Thiel

"Thiel to invest. “In retrospect, just about everything was wrong with it,” Thiel later said of Smart Calendar. The saturated e-calendar space had “like two hundred companies” competing for dominance. Facing headwinds from without and conflict within—Nosek was ousted following a fallout with his cofounder—Smart Calendar shuttered."

"Nosek winkingly referred to these gatherings as “the billionaires’ breakfast club.” “We all believed that the others were going to build big things,” Nosek explained. Over meals, they’d discuss the latest developments in technology, philosophy, education, start-ups, and their predictions for the future. It was here that Nosek learned of Thiel’s interest in start-up investing."

"Both Thiel and Levchin told Nosek that they’d iterate until they landed on a concept that struck sparks. More persuasive to Nosek was the team’s alchemy, which now included three members—Levchin, Pan, and Simmons—that he knew from college. “I decided to work on it because of this feeling that, together, we’re going to do something amazing,” Nosek said. “Even if they had been wanting to do something completely different, I would have wanted to work with this group.”"

"In June 1999, Confinity signed Master-McNeil to name its beaming product. Master and her team interviewed Thiel, Levchin, Nosek, and other Confinity employees. Together, the group solidified what the name should suggest: Convenient, easy, simple to set up/ use Instant, fast, instantaneous, no waiting, time-saving, quick Portable, handy, always with you Transmit, “beam,” exchange, send/ receive, give/ get Money, accounts, financial transactions, numbers, moving money around"

"But Thiel could also see the value in operating experience—time in the CEO chair could fine-tune his investor antennae. So he proposed a compromise: he would serve as Fieldlink’s “ramp-up CEO,” doing the job until the business found its footing. Then, he would depart the position, remaining an advisor and letting someone else steer the business. Levchin agreed."

"But Thiel’s view was that trust among teams was hard to build, and that friends-turned-employees came preinstalled with trust. “It was this network hiring sort of effect where we had a great deal of trust that everybody was reasonably bright, and trying to work toward making this successful,”"

"Later, in his role as an investor and advisor, Thiel emphasized the importance of a team’s “prehistory”—the bonds of work and friendship that exist prior to starting a venture."

"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"

"In hiring David Sacks, Thiel pulled rank and overruled the team’s objections. This was a rare move for Thiel, who believed Sacks a rare candidate: After all, few people would come into an interview guns blazing against their prospective employer’s flagship product. Thiel valued bracing honesty, and he trusted that Sacks would speak candidly. “Peter said, ‘I need people here I can scream at,’ ” Sacks remembered."

"Thiel didn’t like to lose. “Show me a good loser,” Thiel once said to a Confinity employee, “and I’ll show you a loser.”"

"Later, Thiel would call the cataclysm clarifying. “Perhaps the peak of insanity was also the peak of clarity,” he recalled, “where in some sense you saw very clearly what the distant future was going to be, even though it turned out that a lot of specific things went very wrong.”"

"eBay now stood a real chance of reclaiming payments and each change it made sent executives—particularly Thiel and Sacks—into paroxysms of anger. “David and Peter would get totally hysterical and say things like They can’t do this! and How dare they?” an executive observed. “And we’re like, ‘It’s their platform. They can do whatever they damn well want.’"

"On Friday, August 31, 2001, PayPal registered its ten-millionth customer. At PayPal’s 1840 Embarcadero office, the team—already abuzz over the upcoming IPO—celebrated with after-work margaritas, and Thiel sent out an email reflecting on the milestone: As of this week, PayPal has reached its 10,000,000th user. One suspects that too much importance is attached to round numbers. Still, it helps put things into some sort of context: (1) November 18, 1999: 1,000 users. We’re still not sure whether the product is going to take off, or whether the user numbers are just going to fizzle after an initial burst of interest. (2) December 28, 1999: 10,000 users. PayPal is signing up about 500 users/ day, and it’s getting more and more difficult to mail (by hand) all the envelopes with people’s identification numbers. Still, it’s starting to look like the rate of growth is increasing from day to day. (3) February 2, 2000: 100,000 users. It’s definitely looking exponential.... But we have no idea what we’re going to do with these users. We’re starting to get nervous about the sign-up bonuses ($ 20 a person) and we know it can’t go on forever.... Obviously, the spending is growing exponentially too.... A company down the street (X.com) has the same bonuses, and we’re scared that we’re going to get bankrupted in the race. [After the merger, it turns out they were kind of scared too.] (4) April 15, 2000: 1,000,000 users. We’ve just merged PayPal and X.com, and raised $ 100 million as a result of the high growth rates. Now it’s up to us to create a business with the capital, employees, and customer base. Robert Simon, the CEO of dotBank, an early competitor acquired by Yahoo and morphed into PayDirect, suggests that the online payments race will be won by the first company to get to the 5,000,000-user number. Good work everyone."

