Peter Theil

As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Peter has been involved with some of the most dynamic companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past decade. Peter’s first start-up was PAYPAL, which he co-founded in 1998, and led as Chairman and CEO. Peter’s tenure culminated in PayPal’s sale to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. After the eBay acquisition, Peter founded Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund. Peter also helped launch PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES, an analytical software company, and serves as the chairman of that company’s board.

Before launching Founders Fund with his PayPal partners KEN HOWERY and LUKE NOSEK, Peter was an active venture capitalist in his personal capacity, funding companies like FACEBOOK, where Peter was that company’s first outside investor and director. Peter’s contributions to technology, entrepreneurship, and finance have been widely recognized, including by the World Economic Forum, which honored Peter as a Young Global Leader, and by BusinessWeek, which named him one of the 25 most influential people on the Web.

Peter is also involved with a variety of philanthropic, academic, and cultural pursuits. He serves as a primary supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that promotes press freedom worldwide; the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which seeks to foster the responsible development of advanced computing technologies; and the SENS Foundation, a medical charity dedicated to extending healthy human lifespans. Peter remains active at his alma mater, and has taught at Stanford Law School, in addition to serving on the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Peter received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Zero to One

Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

By Peter Theil

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.