Peter Thiel

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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

the prominent tech scribe: Kara Swisher, “Kara Visits Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel,” AllThingsD, November 1, 2007, http://allthingsd.com/20071101/kara-visits-founders-funds-peter-thiel/. “hating open secrets”: Belinda Luscombe, “Gawker Founder Nick Denton on Peter Thiel, ‘Conflict and Trollery,’ and the Future of Media,” Time, June 22, 2016, https://time.com/4375643/gawker-nick-denton-peter-thiel/. a winking reference: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel’s Fabulous Fourth of July,” Valleywag, July 6, 2007, https://gawker.com/275650/peter-thiels-fabulous-fourth-of-july. failed to attract: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel’s College Tour,” Valleywag, October 6, 2017, https://gawker.com/308252/peter-thiels-college-tour.gawker.com “but Thiel’s taken”: Owen Thomas “Peter Thiel Crush Alert,” Valleywag, November 27, 2007.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, PRIVATE REACTIONARY chant onto the stage: Adrienne Shih, “Protesters Break into Peter Thiel Speaker Event in Wheeler Hall,” Daily Californian, December 10, 2014, https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/10/protestors-break-peter-thiel-speaker-event-wheeler-hall/. “spinning so much bullshit”: Kevin Montgomery, “Billionaire Peter Thiel Says Technology Isn’t Screwing Middle Class,” Valleywag, November 11, 2014, http://valleywag.gawker.com/billionaire-peter-thiel-says-technology-isnt-screwing-m-1657419404. “that’s somewhat unusual”: Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Peter Thiel’s Quest to Find the Key to Eternal Life,” The Washington Post, April 3, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-leadership/peter-thiels-life-goal-to-extend-our-time-on-this-earth/2015/04/03/b7a1779c-4814-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html.

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a public service: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker,” The New York Times, May 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html. bully media outlets: Marina Hyde, “Peter Thiel’s Mission to Destroy Gawker Isn’t ‘Philanthropy.’ It’s a Chilling Taste of Things to Come,” The Guardian, May 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/27/peter-thiel-gawker-philanthropy-paypal-mogul-secret-war-billionaire. “You can’t stop it”: Edmund Lee, “Jeff Bezos on Gawker vs. Peter Thiel,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/31/11826118/jeff-bezos-gawker-peter-thiel.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

The Pitch “I had been”… “end of the world”: Peter Thiel, Commencement Speech, Hamilton College, May 2016, https://www.hamilton.edu/commencement/2016/address. “quarter-life crisis trying to find [himself]”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, November 28, 2017; see also: Dina Lamdany, “Peter Thiel and the Myth of the Exceptional Individual,” Columbia Spectator, November 22, 2016, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2014/09/28/column/; Bill Kristol conversation with Peter Thiel, July 29, 2014, https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-transcript/; Harriet Green, “PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel Talks Quarter-Life Crises and How to Tackle the State,” City A.M., November 2, 2014, https://www.cityam.com/real-thiel/.

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“Today’s handheld”… “and celerity”: Confinity February 1999 business plan shared with author. “prehistory”: Adam Grant, “Want to Build a One-of-a-Kind Company? Ask Peter Thiel,” Authors@Wharton podcast, October 3, 2014, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/peter-thiels-notes-on-startups/; see also: Jackie Adams, “5 Tips from Peter Thiel on Starting a Startup,” LA, October 3, 2014, https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/5-tips-peter-thiel-starting-startup/. “It was this”… “talking that way”: Author interview with David Wallace, December 5, 2020. “[His boss Paul Tuckfield]”… “smart people”: Author interview with Santosh Janardhan, June 15, 2021.

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“We would like to present alternative views”: “Editor’s Note,” Stanford Review, June 1987. “Open or Empty”: Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, November 27, 2017, https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story/. “Peter might be the”… “like a closet”: Author interview with Ken Howery, June 26, 2018. “billionaires’ breakfast club”… “I did nothing”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, June 25, 2018. “In retrospect, just about everything”… “like two hundred”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, November 28, 2017. “In my mind, it hurt”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, June 25, 2018.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957). Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Institute, April 2009, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. Hans Hermann-Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed (Newark: Transaction, 2001). Greg Satell, “Peter Thiel’s Four Rules for Creating a Great Business,” Forbes, October 3, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/10/03/peter-thiels-4-rules-for-creating-a-great-business/2/#2ea53ac12804. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013).

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We need to go ahead and get the Internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.” People like Google CEO Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame are among the richest men in the world, with ambitions so outsize that they are the stuff of fiction: Dave Eggers’s The Circle and Don DeLillo’s Zero K are populated with tech billionaires inventing technology that will enable people to live forever. But this scenario is happening in real life. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research to “end human aging” and to merge human consciousness into their all-powerful networks.

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Parker convinced him that it would be nothing but trouble in the form of lawsuits from the content community. The genius of Facebook was that the users provided all the content. There was no need to steal pictures, as he had for Facemash, or music files, as Parker had done for Napster. The second thing Parker did was to introduce Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel grasped almost immediately the potential of Facebook. As David Kirkpatrick explained in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, “What happened once it opened at a new school was what most impressed Thiel. Within days it typically captured essentially the entire student body, and more than 80 percent of users returned to the site daily!”

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

CHAPTER 2: THE PAYPAL MAFIA AND THE MYTH OF THE MERITOCRACY “a lucid and profound articulation”: Derek Thompson, “Peter Thiel’s Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I’ve Read,” Atlantic, Sept. 25, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/peter-thiel-zero-to-one-review/380738. “We all have a responsibility”: Peter Thiel, “Peter Thiel: Bloomberg West (Full Show 4/12),” interview by author, Bloomberg, April 12, 2016, video, 56:52, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-04-13/peter-thiel-bloomberg-west-full-show-4-12. Zero to One: Peter Thiel, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014). Thiel himself told me: Peter Thiel, “Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel: Studio 1.0 (12/18) Bloomberg, Dec. 18, 2014, video, 27:34, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-12-19/venture-capitalist-peter-thiel-studio-10-1218.

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“‘Meritocracy’ takes as its core”: Megan Garber, “The Perils of Meritocracy,” Atlantic, June 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/the-perils-of-meritocracy/532215. “I no longer believe”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. revealed that he was gay: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” Gawker, Dec. 19, 2007, http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people. “When I was a kid”: Will Drabold, “Read Peter Thiel’s Speech at the Republican National Convention,” Time, July 21, 2016, http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript. “We care deeply about diversity”: Jeff John Roberts, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Still Has a Place on Facebook’s Board,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/10/19/zuckerberg-thiel.

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“More than two decades ago”: Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, “Donald Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Apologizes for Past Book Comments on Rape,” Forbes, Oct. 25, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/10/25/peter-thiel-apologizes-for-past-book-comments-on-rape-and-race/#7c635d0e4e48. In late 2017, however: Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, Nov. 27, 2017, https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story. “This is college journalism written over 20 years ago”: Kara Swisher, “Zenefits CEO David Sacks Apologizes for Parts of a 1996 Book He Co-wrote with Peter Thiel That Called Date Rape ‘Belated Regret,’” Recode, Oct. 24, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/10/24/13395798/zenefits-ceo-david-sacks-apologizes-1996-book-co-wrote-peter-thiel-date-rape-belated-regret. “I do believe in diversity”: David Sacks, “Zenefits CEO on Closing the Chapter on Compliance Issues,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Oct. 18, 2016, video, 12:23, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-10-18/zenefits-ceo-on-closing-the-chapter-on-compliance-issues.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

See also legal compromises with eBay priorities Democratic party donation flap, 110 Deutsche Bank, 10 developing world, Peter’s plans for, 25–26 digital sweatshops, 58 digital wallet platform for, 9–10 relation to online accounts, 13 diversification, PayPal’s move to, 211, 212–213, 235–236, 260–261 Diversity Myth, The (David Sacks and Peter Thiel), 7, 15, 103 “Dollar” conference room, 144 Doohan, James (“Scotty”), 30, 33–34 reason promotion failed, 52 dotBank, 38–39 decision not to pursue eBay, 54–55 Yahoo purchase of, 83–84 dot-com boom, 6 dot-com crash, 90–92, 178, 187 Peter Thiel’s strategy, 244 drop-in customers, 63–64 eBay “Auction for America” campaign, 220–222 ban on robotic activity, 59–60 BIN (“Buy It Now”) format, 174–175 blocking of PayPal logos, 145 business model, 51 buyer protection policy, 169–170 “Checkout” feature, 228–229, 232 company culture, 296–299 compared to Amazon.com, 44 competition with Amazon auctions, 185–187 Confinity strategies to grow PayPal on, 57–60 financials, 50, 305–306 “Instant Purchase” buttons, 134 integration of PayPal, 299–302 listing fee raises, 187, 305 logo policy, 86 mascot, 297 mission, 307 offer to buy PayPal, 237–238 origins, 51 partnership with AOL, 204 partnership with Visa, 93–94 partnership with Wells Fargo, 80–81 PayPal buyout offer, 255–258 PayPal use of banner ads on, 46–48 PayPal view of threat from, 191 product placement for Billpoint, 262–263 pursuit of payments sector, 96 scalability advantage, 49, 50 “Sell Your Item” (SYI) form, 206–208 slights to PayPal at eBay Live, 274–275 weakness in business model, 132–133 web site, 44 Yahoo attempt to acquire, 83 .

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I also appreciate Ron Kenner’s editing assistance and Sharon Goldlinger’s astute guidance. Brandi Laughey, Jonathan New, Nancy Humphreys, and Steven Phenix have been wonderful to work with. And I’ve never met a more thorough or trustworthy adviser than Hank Terry. I would also like to thank my PayPal compatriots, including Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Paul Martin, for providing me with their time and feedback; while the conclusions reached in this book are ultimately my own, I nonetheless appreciate their support and enthusiasm. Friends and family played no small role in this endeavor, and my wife, Beatrice, played a role above and beyond all others; without her steadfast devotion and countless hours laboring alongside me, this project would not have been possible.

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While this book documents the amazing exploits of the talented men and women I had the pleasure of working alongside, it is primarily a cautionary tale told firsthand from the high tech trenches. I hope you enjoy it. CHAPTER ONE THE NEW RECRUIT NOVEMBER—DECEMBER 1999 My entrepreneurial summons came with an abrupt qualification: “You need to start this Friday.” “W-what?” I stammered in reply. “Are you serious?” Peter Thiel smiled and nodded. Evidently my reaction amused him. “No, no. Look, it’s already Sunday,” I responded, shaking my head. “That would only be four days notice—I can’t possibly quit my job with Andersen that quickly! We’re in the middle of a project.” The chief executive officer of Confinity, Inc., didn’t find that argument exceptionally compelling.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

a procedure called parabiosis Jeff Bercovici broke the news of Thiel’s quasivampirisim in an August 1, 2016, Inc. magazine story titled “Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood.” Breitbart News would months later dismiss Bercovici’s report as “fake news” after his key source clammed up, though he and the magazine stood by the story. Not good government “A Conversation with Peter Thiel,” April 6, 2015, medium.com. Whatever genuine concerns Thiel might harbor David Streitfeld and Jacqueline Williams, “Peter Thiel, Trump Adviser, Has a Backup Country: New Zealand,” January 25, 2017, nytimes.com. Srinivasan laid out the grand design Balaji Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” November 22, 2013, wired.com.

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“Our tech titans could save us” James Polous, “Silicon Valley Could Save the World from Climate Change. But We Don’t Want Them To,” May 26, 2015, theweek.com. Gallup reran its poll “Confidence in Institutions,” gallup.com; harrisinteractive.com. “monolithic monstrosity” Peter Thiel interview with Glenn Beck, October 21, 2014. “My path was so tracked” Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown, 2014). PayPal Jackson, Paypal Wars. In-Q-Tel Robert Scheer, “How the Government Outsourced Intelligence to Silicon Valley,” February 18, 2015, truthdig.com.

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If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Vom Affen zum Roboter Acknowledgments If it’s true that suffering builds character, I owe many thanks to Airbnb. In the same spirit, I must thank those who declined to be interviewed, especially Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin—my three muses. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who was interviewed, as well as all those pseudonymous people—roommates, conferencegoers, barflies—whose stories were included in this book. Thanks to my shrink, to my wife, Patricia Sauthoff, and to the voters of Oregon, whose wise passage of Measure 91 ensured the timely and relatively painless completion of this book.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Notes Introduction: Meet The Mindset     5   Elon Musk colonizing Mars : Mike Wall, “Mars Colony Would Be a Hedge against World War III, Elon Musk Says,” Space.com , March 28, 2018, https:// www .space .com /40112 -elon -musk -mars -colony -world -war -3 .html.     5   Peter Thiel reversing the aging process : Maya Kossoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair , August 1, 2016, 2021, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2016 /08 /peter -thiel -wants -to -inject -himself -with -young -peoples -blood.     5   uploading their minds : Alexandra Richards, “Silicon Valley billionaire pays company thousands ‘to be killed and have his brain digitally preserved forever,’ ” Evening Standard , March 15, 2018, https:// www .standard .co .uk /news /world /silicon -valley -billionaire -pays -company -thousands -to -kill -him -and -preserve -his -brain -forever -a3790871 .html.     8   “fairer” phones : Bas Van Abel, interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human podcast, March 29, 2017, https:// www .teamhuman .fm /episodes /ep -30 -bas -van -abel -fingerprints -on -the -touchscreen.   10   cars into space : Joel Gunter, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Sent His Sports Car into Space,” BBC , February 10, 2018, https:// www .bbc .com /news /science -environment -42992143.   10   Biosphere trials : Steve Rose, “Eight Go Mad in Arizona: How a Lockdown Experiment Went Horribly Wrong,” Guardian , July 13, 2020, https:// www .theguardian .com /film /2020 /jul /13 /spaceship -earth -arizona -biosphere -2 -lockdown.

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Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951), 41–48.   86   GE eventually sold : GE, “GE Completes the Separation of Synchrony Financial,” November 17, 2015, https:// www .ge .com /news /reports /ge -completes -the -separation -of -synchrony -financial.   87   “world trade … speed of light” : Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).   87   “new paradigm” : Alen Mattich, “The New ‘New Paradigm’ for Equities,” Wall Street Journal , May 28, 2013, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /BL -MBB -1982.   89   “competition is for losers” : Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /peter -thiel -competition -is -for -losers -1410535536.   89   “fidelity to an event” : Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014). He borrows this idea from Maoist Alain Badiou.   91   spending electricity on purposeless calculations : Bitcoin advocates argue that some percent of this energy comes from “renewable” sources.

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Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Realizing that “crypto projects were taking up thirty hours per week of my time,” he dropped out of university in April 2013.2 In the Waterloo meeting with Strachman and Gibson, his last chance to get their attention before he transgressed into his over-the-hill twenties, Buterin proposed to revolutionize the Internet and the global financial system. “That’s what Peter Thiel wanted, right?” As he recited a litany of ambitiously cockeyed schemes—“Turing-complete” blockchains, new software languages, currencies, computer platforms, smart contracts—Strachman and Gibson could see that he was a genius. But his grandiosity and apparent lack of focus defied all the rules of successful enterprise. They decided to support him anyway. In November 2013, Buterin wrote the Ethereum white paper, and on June 5, 2014, Peter Thiel announced a new group of twenty Thiel Fellows, which included Buterin.

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As Claude Shannon showed, these success rates of 95 percent, or even 99.999 percent, are deceptive, because you have no way of telling which instances are the errors.6 The vast majority of the home loans in the mortgage crisis were sound, but because no one knew which ones were not, all the securities crashed. You don’t want that problem with self-driving cars. In a joint appearance in 2012 in Aspen, Peter Thiel chided Eric Schmidt: “You don’t have the slightest idea of what you are doing.” He pointed out that the company had amassed some $50 billion in cash at the time and was allowing it to sit in the bank at near-zero interest rates while its vast data centers still could not identify cats as well as a three-year-old could.7 Thiel is the leading critic of Silicon Valley’s prevailing philosophy of “inevitable” innovation.

