Founders Fund offers $100K to teenage entrepreneurs

Everyone’s heard stories about young entrepreneurs who drop out of school and found hot startups like Facebook. Now the Founders Fund is putting up money to make sure that practice continues.

Managing partner Peter Thiel (pictured) announced a new “20 under 20” program today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. As the name implies, with this new program Founders Fund will offer grants of up to $100,000 to 20 entrepreneurs under 20 years of age. You can apply for the 2011 program until the end of this year, either individually or in teams of up to four.

TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, who was interviewing Thiel, asked if he’s basically encouraging students to drop out of school. He laughed and said the students should “stop out” (i.e., drop out temporarily). Thiel, who was also a co-founder at PayPal, added that while students can learn many important things in college, “I don’t think they learn anything much about entrepreneurship.”

You can read this post for Thiel’s comments on Facebook and general tech trends.