TechCrunch

200px
URL	TechCrunch.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Technology news and analysis
Registration	None
Available language(s)	English, French, Japanese
Owner	AOL[1]
Created by	Michael Arrington
Launched	June 11, 2005
Alexa rank	357 (June 2012[update])[2]
Revenue	US$2.4 million (2007 est.)[3]
Current status	Active

TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiles of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005.^[4]

The website's Technorati rank is 4,^[5] and is 4th in the Info/Tech category.^[6] As of April 10, 2012 (2012 -04-10)^[update], it has over 1,628,000 RSS feed subscribers as measured by tracking company FeedBurner.^[7] On September 28, 2010, at its TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, AOL announced that it would acquire TechCrunch^[8] for $25 million.^[9]

Logo used by TechCrunch from 2005-2011

TechCrunch Network[link]

TechCrunch is now affiliated with several other websites, commonly referred to as The TechCrunch Network. As of July 28, 2008, these include:

• CrunchNotes – An informal personal blog about Web 2.0 written by Michael Arrington.
• TechCrunch France – Founded by Ouriel Ohayon in February 2006, who was Editor through 2009. Features translations of posts from the main TechCrunch blog as well as original content. The blog was then maintained by Alain Ezkenazi until it went inactive for several months as of summer 2009. It was relaunched in March 2010 by Roxanne Varza, who is currently the Editor, and Cedric Giorgi. The team has also been covering French content in English as part of TechCrunch Europe.
• TechCrunch Japan – Features translations of the American TechCrunch as well as original content.
• TechCrunch Europe – Original blog (then TechCrunch UK) canceled following an online argument involving Arrington, TC UK editor Sam Sethi, and Loic Le Meur on 13 December 2006^[10].; focused on European or Europe-targeted Web 2.0 services. Relaunched in September 2007 with a new editor, Mike Butcher.
• MobileCrunch – A blog tracking the Mobile Computing industry, edited by Greg Kumparak.
• TalkCrunch – A podcast about Web 2.0, featuring interviews with founders of assorted Web 2.0 companies, covering new product launches and the like.
• CrunchGear – A blog covering gadgets and computer hardware, edited by John Biggs.
• CrunchBase – A wiki-style database of Web 2.0 people, investors, and companies that include lists of their key employees, funding and acquisition news, and other important events for these companies. It was launched in 2007.^[11][12]
• CrunchBoard – A Web 2.0 job board
• TechCrunch IT - Also known as TCIT, This blog features a range of Enterprise-related news and analysis including applications, open standards,cloud computing, social media, information management and software related subjects.
• TechCrunch TV
• InviteShare
• Gillmor Gang
• Elevator Pitches

Programs[link]

The organization held a live event, the TechCrunch50, on September 8–10, 2008 in San Francisco, California and again on September 14–15, 2009; in 2010, the event was canceled.^[13] TechCrunch also runs The Europas awards^[14] and is a founding host of The Crunchies.^[15] Furthermore TechCrunch organises various one day events, ie. TechCrunch London and twice per year the TechCrunch Disrupt event.

TechCrunch also live-streams the annual ChinICT conference in Beijing - which focuses on the Chinese technology innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Bribery scandal[link]

In February 2010, Michael Arrington reported on TechCrunch that "one of [TechCrunch's] interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post". Arrington also stated that the intern had specifically asked a startup for a MacBook Air in exchange for authoring a post about said startup. Furthermore, Arrington admitted that the intern had taken compensation for at least one post in the past. In response Arrington terminated the intern, and removed the intern's archived posts from the TechCrunch website. The 17-year-old intern in question, Daniel Brusilovsky, posted a statement on his blog shortly thereafter, admitting that "a line was crossed".^[16]

Following Arrington's statement, numerous criticisms arose questioning TechCrunch's handling of the incident. Tech gossip blog Valleywag questioned Arrington's characterization of Brusilovsky as an "intern",^[17] when he had previously been described on the TechCrunch website as a "writer for TechCrunch, while also working on events, conferences and business development".^[18] This was confirmed by Brusilovsky who said in a radio transcript that he was a part time employee with TechCrunch business cards.^[19]

GeeknRolla[link]

GeeknRolla or Geek'n'Rolla (abbreviated GKNR) is an annual one-day conference organized by TechCrunch Europe. Past events:

• April 21, 2009, London ^[20]
• April 20, 2010, London ^[21]

Online commenting[link]