"Kight knew of PayPal’s ambitions to go public, but Thiel had concerns about the IPO. “[ Thiel] just kept saying, ‘I don’t want to run a public company. I [have] no desire to be a public CEO. I’d rather do other things. I don’t want to go public,’ ” Kight recalled. “He convinced me. I didn’t think it was any more complicated than that.”"

"the timing of PayPal’s IPO wasn’t solely a triumph of Girardian logic. Thiel admitted that rivalry, conflict, and emotion also played a powerful role. “The competitive thing in me was just, you know, if the bankers thought we weren’t ready, then it was more important than ever. It was sort of like a Wall Street versus Silicon Valley thing,” he said of his will to prevail, “and there was a part of my thinking where, emotionally, I felt like the Wall Street banks were especially negative because we were encroaching on their turf.”"

"For Musk, Thiel, and other PayPal executives, urgency was the default posture on all things—including and especially its international expansion campaign. Braunstein had only just arrived in London when Musk dropped in for a speaking engagement. They agreed to meet at the small London office. “Within an hour, [Elon’s] grilling me about the regulatory environment,” Braunstein remembered. “And I said, ‘Elon, I’ve literally been here for a week!’"

"Thiel was reflecting many years after the IPO, and he acknowledged that such rationales benefitted from the distance of hindsight. The famous rationalist also caught himself laughing at the feelings involved. “I aspire not to be this competitive,” he said, “but I’m not always successful. I don’t think it’s emotionally healthy to be this competitive, but that’s the honest part of what drove it.”"

"“The IPO is a good time [to sue],” explained Thiel, “because it’s very time-sensitive, so you’re normally just willing to write them a check and make them go away.”"

"In a 2002 talk at Stanford, a questioner asked Thiel what advice he had for PayPal. “The larger market is off eBay,” he said, “and they should develop a lot of product features and functionalities that enable point-to-point payments in a non-eBay context.”"

"The founders—especially in their capacity as investors—have had to find ways of working around this challenge. To that end, Levchin takes regular meetings with smaller student organizations at the various colleges he visits, harkening back to his ACM days. Thiel is known for taking sit-downs well outside of his immediate orbit, including the occasional high school student who reaches out with a compelling note. Hoffman forces himself to regularly ask others: “Who is the most eccentric or unorthodox person you know, and could I meet them? They might be crazy—or they might be a genius.” He’s searching, it would seem, for the less than perfectly polished founder who resembles his once less than perfectly polished colleagues, a group that turned a “hot mess” into one of the world’s largest public companies."

"Both Thiel and Levchin told Nosek that they’d iterate until they landed on a concept that struck sparks. More persuasive to Nosek was the team’s alchemy, which now included three members—Levchin, Pan, and Simmons—that he knew from college. “I decided to work on it because of this feeling that, together, we’re going to do something amazing,” Nosek said. “Even if they had been wanting to do something completely different, I would have wanted to work with this group.”"

"But Thiel’s view was that trust among teams was hard to build, and that friends-turned-employees came preinstalled with trust. “It was this network hiring sort of effect where we had a great deal of trust that everybody was reasonably bright, and trying to work toward making this successful,”"

"Thiel to invest. “In retrospect, just about everything was wrong with it,” Thiel later said of Smart Calendar. The saturated e-calendar space had “like two hundred companies” competing for dominance. Facing headwinds from without and conflict within—Nosek was ousted following a fallout with his cofounder—Smart Calendar shuttered."

"Nosek winkingly referred to these gatherings as “the billionaires’ breakfast club.” “We all believed that the others were going to build big things,” Nosek explained. Over meals, they’d discuss the latest developments in technology, philosophy, education, start-ups, and their predictions for the future. It was here that Nosek learned of Thiel’s interest in start-up investing."

"In hiring David Sacks, Thiel pulled rank and overruled the team’s objections. This was a rare move for Thiel, who believed Sacks a rare candidate: After all, few people would come into an interview guns blazing against their prospective employer’s flagship product. Thiel valued bracing honesty, and he trusted that Sacks would speak candidly. “Peter said, ‘I need people here I can scream at,’ ” Sacks remembered."

"In June 1999, Confinity signed Master-McNeil to name its beaming product. Master and her team interviewed Thiel, Levchin, Nosek, and other Confinity employees. Together, the group solidified what the name should suggest: Convenient, easy, simple to set up/use Instant, fast, instantaneous, no waiting, time-saving, quick Portable, handy, always with you Transmit, “beam,” exchange, send/receive, give/get Money, accounts, financial transactions, numbers, moving money around"

"But Thiel could also see the value in operating experience—time in the CEO chair could fine-tune his investor antennae. So he proposed a compromise: he would serve as Fieldlink’s “ramp-up CEO,” doing the job until the business found its footing. Then, he would depart the position, remaining an advisor and letting someone else steer the business. Levchin agreed."