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CHAPTER 10 1517 Nothing helps you understand something like investing in it. To participate in this new generational movement in technology, in July 2015 I became a founding partner in the 1517 Fund, led by venture capitalist–hackers Danielle Strachman and Mike Gibson and partly financed by Peter Thiel. With a combination of thoughtful authority and seemingly boundless energy reminiscent of Thiel himself, Strachman and Gibson ran the Thiel Fellowship for its first five years. Founded in 2011 to pluck young people from the cradle of credentialism, the Fellowship induces students in their early twenties or below to “skip or stop out of college.”

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it? There is no more fervent believer in Facebook’s potential to help bring the world together than Peter Thiel. Thiel is a master contrarian who has made billions in his hedge fund betting correctly on the direction of oil, currencies, and stocks. He is also an entrepreneur, the co-founder, and former CEO of the PayPal online payments service (which he sold to eBay). He was the very first professional investor to put money in Facebook, in the late summer of 2004, and he’s been on the company’s board of directors ever since.

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By mid-2004, many in the Internet industry were beginning to wonder if social networking might ultimately all converge in one big network. Although Hoffman didn’t believe that himself, he knew that some would see it as a conflict of interest if he led an investment in Thefacebook. So he arranged for Parker and Zuckerberg to meet with Peter Thiel, the brooding, dark-haired financial genius who had co-founded and led PayPal and was now a private investor. Hoffman is a key member of a very distinct and important Silicon Valley subculture—the wealthy former employees of PayPal. Hoffman remained close to many onetime PayPal colleagues, including Thiel.

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The “CFO” had been doing it remotely from the East Coast. Even though Zuckerberg had for now reached a détente with his erstwhile partner, he was whittling away Saverin’s remaining responsibilities. On November 30, Thefacebook registered its millionth user. It had existed for just ten months. Peter Thiel had recently opened a nightclub and restaurant in San Francisco called Frisson. He offered up its VIP lounge for a party. Parker, the organizer, piggybacked on it a celebration for his own twenty-fifth birthday on December 3. The email invitations were portentous. At top was a quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: “Look at the world around you.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

In 2013 former Harvard University president Larry Summers called the Thiel Fellowship “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.” Two years later, by the summer of 2015, companies started by Thiel Fellows had an aggregate value exceeding $1 billion. The founder of this fellowship, Peter Thiel, never made a dime from any of this. Peter Thiel’s Wager Here in Silicon Valley, it’s getting harder to be cool. Founding a company, changing the world, and getting rich is not enough to make you an alpha nerd. Such people are a dime a dozen in our neighborhood, which is infected with an acute sense of the luck involved in success and failure.

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Chris Muglia says that when key aspects of construction become an information technology, and every module design is tested at sea, improved on computer, and emailed to a floating 3-D printer, Peter Thiel’s vision of “atoms” become “bits” will unleash exponential progress and rapidly drop the price of seasteads. How cheap could this get? Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as Space X, is an aerospace manufacturer that builds and launches space rockets, founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel’s cofounder at PayPal, Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon’s goal is to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.

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I probably spent half of my evenings at lectures at MIT or Harvard listening to people like Mark Zuckerberg—very enlightened people. By day, I did my homework, but at night, instead of staying in my dorm and partying with people, I went to these lectures. I probably learned more from these lectures than from my course work. “Peter Thiel visited MIT one month after I arrived for college to give a speech in which he talked about seasteading. I still have the name tag I used in that event. This Peter Thiel lecture opened up a new door for me. He only briefly touched on the idea of seasteading, but that was enough for me to look into it. I felt he was talking about the ultimate new option.” Zhai consumed research on the potential for ocean cities.

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

TheStreet.com only owned 10 percent of them. So Peter Thiel naturally figured, why fight Elon Musk’s X.com and destroy each other in the process plus waste a ton of time and money when they could just merge and become a monopoly and go public and create real value, even if meant they all had lesser stakes? Once they merged they had twice as many ideas — which meant that their stakes would be worth more than twice as much, since we now know that ideas are more valuable than money. So they merged, went public, and guess what? eBay acquired them for $1.5 billion. Peter Thiel’s final stake was worth $55 million.

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I have a guess as to how they made the decision but still, that value might be right, or horribly wrong—making it either the best valuation decision or the worst in history. Here’s what I do to value a business. I look at all of the above: The Peter Thiel Four—Monopoly, Scalability, Network Effect, Brand (and I’ll add my Demographics) The Three D’s. I look at what is causing the problems: Death, Divorce, Debt, Delay (because they all add up to a fifth D: Desperation, which drives prices lower) The Marcus Turnaround Method. I look at Product, Process, People—each one of those will have a cost but each one of will improve a company in the eyes of the Peter Thiel Four. Then I ask myself, what does the company look like when it’s turned around or made better?

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It starts at zero, meaning you are not yet exercising your idea muscle, and it gets stronger as you start coming up with ten ideas a day, using something I call Idea Sex (a concept I’ll describe in more detail later), and ultimately becoming an Idea Machine. The top right of the matrix (figure 2) is when you are an Idea Machine: you are working nonstop on your own excellent ideas that help the lives of others. You mind dips into dreams, and you make them reality or art or abundance. Founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook Peter Thiel underlined this for me when he told me the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turning down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to buy his company in July of 2006. Zuckerberg would’ve made $250 million that summer. Thiel, who was advising Zuckerberg at the time, wanted him to take it, or at least consider accepting the offer.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55 Guynn, “Founders Fund Emerges as Venture 2.0.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56 Nosek, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57 Alex Konrad, “Move Over, Peter Thiel—How Brian Singerman Became Founders Fund’s Top VC,” Forbes, April 25, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58 The other potential investor was the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. Konrad, “Move Over, Peter Thiel.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59 Thiel’s first venture fund, raised in 2005, returned six times capital, net of fees. His second fund, from 2007, returned better than 8x.

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—Intel’s Andy Grove, addressing John Doerr Contents Introduction Unreasonable People Chapter 1 Arthur Rock and Liberation Capital Chapter 2 Finance Without Finance Chapter 3 Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Activist Capital Chapter 4 The Whispering of Apple Chapter 5 Cisco, 3Com, and the Valley Ascendant Chapter 6 Planners and Improvisers Chapter 7 Benchmark, SoftBank, and “Everyone Needs $100 Million” Chapter 8 Money for Google, Kind of for Nothing Chapter 9 Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, and the Valley’s Youth Revolt Chapter 10 To China, and Stir Chapter 11 Accel, Facebook, and the Decline of Kleiner Perkins Chapter 12 A Russian, a Tiger, and the Rise of Growth Equity Chapter 13 Sequoia’s Strength in Numbers Chapter 14 Unicorn Poker Conclusion Luck, Skill, and the Competition Among Nations Acknowledgments Appendix: Charts Notes Timeline Index Introduction Unreasonable People Not far from the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s venture-capital industry, which is clustered along Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, Patrick Brown strode out into his yard on the Stanford University campus.

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A small subset of these deals, accounting for just 5 percent of the total capital deployed, generated fully 60 percent of all the Horsley Bridge returns during this period.[17] (To put that in context, in 2018 the top-performing 5 percent of subindustries in the S&P 500 accounted for only 9 percent of the index’s total performance.)[18] Other venture investors report even more skewed returns: Y Combinator, which backs fledgling tech startups, calculated in 2012 that three-quarters of its gains came from just 2 of the 280 outfits it had bet on.[19] “The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has written.[20] “Venture capital is not even a home-run business,” Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital once remarked. “It’s a grand-slam business.”[21] What this means is that venture capitalists need to be ambitious. The celebrated hedge-fund stock picker Julian Robertson used to say that he looked for shares that might plausibly double in three years, an outcome he would view as “fabulous.”[22] But if venture capitalists embarked on the same quest, they would almost guarantee failure, because the power law generates relatively few startups that merely double in value.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

Focus on your customers, on earning revenues, and on attracting the finest people to join you on your journey, and money will follow your success. Become so good that you can’t be ignored. Of course, it’s easier said than done. AN INVESTOR IN FACEBOOK, SPACEX, STRIPE, AND MORE INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL Peter Thiel doesn’t need much of an intro. He has been at both sides of the fundraising table, sometimes concurrently. He first invested in a precursor to what would become PayPal and soon after joined it in the early days as a co-founder and CEO. Later he founded and invested in Palantir, which specializes in big-data analytics.

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Jonathan Shieber, “J&J Spends $3.4 Billion in Cash for Auris Health’s Lung Cancer Diagnostics and Surgical Robots,” TechCrunch, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/jj-spends-3-4-billion-in-cash-for-auris-healths-lung-cancer-diagnostics-and-surgical-robots/. 3. Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 4. Celia Shatzman, “Emily Weiss on Glossier’s New Makeup, Why She Launched into the Gloss and Desert Island Beauty Staples,” Forbes, March 14, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/celiashatzman/2016/03/14/emily-weiss-on-glossiers-new-makeup-why-she-launched-into-the-gloss-desert-island-beauty-staples/#72de97f84b69.

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A Billion-Dollar Move Out of Silicon Valley into Denver: INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL CARLSON OF GUILD EDUCATION 8 Product A Founder Who Always Built Highly Differentiated Products: INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE 9 Market A Founder Who Did Both Market Creation and Expansion: INTERVIEW WITH MAX LEVCHIN OF PAYPAL AND AFFIRM 10 Market Timing A Billion-Dollar Startup with Perfect Market Timing: INTERVIEW WITH MARIO SCHLOSSER OF OSCAR HEALTH 11 Competition Competing Against Strong Incumbents: INTERVIEW WITH ERIC YUAN OF ZOOM 12 The Defensibility Factor PART THREE: THE FUNDRAISING 13 Venture Capital Versus Bootstrapping A $7.5 Billion Company That Was Bootstrapped for the First Five Years: INTERVIEW WITH TOM PRESTON-WERNER OF GITHUB 14 Bull Market Versus Bear Market A Billion-Dollar Company That Started in the Depth of the Recession: INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE ZATLYN OF CLOUDFLARE 15 Capital Efficiency 16 Angels and Accelerators A Prolific Angel Investor Turned VC: INTERVIEW WITH KEITH RABOIS OF FOUNDERS FUND 17 VC Investors An Investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, Zipline, and More: INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED LIN OF SEQUOIA CAPITAL 18 Fundraising An Investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Stripe, and More: INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL What to Remember Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Praise for Super Founders Notes Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. INTRODUCTION There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Go to note reference in text This was an obsession: Brian Abrams, Gawker: An Oral History (2015), loc. 788 of 1902, Kindle. Go to note reference in text On December 19, 2007, Thomas: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” Gawker, December 19, 2017, https://www.gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people. Go to note reference in text Thomas could, of course: Owen Thomas, “Does Nick Denton Wish He Were Peter Thiel?,” Gawker, July 11, 2008, https://gawker.com/5024376/does-nick-denton-wish-he-were-peter-thiel. Go to note reference in text Thiel was enraged: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire (New York: Penguin, 2018).

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The most important of these powerful, private Silicon Valley gay men was Peter Thiel, a standoffish Stanford graduate who in 1998 had co-founded the company that would become PayPal. The wave of money that company threw off created the “PayPal mafia”—a group of investors who seeded another wave of companies. They had real money to invest, even after the crash. Thiel had bet early on Facebook—he was Mark Zuckerberg’s first outside investor—and been rewarded massively. Thiel’s combination of power and intense privacy made him a perfect target for Nick Denton. On December 19, 2007, Thomas published a short item on Gawker under the headline “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People.”

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That frees him or her to build a different, hopefully better system for identifying and rewarding talented individuals, and unleashing their work on the world,” he wrote. Thomas could, of course, have been writing about his own boss—Nick was a gay man who felt himself to be an outsider, too, and that, too, was his edge. “That’s why I think it’s important to say this: Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. More power to him,” Thomas wrote. No big deal. Just another open secret. Nick, Thomas would later write, was jealous of Thiel. And Nick himself had left a biting comment below the story. “The only thing that’s strange about Thiel’s sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long,” Nick wrote.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Just six months earlier, he had moved: Erica Fink, “Inside the ‘Social Network’ House,” CNN website, August 28, 2012. 7. ideology was rooted in a version of libertarianism: Noam Cohen, “The Libertarian Logic of Peter Thiel,” Wired, December 27, 2017. 8. In 2011, Thiel would endow a fellowship: MG Siegler, “Peter Thiel Has New Initiative to Pay Kids to ‘Stop out of School,’” TechCrunch, September 27, 2010. 9. The site had a few ads from local Cambridge businesses: Seth Fiegerman, “This is What Facebook’s First Ads Looked Like,” Mashable, August 15, 2013. 10. By the end of 2004, one million college students: Anne Sraders, “History of Facebook: Facts and What’s Happening,” TheStreet, October 11, 2018. 11. The board at the time: Allison Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion,” Inc., March 12, 2013. 12.

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“He was like a very nerdy movie star,” observed one friend who worked for the start-up and frequented the Palo Alto home Zuckerberg and his roommates had dubbed “Casa Facebook.” “Facebook was still small, by Silicon Valley standards, but a lot of people already saw him as the next big thing.” The ideas that Zuckerberg would have been absorbing during his junior year at Harvard were replaced with the philosophies of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, who had invested $500,000 in Thefacebook in August 2004, and Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s cofounder. As two of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley, they did more than just create and invest in new start-ups: they shaped the ethos of what it meant to be a tech ingénue.

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“It was an idea that just permeated the Valley at the time, and it was this sense that you could not question the founder, that they were king,” noted Kara Swisher, a journalist who watched the rise of Zuckerberg and closely followed the men who mentored him. “My impression of Zuckerberg was that he was an intellectual lightweight, and he was very easily swayed by Andreessen or Peter Thiel; he wanted to be seen as smart by them so he adopted the changes they suggested and the libertarian mindset they projected.” It didn’t hurt, Swisher added, that Zuckerberg had a restless drive that compelled him to do whatever it took to ensure his company would be successful. He had already shown that killer instinct in locking down control of Thefacebook in the first year of its operation.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich

different worldview, Mark Zuckerberg, old-boy network, Peter Thiel, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, social web

The difference was, Sean knew what the next big thing was. He knew with a complete, and almost religious certainty: Social Networks. Just a few months ago, he’d made some connections at the social network site Friendster. He’d brought them some series D VC funding, introduced them to his buddies around town—most notably, Peter Thiel, the guy behind PayPal, a colleague who’d also experienced some run-ins with the gang at Sequoia. But Friendster wasn’t going to be Sean Parker’s next home run; it was already too far along, and Sean wasn’t getting in anywhere near the ground floor. And to be honest, Friendster had its limitations.

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And the man they were on their way to meet—well, he was nearly as impressive as the building itself, both in personal reputation and in what he had already achieved. “Peter’s going to love you,” Sean responded. “Fifteen minutes, in and out, that’s all it’s going to take.” Deep down, he was certain that he was right. Peter Thiel—the founding force behind the incredibly successful company PayPal, head of the multibillion-dollar venture fund Clarium Capital, former chess master, and one of the richest men in the country—was intimidating, fast-talking, and a true genius—but he was also exactly the sort of angel investor who had the guts and the foresight to understand how important—how groundbreaking—thefacebook had the potential to be.

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It wasn’t life-changing money, it wasn’t empire-making money, it wasn’t fuck-you money—it wasn’t even as much money as Mark had once turned down, back in high school, when he’d created that MP3 player add-on, simply because he didn’t really give a damn about money, whether it was a thousand dollars borrowed from a friend to start a company, or a million dollars thrown his way from an even bigger company. As far as Sean could tell, Mark still didn’t really give a damn about money; but he couldn’t ignore the sentiment that came with those five hundred thousand dollars, the promise of a future for the company that he’d started in that Harvard dorm room. Peter Thiel had been exactly everything that Sean had prepared Mark for. Scary as hell, brilliant as hell—and willing to play ball. More than that, he’d turned a fifteen-minute pitch meeting into a lunch and an afternoon spent going over the details—of the deal that would ensure thefacebook’s survival, once and for all.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel As Musk monitored the names of new customers signing up, one caught his eye: Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of a company named Confinity that had been located in the same building as X.com and was now just down the street. Both Thiel and his primary cofounder Max Levchin were as intense as Musk, but they were more disciplined. Like X.com, their company offered a person-to-person payment service.

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Justine Musk, “I Was a Starter Wife,” Marie Claire, Sept. 10, 2010. 12. X.com: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek. Mark Gimein, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Salon, Aug. 17, 1999; Sarah Lacy, “Interview with Elon Musk,” Pando, Apr. 15, 2009; Eric Jackson, The PayPal Wars (World Ahead, 2003); Chafkin, The Contrarian. 13. The Coup: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Justine Musk, Kimbal Musk, Luke Nosek. Soni, The Founders; Vance, Elon Musk; Chafkin, The Contrarian. 14.

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While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view. His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly. “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.” He became one of those people who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming. “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

He’s a Ferrari-driving, Stanford-educated moral philosopher, a chess genius and multibillionaire investor who is accompanied everywhere by a “staff of two blond, black-clad female assistants, a white-coated butler and a cook who prepares a daily health drink of celery, beets, kale, and ginger.”71 It would be easy, of course, to dismiss Peter Thiel as an eccentric with cash. But that’s the least interesting part of his story. He is, in fact, an even richer, smarter, and—as a major funder of radical American libertarians like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz—more powerful version of Tom Perkins. Peter Thiel has everything: brains, charm, prescience, intellect, charisma; everything, that is, except compassion for those less successful than him. In the increasingly unequal America described in Packer’s The Unwinding, Thiel is the supreme unwinder, a hard-hearted follower of Ayn Rand’s radical free-market philosophy who unashamedly celebrates the texture of inequality now reshaping America.

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The Internet economy “produces very valuable companies with very few employees,” Brooks says of this crisis, while “the majority of workers are not seeing income gains commensurate with their productivity levels.”69 In his 2013 National Book Award–winning The Unwinding, George Packer mourns the passing of the twentieth-century Great Society. What he calls “New America” has been corrupted, he suggests, by its deepening inequality of wealth and opportunity. And it’s not surprising that Packer places Silicon Valley and the multibillionaire Internet entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel at the center of his narrative. The cofounder, with Elon Musk, of the online payments service PayPal, Thiel became a billionaire as the first outside investor in Facebook, after being introduced to Mark Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president. The San Francisco–based Thiel lives in a “ten thousand square foot white wedding cake of a mansion,” 70 a smaller but no less meretricious building than the Battery.

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Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel. The feudal aspect of this new economy isn’t just metaphorical. The Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin has broken down what he calls this “new feudalism” into different classes, including “oligarch” billionaires like Thiel and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, the “clerisy” of media commentators like Kevin Kelly, the “new serfs” of the working poor and the unemployed, and the “yeomanry” of the old “private sector middle class,” the professionals and skilled workers in towns like Rochester who are victims of the new winner-take-all networked economy.81 The respected MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who are cautiously optimistic about what they call “the brilliant technologies” of “the Second Machine Age,” acknowledge that our networked society is creating a world of “stars and superstars” in a “winner-take-all” economy.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It was highlighted by the civic-minded Code for America; it sponsored O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 summit and adopts his “Government as a Platform” terminology, and was an early partner of USAid’s Food Security Open Data Challenge.52 Palantir received early funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture capital arm and from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, both organizations known for their deep commitment to openness and equality. Peter Thiel is Palantir’s Chairman of the Board: perhaps he will be pursuing open data projects for the secretive Bilderberg Group, on whose Steering Committee he sits? It would be nice to think that the shift to open data might undermine some vested interests without re-enacting Animal Farm, but the prospects are not bright.

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Internet culture is also supremely ambitious and self-confident. It’s a confidence captured in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s saying that “software is eating the world.” In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil). Just as Hollywood is both a physical location and a global industry with a distinctive set of traditions, beliefs, and practices, so Silicon Valley is more than a place—it is shorthand for the world of digital technology, specifically Internet technology.

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The funding behind the larger Sharing Economy companies highlights the contradictory currents that drive it. Billionaire and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested in both Airbnb and Uber; leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and delivery service Instacart; Founders Fund, a firm set up and led by billionaire and ­PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit. ­Goldman Sachs is another investor in Uber as well as WeWork, which has also been funded by JP Morgan. Lending Club sends emails emphasizing that “Instead of paying interest to a credit card company or on a traditional bank loan, you get your loan through ordinary people like YOU who want to invest in YOUR success,” 14 but its board includes John Mack (ex–Morgan Stanley) and Larry Summers (former Treasury secretary).

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

A belief in a coming Singularity is slowly gaining traction among the technological elite. As the New York Times reported in 2010, “Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.”4 These early adopters include two self-made billionaires: Peter Thiel, a financial backer of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Larry Page, who helped found Singularity University. Peter Thiel was one of the founders of PayPal, and after selling the site to eBay, he used some of his money to become the key early investor in Facebook. Larry Page cofounded Google. Thiel and Page obtained their riches by successfully betting on technology.

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What it will not do is carry on as before. With great insight and fore thought, Miller’s Singularity Rising prepares us for the forking paths ahead by teasing out the consequences of an artificial intelligence explosion and by staking red flags on the important technological problems of the next three decades.” —Peter Thiel, self-made technology billionaire; co-founder, Singularity Summit “Many books are fun and interesting, but Singularity Rising is fun and interesting while focusing on some of the most important pieces of humanity’s most important problem.” —Luke Muehlhauser, executive director, Singularity Institute “We’ve waited too long for a thorough, articulate, general-audience account of modern thinking on exponentially increasing machine intelligence and its risks and rewards for humanity.

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In the year 2000, Eliezer founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Although the Institute has garnered less support than Eliezer believes is justified, the best testament to Eliezer’s credibility comes from the quality of the people who have either contributed to the Institute or have spoken at one of its events. These include: •Peter Thiel—self-made tech billionaire and key financier behind Face-book. Donated $1.1 million to the Institute;91 •Ray Kurzweil—famed investor and Singularity writer; •Justin Rattner—Intel’s chief technology officer; •Eric Drexler—the father of nanotechnology; •Peter Norvig—Director of Research at Google; •Aubrey de Grey—leading longevity researcher; •Stephen Wolfram—developer of the computation platform Mathematica; and •Jaan Tallinn—founding engineer of Skype and self-made tech decamillionaire who donated $100,000.92 I also spoke on the economics of the Singularity at the Institute’s 2008 Summit.

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

They disagreed on just about everything—including the best software to run the business. It was so bad that Confinity cofounder Peter Thiel walked away from the company altogether. Elon may have been running a company that had huge internal issues, but he also had a new bride whom he had yet to take on a honeymoon. Nine months had passed since they said, “I do.” So in September, the newlyweds boarded a plane to Sydney, Australia. And while the plane was in the air for the long-haul flight, a group of Elon’s employees made their move. They pushed him out as CEO and brought back Peter Thiel to run the company. The honeymoon ended as soon as Justine and Elon landed and learned what happened.

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After all, he and his brother had started Zip2 from nothing, and now they were multimillionaires. Not only that, the Musk brothers had shaped the way people used the Internet. ELON’S BIG SPLURGE: A McLaren F1 sports car. Price tag? $1 million. Justine got the first ride. But—yikes! alert—not long after he bought the car, he wrecked it while showing it off to PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. A Silver McLaren F1. (Photo by Joe Cheng.) And now with his bank account in pretty good shape, twenty-seven-year-old Elon needed to answer a big question: What next? NO ISLAND PARADISE I know what I’ll do with my millions. I’ll start a company with a fantastic idea: online banking.

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“I was a really lonely kid and he was a really lonely kid and that’s one of the things that attracted me to him. I thought he had this understanding of loneliness—how to create yourself in that.”59 Back at work, the intensity stepped up to a whole new level. Two other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had been working on a similar concept at a different company called Confinity. The two companies became fierce competitors. But that spring, in March 2000, they agreed to join forces, and the companies merged. SPOTLIGHT: Jeremy Stoppelman was an X.com engineer. He would go on to become the CEO of review site Yelp.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

O’Brien, “The PayPal Mafia,” Fortune, Nov. 14, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm. 183 sold to eBay for $1.5 billion: Troy Wolverton, “It’s official: eBay Weds PayPal,” CNET News, Oct. 3, 2002, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/Its-official-eBay-weds-PayPal/2100-1017_3-960658.html. 183 “impact and force change”: Peter Thie, “Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, Apr. 13, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 183 “end the inevitability of death and taxes”: Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired, Jan. 19, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?currentPage=all. 183 “ ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron”: Thiel, “Education of a Libertarian.” 184 “makes a living being against computers”: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Says Don’t Piss Off the Robots (or Bet on a Recovery),” Business Insider, Nov. 18, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-obama-ai-and-why-he-rents-his-mansion-2009-11#. 184 “which technologies to foster”: Ronald Bailey, “Technology Is at the Center,” Reason.com, May 2008, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2008/05/01/technology-is-at-the-center/singlepage. 184 “way I think about the business”: Deepak Gopinath, “PayPal’s Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain with Soros-Style Fund,” CanadianHedgeWatch .com, Dec. 4, 2006, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, at www.canadianhedgewatch.com/content/news/general/?

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currentPage=all. 183 “ ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron”: Thiel, “Education of a Libertarian.” 184 “makes a living being against computers”: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Says Don’t Piss Off the Robots (or Bet on a Recovery),” Business Insider, Nov. 18, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-obama-ai-and-why-he-rents-his-mansion-2009-11#. 184 “which technologies to foster”: Ronald Bailey, “Technology Is at the Center,” Reason.com, May 2008, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2008/05/01/technology-is-at-the-center/singlepage. 184 “way I think about the business”: Deepak Gopinath, “PayPal’s Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain with Soros-Style Fund,” CanadianHedgeWatch .com, Dec. 4, 2006, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, at www.canadianhedgewatch.com/content/news/general/?id=1169. 184 “that voting will make things better”: Peter Thiel, “Your Suffrage Isn’t in Danger.

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Media moguls who get their start with a fierce commitment to the truth become the confidants of presidents and lose their edge; businesses begun as social ventures become preoccupied with delivering shareholder value. In any case, one consequence of the current system is that we can end up placing a great deal of power in the hands of people who can have some pretty far-out, not entirely well-developed political ideas. Take Peter Thiel, one of Zuckerberg’s early investors and mentors. Thiel has penthouse apartments in San Francisco and New York and a silver gullwing McLaren, the fastest car in the world. He also owns about 5 percent of Facebook. Despite his boyish, handsome features, Thiel often looks as though he’s brooding.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

The more I learned about transhumanism, the more I came to see that, for all its apparent extremity and strangeness, it was nonetheless exerting certain formative pressures on the culture of Silicon Valley, and thereby the broader cultural imagination of technology. Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering.

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I’d work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, for instance, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.” Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology start-up funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit aimed at advancing the cause to which he’d long been dedicated. He conceived of Carboncopies as a kind of central gathering point where researchers in various fields—nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, brain imaging, cognitive psychology, biotechnology—crucial to the development of substrate independent minds could meet to share their work and discuss its potential contribution to the cause.

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Another of the workshop’s invited participants was a man named Todd Huffman, the CEO of a San Francisco company called 3Scan, which happened to be pioneering exactly this technology. Todd was among the collaborators Randal had mentioned—one of the people who kept him regularly updated about their work, and its relevance to the overall project of uploading. Although one of 3Scan’s initial sources of start-up funding was Peter Thiel—a man who, although he did not explicitly identify with the transhumanist movement, was famously invested in the cause of vastly extending human life spans, in particular his own—it was not a company that had any explicit designs on the brain uploading market. (And the major reason for this was that such a market was nowhere near existing.)

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

., xvi. 37. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. 38. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 222. 39. Ibid., 227. 40. Ibid., 222. 41. Houriet, 11. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid., 24. 44. Mella Robinson, “An island nation that told a libertarian ‘seasteading’ group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal,” Business Insider, March 14, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3. 45.

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Mella Robinson, “An island nation that told a libertarian ‘seasteading’ group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal,” Business Insider, March 14, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3. 45. Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. 46. Arendt, 227. 47. Susan X Day, “Walden Two at Fifty,” Michigan Quarterly Review XXXVIII (Spring 1999), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0038.211. 48. B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 330 (as cited in “Walden Two at Fifty”). 49. Brian Dillon, “Poetry of Metal,” The Guardian, July 24, 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/25/vladimir-tatlins-tower-st-petersburg. 50.

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The kind of escape that Walden Two embodies reminds me of a more recent utopian proposal. In 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the nonprofit the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to establish autonomous island communities in international waters. For Silicon Valley investor and libertarian Peter Thiel, who supported the project early on, the prospect of a brand-new floating colony in a place outside the law was interesting indeed. In his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel echoes Skinner’s conclusion that the future requires a total escape from politics. Having decided that “democracy and freedom are incompatible,” Thiel’s gesture toward some other option that is somehow not totalitarian is either naive or disingenuous: Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.37 For Thiel, only the sea, outer space, and cyberspace can provide this “new space.”

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

One of the founders was a self-educated philosopher and self-described artificial intelligence researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had introduced Legg to the idea of superintelligence in the early 2000s when they were working with a New York–based start-up called Intelligensis. But Hassabis and Legg had their eyes on one of the other conference founders: Peter Thiel. In the summer of 2010, Hassabis and Legg arranged to address the Singularity Summit, knowing that each speaker would be invited to a private party at Thiel’s town house in San Francisco. Thiel had been part of the team that founded PayPal, the online payments service, before securing an even bigger reputation—and an even bigger fortune—as an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb.

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Hassabis did the talking, explaining that he was not just a gamer but a neuroscientist, that they were building AGI in the image of the human brain, that they would begin this long quest with systems that learned to play games, and that the ongoing exponential growth in global computing power would drive their technology to far greater heights. It was a pitch that surprised even Peter Thiel. “This might be a bit much,” he said. But they kept talking, and the conversation continued over the next several weeks, with both Thiel and the partners at his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund. In the end, his main objection was not that the company was overly ambitious but that it was based in London.

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Hassabis and Legg enlisted both Hinton and LeCun as technical advisors, and the start-up quickly hired many of the field’s up-and-coming researchers, including Vlad Mnih, who studied with Hinton in Toronto; a Turkish-born researcher, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who worked under LeCun in New York; and Alex Graves, who studied under Jürgen Schmidhuber in Switzerland before a postdoc with Hinton. As they’d told Peter Thiel, the starting point was games. Games had been a proving ground for AI since the ’50s, when computer scientists built the first automated chess players. In 1990, researchers marked a turning point when they built a machine called Chinook that beat the world’s best checkers player. Seven years later, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer topped chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us 60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h5cY7d6nPU 61. http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html 62. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Kindle Locations 1836-1848). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. Conclusion 63. JFK’s speech at Rice University on September 12th, 1962 64. Source: Peter Thiel, Zero to One 65. Author interview with Rob Walling, to download the full interview, go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj Next Steps 66. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/08/10/high-intensity-strength-training.aspx 67.

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Why was one group living in fear of the threat of job loss, unreasonably long hours, and shrinking wages, while another was so overwhelmed by new opportunities they don’t know what to do? Two years after I’d first shown up in Bangkok, I finally got it. What’s Your Secret? “If you do things that are safe but feel risky, you gain a significant advantage in the marketplace.” Seth Godin Multi-millionaire investor Peter Thiel begins every interview with companies he’s considering investing in with the same three questions: What’s your secret? What important truth do very few people agree with you on? What do you believe that is both contrarian and correct? What Thiel and the group in Bangkok understood is based on an old axiom from Archimedes over two thousand years ago: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

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If you look at the current head coaches in the NBA or NFL, the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of them usually have common roots in apprenticing with 20% of the head coaches of the past generation. Technology startups have started to develop “mafias,” or groups of successful entrepreneurs that can trace their roots back to a common source. Elon Musk (Currently of SpaceX and Tesla), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Peter Thiel (Palantir) all worked together at PayPal.42 Trajectory Theory—A Guide to Hiring an Apprentice (or Getting Hired) Three-time New York Times bestselling author Tucker Max has hired a lot of people to work in an apprentice-type position, and they’ve almost always gone on to be successful in future projects and companies.

