A comprehensive understanding of Peter Thiel, the "clear optimist"

.

The Silicon Valley tech financier and intellectual firebrand, some of his ideas may not be pleasing to your liking. However, no one can erase his business success, which is why Silicon Valley is always listening to what he has to say.

"You don't have to kill a pig cow to get leather, which is amazing," said Lindy Fishburne, an official at the Thiel Foundation. She was talking about a creepy "bio-manufacturing" product that was made by the Thiel Foundation, which invested 350,000 of billions of dollars in start-up companies. The company, called Xiandai Meadow, is able to extract skin and muscle samples from animals and then produce leather and meat in vitro. Xiandai Meadow is only one of 19 companies funded by the Thiel Foundation over the past two years, and the 19 companies dedicated to future technology are the tip of the Thiel Foundation's breakout Labs (Breakthrough laboratories). Charitable foundations have always been rare to invest in profit-making businesses, and conversely, the Thiel Foundation is not a common charity. Established in 2006 by Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor, he gave Fortune magazine his starting point, "you have to pick businesses that can generate value and help people realize broader issues." ”

Breakout Labs focuses on ideas that Thiel has been emphasizing in papers, lectures and debates since 2008, at the core of which is "technology stagnation", which contradicts mainstream perceptions. Thiel believes that the astonishing progress we have made in computer science and communications has masked our stagnation in energy, transport, biotechnology, disease prevention and space travel. This, he stressed, is why our real income has barely budged in 1973 years and is also the culprit for the growing polarization of wealth distribution.

"Over the past 40 years, we have made great strides in the world of bits, but not in the atomic world." "This understanding is also reflected in the Thiel Founders Fund propaganda-" We want to be able to fly the car, the result is only 140 characters. ”

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

To solve this problem, his breakout labs only supports "hard technology" startups – not companies that focus on websites, social media or information technology – and companies that are too far off to attract angel investment and government subsidies. He injected these companies with a start-up fund to prove that these technologies are feasible and to attract traditional venture funds in the future. Xiandai Meadow is an excellent example.

A brilliant orator and instigator, with a bottomless purse and a broad range of philosophy, history, economics, anthropology and literature, Thiel has become an outstanding public intellectual in the United States, taking over the Thorstein Veblen and Norman Mailer occupy position. Yet there is a striking difference between the thiel--of a liberal, gay Christian-and the belief that he has won his followers mainly through business, not literature and scholarly writings.

In 1998, Thiel created an E-commerce payment company, PayPal, as co-founder, which it sold to ebay in 2002 at a price of 1.5 billion dollars. PayPal is known primarily not for its own success, but for its founding team members ' subsequent achievements. These people, now known as the PayPal Gang, have created a series of well-known companies, including at least seven companies valued at more than 1 billion dollars: Tesla and SpaceX (co-founded by Elon Musk), LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer and large data mining company Palantir.

Although Thiel co-founded two companies valued at $1 billion, his best-known identity remains investors. In 2004, he gave a Harvard sophomore who had never officially worked, and 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, 500,000, in exchange for a 10.2% stake in a company known as Thefacebook. For now, the investment has brought 1 billion of dollars in cash to Thiel, a 200 million-dollar stake and still a Facebook director. Thiel Other notable investments include LinkedIn, Spotify, SpaceX and the recent Airbnb.

Thiel's popularity was no longer confined to Silicon Valley in the 2010, when Fincher's film, social networking, famous, was known. This year, HBO's "Silicon Valley" series introduced the world to another grogory, Peter, who is known to have been inspired by Thiel. In the first episode, Gregory a speech, launching a project that is almost identical with Thiel's controversial "Under 20" program, which provides 100,000 U.S. dollars a year for 20 of young technology rookies who drop out of business, for project funding.

