• Peter Thiel's fellowship program has been doling out $100,000 checks to young entrepreneurs for 11 years now.

• The only catch? You have to drop out of college to pursue your big idea.

• The program has helped drive some big names to success, like Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin.

Adobe plans to acquire the design software firm Figma in a deal worth about $20 billion, the company announced Thursday.

Figma was founded in 2012 by Dylan Field with the help of Peter Theil's fellowship program.

Thiel has been paying young adults $100,000 to drop out of college and launch their own companies for 11 years now.

The famed Silicon Valley investor and former Trump adviser founded his Thiel Fellowship program through his foundation for students aged 22 or younger.

The idea was to help young people see their budding ideas funded and realized with access to coaching from noted CEOs and other entrepreneurs, without the burden of attending classes in a university setting. The program encourages the fellows to return to school afterwards, though not all do.

The likes of Ethereum champion Vitalkin Buterin and others saw the light of day thanks to Thiel, who has been open about his stance on higher education being overrated.

"For some people, it's still worth it," Thiel told Newsweek in early 2017, referring to earning a college degree. "But a lot of graduates can't get good jobs; they're saddled with debt and moving back home with their parents. People are starting to see that something has gone wrong."

Here are some of the projects that have come out of Thiel's fellowship.

Figma

Dylan Field was 19 years old when he won a spot in Thiel's fellowship in 2012 and dropped out of Brown University.

His idea originally involved drones — it was a long, messy road before his idea for Figma crystallized enough to get funding.

Figma, a design software company that allows users to create, share, and collaborate on their work in the cloud, was founded in 2012 but didn't actually start shipping its product until 2015.

It evolved into a major rival of Adobe and is now valued at $10 billion. Some of the largest tech firms, like Dropbox, Twitter, and Slack, use the software. Adobe said it planned to acquired it in September 2022 for $20 billion.

Field has a net worth of $1 billion and has made Forbes' 30 under 30 list. He posted on Twitter earlier this month celebrating Figma's 10-year anniversary and thanking the company's "Figmates," a nickname for employees.