
Peter Thiel's Contrarian Strategy - markmassie
http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strategy
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foobarqux
> Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in
> philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps
> America’s leading public intellectual today, assuming a mantle once held by
> the likes of Thorstein Veblen or Norman Mailer.

That's a laughably preposterous characterization. Leading public intellectual?
Comparison to Veblen, author of "The Theory of the Leisure Class", a scathing
critique of the wealthy?

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pbreit
The comparison has nothing to do with agreement.

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_delirium
That's true, but I find it difficult to understand where it's coming from
purely descriptively as well. I think Peter Thiel is a well-known venture
capitalist who is associated by the general public with Silicon Valley, but I
would be very surprised if a significant fraction of the public thinks of him
as a "public intellectual". If anything, I think he is often thought of
(mistakenly) as mainly a technologist. I've frequently seen him referred to
with the assumption that he has an Andreessen or Graham or Musk type
background: a programmer/dev who got rich in the first dot-com boom, and then
invested his tech winnings. It seems to be less well known that Thiel made his
fortune in finance, before entering tech investment, and isn't a techie at
all.

If you were to ask people who they think of as America's leading public
intellectual, some people who I think would come out ahead (on the basis of
quite different audiences): Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Richard Posner, Paul
Krugman, Jared Diamond, Clay Shirky, David Graeber, Francis Fukuyama, Neil
deGrasse Tyson, etc.

~~~
stephencanon
Spot on. Even as a techie who lived in the Bay Area for a decade, I've never
thought of Thiel as a public intellectual.

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AndrewKemendo
>He raised $1 million from friends and family and started his own hedge fund,
Thiel Capital.

Hence the major difference between him and everyone else, including Stanford
Alum, Sullivan & Cromwell Lawyers...somehow he found himself $1M.

There is no way I or really most people, could go out today and from the
people I know gather $1M I simply do not know people with those kinds of
pockets.

~~~
bsder
Exactly.

People forget, that even Bill Gates, intelligent as he is, got where he was
primarily because he could get Dad to write a $50,000 check, in 1980, on short
notice.

The valley isn't the engine of opportunity people think it is.

~~~
larrys
While it doesn't really matter how in the end, after all he has the money and
neither of us do, [1] however what got him to be "Bill Gates" was that his
mother was on the board of the Red Cross with the Chairman of IBM [2] which
opened that door for him. Remove that and he would still have done well no
doubt but he wouldn't have become anywhere near as well known as he is.

[1] That said in all honesty in no way would I want to ever be that public or
that rich personally.

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates)

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sayemm
Rough timeline of Peter Thiel's accomplishments:

\- Started his hedge fund at age 29

\- Co-founded Paypal at 31

\- Paypal acquired at 35 (Thiel took home $55M)

\- Angel investment in Facebook at 37, co-founded Palantir the same year

\- Founder's Fund at age 38

Interesting that he's had all of his big wins starting in his 30s, that each
success compounded into more successes and enabled him to go up to bat for
even bigger wins, and that it's the result of 10+ years of hard work and
intense focus.

~~~
inthewoods
Don't forget about Clarium Capital - at it's peak $8b under management - but
then he made a series of bad bets on hyper-inflation in the dollar and got
crushed. Anyone know if it is still open? I think he's clearly better at the
private investing side than the public investing side.

~~~
gwern
The article covers that:

> His hedge fund did get clobbered. Thiel’s peak-oil thesis did well by
> Clarium until mid-2008, as the price of oil soared from about $40 a barrel
> in 2002 to nearly $140. During that stretch the fund swelled in value from
> about $10 million to more than $6 billion as stock valuations skyrocketed
> and new investors flocked to his door.

> But by February 2009 oil prices had temporarily fallen back to almost $40
> again. And though Thiel had foreseen the real estate bubble, he still
> underestimated it. “We didn’t fully believe our own theories about how bad
> things were,” he admits.

> Worse, he overreacted and missed the rebound, causing Clarium to badly
> underperform in 2009 and 2010. Most institutional investors fled. Today
> Clarium—with about $200 million under management—handles just the money of
> Thiel, friends and family, and a few select investors.

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wahsd
Well, I can scratch him off my list of insightful individuals. I don't know
what it is with "success" but it seems to really mess with your mind. I wonder
if it's that certain types of "successful" people live in a bubble where
everyone is agreeing, cajoling, and otherwise brown-nosing that you start
losing touch with reality and cannot think clearly.

To say that a bubble cannot be a bubble because the "broader public is not
involved" is just flat out stupid. Sure, it's the last stage of a bubble, the
defraud the general public stage where the crooks gather up all the money and
run for the getaway car, but it's still a bubble.

~~~
prostoalex
Then we have hundreds of thousands bubbles happening on the daily basis. Tons
of people invest in real estate, and when those projects miss projections,
some money (or opportunity cost) is lost.

A relatively small loss or returns below expectations does not a bubble make.

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iamjdg
Is this excerpt from one of Peter Thiel's lectures a cheap shot at his buddy
Elon and Tesla?

"Consider the automotive industry. Trying to build a car company in the 19th
century was a bad idea. It was too early. But it’s far too late to build a
traditional car company today. Car companies—some 300 of them, a few of which
are still around—were built in 20th century. The time to build a car company
was the time when car technology was being created—not before, and not after."

~~~
dragonwriter
I think not, I think the restriction "traditional" in "it's far to late to
build a _traditional_ car company today" is significant.

Tesla, I think, is different because they have room to maneuver because none
of the traditional car companies are willing to make an all in effort on
electric (because doing so is mostly taking a risk to compete with their own
established business), so the building a car company centered around new
advances in electric vehicle technology that is very much _not_ a traditional
car company is still possible now.

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rthomas6
Has anyone read his CS183 class notes? Are they worth reading?

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arjunnarayan
Yes, and absolutely yes. Here you go: [http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup](http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup)

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viggity
I think this is the first time I've heard his voice. Wow. The guy who played
"Peter Gregory" in HBO's Silicon Valley nailed his voice. lol.

