companies that are working with their main customers, Volvo, I forget the model, but this fall, Luminar will be on a large number of Volvos and that'll expand over the next few years.

45:29And they keep announcing more customers coming online. Once COVID hit and then postco, So actually, it's really the economic response to COVID and the inflationary economy. The Fed started hiking rates. And what that meant is that any tech company whose future growth was somewhere in the far future, those companies got hit hard in their valuations. So it's like you look across tech stocks, just major declines over the last year since the Fed's been hiking rates. And then if you look at the autonomy space, it's been hammered. And so it's kind of interesting to see that it's just been harder and harder than people think to get to those robo taxis.

46:09Ford recently announced they're shutting down their Argo unit and other efforts are shutting down. So I think the path forward in autonomy is going to be this incremental path where it starts out using these perception systems for driver assist. What that means is keeping you safe in the lanes on the highway, helping you park your car. Eventually, we'll get to the point where you can totally hand over the car. And then as these systems are learning, and as they learn, they get better and better, some of the hardware will improve. And so I do think we will get to robo-taxi type things. It's just going to take another 10 years or so.

46:44But Luminar, yeah, the management team is still extraordinary and they're really building out their manufacturing. So I am still bullish on the company and I'm excited to see what they do. I'm glad you painted all the color behind the backstory and competitive landscape, because I want to know what you think sets Luminar apart from others that it's competing against. You mentioned Elon Musk, Tesla, Google, Google's AI, and some other smaller companies now in the LiDAR technology that are emerging. So what are the advantages that you think Luminar has over everyone else? And what do you think, if we're being a realist here, what do you think are some of the risks ahead?

47:23I think right now they still have a technological advantage when it comes to distance, accuracy, accuracy in bad conditions, and some of those other weird problems I mentioned where it could be like sun glare from windshields because the sensor in a LIDAR is picking up photons. So, you have to know how to distinguish your photons from any other source, whether it's the sun or lasers. So, the proof in the pudding is just, hey, they're acquiring these customers and some of their competitors are not. And even when their competitors do sign contracts, It's always like for some small number of units for a development fleet, not for production level units that are going to be out on the highways.

48:05So to me, I think they just still have that competitive advantage. You go point by point. It's full of the industry is full of a lot of showmanship through press release where people will claim that they, let's say, have a better range on the system. But what they don't tell you is that they tested that system in a white room against a black object. It's a very different situation when you're on the road at night and the object has 10%, 5 % reflectivity. So, the fact that Luminar has been able to reach these levels of performance, I think, is still impressive. Now, I think that said, of course, I don't want to deny that people are racing to try to match their performance specs.

48:44But I still think that they're years ahead right now at this point. As far as Tesla goes, look, I love Elon Musk. I would never bet up against him. I think he's just like a charismatic Randian hero. It's like you couldn't make up this guy. But I will say when it comes to the so-called full self-driving of Tesla, I think he's been wading into some murky territory where I wish he did not call it full self-driving. There are so many accidents that are reported just about every week where someone trusted their Tesla autopilot when they shouldn't have. And so, I think in terms of safety, that's been unfortunate.

49:17I think there's a long way to go. It's hard to predict how technology moves. So if we get to some super artificial intelligence and it's so smart, it can take weak data and still read the roads, maybe that's possible. But for me, the most likely path forward is some perception stack that relies upon LiDAR, maybe a little bit of radar for short range. And then, yeah, sure, maybe even cameras too. I mean, it's not like that has to be ruled out, but I do think it's going to be a combination of different sensors. It's a really interesting company and it's still relatively small. And there's a big opportunity for growth here.

49:57So the expectations for growth are really high. I was actually just looking at their financials and I believe I saw that they're expecting 100 % growth in revenues in 2023. So what do you think is driving those revenue numbers? Is it some of the contracts with the major car and truck companies? Yeah, the Volvo deal is the current strongest revenue stream. And they have these development deals with a lot of other car companies. If a car company is testing out different systems, they're going to buy units from all the different companies in the landscape. But I think what we're going to see over the next year is just knocking down more of these production level deals, where it's clear that a car company has decided, okay, we're going with Luminar as our provider in the supply chain for perception.