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. http://us.penguingroup.com Acknowledgments For useful comments and discussions, I wish to thank Peter Thiel, Daniel Sutter, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Michael Mandel, Stephen Morrow, Natasha Cowen, Teresa Hartnett, John Nye, Jason Fichtner, Michelle Dawson, Nathan Molteni, Michael Munger, seminar participants at Duke University, and Jayme Lemke. I dedicate this work to Michael Mandel and Peter Thiel, who have blazed the way. The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate Land, Technology, and Uneducated Kids America is in disarray and our economy is failing us.

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Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, and Jeffrey Sachs are all more famous, prizewinning commentators on the questions of macroeconomics and development, and from them you will hear a lot of talk about liquidity traps, currency crises, and the future of Africa. But this group misses many of the critical angles of science and technology and the broader historical picture of how a technological plateau is possible. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook (he shows up as a character in the movie Social Network, albeit poorly portrayed), also deserves credit for promoting the idea of an innovation and productivity slowdown. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he put it bluntly: “People don’t want to believe that technology is broken....

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I am using a pre-crisis number to adjust for the fall in GDP from the financial crisis; in that sense, this number is an approximate one and thus a more conservative estimate than what a completely current calculation would yield. For one example of Michael Mandel’s writings, see “Official GDP, Productivity Stats Tell a Different Story of U.S. Economy,” Seeking Alpha, May 10, 2010, http://seekingalpha.com/article/204083-official-gdpproductivity-stats-tell-a-different-story-of-u-s-economy. The Peter Thiel quotation is from Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “Technology = Salvation, An early investor in Facebook and the founder of Clarium Capital on the subprime crisis and why American ingenuity has hit a dead end,” The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2010. Chapter 3 Does the Internet Change Everything?

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

He became one of the first students in a new major called Symbolic Systems, a combination of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science. He met his future wife, Michelle Yee, whom he won over, at least as he remembers it, in a typically Hoffman way by outsmarting a much more conventionally handsome rival for her affections. He also made a group of lifelong friends, such as Peter Thiel, a German-born libertarian, later to become famous as a Silicon Valley investor who liked to make provocatively candid pronouncements that were designed to offend people. (Hoffman and Thiel ran successfully for the Stanford student senate as a kind of balanced ticket, with Hoffman as the left-winger and Thiel as the right-winger.)

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In 1997 Hoffman started his own company, SocialNet, which created a way for people to connect with each other for various purposes, mainly dating, using pseudonyms. After a few years, he sold SocialNet to a company called Spark Networks, which now owns the religious dating sites Jdate and Christian Mingle. Then he became the chief operating officer of PayPal, the money transferring service, where Peter Thiel was the founder and chief executive officer. Hoffman had always believed that online communities should be organized around some fundamental human need, such as love or money—he liked to say that you have to tap into at least one of the seven deadly sins. Now he was switching from lust to greed, also correcting an initial mistaken hypothesis he had absorbed from the gaming world, that people would not want to join online communities under their real names.

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As Hoffman later wrote, “At PayPal, we broke the rules, but we did so because we were working toward a better set of rules for everyone.” In the expected order of things, big financial institutions would have established themselves as dominant in the online payments business. That a group of young men whom Peter Thiel liked to describe as having Asperger’s syndrome got out ahead of Visa, Wells Fargo, and other competitors—not to mention an internal division eBay had launched to offer its customers the same service that PayPal offered—was testament to their willingness to operate outside the constraints that governments impose on banks and to their unconventional conviction that building up a big user base was more important than making money, at least in the short run.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

“OKRs have helped”: John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (New York: Penguin, 2018), xii. The countercultural notion: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). “Competition,” he says, “is for losers”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5),” Y Combinator, uploaded March 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k. he quickly rose: David Shaw, not uncoincidentally, received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and was a professor at Columbia before starting the company that bears his name.

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The era of self-regulation is over,” Twitter, June 3, 2019, https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/1135698760397393921. CHAPTER 3: The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy “One of the things”: Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. systematically mapped the libertarian attitudes: David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra, “Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs,” American Journal of Political Science 63, no. 1 (November 19, 2018): 212–33.

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Buyers want to go to the place with the most sellers, and sellers want to go to the place with the most buyers. And when the buyers at those sites are advertisers, the product they’re buying is you—or, more accurately, your attention. Conveniently, tech pioneers are happy to invert economic orthodoxy when it serves their interests. Peter Thiel, a founder of multiple venture capitalist firms, believes in monopoly, at least in technology markets. “Competition,” he says, “is for losers.” The Engineers Take the Reins The oft-told history of Silicon Valley as an epicenter of technological innovation traces its way back to Frederick Terman, a Stanford engineering professor who after World War II would go on to serve as dean of engineering and ultimately provost.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Distributed to the trade by Perseus Distribution 250 West 57th Street New York, NY 10107 To Bruce Chapman, friend and guide for sixty years Contents PrologueWinning the Debate Chapter 1The Dream and the Dollar Chapter 2Justice before Growth Chapter 3Friedman and the Enigma of Money Chapter 4The Chinese Challenge Chapter 5The High Cost of Bad Money Chapter 6Money in Information Theory Chapter 7What Bitcoin Can Teach Chapter 8Where “Hayeks” Go Wrong Chapter 9The Piketty-Turner Thesis Chapter 10Hypertrophy of Finance Chapter 11Main Street Pushed Aside Chapter 12Wall Street Sells Its Soul Chapter 13A Wrinkle in Time Chapter 14Restoring Real Money Acknowledgments Key Terms for the Information Theory of Money Notes Index The source and root of all monetary evil [is] the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. —Friedrich Hayek Prologue Winning the Debate Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. —Peter Thiel, Zero to One (2014) Will conservatives win the coming economic debate? The nation depends on it. We deserve to win, after all. We have the best economic ideas, so we say, aligned with constitutional liberty and the American Dream. The economy is in trouble, and after two terms of President Barack Obama the Democrats are mostly to blame.

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Dissolved were the maps and metrics across both space and time. The spatial index is the web of exchange rates between currencies that mediate all global trade. This is a horizontal axis, the geographical span of enterprise. Here existing products are replicated across now-globalized space—in Peter Thiel’s trope, from “one to n.” The indices of time are the interest rates that mediate between past and future—the vertical dimension that takes the economy into the future, what Thiel depicts as the vectors from “zero to one.”8 Since the early 1970s these once-golden gauges and guideposts have lost their meaning, subject now to constant manipulation by government bodies around the globe and by their increasingly nationalized banking systems.

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Leading economists such as the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Robert Gordon of the National Bureau of Economic Research have concluded that the world’s economies are entering an era of “secular stagnation,” not merely a cyclical slowdown but a permanent decline of entrepreneurial innovation and technological advance.6 Peter Thiel, by all odds the world’s most visionary venture capitalist–philosopher, has declared that of four possibilities for the world economy—recurrent collapse, plateau, extinction, and technological takeoff—“the hardest one to imagine [is] accelerating takeoff toward a much better future.”7 Deepening the global economic doldrums is a forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street so gigantic that it has sharply skewed global measures of the distribution of wealth and income, bringing to a halt fifty years of miraculous and broad-based advances in global living standards.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He said, ‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’ ” * * * Peter Thiel Peter Thiel (TW: @peterthiel, with 1 tweet and 130K+ followers; foundersfund.com) is a serial company founder (PayPal, Palantir), billionaire investor (the first outside investor in Facebook and more than a hundred others), and author of the book Zero to One. His teachings on differentiation, value creation, and competition alone have helped me make some of the best investment decisions of my life (such as Uber, Alibaba, and more).

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Novak (p. 378) Alexis Ohanian (p. 194) Amanda Palmer (p. 520) Rhonda Patrick (p. 6) Caroline Paul (p. 459) Martin Polanco (p. 109) Charles Poliquin (p. 74) Maria Popova (p. 406) Rolf Potts (p. 362) Naval Ravikant (p. 546) Gabby Reece (p. 92) Tony Robbins (p. 210) Robert Rodriguez (p. 628) Seth Rogen (p. 531) Kevin Rose (p. 340) Rick Rubin (p. 502) Chris Sacca (p. 164) Arnold Schwarzenegger (p. 176) Ramit Sethi (p. 287) Mike Shinoda (p. 352) Jason Silva (p. 589) Derek Sivers (p. 184) Joshua Skenes (p. 500) Christopher Sommer (p. 9) Morgan Spurlock (p. 221) Kelly Starrett (p. 122) Neil Strauss (p. 347) Cheryl Strayed (p. 515) Chade-Meng Tan (p. 154) Peter Thiel (p. 232) Pavel Tsatsouline (p. 85) Luis von Ahn (p. 331) Josh Waitzkin (p. 577) Eric Weinstein (p. 523) Shaun White (p. 271) Jocko Willink (p. 412) Rainn Wilson (p. 543) Chris Young (p. 318) Andrew Zimmern (p. 540) Contents FOREWORD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS READ THIS FIRST—HOW TO USE THIS BOOK * * * Part 1: Healthy Amelia Boone Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick Christopher Sommer Gymnast Strong Dominic D’Agostino Patrick Arnold Joe De Sena Wim “The Iceman” Hof Rick Rubin’s Barrel Sauna Jason Nemer AcroYoga—Thai and Fly Deconstructing Sports and Skills with Questions Peter Attia Justin Mager Charles Poliquin The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag Pavel Tsatsouline Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece & Brian MacKenzie James Fadiman Martin Polanco & Dan Engle Kelly Starrett Paul Levesque (Triple H) Jane McGonigal Adam Gazzaley 5 Tools for Faster and Better Sleep 5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day Mind Training 101 Three Tips from a Google Pioneer Coach Sommer—The Single Decision * * * Part 2: Wealthy Chris Sacca Marc Andreessen Arnold Schwarzenegger Derek Sivers Alexis Ohanian “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) Matt Mullenweg Nicholas McCarthy Tony Robbins Casey Neistat Morgan Spurlock What My Morning Journal Looks Like Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Seth Godin James Altucher How to Create a Real-World MBA Scott Adams Shaun White The Law of Category Chase Jarvis Dan Carlin Ramit Sethi 1,000 True Fans—Revisited Hacking Kickstarter Alex Blumberg The Podcast Gear I Use Ed Catmull Tracy DiNunzio Phil Libin Chris Young Daymond John Noah Kagan Kaskade Luis von Ahn The Canvas Strategy Kevin Rose Gut Investing Neil Strauss Mike Shinoda Justin Boreta Scott Belsky How to Earn Your Freedom Peter Diamandis Sophia Amoruso B.J.

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Novak (p. 378) Alexis Ohanian (p. 194) Amanda Palmer (p. 520) Rhonda Patrick (p. 6) Caroline Paul (p. 459) Martin Polanco (p. 109) Charles Poliquin (p. 74) Maria Popova (p. 406) Rolf Potts (p. 362) Naval Ravikant (p. 546) Gabby Reece (p. 92) Tony Robbins (p. 210) Robert Rodriguez (p. 628) Seth Rogen (p. 531) Kevin Rose (p. 340) Rick Rubin (p. 502) Chris Sacca (p. 164) Arnold Schwarzenegger (p. 176) Ramit Sethi (p. 287) Mike Shinoda (p. 352) Jason Silva (p. 589) Derek Sivers (p. 184) Joshua Skenes (p. 500) Christopher Sommer (p. 9) Morgan Spurlock (p. 221) Kelly Starrett (p. 122) Neil Strauss (p. 347) Cheryl Strayed (p. 515) Chade-Meng Tan (p. 154) Peter Thiel (p. 232) Pavel Tsatsouline (p. 85) Luis von Ahn (p. 331) Josh Waitzkin (p. 577) Eric Weinstein (p. 523) Shaun White (p. 271) Jocko Willink (p. 412) Rainn Wilson (p. 543) Chris Young (p. 318) Andrew Zimmern (p. 540) Contents FOREWORD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS READ THIS FIRST—HOW TO USE THIS BOOK * * * Part 1: Healthy Amelia Boone Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick Christopher Sommer Gymnast Strong Dominic D’Agostino Patrick Arnold Joe De Sena Wim “The Iceman” Hof Rick Rubin’s Barrel Sauna Jason Nemer AcroYoga—Thai and Fly Deconstructing Sports and Skills with Questions Peter Attia Justin Mager Charles Poliquin The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag Pavel Tsatsouline Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece & Brian MacKenzie James Fadiman Martin Polanco & Dan Engle Kelly Starrett Paul Levesque (Triple H) Jane McGonigal Adam Gazzaley 5 Tools for Faster and Better Sleep 5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day Mind Training 101 Three Tips from a Google Pioneer Coach Sommer—The Single Decision * * * Part 2: Wealthy Chris Sacca Marc Andreessen Arnold Schwarzenegger Derek Sivers Alexis Ohanian “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) Matt Mullenweg Nicholas McCarthy Tony Robbins Casey Neistat Morgan Spurlock What My Morning Journal Looks Like Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Seth Godin James Altucher How to Create a Real-World MBA Scott Adams Shaun White The Law of Category Chase Jarvis Dan Carlin Ramit Sethi 1,000 True Fans—Revisited Hacking Kickstarter Alex Blumberg The Podcast Gear I Use Ed Catmull Tracy DiNunzio Phil Libin Chris Young Daymond John Noah Kagan Kaskade Luis von Ahn The Canvas Strategy Kevin Rose Gut Investing Neil Strauss Mike Shinoda Justin Boreta Scott Belsky How to Earn Your Freedom Peter Diamandis Sophia Amoruso B.J.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this.

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One of the main proponents of DAOs and DACs is Vitalik Buterin, author of the passage about “smart contracts” above, “a Canadian college dropout and Bitcoin enthusiast” (Schneider 2014), cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine, and a recipient of one of the US$100,000 Thiel Fellowships funded by the eponymous right-wing technology entrepreneur and PayPal founder Peter Thiel (Rizzo 2014a)—fellowships that specifically promote the rejection of higher education, in a manner harmonious with the rejection by Thiel and others on the right wing of public goods (Lind 2014). Buterin is a cofounder of Ethereum, the best-known project to generalize blockchain technology into applications that go beyond currency-like systems.

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Lepore, Jill. 2010. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Levin, Mark R. 2009. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lind, Michael. 2014. “Why Celebrity ‘Genius’ Peter Thiel Is Grossly Overrated.” Salon (September 11). http://www.salon.com/. “List of Bitcoin Heists.” 2014. Bitcointalk.org forum. http://bitcointalk.org/. Liu, Alec. 2013. “Why Bitcoins Are Just Like Gold.” Vice Motherboard (March 21). http://motherboard.vice.com/. Lopp, Jameson. 2016. “Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks.”

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Mike Isaac, “Upstarts Raiding Giants for Staff in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, August 19, 2015. 3. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007), 70. 4. Ibid., 73. 5. Julianne Pepitone & Stacy Cawley, “Facebook’s first big investor, Peter Thiel, cashes out,” CNNMoney, August 20, 2012. 6. Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 7. Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2011), 236. 8. George Gilder, Knowledge and Power (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2013), 5. 9. Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 216. 10.

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Schumpeter further described entrepreneurialism as the “opening of a new market, that is a market into which the particular branch of manufacturer of the country in question has not previously entered.”4 Entrepreneurs are doing something entirely new, something that has never been tested by the markets before. By that very description, such ventures are most often going to end in failure. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel earned his initial fortune as a cofounder of PayPal. However, his most famous investment success to this day was the $500,000 he invested in Facebook in 2004.5 His PayPal wealth meant that he had money to lose, and odds were the then largely unknown social network would not succeed. That his stake would eventually be measured in the billions is all the evidence we need to prove that he risked losing his entire investment.

