20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow

Silicon Valley visionary Peter Thiel was one of the first investors in Facebook. He has backed many of today’s hottest tech companies. And now he’s searching for the next generation of entrepreneurs – in an electrifying competition unlike anything seen before. 20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow captures every step of this amazing journey, telling the stories of the extraordinary young men and women each vying for a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. Brilliant innovators who are barely out of high school, these budding entrepreneurs have very big ideas - and if they win, Thiel will give them the money and the mentors they need to make their dreams a reality. But there's a catch: to walk away with a Fellowship, they need to walk away from college.

It's a decision that will change their lives... and maybe even the world.

20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow
A Two-Part CNBC Special Event

Part I: Premieres Wednesday, July 11 at 10pm ET
Part II: Premieres Thursday, July 12 at 10pm ET

>PREVIEW

LAST YEAR'S WINNERS
Meet the 2011 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows

Alexander Kiselev is a 19-year-old immigrant from Moscow who wants to create affordable scientific instruments. His first project will be an inexpensive high performance liquid chromatography system to helps biochemists analyze the components of a sample.

Andrew Hsu was enrolled in the University of Washington by the time he was 12, pursing degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. He was a 19-year-old 4th-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University when he left early this year to pursue his start-up, Airy Labs.

Ben Yu had just returned from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro when he interviewed with the Thiel Foundation. He was about to climb another mountain in China when he learned he had won. His next challenge is to build an e-commerce start-up that will revolutionize price comparison on the web.

Christopher Rueth believes access to the Internet is a basic human right. In high school, he was upset when administrators started logging student emails. Chris created a website where students could bypass this snooping. Now he wants to help emancipate information around the world.

Dale Stephens flaunts non-conformity in most aspects of his life. At 19, he leads UnCollege, the global social movement that applies the methods of “unschooling” to the realm of higher education. His first book, a guide to hacking your education, will be published in early 2013.

Daniel Friedman was a sophomore at Yale studying ethics, politics and economics before leaving for the fellowship. He's currently working at Elm City Labs, helping entrepreneurs realize their visions.

Paul Gu and Eric McKay have a deep interest in questions of efficiency and in using market principles to make life better. With a combined wealth of knowledge in mathematics, programming and social entrepreneurship, these two are focused on questions of efficiency and in using market principles to make life better.

Darren Zhu is excited about synthetic biology, a field that engineers solutions to biological problems by using standardized genomic components. Darren plans to build a diagnostic biosensor, the initial step toward his goal of making synthetic biology easier to engineer.

David (Jiageng) Luan plans to do for consumer robotics what the IBM PC did for computing. As student at Andover and Yale, he has been involved in robotics research for five years and now wants to create home robots that can handle an extensible array of jobs.

Eden Full is the 19-year-old founder of Roseicollis Technologies, a solar energy start-up that deploys her patent-pending inventions. Currently electrifying two villages in Kenya, Eden’s SunSaluter is a solar panel rotating system that tracks the sun to optimize energy collection.

Faheem Zaman wants to leverage the pervasiveness of mobile technology to deliver services remotely. He is particularly interested in using mobile technology to revolutionize health, media and finance.

Gary Kurek is the founder of GET Mobility Solutions. He invented a walker-wheelchair hybrid that provides power to assist its user according to how strong they feel at any moment. This flexibility allows users to restore their strength, instead of growing dependent on a substitute.

James Proud taught himself programming at the age of 9. In his teens, he built products for Coca-Cola and Universal Music, while juggling his studies during the day. James founded GigLocator.com, a start-up that aims to help music lovers discover more live shows.

Jeffrey Lim wants to increase the amount of voluntary exchange and cooperation in the world. He’ll use his fellowship to create technologies that will help people self-organize to solve social problems. Jeffrey believes it’s time the means of exchange caught up with the Information Age.

John Burnham believes that the search for new resources drives exploration and innovation. He says the key to colonizing space is to make it possible to extract valuable minerals from asteroids and other planetary bodies. John will use his fellowship to develop space industry technologies.

Laura Deming wants to extend the human lifespan for a few more centuries—at the very least. With her fund IP Immortal, Laura plans on commercializing anti-aging research, bringing therapies out of the lab and into the market sooner.

Jim Danielson is working on building a more powerful and efficient motor for electric vehicles. He has already electrified a Porsche 924S, including power electronics of his own design. He is currently co-launching Makt Systems LLC, a start-up to commercialize his research and design.

John Marbach has years of experience working as an Internet marketer in customer development and blogs frequently about emerging technologies. His start-up Ingenic, will use web-based videos and mobile apps to bring the classroom into the twenty-first century.

Nick Cammarata and David Merfield are working on Tablo, a tool used by teachers to create and share online lessons for students to use at home, leaving class time free for more engaging activities. Nick has worked for Microsoft, Stanford, and Mozilla. David has designed web interfaces used by millions of people around the world.

Sujay Tyle is one of the youngest students at Harvard and is passionate about hacking cellulose to create cheap biofuels. He first worked in a lab when he was 11, interned at Dupont as a teenager, and won the grand prize at the 2009 International Sustainable World Energy Olympiad.

Tom Currier has a deep obsession for cost reductions and renewable energy. He believes that the solar industry needs a fundamental balance of systems breakthrough. He co-founded Black Swan Solar to commercialize an invention that enables low cost dual-axis photovoltaic module tracking.

Sebastien Zany is pursuing a program to unify computation in a cohesive and elegant framework based around Haskell, with the goal of finally realizing the potential of computers and the Internet to enable people to work with information fluidly and creatively, especially on mobile devices.

PREMIERES JULY 11th & 12th 10p ET

Preview the Competition
The search is on to find the next generation of American genius.

VIDEOS

Peter Thiel's Vision
Thiel Foundation CEO Jim O'Neill explains why his legendary boss launched 20 Under 20. The goal: to get the world thinking big again.
One Winner's Inspiring Story
Some ingenious inventions helped Gary Kurek win a 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. Behind the high-tech devices there's a very human story.
Inside the Competition
Thiel Fellow Gary Kurek remembers that high-pressure moment when he pitched his big idea to an elite audience of Slicon Valley leaders.

ABOUT

Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist.

LAST YEAR'S WINNERSMeet the 2011 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows

PREMIERES JULY 11th & 12th 10p ET

VIDEOS

ABOUT

RELATED LINKS

LAST YEAR'S WINNERS
Meet the 2011 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows