Author: Lonely Brain

01. Some people believe that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks, the three leaders of the "PayPal Mafia", have made another successful bet.

02. PayPal Mafia is the largest gang in Silicon Valley. Most of PayPal’s key employees have left since it was sold to eBay in 2002, but they still maintain close contact. They even gave their group a name – “PayPal Mafia”.

03. What are the characteristics of the “Paypal Mafia”?

“We initially hired mostly people from our own circle,” Thiel recalls. “I hired my friends from Stanford, and Levine hired his friends from the University of Illinois.”

They were looking for a certain type of employee: someone who was competitive, knowledgeable, multilingual, and, most importantly, mathematically proficient. Thiel and Levin didn't want MBAs, consultants, fraternity boys, or athletes.

04. Levin recalled: "Once a candidate came to the company for an interview, and I asked him what his hobbies were, and he said he liked playing basketball. I immediately said, 'We can't hire this person. During college, everyone I knew who liked playing basketball was an idiot.'" In other words, they are hiring people who are similar to themselves.

Doesn't it seem like he is a completely different person from Trump and Vance?

05. While at Yale, he attended a speech by Thiel on technological stagnation and the decline of the American elite.

“He believed that the two trends … were interrelated,” Vance later recalled. “If technological innovation were truly driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t be competing against each other over a smaller and smaller number of prestigious outcomes.”

Vance called Thiel’s speech “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.

06. Not all PayPal mafia members support Trump. For example, Reid Hoffman is clearly against Trump and has had a head-on dispute 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 run by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel.

08. In 2016, he announced plans to move back to Ohio from California and founded a nonprofit called Our Ohio Renewal, dedicated to "making it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams."

09. In November 2022, he was elected as a U.S. senator from Ohio, his first public office, with the help of more than $10 million in donations from Thiel, his largest funder.

10. Recalling his first meeting with Thiel in 2011, Vance wrote:

“[Till] expressed a sense that … I was obsessed with achievement for its own sake, not for some meaningful purpose, but for winning social competition.

My fear that I was prioritizing achievement over character became more important: What was it?

The depth of Vance's influence on Thiel can be seen from the following details:

11. In 2019, Vance founded his own venture capital firm, Narya, in Ohio. Like Thiel's company Palantir, Narya's name comes from a fictional object in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" book.

12. He was baptized in the Catholic Church in August 2019. At the time, he attributed his conversion to the work of French philosopher René Girard, whom he had been exposed to through Thiel, who studied with him at Stanford.

Girard is best known for his theory of "imitative desire": humans imitate the desires of their peers, ultimately leading to competition and violent conflict, which is resolved through "scapegoating."

13. Peter Thiel is a critic of Big Tech, but he has done more to establish its dominance than anyone alive.

14. He calls himself a privacy advocate, but he created one of the largest surveillance companies in the world.

15. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity, yet he surrounds himself with a group of mafia professing their loyalty.

16. He is a defender of free speech, but he secretly took down a major American media outlet.

17. Peter Thiel’s basic philosophy is complex and, in some ways, contradictory, but his obsession with technological progress is intertwined with nationalist politics that sometimes seem entangled with white supremacy.

18. Peter Tilde’s biographer writes:

“I wanted to know how he built up such a huge following and how he was able to consistently win every time he made a bet, even when the decisions seemed crazy.

I wondered how someone so respected and loved could be so callous at the same time.

Is Peter Thiel a genius worthy of admiration and study, or a sociopathic nihilist? Is he a bit of both?

19. Making something sweet that might otherwise be sour is Thiel’s personal story, a journey of transformation from an unsuccessful corporate lawyer to an Internet billionaire, which he has told many times in college classes, speeches, and his book Zero to One.

20. Zero to One, the libertarian manual for success that also argues that monopolies are good, monarchies are the most efficient form of government, and tech founders are godlike, has sold more than 1.25 million copies worldwide.

21. Peter Thiel’s “From 0 to 1” sermon takes disruption itself as the purpose of entrepreneurship. Change becomes a declaration—a declaration to challenge the existing order. Thiel is a nihilist—a very smart nihilist, without necessary persistence. He is all about power—this is the law of the jungle, that is, ‘I am a predator, and the predator must win.’

22. Peter Thiel is very tough and ruthless when fighting for the company's interests.

23. PayPal accelerated its growth through a more extreme form of regulatory arbitrage than Company X pursued. Company X at least registered as a bank; PayPal didn’t even bother to do that. PayPal made little visible effort to collect information about its users or prevent them from using their money for illicit purposes, and in what at least seemed to some employees like blatant disregard for banking rules.

24. Of course, there is a territory where such flagrant aggression is seen as legal and even celebrated, and that’s territory with which Thiel and many PayPal executives are all too familiar: radical conservative politics.

25. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay. Peter Thiel cashed out $55 million and changed the name of Thiel Capital to Clarium Capital Management, entering the hedge fund field.

26. Peter Thiel and his colleagues practiced "discovering the truth that others have not discovered" and did not follow the usual path. They practiced the concept of reverse investment. When others were selling, they bought Japanese government bonds. When others were pessimistic about the energy industry, they bought a lot. In the summer of 2008, Clarium's assets exceeded US$7 billion, a seven-fold increase in six years. He also became famous in the investment industry and was hailed as an investment genius.

