Peter Hill (1964), as the founder of PayPal, Thiel gained huge wealth and devoted himself to venture capital industries, including Facebook, LinkedIn, PalantirTechnologies, Yelp and Friendster. Thiel was a big fan of Ron Paul during the 2008 presidential campaign. Earlier in 2009, Thiel pointed out in an article that women's right to vote was one of the reasons for the economic recession. Thiel has also funded several top cutting-edge research projects, including anti-aging research and artificial intelligence development. In 2003, Thiel came out voluntarily and publicly admitted that he was gay.
20 19 Forbes Global Billionaires List ranked 9 16.
Chinese name: peter thiel.
Peter hill
Nationality: USA
Place of birth: Frankfurt, Germany
Date of birth: 1964
Occupation: entrepreneur
Graduate school: Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, Doctor of Law from Stanford University.
Faith: Christianity
Representative works: FromZerotoOne (from zero to one)
outline
With the official IPO of Facebook, which created the myth of wealth, its external investors have gradually become the focus of attention, among which Peter Hill, the first external investor, is the most concerned.
In 2004, Thiel provided $500,000 in start-up capital for Facebook, at that time, the valuation was less than $5 million, accounting for 65,438+00.2% of the shares. Although Thiel sold nearly half of the shares in the following years and the remaining shares were further diluted by Facebook's multiple rounds of financing, Thiel still holds about 3% of the shares. If calculated by the market value of $654.38+000 billion after Facebook's listing, the value of Thiel's shares is expected to reach $3 billion, and the return on investment will exceed 6,000 times.
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Factors of success
"Facebook's success is not a fluke, and Thiel's success is not a fluke." Mark anderson, the founder and investor of Netscapewebbrowser and a member of Facebook's board of directors, said, "Thiel is always desperately looking for opportunities to subvert traditional wisdom."
MarkZuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, still regards Thiel as a very valuable consultant today: "He has always asked us to focus on user growth and thinks that expansion is the most important thing for the company, which is decisive for Facebook."
Thiel's advice to Facebook stems from his entrepreneurial experience. As early as199865438+February, he co-founded an electronic payment company-confinity. The company's first application was called PayPal. After Yi Bei (Yi Bei) users accepted this service, the number of PayPal customers began to increase rapidly. By the beginning of March 2000, it had more than 654.38 million+500,000 users.
In February 2002, under the impetus of Thiel, PayPal successfully went public, with a market value of about $65.438+0.2 billion, becoming the first large-scale IPO after the "965.438+065.438+0" incident. Eight months later, Yi Bei bought PayPal for $654.38+05 billion, and Thiel made huge profits.
After that, Thiel began to patiently look for promising startups. At that time, social networking, a field that few people liked, was considered as the next dangerous internet bubble, but Thiel still invested his personal $654.38 million+in LinkedIn. In 2004, he took a stake in Facebook.
A year later, he founded the FoundersFund with US$ 50 million. After the foundation was established, he invested in a series of highly innovative start-up companies, including YouTube, Slide, Yelp, PalantirTechnologie, an electric car company, Space Exploration Technology Company and Kiva, a microfinance company. These companies turned out to be very successful
How to choose promising entrepreneurs? Thiel said that he would ask every entrepreneur seeking investment the most important question, that is, "Why did the 20th employee join your company?"
Thiel thinks: "It's easy to explain why some people want to be CEOs or join startups as early employees, because they want to run a company or get rich by joining early startups. It is also easy to know why the1000th employee is willing to join, because it is obvious that the company is on the road of growth, and joining can earn a stable income. But the 20th employee will have many different meanings. Because most of your company's equity has been allocated when the company 19 employees joined, but the company has not succeeded, so in order to stabilize income, your company is not a place worth joining. "
"I will only vote for the company that answers this question, that is, the 20th employee will join in, because the company is doing something brand-new and different."
Poor performance of the fund
Behind the scenery of venture capital, Thiel also runs a hedge fund. From 65438 to 0996, Thiel founded ThielCapitalManagement at the age of 29. A few weeks after PayPal was sold in 2002, Thiel changed its name to Thiel Capital Management.
