YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS MOTHERFUCKER
"It started on a sweltering summer day in 1998. Thiel was in a classroom at Stanford’s engineering center, attempting to chat up an awkward but brilliant coder. Max Levchin was 23, and he’d come to a lecture Thiel was delivering on currencies primarily for the air conditioning. The two young men got to talking, and within a day, Thiel, who had been managing a pool of capital he’d raised from friends and family as a hedge fund, told Levchin that he wanted to invest in his embryonic start-up. It made software for Palm Pilots. At the end of that year, they began experimenting with a way for owners of the devices to transmit IOUs to one another. They called the service PayPal, and Thiel, who took over the venture before the year was out, quickly saw its subversive possibilities.
Once you got money via PayPal, you could transfer your balance to a bank. Or you could keep the funds inside PayPal and use them to pay other people. This, Thiel realized, made the service a kind of untrackable digital currency. It was the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in one’s pocket, he believed, boasting to a Wired reporter that it could lead to “the erosion of the nation-state.” Thiel staffed the company with former Stanford Review editors and imposed his libertarian ideas in ways large and small. PayPal employees were free to show up late to meetings as long as they paid $1 for every minute they were tardy, and Ayn Rand was something like required reading. (...)
Thiel despises the counterculture (he dates the precise beginning of American decline to Woodstock) and is contemptuous of the notion of creativity for its own sake. For Thiel, the purpose of founding a company is to control your own destiny. “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery,” he wrote. A new generation of entrepreneurs, coming of age in the wake of the financial crisis, embraced his ideas. Thiel told them to flout norms and seek lucre, not impact. “Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival,” he wrote. “Monopoly profits.” (...)
His ideology dominates Silicon Valley."
La suite de ce portrait écrit par Max Chafkin ici : https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-contrarian-max-chafkin.html
