What Traits Make a Thiel Fellow? (w/ Danielle Strachman, Co-Founder of Thiel Fellowship and 1517)
Smart Friends Episode 98: Danielle Strachman
Danielle Strachman is founding director of the Thiel Fellowship, co-founder of 1517 Fund, and champion of the world’s most wily winners.
Danielle shares the behind-the-scenes story of launching the fellowship alongside Peter Thiel, the early skepticism (read: rage) they faced from academia, and the remarkable outcomes from backing young people who dropped out of college.
Danielle shares how she spots generational talent in teenagers, building founder-first communities, and funding sci-fi startups before the world believes in them.
Links to Platforms:
We discuss:
The founding story and long-term vision behind the Thiel Fellowship
Common traits among exceptional young founders, including curiosity, hyper fluency, and “dog on a leash” energy
Lessons from supporting early pioneers like Vitalik Buterin, Dylan Field, and Laura Deming.
How 1517 Fund backs young builders and “Wily weirdos” working on sci-fi-level ideas
Danielle’s philosophy on education, parenting, and fostering genius in children
If you're building something unconventional, raising potential Thiel fellows, or wondering what genius looks like at 15, this conversation is for you.
Quotes from Danielle:
“We weren’t looking for startup founders—we were looking for people on a mission.”
“Dog-on-a-leash energy—that’s what we look for. We’re here to cut the leash.”
“Hyperfluency is the ability to geek out with geeks, and still explain your work to your grandma at Thanksgiving.”
“These people are kind of mutants—they don’t fit in typical systems.”
“All kids under five are geniuses. The system just squashes it out of them.”
“The most shocking thing? People publicly attacked the Fellows. Not just the program—the people. Teenagers.”
“Crazy, crazy awesome—we can’t tell if they’re insane or brilliant, and it’ll take years to find out.”
“Big screens good, small screens bad.”
“In the future, I want to be funding 11-year-olds. The world won’t be ready, but I will be.”
“We just want to talk to wily weirdos who want to be around other wily weirdos.”
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Learn more about Danielle Strachman:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Rolling Fun #10: Capitalism is Hard, Natural Gas From Sunshine, and "Blimps" (That Work This Time)
Building a Venture Firm From Zero to One, and AI-driven VC Thesis Research
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Well, for those who are new to it, and at least somebody will be because my mom listens to this podcast, would you please introduce the Thiel fellowship? And I'm going to caveat this introduction with like, just absolutely brag on it. Because I feel like some of the times I hear about it, I hear about it as a very like high level general version, and it does not really sell the impact that the Thiel fellowship has had, which I think is unbelievable and still underrated, even by people who feel like they're familiar with what it is and what it does.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, thank you for having me here today. I'm very excited to share with people, especially who might not be familiar with the Thiel Fellowship. The Thiel Fellowship started 15 years ago. It was started by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, first investor in Facebook. And when he was investing in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was 19, 20 years old, quite young. In fact, the movie The Social Network was coming out in, I think it was September of 2010, right before the launching of the Thiel Fellowship. Peter had this idea on a plane ride back from New York to San Francisco. And he'd been thinking about education for a long time. And this idea was hatched of, well, if instead of a young person going into debt of 100K to go to school, and let's not... I mean, well, we could get into the interest rates, but we don't have to here, what if you gave a young person $100,000 non-dilutive and said, hey, the world's your oyster. What are you going to do over the next two years with this support and funding? He launched that program, and it was when we launched the first batch of Thiel Fellows, oh, I forgot to say, the couple sort of, I don't even like calling them restrictions, but there are a couple of like, hey, here's what we're looking for, we're looking for people who are working on projects. And I use the word projects a lot because we weren't looking for specifically startup founders. People could be working on a startup. They could be working on research. They could be working on a nonprofit. And you couldn't be in school, and you couldn't have a job somewhere else. So you needed to be full time on whatever your mission and vision was. And the idea was, hey, what happens when people take this left turn, when all of their peers are going to college and sort of doing the right thing, going into debt to do it, sort of getting on an escalator, if you will, and not getting off? This was very, very controversial. These days, people talk about, like the American gap year is now a thing, which is really amazing. The American gap year did not exist 15 years ago. It was a very European thing to do, to have a gap year.
Eric Jorgenson: You guys were like very attacked when this came out because this was so... and not just uncommon, but like taboo.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, this was extremely taboo to say that, hey, maybe young people might do something else other than go to college at the age of 18. In fact, Larry Summers called us the most misguided piece of philanthropy that ever existed, which is pretty amazing. What's interesting to fast forward is we got to work with some young people who have become some very well-renowned tech greats, which means they've had a profound impact not just on business but also on humanity, on people's individual lives, on technology. Some of these people are people like Vitalik Buterin with Ethereum. We worked with him before he launched Ethereum. In fact, my colleague Michael did a Facebook post telling everyone to buy into the presale of Ether, one of the first media posts out there about it. We supported Dylan Field in launching Figma, which IPO-ed a couple months ago. That IPO is 12 years in the making, and we worked with him when he had stopped out of Brown to work on Figma. People like Laura Deming, who are doing incredible work in longevity. She also started a venture fund to back longevity companies, and now she's currently working on a longevity startup, so very excited to see what happens there. People like Ritesh Agarwal with Oyo Room, the second largest hotel chain in the world. Obviously extremely uncommon to be working outside North America through really any program that supported young people, so that was really amazing to get to support him. And what's interesting, too, to see, and those are direct outcomes of people working on the direct thing that they started in the Thiel Fellowship, but then there's these indirect outcomes also, which are really extraordinary. For example, Chris Olah came into the Thiel Fellowship as a young man who was super interested in 3D printing. He ended up wanting to research ML and what would become AI, and he has become one of the top researchers in the space. After the Thiel Fellowship, he went to Google Brain, and today, actually, he's one of the co-founders of Anthropic. And we think that being- and people like Montessori have a lot to say about being in a highly saturated environment really matters to those long-term outcomes. So the thing I used to always say about the fellowship was, this is a two-year program with a 10-year timeline. It's going to take us a long time to figure it out. And more recently, people are starting to see, wow, on the business financial side, if you think of the Thiel Fellowship like an accelerator, it has the best outcomes of really the top accelerators out there. People are fighting about, is it better than YC? Is it on par? I don't really get into that whole thing, because honestly, we were doing something totally different. We were picking people 19 and under. We were picking only 20 people. And so, in my purview, yeah, when we have our own restrictions of not just looking for great people, but looking for very specific types working with young people. YC can take anybody they want. We were looking for something quite unique and different. So, I think the outcomes are even more incredible given those creative constraints we had on our program.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And so, what is the- you said that it's a two-year program with a 10-year outcome, over a 10-year outcome?
