Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University and earned his JD from Stanford Law School. After a brief career as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and a securities lawyer, he co-founded PayPal in 1998 with Max Levchin and others. PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, generating substantial returns for Thiel and his co-founders. He made what may be the best venture investment in history: in 2004 he invested $500,000 in Facebook for approximately 10% of the company — a stake that was worth billions when Facebook went public in 2012. He co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2004 — a data analytics company providing services to government intelligence agencies and corporations — which went public in 2020 at a valuation of $22 billion. In 2005 he founded Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed SpaceX, Airbnb, Lyft, and other transformative companies. His 2014 book "Zero to One" — based on lectures at Stanford — argued that the greatest value in technology comes from creating genuinely new things (zero to one) rather than incrementally improving existing ones (one to N). The book became one of the most widely read texts on entrepreneurship. Thiel has been a prominent figure in cryptocurrency investment, backing various blockchain and crypto initiatives, and a controversial political actor known for funding legal actions against media organisations. He is one of the most intellectually distinctive and contrarian figures in Silicon Valley venture capital.