Valleywag
facebook
Posts Tagged “
Peter Thiel
”
facebook
private equity
Peter Thiel showing Wall Street how it's done at Clarium Capital
Known best in the Valley for co-founding PayPal and serving on the board of highly-valued Facebook, on Wall Street Thiel is becoming better known as a hedge-fund wunderkind — Clarium Capital, the fund Thiel manages, is well past $3 billion may have already hit the $6 billion mark. The fund's take for taking care of all that business? $500 million by the end of the year, according to estimates by 1440 Wall Street. But then you need that kind of money for retirement if you plan to live forever on a man-made island. (Photo by David Orban)
nerdfight
Zivity sparks Girl Geek porn panic
Cyan Banister's Zivity seemed a natural choice to participate at the second Bay Area Girl Geek dinner, a networking event celebrating women in tech. At the last one in January, over 600 guests assembled at Google's HQ to hear tales of ladypower from female CEOs, founders, engineers, and VCs. Banister, a former systems administrator and network engineer, is the cofounder of Zivity, a social networking site driven by female users sharing sexy photos of themselves. The Zivity motto is "It's not porn." Call what you will pretty women getting paid for making and posting naked photos of themselves. As Zivity's Chief Strategy Officer, Banister was honored to accept the Girl Geeks' invite over five months ago, including their idea to have Zivity bring two female photographers along to lens red-carpet style shots of arriving guests who were up for it. This is where the cocktail of sex, girls, tech, and cameras got complicated, and the collective panties of some female industry "thought leaders" got blogged into a painful bunch. And it had about nothing to do with porn. More »
geek love
iJustine and Justin dating -- but not that Justin
A tipster tells us that Justine Ezarik, the diminutive videoblogger better known as iJustine, has hooked up with a guy named Justin. Not the unprepossessing and socially inept Justin Kan of Justin.tv, with whom she's often jokingly linked, but Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a venture-capital associate at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. The two make an adorable couple, our tipster says, especially because they see eye to eye. He estimates Ezarik's height at 5'1"; Fishner-Wolfson's not much taller, as his Stanford graduation photo shows. Not that his stature matters: By dating Ezarik, he rises above thousands of jealous iJustine fanboys. Update: Ezarik denies that she and Fishner-Wolfson are an item — and claims to be 5'3". (In heels, perhaps.)
online video
How did the blogs which reposted Bambi Francisco's Vator.tv interview with CBS Interactive's Mike Marquez all miss the obvious subtext? Francisco spends much of the interview asking about the company's plans for future acquisitions, getting Marquez to share that they are looking to purchase and partner with anything video-related, particularly well-produced, professional content. Kind of like Vator.tv! More »
Vator.tv looking to sell to CBS?
How did the blogs which reposted Bambi Francisco's Vator.tv interview with CBS Interactive's Mike Marquez all miss the obvious subtext? Francisco spends much of the interview asking about the company's plans for future acquisitions, getting Marquez to share that they are looking to purchase and partner with anything video-related, particularly well-produced, professional content. Kind of like Vator.tv! More »
crime
Vancouver couple offers baby for sale on Craigslist
A Vancouver couple listed their week-old newborn for sale on Craigslist for $10,000, prompting a horrified user to call the police. When the cops arrived, they found the tyke breastfeeding and the parents claimed it was a hoax. Which didn't stop the authorities from confiscating the baby. Susan MacTavish Best issued the by-now boilerplate statement that reads "Misuse of Craigslist for illegal purposes is absolutely unacceptable to us." Those kooky Canadians just hate the free market. When they aren't unjustly subverting self-interest with their free health care, they're criminalizing the trade in human babies. Once Peter Thiel builds his Objectivist paradise at sea, expect him to make another fortune on PayBaby. (Photo by Badr Naseem)
breakdowns
PayPal closes the border
When Peter Thiel launched PayPal a decade ago, he had a vision of a global payments mechanism which would accelerate the withering-away of the nation-state. And then he sold it to eBay. eBay's latest failure to transform the international monetary system is quite literal; for almost two weeks, PayPal has had a bug which prevents it from collecting cross-border payments for subscriptions — this while its new president, Scott Thompson, has been touring the globe. The error: a bit of code in a drop-down menu. Subscriptions are a small part of PayPal's business, though vital to the complaint-prone blogging class. Regardless, it's a trivial bug that should have taken minutes, not weeks, to fix; that eBay has not yet done so would seem to speak to a profound rot in its technical organization — which Thompson headed up as CTO before his promotion.
once you're lucky, twice you're good
T is for Twitter, which turned blogging small
Twitter, the 140-characters at a time blogging service, was shaped by its founder's dry, understated sense of humor. The company, not to mention the service, seems to be a sort of Silicon Valley inside joke that, improbably, Ev Williams and his fellow Twitterers have managed to play on the rest of the world. For this, Sarah Lacy labels Williams a "nontrepreneur." Fittingly, Sarah Lacy gave his microcompany got a mere four pages in her new book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: More »
internet famous
Facebook investor Peter Thiel No. 10 in Out's list of powerful gays
Peter Thiel, the famed venture capitalist who cofounded PayPal and funded Facebook, has not spoken about his private life since Valleywag broke the curious silence about the gay entrepreneur's sexuality in December. (He hadn't really discussed it before then, either.) But it has again become the topic of conversation. Out has put him in tenth place on its Power 50 list of prominent gays and lesbians. The magazine praises him for his multibillion-dollar hedge fund (Out says it's worth $3 billion, but we've heard $5 billion) as well as his $1 billion stake in Facebook and his funding of the Methuselah Foundation, an anti-aging research group. Knowing Peter, we suspect that none of this bothers him particularly — except for the fact that he wasn't No. 1.
hires
Andreessen to stack Facebook board further in Zuckerberg's favor
Netscape cofounder and propagator of porn social networks Marc Andreessen will join Facebook's board of directors, Kara Swisher reports. Andreessen will join current board members Accel Partners Jim Breyer, Clarium Capital's Peter Thiel, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Andreessen is the chairman of Ning, a company which sells tools for rolling your own social network. If your mom has an excellent visual memory, she will probably remembers him for appearing on the cover of Time magazine without shoes on. You can tell her that he dresses better now, but only slightly. Why Andreessen, and not a proxy for new investors Microsoft or Li Ka-Shing? More »
antitrust
Australians question eBay's PayPal-only policy
Years ago, PayPal was an independent company which fought constantly with eBay to be allowed on the site as a way to settle accounts after an auction was won. Now, years after eBay bought PayPal, the payments service is elbowing out all manner of competition. In Australia, eBay is limiting purchases to either PayPal or cash on delivery — no checks or money orders allowed, let alone rival electronic payment methods. In the U.S., eBay was sued last year for tying PayPal too closely to its online marketplace. How soon they forget: PayPal is aiming to quash an economic freedom its founders, including noted libertarian Peter Thiel, fought for.
geek love
Forbes declares Peter Thiel "single," which may be news to his boyfriend
In its latest list of billionaire bachelors, Forbes lists Facebook investor and hedge fund Midas Peter Thiel as "single." Technically true, I'll give the magazine's factchecker that much, if it means "confirmed bachelor." Thanks to California's marriage laws, he doesn't have much choice in the matter. In fact, I hear Thiel is getting less single every day. One tipster close to his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, shares this rumor: that Thiel may have hired his boyfriend, Matt Danzeisen, away from BlackRock Securities, thereby discarding plans to relocate the fund's headquarters to New York. Aside from being convenient for the pair, it would seem like a good career move for Danzeisen. More »
rumormonger
Facebook buying Social.im? Nah
We hear that Facebook has purchased Social.im, the instant messaging application built on top of Facebook. This jibes with Michael Arrington's report that Facebook is about to launch an IM service. Mogad, the company behind Social.im, also took investment from Facebook backer Peter Thiel. Update: "If we're being bought, I haven't gotten the call yet," says Mogad CEO Yanda Erlich. In a now-deleted blog post, he also poked coy fun at the now-debunked rumor with this fake IM exchange: More »
quotable
"What would you be in this environment?" a CNBC reporter asked Facebook invester Peter Thiel late last year. "The basic thing we think is going to happen," Thiel responds, "is either a lot of deflation ... or you're going to have a lot of inflation."
Timeless wisdom from Peter Thiel: Things could go one way, or the other
"What would you be in this environment?" a CNBC reporter asked Facebook invester Peter Thiel late last year. "The basic thing we think is going to happen," Thiel responds, "is either a lot of deflation ... or you're going to have a lot of inflation."
deep thoughts
"Grey's Anatomy" illustrates Peter Thiel's Christian philosophy
Facebook investor Peter Thiel plans to pay someone who adheres to a "specific strain of Christian philosophy" $100,000 to $200,000 a year to give away his money. A tipster tell us that the strain is Stanford professor Rene Girard's. Girard's big idea is something he calls mimetic desire, which posits that the only reason I want a Wii so bad is because everybody else wants a Wii so bad. This is called the triangulation of desire. Girard has a 52-minute clip on the Web in which he explains how the theory relates to Christianity. Or, there's this clip from Grey's Anatomy, which YouTube user nefariouscarrot claims illustrates mimetic desire. More »
careers
Facebook board member Peter Thiel seeks Christian to give away his money
Want to work for Peter Thiel, the Facebook board member, hot-shot venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager? Thiel's personal assistant at Clarium Capital, Robertson George Morrow III — call him Trey — is sending around an email looking for the "right kind of conservative" to give away Thiel's money from his New York offices. Thiel's targeting four areas:1) conservative political education and activism, 2) life extension research, 3) a specific strain of Christian philosophy, and 4) university life.With a starting salary between $100,000 and $200,000 and business-class everying — "none of the usual economizing associated with nonprofits" — the gig actually sounds pretty sweet. That is, if you can embrace Thiel's necessarily nuanced right-wing politics and get over reporting to a guy whose name ends in a roman numeral. Send your resume along with SAT scores to: foundation.th@gmail.com.
politics
Would calling them beta elections make you feel better?
Every vote counts, people. Even if like Peter Thiel, you plan to vote for a loon like Ron Paul. It still sends a message. It says: I am a crazy person who opposes the FDA. Which is cool, because this is a democracy and the majority rules. And you wackos — you lovely, lovely pageview-generating wackos — are never going to be a majority. But don't take my word for it. Go vote and find out for yourselves. Follow this link to find your polling place. (Photo by jean_baptiste_soufron)
politics