This month, as Thiel's new book, "Zero to One:notes on Startups," and "How to" build the Future, he will also be known to more people. The title of the book refers to the revolutionary "vertical" changes (from 0 to 1) and the difference in incremental "horizontal" changes (from 1 to N). "If you have a typewriter, you play 100 words, this is the level of progress, if you have a typewriter, and developed a word processor, then you have achieved vertical progress." ”

"The book is nominally about business," Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fortune, "but I think it's actually about how you create value for the world." ”

"Zero to One" is the origin of Silicon Valley computer experts know the "CS183"-this is the Thiel in the spring of 2012 at Stanford, professor of computer science, the subject code. Blake Masters, a 25-year-old law student at Stanford, who sorted out each class and released it to his Tumblr account--initially without permission--did not matter, and Thiel's course quickly caused a sensation.

After the fourth installment was divided into the theme of David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, Masters recalls, he decided to contact Thiel to see his attitude. "Nothing, then post it," Thiel reply. Masters's post page traffic has reached 2.4 million, visitors 560,000.

"The impact of these curriculum notes is not small," said venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, "and every entrepreneur we meet has seen them." "Andreessen has been involved in the first modern web browser Netscape's code work, but also the VC company Andreessen Horowitz co-founder.

When Thiel decided to start writing this "Zero to one" (a simplified version of the same material), he sought help from Masters, who was listed as co-author of the book. Masters is now starting his own company, using software to do legal analysis, and Thiel 2 million dollars in the seed-round financing.

Thiel, 46 years old, is younger, more energetic and healthier than his screen image. In his first interview, he wore a black V-collar sweater, khaki trousers, and a pair of high-end sneakers. He invited me to breakfast, my vegetable omelet, and his fresh berries-the one his chef made in his airy modern mansion, between the eucalyptus-scented hills of San Francisco. Viewing windows, the San Francisco Art Palace is silhouetted against the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island and Alcatraz Island.

Although Thiel has become a living symbol of Silicon Valley, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since the end of 2002. After selling PayPal, he moved here from Mountain View to start again.

"Very successful entrepreneurs are always trying to compete with the past; If you get an Olympic gold medal, you should retire that day." "It's a bit confusing to say it from a man who has grown up in competition," he said. 10 yards away from where we were chatting, a pair of chess chessboard. This is not a collector's exquisite souvenir, but a master-level player's outfit with a timer next to it.

In any case, belittling competition is the central theme of Thiel's new book. "Capitalism is antithetical to competition," he says, "because" in full competition, all profits are offset. "He exhorts entrepreneurs to seek a monopoly, and concludes," All happy businesses are different: every one finds a monopoly by solving a particular problem. All unfortunate businesses are the same: they have not been able to escape competition. ”

Andreessen, as a friend of Thiel and a regular investor, says he agrees with Thiel's "half content", and that Thiel's debasement of competition is a good example. "He's right that you should do something that nobody competes with you, but he's wrong, and if it's a good idea, someone else will." So what are we going to do? Give up? Well, No. You should compete with it. ”

Andreessen fully affirms Thiel's positive impact on Silicon Valley culture. "You're with Thiel every day, it's hard not to think ' I have to be smarter, '" he said. "When it comes to philosophy, history, politics, and human destiny, Thiel can always talk." Before him, not many people thought about these topics. People are just thinking, ' is the latest chip out? ’”

Thiel, born in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 1967, was a gifted outsider: his father was an engineer who moved a lot because of his work--the family moving to America, then to Africa, and back--which allowed Thiel to turn seven times in elementary school. They finally Thiel in the Bay Area in 1977, when he was 10 years old.

Thiel began playing chess at the age of 6, and at the age of 12 he ranked seventh in the United States at the age of 13. (He went on to play the chess tournament until he was 30 years old and is now playing "lightning" on the internet, which is only five minutes.) He was also good at maths and ranked first in the California math exam, when he attended San Mateo public schools.

Photo: 1975, Peter Thiel, eight years old, in South Africa

In high school, Thiel a great admirer of President Reagan's optimism, which gave him a "long search for answers, and the right answer." ”

When he entered Stanford as a freshmen in 1985, the school was resisting the construction of the Reagan Library. It has also changed the traditional Big Book course to accommodate the burgeoning multicultural culture of the day. In 1987, as a "politically correct" rebel, Thiel co-founded Stanford review--, a magazine with both conservative and liberal views, as his first editor-in-chief.

