53 facts about Vance, the "Redneck" and Thiel, the "PayPal Mafia"

Original title: "53 facts about "countryman" Vance and "PayPal Mafia" Thiel"

Original author: Lonely Brain

01. Some people think that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks, the three "PayPal Mafia" leaders, have made another successful bet.

02. The PayPal Mafia is the largest small group in Silicon Valley. Since it was sold to eBay in 2002, most of PayPal's key employees have left, but they still maintain close contact. They even gave their group a name - "Paypal Mafia".

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

"We initially hired people from our own circle," Thiel recalled. "I hired my friends from Stanford, and Levin hired his friends from the University of Illinois."

They were both looking for a specific type of employee, one who was competitive, knowledgeable, multilingual, and, more importantly, mathematically proficient. Thiel and Levin didn't want their employees to be MBAs, consultants, fraternity members, or athletes.

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

Does it seem like a completely different person from Trump and Vance? ‍‍‍‍

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

Vance later recalled: "He believed that these two trends... were interrelated. If technological innovation really brought real prosperity, our elites would not compete with each other on fewer and fewer prestigious results."

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

06. Not all PayPal gangsters support Trump. For example, Reid Hoffman clearly opposed Trump and therefore had a head-on dispute with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

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

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

09. In November 2022, he was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio. This was his first public office, with the help of more than $10 million in donations from Thiel. Thiel is his largest funder.

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

“[Thill] expressed a sense… that I was obsessed with achievement for its own sake, not for some meaningful purpose, but for winning social competition.

My concerns about prioritizing achievement over character became more important: What?”

Vance was deeply influenced by Thiel, as shown in the following details:

11. In 2019, Vance founded his own venture capital firm, Narya, in Ohio. Like Thiel’s company Palantir, Narya’s name 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 the time, he attributed his conversion to the work of French philosopher René Girard, whom he encountered through Thiel, who had studied with him at Stanford.

Girard is best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”: that humans imitate the desires of their peers, ultimately generating competition and violent conflict, which is resolved through “scapegoating.”

13. Peter Thiel is a critic of Big Tech, but he has done more to establish its dominance than anyone alive.

14. He bills himself as a privacy advocate, but he created one of the world’s largest surveillance companies.

15. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity, but he surrounds himself with a mafia of self-proclaimed loyalty.

16. He is a defender of free speech, but he secretly took down a major American media outlet.

17. Peter Thiel's basic philosophy is quite complex and in some ways contradictory, but his obsession with technological progress is intertwined with nationalist politics, which sometimes seems entangled with white supremacy.

18. Peter Thiel’s biographer wrote:

“I wanted to know how he built up such a high following and how he managed to win every bet consistently—even if the decisions seemed crazy.

I wanted to know how a man so respected and loved could be so ruthless at the same time.

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

19. Making something that might have been sour sweet is Thiel’s personal experience, a journey of transformation from an unsuccessful corporate lawyer to an Internet billionaire, which he has told many times in college classes, speeches and his book “From 0 to 1”.

20. Zero to One, the libertarian manual for success, also argues that monopolies are good, monarchies are the most efficient form of government, and tech founders are godlike. The book has sold more than 1.25 million copies worldwide.

21. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One sermon makes disruption itself the purpose of entrepreneurship. Change becomes a manifesto—a manifesto that challenges the existing order. Thiel is a nihilist—a very smart nihilist with no necessary persistence. He’s all about power—it’s the law of the jungle, where ‘I’m a predator, and predators win.’

22. Peter Thiel is very tough and very ruthless in his fight for corporate interests.

23. PayPal accelerated its growth through a more extreme form of regulatory arbitrage than Company X pursued. Company X at least registered as a bank, something PayPal didn’t even bother to do. PayPal made little visible effort to collect information about its users or prevent them from using their money for illicit purposes, and in the eyes of at least some employees, it was blatantly flouting banking rules.

24. Of course, there is territory where such flagrant violations are seen as legal, even celebrated, and that’s territory that Thiel and many PayPal executives are all too familiar with: radical conservative politics.

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

26. Peter Thiel and his colleagues practiced "discovering the truth that others have not discovered", and did not follow the usual path. They practiced the concept of reverse investment. When others were selling, they bought Japanese government bonds, and when others were pessimistic about the energy industry, they bought a lot. In the summer of 2008, Clarium's assets exceeded US$7 billion, a seven-fold increase in six years. He also became famous in the investment industry and was hailed as an investment genius.

It was at the end of September 2008 that the financial markets collapsed. Clarium Fund began to lose money, and contrarian investment failed. He kept buying stocks, but the stocks plummeted. In 2009, he shorted the stocks, but the stocks rose. In 2010, Clarium's market value was only $350 million.

27. Thiel's parents were ardent Republicans, and Thiel also inherited this sentiment, thus regarding those who did not shout as his own, and worshipped the Nixon era and Nixon's political successor Ronald Reagan.

