2025-06-19 23:42:06
"The best long-form essays on VC & Private Companies. " — MS, a paying member
Friends,
A prophet without disciples is a madman.
Founders Fund would not have achieved a fraction of its success had Peter Thiel not succeeded in winning others to his cause.
None have been more important than two largely unheralded figures: Napoleon Ta and Lauren Gross. Ta is the investor behind Founders Fund’s best-performing growth investments. A former poker player, Ta prefers to keep such a low profile that he has repeatedly asked his team not to submit his returns to Forbes’ Midas List.
Meanwhile, Gross is Founders Fund’s most important operator. As COO and head of IR, Gross scaled the firm’s AUM into the billions of dollars, staffed its world-class team, and executed Thiel’s vision.
In Part 2 of “No Rivals,” our series on Founders Fund, we chronicle Thiel’s major disciples and their impact on the firm. In the process, we tell the stories of its investments in Spotify, Airbnb, DeepMind, Stemcentrx, Stripe, and several others.
Part 1 quickly became The Generalist’s most popular piece ever. If you missed it, you can catch up by reading it here:
Given the depth and exclusivity of our reporting, the full series is available only to subscribers of our premium newsletter, Generalist+. For $22 per month or $220 per year, you’ll get unprecedented access to Founders Fund’s performance data, detailed case studies of their biggest wins and losses, and insights into how they’ve shaped Silicon Valley and Washington. If you work in tech, venture capital, or traditional investing, this series alone should more than justify a year’s subscription.
Previously on No Rivals…
Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek launched Founders Fund in 2005 with a radical promise: to never remove entrepreneurs from their own companies. This was a direct challenge to the traditional activist VC model in general, and to Sequoia’s Mike Moritz, in particular.
The firm's early performance was extraordinary. Thiel's $500,000 Facebook investment delivered $1 billion in personal returns and a windfall for Founders Fund. Palantir generated an 18.5x multiple and $3.1 billion in distributions.
Guided by philosopher René Girard's theories on mimetic desire, Thiel deliberately avoided the social media gold rush after Facebook. Instead, Founders Fund pivoted to hard tech, a call that led them to their greatest ever investment: SpaceX. Today, that position is valued at $18.2 billion.
By 2008, Founders Fund had built a promising early reputation, but was still a bit-part player in Silicon Valley. To turn the firm into a force, Thiel needed to scale capital and build a team…
Ever since PayPal’s acquisition, Peter Thiel had established his reputation as a hedge fund manager with an array of intriguing side projects: Frisson, a swanky San Francisco eatery; American Thunder, a short-lived magazine devoted to NASCAR racing; and, of course, his venture fund. Founders Fund was undoubtedly the most important of these less important things, but there was no question that Clarium Capital represented the barycenter around which the others orbited.
That began to change in 2008. The year started brightly, with Clarium coming off the back of a barnstorming 2007, up 40%, and sitting on over $7 billion in assets under management. Considering Thiel had founded the firm just six years earlier with $10 million, that rise was a testament to Clarium’s strong performance and Thiel’s growing reputation as a macro interpreter.
For several years, he had identified three thematic waves he intended to ride:
Rising 30-year U.S. Treasuries
The dollar outperforming the euro
Surging oil prices
During the first half of 2008, the world looked to be tilting even further in Thiel’s direction. While his peers in the hedge fund industry endured the “worst year on record,” Thiel racked up 59% in gains, driven by soaring oil prices.
They didn’t last. U.S. stocks crumbled to near-historic lows, and oil prices fell with them, erasing Clarium’s gains to leave it down 4.5% on the year. It never regained its footing, falling 25% in 2009 and a further 23% in 2010.
Investors fled, shrinking assets under management to approximately $500 million by 2011, down over 90% from its high. By then, most of it was Thiel’s own capital. The few LPs who stayed experienced a cumulative 65% drop between 2008 and 2011. By the end of that run, Clarium was effectively defunct. It would later get rolled into Thiel Capital, becoming a de facto family office.
Clarium’s demise was made more bitter by the fact that Thiel’s macro reading was largely sound. What scuppered it was not that Thiel had misconstrued the world’s shifting forces but that he, and the team, had been unable to translate those views into suitable trades. When the market turned in Clarium’s favor, it didn’t benefit as much as it should have; when the market turned against it, weak risk controls saw it incur mortal losses. In the end, Clarium posted annualized returns of 12% over the entirety of its history, but that didn’t help much when its worst years coincided with its fullest coffers.