Danielle Strachman: I used to say, and I would say this to the Thiel Fellows, like working with them in the program, this is a two-year program with a 10-year timeline. Because sometimes people, I remember when we got to the end of the first two-year batch, and people like Laura Deming, Paul Gu who started Upstart, Nick Cammarata, all these folks, and people were like, are we going to do a demo day or this or that? I was not into that. I was like, this is not about- we want to celebrate what's been done here, but really this is still the beginning. This is still the beginning of a very long trajectory. And that intuition was dead on. Like I said, Dylan had his IPO just a couple months ago, and that was 12 years in the making. And that's on par for an average IPO as well. So yeah, it's interesting to have something that we've worked on go from being literally shamed, and not just the program. This is one of the things that shocked me the most, especially at the time, was people were publicly attacking individual Thiel Fellows. It wasn't just, hey, the Thiel Foundation is doing this, rah-rah, we don't like it, or Peter's saying this. It was attacking people like Dale Stephens very publicly, people like Andrew Hsu, who's a multiple-time startup founder now, as 18- and 19-year-olds. And what I want to say to those people now is, shame on you. How dare you attack young people who want to make a really, really big difference, and now we can see have done that over time. So that was the most shocking thing of all. But now, it feels a little bit like this overnight success 15 years in the making narrative, where people are kind of waking up and seeing, hey, wow, this program has an outsized impact. And not just like comparing it to YC and things like that, but also culturally changing the narrative. The term higher education bubble was not coined by Peter, but he popularized it. And I remember in one of our reports that after the first year, I was like kind of trying to look for any data of like, yes, I keep saying this is a two-year program with a 10 year timeline, but I also want to try to start showing what's actually happening. And I looked at what are the Google searches for higher ed bubble. And it was interesting. I don't remember the exact number, but it like skyrocketed. It went from being like a flat Google search term to really, really sharp really quickly. And what I noticed over time too is that, eventually, that term got unbundled from Peter, which means it's getting into the common vernacular. So people were just like, oh yeah, higher ed bubble, and not like, oh, Peter Thiel's talking about this thing. And then seeing it just normalized in families and people writing in to us, hey, my mom told me about this program. In fact, we just got an email through our 1517 contact form, and we always ask like, how'd you hear about us? And this teenager wrote in and said, oh, my mom told me to come check this out, and I'm like, yeah, that's amazing. And we're also seeing this on the college level too, actually. We have a teen camp we run, and one of our teen campers is doing a gap year right now. And the school that he applied and got into and may or may not go to, he's doing a deferral. He's doing a gap year this year to actually work at a tech startup in San Francisco. We helped him negotiate and think about, hey, how do you think about that process, really fun to do that. And on his- Apparently, his college now has a box for like, are you going to take a gap year? It's interesting to see that it's so common now that schools have to prep for it. I'm still very confused about why four-year institutions have not changed their ways and been like, maybe we should speed things up. Maybe there should be a two-year degree or maybe we should offer some sort of unbundled, hey, you want freshman year and that's all you want experience or something like that. But at least we've gotten to the point where they put a checkbox on there. It reminds me a lot of I've worked in education and alternative education for a long time, and I also worked in neurology at one point in my career, and the thing that always astounded me was that I'd be reading interesting papers about learning and cognition on the neurology side, and it took about 10 years for those things to actually downstream go into the classroom. And I feel like it's kind of the same with these things. It takes a lot of time for these systems to change. People talk about systems like a boat. It's like the larger the boat, the harder it is to turn it. But I'm still surprised that it's like, okay, we got the check box, we're taking a gap year, but we haven't gotten the actual systemic on the college side change. But families and young people are making those changes themselves.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So many of those institutions don't change until they're forced to, or they follow the physics rule of physics advances one death at a time, even more slowly. People don't update. People don't change their mind. They just get replaced eventually. It's very few people that can update in a dynamic environment, especially, I think, in a slow-moving institution like a school. Part of the magic of what Peter and you and Michael identified 15 years ago is there were hints at it. The theory... Reading Michael's book, Paper Belt on Fire, like all of the trends that you identified in terms of like higher education getting more expensive, the outcomes getting worse, being suitable for fewer people, they're not innovating, they're not updating, all of those have gotten worse, massively worse over the intervening decade. And so, the things like the Thiel Fellowship and others that it sort of inspired just become more and more and more popular as they should be.
Danielle Strachman: Well, and what's interesting to me is I'm really big on fellowship programs in general now. And when we were running the Thiel Fellowship, there weren't other fellowships for young people. They just didn't exist. There were fellowships, they were usually for postdocs, but you didn't get something early in your career or early in your adult life. And now, it's so amazing to see things like OSV and 776 and the Magnificent grants and all this. I'm like a resource library and I keep a spreadsheet of all these different grants. I'm sending it out to people all the time, and we actually do an event now called the Renaissance Reimagined because I really believe where a lot of this early R&D and creative thinking and stuff that has a lot of friction because of views, or this sounds terrible, not enough people have died in physics yet, or whatever it may be. I think those are the places that are going to really support some of these new changes. So we gather those leaders together every two years. And then we also do like this cross-pollination of fellowship communities. And it's been really fun. But it's really cool to see that grow because it went from we were the only game in town, which made me sad. I was like, man, I want more resources out there for young people. And now the resources are here.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, it must have been heartbreak to choose 20 people out of whatever, thousands or tens of thousands that you met of worthy applicants that you just like...
Danielle Strachman: Absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of times, like my sort of no responses, especially at the finalist round, where we just have so many spots, like this is kind of where we're at. What was interesting is we would keep in touch with the applicant pool. We had applicant events, and we do this with 1517 too. Community building is something that scales. Can we write a check to everybody? No. But can they come to an event and meet potential collaborators and mentors and peers who really get it? Absolutely. And it's been interesting to see as well young people engaging on that level and wanting and needing that. And what we see in today's age, which is interesting since COVID, is what we hear is, I don't get to meet- what we used to hear in the past was, I don't get to meet other young people like me. And what we hear now is, I don't get to meet other young people like me in person. There's so much that's been brought online. And for these institutions, it's cheaper for them to run it this way, and less liability, and less everything, less dynamic-ness. But we do a lot of that for our community, not just our founders.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm curious... this is going way back to like the seeds of this thing, but what does it look like when Peter Thiel starts something? You said Peter Thiel started it, but I have the sense that it was actually mostly like him setting the starting conditions or being the public face or having the germ of the idea. Like what did those early formation stages of the Thiel Fellowship look like?
