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Michael Gibson on The End of Academia and What's Next
Michael Gibson joins to discuss his book Paper Belt on Fire, which chronicles his work with Peter Thiel's fellowship program investing in young talent.
He explains how old institutions like academia are declining yet retain lingering prestige, and the development of new ecosystems and hierarchies based on competence. Michael argues creativity comes from outside stale hierarchies, citing the conflict between legitimate prestige and disruptive greatness.
They debate how far we are from the decentralized network state, and if COVID accelerated institutional failure. Malcolm notes elite alternative communities forming, while Simone asks if the paper belt’s dysfunction will deter its acolytes. Overall Michael concludes we need more inspirational stories of success outside institutions.
Simone Collins: . [00:00:00] I'm super excited for this. Hello and welcome to another episode of Basecamp where today we have a very special guest and someone who's writing I really enjoy but also whose work I probably enjoy even more, Michael Gibson.
Simone Collins: You probably, if you've heard of Michael, I've heard of him because of his book, Paper Belt on Fire. However, he's in other circles, much more well known for being the co founder of 1517, a very unique type of venture capital fund that doesn't just focus on sort of already proven older entrepreneurs, but rather really young people.
Simone Collins: They are investing in, in people like pre college. It's amazing. We're going to talk about all these things. But in this conversation, we are really hoping to dive into his book, which I read as soon as an audio book was available paper belt on fire which really aligns with a lot of the stuff that we're saying.
Simone Collins: is much more eloquently written than the way we would write it. It's, it's sort of a mixture of philosophy prognostication, but also like personal history and history of the 1517 fund, which is absolutely fascinating. So we're [00:01:00] really excited to talk with you about it.
Would you like to know more?
Michael Gibson: Okay. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
Michael Gibson: And You know, thanks for the kind words as well, both about, you know, whatever, my writing style, but also about what we're doing. Yeah, the book I, I maybe How would I boil it down? I said something like because why would I have memoir? In philosophy and then, you know, behind the scenes account, venture capital and backing young people, I think, I think it comes down to strange people do strange things and when the times get tough, the weird GoPro and I wanted to take people behind the scenes and add some color and story to, you know, some of these characters I've worked with over the years.
Michael Gibson: One, the one thing I guess part of my bio okay, why tell this story is the, we have Danielle Strachman, my co founder of 1517, we helped Peter Thiel start his fellowship program in 2010, and that was a program where [00:02:00] 100, 000 was given to 20 individuals a year. The two conditions were one, you had to be 19 and under to apply.
Michael Gibson: And two, you couldn't be enrolled in university. So you had to drop out or take time off or maybe you never went. And across five years of co running that program, we saw incredible things come out of it. We, you know, most notable examples are helping Vitalik Buterin launch Ethereum Dylan Fields created a company called Figma that was acquired by Adobe for 20 billion last year.
Michael Gibson: Austin Russell. Founded a company called Luminor Technologies. They make a LIDAR system for cars. They went public in 2020. So the, the Teal Fellowship had a lot of great successes and there's a independent, this guy is probably the best venture capital analyst in terms of being an ou
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago