Six Learnings From PayPal’s Founder Peter Thiel’s Book Zero To One
“If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.”
Published in
6 min readSep 8, 2021
Who is Peter Thiel?
Peter Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn. As of June 25, 2021, Thiel has an estimated net worth of US$7.24 billion and is ranked 385th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The first team Thiel built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of his former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. They sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then:
- Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors
- Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn
- Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube
- Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp
- David Sacks co-founded Yammer
- and Thiel himself co-founded Palantir
