Lebanon's Youngest Entrepreneur Jihad Kawas Among 2015 Thiel Fellows who will Receive $100,000 To Drop Out Of College & Start A Company.
The Thiel Foundation announced, few days ago, its next class of 20 fast-tracked college dropouts to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Lebanese Jihad Kawas is one of the people they have chosen; Kawas will be receiving $100,000 but more importantly a wealth of mentorship during the two-year program provided he drops out of college during this period.
Jihad, 17 years old, is the founder of Saily, an app that consists of an online market place in which you can buy and sell with a local community you can trust. The app gives you the opportunity to unload all of the stuff that is taking over space, it is the fastest way for someone to sell unwanted stuff and share it with people nearby.
Kawas attended the Worldwide Developer's Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco where he took a selfie with Apple's CEO Tim Cook who gave him the thumbs up for his idea with the advice "to just keep working on it.
What is the Thiel Foundation?
The Thiel Fellowship was created by Peter Thiel, an American entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director.
He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.
"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," said Peter Thiel, who founded the program. "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."
Thiel announced the fellowship back in 2010 and has been attracting more and more applicants every year, with over 2,800 people applying for the fifth class of fellows that was announced few days ago. The idea from the program is not to question education and encourage students to drop out of college, but to invest in a group of young, talented and passionate individuals and help them fulfill their dreams, invest in their ideas and come up with new companies and concepts.
Entrepreneurship has become a career path whether we like it or not, and Thiel argues that investing in an idea at a young age can prove to be more beneficial than spending years pursuing higher education.
Mike Butcher from Techcrunch stated back in April that "Beirut is rapidly shaping up to be a powerhouse for startups in the Middle East", and that "Lebanon is uniquely posed to generate startups which aim both at the Arab world and the wider world at large", and Jihad Kawas is one of the many young Lebanese entrepreneurs proving him right. He may start his own company after 2 years, or maybe consider selling his idea or even going back to college; what's important is that he will be gaining a unique experience.
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