 Hello how's everyone doing? Wow, I look younger there. It's a few years ago, I guess, but I am Michael Gibson I am the co-founder of 1517 fund We oh, whoops I had a Generative AI developed some images for what a network state college would look like and the guys of Norman Rockwell And I was asked to speak on how to build a parallel institution to the current University system. I have some background in this. I thought it'd be a professor of philosophy Who's working towards a PhD and I and I dropped out? But even though I dropped out for other reasons there were already problems Accumulating that we all know about but just to rehearse, you know, we're close to 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt in the United States People either crippling under that debt or taking well-paying but boring jobs to pay it off It's a hot political issue The cost of college over the last 40 years has increased by more than a thousand percent and that's in real terms So it's getting more expensive and people are taking debt to pay for it and yet In recent history even though college seems to pay more than high school alone Nevertheless, you know the incomes that recent graduates earn aren't that much higher and sometimes lower than they used to be So, you know in technology, we're used to seeing better faster cheaper With education and in particular higher ed. We have the opposite things are getting more expensive In some ways they're getting worse And people are going into debt On top of that if that weren't bad enough now they've become in the words of biology woke madrasas There's indoctrination on campus They tell you you can look at the mission statement of any college from Harvard on down And they will tell you their mission is to help you to think critically to become leaders of tomorrow and yet Here we have, you know, most colleges, you know, some 4,000 colleges in the US and yet somehow there's only one point of view All of this was you know, it's certainly Trouble now, but it was apparent that this was a problem me back in 2010. I Was on the founding team of the teal fellowship. I never thought I told you my background I never thought I would be involved in the world of Silicon Valley But I met Peter teal through pottery Friedman who spoke earlier. I Interviewed for a role on his hedge fund He asked me if I would help him teach a class at Stanford Law School on philosophy and tech And I said yes to that job because it was so cool But I showed up to work the first day and I can tell you the date because it was my first day of work September 27th 2010 it was a Monday. I came to the office. It was exactly as you would imagine in the TV show for a hedge fund There were Bloomberg terminals stacked, you know in triptychs There was a stock ticker CNBC on the screen and I'm sitting at this desk and I'm thinking how the hell did I end up here? when my colleague Jim O'Neill came to The desk and picked me up. He says hey, we got to go to Peter's house I said why he said well on the plane ride back from New York last night. We came up with this idea We're calling it the anti-road scholarship. I said great. I went to Oxford. That's where I dropped out of Hated road scholars. They were insufferable credentialist Greyhounds chasing mechanical orders of prestige So I was in I was like great. Let's go. What is this? He's like well, we're gonna pay people to leave school. Okay great So we get to Peter's house Peter comes bounding down the stairs He gets you know his coat on his assistant is telling him the schedule we get in a car. It was Tech crunch disrupt that day Peter was scheduled to be interviewed by Sarah Lacey and He had decided that this would be the best time to announce this program. Why well five days later on Friday This is so long ago now the movie the social network was set to come out And in the script that had been leaked by Aaron Sorkin, you know, Peter's knew he was gonna be portrayed negatively And certainly Zuckerberg was gonna be portrayed negatively And so he thought he changed the conversation by doing something bold So I'm in the car. We're like, what do we call this thing? We're on our way to the convention center I'm backstage, you know, people are trying to pitch Peter their idea, but we're focusing on okay. What do we call this thing? How much money? Peter's on stage and on youtube you can watch the interview If you find it and you will see that Peter is talking in the present tense He's saying we're taking application. We're running this program It was already an existence And so that was my first day of work. I went home and called my parents. I was like, wow, this is my first day What's tomorrow gonna be like? We There were two newsworthy conditions for the fellowship Number one was you had to be 19 and under to apply And number two was that you had to not be enrolled in school to receive the grant You know, I I highly recommend anyone here read the new Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk But you can also youtube interviews with musk You know, the book is extraordinary. Elon gave complete access He even gave the emails and phone numbers of his ex-wives and girlfriends. It's incredible Really gripping story But one thing that stood out to me was something musk calls the algorithm For this is how he thinks about production assembly lines. It's a five-step process and the first step in the process is What are the requirements And challenge them So with space x there were all these components and nothing had been innovated In aerospace in decades and they're trying to drive down the cost of making rockets And someone would say hey, we need this component because you know the nasa or the military says it's a required component And then he began to challenge people Find me the person who created that component or who created that requirement rather And then if there was no good answer as to why it existed He removed it and that's step two in his algorithm If if the requirement can't be justified remove it And he says you never know if you're doing enough until you put 10 until you have to put 10 percent back in So I thought about this with respect to the fellowship is that's exactly what we did Harvard requires you to take 32 credits to graduate Some 16 in a major electives. We decided None of that is required to find success in life Especially when it comes to working in technology But that didn't convince anyone Right away. Uh, we had our haters. Jacob Weisberg took the newsweek and slate You can't see it in that text, but he said we were creating the white man's version of the nba Harvard's former president larry summers a couple years later Treasury secretary of the united states. He said and this is one of my favorite quotes The teal fellowship is the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade But now here we are 13 years later. What are the results young man dillon field created figmon 2012 We helped him launched it recently that made news last year because they were bought by adobe for 20 billion dollars Just two weeks ago at lassion bought loom for nearly a billion We helped the tolic launch aetherium Luminar went public founded by austin russell multibillion dollar company makes sensors for driverless cars CB insights ran an analysis recently on the teal fellowship And you know this best accelerated in the world not called y-combinator 11 companies worth more than a billion dollars out of 150 teal fellowships Pretty extraordinary You know peter has a famous interview question where he he he tests people by saying What truth do you believe in that the rest of the world thinks is false? Well, I believe in child labor is good I wrote a book about this inside account of the teal fellowship and what we did Originally a few publishers didn't want to publish it because I quote literally one of them said Peter teal is evil anyone who works for him is evil And we can't possibly publish this You know six or seven others said I went to Yale and studied English literature. I don't believe this But nevertheless small publishing house encounter put it out I think it's a hoot goes into some of the background on on everything you just saw So what's next in 2015 I realized I could be Making money and extending the mission of the teal fellowship. I started a fund called 1517. That's our geeky historical reference to the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther originally nailed his 95 theses to the church door because he was protesting the sale of indulgences And the Roman church would sell these they told you it could save your soul If you bought one or your friend's souls and so we decided that you know, we don't believe in indulgences There's a corrupt institution today that's selling a piece of paper and telling you it can save your soul It's Yale or fail. It's called the college diploma and we think that's bullshit too. Thank you