How the Billionaire Peter Thiel Came to Success
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
This said by billionaire Peter Thiel, probably one of the most innovative billionaires ever.
Peter is responsible for the creation of some of the biggest, and most innovative companies in the world.
His career is truly inspiring, for he is not hoarding his 4.7 billion dollars, but using it for innovation, and making the a world better place.
This article goes into how Peter came to success, and all the metrics he followed, so that you, the reader, can follow them to success.
About Peter
Peter Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.
He was born in Germany in 1967, but moved to the US in 1978. He went to Stanford to study philosophy, where his whole career started.
He founded the Stanford review, a newspaper of political correctness, which opened so many doors. Shortly later, he graduated in the spring of 1992.
This is where it gets interesting, in 1998, he cofounded Confinity, inspired by the possibility of sending money over email. The next year, they merged with X.com, which happened to be run by Elon Musk.
This is where Pay-Pal was created, with the intention of revolutionizing the transfer of money online(e-transfer).
Eventually, in 2002, Peter, the CEO of Pay-Pal sold the company to eBay for 1.5 billion, which made him a multimillionaire, which led him to his next investments.
Later, in 2004, with all of his money, he invested in Facebook, a social networking platform, him being one of the first outsider investors. Peter invested $500,000 for a 10.2% stake in the company, valuing it at $4.9 million.
Later on, in 2012, he sold ~16.8 million shares for $638 million, ~1 million in 2016 for 100 million, and another 160,805 shares for $29 million.
In 2005, Peter, and other partners created Founders Fund, a place where they invest in smart people, solving difficult problems.
Some of the most successful companies to come out of Founders Fund are:
- Airbnb
- DeepMind
- Lyft
- Palantir
- SpaceX
- Spotify
- Unity Biotech
- Stripe
- ScaleSynthego
Just to name a few of all the successful companies.
Peters 5 Rules for Success
Throughout peters life, he has lived by a couple of rules. This section has a compilation of his top 5 rules in my view.
You are the entrepreneur of your life: Your life is a business, and you are the entrepreneur of your life. You are the one person that controls the success of your life, and all of your actions, whether they be under stress, pressure, difficulty. With that entrepreneurism skill, you better that business, and better your life.
Do one thing uniquely well: There are so many people in the world who show potential, and more skill than you. If you take the conventional route, you will never end up successful. That is why you have to find one thing, and go deep, something that you are so deep in, there is no one close to your skill in that field, or a combination of two fields.
Aim for monopoly: When you start building a company, the goal is not that it will be as good as another, the goal is to be the best, better than all the other attempts. The great companies like Google have not had any major competition in a while, for they have distanced themselves, and specialized in fields not many people had ventured down.
Validate substance over status: As most people live their lives, they are driven by prestige and status, those being considered status. Very few people though are driven by or substance of trying to learn things. People need to not value prestige, but value what they really want to do, and most of the time, it should bring them closer to real success, and not the success of status.
Don’t lose sight of what’s valuable: Oftentimes, throughout one carer, they will compete, to such a ferocious level, that their long terms goals come obsolete. Their goals turn from personal, long-term, to beating the surrounding people. When doing this, it might turn out well, if you’re comparing with people that much better, but when you compare down to people, you drop skill, and at that time, you lose sight of your long-term valuable goals.
Zero to One
In 2014, Peter wrote a book titled Zero to One. The book is basically notes on startups, how to build the future, and focusing on businesses that create something new(0 to 1), rather than copying things that already work(1 to N).
“To succeed, you need to build, and maintain a monopoly”
At the beginning of the book, Peter makes the statement that capitalism and competition are opposites, which is a highly debated, and controversial topic(more here).
Peter believes that to create a monopoly, or a company that can generate a lot of profits to then go invest in other companies, we need to believe in ourselves, and that success is not a matter of luck, where our entire school system is built on this metric.
Throughout school, you spend the exact same time on every subject, where the result is you being average at everything, and really good at nothing(which is shown in his rules for success).
He proposes getting laser focused early on so that when your older, you will stand out, and develop your zero to one skill. One example of a program doing this is The Knowledge Society, a human accelerator program, designed to help kids specialize in certain fields(more here https://tks.world/).
At this point, the goal should be to developed 10x. Instead of making something 10% better, you make it 10x better, where you will pull away in your specialized area.
Peter also goes on in the book about how to protect a monopoly, and he outlined his core beliefs:
Globalization is doomed without technological innovation
Capitalism is the opposite of competition
We can shape our own future
Peter Now
Founders Fund: Peter is still strongly correlated to Founder Fund, and currently the managing director.
Companies: Peter is still heavily involved in most of the companies he has invested in, that being Airbnb, Affirm, Stripe, SpaceX, Palantir, etc. He is mostly involved with Facebook, and is a board member there to this day.
Thiel Foundation: Peter and his family recently started a foundation called Thiel foundation. It’s like the Gate foundation, except they give a small number of young entrepreneurs $100,000 over two years to skip college and pursue their business dreams.
All in all, in my view, Peter has lived a very successful life, not just due to the fact that he made money, but the fact that he gave back, instead of keeping all of his money, he invested in companies, and is trying to make the world a better place.
This is what I deem as success, making the world a better place, and its exactly what Peter has done.
From investing, to his book, to the Thiel foundation, he is making the world a better place, whether that be one investment made, or one page written, he is putting us on a better track.
I encourage you, the reader, to support things like this, research programs, investment programs, foundations, for not having billions of dollars is not an excuse to not make the world a better place.