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, it was really exciting because I had worked with homeschoolers before the fellowship and I also started a charter school in San Diego called Innovations Academy, still running today, 17 years running, and we serve 450 students a year. When you run and operate a charter school and you start a charter school, there's all this operations work you have to do to get it off the ground. We had to write a 400 page thesis, basically, and petition the district, and you have to do pilots, and all that stuff. So this is the mindset that I'm in of how you build something. And I had seen Peter's interview with Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch Disrupt about the fellowship. And every now and again, I go back and watch it, actually, because it's just fascinating, because he's talking about the fellowship in the present tense. The application is up. We have this. We have mentors. When I watched that, my assumption was like, oh, well, they must be operators and they must have all the things that they need because that's the way that I would do it. Less than 24 hours later, I got a phone call from this woman, Lindy Fishburne, and her exact words to me were, Danielle, the foundation has lost their minds. We're starting our first in-house program, and we have nobody running it. I was like, what? How does that work? That was unbelievable to me... You could just do that as a big public figure. I loved it. I loved that it was just like, wow, this is nimble and creative and they're just going for it.
Eric Jorgenson: We build the front door of the house and then build the rest of the house as people walk up to the front door.
Danielle Strachman: That's a great description. That is a great description. I interviewed the next week to come on board, and then the week after that, I did come on board. And a lot of it, too, we were building with the Thiel Fellows of like, hey, what does a retreat for this type of person look like? What do they want in terms of community building? We didn't know that so, like almost all of them moved to the Bay Area when they got the fellowship, but we didn't have a requirement about being in the Bay or doing reviews in person. Like, we would have events that people could fly in for, but there was not a requirement on location. And then all of them came to the area. Some of them were just getting an apartment wherever they could. I remember a couple of them got apartments in the Tenderloin, and I was like, oh my God, that's a bad neighborhood. We got to get you somewhere else. And then in subsequent years, we actually partnered with people to do co-living houses for them. And then we would finance it for the summer. We would typically take a batch at the beginning of the summer, have them live in this house together, for those who wanted to. We're very sort of choice-based in how we do things. And oftentimes, they would take over the lease. And actually, there's a house called Mission Control that has gone in and out and through the Thiel Fellowship and Thiel Fellowship friend-adjacent communities. And right now, it's kind of back to being like a maker sort of startup house, which is really cool. And I'm in touch with the person who's leading it now. And it's cool to see that that house has been like in the family for probably like 13 years at this point, which is really, really cool. And so, yeah, for me, it was really amazing to come in. And what I didn't want was someone to tell me like, well, here's what it's going to be. Here's the dream. Here's everything we want and we just want you to manage it. I was like, I build things. I want to embed homeschooling philosophy into this. I want to embed unconference vibes in the events we do. I have a whole thing I want to do. What was great was there was that pure openness to do that. What there wasn't that a lot of organizations do, there wasn't a lot of like, hey, we have to prove that this is working within the first year, even within the second year. Like I said, I was writing up these reports. I wasn't even really being asked to write these reports. I was just like, I just feel like I should be documenting some things. This seems like a good thing to do. In fact, I should go back and find some of those, be like, wow, what did I put in those reports? I remember looking for that search term, higher ed bubble, and seeing what happens there. But now I've got an itch to scratch. I'm like, let me go back and see, what was I putting in those reports? But that freedom was really, really important on our team to be able to be nimble and choose to do things how and when we would do them and iterate on the program, iterate on the application. Yeah, it was great.
Eric Jorgenson: So, speaking of the application, I feel like so deeply curious, and I'm sure this is hours of conversation and years of intuition, but what makes a Thiel fellow? Like, I feel like that was one of my favorite chapters of Michael's book. Like, what are the traits, what are the patterns that you see? I think it's something that you are an absolute world expert in is like seeing these unbelievable people at their earliest stages and pattern-recognizing and nurturing them and bringing them along. If we could deep dive on that a little bit, I think that'd be fun.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that comes to mind now, one thing that's been beautiful about the book is we're getting some of our lexicon out into the broader ecosystem. I'll talk about some of those things, but we also have new lexicon, where it's like, okay, we've got some new phrases, new things, and we're always thinking about this. We're always jamming on certain ideas. Like one new lexicon piece is dog-on-a-leash energy. This is not in the book. This has come up in the last year, year and a half, something like that. And it's this energetic sense you have of someone, that they're a dog on a leash. And a dog who's pulling on a leash doesn't need more food put down in front of it, doesn't need more water, doesn't need a longer leash. What they need is to be cut. So that is our job, both at 1517 and in the past with the Thiel Fellowship, of we're here to cut the leash for you. We're here to set you free and see what you can do with all that energy that you're pushing with. And I think it's something too that's coming to mind around a dog who's pulling on a leash is not compliant. Maybe they're not fully untrainable, but it's like, okay, they're not going to bow down to the system. And I feel like a lot of the people we work with are the same, where they've kind of seen- they've sort of either looked at systems sometimes from the interior, but sometimes from the exterior and seen like, okay, it's barren in there. That's not where I want to be. And so are like making a pretty different choice for themselves. So another word that comes to mind a lot for us these days is mutant. Like, these people are kind of mutants. Like, they don't fit in your typical system. They have weird outside hobbies. You ask them about their childhood and you get, again, weird stories, a lot of stuff around almost blowing up the house level things. And then a couple that are in the book, one is a trait that we've just loved and loved and loved. And in fact, I took a group of high schoolers to the Gundo to get the inside scoop on a bunch of startups there. And so many of the founders, it's funny, I didn't prep them on this at all. I wasn’t like, hey, we want these messages for these high schoolers. But they gave some great messages and a lot of the places we went to were very heavy engineering focused. One group, Vukasan, who's making a new 3D metal printer, Augustus from Rainmaker, he actually had one of his employees, his hire number four, give us a tour because he's halfway across the world somewhere right now doing stuff. But what people were talking about multiple times at our tour were it's not enough to be a geek. You have to be a geek who can articulate really well to anybody, where you can talk to your grandma at Thanksgiving about what you do, where you can talk to anybody, and you can geek out with the geekiest geek. And we call this hyperfluency at 1517. And we didn't coin this term when we were at the foundation. It really took, Michael when he was writing that book, it was only maybe a year or two before that, that we sat down and we were like we need to write our own lexicon. And so we were intuiting these things, we were getting pattern recognition for these things, but we hadn't named them. And there's nothing like listening to someone who's super passionate about what they do, and they can explain it to you. And you're like, hold on, time out, back the bus up, like let's talk more about your ideas in physics, but yeah, talk to us like we are dumb Labrador retrievers, and not in a condescending way, can actually relate. There's that social-emotional intelligence piece of just being able to explain things to people. So that's a trait that we have found to be very important. And the Thiel Fellows we worked with had that trait in spades where they could really, really explain and articulate in a beautiful way. Part of it might be some of our own bias. I used to be a teacher, Michael was gearing up to teach as well, and so we definitely have a bias towards people who can teach and explain things, and there seems to be something to that. Lastly, I'll say another trait that became very clear pretty early on in the fellowship days, like probably, I mean, when I say early on, I mean in like year three, was the people we work with are insatiably curious. And not just about their area, they're just like inherently curious people. They're like, they are people who have somehow been able to keep that inner five-year-old of asking why and being curious. I remember when we first were getting to know Vitalik Buterin, I was really blown away. I was like, wow, this guy, he's not just curious. I used to work in intelligence and cognitive testing and stuff, so I have more of a grip on what does it look like to be a standard deviation or two or three out on something in the visceral sense of I'm working with someone, this person looks like they have an IQ of 130. This is what that's like and not just a number. And what we used to say about Vitalik was that he is definitely at least two standard deviations out on curiosity, which actually puts you pretty far out on the edge of the bell curve. And I would think of my own experiences previous to knowing Vitalik and think about cousins I have who are 20 years younger than me, and I was like, they're curious, but they're not like this. This is a mutant. This is a whole other beast. And when we got to know people like that and see it, then you can spot it in other people, because you actually have a comparison. If you think about color, you're like, okay, this color red is saturated in this way, and this other color red is saturated in this way. But you've got to spend time with both of those reds to get it. And you can't just theorize about, well, this red is going to be deeper in this way. I think there's something about the visceral experience of it that has really mattered over time.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And you have this really interesting experience of like, I like the quote, you can only conceive of the level of excellence you've experienced. And so, as you are sort of iteratively marching through like the top 1% and then the 10th of a percent, 100th of a percent, 1000th of a percent of like the most talented teenagers in the country, if not the world, you do start to see that thing of like, wow, our bar just keeps moving. It's so much higher than you ever thought it could be.