At university, Thiel was deeply attracted by the teachings of the French anthropological philosopher Rene Girard. Girard had a lot to say about what he called "imitation Desire" (mimetic desire)-Our subconscious mind tends to align with the vision of our neighbors. In Girard's dictionary, Imitation creates competition, and competition brews imitation.

As a natural deviant, he has been a hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and venture capitalist – all of which need to put an end to herd mentality, avoid market bubbles and seize the neglected opportunities. In Thiel's view, Girard's analysis of human subconscious to imitate others is very convincing.

Now, Thiel the more personal reason why he was attracted to the university by Girard: his subconscious imitation of the people around him. Because of his imitation of others, Thiel passively boarded a conveyor belt, took him from college to Stanford Law School, and from there, became a young lawyer for Sullivan Klenwil (Sullivan & Cromwell) in New York, the pinnacle of the line. "This is the most unhappy period of my life," Thiel recalls his time in Sullivan, "which lasted seven months and 03 days." "After leaving the law firm, Thiel became a derivative trader in a subsidiary of the Swiss credit group, the CS Financial products division.

When Thiel visited his family on the west Coast during Christmas 1994, he met with his college friend, Reid Hoffman. Although at Stanford Hoffman the Thiel as an "extremist right-wing" and a socialist, they became very close friends, often in philosophical, moral and political discussions.

Hoffman, who had aspired to become a public intellectual, was a professor of philosophy, but now he has changed his plans. "I realize that public awareness has an impact on the media, and you start a software company that can also have this impact, and it has the power of a business model that gives a person the economic benefit of earning money." ”

Thiel recalls the meeting, "We've been figuring out the different technology companies we can create, and we're feeling vaguely that something important is happening here and we should do something about it," said Silicon Valley.

1996 was a turning point for Thiel, who left New York for Monropach. Raised 1 million of dollars from relatives and friends, opened their own hedge funds, Thiel Capital.

A year later, he met the 21-year-old Luke Nosek, one of several engineers who had just left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), following Marc Andreessen's footsteps to Silicon Valley. Nosek wants to launch a web-based calendar to ask Thiel about financing. To his surprise, Thiel said he was willing to invest 100,000 dollars from his own fund. He did the same.

The company eventually died out. Nosek guilty of losing Thiel's money. "I thought, ' my goodness. My friend. He offered to invest. I failed him. ’”

Nosek's friend Max Levchin, another UIUC programmer, asked Nosek to introduce himself to Thiel so he could sell his Fieldlink company, the main cryptographic business. Nosek still feel ashamed and Thiel speak, so levchin around him, in Thiel after a Stanford lecture to catch the opportunity to tell the idea of his own Thiel. Thiel liked his idea and made a wish to be his co-founder. Thiel and Levchin invited Nosek to join.

"This is the Thiel great place," Nosek said. "He values friendship very much. This is something that lasts longer than ever. My reaction at the time was, ' Oh, I screwed things up. But it doesn't matter. He certainly does not like failure, he is also very mad, but in the end it doesn't matter. ”

Fieldlink several times, the name also changed, finally became PayPal. In selecting team members, Thiel and Levchin uphold the principle that at least one of them is familiar with the person. Thiel persuaded Reid Hoffman to become a board member, he also dug David Sacks as chief operating officer, and David was the editor-in-chief of Stanford's comments after Thiel.

"Thiel was never a scrupulous," Sacks wrote in an e-mail. "But he has the knack of identifying all the major strategic issues and fixing them one by one." "In March 2000, PayPal was making a 100 million dollar financing. People were dazzled by the illusion of an internet bubble, and had to wait for the market to be more positive. Thiel made a decision to make the round of financing complete. A few days later the market collapsed. If we had waited another week, the company would have died. ”

2002, ebay bought PayPal at a price of 1.5 billion dollars. Thiel got 55 million dollars. He then began planning his own two startups, including three parts: to restart his hedge fund, to become a venture capitalist, and to set up a new company with a market value of $1 billion.