However, compared with his venture capital fund, Thiel's hedge fund performance is not satisfactory. Thiel, who is good at making long-term investments, can always predict the future correctly, but he seems to lack a correct judgment on market timing.
Since the financial crisis, the return on investment of Clary Capital has been declining for three consecutive years, falling by 4.5% in 2008, 25% in 2009 and 23% in 20 10, and the asset management scale has also plummeted from $6 billion in mid-2008 to $46 million.
The decline stems from Hurtel's belief that if the US economy continues to slump, 30-year US Treasury bonds will rise, and investors will borrow a lot of dollars to invest in emerging markets, so the dollar will strengthen. At the same time, he also raised the oil price to1$47/barrel and shorted the oil price to $34/barrel. However, the profits he gained from the rise in crude oil failed to make up for the forecast of the appreciation of the US dollar and his investment in national debt.
Thiel said that his hedge fund was basically dormant and had no stock exposure, but he still shorted a small amount of dollars, fixed-income securities and commodity futures, and also made more oil.
He said: "We are waiting for the correction of market fundamentals, but the current extremely mismatched market situation will continue for some time."
Innovation saves the world
Now, Thiel, who has made a lot of money in the field of social media, has a new goal-to provide funds for those "ideas that can save the world", in his words, at least to "raise our civilization to a higher level".
Thiel believes that almost all the problems in the world, such as the defects of government institutions and education systems, lingering financial turmoil, market bubbles, energy crises and resource wars, all stem from the stagnation of scientific and technological innovation, and the only way to save them can only be a drastic scientific breakthrough.
"What our society urgently needs is a company that can represent real progress, instead of frantically changing from one fashion to another." Tell said this in his new book.
Thiel has invested a lot of money in companies that focus on extending life, migrating to offshore platforms, commercializing space, friendly artificial intelligence, modifying DNA sequences to accelerate evolution and other crazy ideas.
In addition, he kept telling the outside world that there is no so-called bubble in the Internet industry, and the place where there is a terrible bubble is higher education.
"The emergence of a bubble means that something is overvalued and over-trusted. Now in the United States, perhaps only education is a cause that people still trust. " Thiel said that the way to burst this bubble is to let some excellent college students drop out of school and start businesses, and provide financial support for these dropouts who pursue technological innovation.
grow up
Thiel 1964 was born in Frankfurt, Germany. His father was a chemical engineer. He always took his family everywhere and finally settled in Foster, 20 miles south of San Francisco.
Like most boys, Thiel was addicted to the series of novels LordoftheRing when he was a child, from which he learned the temptation of evil and the limitation of power. However, it is said that he is smarter than most of his classmates and has memorized the names of all countries in the world since he was five years old.
As a teenager, Thiel was also a chess master, ranking seventh in the United States. He is also keen to compete with friends or enemies for wisdom through chess, and he is crazy about winning. According to one of his high school classmates, he won't appear on the court until five minutes before the start of the game, so as to create pressure on his opponent.
After graduating from high school, Thiel entered Stanford University to study philosophy and minor in "Political Incorrectness". In the meantime, he also founded a liberal newspaper called Stanford Review, but it was not popular.
1992, after obtaining a bachelor's degree in law, Thiel got a job at the top Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, but resigned seven months later. Later, he turned his attention to the financial industry and found a job as a financial derivatives trader at Credit Suisse First Boston Bank. 1996, Thiel, who wanted to start his own business, returned to his hometown from new york. With 1 10,000 dollars raised from his family and friends, he rented a windowless warehouse in the financial center of Silicon Valley at the cheapest price, founded Thiel Capital, and embarked on the road to wealth creation.
Thiel ranks 365th on the Forbes list with a net worth of $654.38+05 billion. However, it is rumored that Thiel, as a Christian, is also an out-and-out homosexual, which is one of the concrete manifestations of Thiel's being called ambivalent complex by the outside world.