50:44And I think that's where the revenue is going to come from, selling those units. And then they're also on the software side training. So imagine, I guess you could compare it to Tesla. Tesla is vertically integrated. So it's like the whole car is made by Tesla, including the perception system. But one thing Tesla has made famous is that they're learning every single Tesla is feeding information into the motherboard, the mothership. And then that feeds back out to the cars all over the world and trains them to be better. And so just imagine Luminars doing the same thing for the cars that they'll be in.

51:17As a value investor, I'm still kind of wrapping my head around this whole company. It's not profitable. They're spending a lot of money. Their revenue is great, but it's not profitable. So as a value investor, I'm still kind of wrapping my head around it. It's still on my watch list for now, but it's something interesting that I'm keeping an eye on. Yeah, it's still a young company. They went public in the heyday of the SPAC, which is a lot of those companies that went public through that route are really facing a tough time because a lot of their future revenue is far in the future. And the way Wall Street analysts value companies, especially in a high interest rate environment, that puts a higher discounted rate on future cash flows.

51:55And so, you look at the valuations of any company that's in that growth category, they've just been slammed. So, I think Luminar on a relative basis has been doing quite a good job. But look, that said, I don't want to pretend there aren't challenges ahead. They certainly have a lot of runway, but that revenue stream is going to have to pick up by 2024, 2025. As we get towards the end of the show, Michael, I want to know, what are you working on right now? And what are you excited about? What are some of your current or most exciting projects? Well, yeah. So we're constantly thinking about just how to inspire the next generation.

52:31I guess we've gotten really good at talent spotting because just running the Teal Fellowship and 1517, there's a set of character traits that we look for in founders. What we don't, what is the black box is development. So, we know talent spotting. What does talent development look like? And that's really, really hard. We have some ideas that we want to try out. We're looking to pilot maybe a summer program for teens where we want to expose them to frontier technologies. Because when I was a teenager, I didn't know about quantum computing or moving objects in outer space, you know, all these different areas that are opening up, I think could be quite inspiring for teens.

53:09And then maybe just getting them together with each other. So, we just find that can be so valuable. So, we're looking to go younger and younger. Like, how do we expose people, get them inspired to want to pursue a different path? So, that excites me. We call this effort the invisible college. We're always giving names to things and invisible because it's not like a normal college, but we do want to... It's funny. He's like, we don't believe in classroom education, but we do believe in learning. So, how do we get people out to the frontier as fast as possible? And we're trying to dream up new ways to do that.

53:39Otherwise, yeah, we're just in business. I'm just out there meeting new people all the time and trying to get to understand where they're coming from, see how we can help them. We do a lot of events in cities and around college campuses. So, I just got back actually from a massive Midwest tour where I went to Chicago, Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Champaign-Urbana. And the whole time I'm just meeting younger people building stuff. And that's what inspires me. This is a dream. I get to meet people who are doing extraordinary things. And I love the challenge of trying to get up to speed on what they're working on.

54:14I know you've said that you have certain qualities that you look for in founders. And I think for investors, even if it's a public company, it's important to have a checklist for the CEO or the management team. So what do you look for? What's your checklist for founders? Well, when we started the fellowship, we were too imitative of college. We had an application that looked for, we asked for GPA, your test scores, what college you went to, maybe even asked for AP exams. And in the event, pretty quickly, we discovered these things were not great predictors of success for entrepreneurs. We had to know that you had the technical know-how and smarts to build what you were going to build.

54:51But when it came to success, we just saw some other contributing factors. And then we started to canvas the research literature on creativity, which is very lame, and these observational studies of past greatness in different fields. And so, we suddenly realized it's like, wow, you know, sometimes we may just have to invent our own terms for things. So, in the book, I go through a number of them. One of them that like I start off the bat with is, and it's pretty common, people want to know that someone has the, let's say, courage to become an entrepreneur. In a lot of the rhetoric and marketing around entrepreneurship, it's always portrayed as this leap of faith.

55:29It's almost like an extreme sport. It's portrayed as like jumping out of an airplane. And there is an element of truth to that. But what we decided, we had to find the sustaining motivation for that courage. This is a term we use, the sustaining motivation. Because we found that what was really important was what motivated people to want to work on this problem. We discovered it couldn't be fame or fortune. If you're after money, starting a company is like the worst way to do it because the chances of success are so low and the ups and downs are so high and low that it can be quite the challenge.