If there was a silver lining to Clarium’s collapse, it came on the talent side. Suddenly, a swath of anomalous Thiel-ites were free to take on new missions, bringing their leader’s eccentric view of the world into new organizations and domains. Many did so with Thiel’s backing, or at his direct behest.
Some stayed to manage Clarium’s remnants as it morphed into Thiel’s family office. Others were pushed to Founders Fund or Palantir, or left to launch funds of their own.
Unlike Julian Robertson’s “Tiger Cubs,” Thiel often co-founded these organizations — making him more partner than backer to his set of “Thiel Cubs.” Of these, Valar and Mithril hold the starring roles.
In 2010, Clarium alums James Fitzgerald and Andrew McCormack founded Valar Ventures with Thiel. It began with a simple, complementary premise: while Founders Fund focused on backing Silicon Valley’s elite entrepreneurs, Valar would search for outliers beyond California.
New Zealand was a particular focus in Valar’s early days. In 2011, Thiel became a Kiwi citizen, calling New Zealand a utopia and suggesting it could become a promising geography for tech innovation. Perhaps as a reflection of that belief, and to continue currying favor, Valar invested in companies from the country, initially through a series of special-purpose vehicles totaling $100 million.
Its first Kiwi investment was its best: Valar accumulated shares in accounting business Xero at just shy of $1.50 a share in 2010. By 2017, the $4 million invested was worth approximately $54 million.
As Thiel’s interest in New Zealand waned, and with opportunities abounding elsewhere, Valar’s focus shifted as the years passed. It progressively widened its aperture to include Europe and emerging markets. In 2013, it led a $6 million Series A in TransferWise (now Wise), which hit an $11 billion valuation at the time of its direct listing. Valar would also snag positions in neobanks Nubank and N26.
In recent years, it has evolved once again. Because of Thiel’s PayPal credentials, Valar has always shown particular aptitude in fintech. Today it leans on this aspect of its identity, rather than narrowing in on particular geographies. It raised a $300 million vehicle in 2024.
Mithril Capital arrived just two years after Valar. In 2012, Thiel and former Clarium managing director Ajay Royan launched a $402 million growth equity shop. They added another Clarium M.D., Jim O’Neill, to round out the initial team. By then, O’Neill had already done an extensive tour through several Thiel entities, moving from Clarium to the Thiel Foundation before launching the Thiel Fellowship, a program that gave $100,000 to talented college dropouts (more on that later).
Like Valar, Mithril’s initial positioning was complementary to Founders Fund. While Founders Fund focused on high-risk early-stage investments, Mithril was designed to back more mature businesses, such as surgical robot Auris and fundraising platform Classy. Auris looks like Mithril’s best investment thanks to a multi-billion-dollar acquisition from Johnson & Johnson.
Despite such results, Mithril’s history has not been a happy one. Though Royan announced his desire to build the “capstone” of Thiel’s empire, serious allegations about his management began to circle in 2019. That year, former counsel Crystal McKellar alleged that Royan had misled investors, artificially pumping its numbers to reap financial rewards. McKellar also alleged that she had been unjustly fired for reporting these issues. Jim O’Neill repeated similar claims in a lawsuit filed a few years later, alleging wrongful termination and “toxic” management from Royan. Ultimately, the FBI led a probe into Mithril, and prominent LPs like Cambridge Associates reportedly conducted internal investigations of their own.
No public charges have been brought against Mithril or Royan, but the firm nevertheless appears to be managing out its final days. It last raised a fund in 2017 and, as of 2023, was reported to have just $100 million left to deploy.
Despite its ostensible issues, Mithril did succeed in attracting strong talent, including future Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm and future Vice President JD Vance. Like so many before him, Vance had been bewitched by Thiel after attending his speech at Yale Law School:
I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel…
He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better — those in biology, energy, and transportation — and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends — elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society — as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.
The Hillbilly Elegy author would describe the encounter as the “most significant moment” of his time in New Haven. After leaving Mithril, Vance would join Steve Case’s Revolution, before founding a firm of his own, Narya.
Looking at the full span of Thiel’s financial diaspora, it’s hard not to ask oneself what the point of it all is. Why bother to co-found multiple investment firms rather than unite several strategies under a single roof? Why shift employees from one organization to another?
Two reasons stand out.