In the 2003, Thiel a bit of trouble again. He told some friends that his colleagues were gay and the news spread quickly. "In today's society, this is still one of the few things that people feel is at stake." Thiel mentioned the words with anger.

Some critics believe his gay identity exposes the hypocrisy of some of Thiel's earlier writings. Thiel was deeply sceptical of "identity politics" during his tenure at Stanford. In 1995, he and Sacks published a book titled "Diversity Myth" (Diversity myth), which they claimed to be in the school environment, "those who complained of oppression generally did not experience oppression personally." In a chapter in the book, they defended a law student who had been shouting anti-gay remarks outside a gay dormitory in 1992.

When asked about the incident in 2011, Thiel told New Yorker that he regretted writing. "All identity-related things are much more subtle in my mind than black and white. I think there is a unique experience as a homosexual, there exists as the experience of the Negro, the existence as a female experience. They are very unique. I also think that people tend to exaggerate this unique experience and put it into the realm of ideology. ”

In our interview, Thiel said he wasn't fully aware that he was gay when he wrote that book. "In retrospect, I should have known, but it was very confusing and unbelievable. "Now, Thiel has had a boyfriend for years, but has not revealed more details.

(Interestingly, the former law student who slandered homosexuality has recently made public his own same-sex relationship.) What does he think of the events that took place in 1992? "I'm not going to look back?" That was 22 years ago. ”）

Thiel the 10 million dollars he earned in PayPal into hedge funds, renamed Clarium Capital. "The macro thinking we have developed in Clarium is the theory of peak oil, the basic thing is that global oil is becoming scarcer, and there is no simple alternative." "This is the embryonic form of his theory of technology stagnation, the first flash of light."

In venture capital, he began an angel investment with Hoffman. The two invested in social-networking start-ups, starting with their own LinkedIn investments in 2003 and Hoffman to Facebook in 2004.

Also in 2004, Thiel created a new company--its business model seemed so unreliable that it did not initially attract any Silicon Valley investment. At first, its only supporter was Thiel, a nonprofit agency called In-q-tel, the CIA's venture capital department.

"Basically, I think some of PayPal's ways to fight fraud can be extended to other areas, like fighting terrorism." "After 911," You'll get into a debate like Vice President Dick Cheney and the ACLU: Are we sacrificing privacy to keep us safe, or are we sacrificing security to keep our privacy? What I fear is that whenever a terrorist attack occurs, the ACLU must be the loser. ”

Thiel that this debate does not take into account that as technology advances, "we can guarantee security without sacrificing so much privacy." ”

As a result, Thiel created Palantir to provide data mining services to government intelligence agencies, and he stressed that these services would achieve maximum non-intrusive and traceability. Ten years later, the market has proved much larger than many have predicted, with more than 60% of its revenues from private sector clients last year. Palantir's last round of financing was valued at $9 billion trillion.

After setting up his own venture capital company Founders Fund, in 2006, Thiel founded Thiel Foundation and opened his exploratory charitable donation. At present it donates 13 million dollars to 15 million dollars a year.

The foundation's early beneficiaries were Aubrey de Grey, a controversial biologist who founded the Research Foundation of SENS (Strategies for engineered negligible senescence, anti-aging strategic engineering). De Grey is working to develop a regenerative therapy that slows down aging, perhaps indefinitely. In an e-mail, De Grey said he still believes the first person to be able to live to be 1000 years old may have been born.

Thiel's support for the study of aging may be the most extreme embodiment of his "clear optimist" (definite optimist). Thiel the optimists in Zero to one, believing that "if he makes plans and tries to make the world a better place, the future will be better than it is now." "Thiel separates such people from the" ambiguous optimists "(indefinite optimist), which says" the future will be better, but ... He doesn't know how to get better, so he doesn't make any concrete plans. "Thiel hates the latter's worldview, which, in his view, dominates the United States."