Danielle Strachman: And I think the best is yet to come. With the fellowship, I was like two-year program, 10-year timeline. I feel like that same way 15 years in where I'm like, I love everybody we've worked with. Thiel Fellows, 1517ers have done some incredible, incredible things. And like the best is definitely yet to come because younger and younger people are working on harder and harder problems and getting to the frontier of knowledge. And I get to see this every day, and I'm getting to see what it looks like for them to be like in there working on it right now. And I'm super curious, like what will those outcomes be in like seven years from now? And then other people will be like, wow, holy moly, this person has a decacorn, and they're doing crazy, amazing things, and they're only 25. How does that happen? It'll be like, oh, well, those seeds were planted when they were 13, 15, 16 years old, and that's when we got to know them.
Eric Jorgenson: There's so many trends driving that actually. If you think the level of interconnectivity of the world is still going up, the greatest generation of founders are accomplishing more younger, which enables the next generation to dream bigger at a younger level. We're reaching more people on Earth. The Thiel Fellowship itself is becoming known to more and more people, and there are more of them, which means there's more signposts towards it. I find it interesting in tech generally, how often we are only a few percent into something that might be around for 100 years. You don't get to assume that it will be, but what if YC is going to be 20 years or 200 years? What if 1517, Thiel Fellowship are going to be hundreds of years long programs? What does that look like in another century? It's a really wild thing.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, absolutely. One thing, what we're really seeing is with young people having access to things like LLMs and things like that, extreme knowledge and competence coming earlier, really, really extreme. It just makes me really excited. Sometimes people ask us, what do we want to be doing in 15 years? I've been telling people, and I mean it, but I say it in a tongue-in-cheek way, I want to be funding 11-year-olds because some of them are going to be ready. The world's not going to be ready, but I'm going to be ready.
Eric Jorgenson: The history of genius is often that it happens really young, like the old Beethoven story about writing symphonies at 11.
Danielle Strachman: Oh, I know.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm sure you tell that story all the time. It's a narrative violation to the all people are equal if given equal opportunities, but I think this is Peter's superpower. It's like seeing the world for what it is and aligning with it.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, definitely. And it's funny, I even, speaking of the like, hey, some people are geniuses thing, like my own contrarian take on this is that all children before the age of five are geniuses. Like, I've never talked to a five-year-old that I've thought like, oh, man, not very much horsepower there. And I really think it's a lot of our systems that squash people. And I do think there are individual differences as well. But I think those systems squash people way, way more than people recognize. And it's detrimental to these people's futures. And it's just so painful to think about it.
Eric Jorgenson: This is a perfect segue because I just had my first child two months ago. And so, I am already having an existential crisis about the education system and what the things are. And so, I know you can't reverse engineer a Thiel Fellowship, but you've seen so many unique people and so many interesting things. You have a background in homeschooling and education... What do you think is the essential ingredients of an upbringing of an education that doesn't squash the genius out of the five-year-old?
Danielle Strachman: Absolutely. I think a lot starts at home. I think a lot starts with having parents who are connected and attuned and who are curious, who bring that curiosity out of their children, who don't squash the curiosity in their children when their children are being curious, who can take the lens of being child-led. I'll never forget, in my early 20s, I was nannying and tutoring, and I took this little girl, Jenna, who I still know. She's in her 20s now, probably mid-20s. I'm like, whoa, time is flying. But I took her on a walk in her neighborhood, and I let her direct the walk. And I remember we ended up sitting at this set of steps, and there were stones embedded in the steps. And we just sat there for a half hour, and she's touching them and looking at them and just was intrigued. And it was like, yeah, let's do what she wants to do right now, not what I think. And we weren't doing baby Mozart or flashcards or anything like that. It was like, let's just keep following her interest. So, I think a lot starts in the home, including things like, have you set up the environment so that the child can have agency in the home? If the child is old enough to be able to pour their own water into a cup, is there a water container low enough so they can do it themselves and they don't have to ask? Are books on a shelf that they can reach? And is the environment set up? And a lot of this also goes into Montessori theory. I read Montessori 25 years ago, and I've been doing a reread, and it's amazing. She has just the deepest reverence for the human experience, and she's really channeled and funneled that into children because I think children are kind of like the purest expression of being human because they haven't necessarily touched all these systems that kind of squash everything. And so a lot of people get into like, oh, well, you got to buy these blocks and you've got to have a thing to sweep with. And it's like not about that. Like what it's about is like that respect and that reverence and thinking about is this environment set up for this child to be doing exploration, for them to have access to real materials, for them not to always have to ask for things. All of these things are great. And then I just have to throw in a plug for reading. Reading to children is amazing. It is one of the most well-researched outcome-based things you can do is read to your child very, very early. And children pick up language so seamlessly. They're such little sponges. So, I also tell people, don't dumb down your language for children. Use your language. And children always ask, hey, what's that? What does that word mean? Oh, okay. And I do this with my godchildren all the time. In fact, sometimes I try to go higher with my vocabulary, because I'm always like, teachable moment, they're going to ask me what this word means. This came up the other day, and now I'm like, oh, what was that word? I don't even remember. But yeah, all these things, I think, add up. And lastly, I'll say, we did poll Thiel Fellows early on because the educator in me was like, I got to know what school was like for these people. I'd say certainly a majority of fellows had spent some amount of time in what would be considered alternative education. That might be Montessori, that might be being homeschooled, and sometimes it would just be for a six-month period or a year, but they had had a taste of something different. And the end on that study, if you will, that observational study was low. I think we did it in the first three batches of fellows, so probably something like 60 people. But it was really interesting. Lots of Montessori, lots of homeschooling. And some people would argue that, well, you look at those populations, you get two-parent households who are more engaged and things like that. I can't deny it. I think that a lot does start in the home. But that said, I don't think- I grew up in a single-parent household. My mom is very curious and inquisitive and ran a wood shop in the basement. We were always building and making stuff. She was like, all right, I'm going to do this the way I know how to do it, and got to grow up in that environment. I think these things can be implemented and it doesn't have to be like home life has to look perfect all the time.
