Each will be given $100,000 to nurture their entrepreneurial dreams.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Four students of Indian origin – three from the US and one straight from India – have been named winners of the Thiel Fellowship, a grant that gives students money to pursue their small business dreams instead of going directly to college after they complete high school.
Shantanu Bala, Aditya Ganesh, Ishaan Gulrajani, and Kaushik Tiwari were all named as 2014 Fellows of the program. The Thiel Fellowship awards $100,000 to each of its recipients, grant money that is paid in monthly installments so that each of its winners can skip or delay going to college in order to focus on their entrepreneurial ventures.
Bala (19) is from Phoenix, Arizona, is “developing a system for using a real-time video and audio feed to convey visual facial expressions and auditory cues using a series of vibrations across a user’s skin,” according to the Thiel Fellowship website. His research could potentially expand the “scope of information that can be extracted and conveyed using digital sensors and haptic actuators.”
Ganesh (17) is from Plano, Texas, is already in college at Stanford University. A student of computer science, he is currently on leave from school so that he can focus on IntentSense, an intelligent bionic glove that can be used by partial hand amputees to mimic a real hand. He is “interested in using machine learning and predictive analytics to personalize bionics and health care in general.”
Gulrajani (19) hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was a student at MIT before leaving the school to get into software development. He founded his own start-up company, which won the Apple Design Award and received the support of Y Combinator, a prestigious American seed accelerator for small businesses.
Finally, Kaushik Tiwari is from New Delhi, and is interested in the healthcare field. He plans to use his Theifl Fellow grant to “create a technology interface that changes the hospital-patient relationship and solves the problems of transparency and efficiency.”
In total, 20 young men and women were selected as Thiel Fellows this year. The fellowship, originally called 20 Under 20, was created by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who has been a big name in the entrepreneurial and angel investment game for several years now.
Applicants must be 19 or younger by December 31 of the year they apply, and commit to the program for two years. They are also encouraged to live in San Francisco during that time, to take advantage of the area’s considerable resources, and are discouraged from getting any monetary support from their families, as the Fellowship says that fewer funds makes entrepreneurs hungrier for success.