"Facebook's success is not a fluke, nor is Thiel's success a fluke." Mark anderson, the founder and investor of Netscape web browser, who is also a member of Facebook's board of directors, said, "Thiel is always desperately looking for opportunities to subvert traditional wisdom."
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, still regards Thiel as a very valuable consultant: "He has always asked us to focus on user growth and thinks that expansion is the most important thing for the company, which is a decisive point for Facebook."
Thiel's advice to Facebook stems from his entrepreneurial experience. As early as December 1998, he co-founded an electronic payment company-Confinity. The company's first application was called PayPal. After eBay (Weibo) users accepted this service, the number of PayPal customers began to increase rapidly. By the beginning of March 2, it had more than 15, users.
in February p>22, under the impetus of Thiel, PayPal successfully went public, with a market value of about $1.2 billion, becoming the first large-scale IPO after the "911" incident. Eight months later, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Thiel made a lot of money.
after that, Thiel began to patiently look for promising startups. At that time, social networking, a field that few people liked, was thought to be the next dangerous Internet bubble, but Thiel still invested his personal $1, in LinkedIn. In 24, he took a stake in Facebook.
a year later, he founded the Founders Fund for $5 million, and after the fund was established, he invested in a series of highly innovative startups, including YouTube, Slide, a photo sharing software company, Yelp, Palantir Technologie, which developed software for searching terrorists and financial fraud, SpaceX, an electric car company, and Kiva, a micro-lending company. These companies turned out to be very successful.
how to select promising entrepreneurs? Thiel said that he would ask the most important question to every entrepreneur seeking investment, that is, "Why did the 2th employee join your company?"
Thiel thinks: "It is 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 the 1,th employee is willing to join, because it is obvious that the company is on the road to growth, and joining can earn a stable income. But the 2th employee will have many different meanings. Because most of your company's equity has been allocated when the 19th employee of the company joined, but the company has not succeeded, so your company is not a place worth joining in order to stabilize income. "
"I will only vote for a company that answers this question, that is, the 2th employee will join in because the company is doing something brand-new and different." Behind the scenery of venture capital, Thiel also runs a hedge fund. Thiel started Thiel Capital Management in 1996 at the age of 29, and a few weeks after selling PayPal in 22, Thiel renamed Thiel Capital Management.
but compared with his venture capital fund, the performance of Thiel's hedge fund is not satisfactory. Thiel, who is good at making long-term investments, can always predict the future correctly, but he seems to be lacking in the right judgment of market timing.
Since the financial crisis, the return on investment of Clary Capital has dropped for three consecutive years, by 4.5% in 28, by 25% in 29 and by 23% in 21, and the asset management scale has also dropped sharply from $6 billion in mid-28 to $46 million.
The decline stems from Hurtel's belief that if the US economy continues to slump, the 3-year US Treasury bonds will rise, and investors will borrow a lot of dollars to invest in emerging markets, so the US dollar will be stronger. At the same time, he also increased the oil price to $147 per barrel and shorted the oil price to $34 per barrel. Nevertheless, his profit from the rise in crude oil failed to make up for the forecast of the appreciation of the US dollar and his investment in treasury bonds.
Thiel said that his hedge fund was basically dormant and had no exposure to equity risk, but he still shorted a few 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 conditions will continue for some time." 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" and, in his words, to at least "raise our civilization to a higher level".
Thiel believes that almost all the problems in the world, such as the defects in government institutions and education systems, lingering financial turmoil, market bubbles, energy crisis and wars for resources, all stem from the stagnation of scientific and technological innovation, and the only way to save them can only be drastic scientific breakthroughs.
"What our society urgently needs is a company that can represent real progress, instead of frantically changing from one fashion to the next." Tell said this in a new book he published.
Thiel has invested a lot of money in companies that focus on prolonging life, migrating to offshore platforms, commercializing space, friendly artificial intelligence, modifying DNA sequences to accelerate evolution and other crazy ideas.
In addition, he keeps 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 bubbles is when 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 outstanding college students drop out of school and start businesses, and provide financial support for these dropouts who pursue scientific and technological innovation.