Techcrunch utilizes Facebook to permit readers to comment on news stories. Before using Facebook, Techcrunch utilized Disqus for commenting. ^[22]

References[link]

External links[link]

• TechCrunch
• The 2010 Crunchies Awards
• The 2011 Crunchies Awards
• Mike Butcher (Editor TechCrunch) about TechCrunch & TechHub: Interview with 99FACES.tv

Dennis Crowley
Born	(1976-06-19) June 19, 1976 (age 36)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Syracuse University (B.A. 1998) New York University (M.P.S. 2004)
Occupation	internet entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder of Dodgeball and Foursquare
Website
denniscrowley.com

Dennis Crowley (born June 19, 1976) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking sites Dodgeball and Foursquare.

Education[link]

Crowley was born in Medway, Massachusetts and graduated from nearby Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, Massachusetts in 1994 and was featured in the front-cover story of Xaverian's seasonal magazine. He received a B.A. in 1998 from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a M.P.S. master's degree in 2004 from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).^[1]

Career[link]

Crowley co-founded Dodgeball with fellow student Alex Rainert in 2003 while attending New York University.^[2] Dodgeball was subsequently acquired by Google in 2005,^[3] after which Crowley along with Naveen Selvadurai developed a second version of the original Dodgeball service called Foursquare in 2009. Foursquare, offering location-based social networking services via mobile devices, had over 6 million users worldwide as of January 2011,^[4] and 10 million users as of June 2011.^[5]

Awards[link]

Crowley was named one of Fortune Magazine's "40 under 40" Business's hottest rising stars in 2010.^[6] The online magazine AskMen.com ranked Dennis Crowley number 19 of the "Top 49 Most Influential Men 2010."^[7] In 2005, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[8]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website

This article about a United States businessperson is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

David or Dave Karp may refer to:

• David Karp (novelist) (1922–1999), American novelist and television writer who also used the pseudonym Wallace Ware
• David A. Karp, American sociologist
• David Karp (pomologist) (born 1958), American culinary journalist
• David Karp (entrepreneur) (born 1986), founder of Tumblr
• Dave Karp, a character in the 1992 film The Mighty Ducks

This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt at the 37th G8 summit in 2011.
Born	(1955-04-27) April 27, 1955 (age 57) Washington, D.C., United States
Residence	Atherton, California, U.S.
Alma mater	Princeton University University of California, Berkeley
Occupation	Software engineer, businessman
Salary	$1.25 million in 2012[1]
Net worth	US$ 6.9 billion (2012)[2]
Title	Executive Chairman of Google
Website
Google.com - Eric Schmidt

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google.^[3] From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google.

Additionally, Schmidt was a former member on the board of directors for Apple Inc. and sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.^[4][5][6]

Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.

Biography[link]

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. After graduating from Yorktown High School,^[7] Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1976.^[8] At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments,^[9] and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.^[10] He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business as a part time professor.^[11]

Schmidt and his wife Wendy lived in Atherton, California in 1999.^[12] In 2011, he was reported to be dating Lisa Shields, a communications executive for the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based foreign policy think tank.^[13].

He was on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors in 2008.^[14]

He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.^[15][16]

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation[link]

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. Wendy and Eric Schmidt, working with Heart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, have inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island, and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island's core community. Wendy Schmidt offered the prize purse of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a challenge award for efficient capturing of crude oil from seawater motivated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.^[17]

Career[link]

Early career[link]

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, Byzromotti Design, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Cente (PARC).

From Sun to Google[link]

Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems in 1983 as its first software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.^[18]

During his time at Sun he was the butt of two notable April Fool's Day pranks. In the first his office was taken apart and rebuilt on a platform in the middle of a pond complete with working phone. The next year a working Volkswagen Bug was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.

In April 1997, he became CEO and chairman of the board of Novell. Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him,^[19] they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Google[link]

Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company's CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google's 2004 S-1 Filing^[20] Schmidt, Page, and Brin ran Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt had legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google's website, Schmidt also focuses on "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum."^[21]

In 2007, PC World ranked Schmidt as the first on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.^[22]

In 2009, Schmidt was considered one of the "TopGun CEOs" by Brendan Wood International, an advisory agency.^[23][24]

On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as CEO of Google, but continue as the executive chairman of the company, and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Page replaced Schmidt as CEO on April 4, 2011. ^[25]

The 2011 book In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy claims that in 2001, Schmidt requested that a political donation he made be removed from Google search results. The request was not fulfilled. Schmidt has denied this ever occurred.^[26]

Apple[link]

Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006.^[27] On August 3, 2009, it was announced that Schmidt would resign from the board of directors at Apple due to conflicts of interest amid the growing competition between Google and Apple.^[4]

President Barack Obama[link]

Schmidt was a campaign advisor and major donor to Barack Obama, and when he announced he was leaving that perch, he planned to remain at the forefront of Google’s government relations team. Obama has even considered him for Commerce Secretary.^[28] Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate.^[29] He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the chief technology officer position which Obama created in his administration.^[30] After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama's transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the problems of the United States at once, at least in the domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.^[31] He has since become a new member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology PCAST.^[32]

New America Foundation[link]

The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank, founded in 1999. Schmidt is the current chairman of the board of directors. He succeeded founding chairman James Fallows in 2008.^[33]

Innovation Endeavors[link]

Founded in 2010 by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Dror Berman, Innovation Endeavors is an early stage venture fund focused on advancing the world by providing high-impact entrepreneurs with the capital, coaching and network to build game-changing ventures. Innovation Endeavors has invested in more than 30 companies around the world in various industries. The firm is based in Palo Alto, USA. ^[34]

Compensation[link]

Upon being hired at Google, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000, and an annual performance bonus. He was granted 14,331,703 shares of class B common stock at 30 cents per share, and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at purchase price of $2.34.^[35]

Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of $1 in 2004 (which continued through 2010), with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006,^[36] $508,763 in 2008 and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any additional stock, or options in 2009 or 2010.^[37][38] Most of his compensation was for "personal security" and charters of private aircraft.^[38] Schmidt is one of the few people who became billionaires (in United States dollars) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which he was neither the founder nor a relative of the founder.^[39] In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion.^[2] Google gave him $100 million in 2011 as a parting gift.^[40]

Views[link]

During an interview which aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google", Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" His reply was: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that, that information could be made available to the authorities." ^[41][42] At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good, but he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous." ^[43]

In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company's views on network neutrality: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue."^[44]

According to PCWorld Schmidt also expressed the following sentiment: "if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear" ^[45]

See also[link]

• List of billionaires
• 70/20/10 Model — business model advocated by Schmidt^[46]
• RechargeIT

References[link]

• "Google Boss Dates P.R. Beauty". New York Post. July 28, 2011. http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/google_boss_dates_beauty_nb2QK0SyBVOuJ4ZNlV5gCP. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eric E. Schmidt

• Eric Schmidt on Google+
• Eric Schmidt on Twitter
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose
• Eric Schmidt at the Internet Movie Database
• Eric Schmidt collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Eric Schmidt collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Eric Schmidt collected news and commentary at The Wall Street Journal

Speeches

• Eric Schmidt and Larry Page speaking at Stanford (May 1, 2002)
• Eric Schmidt talks about innovation on Executive Talks, November 2006
• Schmidt-ceo-of-google.html Eric Schmidt interview by iinnovate, March 2007^{[dead link]}
• YouTube: Eric Schmidt at the Seoul Digital Forum. (2007.06.05)
• Eric Schmidt speaks as part of NASA 50 years Lecture Series, January 17, 2008
• Mobile World Congress 2010 Keynote: Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google(Feb 2010)
• iTunes: Google making of a modern company.^[when?]

Articles

• CNET: Google balances privacy, reach (July 14, 2005), which uses Eric Schmidt as an example of the personal information held by Google.
• Princeton University Board of Trustees^{[dead link]}

Peter Thiel
Born	(1967-10-11) October 11, 1967 (age 44)[1] Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Alma mater	Stanford University (B.A.) Stanford Law School (J.D.)
Occupation	Managing partner in The Founders Fund President of Clarium Capital Former CEO and Co-founder of PayPal Financial backer in Facebook
Net worth	$1.5 billion (2011)[2][3]

Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967)^[1] is a German-born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. With Elon Musk and Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund with under $700 million in assets under management, and a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a $275M venture capital fund that he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. He was an early investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and sits on the company’s board of directors. Thiel was ranked #293 on the Forbes 400 in 2010, with a net worth of US$1.5 billion.^[2] However, this number now underestimates his wealth as his Facebook share alone, at a 2010 valuation, is worth US$1.7bn.^[3] Peter Thiel lives in San Francisco, California.^[4]

Life and career[link]

Born to German parents in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, moved to America with his parents when he was a toddler, and raised in Foster City, California.^[5] Thiel was a US-rated Chess Master and one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the country. He studied 20th century philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford University. An avowed libertarian, he founded The Stanford Review, now the university's main conservative/libertarian newspaper. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford in 1989 and acquired a J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992.^[6]

