Peter Thiel

Peter is a Partner at Valar Ventures.

Peter is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist.  In 1998, Peter made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding and leading PayPal.  With more than 100 million active accounts in markets around the world, PayPal enables global ecommerce.

Since selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Peter has funded many of the world’s most successful start-ups, including Facebook, in which he was the first outside investor.  In 2002, Peter founded Clarium, a global macro hedge fund, and in 2005, building on his personal success as a venture capital investor, Peter established Founders Fund, a leading and widely emulated Silicon Valley venture capital firm.  Both personally and through Founders Fund, Peter has funded over a hundred new technology companies, including LinkedIn, Zynga, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Yelp, Spotify, IronPort Systems and ZocDoc.

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, BusinessWeek, which named him one of the 25 most influential people on the Web, and The Economist, which honored him with its Innovation Award in 2010.  Peter has also appeared on Forbes’ Midas List.

Peter is also involved in a variety of philanthropic, academic and cultural pursuits.  He founded and funds the Thiel Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting non-violence, freedom and science & technology.

Peter received a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.