Author: Lonely Brain
01. Some people believe that the three leaders of the "PayPal Mafia," Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks, have once again bet successfully.
02. The PayPal Mafia is the largest small group in Silicon Valley. After being sold to eBay in 2002, most of PayPal's key employees have left, but they still maintain close ties. They even gave their group a name - the "PayPal Mafia."
03. What are the characteristics of the "PayPal Mafia"?
Thiel recalled, "Initially, we mainly recruited people from our own circle. I recruited friends from Stanford University, while Levchin recruited friends from the University of Illinois."
They were all trying to find specific types of employees, with the criteria being competitive, knowledgeable, multilingual, and most importantly, proficient in mathematics. Thiel and Levchin did not want their employees to be MBAs, consultants, fraternity members, or athletes.
04. Levchin recalled, "Once an applicant came for an interview at the company, and when I asked him about his hobbies, he said he liked playing basketball. I immediately said, 'We can't hire this person. Every person I knew in college who liked playing basketball was an idiot.'" In other words, they were recruiting people similar to themselves.
Doesn't it seem completely different from Trump and Vance?
05. During his time at Yale, he attended a speech by Thiel on technological stagnation and the decline of the American elite.
Vance later recalled, "He believed that these two trends… were interrelated. If technological innovation really brought true prosperity, our elite would not be competing with each other for increasingly scarce prestige."
Vance described Thiel's speech as "the most important moment" during his time at Yale.
06. Not all members of the PayPal Mafia support Trump. For example, Reid Hoffman is explicitly against Trump, leading to direct disputes with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
07. In 2015, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance joined Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm operated by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel.
08. In 2016, he announced plans to move back to Ohio from California and founded a non-profit organization called "Our Ohio Renewal," dedicated to "making it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams."
09. In November 2022, with the help of over $10 million donated by Thiel, he was elected as a U.S. Senator for Ohio. This is his first public office. Thiel is his biggest sponsor.
10. Recalling his first meeting with Thiel in 2011, Vance wrote:
"(Thiel) expressed a feeling… I was infatuated with achievement itself, not for some meaningful purpose, but to win the social competition.
I was worried that I prioritized the pursuit of achievement over character, and this concern became more important: pursuit of what?"
Vance's deep influence by Thiel is evident from the details below:
11. In 2019, Vance founded his own venture capital firm, Narya, in Ohio. Like Thiel's company Palantir, the name Narya comes from a fictional item in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."
12. In August 2019, he was baptized in the Catholic Church. At the time, he attributed his conversion to the works of French philosopher René Girard, whom Thiel studied under at Stanford University.
Girard is most famous for his theory of "mimetic desire": human desire to imitate peers ultimately leads to competition and violent conflict, resolved through "scapegoating."
13. Peter Thiel is a critic of large tech companies, but his efforts to establish the dominance of large tech companies exceed those of anyone alive.
14. He claims to be a privacy advocate, yet he has created one of the world's largest surveillance companies.
15. He advocates for elite political and intellectual diversity, yet he is surrounded by a group of self-proclaimed loyal mafia.
16. He is a defender of free speech, yet he secretly took down a major American media company.
17. Peter Thiel's basic ideas are quite complex and contradictory in some respects, but his obsession with technological progress is intertwined with nationalist politics, which sometimes seems entangled with white supremacy.
18. The biographer of Peter Thiel wrote:
"I want to know how he built such a high following and how he continues to make every bet pay off - even when these decisions seem crazy.
I want to know how someone so respected and beloved can also be so ruthless.
Is Peter Thiel a figure to be admired and studied, or is he an antisocial nihilist? Is he both?"
19. Turning something that might be bitter into something sweet is Thiel's personal experience, a journey from an unsuccessful company lawyer to an internet billionaire, which he has talked about in his college classes, speeches, and his book "Zero to One."
20. "Zero to One," this handbook of success for libertarians, also argues that monopolies are good, monarchy is the most effective form of government, and tech founders are like gods. The global sales of this book have exceeded 1.25 million copies.
21. Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" turns disruption itself into the purpose of entrepreneurship. Change becomes a declaration - a declaration to challenge the existing order. Thiel is a nihilist - a very clever nihilist, with no necessary persistence. He is entirely for power - this is the law of the jungle, 'I am a predator, and predators always win.'
22. Peter Thiel is very tough and ruthless when it comes to fighting for company interests.
23. PayPal accelerated its growth through a more extreme form of regulatory arbitrage than X company pursued. X company at least registered as a bank, but PayPal couldn't even be bothered to do that. In collecting user information or preventing them from using money for illegal purposes, PayPal made almost no apparent effort, and at least to some employees, it was openly flouting the rules of the banking industry.
24. Of course, in a territory where such blatant violations are seen as legal, even worth celebrating, Thiel and many PayPal executives are very familiar with this territory: radical conservative politics.
25. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay, and Peter Thiel cashed out $55 million, renaming Thiel Capital to Clarium Capital Management and entering the hedge fund field.
26. Peter Thiel and his colleagues practiced "discovering truths that others have not discovered," took an unconventional approach, and practiced the concept of contrarian investing. When others were selling, they bought Japanese government bonds, and when others were pessimistic about the energy industry, they bought a large amount. By the summer of 2008, Clarium's assets exceeded $7 billion, growing sevenfold in six years. He also gained a reputation in the investment industry, being hailed as an investment genius.
Also in late September 2008, the financial markets collapsed. Clarium Fund began to lose money, and contrarian investing failed. He had been buying stocks, but the stocks kept falling. In 2009, he shorted stocks, but later the stocks rose. In 2010, Clarium's market value was only $350 million.
