The Thiel Foundation
Delian Asparouhov, co-founder at Nightingale
Driven by his grandmother's battle with breast cancer and feeling frustrated by her quality of care, Asparouhov set out to improve the quality of patient care through technology.
Today, Asparouhov and his co-founder Eric Bakan are launching Nightingale for iOS and Android.
Nightingale wants to help ensure patients never forget their medication again. The mobile app learns your lifestyle so that it can provide each patient with accurate, custom medication reminders.
If a daughter is taking care of her father, she could also benefit from Nightingale to track her dad's compliance and get alerts if he's taking less than 10% of his medications.
Nightingale also wants to help improve the communication between patients and their doctors. Down the road, it will provide on-demand data and a suite of analytics so that caregivers and health care providers can gain better insight into a patient's health.
A service provider with only one or two patients likely won't have to pay, but someone with multiple patients may have to pay yearly fee on a per-patient basis.
Following the sentiments of Square founder and college dropout Jack Dorsey and high school dropout David Karp of Tumblr, Asparouhov says that dropping out isn't for everyone.
"I think my philosophy on this and what frustrates me with people trying go to deal with this issue is, they try to give really general, overarching advice," Asparouhov says. "They'll say, 'Oh everyone should drop out of school' or 'Oh, no one should drop out of school. It's one of those individual decisions that just needs to be made on a case-by-case experience."
In Asparouhov's case, he had overloaded himself with classes and finished up a lot of his computer science degree requirements pretty quickly. He was only in his second year at MIT., but was technically considered to be a junior.
The only classes left were introductory courses to computer science — classes that he had previously skipped. But Asparouhov says MIT would not allow him to graduate without taking them.
Asparouhov ultimately decided to just drop out and use his time more productively, especially given his experience interning at Square the summer before.
He officially dropped out June 7, shortly after news of him becoming one of the newest Thiel Fellows came out.
The Thiel Fellowship gives 20 teenagers $100,000 to drop out of college and start a company. The two-year program has been pretty hands-off so far, Asparouhov says, but he likes it that way.
The program officially started about a month ago and Asparouhov has since relocated to Mountain View, Calif. where he lives in a hacker house with fellow entrepreneurs.