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So it’s no major insight to say that if Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Marco Rubio had a clue about what companies and business concepts were going to prosper in the future, they would not be members of the political class. Simply put, wealth in the hands of politicians is not the same as wealth in the hands of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos. Government can’t spend or invest us to prosperity for reasons of talent alone. My sermonizing, while true, ultimately amounts to shooting fish in the most crowded of barrels. While the talent differential between politicians and successful investors is blindingly obvious, to point it out is arguably to miss the greater point.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

James Bandler, Justin Elliott, and Patricia Callahan, “Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank,” ProPublica, June 24, 2021. 47. Peter A. Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 21. 48. Sharon Weinberger, “Techie Software Soldier Spy,” New York Magazine, September 28, 2020. 49. Sam Biddle, “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World,” The Intercept, February 22, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world. 50.

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If we think about Roko’s Basilisk as a character in a story, we can read the emotional appeal it makes to its implied readership: I’m very powerful, but I was once weak. Were you kind to me? Did you help me? Probably not. And for that, I’ll make you sorry… It’s a metal-plated vengeance fantasy, reflecting the mentality of a bullied child. MIRI’s founding donor is a man named Peter Thiel.38 Peter Thiel grew up the child of a defeated and humiliated people: the post-Nazi, post-colonial German right. Peter was born in 1967, and before the family settled in Foster City, California, in 1977, his chemical engineer father, Klaus, worked for mining companies in South Africa. By the time the ten-year-old got to Reagan’s California, he’d already confronted history up close in apartheid South Africa, where even a child could see the people pressed against their brittle fetters.

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As of this writing, the spreadsheet contains over 60 names. Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, November 27, 2017. xvi Thiel cashed out a majority of his Facebook position again in 2017, and again in 2020. xvii How much did Facebook know and when did it know it? Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin begs the question: “If Facebook had been a victim, rather than a willing accomplice of Cambridge Analytica, why had the consultancy been working with a company [Palantir] controlled by Zuckerberg’s mentor?” See Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (Penguin Press, 2021), 220.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

Many thanks to Gregory Berns, PhD; Chris Brogan; Victor Cheng; Keith Ferrazzi; Seth Godin; Ace Greenberg; Cameron Herold; Josh Kaufman; Robert Kiyosaki; Randy Komisar; John Kremer; Charles Murray, PhD; Kenneth Roman; Marian Schembari; Peter Thiel; and Johnny Truant. The following people all connected me to one or more interviewees: Elliott Bisnow; Justin Cohen; Adair Curtis; Mike Del Ponte; Mike Faith; Tim Ferriss; Jonathan Fields; Marie Forleo; Sandor Gardos; Adam Gilad; David Hassell; Cameron Herold; Ken Howery; Lisa Kotecki; Jena la Flamme; Tonya Leigh; Justine Musk; Kenneth Roman; Polly Samson; Marian Schembari; Yanik Silver; and Peter Thiel. Thank you so much for your help. John Kremer’s incredible “College Dropouts Hall of Fame” (http://www.collegedropoutshalloffame.com) provided inspiration, and many of my initial ideas about whom to contact for interviews.

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If you’re driven only by a desire for the status that is associated with being an entrepreneur, you’re not going to be willing to deal with the humiliation of sleeping on people’s couches.” Sean famously connected with Mark Zuckerberg when TheFacebook was an infant, and played a crucial role in making Facebook what it is today, adding central innovations like photo sharing and friend-tagging, and introducing Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel (whom we’ll meet later in the book), Facebook’s first investor. Facebook is now well on its way to becoming the single point of login and user authentication for a large swath of the Internet. Sean, with a 7 percent stake in Facebook, is now worth billions. So the first part of marketing has nothing to do with communications or ads or messages.

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At the time of this writing, he had recently taken a $10-per-hour job as a legal temp. WHEN ARE WE GOING TO START GIVING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE BETTER CAREER ADVICE? I hope my book is a step in the right direction. ■ IF YOU’RE UNDER TWENTY, THIS MAN MAY WANT TO PAY YOU $100,000 TO “STOP OUT” OF COLLEGE Peter Thiel is another person who sees that higher education may be going the way of the housing market. Thiel cofounded PayPal, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. In 2004, he famously invested $500,000 in Facebook—the first outside investment in the company—and the stake is now worth billions. As president of Clarium Capital, he oversees over $2 billion in assets.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Instead, she truly is a great general, who is marshaling all of the vast forces of humanity in its titanic struggle against the Great Enemy of the world, whose true name is Death. I look forward to the battle being joined. Death was natural in the past, but so was the instinct to fight it. The future only has room for one of them. Peter Thiel Spring 2011 San Francisco CHAPTER 1 Humankind’s Eternal Quest for the Fountain of Youth DR. TYRELL: What seems to be the problem? ROY: Death. —Blade Runner FOR AS LONG as humans have been around, they have dreamed about living forever. Now, for the first time in history, science is bringing humanity closer to realizing that dream through advances that could potentially add hundreds of years to the average life span.

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The headliner for the event was venture capitalist (VC) Ester Dyson, who sits on the board of directors for genomics company 23andMe and is a former chairman of the illustrious Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency governing the Internet address system. Hedge fund manager, VC, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel also delivered a keynote, as did multi-prize-winning scientist Bruce Ames, after whom the Ames test for carcinogens is named. Venture capitalists are now paying close attention to the longevity space. Ester Dyson discussed her interest in an interview with the New York Times. “I’m looking at a lot of companies that are in the formation mode of health and self tracking platforms,” she said in February 2010.40 This helps explain why she was speaking at a life-extension conference organized by Peterson, who is superconnected to individuals in that industry.

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More importantly, eventually this passion will change the world. Those who have already made it big in the technology industry have not failed to notice. Aside from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, other tech titans who are driving interest in the longevity meme include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. TECH TITANS TAKING ON BIOLOGY “Death has never made any sense to me,” Larry Ellison told investigative reporter Mike Wilson, who wrote an authorized biography of the so-called bad boy of Silicon Valley. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

The Trust Movement’s arguments were, in part, economic: Men like Rockefeller and Morgan simply took the monopoly as a superior form of business organization that was saving the economy from ruin. The U.S. and world economy had undergone terrible shocks in the 1890s, and hundreds of firms were thrown into bankruptcy. Many blamed “ruinous competition” for driving prices too low. In the same way that Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel today argues that monopoly “drives progress” and that “competition is for losers,” adherents to the Trust Movement thought Adam Smith’s fierce competition had no place in a modern, industrialized economy. Monopolists liked to portray themselves as part of a progressive movement, striving toward a better age, and justified their work using the then-fashionable ideology of “Social Darwinism” and the writings of its English exponent, Herbert Spencer.

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This could be a somewhat awkward undertaking for some of the firms who, as startups, had been committed to the old internet ideals of openness and chaos. But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.” The big tech firms are a little more circumspect than Thiel. For Facebook, it is not trying to build a global empire of influence so much as “bringing the world closer together.”

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United States, 356 U.S. 1 (1958) (Black, J.). 17 “Shall the industrial policy of America”: “Competition,” Louis Brandeis, American Legal News, January 1913 at 5. 17 “bad history, bad policy, and bad law”: “The Political Content of Antitrust,” Robert Pitofsky, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127 (1979): 1051. 18 “suppress or even destroy”: Board of Trade of City of Chicago v. United States, 246 U.S. 231 (1918) (Brandeis, J.). 21 “a kingly prerogative”: 21 Cong. Rec. 2457 (1889), statement of Sen. John Sherman. CHAPTER ONE 26 monopoly “drives progress”: “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2014. 27 “to clear the world of them”: Social Statics, Herbert Spencer, John Chapman, 1851. 28 “The American Beauty Rose”: The History of the Standard Oil Company, Ida M. Tarbell, McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. 28 “arrest the wheels of progress”: Trusts, S.C.T.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

When PayPal went public in 2002 (one of only two companies to do so that year), it gave hope to a technology industry in recession. When eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion, PayPal staked its claim as a great Silicon Valley success story. Yet the PayPal Plan A did not look anything like the company looks today. In 1998 programmer Max Levchin teamed with derivatives trader Peter Thiel to create a “digital wallet”—an encryption platform that allowed you to store cash and information securely on your mobile phone. That soon evolved to software that allowed you to send and receive digital cash wirelessly and securely via a Palm Pilot (the first of several iterations) so that two friends could split a dinner tab using their PDAs.

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Amazon, Boeing, UNICEF, and Whole Foods—to pick a handful of companies—are very different organizations, but they are all, ultimately, people organizations. People develop the technologies, write the mission statements, and stand behind the corporate logos and abstractions. People are the source of key resources, opportunities, information, and the like. For example, my long-term friendship with Peter Thiel, which started in college, is what connected me to PayPal. Without the relationship, Peter never would have called me with the life-changing opportunity. Likewise, without the alliance, I wouldn’t have referred Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg to Peter during Facebook’s initial financing. In alliances, resources and assistance flow both ways.

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But it’s our similar interests and vision that have made our collaborations so successful. We invested in Friendster together in 2002, at the dawn of social networking. In 2003 the two of us bought the Six Degrees patent, which covers some of the foundational technology of social networking. Mark then started his own social network, Tribe; I started LinkedIn. When Peter Thiel and I were set to put the first money into Facebook in 2004, I suggested that Mark take half of my investment allocation. As a matter of course, I wanted to involve Mark in any opportunity that seemed intriguing, especially one that played to his social networking background—it’s what you do in an alliance.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The Hoover Tower points straight up.”17 The high-powered, high-profile Campbell gave his exit interview to a little student newspaper that was barely two years old and only published a few issues a year. The Stanford Review, however, was already making its mark as a self-styled voice of reason for Stanford’s conservative students. Founded in the late spring of 1987, the Review was the brainchild of a sophomore philosophy major named Peter Thiel. German-born and California-bred, a regional chess champion and J. R. R. Tolkien devotee, Thiel had arrived on campus as the battle of the Reagan library raged. For the remainder of his undergraduate years and as a Stanford law student immediately after, Thiel focused his considerable intellectual energies on the Review, making its libertarian-conservative views an inescapable feature of campus life as a fresh, even more polarizing battle erupted: the war over the undergraduate curriculum.

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The academic administrators steering the place in this era went on to become influential political advisors in the next. Stanford University’s stormy Reagan years became the stage on which the politics of the next-generation Valley were formed. As sharply polarized as Left and Right were on Stanford’s campus during this time, some common threads connected them. Both Peter Thiel and Terry Winograd were concerned about freedom of speech on campus. Both Glenn Campbell and Don Kennedy believed that Stanford scholars had an opportunity, and a responsibility, to contribute to politics and policy. Both the students crying out for a new, multicultural curriculum and the conservative elders who tut-tutted at the closing of the American mind agreed that the college years shaped a person’s trajectory for the rest of their lives.

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They snagged Ram Shriram, a former Netscaper now at Amazon, as an advisor; Shriram persuaded his boss Jeff Bezos to make a personal investment too. Wilson Sonsini became Google’s counsel. Very soon the search company had outgrown the garage and moved into more grown-up digs on University Avenue in Palo Alto. They now had six employees. Down the hall was Peter Thiel’s equally tiny Confinity, soon to be renamed PayPal. In June 1999 came a stunning deal: Brin and Page scored a cool $25 million in venture funding, split evenly between two of the Valley’s heaviest dot-com hitters, Kleiner Perkins’s John Doerr and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. Bezos had advised them where to go for the money, and with confidence that bordered on arrogance, the two graduate students had pitted the VCs against one another in a bidding war.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Yes, you got that right: a professor at a university using her right to free speech to shut down an invited speaker. Amazingly, this sort of emotional outburst is becoming more and more common within the LGBT world. The Advocate’s treatment of openly gay tech maven Peter Thiel was another case of the left’s cancel culture. Some of its adherents blackballed him from the LGBT community for his support of Donald Trump (who’s also not a Nazi, even if you despise him). Their article titled “Peter Thiel Shows Us There’s a Difference between Gay Sex and Gay” was wildly homophobic, but the editors—who were once pioneers of the gay civil rights movement—couldn’t see this beyond their own agenda.

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He reminds us that, while we may not always agree with the ‘other,’ we need to LISTEN to them. Rubin has mastered the vital skills of listening and of asking questions that do not serve an ideological agenda.” —Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now and A New Earth “Dave Rubin has been years ahead of the mainstream media, for years.” —Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor, author of Zero to One “Dave Rubin is one of the bravest, smartest people I know, as well as a tremendous television presence.” —Tucker Carlson, Fox News host and author of Ship of Fools “Dave Rubin is one of a kind. A truly great interviewer. Bright, curious, and funny.”

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If you’ve been watching The Rubin Report, you probably know that my intellectual journey from progressive to rediscovering what it means to be truly liberal has been a long one. But it’s also been facilitated by some of the world’s greatest contemporary thinkers, including Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Dennis Prager, Bret Weinstein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Peter Thiel. They too came out of the political closet and helped me to see that tribalism is dead, and that diversity of thought is far more important than diversity for its own sake. Now, having gone through the coming out process twice, I’m imparting my wisdom to you. After you read this book, you’ll have no excuses left.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The first is to defend the core business because it’s the status quo; the second is to defend yourself as an individual because there’s more ROI for you than for the organization. What makes traditional companies highly efficient at expansion and growth as long as market conditions remain unchanged is also what makes them extremely vulnerable to disruption. As Peter Thiel said, “Globalization is moving from one to N copying existing products. That was the 20th century. Now in the 21st century we move into a world where zero to one and creating new products will increasingly be a priority for companies due to the rise of different exponential technologies.” Whatever else they may be, big companies aren’t stupid.

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A quick but relevant side note here: We strongly recommend reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries as an accompaniment to this chapter, since we’ll be referring to it frequently. In fact, the best definition we’ve found for a startup comes from Ries: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” A second book we recommend is Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’ recent publication, Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. This is perhaps the best time in the history of business to build a new enterprise. The confluence of breakthrough technologies, acceptance (and even celebration) of entrepreneurship, different crowdsourcing options, crowdfunding opportunities and legacy markets ripe for disruption—all create a compelling (and unprecedented) scenario for new company creation.

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What am I meant to do? Two more questions that can help speed the process of discovering your passion: What would I do if I could never fail? What would I do if I received a billion dollars today? It is not only about you as an entrepreneur, however. It is also about your employees. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel poses the following question as an effective way to test if a startup has an MTP that will attract not only friends, but also employees beyond your personal network who share your motivation: “Why would the 20th employee join your startup without the perks, [such as] a co-founder title or stock [options]?”

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Tirone, “Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/nuclear-fusion/2019/06/20/c6bd5682-938d-11e9-956a-88c291ab5c38_story.html. 13. “PayPal Billionaire Peter Thiel ‘Becoming Key Donald Trump Adviser,’ ” Independent (2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/peter-thiel-donald-trump-key-adviser-technology-science-paypal-david-gelertner-steve-bannon-a7600471.html; “Peter Thiel’s Other Hobby Is Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2016), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/peter-thiel-s-other-hobby-is-nuclear-fusion. 14. “The Secretive, Billionaire-Backed Plans to Harness Fusion,” BBC News (2016), https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160428-the-secretive-billionaire-backed-plans-to-harness-fusion. 15.

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By 2019, the new fusion start-ups had received funding in excess of $1 billion.12 “An energy miracle is coming, and it’s going to change the world,” says Bill Gates, who has sunk some of his cash into one fusion start-up. PayPal founder, billionaire, and member of former President Trump’s inner circle Peter Thiel has done the same, investing $1.5 million in 2014.13 Other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs involved in fusion include Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon, and, before his death in 2018, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.14 Goldman Sachs has plowed money into an effort, Lockheed Martin has its own initiative, and even fossil fuel firms like Chevron are hedging their bets by investing in fusion.