Thiel clerked for Judge J.L. Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.^{[citation needed]} From 1993 to 1996, he traded derivatives for Credit Suisse Group.^[7] He founded Thiel Capital Management, a multistrategy fund, in 1996. After co-founding PayPal, Thiel took the company public on February 15, 2002, and sold it to eBay for $1.5bn later that year.^[8] His 3.7 percent stake in PayPal was worth approximately $55M at the time of the acquisition.^[9] Immediately after the sale, Thiel launched a global macro hedge fund, Clarium, pursuing a global macro strategy. In 2005, Clarium was honored as global macro fund of the year by both MarHedge and Absolute Return, two trade magazines. Thiel’s approach to investing became the subject of a chapter in Steve Drobny’s book, Inside the House of Money. Thiel successfully bet that the US dollar would weaken in 2003, and gained significant returns betting that the dollar and energy would rally in 2005. After significant losses starting in 2009, Clarium dropped from $7bn dollars in assets in 2008 to around $350M in 2011.^[10]

In 2004, well before the financial crisis of 2007–2010 bore him out in general terms, Thiel spoke of the dot-com bubble of 2000 having migrated, in effect, into a growing bubble in the financial sector. He specified General Electric, with its large financing arm, and WalMart as vulnerable. At the same time, he was "always talking about a real estate bubble." To illustrate, in 2004, he reported having backed away from buying Martha Stewart's Manhattan duplex for $7M in the winter of 2003-2004.^[7] While the apartment did sell in 2004 for $6.65M to another buyer, it was on the market but unsold in early 2010 at $15.9M,^[11] and later at the reduced price of $13.9M.^[12]

In late 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for 10.2% of the company.^[3][13] In addition to Facebook, Thiel has made early-stage investments in numerous startups (personally or through his venture capital fund), including Booktrack, Slide, LinkedIn, Friendster, Rapleaf, Geni.com, Yammer, Yelp, Inc., Powerset, Practice Fusion, Vator, Palantir Technologies, IronPort, and Votizen. Slide, LinkedIn, Yelp, Geni.com, and Yammer were founded by Thiel's former colleagues at PayPal: Slide by Levchin, Linkedin by Reid Hoffman, Yelp by Jeremy Stoppelman, Geni.com, Yammer by David Sacks and Xero by Rod Drury. Fortune magazine reports that PayPal alumni have founded or invested in dozens of startups with an aggregate value of around $30bn. In Silicon Valley circles, Thiel is colloquially referred to as the "Don of the PayPal Mafia", as noted in the Fortune magazine article.^[14] Thiel's views on management are highly regarded, especially his famous observation that start-up success is highly correlated with low CEO pay.

Thiel is an occasional commentator on CNBC, having appeared numerous times on both Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo, and Squawk Box with Becky Quick.^[15] He has been interviewed twice by Charlie Rose on PBS.^[16] In 2006, he won the Herman Lay Award for Entrepreneurship.^[17] In 2007, he was honored as a Young Global leader by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 most distinguished leaders age 40 and under.^[18] On November 7, 2009, Thiel was awarded an honorary degree from Universidad Francisco Marroquin^[19]

Thiel's cultural pursuits have included executive production of “Thank You for Smoking”, a 2005 feature film based on Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel of the same name. Thiel is the co-author (with David O. Sacks, who produced TYFS) of the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, which "drew a sharp rebuttal from then-Stanford Provost (and later President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor) Condoleezza Rice."^[3] He has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Forbes, and Policy Review, the journal published by the Hoover Institution, on whose board he sits.

Philanthropy[link]

In February 2006, Thiel provided $100,000 of matching funds to back the Singularity Challenge donation drive of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, he joined the Institute's advisory board and participated in the May 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford as well as at the 2011 Summit held in New York City.

In September 2006, Thiel announced that he would donate $3.5M to foster anti-aging research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation.^[20] He gave the following reasons for his pledge: "Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I’m backing Dr. [Aubrey] de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones."

In May 2007, Thiel provided half of the $400,000 matching funds for the annual Singularity Challenge donation drive.