56:05And so, the only way to get through that dark night of the soul is to have some sustaining motivation to pull you through. It doesn't have to be that the company you're working on is like Like this, the meaning of life, purpose, like, oh, you know, maybe you're saving the environment. I mean, that can work. Okay, I love that. But it can also be something like you just love the excitement of the mischief making of working with your best friends. And that's going to pull you through. So, I got that term from a book from the Civil War of all things. I was just interested in motivation and commitment.

56:34And I read a book on, you know, why people would reenlist in war after they had seen the horrors. and this one historian pointed out, you know, various sustaining motivations. And since I saw the same thing, it was never, it wasn't going to be like in the army. It's interesting. It's like no one joins for like patriotism. I mean, maybe you sign up, but that's not why you reenlist. Why you reenlist is the band of brothers. It's like, you don't want to let your friends down. And I think there's something similar with startups. So, I do think it does take courage, but there has to be a motivating character trait there.

57:06And for us, when we're talking to people who are willing to leave school, that's just like such a strong signal of commitment that this is so important to you that you're willing to give up this socially sanctioned commitment to college to do something unusual. That's a big piece of the puzzle for us. And so, by contrast, sometimes we meet professors and they've got some research coming out of their lab, but they're not going to quit their tenure track job or their tenure job to do it. To us, that sends a terrible signal. It means you don't believe in this idea enough to leave your cush job. So yeah, always wondering about the commitment and the motivation.

57:43There's another one we call Friday Night Dyson Sphere that touches on commitment too, because it's like, startups combine ambition and practicalness in a way that sometimes leads to confusion and paradoxes. But for us, we love someone who, a Dyson Sphere is this far-flung idea from the physicist Freeman Dyson that, you know, one day will harness the whole power of a star by surrounding it with solar cells, basically. And so, it's like the grandest vision you could imagine in science fiction. So, the fact if we meet someone and they're working on this on a Friday night on campus when all their friends are partying, this is the one thing they want to be working on.

58:20And they've got some ridiculous plan to move from like this lemonade stand that they're currently operating to grow the business to build Dyson spheres in eight years. That's something we'd love to hear. So yeah, I think entrepreneurship just requires... I mean, these types of character traits don't guarantee success, but they certainly contribute to it. And the thing I noticed is you can't... The game is the best teacher. To try to impart this kind of knowledge in a class just doesn't work. Before I let you go, where can the audience go to learn more about you, find your book, remind people what the name of your book is?

58:51Just tell people where they can go to connect with you, learn more about what you got going on and more about your story. Yeah. So, if you have ideas, if you just want to chat with us because you're interested in startups or you have an idea you want to try to nurture, just go to our website, 1517fund.com. We have a contact form. It goes straight to me, Danielle, and a couple other people. We always follow up with that. On Twitter, I'm at William Blake. I was a journalist when Twitter started. So, I thought it was a site for haiku. I was like, what is this? So, I signed up as a poet. I do admire William Blake, but yeah, you can follow me there.

59:23And yeah, do pick up a copy or listen to my book. There's an audible paper built on fire. And thanks for having me on. All right, guys, that's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional.

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From the publisher

Robert Leonard chats with Michael Gibson about the Thiel Fellowship, what it is and how it came to be, some of the most successful companies to come out of it, his firm 1517, startup investing, Luminar, and much, much more! 
Michael Gibson is the founder of the venture capital firm 1517, one of the minds behind the Thiel Fellowship, and most recently, the author of Paper Belt on Fire. 

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro.
04:35 - The story of how he met Peter Thiel and started the Thiel Fellowship. 
15:56 - Why he left the Thiel Fellowship to start his own venture fund, 1517?
27:10 - The flaws with the current education system and how we can create more effective alternatives for young people interested in entrepreneurship.
31:41 - Some of his most successful investments at 1517, such as Luminar and Loom. 
59:46 - His thoughts on Luminar, the the role he thinks the company can have in the future of autonomous driving. 

*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.

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Check out: 1517 Fund.  

Check out: Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. 

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