The rise of Peter Thiel, the iconic Silicon Valley VC who wants to cheat death

Thiel was born in Germany and moved to the US when he was one year old though his family moved around some more until they settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in fifth grade. He attended Stanford where he studied philosophy and got his JD law degree. At Stanford he met many of the people that would become key players at PayPal (later known as the PayPal mafia) including include Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.

Never afraid to share controversial opinions, in 1999, Thiel and his buddy David Sacks wrote a book called "The Diversity Myth" in which they argued that colleges were bowing to political correctness, dumbing down their admissions policies and silencing intellectual dissent in the "name of diversity."

Thiel is also a world-ranked chess player who was reportedly once one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the US.

Before his career in tech, he was a clerk for an appeals judge, which landed him an interviews to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia. He didn't get the job. "At the time, I was devastated," he wrote in his book "Zero to One."

So he took a job as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group and made enough money to launch a fintech startup called PayPal with Max Levchin. PayPal merged with Elon Musk's payment company, X.com, went public and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Those early employees (the PayPal Mafia) became wealthy angel investors. Thiel's stake was worth about $55 million, and from there he launched a hedge fund, Clarium Capital. By the time he was 37, Clarium was managing $270 million.

In 2004, Thiel led a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for about 10% of the company, taking 3% himself. (Others like Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus were also angels). This was the first outside investment in Facebook and between the shares that Thiel sold at the IPO and those he sold shortly after, he made about $1 billion.

"[My] biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," he says.

In the movie about Facebook, "The Social Network" Thiel was played by Wallace Langham. Thiel wasn't a fan of the movie, saying,"The zero-sum world it portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood."

In 2004, Thiel cofounded another tech company, Palantir, with Alexander Karp. They landed the CIA as an early customer and investor. Thiel's idea was to use financial industry fraud-detection software to detect terrorist activity. Palantir can sift through photos, videos and other data to watch for criminal activity. Palantir is known today as one of the most secretive successful companies in the Valley. It raised $2.42 billion and is valued at $20 billion and Karp has indicated that it has no plans to go public.

Thiel's parents didn't let him watch TV when he was a kid. He did like to read and J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" was his favorite read as a teen. He tends to choose "Lord of the Rings" inspired names for his ventures. For instance, Palantir refers to the "seeing stones" in Tolkien's books.

Thiel is best known today as a venture capitalist. His VC firm, Founders Fund, had a manifesto that once famously said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," a ding at Twitter that expressed his disappointment with what he considered a lack of big ideas from startups. Still, he's also an active angel investor, who's backed about 80 companies like LinkedIn, Yammer and Yelp.

Source: Founder's Fund manifesto: What happened to the future?

The big idea he's trying to solve: curing death. Or at least curing aging."Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it."

He says he plans to live to be 120 and takes human growth hormones every day. He's donated over $6 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a foundation working on technology to reverse aging. He supports the SENS Research Foundation which is working to stop aging, and has backed a bunch of similar biotech firms.

And he's signed up with cryogenics company Alcor, which will freeze your ailing body in the hopes of unfreezing it in the future when there is a cure. "In telling you that I’ve signed up for it [cryogenics], there’s always this reaction that it’s really crazy, it’s disturbing. But my take on it is it’s only disturbing because it challenges our complacency."

Thiel also supports a bunch of other anti-aging research, which he calls "The Immortality Project."

He likes other big ideas too. He's backed the Seasteading Institute, which is building self-sustained floating cities that want to experiment with different types of governments, something that appeals to his libertarianism. One of its projects isn't that high and mighty. It is Ephemerisle, "which is intended to be more like Burning Man on the ocean," as Thiel describes it.

He also believes that college costs too much for what it returns and that smart kids are better off skipping it to start companies. So he launched The Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship where young people get $100,000 and two-years of support to launch their companies.

The Thiel Fellowship has become a competitive and prestigious program. So far 104 young people, under age 22, have participated in class sizes that range from 20-30 people. Dropping out of school, at least for the two-years, is a requirement of the fellowship.

The rise of Peter Thiel, the iconic Silicon Valley VC who wants to cheat death

Thiel is also a world-ranked chess player who was reportedly once one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the US.

Before his career in tech, he was a clerk for an appeals judge, which landed him an interviews to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia. He didn't get the job. "At the time, I was devastated," he wrote in his book "Zero to One."

"[My] biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," he says.

The big idea he's trying to solve: curing death. Or at least curing aging."Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it."

Thiel also supports a bunch of other anti-aging research, which he calls "The Immortality Project."

He also believes that college costs too much for what it returns and that smart kids are better off skipping it to start companies. So he launched The Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship where young people get $100,000 and two-years of support to launch their companies.

The Thiel Fellowship has become a competitive and prestigious program. So far 104 young people, under age 22, have participated in class sizes that range from 20-30 people. Dropping out of school, at least for the two-years, is a requirement of the fellowship.

Popular Right Now