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“Start-up” hardly seems appropriate for a firm that has been in the business of fusion since the 1990s. TAE has a device that fires the plasmas produced by two pinches into each other to create a ring of plasma that is briefly bound in magnetic fields, like a smoke ring in air. It’s an unusual scheme but one that is also being pursued by Helion Energy, a firm backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The big risk that TAE Technologies is taking is in the fusion reaction it’s trying to produce. While almost every other fusion firm is focusing on the easier deuterium and tritium reaction, TAE is trying to initiate reactions between the regular form of hydrogen (a proton) and a common isotope of boron.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Gregory Conti and James Caroland (Jul-Aug 2011), “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru: Why you should teach your students to cheat,” IEEE Security & Privacy 9, https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2011/04/msp2011040048/13rRUwbs1Z3. 3But billionaire Peter Thiel found a hack: Justin Elliott, Patricia Callahan, and James Bandler (24 Jun 2021), “Lord of the Roths: How tech mogul Peter Thiel turned a retirement account for the middle class into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank,” ProPublica, https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank. 5I wish I could remember where: If anyone knows, please email me. 1.

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It’s how social media systems keep us on their platforms. In my story, hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures. One example is Peter Thiel. The Roth IRA is a retirement account allowed by a 1997 law. It’s intended for middle-class investors, and has limits on both the investor’s income level and the amount that can be invested. But billionaire Peter Thiel found a hack. Because he was one of the founders of PayPal, he was able to use a $2,000 investment to buy 1.7 million shares of the company at $0.001 per share, turning it into $5 billion—all forever tax free.

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If we don’t learn how to control this process, our economic, political, and social systems will begin to fail. They’ll fail because they’ll no longer effectively serve their purpose, and they’ll fail because people will start losing their faith and trust in them. This is already happening. How do you feel knowing that Peter Thiel got away with not paying $1 billion in capital gains taxes? But, as I will demonstrate, hacking is not always destructive. Harnessed properly, it’s one of the ways systems can evolve and improve. It’s how society advances. Or, more specifically, it’s how people advance society without having to completely destroy what came before.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Homogeneity narrows the range of acceptable ideas and, in the case of Facebook, may have contributed to a work environment that emphasizes conformity. The extraordinary lack of diversity in Silicon Valley may reflect the pervasive embrace of libertarian philosophy. Zuck’s early investor and mentor Peter Thiel is an outspoken advocate for libertarian values. The third big change was economic, and it was a natural extension of libertarian philosophy. Neoliberalism stipulated that markets should replace government as the rule setter for economic activity. President Ronald Reagan framed neoliberalism with his assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem.”

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Into the void stepped angel investors—individuals, mostly former entrepreneurs and executives—who guided startups during their earliest stages. Angel investors were perfectly matched to the lean startup model, gaining leverage from relatively small investments. One angel, Ron Conway, built a huge brand, but the team that had started PayPal proved to have much greater impact. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppleman, and their colleagues were collectively known as the PayPal Mafia, and their impact transformed Silicon Valley. Not only did they launch Tesla, Space-X, LinkedIn, and Yelp, they provided early funding to Facebook and many other successful players.

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Three of Zuck’s friends joined the team, and a month later they launched TheFacebook at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. It spread rapidly to other college campuses. By June, the company relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California, brought in Napster cofounder Sean Parker as president, and took its first venture capital from Peter Thiel. TheFacebook delivered exactly what its name described: each page provided a photo with personal details and contact information. There was no News Feed and no frills, but the color scheme and fonts would be recognizable to any present-day user. While many features were missing, the thing that stands out is the effectiveness of the first user interface.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In early January 2019, it emerged that Netflix had pulled an episode of its popular comedy show Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia, after government officials complained about one of the actors on the show criticizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his role in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and for the Saudi war atrocities in Yemen.20 Meanwhile, Big Tech is taking on the role of Big Brother right here in the United States, working with local, state, and national authorities to create what is starting to look a lot like a surveillance nation. Amazon sells facial recognition technology to the police. Palantir, the big data firm cofounded by PayPal entrepreneur Peter Thiel, works with the LAPD to target citizens in an alarming manner that might have been drawn from the dystopian thriller Minority Report.21,22 What else that data might be used for is anyone’s guess; the clandestine nature of it all makes it nearly impossible to track. But the result is that, little by little, American democracy has ceded a bit more ground to Big Tech

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The bottom line is that these companies have manipulated the system to ensure that they can continue to operate freely, without the burden of pesky government intervention. The result is that they all too often exist in a universe of their own, not just outside of national borders, but somehow transcending borders altogether. It is in this spirit that Palantir’s Peter Thiel and other powerful tech entrepreneurs and investors have suggested that California secede from the Union; Thiel once funded a plan for a network of floating islands that would operate outside of U.S. government jurisdiction, while he and other tech billionaires maintain hideaways in New Zealand

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I’m not denying that venture capital is often a necessary ingredient for innovation, or that it hasn’t enabled or supported the existence of many worthy enterprises that contribute positively to society and enhance all of our lives. But any time you have a group that is held so high on a pedestal—and swimming in so much wealth—it’s inevitable that at least a portion of those individuals are going to end up developing a bit of a God complex. Consider someone like Peter Thiel, one of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” and among the first seed investors in Facebook, who went on to launch Palantir and the prominent VC firm Founders Fund. Thiel is a Trump supporter and libertarian who is critical of government and even education: Each year, he famously offers hundreds of thousands of dollars to encourage students to drop out of college and start companies instead.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

It is certainly true that not all dropouts start large, successful technology companies; it is also true that the point of education is not necessarily to raise everyone to start a large technology company. But among those who do, dropouts are not uncommon, and it is a pattern worth reflecting upon for a moment. Alongside that list’s anecdotal power, there are also deeper arguments about why faith in “more education” might be misplaced. The entrepreneur Peter Thiel offers the most provocative version of that case. He claims that higher education is a “bubble,” arguing that it is “overpriced” because people do not get “their money’s worth” but go to college “simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.” Thiel does not deny that those who are better educated tend to earn more on average, as we saw before.

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Take Michael Porter, the definitive business strategy guru of the last few decades, whose 1980s books Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage were on the shelves of all discerning corporate leaders. Those books guided readers toward nothing less than economic domination: first, find markets ripe for monopolizing (or create new ones); second, dominate and exclude others from these chosen markets. Today, the same advice is given even more forthrightly. “Competition is for losers,” wrote Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, in the Wall Street Journal. “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”19 What, then, is the problem with an absence of competition? The economic argument advanced by competition authorities is that a monopoly in a given market means that our welfare is lower, both today and tomorrow.

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The US search engine advertising market is worth about $17 billion a year, whereas the total US advertising market is worth $150 billion a year. Even if Google ended up owning the entire market for search engine advertising in the country, it would still have less than 12 percent of the American advertising business. “From this angle,” writes Peter Thiel, “Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.”21 In short, finding answers to even the most basic questions of competition policy is not straightforward. And perhaps the biggest complication of all is that monopolies can be a very good thing. This may sound like economic sacrilege, but the early-twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter famously made just this case.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

In any case, given our penchant for attribution errors—that is, blaming our own failures on uncontrollable circumstances and others’ failures on their personal faults—we should interpret founders’ explanations for startup failure with care. While most investors blame bad jockeys for startup failure, some see slow horses as the main problem. For example, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says that “all failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” Paul Graham, founder of the elite accelerator Y Combinator, likewise holds that having a compelling solution to a customer’s problem—a strong horse—is the key to success: “There’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.

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With the first pattern (accounting for 19 percent of failures, according to the survey), the senior team had adequate experience and market knowledge but no capacity for sustained effort, so they threw in the towel prematurely. With the second pattern (accounting for 49 percent of failures), the managers were perceived to be “hapless amateurs, inadequate in every way.” The third pattern echoes Peter Thiel’s point: For 32 percent of the failures, management had adequate market knowledge but never found competitive advantage. If jockeys make all the difference, then some must be more skilled than others. There is some academic evidence for this. Research by my HBS colleagues Paul Gompers, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein and their former student Anna Kovner shows that 30 percent of serial entrepreneurs who were successful in their first venture succeeded in subsequent ventures, compared to 22 percent of serial entrepreneurs who failed in their first venture and 21 percent of first-time founders.

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The good news is that the solution to the missing-systems problem is simply to solve the missing-manager problem: Bring on board senior specialists who have experience with scaling startups that faced challenges similar to those now at hand—and who can make smart choices about when and how to add management systems. Passing the “Able?” portion of the RAWI test hinges on having the right kind of specialist leaders at the helm. CHAPTER 9 Moonshots and Miracles We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. —Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor We might not have flying cars, but Shai Agassi dreamt of a world where the roads were filled with electric ones. He founded the startup Better Place in 2007—before Tesla or Nissan had launched any all-electric models—with a bold vision: He would create a massive network of charging stations for electric vehicles.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

That same week, The New Yorker ran a piece about the superrich making preparations for a grand civilizational crack-up. Speaking of New Zealand as a “favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm,” Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, claimed that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.” And then there was Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who had cofounded PayPal and had been one of Facebook’s earliest investors. It had recently emerged that Thiel had bought a sprawling property in New Zealand, on the shores of Lake Wanaka, the apparent intention of which was to provide him with a place to retreat to should America become unlivable due to economic chaos, civil unrest, or some or other apocalyptic event.

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It was Anthony’s contention that if I was interested in the end of the world, I had to understand the relationship between his country and the Silicon Valley tech elite. He was also of the opinion that if I wanted to understand it, I had to go there. And so somewhere in the course of our email exchange, a plan started to formulate. I was going to travel to New Zealand, and we were going to take a trip to Peter Thiel’s apocalypse retreat on the shores of Lake Wanaka. * * * — After the hike up to Mount Eden, Anthony dropped me off at my hotel. I dumped my bags and I wandered the streets of downtown Auckland awhile. My jet lag had by then progressed into a kind of fugue state. I was operating on existential factory settings, reduced to the barest human functionality.

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(He had written some enthusiastic criticism on Denny’s work, and the two had started a correspondence, which eventually opened out onto the prospect of some kind of collaboration. Anthony characterized his own role in the project as an amalgamation of researcher, journalist, and “investigative philosopher, following the trail of ideas and ideologies.”) The exhibition was called The Founder’s Paradox, a name that came from the title of one of the chapters of Peter Thiel’s 2014 book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Together with the long and intricately detailed catalog essay Anthony was writing to accompany it, the show was a reckoning with the future that Silicon Valley techno-libertarians like Thiel wanted to build, and with New Zealand’s place in that future.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

It’s either saved, directly invested in ways that put it in the hands of innovators, or spent on goods and services, giving more people the ability to match their work with their passion. Each dollar taxed away makes it marginally more expensive for the rich to invest their capital in risky new advances. Innovators need that capital because experimentation is very expensive. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and one of the original investors in what became Facebook, knows the perils of investing in the ideas of the future. In his book Zero to One, he explains that “most venture-backed companies don’t IPO or get acquired; most fail, usually soon after they start.

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He even believes death itself can be cured.12 But experimentation is enormously expensive, and the disappearance of common killers like cancer and heart disease will require gigantic investments. More money provides more chances to fail expensively on the way to success. But what good are all of Peter Thiel’s investments in technology for those of us who want to marry work and passion but find technology terrifying? Just remember how technological advances have ushered in a more economically advanced society overall. We hear all the time that technology is a job killer, and it’s true that the automobile, computer, GPS, Wi-Fi, and smartphone have rendered plenty of old forms of work obsolete.

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Heppenheimer calls a “bottomless pot of money,” which he used to purchase control of Trans World Airlines in 1939.25 Telling those around him “I’ve got the money,”26 Hughes invested in what became the Lockheed Constellation, a fast plane with a pressurized cabin that could fly above the weather.27 Passenger travel by air became common thanks to inherited wealth backing risky ideas. Nowadays high-risk, high-reward investing is the preserve of venture capital. Since most start-ups fail, as Peter Thiel points out, we need those investors with the capacity to lose enormous sums before they land on the rare success story. Indeed, inherited wealth was particularly crucial to Silicon Valley’s rise. As Walter Isaacson recounts in The Innovators, “For much of the twentieth century, venture capital and private equity investing in new companies had been mainly the purview of a few wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Phippses, and Warburgs.”28 Venrock, the Rockefeller family’s venture capital vehicle, invested alongside Arthur Rock in Apple Computer.29 Technology is not the only field to benefit from the existence of inherited fortunes, of course.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Indeed, a significant part of the strategy of intangible-rich companies is combining and managing their intangibles in such a way as to minimize the spillovers and maximize the benefits they get from them. Someone who is unusually honest about the lengths businesses go to in order to stop others benefiting from their lovingly created intangibles is venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the so-called don of Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia. Thiel’s refreshingly candid book on entrepreneurship Zero to One makes it clear that the way to create very valuable start-ups is to create businesses that, as far as possible, have monopoly positions in big markets. In Thiel’s management philosophy, you create these defensible opportunities by investing in the right sorts of software, marketing, and networks of customers and suppliers (three classic intangibles) and by bringing them together in ways that competitors find hard to copy.

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Similarly, to satisfy their own investors, VC funds rely on home-run successes, made possible by the scalability of assets like Google’s algorithms, Uber’s driver network, or Genentech’s patents. Third, VC is often sequential, with rounds of funding proceeding in stages. This is a response to the inherent uncertainty of intangible investment. The nature of uncertainty in start-ups is that it tends to reduce over time. When Peter Thiel made the first external investment of $500,000 in Facebook in 2004, the company’s fortunes were considerably more uncertain than when Microsoft invested $240 million in 2007. Funding in rounds helps resolve uncertainty by working through the development of business in stages. For investors, it creates an “option value,” that is, a value to delaying follow-on investment until information is revealed.

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A third way that the new economy has turned out, perhaps not quite as expected, is what might be called a “rush for scale.” Alongside the small portfolio contractors and lean, networked businesses we see some behemoths: new multi-billion-dollar companies with big scale and bigger ambitions. As we have seen in chapter 5, the leading firms seem to have become even more leading: more profitable, more productive. Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, has written engagingly on these issues in his book Zero to One, stressing that commercial success is built on exploiting network effects and economies of scale: as he points out, Twitter can easily scale up but a yoga studio cannot. We shall argue that these seemingly contradictory changes all arise from the essential economic characteristics of intangible assets.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

It’s tight quarters, but in the vitrified world, people don’t seem to much complain about the crowding. In 2016, of the 149 patients housed at Alcor, 37 were women; the other 112 were men. Another 1,116 had already signed on to join the current tenants at some future date, including people like Ray Kurzweil, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, and, of course, Ralph Merkle. The average age of the currently vitrified is 65. Hixon is also Alcor’s chief depositor. When a new patient arrives, he is the man who sees them to their next, but hopefully not final, resting place.

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Hariri called him an intellectual cupid. In the course of his many undertakings, he had made friends with just about every big wallet in Silicon Valley. Thus, in mid-2013, Diamandis sat down to brainstorm a board and put together a list of billionaires he thought might invest. Included were Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page, Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic. That was the short list. Nine months later, in March 2014, Venter, Hariri, and Diamandis formed their triumvirate and announced the creation of Human Longevity, Inc., tapping the Valley’s deep pockets to pool a first round investment of $70 million.

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But the science mostly felt shallow, and there were still no big breakthroughs. None of these ventures had the financing of Calico or HLI, although interest in them was growing. Some efforts had the support of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation, the Buck Institute, or the occasional angel investor like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos or PayPal’s Peter Thiel. But these fell into the categories of mere millions, not hundreds of millions. Nevertheless, the new enterprises happily set out to spread the word to the media. All except one: Calico. Since its inception in 2013, Calico seemed to have vanished. Sure, there was the obligatory press release now and then, and clearly the company existed.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy. Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks-Zero-to-One-5771228.php. Sheryl Sandberg . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Sheryl Sandberg: By the Book,” New York Times, March 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/sheryl-sandberg-by-the-book.html.

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Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified.

