Peter Thiel's Contrarian Strategy
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That's a laughably preposterous characterization. Leading public intellectual? Comparison to Veblen, author of "The Theory of the Leisure Class", a scathing critique of the wealthy?
If you were to ask people who they think of as America's leading public intellectual, some people who I think would come out ahead (on the basis of quite different audiences): Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Richard Posner, Paul Krugman, Jared Diamond, Clay Shirky, David Graeber, Francis Fukuyama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, etc.
Hence the major difference between him and everyone else, including Stanford Alum, Sullivan & Cromwell Lawyers...somehow he found himself $1M.
There is no way I or really most people, could go out today and from the people I know gather $1M I simply do not know people with those kinds of pockets.
People forget, that even Bill Gates, intelligent as he is, got where he was primarily because he could get Dad to write a $50,000 check, in 1980, on short notice.
The valley isn't the engine of opportunity people think it is.
[1] That said in all honesty in no way would I want to ever be that public or that rich personally.
Opportunity compound, people. The poor have the least luck/opportunity. The rich have the best.
It's just the way it is, and it has nothing to do with whoever deserves it.
But, trying to get those kinds of people to invest $1MM+ would be a serious chore - they got their by saving their money and via extreme frugality, so any investment they would make would come with serious strings attached.
As for the $1m thing. $1m today will barely allow someone to retire above the poverty line. You may be surprised how much money exists in just a few blocks of a non-descript town. $1m was also the number Warren Buffet started investing with, raised from other friends and neighbors.
All very true, however that is a different context than Thiel and a few others mentioned in this thread (Gates etc...). The difference is really in the "Terms" or lack thereof and the proofs.
Yes it is true that I can reach out and touch a handful of millionaires, and in fact spoke with a few yesterday on a conference call. However they weren't "Friends and Family" like the Thiel/Gates case, they were businessmen looking at me like a potential asset/liability. The relationship and the bar for getting their money is completely different and I think not comparable.
2 generations ago, people in my family were farmers who had to count the potatoes for dinner. They worked hard to give their kids a better standard of life than they could have ever dreamt of (my grandmother started working when she was 13, and she and my grandfather did all they could to send my mom to college).
There is no way I would be okay asking my parents for their hard earned money to fund a venture that could absolutely fail, let alone some silly "social network platform" startup.
I wish I had a good way to end this comment (life is unfair? or maybe it's useless to be upset at this sort of thing, what matters is living a happy honest life?) but I don't.
- Started his hedge fund at age 29
- Co-founded Paypal at 31
- Paypal acquired at 35 (Thiel took home $55M)
- Angel investment in Facebook at 37, co-founded Palantir the same year
- Founder's Fund at age 38
Interesting that he's had all of his big wins starting in his 30s, that each success compounded into more successes and enabled him to go up to bat for even bigger wins, and that it's the result of 10+ years of hard work and intense focus.
Good point, several mistakes and failures throughout his tech/investing career path too, like that $100K investment in Luke Nosek's startup that failed. It goes with taking risks and playing the game, only way to learn and level-up.
> His hedge fund did get clobbered. Thiel’s peak-oil thesis did well by Clarium until mid-2008, as the price of oil soared from about $40 a barrel in 2002 to nearly $140. During that stretch the fund swelled in value from about $10 million to more than $6 billion as stock valuations skyrocketed and new investors flocked to his door.
> But by February 2009 oil prices had temporarily fallen back to almost $40 again. And though Thiel had foreseen the real estate bubble, he still underestimated it. “We didn’t fully believe our own theories about how bad things were,” he admits.
> Worse, he overreacted and missed the rebound, causing Clarium to badly underperform in 2009 and 2010. Most institutional investors fled. Today Clarium—with about $200 million under management—handles just the money of Thiel, friends and family, and a few select investors.
To say that a bubble cannot be a bubble because the "broader public is not involved" is just flat out stupid. Sure, it's the last stage of a bubble, the defraud the general public stage where the crooks gather up all the money and run for the getaway car, but it's still a bubble.
A relatively small loss or returns below expectations does not a bubble make.
"Consider the automotive industry. Trying to build a car company in the 19th century was a bad idea. It was too early. But it’s far too late to build a traditional car company today. Car companies—some 300 of them, a few of which are still around—were built in 20th century. The time to build a car company was the time when car technology was being created—not before, and not after."
Tesla, I think, is different because they have room to maneuver because none of the traditional car companies are willing to make an all in effort on electric (because doing so is mostly taking a risk to compete with their own established business), so the building a car company centered around new advances in electric vehicle technology that is very much not a traditional car company is still possible now.