"Countryman" Vance and 53 Facts about "PayPal Mafia" Thiel

Author: Lonely Brain

01. Some believe that the three leaders of the "PayPal Mafia," Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks, have successfully placed their bets once again.

02. The PayPal Mafia is the largest small group in Silicon Valley. Since its sale to eBay in 2002, most of PayPal's key employees have left, but they still maintain close ties. They even named their group the "PayPal Mafia."

03. What are the characteristics of the "PayPal Mafia"?

Thiel recalled, "We initially hired people from our own circles. I hired friends from Stanford, while Levin hired friends from the University of Illinois."

They were all looking for a specific type of employee, with the criteria being competitive, knowledgeable, multilingual, and, more importantly, proficient in mathematics. Thiel and Levin did not want their employees to be MBAs, consultants, fraternity members, or athletes.

04. Levin recalled, "There was once a candidate who came for an interview, and when I asked him about his hobbies, he said he liked playing basketball. I immediately said, 'We can't hire this person; every person I knew in college who liked basketball was an idiot.'" In other words, they were hiring people similar to themselves.

Doesn't it seem like they are completely different from Trump and Vance?

05. While at Yale, he attended a speech by Thiel about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites.

Vance later recalled, "He believed these two trends… were interconnected. If technological innovation truly brought about real prosperity, our elites wouldn't be competing with each other over fewer and fewer prestigious outcomes."

Vance described Thiel's speech as the "most important moment" of his time at Yale.

06. Not all members of the PayPal Mafia support Trump. For example, Reid Hoffman has openly opposed Trump and has had direct confrontations with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk because of it.

07. In 2015, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance joined the venture capital firm Mithril Capital, run by Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel.

08. In 2016, he announced plans to move back to Ohio and founded a nonprofit organization called "Our Ohio Renewal," dedicated to "making it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams."

09. In November 2022, with over $10 million in donations from Thiel, he was elected as a U.S. Senator from Ohio. This was his first public office. Thiel was his largest donor.

10. Reflecting on his first meeting with Thiel in 2011, Vance wrote:

"(Thiel) expressed a feeling… I was obsessed with achievement for its own sake, not for some meaningful goal, but to win social competition.

I worried that I prioritized the pursuit of achievement over character, and this concern became more significant: Pursue what?"

The depth of Vance's influence from Thiel can be seen in the following details:

11. In 2019, Vance founded his own venture capital firm, Narya, in Ohio. Like Thiel's company Palantir, the name Narya comes from a fictional object in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

12. In August 2019, he was baptized in the Catholic Church. At that time, he attributed his conversion to the works of French philosopher René Girard, which he encountered through Thiel, who studied under Girard at Stanford.

Girard is best known for his theory of "mimetic desire": the idea that human beings imitate the desires of their peers, ultimately leading to competition and violent conflict, which are resolved through "scapegoating."

13. Peter Thiel is a critic of large tech companies, yet his efforts to establish their dominance surpass those of anyone alive.

14. He prides himself on being a privacy advocate while creating one of the world's largest surveillance companies.

15. He is an advocate for elite politics and intellectual diversity, yet surrounded by a group of self-proclaimed loyal mafia members.

16. He is a defender of free speech but secretly took down a major media outlet in the U.S.

17. Peter Thiel's fundamental ideas are quite complex and, in some respects, contradictory, but his obsession with technological advancement is intertwined with nationalist politics, which sometimes seems entangled with white supremacy.

18. The biographer of Peter Thiel wrote:

"I wonder how he built such a high level of followership and managed to consistently win bets—even when those decisions seemed crazy.

I wonder how someone so respected and beloved can also appear so cold and ruthless.

Is Peter Thiel a genius worthy of admiration and study, or an antisocial nihilist? Is he both?"

19. Transforming what might have been a bitter experience into something sweet is Thiel's personal journey, a metamorphosis from a struggling corporate lawyer to an internet billionaire, which he has recounted many times in his university lectures, speeches, and his book "Zero to One."

20. "Zero to One," a libertarian's handbook for success, also argues that monopolies are good, monarchy is the most effective form of government, and tech founders are akin to gods. The book has sold over 1.25 million copies worldwide.

21. Thiel's doctrine of "Zero to One" positions disruption itself as the goal of entrepreneurship. Change becomes a declaration—a declaration to challenge the existing order. Thiel is a nihilist—a very intelligent nihilist, without any necessary adherence. He is entirely about power—this is the law of the jungle, that 'I am the predator, and the predator wins.'

22. Peter Thiel is very tough and cold when it comes to corporate interests.

23. PayPal accelerated its growth through a form of regulatory arbitrage that was more extreme than what Company X pursued. Company X at least registered as a bank, while PayPal couldn't be bothered to do even that. PayPal made almost no obvious efforts to collect user information or prevent them from using money for illegal purposes, and at least in the eyes of some employees, it was openly contemptuous of banking rules.

24. Of course, there is a territory where such blatant violations are seen as legitimate, even commendable, and that is the territory familiar to Thiel and many PayPal executives: radical conservative politics.

25. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay, and Peter Thiel cashed out $55 million, renaming Thiel Capital to Clarium Capital Management, entering the hedge fund arena.

26. Peter Thiel and his colleagues practiced the idea of "discovering truths that others have not," taking unconventional paths and practicing contrarian investing. While others were selling off, they bought Japanese government bonds; when others were bearish on the energy sector, they bought in heavily. By the summer of 2008, Clarium's assets exceeded $7 billion, growing sevenfold in six years. He also gained a reputation in the investment world, hailed as an investment genius.