Eric Jorgenson: When you say reading Montessori, do you mean reading the works of Maria Montessori herself?
Danielle Strachman: Oh, the works of Montessori. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Absorbent Mind is incredible. That's where I tell people to start. What's crazy to me is this reread period. When I first read her, what I picked up on was this reverence, this very deep reverence that she has for children and therefore the human experience. But when I've been doing a reread, there's like all these undercurrents about higher ed in there, and some of them are overcurrents. I'm like, oh my gosh, I wonder how much I was memed out by Montessori and had no idea and that that would influence later how I thought about things. So, it's been really funny to go back and be like, whoa, themes are popping out that I didn't even recognize in this book the first time because I was focused on child development and K-12 and things like that.
Eric Jorgenson: It's the Steve Jobs, like trust your intuition, it already knows what you want to become.
Danielle Strachman: No, definitely. I want to add one more thing while we're talking... The last thing I'll add, and I say this as my godchildren live next door to me. I get to be auntie. I'm not a full-time parent. So, this one's a tough one. But I'm really mindful about my screen time in front of my godchildren. I'm very mindful of that phone is going to stay in my pocket. What I don't want is them picking up on that this cube is the most interesting thing in the room right now. And someone on Twitter said something that I think is absolutely brilliant. They said, big screens good, small screens bad. And I've had this in my mind now for months. And in fact, we just had a larger camp for 1517 called 1517 Unplugged, and we got a huge screen and speakers, and we showed Ratatouille and Ghostbusters. And it was so fun to watch these movies, like really big, outside with people and then have discussions and talk about it, and it would sort of permeate throughout. And this whole like big screens good, because you're like interacting and you can walk away from it, and small screens bad, I think there's really something to this.
Eric Jorgenson: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, a big screen is sort of, the bigger it is, the more social of an experience it is...
Danielle Strachman: And you're not holding it, and your body's not encompassing it. I see this with my godchildren. They've got a big TV in the playroom, but they're like, yeah, they're like building blocks on the floor and doing something else while they're also doing it. And it's interesting to see.
Eric Jorgenson: ...Since the front facing camera and face ID, it's actually become, like competes for your attention in a way that it didn't when it was a device. It will not unlock without eye contact. Once you're looking at it, you're dialed into it and the dopamine loop is going and it just interrupts the social pattern in such an interesting pernicious way. If you're sitting there next to a two-year-old or a three-year-old, they don't understand what's happening. They just know that you're not paying attention to them.
Danielle Strachman: Absolutely. And there's a study that just came out. I haven't dug into the actual study, so it'd be interesting to see how did they screen for this. But it turns out, and this makes so much sense to me, having a phone in your pocket or on the table, part of your attentional power is still on what's going on with that device. And they're finding, I mean, if you put it in a different room, it makes a cognitive difference to how you do things. And so even things, I mean, I think about this. We had a dinner with founders recently, and nobody put their phones on the table. But if they did, I was going to be like, everyone needs to put their phone at least in your pocket. Like we're not having phones at the table during family dinner with 1517. Like we're not doing it. The habits, and habits die really, really hard. But if you start doing it, you got to start a habit like that day. I think these things are just super important, especially around children.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Is there anything that you are recommending to families specifically that you direct for your godchildren or wish for your godchildren, those that you’re closest to?
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of it to me is about quality time. It can be about having a really good conversation. It can be about building something together, playing a game. One of my favorite memories with my oldest godchild is, I think she was, I don't know if she was three or four, somewhere in there, we started playing tic-tac-toe together and I got to be the first person to show her what tic-tac-toe was. What was amazing to me, especially as an educator, was to see her jumps, her cognitive jumps on tic-tac-toe. There were some times where she'd be like, boop, I beat you, and I was like, oh my God, you did. Holy moly, that's incredible. I was not anticipating that. But yeah, just really, really amazing to see that. And just engaging with them on what their interests are. What I'm actually really excited about is to integrate this in more. The family has been talking to the oldest that probably when she's about 10, she'll be able to homeschool. I'm like, cool, she can come with me to meetings. And already I have founders over at my house all the time. She's always asking them questions about science. I love getting that going. And actually, it's been funny. We've had some of our... I'll do a barbecue with our community members and people will come over and will vie for the children's attention. They'll be like, oh, she seems most interested in this person and I want to talk to her about rockets and she's super into space. I really want to talk to her. I'm like, you'll have your chance to talk to Sorka. It's going to happen. We're going to make sure you guys get to talk about rockets. It's wonderful. I think that one of the things I'm able to bring to the table for them is this highly saturated environment and community and bringing people around them who are working on crazy things. This is why I did the the field trip day with the Hawthorne El Segundo high schoolers, it was like, I want them to see the inside of these companies. One company was two people. Another one was probably, I don't know, 25, something like that, and they were busting at the seams. It's just like, oh my gosh, people are packed in here doing their thing. The energy is really infectious, and I want them to see that that's something you can do. If you're someone who's in engineering in Southern California, you don't have to just go necessarily work in defense or at one of the primes. You can do something else.
Eric Jorgenson: One of the traits that was sort of listed in this way, I think there were like eight or ten, was emotional depth and resilience, which is a really interesting one for a 17, 18, 20 year old to have. And I'm curious what the markers of that are, but also where does it come from at that age? Do you see... how often are you meeting parents? Where do you see patterns there?