28. Peter Thiel has always been very skeptical of the role of the government. He has supported various "anti-government" organizations. He believes that the government's progress has lagged far behind the current level of technology.

He has long supported seasteading, which means introducing free market competition into government, using the vast ocean as a platform to allow 1,000 governments to compete with each other, and then citizens can freely choose their own government like choosing a mobile 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 really attracted him was the vision of the future. He read the works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who imagined humanoid robots, space travel, lunar settlements, petroleum-based foods that can fill the stomach, cars that float in the air instead of wheels, and even immortality.

30. Peter Thiel believes that most of the current investments have been poured into byte innovation, but more hard technology research, innovations on matter and atoms have not received enough attention, so his Founder’s Fund has also invested in airlines, biotechnology, materials science and other fields, committed to opening up more uncultivated virgin land.

31. The official website of Peter Thiel’s Founders’ fund has the following declaration:

We invest in smart people to solve difficult problems, usually difficult scientific or engineering problems.

32. (Founders’ fund) We believe that moving away from supporting transformative technologies and turning to more cynical and incremental investments has undermined the landscape of venture capital. Explaining venture capital’s nightmare decade with the excuse of adverse economic conditions ignores the industry’s strong, non-cyclical first 40 years of return history and the continued solid performance of the industry’s top 20%. What venture capital supports has changed, and that’s why the returns have changed too.

33. (Founders’ fund) Our list is not exhaustive. The best companies create their own categories. Generally speaking, the most promising companies from our investor perspective tend to have several characteristics:

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

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

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

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

34. He has a “grand” idea: to stop death and extend life. He thinks that most people have a passive attitude towards aging, but he doesn’t think so. He plans to live to at least 120 years old and takes human growth hormone every day to achieve this.

35. He also donated more than 6 million US dollars to several anti-aging research foundations, and signed a "freezing agreement" with Alcor, a cryogenic technology research company, which means that if Thiel suffers from an incurable disease, his body will be frozen and will only be thawed when a treatment is available in the future...

36. It is said that Peter Thiel regularly exchanges blood with young people in order to stay young.

37. Peter Thiel’s self-evaluation is: “So I think what you call heresy is more of a sober understanding of myself.”

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

“I think Trump is right on major issues. For example: free trade does not benefit all Americans. The opposing side does not realize this. The elites like free trade. People with higher education and public policy explain that according to economic principles, cheap imports can benefit everyone.

In fact, in foreign trade, we have lost thousands of factories and millions of jobs, and the core areas have become a wasteland. Maybe policymakers think no one is a loser, or maybe they think they are winners so they don’t care.

I think people who voted for Trump are also tired of war. We have been fighting for 15 years and spent $460 billion, more than 2 million lives lost, more than 5,000 American soldiers killed. But we did not win. The Bush administration said $50 billion would bring democracy to Iraq. We spent 40 times that and got chaos back. But after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic Party has become more hawkish than since Vietnam."

Here are Peter Thiel’s 15 tips for starting a business, investing, and life.

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

40. Do one thing best.

41. Make sure the people you associate with are a good fit for your life and company, and complement each other.

42 Go for a monopoly. Build a company that is so competitive that no one can match it, and then work to free yourself from the competition.

43. Don’t be a “fake” entrepreneur. Start a company because you have an answer to a universal problem.

44. Value essence over status and prestige. Decisions driven by status are not sustainable and, in the long run, are worthless.

45. Competition is a double-edged sword. You can focus on beating the people around you, but you pay the price by neglecting what is valuable and important.

46. All trends are overrated. Don’t chase the latest and hottest thing, strive for a practical solution to a common problem.

47. Don’t dwell on the past. Focusing on things that don’t work only weakens confidence. Don’t spend too much time analyzing why something doesn’t work, but should move forward and change the direction.

48. Find the secret path to success, never follow the crowd.

49. I make a living by thinking about the future. This is a graduation ceremony, a fresh start. As a technology investor, I invest in new things, and I believe in things that have not been seen or done yet.

50. You now know fewer limits, fewer taboos, and fewer fears than you will in the future. So don’t waste your ignorance. Do what your teachers and parents thought was impossible, what they never thought of doing.

51. Ezra Pound, a distinguished graduate of Hamilton College Class of 1905, was both a poet and a prophet. He summed up his mission in three words: “Make it new.” That is, to restore the essence of tradition and make it new.

52. Don’t be true to yourself. How do you know if you have a part called yourself? Your ego may be motivated by competition with others, as I have. You need to discipline your ego, cultivate your ego, and take care of your ego. Instead of blindly pursuing it.

53. Live every day as if you will live forever. This means, first and foremost, that you treat the people around you as if they will live a long time in the future. The choices you make today matter because the consequences of those choices will grow larger and larger.

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