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venture capital
spinoffs
Even eBay wishes PayPal weren't part of eBay now
PayPal's CEO is talking up the company's business handling payments on websites other than eBay. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes: In April 2002, when I had coffee with Peter Thiel, then the CEO of PayPal as an independent concern. He talked up the prospects of growing PayPal's business on other websites. He agreed to sell PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion that July, and left three months later. And then I heard the story again, and again, and again, as eBay pushed a number of forgettable executives through the revolving door of PayPal's executive suite. More »
10:40 AM on Fri Aug 8 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,124 views,
9 comments
Latest by Owen Thomas: @souhaite: The discussion I had with the former PayPal executive was specifically about their headquarters staff, not customer support. I more »
venture capital
Peter Thiel funds Elon Musk's sputtering rocketships
Peter Thiel fought viciously with Elon Musk in the early part of this decade; after they merged their companies to form with PayPal, they wrestled for control, with Thiel emerging victorious as the CEO who led the company through an IPO and a $1.5 billion sale to eBay. At the time, Musk was the richer, having sold a forgotten company to another forgotten company for an unforgettable $220 million. The two have long since made up — and a lucky thing for Musk, who now finds himself a supplicant to Thiel. Thiel's venture capital firm, the Founders Fund, has agreed to invest $20 million in Musk's faltering SpaceX, a rocket-ship startup whose latest vehicle crashed into the Pacific Ocean rather than soaring into the beyond. More »
developers, developers, developers
Facebook to spend another $2 million trying to prove it's worth $15 billion
Facebook announced it will pay out $2 million to winners of its second fbFund developers' competition. 25 first-round winners will get $25,000 each, and five second-round winners will win $250,000. The money comes as a grant, not an investment, with the only stipulation being that Facebook backers Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund get the right of first refusal for any investment rounds in the future. More »
envy
Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?
"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will make an estimated $500 million this year running Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. (We reported this a few weeks ago, boss.) It hit me hard: Could Denton actually be jealous of Thiel? More »
1:20 PM on Fri Jul 11 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,758 views,
11 comments
Latest by Shadowlayer: 500m a year? he must be bringing some serious money to get that kind of deal. more »
facebook
Marc Andreessen to officially join Facebook board this week
Facebook will announce this week that it's brought Silicon Valley wunderkind turned Web 2.0 grumpy grandpa Marc Andreessen onto its board of directors. Andresseen will fill one of the two open seats on Facebook's five-person board. Founder Mark Zuckerberg and investors Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer make up the rest. More »
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
