Reddit Co-Founder Pays College Dropouts To Build Climate Start-Ups
How Reddit’s Co-Founder Wants Students to Drop Out of College to Fight Climate Change
In 2010, legendary tech investor Peter Thiel shook the status quo with a radical idea: pay college students not to go to college. His Thiel Fellowship gave young visionaries $100,000 to drop out and build companies instead. It worked—big time. The fellowship helped launch names you now hear all the time:
Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum)
Lucy Guo (Scale.AI)
Ritesh Agarwal (OYO Rooms)
Dylan Field (Figma)
Austin Russell (Luminar Technologies)
And one that especially stood out in the climate space: Boyan Slat, the founder of The Ocean Cleanup. He didn’t just build a company—he built a global movement, raising millions through philanthropy, crowdfunding, and product sales to tackle ocean plastic pollution removal at scale.
Fast forward to today, and Alexis Ohanian—the co-founder of Reddit—has established a similar fellowship on Climate Change.
In 2022, Ohanian launched the 776 Fellowship, a two-year program for ambitious 18 to 24-year-olds ready to skip or drop out of college to focus on solving climate problems. The prize? $100,000 and two years of backing to build.
Ohanian himself may have finished college, but he famously ditched his LSAT prep course to co-found Reddit—and never looked back.
He’s committed $20 million over 10 years to back young climate builders through this fellowship. And the results are already making waves:
Notable 776 Climate Fellows:
Sasankh Munktala raised $58M for carbon removal through enhanced rock weathering.
Abhi Godavarthi secured $6.6M to develop bio-based plastics from agricultural waste.
Rostam Reifschneider raised $1M to scale aluminum recycling.
But it’s not just founders raising big rounds. The fellowship also supports climate activists like:
Wawa Gatheru, also known as the Black Girl Environmentalist
Xiye Bastida, a rising voice in youth-led climate justice
If you want to apply for the next 776 Fellowship cohort, please apply here by April 13th, 2025.
To learn more about Climate Finance, you can subscribe to the Climate Finance Course or apply for the Elite Climate Finance Fellowship.
For more inspiring stories related to Climate Finance, please subscribe to ClimateFinance.XYZ.