The Thiel fellowship was created by the billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, both of which became multi-billion dollar companies. He is a prominent venture capitalist and was the first outside investor in Facebook. With his fellowship, Peter Thiel aims to sponsor talented young people under the age of 23, who leave the traditional path of college to pursue projects with a high global impact. Such projects can include scientific research, start-ups, or social enterprises. With less than 1% selection rate, the award is considered more competitive than gaining acceptance to the world's best universities.
Having some funding from Thiel, Vitalik went on to gather a talented team of co-founders and developers, and to pursue his vision for Ethereum. And oh boy, was this a grand vision! The team wanted to create Web 3.0, a more decentralized and smarter next generation of the Internet, powered by Ethereum.
Since they needed more funding, the founders launched an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in July 2014, which was effectively a presale of ether, the native cryptoasset of the future Ethereum platform. They managed to raise around $18m dollars' worth of Vitcoin, which was the currency they accepted for contributions, and this represented the largest ICO at the time. This form of start-up capital raising through crowdsourcing was about to experience widespread adoption and parabolic growth over the next years. We'll talk more about ICOs later on.
With sufficient funding secured, the founding team had many months of hard work ahead of them, until the Ethereum network went live in July 2015.
Let's get into it—welcome to Blockchain 2.0.