"Later, in his role as an investor and advisor, Thiel emphasized the importance of a team’s “prehistory”—the bonds of work and friendship that exist prior to starting a venture."

"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"

"Given a teetering market and a take-no-prisoners competitor, Thiel and others in the company began considering an alternative course. “A lot of us came to the conclusion that this would be a winner-take-all market, and that this should be a single company,” Confinity cofounder Ken Howery said. “Or both of us would spend ourselves into oblivion.”"

"Thiel’s chess opponents remembered his aggressive style. “He was merciless,” a fellow player, Ed Bogas, remembered. “There was no humor in the chess playing.”"

"Thiel didn’t like to lose. “Show me a good loser,” Thiel once said to a Confinity employee, “and I’ll show you a loser.”"

"Later, Thiel would call the cataclysm clarifying. “Perhaps the peak of insanity was also the peak of clarity,” he recalled, “where in some sense you saw very clearly what the distant future was going to be, even though it turned out that a lot of specific things went very wrong.”"

"eBay now stood a real chance of reclaiming payments and each change it made sent executives—particularly Thiel and Sacks—into paroxysms of anger. “David and Peter would get totally hysterical and say things like They can’t do this! and How dare they?” an executive observed. “And we’re like, ‘It’s their platform. They can do whatever they damn well want.’ ”"

"On Friday, August 31, 2001, PayPal registered its ten-millionth customer. At PayPal’s 1840 Embarcadero office, the team—already abuzz over the upcoming IPO—celebrated with after-work margaritas, and Thiel sent out an email reflecting on the milestone: As of this week, PayPal has reached its 10,000,000th user. One suspects that too much importance is attached to round numbers. Still, it helps put things into some sort of context: (1) November 18, 1999: 1,000 users. We’re still not sure whether the product is going to take off, or whether the user numbers are just going to fizzle after an initial burst of interest. (2) December 28, 1999: 10,000 users. PayPal is signing up about 500 users/day, and it’s getting more and more difficult to mail (by hand) all the envelopes with people’s identification numbers. Still, it’s starting to look like the rate of growth is increasing from day to day. (3) February 2, 2000: 100,000 users. It’s definitely looking exponential.… But we have no idea what we’re going to do with these users. We’re starting to get nervous about the sign-up bonuses ($20 a person) and we know it can’t go on forever.… Obviously, the spending is growing exponentially too.… A company down the street (X.com) has the same bonuses, and we’re scared that we’re going to get bankrupted in the race. [After the merger, it turns out they were kind of scared too.] (4) April 15, 2000: 1,000,000 users. We’ve just merged PayPal and X.com, and raised $100 million as a result of the high growth rates. Now it’s up to us to create a business with the capital, employees, and customer base. Robert Simon, the CEO of dotBank, an early competitor acquired by Yahoo and morphed into PayDirect, suggests that the online payments race will be won by the first company to get to the 5,000,000-user number. Good work everyone."

"Kight knew of PayPal’s ambitions to go public, but Thiel had concerns about the IPO. “[Thiel] just kept saying, ‘I don’t want to run a public company. I [have] no desire to be a public CEO. I’d rather do other things. I don’t want to go public,’ ” Kight recalled. “He convinced me. I didn’t think it was any more complicated than that.”"

"the timing of PayPal’s IPO wasn’t solely a triumph of Girardian logic. Thiel admitted that rivalry, conflict, and emotion also played a powerful role. “The competitive thing in me was just, you know, if the bankers thought we weren’t ready, then it was more important than ever. It was sort of like a Wall Street versus Silicon Valley thing,” he said of his will to prevail, “and there was a part of my thinking where, emotionally, I felt like the Wall Street banks were especially negative because we were encroaching on their turf.”"

"In a 2002 talk at Stanford, a questioner asked Thiel what advice he had for PayPal. “The larger market is off eBay,” he said, “and they should develop a lot of product features and functionalities that enable point-to-point payments in a non-eBay context.”"

"“The IPO is a good time [to sue],” explained Thiel, “because it’s very time-sensitive, so you’re normally just willing to write them a check and make them go away.”"

"The founders—especially in their capacity as investors—have had to find ways of working around this challenge. To that end, Levchin takes regular meetings with smaller student organizations at the various colleges he visits, harkening back to his ACM days. Thiel is known for taking sit-downs well outside of his immediate orbit, including the occasional high school student who reaches out with a compelling note. Hoffman forces himself to regularly ask others: “Who is the most eccentric or unorthodox person you know, and could I meet them? They might be crazy—or they might be a genius.” He’s searching, it would seem, for the less than perfectly…"

"Among them were stories about the great business legends the Wallenbergs, Kreuger, and Thiel, who lived near the grandparents' Parkudden out on Djurgården. I saw money early on as a way to achieve freedom from the constraints at home."