First, more than almost anyone else, Thiel understands the importance of conserving talent. Once he decides someone meets his high bar, once he decides you are special, he is uncommonly proactive in ensuring that person remains in his orbit. Like a sports agent, he seems to understand what each “client” needs to further their career and deliver fulfillment, and then searches for it within his direct network. If an investor wants to experience operational life, they should join Palantir or Anduril; if an operator wants to learn how investors think, they can take a stint at Clarium or Mithril or Founders Fund; if someone is ready to start a firm of their own, why not do it with his backing?
By doing so, Thiel effectively captures part of the upside of a talented person’s entire career (or at least much more of it), reaping the benefits as they evolve from superstar operator to deft investor to founder to fund manager. Not everyone gets this support, nor do those chosen keep it if they fail to perform, but Thiel is unusually creative in hanging on to talent.
Another motivating factor may be Thiel’s sheer curiosity. He is incapable of doing one thing at a time, of staging his ambition. Always, he has at least two serious ventures running: at Thiel International, he moonlit as a founder; at PayPal, he moonlit as an investor; after PayPal, he founded a business, ran a hedge fund, and spun up a venture firm, all at the same time. By running multiple experiments simultaneously, Thiel forces each organization to jockey for his attention and capital, to prove one is more important than the other. It is, in a sense, a kind of hedging: Macro investing might seem like the best use of my time and talents today, but perhaps seed-stage venture will be tomorrow. By keeping talent in the system, Thiel gives himself the ability to run these experiments more effectively.
By the early 2010s, Founders Fund was about to become Thiel’s primary focus, powered by a Clarium refugee.
At the 2005 annual summit for Wesco Financial, the late Charlie Munger shared his views on investment banking and money management.
“It’s my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and its attendant friction,” Munger said. “Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization.”
Had Lauren Gross been in the audience, she would have agreed. That same year, the Stanford economics graduate had taken an analyst position in Citi’s investment banking practice and found it stultifying. “I defaulted into it based on a general enjoyment of math but I wasn’t particularly blown away by it,” Gross recalled.
Still, Gross struggled to imagine what she would do instead. As far as she understood at the time, the only viable options for someone like her were to choose between banking, consulting, and perhaps a job at Google. The last of those options held little intrigue for Gross, despite her time in Palo Alto. “Unlike all of my partners that were building rockets out of their garages growing up, I was never particularly passionate about technology. I’m still not,” she said. Instead, Gross was motivated by people. “I’ve always been attracted to people that are uniquely bright. My favorite subject was always the teacher.”
Halfway through the two-year analyst program, Gross met the kind of uniquely brilliant person she’d hoped to find at Citi.
The introduction came via her friend and old college roommate, Dan Fink. “He was doing a hodgepodge of different projects for Peter,” Gross recalled. “He was connected to him because Peter stayed very connected to Stanford.” As part of Thiel’s orbit, Fink was invited to a cocktail party hosted on his rooftop overlooking San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.
Gross knew a little about Thiel through Fink, but not much. “I knew he was a somewhat rich, somewhat important person, but I had no appreciation for his story,” she said. That was for the best. No sooner had she been introduced and asked a few preliminary questions than Gross launched into a tirade about investment banking. “I went on this long rant of how silly and mundane it was. It was drawing reasonably strong talent, but it was all about competing with the herd; modeling companies without understanding why.” Had Gross known the impressive particulars of Thiel’s resume, she might have had the urge to soften her frustration. “I’m not sure I would have had the boldness.”
Without knowing it, her tirade was tailor-made for Thiel. There was little that aggravated him more than talent sacrificed on the altar of careerism. “Why don’t you come in for an interview?” Thiel suggested.
A week later, Gross showed up at 1 Letterman Drive, Clarium’s office. Thiel got right to the point, offering her a job in investor relations (IR). “I remember saying, ‘Why do you think I would be good at that? ‘Why would I be good at IR and fundraising when I’ve literally never done and never expressed any interest in it?’” Gross said.
Thiel didn’t need a schmoozer, he explained. He needed someone sharp, sophisticated, and economically educated enough to tell Clarium’s macro story, in detail, so that he didn’t have to. He would later put the significance of the role in even starker terms: “He said to me, ‘Your bar for success is if I never have to take a fundraising meeting.’ The autonomy and depth with which he saw the role was different than I’d anticipated.”
