A Dropout With Degrees

Editor's Note: Innovative entrepreneurs are just about everywhere in the United States. And this year, the 40 weekly newspapers of Portfolio.com's parent American City Business Journals chronicled some of the most creative business ideas around. Here's an excerpt from one, originally published August 3 in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

Celebrated investor Peter Thiel had a bold premise when he launched his Thiel Fellowship program: pay promising young entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out of school.

Thiel believes college is a waste of time for the true independent thinker. These individuals need to be out starting companies and changing the world, not taking classes.

But in the case of Andrew Hsu that’s not exactly how it happened.

Although Hsu’s company, Airy Labs, was the first to launch out of Thiel’s program, Hsu has not just one college degree, but three.

He graduated from the University of Washington at 16 with bachelors degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry, having started college at 12. In order to join the Thiel Fellows program, he left in his fourth year of a neuroscience PhD at Stanford University.

"I'm in a bit of a weird situation, because I’m actually the only Fellow with college degrees," Hsu said. "It's a really good program, I think it’s the right thing to do. Obviously, there was some controversy about it, but the other fellows are all really amazing people, I love them all."

The company is actively recruiting engineers and game developers to help create educational social games. Hsu is using his understanding of how the brain functions to help children learn.

The Palo Alto, California-based startup aims to make learning fun by creating social games that teach children core learning skills, such as math, reading, and geography, as well as more abstract skills like sportsmanship, teamwork, and ethics. Educational games have tended to get a bad rap, Hsu said, but it's not because the concept is inherently unsound. Rather, it's because they weren't fun.

"The problem today is that educational games suck. They have sucked for the past 20 or 30 years," Hsu said. "So first and foremost you have to create massively popular games, games that kids actually want to play."

Jim O'Neil, who runs the Thiel Foundation, said he was impressed by Hsu's background, but also by his vision. Education is a pressing challenge, and using game mechanics to improve it has a very real potential to change the world for the better, he said.

"His idea for combining neuroscience with videogames to produce something that would be both fun and educational we thought that was awesome." O'Neil said. "It's a combination of independence and courage, and Andrew definitely had that."

To read the full story of Andrew Hsu, click here. And to subscribe to the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, click here.

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Jon Xavier writes for the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.