Danielle Strachman: Interesting. A lot of this, I think, comes out in their storytelling the most. I had a call with a younger founder recently, and she really opened the kimono. Her and I had never talked before, and she told me about a lot of experiences in her life that were just hard, really, really challenging. But the thing that really came through was that she's doing her thing, not in the like, I have a chip on my shoulder and I'm going to prove other people wrong because these bad things have happened, but more in the like, and I kept hope this whole time, and I know that I'm aligning myself in this positive path, and that's why I have to do what I'm doing, so that other people don't have to experience things like I did. And it's like, wow. Like that is heartbreaking on one end and also shows that resiliency of like, wow, this person being able to keep a positive forward thinking, I can do something about this attitude in the face of just absolute trauma, I mean, I was just blown away. I felt so honored talking to her and that she would also share these things with me. And so, yeah, I think we have become very trusted mentors and advisors to people. I've always been this way where a random person behind me in the supermarket is like, let me tell you my deepest, darkest thing. I'm like, why is this happening? I'm really good with people's secrets. I very much pride myself with putting those secrets in an internal apothecary cabinet and just being like, okay, I'm going to keep this close for you and somehow people pick up on that. So yeah, I don't know why people tell me these things, but they do. When I think about the NVIDIA story, Jensen tells these incredible stories of hardship. He just went to Stanford and gave this great talk about, you all haven't suffered enough. Every time I hear him talk, I'm like, I love you. You're amazing. I think those messages are really, really important. We've seen some of those things come out. Now, sometimes it's not in the super traumatic, wow, holy moly, obviously do not wish this on people category. But sometimes it's also resilience. People told me it wasn't possible to do X in physics, and I just kept going, and going, and going, and going, and there was that two standard deviations out on curiosity and this super drive of like I am going to bring this to fruition. And I think about someone like Austin Russell with Luminar, and he just, I mean, even in the fellowship, he had fellows who were like, this isn't possible, it's not possible to build what he's talking about, there's no way it's going to happen. It was just like, whatever, I'm just going to keep... you can say what you want, I'm just going to keep doing it. And I don't think it was like arrogance, like, oh, it's going to work. I think it was more like, I'm going to find out. And I think that drive to find out also has that resiliency piece, because most people, that finding out process leads you to lots of failure. Well, it didn't work this time, it didn't work the next time, didn't work the time after that, but oh, okay, maybe the 12th time it worked. And there's the whole Edison light bulb, however many, I don't remember the exact number, but it's like, okay, on the, I think it was, I don't know if it was in the hundreds category or what or more, but it was like, it took that many iterations to do it. And that's resilience too.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, almost a thousand. And James Dyson's story is 5,000 prototypes.
Danielle Strachman: That sounds ridiculous to say, but it's like, as ridiculous as it is to say, that's it.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, it's an interesting- it's almost like the Stockdale paradox of like, I'm not attached to any one of these ideas or theories working, but I am going to keep trying different theories until I die because just this quest is worth it.
Danielle Strachman: And going back to kind of what we were talking about with child development, what dawns on me, too, is like I think for a lot of these people, this is a playful process. This isn't necessarily, especially maybe not, so at the beginning, I don't think it feels like work. I don't think it feels like a chore. I think it probably feels like play to them and they're tapped into that. When a child is deep in play, they just keep playing. Maybe there's a roadblock or something that stops them, but they just keep going. I think part of that is at play here. It's like, okay, these inventor types who are just like really hungry to satiate this itch, I think it's really playful.
Eric Jorgenson: Does that get to the, this is another, sustaining motivation?
Danielle Strachman: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the sustaining motivation is a huge trait that we look for. And usually this goes back into narrative and story. And sometimes it's this like, I've had this itch to scratch forever or something like that. And sometimes it's very personal. We have a founder who has an autoimmune disease, and he is working on a cure for type 2 diabetes. And then he's looking to purpose that platform to cure other disease. And it comes from a really deep personal place for him. And part of that deep personal place, he gave a great talk at our event we just had, he's like, I am really viscerally in touch that I only have at least this one visceral life. And he's a spiritual person, so he may be like, all right, the kingdom of heaven is waiting for me, and I'm good for that too, but he also knows this visceral piece of it, this is this chapter. And he has almost died multiple times. He had sepsis at one point while we worked with him, and I was just like, oh my God, if we lose this guy, one, losing him, it's going to kill me. But losing his contribution to the world is going to harm other people. And it's just heart-wrenching to think about. And he keeps that feeling close to him and it keeps him going of like, well, I'm doing this because this is my shot. And he's going to make as big a shot as possible. And someone asked him, he runs a company called Stark Therapeutics, someone asked like, oh, well, what do you do when you're not feeling motivated? And he's like, I am not the guy to ask this. He's like, because I don't- he's like, I may be insane, but I just don't have that experience. Like I'm just so laser focused. I'm not like, oh, I'd rather be doing something else. This is the only thing he wants to do.
Eric Jorgenson: This one's going to require a little definition. I don't know if what you were describing is this or not. The alpha gamma tense of brilliance. That's some of your high level grammar that I need you to talk to me like I'm a dog.
Danielle Strachman: That one I haven't used in a long time. I'm like, what was Michael getting at with that one? What I can talk about that might be related, and I'm going to have to be like, oh, Michael, I’ve got to go back and read your chapter, because we haven't...
Eric Jorgenson: My recollection of it is, because I've read this like within the last couple of weeks, is that they are just like two surprisingly contrasting traits, like the tense of brilliance of like someone who's really emotional and really technical or something like that. But I could be oversimplifying to its detriment.
Danielle Strachman: Okay, there's something else that was coming to mind when you were saying that that might serve as a good example. So one of the things, and I don't remember if Michael coined this in the book, that I think touches on this is a trait we call crazy, crazy awesome, which is like we can't tell if the person is crazy or crazy awesome when we meet them or when we make the investment. I think people think like, oh, you must have figured out that they're crazy awesome and then you wrote them the check. We're like, no, the jury's out. It's going to take literal years to figure out if they're crazy or crazy awesome in this like particular domain. And what we've noticed is that trait tends to translate other places. So, we were talking with someone who's working, I'll just keep at a high level, he's working on a quantum physics play in something. At the beginning, this is crazy to me. Our team is on a Zoom call with this guy, and he's clearly in a hotel room and his cats are in the hotel room. I was like, wow, your cats are in the hotel room. Cool. We love rabbit holes at 1517. We're like, anything that's distracting or weird, we're going to ask you about it. I was like, wow, wait, are you traveling with your cats? And he's like, yeah, I have these two cats. I travel with them. And we were like, okay, wow, that's already weird. He's starting to hit the crazy, crazy awesome meter just on that. And then he starts talking to us about how he believes some of these quantum theories about how animals can tell when you're going to come home, even though it’s at a totally different time because you've shared some atom, or neutron, or electron, and that's how they felt.
Eric Jorgenson: You are entangled with your pets.