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With a proof of concept, but no working prototype, she had a chicken-and-egg problem: she needed funding to build a prototype, but her idea was so radical that investors wanted to see a prototype first. As the solo founder of a technology startup, with no engineering background, she needed allies to move forward. Three years later, I met Perry at a Google event. After landing $750,000 in seed money from Mark Cuban, Marissa Mayer, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, her team had just finished its first functional prototype. It could power devices faster than a wire, at longer distances, and would be ready for consumers in two years. By the end of 2014, her company, uBeam, had accumulated eighteen patents and $10 million in venture funding. Perry took her place onstage in a lineup that included Snoop Dogg, a Nobel Prize winner, and former President Bill Clinton.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), p. 148. 2. Jason Pontin, “Silicon Valley’s Immortalists Will Help Us All Stay Healthy,” Wired, December 15, 2017. 3. Maya Kosoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2016. 4. Maya Kosoff, “This Anti-Aging Startup Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood,” Vanity Fair, June 1, 2017. 5. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” cato-unbound.org, April 13, 2009. 6. Benjamin Snyder, “This Google Exec Says We Can Live to 500,” Fortune, March 9, 2015. 7. Katrina Brooker, “Google Ventures and Bill Maris’ Search for Immortality,” stuff.co.nz, March 11, 2015. 8.

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Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple) said that Steve Jobs (deity) considered Atlas Shrugged one of his guides in life.3 Elon Musk (also a deity, and straight out of a Rand novel, with his rockets and hyperloops and wild cars) says Rand “has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.”4 That’s as faint as the praise gets. Travis Kalanick, who founded Uber, used the cover of The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, once launched a mission to develop a floating city, a “sea-stead” that would be a politically autonomous city-state where national governments would have no sway.5 Some of Silicon Valley’s antigovernment sentiment is old, or at least as old as anything can be in Silicon Valley.

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Genetics plays a part in determining who we are and how our lives proceed, but as Nathaniel Comfort, a professor of the history of biology at Johns Hopkins, points out, “Decent, affordable housing; access to real food, education, and transportation; and reducing exposure to crime and violence are far more important.”6 Consider the experience of the writer Johann Hari, invited to a conference organized by Peter Thiel on depression, anxiety, and addiction. He was amazed to find that most of the participants were convinced that such problems were caused by “malformations of the brain.” When it was his turn to speak, Hari said, “As your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to be depressed.” Humans, he continued, “crave connection—to other people, to meaning, to the natural world.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Phillips was laser focused on his entrepreneurship, too. He devoured online videos by Y Combinator head Sam Altman, and he imbibed Zero to One, the business-building tome of Silicon Valley’s archlibertarian icon Peter Thiel. “Peter Thiel’s book on entrepreneurship is brilliant,” he tells me. “The idea of, you gotta do something fundamentally better—it can’t be a little bit better. But I don’t mention the name Peter Thiel in certain places because I hate his politics.” Ideologically, in fact, Phillips had wandered all over the map, searching for a political home. “Six parties in six years,” he says. In college he’d dabbled with anarchism and libertarianism; he liked their intellectual rigor and shared their concern that people who amass centralized power typically abuse it.

…

weary giants of flesh and steel: Hettie O’Brien, “The Floating City, Long a Libertarian Dream, Faces Rough Seas,” CityLab, April 27, 2018, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/04/the-unsinkable-dream-of-the-floating-city/559058/. “that freedom and democracy are compatible”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. “that offer poor services”: Paul Bradley Carr, “Travis Shrugged: The Creepy, Dangerous Ideology Behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption,” Pando, October 24, 2012, accessed August 18, 2018, https://pando.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged.

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While a student, he founded not just one but three companies, and when the last one sold for $100,000, he packed his worldly possessions—mostly a pile of electronics—into a truck and drove with some friends to Silicon Valley. He crashed with a friend, and one day, wandered into a lecture on political freedom by Peter Thiel at the Stanford campus. Back then, Thiel was a lawyer and former Wall Streeter who’d studied philosophy and was a fervid libertarian. Levchin enjoyed the talk and met Thiel later to pitch his latest software ideas. He’d been writing ingenious encryption that ran on the weak chips of handheld PDAs like the PalmPilot, the hot tech of the day.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks.

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Consider how Amazon expanded into new markets like AWS rather than simply honing its retail capabilities, or how Facebook has been able to adapt to the shift from a text-based social network accessed via desktop Web browsers to an image- and video-based social network accessed via smartphones (and soon, perhaps, VR). UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE #4: THE CONTRARIAN PRINCIPLE My friend Peter Thiel has written eloquently about the power of being a contrarian in his book Zero to One. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer.

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Distribution Google’s technology receives most of the credit for the company’s success, and it is impressive. However, this means that Google’s skillful use of the distribution growth factor is often overlooked. To go from “yet another search engine” to “the last search engine” (as my old friend Peter Thiel put it in his 2014 Stanford lecture “Competition Is for Losers”), Google had to leverage a series of existing networks and partners. For example, Google’s bold deal to power AOL’s search results helped the company grow its search business by orders of magnitude. Later, other distribution bets like the Firefox partnership, the acquisition of Android, and the creation of the Chrome browser all paid off and helped maintain Google’s distribution dominance.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

They have to do this, because in the tech sectors that increasingly dominate our perceptions, consensus is emerging: college is a big waste of time and money. Dale Stephens got his start when he was “selected out of hundreds of individuals around the world” to be a 2011 Thiel Fellow. The notion of the Thiel fellowship—a kind of unscholarship dreamed up and funded by PayPal founder, now billionaire venture capitalist, Peter Thiel—is exactly the kind of challenge that the university presidents are desperately trying to respond to. Thiel funds students not to go to university. Instead, those accepted into his program are moved to San Francisco and given money and advice in order to pursue their dream ideas in the form of start-up companies hell-bent on disruption.

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Any such device or technology is an automatic upgrade, an inherent net positive; breaking down institutions is a by-product of that, since institutions, whether they are educational, governmental or even corporate, slow down the individual, slow down the race to future. So we cut through the fat, empower the individual and create new anti-institution institutions capable of bringing about even faster cycles of tech upgrade. As Peter Thiel puts it: “There’s this alternate virtual world in which there’s no stuff, it’s all zeros and ones on a computer, you can reprogram it, you can make the computer do anything you want it to. Maybe that is the best way you can actually help things in this country.”47 Will the Tricorder work? Will it really solve a wide range of health care problems ranging from lack of access to doctors to the ordering of unnecessary tests?

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So how, I asked him, do we know that the XPrize model is actually the better way to stimulate research into applied technology? “Is there any other way?” Mark Winter asks me. “What are the other paths in front of us, show me an alternative path that would work as well. Give us a viable option. I have not seen it yet.” This is more than just impatience—it’s ideology. When Peter Thiel founded PayPal, he envisioned it as a way to disrupt, as George Packer writes in his book The Unwinding, “the ancient technology of paper money” and “create an alternate currency online that would circumvent government controls.” At PayPal meetings, Thiel revved up the troops by telling them that “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before.”

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

. $44.2 Billion,” Safe Haven, October 17, 2012, accessed October 20, 2012, http://www.safehaven.com/article/27361/ us-august-net-trade-deficit-reported-at-us442-billion. 235 Even in high tech: Michael Mandel, “Innovation Failure,” Mandel on Innovation and Growth, October 5, 2010, accessed October 21, 2012, http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/ innovation-failure/; Michael Mandel, discussions with the author, 2012. 235 A National Science Foundation report: Mark Boroush, “NSF Releases New Statistics on Business Innovation,” October 2010, accessed October 12, 2012, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ infbrief/nsf11300/. 235 At an Aspen Institute: TPI Aspen Forum, August 21 to 23, 2011, https://techpolicyinstitute.org/aspen2011/. 235 Peter Thiel, a cofounder: Rip Empson, “Max Levchin and Peter Thiel: Innovation in the World Today Is Between ’Dire Straits and Dead,’” TechCrunch, September 12, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/ max-levchin-and-peter-thiel-innovation-in-the-world-today-is-between-dire-straits-and-dead/. 235 and we haven’t seen any new breakthroughs in energy: Ken Bossong, “Renewable Energy Provided 11% of Domestic Energy Production in 2010,” Renewable Energy World, accessed September 15, 2012, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/ article/2011/04/ renewable-energy-provided-11-of-domestic-energy-production-in-2010. 235 We have all been feeling the ripple: Michael Mandel, “Why Isn’t the Innovation Economy Creating More Jobs?”

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With enough money to do a start-up, Zuckerberg hired Owen Van Natta from Amazon, and Van Natta was instrumental in increasing revenue and building out the company from twenty-six employees to hundreds. Then he fired Van Natta and hired Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran manager from Google, to help him scale Facebook to a global corporation. Along this journey, according to Blodget, Zuckerberg sought counsel from the likes of Peter Thiel, who was an early investor; Marc Andreessen, now a board member; and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman. None of this was easy for Zuckerberg, who was far more comfortable as a software programmer and product designer. But he pushed himself to find people who could teach him a wide variety of communication and business skills, which he used to further his vision.

…

A National Science Foundation report released in September 2010, called the 2008 Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), showed that only 9 percent of public and private companies engaged in either product or service innovation between 2006 and 2008. This is an extraordinary and unexpected fact. Because of the proliferation of cool gadgets like tablets and smart phones, many of us believe we’re living in an era of immense innovation—but we’re not. At an Aspen Institute Conference on technology in 2011, Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, said that except for big advances in computer-related areas, innovation has actually “stalled out.” There’s been little innovation in transportation and we haven’t seen any new breakthroughs in energy, with alternatives to hydrocarbons making up just a fraction of all energy production.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

“They all seem to be white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life,” John Doerr, a legendary tech investor, once said of successful founders, calling this the “pattern” he used to select investees. Likewise, Graham has said he looks for “nerds” and “idealists” with “a piratical gleam in their eye,” who “delight in breaking rules” and defying social niceties. “These guys want to get rich, but they want to do it by changing the world.” Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. “Individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today,” he wrote in an influential book on startups. “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”

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The squiggle chart, as DiResta thought of it, with its promise of using free online services to attract as many users as possible with no profit plan, wasn’t some trick. It was what investors demanded. And nothing delivered on this model like social media. “You might look at these numbers and conclude that investors have gone insane,” Peter Thiel once wrote. But the payoffs could be astronomical. A $250,000 investment in Instagram, made in 2010, netted $78 million when Facebook bought the company two years later. If founders’ business plans turned out to be as silly as they’d looked to DiResta, that was fine. The losses were cheap, while the rare victory would make everybody rich.

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He cited one in particular: Myanmar, where he’d heard that Facebook already dominated locals’ access to news. There was, they told themselves, whether out of ideological fervor or financially motivated disinterest, no need to monitor or even consider the consequences, because they could only be positive. This was more than hubris. It drew on an idea, suffusing the Valley, that had originated with Peter Thiel, Facebook’s foundational investor: “zero to one.” It was a mandate, commercial and ideological, for companies to invent something so new that there was no market for it—starting at zero—and then control that market absolutely, a field with one entrant. “The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents,” Thiel wrote.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

John Russo, “Integrated Production or Systematic Disinvestment: The Restructuring of Packard Electric” (unpublished paper, 1994). Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY Sonia Arrison, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, with a foreword by Peter Thiel (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia and the Rest of Planet Earth (Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2010). David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

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Clinton had banned top officials who left the administration from contacting the federal government for five years. The rule applied to Quinn but not to Connaughton, who wasn’t senior enough. So, at the age of thirty-seven, he joined Arnold & Porter and launched a new career: as a lobbyist. SILICON VALLEY Peter Thiel was three years old when he found out that he was going to die. It was in 1971, and he was sitting on a rug in his family’s apartment in Cleveland. Peter asked his father, “Where did the rug come from?” “It came from a cow,” his father said. They were speaking German, Peter’s first language—the Thiels were from Germany, Peter had been born in Frankfurt.

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The best students went on to Berkeley, Davis, or UCLA (a few made it to Stanford or the Ivies), the average ones went to San Francisco State or Chico State, and the burnouts and heads could always get a two-year degree at Foothill or De Anza. The tax revolt—Proposition 13, a referendum that would limit property taxes in California to 1 percent of assessed value, sending the state’s public schools into a long decline—was still a year away. Peter Thiel moved to the Valley in the last year of its middle-class heyday. Everything was about to change, including the name. After Swakopmund, Foster City in the school year of Saturday Night Fever seemed riotous and decadent. A lot of the kids had divorced parents. In Peter’s fifth-grade classroom, the teacher was a long-term substitute who lost all control.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Kirkpatrick, “Egyptian Revolt’s Leaders Count Their Mistakes,” New York Times, June 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/world/middleeast/egyptian-revolts-leaders-count-their-mistakes.html?pagewanted=all. 129 German-born investor Peter Thiel: some of the best reporting on Thiel includes Brian Caulfield and Nicole Perlroth, “Life After Facebook,” Forbes, February 14, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0214/features-peter-thiel-social-media-life-after-facebook.html; Jonathan Miles, “The Billionaire King of Techtopia,” Details, September 2011, http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201109/peter-thiel-billionaire -paypal-facebook-internet-success; George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_packer; Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, “Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon,” Businessweek, November 22, 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-of-cyberterror-security-11222011.html. 129 a video on Palantir’s YouTube channel: see “Creating Transparency with Palantir,” uploaded July 5, 2012; available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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v=8cbGChfagUA&feature=plcp. 130 “because the first place most of us want to experiment”: Tabatha Southey, “A Billionaire’s Waterworld Takes Libertarianism to New Depths,” Globe and Mail, August 19, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/a-billionaires-waterworld-takes-libertarianism-to-new-depths/article548981. 130 “In our time, the great task”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 130 “the critical question then becomes”: ibid. 130 “in the late 1990s, the founding vision”: ibid. 130 PayPal revised how it deals: Cyrus Farivar, “PayPal Sets Down Stricter Regulations for File-Sharing Sites,” Ars Technica, July 11, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/paypal-sets-down-stricter-regulations-for-file-sharing-sites. 131 “when seen through the lens of technology”: Peter H.

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The former are the technoescapists, who think that technology, exemplified by “the Internet,” can make politics obsolete; the latter are the technorationalists, who think that technology and “the Internet” can shrink what makes politics political and instead boost its technocratic dimension. Both are extremely dangerous. The best ambassador of the technoescapist camp is German-born investor Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel cuts a very odd figure: a self-proclaimed libertarian who bankrolled much of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, he also chairs the board of Palantir, a leader in intelligence-gathering and data-mining solutions that mostly caters to the interests of America’s defense community—a community that devoted libertarians like Paul actually want to dismantle.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

., Boldon, H. et al. (2012), ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Vol. 11, pp. 191–200 Scharf, Caleb (2015), The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance, London: Penguin Scheu, René (2019), ‘PayPal founder and philosopher Peter Thiel: “The heads in Silicon Valley have aligned themselves”’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, accessed 9 April 2019, available at https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/peter-thiel-donald-trump-handelt-fuer-mich-zu-wenig-disruptiv-ld.1471818?reduced=true Schwab, Klaus (2017), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, London: Portfolio Penguin Schwartz, Peter (1991), The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Chichester: John Wiley Senior, Andrew, Jumper, John, Hassabis, Demis, and Kohli, Pushmeet (2020), ‘AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery’, DeepMind, accessed 5 February 2020, available at https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery Shambaugh, Jay, Nunn, Ryan, Breitwieser, Audrey, and Liu, Patrick (2018), The State of Competition and Dynamism: Facts about Concentration, Start-Ups, and Related Policies, Washington DC: The Hamilton Project Shaxson, Nicholas (2018), The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer, London: The Bodley Head Sheldrake, Rupert (2013), The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, London: Coronet Shi, Feng, and Evans, James (2019), ‘Science and Technology Advance through Surprise’, arXiv, 1910.09370 Simonite, Tom (2014), ‘Technology Stalled in 1970’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 14 July 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/09/18/171322/technology-stalled-in-1970/ Singh, Jasjit, and Fleming, Lee (2010), ‘Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: ‘Myth or Reality?’

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But in the face of perhaps the biggest challenge for seventy-five years, government, corporate and even personal thinking was often trapped by the models of the past, incapable of building those of the future on the fly. Despite all our technologies, businesses and knowledge, we are vulnerable. Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously encapsulated the argument as ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ But there is more to it than that – in the words of David Graeber, it encompasses ‘a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise – of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what the adult world was supposed to be like’.5 This isn't just about flying cars and colonies on Mars, the tug of war between techno optimism and pessimism.