Though Gross had majored in economics and seen the inside of Citigroup, she knew very little about Clarium’s world. That didn’t seem to faze the man sitting across from her. As he’d demonstrated at PayPal, Thiel hired for talent, not experience. “I learned really quickly that Peter just takes bets on young people, well ahead of their talent being proven,” Gross said. “I mean, when I started I wouldn’t have been able to define what a hedge fund was. Genuinely. But he just throws people into the deep end and lets them sink or swim.”
Despite Thiel’s assurances, Gross wasn’t ready to commit on the spot. “The amusing part of the story is my naivete. I said, ‘Great, well, I’d love to work for you, but I’m in this two-year investment banking program. I’m someone who’s firm in my commitments, so I have a year left.’
Thiel responded flatly, “If you like the job, you’ll start on Monday.”
Gross did. It was the beginning of a critical partnership between the pair, spanning two organizations and nearly 20 years. Though many other members of Thiel’s circle attract greater attention, few have been as essential to his continued success as the person who would become Founders Fund’s Chief Operating Officer.
But Clarium came first — a four-year whirlwind exposing Gross to the madness of the markets. Clarium’s seesawing fortunes fomented a pressurized environment and forced rapid learning. “I’m so deeply grateful that I was there through a financial crisis,” Gross said. “That’s an odd thing to say and perhaps not what Peter would want me to say, but it was a crash course in the job. You get asked infinitely more questions when things go wrong. You’re really pushed on the details: Why that trade? Why that size? Why that timing? Even if people don’t like the answers, you have to be able to nail them. I got substantially better at that during the back half of 2008.”
As Clarium teetered, Thiel surveyed the capital landscape with his quintessential sangfroid. If hedge funds were no longer the optimal way to capitalize on his skill set, what should he turn his attentions to instead? In 2010, he shared his view of the coming decade with Gross. “At so many points in my career, Peter has called these macro moments for me,” Gross recounted. “He approached me and said, ‘The next decade is going to be about venture capital. Companies are going to be staying private longer, and more of that value is going to be captured on the private side.’ It wasn’t him necessarily saying, ‘Hedge funds are over,’ but it sort of was.”
Thiel told Gross about the venture fund he’d been running on the side. Founders Fund was off to a good start, he explained, but it had minimal brand presence and needed to be bigger to capture the opportunity he expected to materialize. How much bigger? Within the next few years, Thiel wanted to raise a billion-dollar fund, he told her. “It was outlandish,” Gross said, “No one had a billion-dollar fund at the time.” There had been growth equity vintages that exceeded that benchmark, of course, but mega-vehicles had yet to come to traditional venture. Thiel wanted Gross to become Founders Fund’s lead fundraiser.
“I wanted to keep working for Peter, and I trusted his macro calls implicitly,” Gross recalled. “He placed someone I worked side by side with [at Clarium] at Palantir; I honestly would have gone there if he’d told me to.”
Gross accepted the offer, though she did so once more with characteristic circumspection, explaining that she’d love to meet the Founders Fund team and make a gradual transition. Once more, Thiel cut to the chase: “I’d like you to start on Monday.”
2025-06-17 20:03:19
A quick note before today's podcast: Last Thursday, we launched Part 1 of our four-part series on Founders Fund. If you haven’t read it yet, you can catch up on Part 1 here. For everyone following along, Part 2 drops this Thursday, June 19th.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy today's podcast episode below.
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Why search for life beyond Earth? For MIT astrophysicist and MacArthur Genius Fellow Sara Seager, it’s not just a scientific question—it’s a deeply human one. Like creating art or studying philosophy, the search taps into our primal curiosity about who we are and whether we’re alone. Sara is a pioneer in the field of exoplanets: planets that orbit stars other than our Sun. Her early work was met with skepticism. Today, she’s one of the most respected voices in the field, with discoveries that have redefined our understanding of the universe. From detecting alien atmospheres to reimagining where life might exist, she shares how entrepreneurial thinking and intuition are fueling groundbreaking discoveries.
In our conversation, we explore:
An explanation of exoplanets and the importance of their discovery
The key technologies that enabled exoplanet detection
Sara’s controversial discovery of phosphine gas in Venus's atmosphere and why it could be a sign of life
An overview of Project Starshade, why NASA has currently shelved it, and why Sara continues to work on it anyway
How scientific innovation often requires challenging authority and conventional wisdom
How Sara approaches her research portfolio like an investment strategy, but with an inverse risk profile
Why AI may someday explore planets we’ll never reach—and what that means for humanity
Much more!
(00:00) Intro
(04:07) What is an exoplanet?