Danielle Strachman: They are entangled with you, yeah. I was like, I love this guy. The fact that he's willing to share this with us, so that's that sort of like openness that we look for, and that it's clear he really believes this, and he might be right. And he's also doing all this work in quantum. It's like, all right, this guy is hitting our crazy, crazy awesome vibe like a million times. And we love that. And sometimes what's interesting is that people end up being like crazy awesome in one area, and then their views on something else were just like, wow, they're batshit crazy. But we find that polarization to be a good thing. Where it's like, okay, if someone has really radical views in one area, are they just going to compartmentalize it to that? Probably not. This is also why these people get rejected from systems and also just why they leave these systems is they're like, oh, it wasn't okay for me to talk about X, Y, or Z in my class or in my grad program. Even though I have these really brilliant ideas in this area, I can't question the authorities about this other thing over here, so I'm just viewed as crazy now.
Eric Jorgenson: It's kind of an interesting question of which comes first, the student rejecting the institution or the institution rejecting the student.
Danielle Strachman: It's a great question. Yeah, it's a great question.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm sure you've got examples of both, those people that don't drop out until they get the fellowship and some that would never have gone to college under any circumstances regardless.
Danielle Strachman: No, totally. Like I think about Josie Zayner with the Embryo Corporation, she went all the way through her PhD and was like, yo, homies, this institution is not the best for all these reasons. And now she's doing really radical work. But she went all the way through.
Eric Jorgenson: And if you've talked to Josie at all or followed her even, you know that like it's pretty surprising that she made it that far.
Danielle Strachman: I concur. I need to talk to her more about like how was that? What was the pain and suffering like? How much did you feel like you had to swallow yourself? Because like in my view, at like the- I mean, outside of at the top level being a soul, I think Josie is such an amazing soul, I think Josie is an artist and a provocateur, and it happens to be that the medium she's using right now is biology. And I'm like, wow, how do you fit yourself in some of these boxes? And master contortionist while also being self-expressed. I don't know exactly how that worked or works for her because she also is butting up against the establishment and is working to also be taken seriously in some sense by it, because she's not an army of one. She has a team. Some of those people have also come all the way through the institution. Some of those people probably even thought they liked it. Now they're working in a crazy lab in Austin.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Josie's one of a few. It's funny how the sort of like-minds attract in the Silicon Valley world through this purely organic thing. And so just looking through their portfolios, I've invested in more Thiel Fellows than I thought or more people in the 1517 orbit than I thought. And then like, of course, it makes total sense philosophically that like we end up in such a similar place and look for similar things in founders. And Josie is one, Marathon Fusion is the other one that like...
Danielle Strachman: Oh, of course. My God... Adam. And they have crazy stories. Like, Adam has this crazy story of hiking a mountain and like you're not supposed to go past a certain point at night because you're going to get trapped up there, basically. And he did and ended up with this crazy, crazy excursion. I'm like, okay, I'm glad you didn't die. And on all accounts, from the outside, he looks like a very mild-mannered, maybe not straight-laced, but mild-mannered, like okay, no, I do my physics, like I do my thing. And then you get into these stories, and you're like, oh my God, this guy's willing to do some risky, risky stuff, like wild.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And that's a good example of the thing you mentioned before, which is just high variance. Like I don't have the ability to diligence whether your theoretical fusion engineering project is going to work. And like a lot of investors I talk to are like I can't, I pass because I can't diligence it. It's like the diligence, this thing has never been built before. The diligence is the company.
Danielle Strachman: I know. And that's what we talk about, too. Like for us, one, when someone hits our crazy, crazy awesome vibe, we're like, that's a great starter, number one. And two, we will have people speak to people in the area who are maybe adjacent or experts in their field. And the question isn't, is this going to work? It's just, does this person know their stuff? Like, can you go out for a beer and talk about physics and you're like, oh wow, this person can jam here? That's what we're looking for. Because if it could have already been done, it would have been done. And luckily, we've also built a group of people around us, I use the word wily a lot. We've collected lots of wily people. And so, they're not going in with like, well, here's exactly why this, yeah, this thing isn't going to work, because that's not really what the diligence is for. That's what the money is for. Like oftentimes, the way I think about our deep tech investing is, is this money well spent to find out the answers to these questions? And if the answer is yes, especially on our very early checks, like our 100k check, let's go. Let's do it.
Eric Jorgenson: And it should be the role of a pioneering founder or financier to be like, if the answer to can this thing be built with $100,000 is no, that's a useful thing for humanity. Like we're running the thousand trials of Edison, in a thousand different ways with a thousand different founders as an ecosystem. And that's a really powerful and important thing to keep moving forward. I wanted to ask what the... about wily or cunning or crafty, or is there even a word for it in English, like that was actually the number one trait of the Thiel fellow, at least as written in the book. And it is also similar to YC’s relentlessly resourceful. But I think just like that mix of refusal to quit and creativity and a little bit of irreverence for the status quo, like that is such a fun collection of traits.
