Venture Math · Fall 2026
33 companies, valued at $1B+ at some point († only at peak: Luminar bankrupt, Embark wound down, Loom sold for $975M, Adept licensed to Amazon, Forge sold for ~$660M, RapidAPI to Nokia). Mercor and Etched each have three fellow founders (+2); Speak has two (+1: Zwick, 2012, who met Hsu through the fellowship). The 2024 class alone: 8 of 20 fellows.
| Class | Fellow | Company | $1B+ mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Gu | Upstart | IPO 2020 |
| 2011 | Hsu +1 | Speak | $1B |
| 2011 | Tyle | Merama | $1.2B |
| 2011 | Proud | Substrate | $1B |
| 2011 | Luan | Adept † | $1B |
| 2012 | Field | Figma | $68B |
| 2012 | Olah | Anthropic | S-1 filed |
| 2012 | Hewett | RADAR | $1B |
| 2013 | Agarwal | OYO | $10B |
| Class | Fellow | Company | $1B+ mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Russell | Luminar † | $11B |
| 2013 | Asparouhov | Varda | $1.6B |
| 2013 | Sohmers | Positron AI | $5B |
| 2013 | Ennis | Freenome | $1.1B |
| 2014 | Guo | Scale AI | $29B |
| 2016 | Rodrigues | Embark † | $5.2B |
| 2016 | Owens | Paddle | $1.4B |
| 2016 | Prasad | Forge Global † | $2B |
| 2017 | Khan | Loom † | $1.5B |
| Class | Fellow | Company | $1B+ mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Turner | Curative | $1.3B |
| 2017 | Gino | RapidAPI † | $1B |
| 2017 | Rahman | Flex | $1.2B |
| 2018 | Cox | Fluidstack | $7.5B |
| 2019 | Henry | Stord | $3B |
| 2020 | Guild | Owner.com | $2.3B |
| 2020 | Ferguson | Immutable | $2.5B |
| 2022 | de los Rios | Nowports | $1.1B |
| 2022 | Manohar | Hightouch | $2.75B |
| Class | Fellow | Company | $1B+ mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Thornton | Mach | $3.7B |
| 2023 | Cardenas | Slash | $1.4B |
| 2024 | Foody +2 | Mercor | $10B |
| 2024 | Uberti +2 | Etched | $10.3B |
| 2024 | Yan | Cognition | $10.2B |
| 2024 | Patil | Applied Compute | $1.3B |
Thiel Foundation class releases · company rounds and filings as reported · a floor: every 2011–2024 class list checked by name · protocols (Ethereum, Polkadot) not counted
Fellows ÷ applicants where the Foundation gave a count, vs. Harvard’s admit rate every year.
2016 (6,000+ applicants, 29 fellows) is left out: about 60% of that class was recruited.
Foundation releases (Xconomy, TNW) · First Round Review · Harvard Gazette
Unicorn hit rate per person or company funded, as CB Insights counted it.
| Metric | Thiel Fellowship | Y Combinator |
|---|---|---|
| People / companies funded | 185 | 5,842 |
| Unicorns (>$1B) | 11 | 112 |
| Unicorn hit rate | 5.9% | 1.9% |
CB Insights’ count covers 185 fellows. Through the 2024 class we can name 38 of 290 (13.1%).
Anand Sanwal, Aug 2025 · source data: CB Insights
Foundation-reported value of fellow companies (excl. Ethereum, log scale) vs. max grants ($100K each, then $200K, $250K). Hollow: money raised, or Ethereum not stated.
Foundation releases (Business Wire) · claim ÷ spend, not a return: no equity taken
First four classes: returned or earned a degree after starting · didn’t · degree before · unknown.
23 of 86 (≥27%); 18 if only dropouts who came back count. The big outcomes didn’t (Field, Olah, Buterin, Agarwal); the researchers did.
Public bios, press · WSJ (Feb 2024): “about a quarter”
Age at founding, 1,345 founders of 523 US unicorns (1997–2019). Only 8 started at 18–19, the Fellowship’s core age.
Ilya Strebulaev, Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative (10/2021)
Founders born abroad, top 10 countries; 1,078 founders of 500 US unicorns (1997–2019). Israel also founds US unicorns at ~10× a matched random sample (29 vs. 3).
Ilya Strebulaev, Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative (01/2022; 10/2022)
Evan Wallace co-founded Figma with Dylan Field (Thiel 2012) and left around 2021 (his site: “2012–2021”). Value of his family trust’s Class B stake. It sold 0 shares in the IPO.
Plus two gifts: 13.4M shares to a charity in June 2025, sold in the IPO for $441M (donor named only by Fortune), and 4.4M in June 2026 (~$90M).
Figma 424B4, 13D/A No. 2, 2026 proxy · Adobe 424B3 (Jan 2023) · prices: IPO Scoop, stockanalysis
Share of Figma’s votes: Field’s own · Wallace’s, via proxy · everyone else. Class B carries 15 votes a share.
A 2022 irrevocable proxy (Field paid $250,000) lets him vote the trust’s shares “in his sole discretion”, with no end date. Shares Wallace sells convert to 1-vote Class A and leave the proxy, so a full sale would leave Field ~61% on his own.
S-1 Ex. 99.1 (proxy) · 424B4 · Q2 2026 10-Q · last line our arithmetic
Joshua Browder (Thiel 2018, DoNotPay) runs Browder Capital, a solo pre-seed fund. His first check was his own Fellowship stipend, into Adam Guild’s company in 2018; Guild became a fellow in 2020. Funds by SEC filing, to scale (Fund IV LPs include Sequoia); fellow founders by year of first known check.
| First check | Fellow founders (class) and company |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Guild '20 Owner $2.3B |
| 2021–22 | Sadeghi '23 Nucleus · McElhone '23 CropSafe |
| by early 2023 | Du '23 Alloy · Favret '23 Tavus · Dinesh '23 Spellbound · Dinakaran '23 Luminai · Adler '23 Neusleep · Field '12 Figma, late stage |
| 2024–25 | Wu '24 Orchard · Cardenas '23 Slash $1.4B* |
| unknown | Shieh '26 Antifraud Co.* |
33 and ~10% (of ~317 fellows through 2026) are Browder’s claim. 12 are independently verified (~4%). He said 35% (7/20) of the 2023 class in Feb 2023, 50% in May 2025; 7–8 of 20 can be documented. No Fund III Form D exists; which fund made each check isn’t public. * aggregator or third-party list only.
SEC Form D (2020–25) · Browder on X (Feb 2023, May 2025) · AngelList case study · Thiel Foundation releases · Goldman Sachs (Owner, Aug 2026)