The best accelerator in the world not called Y Combinator

If there is an “accelerator” that rivals Y Combinator (YC), it’s not one of the usual suspects.

It’s the Thiel Fellowship.

The 2-year fellowship program, created by the Thiel Foundation in 2011, gives $100K to young people to build things (companies) instead of going to college.

It differs from YC in several ways (point 4 in particular):

1. It doesn’t consider itself an accelerator.
2. It’s not nearly as active as YC.
3. Its focus is investing in young people (<22 years old).
4. It doesn’t take equity for the $100K it provides.
5. Recipients must drop out of school.

The Thiel Foundation invests in about 20-25 young people/companies per year vs. YC, which now does 500+ deals per year.

But the Thiel Fellowship alumni highlight its prowess.

Here are just a few notable alumni and companies they’ve built:

• Dylan Field, founder of Figma ($20B acquisition by Adobe)
• Ritesh Agarwal, founder of OYO Rooms ($9.6B valuation)
• Austin Russell, founder of Luminar Technologies (Nasdaq: LAZR)
• Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum

There are 11 companies with valuations/market caps over $1B, or 7.7% of the nearly 150 Thiel Fellowship recipients on CB Insights to date. Many others are valued in the hundreds of millions.

While YC and TF are ultimately looking for outliers, the Thiel Fellowship batting average is exceptional (YC, for context, has backed 4,500+ companies with just over 100 achieving $1B+ valuations/market caps per CBI data).

Considering that the more recent classes of Fellows (2020 and on) are still very young companies — essentially inflating the denominator since they may become valuable ($1B+) companies in the future — the “batting average” is even higher.

To dig into the individual Thiel Fellowship recipient companies, CB Insights customers can run this search.

If you aren’t already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more about our platform.