However, at the end of September 2008, the financial markets collapsed. The Clarium fund began to lose money, and contrarian investing failed. He had been buying stocks, but they plummeted. In 2009, he shorted stocks, only for them to rise later. By 2010, Clarium's market value was only $350 million.

27. Thiel's parents were fervent Republicans, and Thiel inherited this sentiment, viewing those who do not shout as his kindred, idolizing the Nixon era and Nixon's political successor, Ronald Reagan.

28. Peter Thiel has always been very skeptical of the role of government. He has supported various "anti-government" organizations, believing that government progress has lagged far behind current technological levels.

He has long supported seasteading, which means introducing free market competition mechanisms into government, using the vast oceans as a platform for a thousand governments to compete, allowing citizens to choose their government as freely as they choose a phone. He has donated at least $5 million to organizations dedicated to small government.

29. As a teenager, Peter Thiel wrote some programs, but what truly attracted him was the vision of the future. He read works by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who imagined humanoid robots, space travel, lunar settlements, food sources that could fill stomachs, cars that float without wheels, and even immortality.

30. Peter Thiel believes that most investments are currently flowing into innovations in bits, but more research on hard technologies, innovations in matter and atoms, has not received enough attention. Therefore, his Founder's Fund has also invested in aerospace, biotechnology, materials science, and other fields, aiming to explore more untapped frontiers.

31. On the official website of Peter Thiel's Founders' Fund, there is the following declaration:

We invest in smart people solving hard problems, usually difficult scientific or engineering problems.

32. (Founders' Fund) We believe that moving away from supporting transformative technologies and towards more cynical, incremental investments has disrupted the venture capital landscape. Using unfavorable economic conditions as an excuse to explain the nightmare decade of venture capital ignores the strong, non-cyclical return history of the industry over the past 40 years and the continued robust performance of the top 20% of the industry. What venture capital supports has changed, which is why returns have also changed.

33. (Founders' Fund) Our list is not exhaustive. The best companies will create their own niches. Generally speaking, from our investors' perspective, the most promising companies often have several characteristics:

1. They are unpopular (popular investments are often expensive; for example, Groupon is worth billions).

2. They are hard to evaluate (which increases their unpopularity).

3. They have technological risks, but not insurmountable technological risks.

4. If they succeed, their technology will be very valuable.

34. He has a "grand" idea: to block the footsteps of death and extend life. He believes that most people's attitudes toward aging are passively accepting, but he disagrees. He plans to live at least to 120 years old and takes human growth hormone daily for this purpose.

35. He has also donated over $6 million to several research foundations focused on anti-aging and signed a "cryonics agreement" with the cryonics technology company Alcor, which means that if Thiel contracts an incurable disease, his body will be frozen and thawed only when a treatment becomes available in the future…

36. It is rumored that Peter Thiel regularly undergoes blood transfusions with young people to maintain his youth.

37. Peter Thiel's self-assessment is: "So I think what you call being unconventional is more of a clear understanding of myself."

38. Many years ago (around 2016), during a speech supporting Trump, Peter Thiel expressed the following views:

"I think Trump is right on major issues. For example: free trade has not benefited all Americans. The opposition does not realize this; the elites love free trade. Educated people who make public policy explain that, according to economic principles, cheap imported products can benefit everyone.

In reality, we have lost thousands of factories and millions of jobs in foreign trade, and core areas have become wastelands. Perhaps policymakers think no one is a loser, or perhaps they think they are winners and therefore do not care.

I think those who vote for Trump are also tired of war. We have been at war for 15 years, spending $460 billion, with over two million lives lost and more than 5,000 American soldiers dead. But we have not won; the Bush administration once said that investing $50 billion could bring democracy to Iraq. Yet we invested 40 times that amount and got chaos instead. But after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic Party has become more hawkish since the Vietnam War."

Here are Peter Thiel's 15 secrets to entrepreneurship, investment, and life.

39. You are the planner of your life; set your priorities.

40. Do one thing and do it well.

41. Ensure that the people you associate with are suitable for your life and company and complement each other.

42. Pursue monopoly status. Build a highly competitive company that no one can rival, and then work to eliminate competition.

43. Don't be a "fake" entrepreneur. Start a company because you can provide an answer to a common problem.

44. Value essence over status and prestige. Status-driven decisions are not sustainable and are ultimately worthless in the long run.

45. Competition is a double-edged sword. You can focus on defeating those around you, but you pay the price of neglecting valuable and important matters.

46. All trends are overestimated. Don't chase the latest and hottest things; strive to propose practical solutions to common problems.

47. Don't be stuck in the past. Focusing on what doesn't work will only undermine your confidence. Don't spend too much time analyzing why some things don't work; you should move forward and change direction.

48. Find the secret path to success and never go with the flow.

49. I make a living by thinking about the future. And this is a graduation ceremony, a fresh start. As a tech investor, I invest in new things, believing in things that have yet to be seen or accomplished.

50. Compared to your future self, your current self knows fewer limitations, fewer taboos, and less fear. So don't waste your ignorance. Boldly do the things that your teachers and parents think are impossible, do the things they never even thought to do.

51. Ezra Pound, an outstanding graduate of Hamilton College Class of 1905, was both a poet and a prophet. He summarized his mission in three words: Make it new. That is, to restore the essence of tradition and make it fresh.

52. Don't be loyal to yourself. How do you know if you even have a part called self? Your self may be motivated by competition with others, just like my experience. You need to train your self, cultivate your self, and take care of your self. Rather than blindly pursuing self.

53. Live each day as if you will live forever. This first means that the way you treat those around you should also be as if they will live for a long time in the future. The choices you make today are significant because the results of those choices will grow larger over time.