(04:33) The diverse types of exoplanets, including the common Sub-Neptune type
(06:40) Why the search for habitable planets matters
(08:57) The timeline for finding life outside of Earth
(10:15) Parallels between professors and entrepreneurs
(11:37) Sara’s background and inspirations
(15:48) Why the study of exoplanets was initially viewed with skepticism
(18:38) Technology breakthroughs enabling exoplanet discovery
(21:05) Looking for atmospheric signals as signs of life
(25:48) The K2-18b debate and challenges of detecting life
(31:10) The Venus Life Finder Initiative and phosphine discovery
(37:38) The mission to explore Venus's atmosphere
(39:20) Goals of the first missions and the inspiration from a prior Soviet balloon mission
(41:58) An overview of the Starshade project
(47:44) Applications from the Venus mission that may benefit Earth
(48:50) Sara's scientific "investment portfolio" and the impact of the MacArthur grant
(52:46) The power of intuition
(56:09) Formative lessons from Sara’s childhood
(59:04) How Sara uses AI for administrative tasks
(01:00:38) The evolution of AI
(01:01:50) Sara’s speculation on life beyond Earth
(01:03:24) Where Sara's best ideas come from
(01:04:02) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-seager-1352b85/
Website: https://www.saraseager.com/
The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir: https://www.amazon.com/Smallest-Lights-Universe-Memoir/dp/0525576258
The Giver: https://www.amazon.com/Giver-Quartet-Lois-Lowry/dp/0544336267
John Bahcall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Bahcall
Exoplanets: https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/
Sub-Neptune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Neptune
NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Sample Reveals Mix of Life’s Ingredients: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-asteroid-bennu-sample-reveals-mix-of-lifes-ingredients/
Seager Hair Transplant Centre: https://www.seagerhairtransplant.com/
Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html
Astronomers may have found a signature of life on Venus: https://news.mit.edu/2020/life-venus-phosphine-0914
Venus Morning Star Missions: https://www.morningstarmissions.space/
Past Missions: https://www.morningstarmissions.space/pastvenusmissions
Exoplanet Program: Starshade: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exep/technology/starshade/
Project Starshade: https://www.projectstarshade.com/
Coronagraph: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coronagraph/
MacArthur Fellows: https://www.macfound.org/programs/awards/fellows/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-06-12 23:33:51
“The Generalist offers the most in-depth, well-researched, and thought-provoking insights.” — Alya, a paying member
Friends,
In January of 2024, we asked you, our readers, which startup or venture fund you most wanted us to cover in a deep dive. The answer was unequivocal: Founders Fund.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve been working on that story. Today, at long last, we’re sharing the fruits of those efforts.
“No Rivals” is a four-part series spanning more than 35,000 words. It will run over the next four weeks. It’s the most comprehensive examination of Silicon Valley’s most controversial venture firm, its extraordinary performance, and its remarkable cultural influence. The series is the product of extensive research, interviews with more than a dozen key figures, and a detailed analysis of Founders Fund’s previously undisclosed returns.
It’s a story featuring globally visible characters—Thiel, Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, Trump—and secretive power brokers who shun the spotlight. It’s a story of philosophy and technology, spite and vision, political maneuvering and spectacular windfalls.
Given the depth and exclusivity of this reporting, the full series is available only to subscribers of our premium newsletter, Generalist+. For $22 per month or $220 per year, you’ll get unprecedented access to Founders Fund’s performance data, detailed case studies of their biggest wins and losses, and insights into how they’ve shaped Silicon Valley and Washington. If you work in tech, venture capital, or traditional investing, this series alone should more than justify a year’s subscription.
Peter Thiel was nowhere to be seen.
On January 20, escaping a bitter winter storm, America’s most powerful gathered beneath the Capitol dome to celebrate Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president.
The usual suspects were in attendance, mingling with a new guard: UFC impresario Dana White lurking a few feet behind Barack Obama, George W. Bush a simple football toss away from Joe Rogan, OpenAI’s Sam Altman conversing excitedly with influencer Logan Paul. Welcome to the New America; you don’t need a podcast to work here, but it helps.
If you have even a passing interest in technology and venture capital, it is difficult to review photos from the event and not think of Thiel. He does not appear once, and yet he is everywhere.