Danielle Strachman: Yep, absolutely. And we used to use the word quirky a lot. And lately, in the last maybe year, I've been using the word wily because wily gets at that like irreverence, like quirky doesn't always get at that irreverent nature. But wily definitely does. The person who's going to buck the system, the one who's going to be self-expressed maybe in their area, but also in other areas. And you're like, oh, wow, like this person has a lot to say. Yeah, we have found that to be a very, very interesting trait. Although it's a funny one because I remember running the first year of the Thiel Fellowship and was talking to an old colleague, Jimmy Caltrater, and we were running programs and getting people together. I'm an East Coaster at heart. I say I'm East Coast on the inside and West Coast on the outside. I grew up in the Boston area where at least when I was growing up, being late was sacrilegious and all this stuff. It's taken me some time to culturally adjust to the West Coast. Sometimes I'd be like, people didn't show up on time today. My colleague would be like, so wait, let me get this right. You selected for a bunch of people who are anti-status quo and want to do something different, but you're upset that they didn't show up at like one o'clock for this event. I’m like, okay, wrong, but I wanted them not to be wily about our stuff. I wanted them to be wily about other stuff. So yeah, some of it has been an adjustment indeed, but we find those character traits endearing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, there's some element of like living in a montage of a zoo of just like all these different things happening at the same time with these like highly creative high agency people. You never really know what's going to happen next. That's a wonderful picture. So, I want to sort of spend a minute towards the end here on 1517. And like the chapter that you're in now, coming out, applying everything that you learned in the Thiel Fellowship to building what is now a fund and a community, but really in the same ethos, I think. But I think 1517 is also a really interesting, powerful application of these ideas that is still very early on a lot of people's radar.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, and I think we are in the early narrative arc of 1517, just like when we left 10 years ago, we were in the early narrative arc of the Thiel Fellowship. And I think within the next five years, Josie's been very kind. I was on a panel with her and she said to the audience, 1517 is the most underrated venture capital firm that there has ever been. I was like, oh, that's really sweet. I think in another five years, people are going to be like, whoa, where'd you guys come from? I'll be like, we've been here for 10 years now. But we very much packaged all the things we're talking about into our firm. We wanted to scale our work with the Thiel Foundation and the fellowship. And we thought the way to do that would be through using venture capital as a tool to back people. So then we could continuously back them over time and back way more of them. So, at this point, we've invested over the last 10 years in 200 companies. The average company has two to three founders. We also will back solo founders. So that's a lot of people that we're working with. That doesn't include our grants that we give. We have a grant program where we'll give a young person, typically in high school, typically working on building something, like literally with their hands, getting on a lab bench, working in electronics, something like that, and we'll give them a thousand bucks. We have a thousand grantees at this point. Some of our portfolio companies have started as grantees with us. Ethan from Mach started as a grantee with us. We gave him a grant to start working on some ideas he had about rifles at his home in Texas, and that has spun out into what has become his defense tech company. We were the first investors into that company with a 100k check. And we're often that first investor in somebody before anybody else will take them seriously. We do angel and pre seed work. And then we also have a thesis breaker. So we noticed over time that lots of very wily scientists were coming to us at 1517. And Michael and I were like, wow, this is really cool stuff but doesn't fit our dropout narrative of being non-degreed and not, when people come to me and they're like, I dropped out of my PhD or I dropped out of Google, I'm like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something a little earlier. But this guy Ben from Atom Computing came to us seven years ago, and he sat down and told us what he was doing with Atom Computing, a quantum computing company. He leaves the meeting, me and Michael turn to each other and we're like, wow, we're totally blown away by this guy. Hyperfluency up the wazoo. He asked us, what level of physics should I start at in this meeting? And we're like, I don't know, high school. About two minutes in, we're like, time out. Let's go to middle school. And then he starts talking again, and a minute later, we're like... We literally said to him, talk to us like we are the dumbest golden Labradors you've ever met. It was the first time we ever used that phrase, and he did. He dumbed it down for us. Actually, what was hilarious is after he left the room, me and Michael tried to explain it back to each other of like, what did we hear here? Then we realized this would make a hilarious outtake podcast of us trying to explain back some very deep technical idea. But we knew we had to write a check. And we said, okay, what would be a thesis break for us? What would make our dropouts proud? And it wouldn't be funding someone who has a PhD doing B2B SaaS. It would be someone who's working on sci-fi tech. And so that sci-fi tech bucket has become a mainstay of what we do at 1517, no matter if someone has a degree or not. But what we're seeing now, and what I'm so passionate about, is the coming together of those two thesis areas, younger and younger people working on sci-fi tech. That's where I'm like, let's go, write the check. Okay, we're ready. Let's find out where they are on the crazy, crazy awesome spectrum by actually working with them and giving them resources to see through their vision.
Eric Jorgenson: ...I'm glad to see that because it's also, in my view, the greatest moral good that venture can do is like push those sci-fi boundaries and drag the impossible into the possible. Like, it's just so, so...
Danielle Strachman: Oh, I love that. I've been using the phrase something impossible to the possible, but I like to drag the impossible into the possible. That's great.
Eric Jorgenson: I just wrote the welcome to my book of collecting all Elon's most useful ideas. So that was like, I feel like his most core skill is dragging the impossible into the possible. The hope for that book is that it creates one million Musks in the next generation. How can we pull out the best parts of him and incept thousands or millions of kids?
Danielle Strachman: When is this book coming out?
Eric Jorgenson: Q1. I'll send you a copy.
Danielle Strachman: All right. Cool. I'm excited. I want our community to read it, when we have events, have it at events. I'm like, this sounds great.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I feel like this is why I have so much fun with these conversations, because I feel like the ethos is identical, just served in different ways. And it's just very, very fun to find allies in the cause, because nobody's doing this for any reason other than to grow the pie and push the frontier. And when you see somebody who's also doing that, you're like, oh my god, how can I help?
Danielle Strachman: No, absolutely. And when we were starting doing sci-fi investing seven years ago, like no one was writing these early stage checks. And so it's really cool just like seeing, hey, there's fellowships now. It's like now there's more people writing sci-fi checks and there's an ecosystem and that ecosystem is what like makes a leverage of support for people to do what they're doing. And yeah, similarly, it gets me very, very excited.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. All right. So as we wrap up here, what is your call to adventure for people? You've got this incredible community around 1517. There's probably a wide variety of people listening to it. Some will have kids that maybe the Thiel Fellowship is relevant to. Some will be potential founders for 1517. What are the on-ramps into your world?
Danielle Strachman: Oh, gosh. Yeah, on ramps are super straightforward. I love when people email me, and I love a good cold email. I even have a pinned tweet that's like, here's how you cold email me. This is what I want to hear from you. I want to hear about you. Send me pictures of your stuff and your cats and whatever you've got. And those emails really stand out. So Danielle@1517fund.com, you can follow me on Twitter, DStrachman. We have our website, 1517fund.com. People have been telling us we have some broken links on there. We've been too busy working with our founders, but we're going to have a new website coming out probably sometime in 2026, so all is not for naught. But those are some places to find us. We've done lots of writing on Substack and Medium, and ideally, the new website actually will tie all of this together. So people are like, ah, I know where to find you now. But those are some ideas.
Eric Jorgenson: And in-person events mostly in the Bay?
Danielle Strachman: I'd say there's like a stronger fraction of them here, but we also do dinners when we travel. We're going to Singapore next week. We do ice cream socials wherever we go. And we're going to do an ice cream social in Singapore. And these types of events, we just love to meet people and have them come. So yeah, just reach out.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and if you're on a campus, keep your eye out. Because I feel like the thing that you guys do best that most people don't bother to do is like go to the campuses, go to the events, go to the hackathons and like meet the people there. You're like scouting for a pro sports team.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah. And we describe it like a sporting analogy a lot. And we want to meet people when they're makers before they're even thinking about founding something. So it's not about interacting with us when you're like, oh, I need a check or I'm ready to build my first startup. We just want to talk to wily weirdos who want to be around other wily weirdos. And then we'll see what happens in the future.
Danielle Strachman: Yeah, there's nothing that a wily weirdo loves more than a community of wily weirdos to hang out with. Like, those pockets are rare and prized. And even just the service that you provide by being a shelling point for everybody to organize around and just like hanging out around your lighthouse is an incredible thing for the community.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, we love what we do.
Eric Jorgenson: All right. Thank you. Thank you for coming here. Thank you for doing what you do. Appreciate it. This has been extremely fun.
Danielle Strachman: Oh, this has been super fun. Thanks for having me today.
Eric Jorgenson: Of course.