Thiel on the next Big Thing

PayPal Founder and Facebook Backer Peter Thiel on The Next Big Thing, and Why He Thinks College Isn’t Worth It

The future is limitless,” said Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist. If you were Thiel, you’d probably think so too.

The 43-year-old Thiel has become Silicon Valley’s version of the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz” by creating or funding some of the most successful enterprises to come out of the technology world.

“I think technology is the key to a better future,” he said.

After attending Stanford Law School and becoming a derivatives trader, Thiel co-founded PayPal when he was 31 years old. Now he’s known as the Don of the PayPal mafia — a group of braniac executives who ran the company and have since gone on to give birth to digital pillars like YouTube and Yelp.

“That was the very basic idea — take dollars and email and try to combine them,” he said of PayPal.

That combination turned into a billion-dollar empire. EBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, putting around $55 million in Thiel’s pocket, which he used to invest in promising media start-ups, most famously Facebook. His $500,000 investment in the social-networking giant is now worth about $2 billion.

Being Facebook’s first Silicon Valley investor earned Thiel the full Hollywood treatment — complete with a portrayal in the Academy-award winning film about the company, “The Social Network.” Thiel said he spent time studying all of the social networking businesses for a few years before sitting down with Mark Zuckerberg and his team.

Full article here.