There is his former employee, now the Vice President of the United States. A few feet away is an old Stanford Review buddy, newly named Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.” Further along sits one of his first angel investments, the CEO and founder of a little company called Meta. Next to him is a friend turned nemesis turned partner — the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, ringleader of DOGE, and richest man in the world. Thiel’s favorite philosopher, René Girard, describes divinity as a kind of “transcendental absence.” Studying the figures swarming beneath a fresco of George Washington’s apotheosis, this is the quality of Thiel’s presence and non-presence.
It would be too much to say that Thiel designed such a moment. But throughout his career, the former chess prodigy has shown an uncanny gift for seeing twenty moves into the future and pushing key pieces into position: JD to b4, Sacks to f3, Zuck to a7, Elon to g2, Trump to e8. He does so across power centers, moving between New York finance, Silicon Valley tech, and Washington’s military industrial complex. He employs a puzzling blend of discretion and impropriety, disappearing for months on end only to pop up with a spiky bon mot, a head-scratching new investment, or a titillating vendetta. Many of these maneuvers look like blunders at first, only for time to reveal them to be indications of stunning foresight.
At the heart of Thiel’s power, influence, and wealth is Founders Fund. No organization has benefited more from his singular abilities, and those of the team he has assembled, than the venture firm. Since launching in 2005, Founders Fund has grown from a $50 million inaugural fund, with a novice investing team and little brand equity, into a Silicon Valley powerhouse, boasting billions under management and what looks like the best full-stack investing team in the industry. It has done so while cultivating a polarizing, piratical image — venture capital in the styling of the Oakland Raiders or the “Bad Boy” Pistons of the early 1990s, if Dennis Rodman adored Leo Strauss.
The numbers have justified Founders Fund’s swagger. Concentrated bets on SpaceX, bitcoin, Palantir, Anduril, Stripe, Facebook, and Airbnb have delivered a string of hit vintages even as fund sizes have grown. In its 2007, 2010, and 2011 vehicles, Founders Fund can lay claim to a trio of the asset class’s best-ever vintages, producing gross multiples of 26.5x, 15.2x, and 15x from $227 million, $250 million and $625 million, respectively.
The Generalist has spent over a year studying Thiel’s firm, its ascent to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley, remarkable influence, and impact it has had on the venture capital industry and the world beyond. It is a story populated by many of tech’s most vivid characters and marked by unpopular choices, sharp elbows, and, yes, contrarian thinking. More than anything, Founders Fund is a story about the power of wanting differently. In an asset class predisposed to posturing and mimesis (one of Thiel’s pet subjects), Founders Fund has succeeded by directing its desires uncommonly.
To build this picture of Founders Fund, The Generalist interviewed over a dozen sources, including leadership, longtime LPs, and some of the exceptional entrepreneurs the firm has backed. We have also reviewed fund material, including a detailed picture of Founders Fund’s performance. The result is the definitive case study of an outlier organization.
If you do not want to work for Peter Thiel, you must avoid meeting him.
The French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoleon’s foreign minister, was said to be so interesting, so charming, that it was almost dangerous to spend too much time in his company. Contemporaries described his smile as “paralyzing,” while the salonist Madame de Staël, no stranger to grandiloquence, gushed of Talleyrand, “If his conversation was for sale, I should ruin myself.”
Peter Thiel seems to have a similarly transfixing effect. In studying Founders Fund’s origins, evidence of this referent power appeared repeatedly: a chance encounter with Thiel bewitching the listener to move cities, forgo prestige, and alter career plans, to spend a little more time in the strange moonlight of his mind.
Listen to Thiel speak — on the stage at a conference or during a rare podcast appearance — and it’s plain his magnetism does not come from a diplomat’s oleaginous patter. Rather, it stems from a polymathic ability to dance across subjects, to frame a conversation as an invitation into a secret, to red-pill with the sophistication of a tweed-jacketed Trinity College professor. Who else can write a canonical book on startups by way of Lucretius, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Ted Kaczynski that also argues for the virtuousness of monopolies and the wisdom of running one’s business like a cult? How many other minds contain this range of rigor and irreligion?
Before forming Founders Fund with Thiel in 2004, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek fell under his spell years earlier.
Ken Howery’s conversion experience arrived as an economics undergraduate at Stanford. In Zero to One, Thiel’s business philosophy book published in 2014, he describes Howery as the only one of PayPal’s founders to “fit the stereotype of a privileged American childhood,” the company’s “sole Eagle Scout.”
Born and raised in Texas, Howery moved to California in 1994 for college, where he began writing for The Stanford Review, a conservative student publication Thiel had co-founded seven years earlier. It was through the Review that Thiel and Howery first met, connecting at an alumni event in his early years at Stanford. They stayed in touch as Howery progressed through his education and rose to the position of managing editor in his senior year.