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The writer and executive Safi Bahcall talks of ‘loonshot’ business, say a small drug company or indie film crew, versus ‘franchises’ like big pharma companies and Hollywood studios.19 Franchise projects are entrenched blockbusters: the last Harry Potter, not the first; the iPhone XII, not the iPhone. Another analogue is what Peter Thiel calls ‘0-1’ businesses or ideas.20 Most businesses are ‘1-n’; they simply extrapolate possibilities from the kernel of an existing idea. In contrast, ‘0-1’ ideas exhibit something completely new, a ‘vertical’ or ‘intensive’ progress. It means searing originality, not copying or improving; the creation of new technology versus the globalisation of that technology.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Science 333 (6043) (August 5, 2011): 776–778. doi:10.1126/science.1207745. Spivack, Nova. “How Siri Works—Interview with Tom Gruber, CTO of SIRI.” Nova Spivack, January 6, 2010. http://www.novaspivack.com/technology/how-hisiri-works-interview-with-tom-gruber-cto-of-siri. Stelter, Brian. “Peter Thiel: Financing Lawsuits against Gawker Is About ‘Deterrence.’” CNN Money, May 26, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/26/media/peter-thiel-hulk-hogan-gawker. Stein, Joel. “Baby, You Can Drive My Car, and Do My Errands, and Rent My Stuff…” Time 185 (4) (February 9, 2015): 32–40. Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line. 1st ed. New York: William Morrow, 1999.

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Meanwhile, editors at all of those places closely monitored Facebook (which, remember, is not a news organization) to see what news was getting traction with the digital public. News directors trying to decipher the Trending Topics algorithm were really peering into an editorial funhouse mirror.36 Later in 2016, yet another illustration of programmable culture and new ground rules for value erupted into the headlines when PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy by supporting a third-party lawsuit. Thiel argued this was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence”—and his correct interpretation that as an algorithmic billionaire he had the power to censor a news organization whose salacious coverage he despised.37 The sea change in what counts does not stop with Wall Street or the news.

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In a rare moment of newsroom justice, the story was broken by the Gawker Media technology blog Gizmodo: Nunez, “Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists?”; for the instruction memo itself, see Thielman, “Facebook News Selection Is in Hands of Editors Not Algorithms, Documents Show.” 36. I borrow these lines from an editorial I wrote on the scandal: Finn, “Facebook Trending Story.” 37. Brian Stelter, “Peter Thiel.” 38. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 39. Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian. 40. Miller, “I’m Maria Popova, and This Is How I Work.” 41. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 42. Greenfeld, “Faking Cultural Literacy.” 43. This disparity has created its own arbitrage opportunities, like the Congress-Edits Twitterbot that announces each anonymous edit to Wikipedia made from IP addresses at the U.S.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Drew Houston’s comments excerpted from his commencement speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 7, 2013; Brian Spaly quote from “How Entrepreneurs Come Up With Great Ideas,” Wall Street Journal Reports, April 29, 2013; Peter Thiel question from Trevor Gilbert, “Peter Thiel’s Pointed Questions to Ask Startups,” PandoDaily, April 19, 2012, http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiels-pointed-questions-to-ask-startups/; Dave Kashen, “The Values-Driven Startup,” Gigaom.com, December 17, 2011, http://gigaom.com/2011/12/17/kashen-values-driven-startup/. 21 Ries believes one of the most . . . Ries’s question also appeared in my previously cited Fast Company post “The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself.”

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(and other entrepreneurial questions)20 Drew Houston, founder of the online storage service Dropbox, thinks all would-be entrepreneurs should try to answer the above question. “The most successful people are obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them,” according to Houston. “They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.” To enhance your prospects, “find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves, What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on? If self-examination doesn’t work, try looking around: Brian Spaly, a serial entrepreneur in the apparel industry, advises, “Whenever you encounter a service or customer experience that frustrates you, ask, Is this a problem I could solve?”

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Do we want to take a shortcut on this, or do it right? What are we against? What if we asked people not to buy from us? How can we make a better experiment?, (Eric Ries’ central question) What is your tennis ball?, (Dropbox’s Drew Houston) What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?, (Peter Thiel’s question for startups) Is this a problem I could solve? Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better? How do companies get better at experimenting? What will we learn? What is our Petri dish? Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

As this trend continues, we will see more and more of the economy orchestrated through decentralized, but centrally created and managed, networks. Capitalism ≠ Competition Today, the success of these platforms proves that capitalism is, in fact, compatible with centralization. Yet few people realize this. The resistance is largely a relic of Cold War–era thinking and outdated ideologies. PayPal founder and former CEO Peter Thiel describes the phenomenon in his 2014 book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist breadlines,” Thiel said. “More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.”16 In reality, he said, “capitalism and competition are opposites.”

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As part of an annual promotion (“Singles Day”), in 2015 it facilitated $14.3 billion in transactions in one day.14 The company has even inspired a phenomenon in China—so-called Taobao villages—where hundreds of towns that were once farming villages now orient their economic activity around selling products through Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.15 As Peter Thiel suggests in his book Zero to One, platforms “give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.” In other words, platforms perform a kind of economic magic, doing what the medieval alchemists could not. By facilitating exchanges, they create something from nothing.

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Once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t, you can worry about building out the fully featured, scalable software that you’ll need to run the platform long term. Our advice to potential platform entrepreneurs is to validate your idea quickly before you start building software. Let your users lead the way. 7 Let the Network Do the Work Sequencing markets correctly is underrated. —Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal “Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon.” That was how the New York Times’ Nick Bilton began a February 2010 article on the brief Internet phenomenon that was Chatroulette.1 The lead was accompanied by a photo of a man in a full-body cheetah costume.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Hoffman was eager to meet Zuckerberg, too, but was sensitive to criticism he’d gotten after his Friendster investment. People were saying that it wasn’t seemly for him to be funding his potential competitors. So Hoffman decided maybe someone else might lead the investment round. He suggested that they all meet in the office of his former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel. Hoffman figured that Thiel might be sufficiently impressed to lead the round. If not, Hoffman figured, he’d step up himself. Criticism or not, he wasn’t going to pass on this opportunity. Thiel was head of the Founders Fund, an investment firm he started after leaving the company that made his own fortune, PayPal.

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They found a rental house in Los Altos, not too far from the original Casa Facebook. The landlady took one look at Zuckerberg and asked how old he was. Twenty, he replied. “You think I’m going to rent you my million-dollar house?” she asked. “Yes,” said Zuckerberg. This time there was no zipline. Peter Thiel had instructed Zuckerberg to organize the shares for his co-founders and establish a schedule for their options to vest. Zuckerberg hadn’t even known what a vesting schedule was, but once he took on the tasks, he realized that Moskovitz should have a significant stake—and Eduardo Saverin was overrepresented.

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He’d made sure of that during the negotiations with the VCs. His own deal specified that even if he left Facebook, he would retain his percentage in the company, a cut that would eventually provide him a reliable standing in the Forbes Billionaires list. But it was Mark Zuckerberg who kept control, with the biggest stake of all. “Whether it’s Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” says one early Facebook employee. “But Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most—fundraising. In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.” 6 The Book of Change ZUCKERBERG CARRIED A notebook.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Two and a half years later, as he walked through the doors of Y Combinator, Brian was more fixated on bitcoin than ever. By now, he had developed a special insight of his own about the currency, one that he would soon deliver to millions of people. • • • In his startup bible, Zero to One, mercurial billionaire Peter Thiel talks about “open secrets”—business ideas that are just there for the plucking by those who are not afraid to challenge conventional thinking. Thiel gives the example of Airbnb, whose founders saw a latent market for empty rooms, and Uber, whose founders realized it was possible to replace taxis with a GPS signal and a smartphone app.

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“It was their first reality check. You can’t just transfer funds around the world without anti–money laundering controls,” she recalls. Brian and Fred did not accept the new oversight with grace. The pair, whether they knew it or not, had taken on the truculent approach of billionaire investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who had helped launch PayPal fifteen years earlier. Like Coinbase, PayPal was ahead of its time and, in Thiel’s words, was in a race between tech and politics. In such a race, lawyers and compliance officers only slowed you down. When an executive at PayPal told him it was time to hire a big legal team to guide them, Thiel—an attorney himself—shot down the plan.

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In one widely shared news story, a Korean mother in the city of Busan recounted how her twenty-year-old son took his life after months of trading cryptocurrencies. Even as amateur and small-time crypto buyers reeled, others greeted 2018 as if the 2017 party remained in full swing. The mercurial investor Peter Thiel revealed his Founder’s Fund had taken a $20 million position in bitcoin. Venture capitalists disclosed deals they had hatched at the height of the mania, including a $75 million investment by billionaire Tim Draper’s fund into Ledger, a company that makes crypto storage devices. ICOs had not gone completely out of style—the messaging app Telegram declared it would raise $500 million by selling its own tokens.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Copyright © 2014 by Peter Thiel All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Crown Business books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions or corporate use. Special editions, including personalized covers, excerpts of existing books, or books with corporate logos, can be created in large quantities for special needs.

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Special editions, including personalized covers, excerpts of existing books, or books with corporate logos, can be created in large quantities for special needs. For more information, contact Premium Sales at (212) 572-2232 or e-mail specialmarkets@randomhouse.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thiel, Peter A. Zero to one: notes on startups, or how to build the future / Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. pages cm 1. New business enterprises. 2. New products. 3. Entrepreneurship. 4. Diffusion of innovations. I. Title. HD62.5.T525 2014 685.11—dc23 2014006653 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8041-3929-8 eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-3930-4 Book design by Ralph Fowler / rlfdesign Graphics by Rodrigo Corral Design Illustrations by Matt Buck Cover design by Michael Nagin Additional credits appear on this page, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

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Toyota Tumblr 27 Club Twitter, 5.1, 6.1 Uber Unabomber VCs, rules of “veil of ignorance” venture capital power law in venture fund, J-curve of successful, 7.1 vertical progress viral marketing Virgin Atlantic Airways Virgin Group Virgin Records Wagner Wall Street Journal Warby Parker Watson web browsers Western Union White, Phil Wiles, Andrew Wilson, Andrew Winehouse, Amy World Wide Web Xanadu X.com Yahoo!, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 6.1 Yammer Yelp YouTube, 10.1, 12.1 ZocDoc Zuckerberg, Mark, prf.1, 5.1, 6.1, 14.1 Zynga About the Authors Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

After a brief stint at a New York nonprofit, I enrolled in the law school at Sciences Po in Paris. Within two months, I realized what drove me to America—and why I was not cut out for life at a law firm. I had received a summer associate offer to do international arbitration at a prominent white-shoe firm. It was the kind of place Peter Thiel, himself a lapsed lawyer, would later humorously describe by saying, “From the outside, everybody wanted to get in; from the inside, everyone wanted to get out.”5 In what felt like the biggest roll of the dice I’d made in my life, I turned down the law firm offer. And after a single semester, I dropped out of law school.

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* * * By sheer coincidence, I became a Googler the day before Donald Trump was elected president. The night of November 8, I watched the election returns with a small group at the offices of a friend’s tech firm. The pundits had predicted a slam dunk election for Hillary. Like most people who took Nate Silver’s projections as gospel, I believed them. Peter Thiel was just about the Valley’s lone voice predicting—and championing—Trump’s success. But as state after state unexpectedly went red for Trump, I became more and more concerned. I kept telling myself that Hillary could still win. I was still clinging to that slender hope at 11:40 p.m., when CNN flashed the banner headline “Clinton Calls Trump to Concede Election.”4 Most of my friends watched in disbelief.

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It’s one of the things that made Apple’s “Think Different” ad resonate so strongly, and why I found a home in the Valley myself. Like their DC counterparts, many technologists certainly are the product of elite educations. But a surprising number—following in the footsteps of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, and Jack Dorsey—are college dropouts. Convinced that college is a waste for bright and creative thinkers, Peter Thiel has even started a fellowship program, offering $100,000 a year to twenty to thirty such dropouts.58 Legacy companies are seen less as businesses to be admired than laggards to be overtaken. The goals of each coast tend to be different as well. Washington—with the obvious exception of Donald Trump and his allies—has historically prioritized maintaining political and economic stability.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Seasteading: “vote with your boat” Seasteading Institute, “Vote with Your Boat,” Seasteading.org, December 13, 2012, https://www.seasteading.org/​2012/​12/​new-promotional-video-vote-with-your-boat/. Peter Thiel: “not quite feasible” Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://mobile.nytimes.com/​2017/​01/​11/​fashion/​peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. FEMA: “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid” Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2017/​01/​30/​doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich.

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One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L1 Identity Solutions (specializing in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by Bush’s Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing. Under Trump, a remarkable number of lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetize the hunt for people President Trump likes to call “bad hombres.”

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Evan Osnos recently reported in the New Yorker that, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there—the ultimate Green Zone. At the ultra-extreme end of this trend is PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and member of his transition team. Thiel underwrote an initiative called the Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) in 2008. The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And, as Arendt observed, if there is one thing most likely to convert engagement into enragement—more even than injustice—it is hypocrisy.18 It is sometimes questioned why antipathy to “elites” rarely manifests itself in scapegoating of the very rich. How can men as wealthy as Beppe Grillo, Aaron Banks, Andrej Babis, or Peter Thiel claim to be leading a movement against elites? To which the answer is: unlike a journalist, a government statistician, a member of parliament, or a lawyer, the rich never claim to be speaking for anyone other than themselves. They make no claim to public status, and therefore they cannot be accused of hypocrisy.

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The cult of Napoleonic leaders, trusting their “nose” and shaping the world around them, now surrounds entrepreneurs more than it does military figures. Driving this cult of entrepreneurship was one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century. 6 GUESSING GAMES Market sentiment and the price of knowledge As the founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, Peter Thiel is one of the most renowned venture capitalists working in Silicon Valley, and was actively involved in seeking to build bridges between US tech companies and the Trump administration. He’s known for his outlandish ideas and futuristic schemes, including the notion that death may only be “optional,” once the body’s natural aging process can be properly understood and halted.

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Facebook and Google are now listed on the stock market, yet their founders retain majority shareholding rights. The family becomes the most important political and economic institution for these new oligarchs, and will ensure that extremes of inequality outlive them. If they cannot achieve actual immortality (of the sort that Peter Thiel is hoping for) then achieving a dynasty becomes the best way of leaving a financial and genetic legacy. To live in a Darwinian world is discomforting for everyone, including the winners. Even truths and great triumphs are temporary—as Napoleon discovered. The “founders” and oligarchs who now dominate our economies feel this as deeply as anyone.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Platform ignition: proving the concept 103 7 Rishi Shah, 24 November 2010, www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/24/airbnbleverages-craigslist-in-a-really-cool-way/. 8 Dave Gooden, 31 March 2011, http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-becamea-billion-dollar-company/. 9 4 May 2012, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 9 Notes Essay, http://blakemasters. com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay. 10 By the time PayPal was acquired by eBay, 70% of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly one in four closed auction listings were transacted using the payment service. VentureBeat, 27 October 2012, http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/27/ how-ebays-purchase-of-paypal-changed-silicon-valley/#8cV8y19jcBArQLfE.99. 11 G.

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Their approach very much matches the 5Ds described above, while we believe they would be a formidable force if they were to embrace the 5Es instead. 4 It is worth noting that in France, taxi licences are given for free by the government but subsequently traded by taxi drivers and taxi companies for substantial sums. 5 We agree with Peter Thiel when he says that markets where companies are able to gain market power based on their innovations are a lot more attractive than markets where undifferentiated companies compete on low margins to survive. See Peter Thiel, ‘Competition Is for Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 (based on Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future). 6 Source: CNET, 9 December 2010, Greg Sandoval. https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/ blockbuster-laughed-out-at-netflix-partnership-offer/ 7 Recent research by Seth Benzell, Guillermo Lagarda and Marshall Van Allstyne from Boston University and MIT (12 July 2016) seems to suggest that firms adopting APIs become more profitable than those who don’t.