Peter Thiel

Co-Founder, Founders Fund; Co-founder & Chairman, Palantir Technologies Business Circle

Peter Thiel is known as the angel of Silicon Valley and the thinker in the investing world. He founded PayPal as CEO in 1998, and sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, bringing e-commerce to a new era. In 2004, he made his first external investment in Facebook and served as a director. In the same year, he established Palantir, a software company serving in data analysis in the field of national security and global finance. Till co-founded the Founders Fund to provide early funding for more than a dozen outstanding technology start-ups such as LinkedIn, SpaceX and Yelp. Several of these companies were run by PayPal's colleagues who were called “PayPal Gangsters” in Silicon Valley. He founded the Thiel Fellowship to encourage young people to study and start their own business outside the campus. He also founded the Thiel Foundation to promote scientific and technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.