Ahead of the Texan’s graduation, Thiel presented an offer: Would Howery like to be the first employee at Thiel’s fledgling hedge fund? He suggested the pair discuss the opportunity over a meal at Sundance, a Palo Alto steakhouse. It did not take long for Howery to realize that this would not be a traditional recruiting dinner. What followed was a four-hour tour of Thiel’s mind, with the upstart investor in full mesmer mode.
“Everything we talked about, from politics to philosophy to entrepreneurship — I felt he had more interesting views on them than almost anyone I had met during my four years at Stanford,” Howery recalled. “I was super-impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge.”
In spite of that, Howery wasn’t ready to commit to Thiel’s offer on the spot. He said he’d have to think it over. But when he returned to campus that evening, Howery recalled telling his girlfriend, “I think I might work with this guy for the rest of my career.”
There was just one impediment: Howery had intended to move to New York for a well-paid banking job at ING Barings. In the weeks that followed, the Stanford senior conducted an informal survey. He asked his family and close friends which of the two jobs he should take: the lucrative, prestigious Barings position or the hazy post with a new acquaintance of unknown abilities and just $4 million under management? “One hundred percent of them told me to take the bank job,” Howery said. “I thought over it for a few weeks and decided to ignore their advice and do the non-obvious thing.”
Before graduation, Howery attended a talk his new boss was giving on Stanford’s campus. A pale young man with a crop of brown curly hair sat next to Howery and, before the lecture began, leaned over and asked him if he was Peter Thiel.
No, Howery told him. But I’m working for him.
The young man introduced himself as Luke Nosek, passing Howery a business card that said, simply, “Entrepreneur.” I build companies, Nosek explained.
“I was just instantly fascinated,” Howery said.
As it turned out, Nosek was building a company that Thiel had already backed: Smart Calendar, one of a flush of digital timetables that emerged around the same time.
The interaction raises a puzzling question: How had Nosek forgotten the face of one of his backers, someone he’d shared several breakfasts with? Perhaps it had been a long time since their last meeting. Or perhaps an eccentric, driven founder put little stock in the facial composition of his money man. Or just maybe, Thiel was, for a brief moment, forgettable.
Though Nosek didn’t recall his first encounter with Thiel in high fidelity, Thiel certainly seemed to. In Zero to One, he recounted how in that initial conversation, Nosek explained that he’d arranged to be cryonically preserved upon death, in hopes of being resurrected in the future. In Nosek, Thiel found something he would come to use as a kind of talent archetype: a startlingly brilliant and undeniably odd individual, willing to reason to conclusions that others were too timid to consider. That mixture of cerebral horsepower, intellectual liberty, and disregard for social mollification spoke to something in Thiel, perhaps because it reflected so much of his own demeanor. Thiel soon followed Nosek’s lead, giving control of his remains to cryogenic provider Alcor.
As of that Stanford talk in mid-1998, all three of Founders Fund’s founding fathers had officially met. Though it would take another seven years for the trio to launch their venture fund, a deeper collaboration began almost instantly.
“Hi, I’m Larry David and I want to tell you about a new store I’m opening called Latte Larry’s.”
So begins episode 9, season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the meta comedy of manners from Seinfeld’s legendary creator. “Why am I getting into the coffee game?” David continues. “Because I went to the coffee shop next door and the guy was such a jerk that I felt like I had to do something. Now, you know what? I’ve got me a little Spite Store.”
With that, David added another phrase to the cultural lexicon, alongside Seinfeld favorites “close talkers,” “master of my domain,” and “sponge-worthy.”
Spite Store, noun. A commercial enterprise used to exact revenge on a rival by competing for their customers.
At least on one level, Founders Fund was Peter Thiel’s spite store. While the snippy “Mocha Joe” motivates Larry David, Thiel’s endeavor can be viewed as a response to Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz. An Oxford-educated journalist by training, Moritz is one of venture capital’s true legends, responsible for early investments in Yahoo, Google, Zappos, LinkedIn, and Stripe. An investing power slugger with a literary bearing, Moritz appears at regular intervals throughout the early part of Thiel’s story, foiling his plans and slighting his allies.
It all began at PayPal.
