![]() Rather than those two identities being in conflict, Thiel discovered, each can bolster the other. There, in microcosm, were the two sides of Thiel, and two sides of disruptive Silicon Valley values: the self-proclaimed advocate for personal liberation who dreams of overthrowing the current order, as well as the ruthless entrepreneur dreaming of making a large fortune at internet speed. You would become the middleman of e-commerce without incurring a retailer’s burden of keeping track of orders, maintaining warehouses and making deliveries. If you happened to create and own a new digital currency, you could collect a cut from each transaction. Many of these countries’ governments play fast and loose with their currencies … Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like US dollars.”īut there was that other thing, too, the chance to make a fortune. Thiel pitched the idea as fulfilling his anti-government dream of a global market that protects the welfare of the public by empowering them as consumers: “What we’re calling ‘convenient’ for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Anti-government dreamĪfter fumbling with other ideas, Thiel and Levchin came up with PayPal, which would create “a new internet currency to replace the US dollar”. “We hit it off really quickly – I have this IQ bias – anybody really smart I will figure out a way to deal with,” Levchin says. The two committed to working together on a start-up. That’s great, I invest in companies, Thiel answered. The subject of Thiel’s talk was currency trading, but inevitably he touched on a broader political point – how market globalisation would lead to political freedom.Īmong the audience was Max Levchin, an intense, libertarian-leaning Soviet Jewish emigre who had recently graduated with a computer science degree from the University of Illinois. It was there he would find the ambitious hacker to help him on his way. Later that year, Thiel returned to the Stanford campus to give a guest lecture. He had already helped friends with start-ups that had “sort of blown up in catastrophic ways” and was determined that next time he would be involved from the beginning and do things differently. ANDREW WHITEīy 1998, Thiel was running his own small investment firm back in the Bay Area, where the dotcom gold rush was in full effect. Peter Thiel operates at the very heart of the Silicon Valley tech world as an investor and a trusted adviser to a new generation of leaders. If moguls like Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg started as ambitious young hackers who discovered that their obsession with computers could lead to great wealth and power, Peter Thiel was something like the opposite – an ambitious young man who discovered that his obsession with great wealth and power would lead to computers.Īfter graduating from Stanford with a BA in philosophy and a law degree in the early 1990s, Thiel briefly worked for a blue-chip corporate law firm then became a Wall Street banker. In this extract from his book The Know-It-Alls, Noam Cohen argues that PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel personified the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley values.
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