Schmidt-Backed Pro-America Fund Places Its First Bets
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Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook.
Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on 11 October 1967, to Susanne and Klaus Friedrich Thiel. The family migrated to the United States when Peter was one year old and lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a chemical engineer. Klaus then worked for various mining companies.
Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiels lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia).
He studied philosophy at Stanford University. Thiel enrolled in Stanford Law School and earned his Juris Doctor degree in 1992.
After graduating from Stanford Law School, Thiel clerked for Judge James Larry Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Thiel then worked as a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. He left the law firm after seven months and three days. He then took a job as a derivatives trader in currency options at Credit Suisse. He joined them in 1993 while also working as a speechwriter for former United States Secretary of Education William Bennett.
Upon returning to the Bay Area, he raised $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embarked on his venture capital career. Thiel wanted to create a type of digital wallet for consumer convenience and security by encrypting data on digital devices, and in 1999 Confinity launched PayPal. When PayPal launched at a press conference in 1999, representatives from Nokia and Deutsche Bank sent $3 million in venture funding to Thiel using PayPal on their PalmPilots. PayPal then continued to grow through mergers in 2000 with Elon Musk’s online financial services company X.com, and with Pixo, a company specializing in mobile commerce. These mergers allowed PayPal to expand into the wireless phone market, and transformed it into a safer and more user-friendly tool by enabling users to transfer money via a free online registration and email rather than by exchanging bank account information.
PayPal went public on 15 February 2002 and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in October of that year. Thiel remained CEO of the company until the sale. His 3.7% stake in the company was worth $55 million at the time of acquisition.
Thiel used $10 million of his proceeds to create Clarium Capital Management. In May 2003, Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company named after the Tolkien artifact. Palantir’s first backer was the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. In August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for a 10.2% stake in the company and joined Facebook’s board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook, and valued the company at $4.9 million. In 2005, Thiel created Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. Other partners in the fund include Sean Parker, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek.
In addition to Facebook, Thiel made early-stage investments in numerous startups (personally or through Founders Fund), including Airbnb, Slide.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, RapLeaf, Geni.com, Yammer, Yelp Inc., Spotify, Powerset, Practice Fusion, MetaMed, Vator, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, IronPort, Votizen, Asana, Big Think, CapLinked, Quora, Nanotronics Imaging, Rypple, TransferWise, Stripe, Block.one, and AltSchool.
In 2017, Founders Fund bought about $15–20 million worth of bitcoin. In January 2018, the firm told investors that due to the cryptocurrency’s surge the holdings were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also in 2017, Thiel was one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, a facial recognition technology startup that has raised concerns in the tech world and media for its risks of weaponization.
Through Valar Ventures, an internationally focused venture firm he cofounded with Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald, Thiel was an early investor in Xero, a software firm headquartered in New Zealand. Valar Ventures also invested in New Zealand-based companies Pacific Fibre and Booktrack.
In June 2012, he launched Mithril Capital Management, named after the fictitious metal in The Lord of the Rings, with Jim O’Neill and Ajay Royan. Unlike Clarium Capital, Mithril Capital, a fund with $402 million at the time of launch, targets companies that are beyond the startup stage and ready to scale up.
In March 2015, Thiel joined Y Combinator as one of 10 part-time partners.
Thiel led a $125 million round of funding for ATAI Life Sciences, researching the delivery of psychedelic drugs to mental health patients. He invested $12 million of his own funds in the company.
In May 2016, Thiel confirmed in an interview with the New York Times that he had paid $10 million in legal expenses to finance several lawsuits brought by others, including a lawsuit by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) against Gawker Media for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and infringement of personality rights after Gawker made sections of a sex tape involving Bollea public.
Thiel said he was motivated to sue Gawker after they published a 2007 article publicly outing him, headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” On 15 August 2016, Thiel published an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he argued that his defense of online privacy went beyond Gawker.
Thiel is a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and is a Republican.
Peter Thiel is 56 years old (birth date October 11, 1967).
Peter Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany.
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