27. Thiel's parents were fervent Republicans, and Thiel also inherited this sentiment, thus regarding those who do not shout as his own kind, and admiring the Nixon era and Nixon's political successor, Ronald Reagan.
28. Peter Thiel has always been very skeptical of the role of government. He has supported various "anti-government" organizations and believes that government progress has lagged far behind the current level of technology.
He has long supported seasteading, which means introducing the competitive mechanism of the free market into the government, using the vast ocean as a platform for 1,000 governments to compete with each other, and then citizens can freely choose their own government, and he has donated at least $5 million to organizations dedicated to small government.
29. In his teenage years, Peter Thiel wrote some programs, but what really attracted him was the vision of the future. He read the works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who imagined humanoid robots, space travel, lunar settlements, food sources from petroleum, cars that could travel without wheels, and even immortality.
30. Peter Thiel believes that most investments are currently pouring into byte innovations, but there is not enough attention to research in hard technology, about material and atomic innovations. Therefore, his Founder's Fund also invests in aviation companies, biotechnology, materials science, and other fields, dedicated to exploring more untapped territories.
31. On the official website of Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, there is the following declaration:
"We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, usually difficult scientific or engineering problems."
32. (Founder's Fund) We believe that moving away from supporting disruptive technology and turning to more cynical, incremental investments has disrupted the pattern of venture capital. Explaining the nightmare of venture capital over the past ten years with unfavorable economic conditions has ignored the industry's strong, non-cyclical 40-year history of returns, as well as the sustained and steady performance of the top 20% of the industry. What venture capital supports has changed, which is why returns have also changed.
33. (Founder's Fund) Our list is not exhaustive. The best companies will create their own field. Generally, from our investors' perspective, the most promising companies often have several characteristics:
- They are not popular (popular investments are often expensive; for example, Groupon is valued at tens of billions).
- They are difficult to evaluate (this increases their unpopularity).
- They have technical risks, but not insurmountable technical risks.
- If they succeed, their technology will be very valuable.
34. He has a "grand" idea: to stop the footsteps of death and prolong life. He believes that most people passively accept aging, but he does not. He plans to live to at least 120 years old and takes human growth hormone every day for this purpose.
35. He has also donated over $6 million to multiple research-based foundations for anti-aging and signed a "cryonics agreement" with the low-temperature technology research company Alcor, which means that if Thiel is diagnosed with an incurable disease, his body will be cryogenically frozen and thawed out in the future when a treatment becomes available…
36. It is rumored that Peter Thiel regularly undergoes blood transfusions with young people in pursuit of eternal youth.
37. Peter Thiel's self-assessment is: "So I think what you call unconventional is more of a sober understanding of myself."
38. Many years ago (around 2016), in a speech supporting Trump, Peter Thiel expressed the following views:
"I think Trump is right on major issues. For example: free trade has not benefited all Americans. The opposition does not realize this, and the elites like free trade. People with higher education who make public policy explain that according to economic principles, cheap imported products can benefit everyone.
In reality, in foreign trade, we have lost thousands of factories and millions of jobs, and the core areas have become wastelands. Perhaps policymakers think no one is a loser, or perhaps they think they are winners so they don't care.
I think the people who support Trump are also tired of war. We have been at war for 15 years, spent $460 billion, over 2 million people have lost their lives, and over 5,000 American soldiers have died. But we have not won. The Bush administration once said that $500 billion could bring democracy to Iraq. But we invested 40 times that amount and only got chaos in return. But after these failures caused by both parties, the Democratic Party has become more hawkish since the Vietnam War."
Here are Peter Thiel's 15 secrets of entrepreneurship, investment, and life.
39. You are the planner of your life, set priorities.
40. Do one thing to the best of your ability.
41. Ensure that the people you are connected with are suitable for your life and company, and complement each other.
42. Pursue a monopoly. Build a company with strong competitiveness that no one can match, and then strive to free yourself from competition.
43. Do not be a "fake" entrepreneur. Start a company because you have an answer to a universal problem.
44. Evaluate essence over status and prestige. Decisions driven by status are not sustainable and, in the long run, are worthless.
45. Competition is a double-edged sword. You can focus on defeating those around you, but you pay a price, neglecting valuable and important things.
46. All trends are overrated. Do not pursue the latest and hottest things, strive to provide practical solutions to universal problems.
47. Do not be bound by the past. Focusing on things that do not work only weakens confidence. Do not spend too much time analyzing why some things do not work, instead move forward boldly and change direction.
48. Find the path to success and never go with the flow.
49. "I make a living by thinking about the future." And this is a graduation ceremony, a new beginning. As a technology investor, I invest in new things, I believe in things that have not been seen or done before.
50. Compared to your future self, your current self knows fewer limitations, fewer taboos, and fewer fears. So don't waste your ignorance. Boldly do things that your teachers and parents think are impossible, do things that they have never thought of doing.
51. The outstanding graduate of the Hamilton College class of 1905, Ezra Pound, was both a poet and a prophet. He summarized his mission as "Make it new" in three words. That is, to restore the essence of tradition and make it new.
52. Do not be faithful to yourself. How do you know if you really have a part called self? Your self may be motivated by competition with others, as in my experience. You need to train your self, cultivate your self, and take care of your self. Instead of blindly pursuing self.
53. Live every day as if you will live forever. This means, first and foremost, that the way you treat the people around you should be as if they will live for a very long time. The choices you make today are significant because the results of these choices will become increasingly significant.
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