Breaking: Chen '15 wins $100,000 “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowship

Xinyi Chen '15 has won one of the 2013 “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowships, the Thiel Foundation announced this morning.

The Thiel Fellowships provide 20 young entrepreneurs under 20 years of age with $100,000 each to start a company. The winners are required to cease active enrollment in school during their two years as Thiel Fellows.

Chen, a math major from Beijing, China, participated in the Tigerlabs startup accelerator last summer. There she developed prototypes for her consumer robotics project, Helios, which attempts to make telepresence devices accessible to average families, according to a Thiel Foundation statement.

“I actually heard about [the fellowship] a while ago, even before I started college,” Chen said in an interview Thursday afternoon. “I used to think that it was something crazy cause I grew up in China and I grew up in a very traditional conservative family so it was like I can’t believe people are doing that.”

The project Chen pitched to the Thiel Fellowship was a telepresence robot project, which aims to revolutionize the way in which people communicate with videochat.

Chen will leave the University for two years to begin work on her project and said she plans to return to the University after the Thiel fellowship to complete her degree.

“I actually love Princeton. It makes me sad that they want me to leave,” Chen said. “I definitely plan to complete my Princeton education.”

The judges from the Thiel Fellowship’s selection committee came to an idea factory hosted by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club this fall where Chen presented the project that she had worked on last summer at Tigerlabs, she explained. Last summer, she co-founded a company and built a telepresence robot with her co-founder, Tianlong Wong GS ’12.

“Our grand ambition is personal robotics,” Chen said.

A representative from Tiger Labs was not immediately available for comment.

The company she co-founded with Wong was inspired by the notion that modern day videochat is something stationary and their goal was to change that, Chen explained. The mobile gadget company that Chen and Wong founded makes communication tools for mobile phones.

“We founded a company because TigerLabs invested in us,” Chen said.

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Chen, who will turn twenty in June, applied for the Thiel Fellowship this year because she saw it as an opportunity to do something rare and it was the last year in which she had a chance to apply to the fellowship.

“I’m a math major,” Chen said. “It means I like heavy academics; really, really hard classes.”

Chen said she has invested a lot of time on her academics over the past two years but she is also involved with the International Students Association at Princeton, the team that organized the Princeton University Mathematics Competition held in the fall, and is “marginally involved” in the entrepreneurship club. She is a member of Terrace Club.

“From my point of view the fellowship is more of an educational experience that is very different from college we get to structure our own education, our own schedule, what we learn and be very self-motivated,” she said. “I think that’s very exciting.”

She said she has never lived in California and looks forward to moving to there in June to begin her work on research and development to continue her project.

“After that it’s more of a testing phase where I see what the reactions are from customers how people are gonna use it,” Chen said.

The Thiel Foundation will provide housing to the fellows for the summer where they will all live in one house as they begin their research and work in launching their projects. After August, fellows will live on their own and are responsible for supporting themselves.

Fellows are expected to have meetings with the foundation staff periodically and they have a pool of mentors with which fellows are responsible for contacting and working with closely.

“At first [my parents] weren’t in favor at all. They think it’s too risky,” Chen said. “It’s very possible that I will be wasting these two years.”

“It’s very uncertain what the outcome will be; you know, what I will actually achieve in these two years but I think for me it will be a really good time of growth I think I will learn a lot,” she said. “I will learn a lot of things I can’t necessarily learn at Princeton,”

Chen explained that her parents are not pleased with the fact that she will be graduating two years later and as a result with students who are younger than she, but she said that she saw the Thiel Fellowship as a “rare opportunity.”

“It’s worth trying,” she said.