We can really be proud of our education system.
His passport to tech Mecca arrived in 2011. Thiel, who made his fortune as an early Facebook investor, runs a scheme that pays youngsters to become entrepreneurs instead of going to college — Proud won a fellowship worth $100,000. Today Proud says he doesn’t really know why he was chosen but, as Thiel later told Forbes magazine, “James stood out from the start as extremely tenacious and determined”.
FT Magazine
James Proud is a 25 year-old Brit.
He’s so good that
Thiel to invest $2m of his own funds into Hello, six years after he flew Proud to San Francisco. He is the first Thiel Fellow that the venture capitalist has personally invested in.
S’pore education teaches kids to be kuai-kuai & conservative, especially those in the top 20%. They & their parents’ dreams are to enter Uni courses that will enable them to go into conservative & highly paid professions such as doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or have strong majors with top results that enables them to go into major banks & MNCs.
Currently only a handful of top 20% students willing to attempt Thiel route — insufficient critical mass to have any significant statistical outcome.
Need to have major job & societal disruption before sufficient numbers of “smart” kids willing to take on Thiel challenge. By then things may be so bad that you’ll have mass demonstrations, confrontations with riot police, and likely overthrow of govt.