At the end of September 2008, the financial markets collapsed. Clarium Fund began to lose money, and the contrarian investment failed. He kept buying stocks, but the stocks kept falling. In 2009, he shorted the stocks, but the stocks rose. In 2010, Clarium's market value was only $350 million.

27. Thiel's parents were ardent Republicans, and Thiel has adopted that sentiment, identifying with those who do not shout, idolizing the Nixon era and Nixon's political successor, Ronald Reagan.

28. Peter Thiel has always been very skeptical of the role of the government. He has supported various "anti-government" organizations. He believes that the government's progress has lagged far behind the current level of technology.

He has long supported seasteading, which means introducing the free market competition mechanism into the government, using the vast ocean as a platform to allow 1,000 governments to compete with each other, and then citizens can freely choose their own government like choosing a mobile phone. He has donated at least 5 million US dollars to organizations dedicated to small government.

29. As a teenager, 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, petroleum-based foods that fill the stomach, cars that float in the air instead of running on wheels, and even immortality.

30. Peter Thiel believes that most of the current investments have gone into byte innovations, but more hard technology research and innovations on matter and atoms have not received enough attention. Therefore, his Founder’s Fund has also invested in airlines, biotechnology, materials science and other fields, dedicated to opening up more uncultivated virgin lands.

31.  Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund’s official website has the following statement:

We invest in smart people solving hard problems, often hard scientific or engineering problems.

32. (Founders’ fund) We believe that the move away from supporting transformative technologies and toward more cynical, incremental investments has damaged the venture capital landscape. Excusing venture capital’s nightmare decade with adverse economic conditions ignores the industry’s strong, non-cyclical first 40 years of return history and the continued solid performance of the industry’s top 20%. What venture capital supports has changed, and that’s why returns have changed as well.

33. (Founders’ fund) Our list is not exhaustive. The best companies create their own fields. Generally speaking, from our investors’ perspective, the most promising companies tend to have several characteristics:

1. They are unpopular (popular investments tend to be expensive; e.g., Groupon is worth billions).

2. They are difficult to evaluate (which adds to their unpopularity).

3. They have technical risks, but they are not insurmountable technical risks.

4. If they succeed, their technology will be extremely valuable.

34. He has a "grand" idea: to stop death and prolong life. He believes that most people passively accept the issue of aging, but he doesn't think so. He plans to live to at least 120 years old and takes human growth hormone every day to achieve this.

35. He has also donated more than $6 million to several anti-aging research foundations and signed a "freezing agreement" with cryogenics research company Alcor, which means that if Thiel develops an incurable disease, his body will be frozen and thawed in the future when a treatment is available...

36. It is said that Peter Thiel regularly exchanges blood with young people in order to stay young forever.

37. Peter Thiel’s self-evaluation is: “So I think what you call unorthodox is more of a clear understanding of myself.”

38. Many years ago (around 2016), in a speech supporting Trump, Peter Thiel expressed the following view:

“I think Trump is on the right track on the big issues. For example, free trade has not benefited all Americans. The other side doesn’t realize that. The elites love free trade. The highly educated people who make public policy explain that economic principles make cheap imports a win for everyone.

In fact, we have lost thousands of factories and millions of jobs in foreign trade, and the core areas have become complete wastelands. Perhaps policymakers think no one is a loser, or perhaps they think they are winners and don't care.

I think people who voted for Trump are also tired of war. We fought for 15 years, spent $460 billion, lost more than 2 million lives, and more than 5,000 American soldiers died. But we didn't win. The Bush administration said that $50 billion would bring democracy to Iraq. We spent 40 times that amount and got chaos back. But after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic Party has become more hawkish than it has been since Vietnam."

Here are Peter Thiel’s 15 tips for entrepreneurship, investing, and life.

39. You are the planner of your life. You set priorities.

40. Do one thing to the best of your ability.

41. Make sure the people you associate with are a good fit for your life and company.

42. Pursue a monopoly. Build a company that is so competitive that no one can match it, and then work to insulate yourself from the competition.

43. Don’t be a “fake” entrepreneur. Start a company because you have an answer to a universal problem.

44. Value substance 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 beating those around you, but you pay the price by neglecting valuable and important things.

46. ​​All trends are overrated. Don’t chase the newest, hottest thing; strive for a practical solution to a common problem.

47. Don’t dwell on the past. Focusing on what didn’t work only erodes your confidence. Don’t spend too much time analyzing why something didn’t work. Move forward and change your direction.

48. Find the secret path to success and never follow the crowd.

49. I think about the future for a living. This is a graduation, a fresh start. As a technology investor, I invest in new things, and I believe in things that haven't been seen or done yet.

50. You now know fewer limits, fewer taboos, and fewer fears than you will in the future. So don't waste your ignorance. Dare to do things that your teachers and parents think are impossible, things that they have never thought of doing.

51. Ezra Pound, a distinguished graduate of Hamilton College Class of 1905, was both a poet and a prophet. He summed up his mission in three words: "Make it new." That is, to restore the essence of tradition and make it new.

52. Don’t be true to your ego. How do you know if you have a part called ego? Your ego may be motivated by competition with others, as it was in my experience. You need to train your ego, cultivate your ego, and take care of your ego. Instead of blindly pursuing ego.

53. Live each day as if you will live forever. This means, first and foremost, treating the people around you as if they will live a long time in the future. The choices you make today matter because the consequences of those choices will grow ever greater.