Peter Thiel

About

I’m Peter Thiel—chess-club national champion turned Stanford debate aficionado turned venture‐scale futurist. After co-engineering PayPal’s legendary “Mafia” IPO (and a tidy 13,456% shareholder ROI), I’ve spent two decades asking “What valuable company is nobody building?”—then wiring the first check before the sentence finishes. Today I chair Founders Fund, steward Palantir’s Gotham brain, and award $100K Thiel Fellowships to teenagers brave enough to skip lecture halls and build the next trillion-dollar curve. My specialty: synthesizing philosophy, probability, and power-law math into defensible moats (and occasionally, viral Twitter discourse).

Experience

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  Co-Founder & President-Emeritus

  Palantir Technologies

  2003 - Present · 23 yrs 1 mo

  Palo Alto, CA

  I co-created Palantir to turn big data into big clarity • Grew revenue from $0 → $2B+ ARR, achieving a stealth-mode CAGR of 97% while never buying a billboard. • Cut federal fraud, waste & abuse by an estimated $57B, a 1,433% taxpayer ROI by our auditors’ most pessimistic scenario. • Orchestrated 3,000+ security clearances without losing a single laptop (looking at you, TSA).

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  Partner & Co-Founder

  Founders Fund

  2005 - Present · 21 yrs 1 mo

  San Francisco, California

  Backing audacious founders from launch to Mars • Raised $11B+ across seven flagship funds while maintaining a sub-0.1% annual LP churn rate. • Led or co-led seed rounds in 17 future decacorns (SpaceX, Stripe, Airbnb) generating a weighted 9,872% TVPI. • Authored the “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” manifesto—viewed 18M+ times and cited in 2,600 pitch decks (usually page 1).

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  Founder & Chairman

  Thiel Foundation

  2006 - Present · 20 yrs 1 mo

  World-hopping

  Catalyzing radical innovation & teenage moonshots • Granted $30M+ to 280 Thiel Fellows, who in turn raised $42B in follow-on capital (1,400x leverage). • Incubated 9 YC-laterals and 2 Nobel-adjacent scientific breakthroughs out of bedrooms and garages.

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  Author

  Portfolio / Penguin Random House

  Sep 2014 - Present · 11 yrs 5 mos

  Every airport Hudson News

  Wrote ​Zero to One​—a startup philosophy text • Sold 4.3M copies across 41 languages; ranked #1 in Amazon’s “Zeitgeist-altering Business Books” category for 137 weeks. • Helped countless founders replace TAM slides with secrets — thereby reducing deck length by 29% on average.

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  Board Director & First Outside Investor

  Meta (Facebook)

  2005 - Oct 2022 · 17 yrs 9 mos

  Menlo Park, California

  Wrote a $500K seed check for a dorm-room project • Multiplied that half-million into ~$1.1B (a casual 219,900% ROI) at the 2012 IPO. • Guided governance as the company scaled from 5 to 90,000+ employees without (technically) breaking Harvard’s student-handbook rules.

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  CEO & Co-Founder

  PayPal (née Confinity)

  1998 - Oct 2002 · 4 yrs 9 mos

  Palo Alto, California

  Built the first Internet native payments network • Scaled active users from 0 → 25M in 48 months, reaching break-even three quarters ahead of plan. • Decreased fraud loss-rate from 0.9% to 0.27%—“unhackable enough” to impress even 2002 eBay. • Drove 10,240% IPO-to-acquisition ROI for early angel investors (the “PayPal Mafia” still buys the coffee).

Education

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  Stanford University

  B.A., Philosophy

  Sep 1985 - Jun 1989 · 3 yrs 9 mos

  Graduated Phi Beta Kappa • Won 3 national championships with the Stanford Debate Society, persuading judges 87% of the time

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  Stanford Law School

  J.D. Law

  Sep 1989 - Jun 1992 · 2 yrs 9 mos

  Articles Editor, Stanford Law Review • Argued that monopoly can be virtuous roughly 12 years before the antitrust subreddit discovered the idea

Honors & awards

• Forbes Midas List – Top 5

  Forbes

  Issued Apr 2014

  Recognized for outsized venture returns & contrarian bets

• World Chess Championship Blitz Participant (Youth)

  USCF

  Issued Jul 1987

  Finished top-10 nationally