Thiel's second "notorious" charity project was the Marine Homestead Association (seasteading Cato), which he co-founded with others in 2008 to create a floating city outside the existing government (floating town). However, in our conversation, Thiel that the project was used in the past, he pointed out, "This is very difficult to do, both technically and culturally." ”

Thiel's most notorious charitable project is estimated to be his "Under 20", which provides 100,000 dollars for gifted students 18-20 years of age to start their own business. The project gives the "clear optimists" a grip on resources, but it also highlights the Thiel view that we are in an "educational bubble" in which undergraduate education cheats students to overestimate the value of their degrees and thus get bogged down in unnecessary educational loans.

There is also a backlash against him, former Harvard president Larry Summers called the project "the worst charity of the decade", while Slate Group chairman Jacob Weisberg wrote in Newsweek. The Thiel-sponsored students will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsors by abandoning their intellectual development at the beginning of adulthood, concentrating on wealth and being as young as possible to eliminate the need to learn for their own long-term plans. ”

This is a narrow project for all opponents. "And that's the typical Thiel," Andreessen said, "You're scaring the people of the Academy, as if it sounded the death knell of organising education." Now it is only 20 children a year, wait for 20,000 children a year to call me again. ”

As Thiel was built on his economic success as a well-known credit, the 2008 economic crisis also threatened everything he created. But in the end he survived. His hedge fund was not hit. In Clarium, until the middle of the 2008, Thiel's oil peak theory has always been applicable. Oil prices soared from about $40 a barrel to nearly 140 dollars in 2002. During this period, the fund's market value rose from $10 million trillion to $6 billion trillion, stock valuations soared and new investors flocked to his doorstep.

But by February 2009, oil prices fell back to 40 dollars. Although Thiel had foreseen the bubble, he underestimated it. "We don't fully believe in our own theory of predicting bad things, or with luck." "Worse, he overreacted and missed the rally, which led to the 2009 and 2010 Clarium stocks operating badly weaker than the general market." Most institutional investors fled. Today's clarium is about 200 million dollars for Thiel, friends and family, and a handful of specific investors.

On the other hand, his founders Fund has grown quite well. Its managed funds grew from $50 million trillion in 2005 to $2 billion today. According to a limited partner who has been involved in founders Fund since 2007, founders Fund's performance in all venture capital funds, if not the best, is at least the top One-fourth, with an annual return of between 35% and 45%.

Although the 2008-year financial crisis has hit Thiel's cause, it has made it easier to accept his "High-tech slowdown theory". However, Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist who had debated the issue with Thiel in Oxford, wrote, "Now, most of my top university scientists and colleagues are full of terrible confidence in their projects, and their projects are in the forefront of nanotechnology, neuroscience and energy." They think they are changing the world at an unprecedented rate, as quickly as in the field of technology. ”

At first glance, Thiel's "Zero to One" is a way of persuading entrepreneurs to embark on transformative innovation, which seems to contradict his pessimism about "technology stagnation". The latter, however, was actually the motivating background of the former, so they rode forward.

When it comes to the future, it is agreed that globalisation will take its course, and that developing countries will slowly become developed countries. However, one has not noticed the dark side of Malthus's reality, that is, there is no major technological breakthrough to solve the Malthusian problem.

"If everyone in China had a fuel car, the oil price would be 10 dollars a gallon and be accompanied by a huge pollution." ”

But this is only the beginning, because even without economic growth there will be more and more political unrest. Instability can lead to global conflict, this, in turn, leads to the "secular Apocalypse" (secular revelation) that he mentions in a 2007-year article-The extinction of the human race, whether through thermonuclear warfare, biological contagion, runaway climate change, or a biblical Armageddon of good and evil.

"That's why," Thiel, with his usual understatement and composure, "I think the big benefit here is not just ' do we have some new gadgets?" ’”