‘Fortune’ Explores Thiel Foundation’s Support for Nonprofit and For-Profit Start-Ups

Peter Thiel, the billionaire philanthropist and venture capitalist, has carved out a niche as “perhaps America’s leading public intellectual,” according to a profile in Fortune (September 22). As Mr. Thiel’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, hits the stores, the magazine makes a case that his vision of technological progress—and the lack of it in certain fields—fuels not only his business decisions but also his charitable giving.

Mr. Thiel, Fortune says, believes that technological advances in recent decades have largely been confined to computer science and communications, which have “masked ominously disappointing progress in energy, transportation, biotech, disease prevention, and space travel,” with some of these failures contributing to income inequality.

His eight-year-old philanthropy, the Thiel Foundation, gives up to $15-million a year, focusing on nonprofit and for-profit start-ups aimed at accelerating progress in those lagging areas. “You want to pick an issue where it does some good on its own, and at the same time helps draw awareness to a broader set of issues,” says Mr. Thiel, who co-founded the online payment service PayPal.

Among the foundation’s programs designed to spur this type of innovation is Breakout Labs, whose grantees include the company Modern Meadow, which got $350,000 for its work creating leather and meat from tissue samples taken from animals and growing them in vitro. The magazine also spotlights his most controversial philanthropic effort, the 20 Under 20 program, in which people of ages 18 to 20 are given $100,000 each to forgo college and work on their start-up projects.

The expansion of a handful of nonprofit programs nationwide that bring together vulnerable people like foster children and injured military veterans with older people seeking fellowship, purpose, and lower housing costs could help meet an array of social-service needs, Newsweek suggests (October 3).

The magazine spotlights programs like the 20-year-old Hope Meadows, in Illinois, run by the Generations of Hope Development Corporation. The group has received support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to spread its model of multigenerational housing developments in which the residents—foster children, elderly people, and adoptive families—offer each other daily, practical support. The organization is trying to spread its work around the country. “We’re interested in how to use this model to support vulnerable families: vets dealing with [traumatic brain injury], adults with developmental issues, young moms,” says Mark Dunham, of Generations of Hope.

Though such programs now serve only a small population, they could offer one solution to a looming challenge, says Paul Halpern, who directs one such multigenerational community, New Life Village, in Tampa. “It could save us from ourselves,” he says, “because my generation, the baby boomers, are getting old, and there’s not going to be anyone to take care of us.”