The Thiel Foundation has announced the names of 29 new members who have been accepted into the 2016 class of Thiel Fellows. This year’s cohort was selected from over 6,000 applications received from around the world and includes technologists at the forefront of gaming, artificial intelligence, health IT, and software development.
Augur co-founder Joey Krug has made it to the list. Krug is building the world’s first decentralized prediction market platform. Augur is built on the Ethereum blockchain and allows users to forecast events and be rewarded for predicting them correctly.
Augur’s crowdsale drive, which ended on 01 October, 2015, raised more than $5.2 million. It placed the Augur Project among the most successful crowdfunding campaigns and as the best in the cryptocurrency space after Ethereum, at the time.
Krug joins Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, who was selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2014. To date, companies created by Thiel Fellows are together worth more than $1.4 billion.
The fellowship provides young people with $100,000 to learn by doing rather than by following conventional education system like college. Thiel Fellows receive mentorship and guidance from current and former fellows, as well as from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, investors, and scientists.
“We launched the fellowship in 2011 to test a simple thesis: college isn’t right for everyone—especially for young people who want to create new things,” said Blake Masters, President of the Thiel Foundation. “This has been proven true—by the successes of our past fellows, by the new applications we get every year, and by the growing numbers of young people who are creating their own career paths outside of college, with or without a fellowship from us.”