On April 15, 2008, Thiel pledged $500,000 to the new Seasteading Institute, directed by Patri Friedman, whose mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".^[21] This was followed in February 2010 by a subsequent grant of $250,000, and an additional $100,000 in matching funds.^[22]

On September 29, 2010, Thiel said he had created a new fellowship called the Thiel Fellowship, which will award $100,000 each to 20 people under 20 years old,^[23] in order to spur them to quit college and create their own ventures.^[24]

Thiel is a supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes the right of journalists to report the news freely without fear of reprisal.^[25]

Bilderberg Group[link]

Thiel is listed as a member of the Steering Committee of The Bilderberg Group, a controversial group of influential business and government leaders who meet annually behind closed doors under a media blackout to discuss world issues.^[26]

Politics[link]

In 2004, it was reported that Thiel, "a libertarian, advise[d] several free-market think tanks, including the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. 'He believes in open markets and that self-interest can be harnessed in useful and productive ways,' sa[id] Sonia Arrison, the institute's director of technology studies."^[3]

When asked about his political beliefs in a 2006 United Press International interview, Thiel stated, "Well, I was pretty libertarian when I started [in business]. I'm way libertarian now."^[27][28] In December 2007, he endorsed Ron Paul for President.^[29]

In a two-part article for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."^[30] Thiel later clarified several of his initial statements in a follow-up essay, stating that, "While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."^[31]

Thiel founded Palantir Technologies funded by the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel.^[32]

Peter Thiel professes that he is unable to engage in what he terms “unacceptable compromise politics," further spelling out his views in a piece for the Oslo Freedom Forum: "We tend to like a government very much when we believe we’re among its net winners. That makes it very hard to think clearly about whether any of its laws are just or unjust. And because power corrupts, any state unchecked by vigorous public scrutiny and a free press will attempt to become the judge in its own cause and the intermediary of all human interaction."^[33]

Thiel met René Girard at Stanford and embraces mimetic theory. In an interview, Thiel said that his first impression of Girard mimetics was that it "is crazy... that it can't be true that imitation is this important and drives this many different things."^[34]

In 2009, it was reported that Thiel helped fund college student James O'Keefe's "Taxpayers Clearing House" video - a satirical look at the politics behind the Wall Street bailout.^[35] O'Keefe went on to produce the ACORN undercover sting videos.^[36]

Thiel, who is openly gay, has also supported gay-rights causes such as the American Foundation for Equal Rights and GOProud.^[37]

In 2009, Thiel wrote that "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."^[38]

In 2010, Thiel supported Meg Whitman, who as CEO of eBay had purchased PayPal from Thiel and his co-founders and investors, in her unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California. He contributed the maximum allowable $25,900 to the Whitman campaign.^[39]

In 2011, Thiel was reported as having given $1.25M to the Seasteading Institute, a group seeking to build sovereign nations on artificial islands in international waters ("seasteading"). He previously gained attention when he gave the group $500,000 in 2008.^[40]

In a December 2011 interview Thiel encouraged his '20 under 20' applicants to consider the list of "biotech, genomics, synthetic biology; robotics; information & communication technology; aerospace; artificial intelligence; neurotech; nanotech; and medical devices".

In 2012, Thiel, along with PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek and Scott Banister, an early adviser and board member, put their support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, alongside Internet advertising veteran Stephen Oskoui and entrepreneur Jeffrey Harmon, who founded Endorse Liberty in November 2011. Collectively Thiel et al. gave $3.9 million to Endorse Liberty, whose purpose was to promote Texas congressman Ron Paul for president in 2012. As of January 31, 2012 (2012 -01-31)^[update], Endorse Liberty reported spending about $3.3 million promoting Paul by setting up two YouTube channels, buying ads from Google and Facebook and StumbleUpon, and building a presence on the Web.^[41]

Depictions in media[link]

In the film The Social Network, Peter Thiel is played by actor Wallace Langham. The film depicts him making the $500,000 angel investment in Facebook.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Drobny, Steven (2006). Inside the House of Money. The Dot-Commer: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-79447-3. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0471794473. 

External links[link]

• Thiel Foundation profile
• The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus book by David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, published by The Independent Institute
• Honorary Doctoral Degrees, Universidad Francisco Marroquín
• Peter Thiel compares Silicon Valley bloggers to Al Qaeda
• Virtual Money on ITConversations.com - November 2004
• The Optimistic Thought Experiment essay by Peter Thiel published in Policy Review
• Bloomberg Markets profile of Thiel
• Audiovisual Media, NewMedia Universidad Francisco Marroquín
• Can Entrepreneurs change the world?: Peter Thiel interviewed Luis Figueroa
• Crunchbase profile of Peter Thiel

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