The same summer that Thiel recruited Howery, he met Max Levchin, a talented Ukrainian-American entrepreneur. Like Nosek, Levchin had graduated from the University of Illinois, where he’d built a profitable encryption product for PalmPilot owners. Over smoothies, Levchin convinced Thiel of its promise. “That’s a good idea,” Thiel said. “You should do that. And I’d like to invest.”
Though he could not have known it, Thiel was not only making an exceptional investment decision — his $240,000 check would ultimately deliver a $60 million windfall — but entering into the dotcom era’s most vivid opera, which alternated between tragedy, farce, and, ultimately, triumph. (The Founders offers a full accounting.)
Levchin quickly recruited Nosek, whose calendaring company had died. Shortly after, Thiel and Howery joined as full-time employees, with Thiel taking on the CEO mantle. Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and many others would follow to form one of the most talent-rich startups in Silicon Valley history.
It did not take long for the company — originally named Fieldlink, before rebranding as Confinity — to collide with rival firm X.com, run by a brash South African entrepreneur named Elon Musk. Rather than burn through their capital in an extended war, Confinity and X.com agreed to join forces. They named the combined company after Confinity’s most popular feature, which connected email addresses to payments: PayPal.
The merger not only meant annealing two opinionated management teams but welcoming the other party’s investors. Moritz, who had invested in Musk’s X.com, suddenly had to wrangle with a new cadre of awkward geniuses.
The first indication that Thiel and Moritz were a marriage of strained convenience arrived on the back of the merger. The same day the companies announced their partnership to the press, March 30, 2000, they shared the news of an $100 million Series C.
Thiel had been critical in pushing the round to a definitive conclusion, concerned by what he saw as a worsening macroeconomic backdrop. His concerns proved prescient. In a matter of days, the dotcom bubble had begun to burst, sending many of the era’s buzziest names toward painful deaths. By pushing to get the deal across the line, Thiel had saved PayPal from a similar fate. “I give the credit to Peter,” one employee said. “He made the macro call and said, ‘We have to close on this … because the end is near.’”
It wasn’t enough that his shrewd macro reading had saved the company, though. Thiel, a hedge fund investor by disposition, saw an opportunity to turn a profit. At a meeting with PayPal’s investors in the middle of 2000, Thiel made his modest proposal: if the markets were poised to drop further, as he believed they were, why not short them? All PayPal needed to do was transfer its new $100 million war chest to Thiel Capital International and he could take care of the rest.
Moritz was apoplectic, and reasonably so. Thiel was asking for permission to gamble with company money during an economic bloodbath. “Peter, this is really simple: if the board approves that idea, I’m resigning,” another board member remembered the Sequoia investor warning. For his part, Thiel couldn’t understand such a hidebound reaction. The fundamental divide was between Moritz’s desire to do right and Thiel’s to be right. It was not easy to find common ground between those two epistemological poles.
In the end, both won and both lost. Moritz succeeded in thwarting Thiel’s plan, but Thiel was right: the market tanked. If they’d had the right positions, PayPal and its backers could have made a killing. “We would have made more money [investing] than anything we did at PayPal,” one backer said.
If that boardroom debacle fed a fermenting distrust between the two men, a clash just a few months later ensured that it did not heal. In September 2000, PayPal’s employees — led by Levchin, Thiel, and Scott Banister — staged a coup against current CEO Elon Musk. PayPal did a good line in coups in those days, having launched a putsch against short-lived outside CEO Bill Harris.
That had been a relatively bloodless affair, but, true to form, Musk did not go quietly. To get him out the door, Thiel’s insurgent force had to convince Moritz to ratify their plan to give Thiel control of the company. The Sequoia investor did so, on one condition: Thiel could become CEO, but only on an interim basis.
As it happened, Thiel had little interest in being PayPal’s long-term CEO. His skills lay in the cerebral rather than the logistical. But Moritz’s edict forced him into the humiliating position of hiring his replacement. Only after the leading outside candidate told Moritz that even he would recommend appointing Thiel full-time did the Sequoia investor abandon his initial plan. The push-and-pull of being asked to step aside only to be anointed full-time CEO aggravated Thiel, a man with a talent for holding a grudge.
Despite PayPal’s formidable dysfunctions, it survived and ultimately succeeded. Thiel had Moritz to thank for the scale of the outcome. In 2001, eBay offered to acquire PayPal for $300 million. Thiel considered it a good offer and advocated for a sale, while Moritz pushed for PayPal to hold out. “He was the hedge fund guy,” Moritz later said of Thiel, “Wanted to take all his money out. I mean, goodness gracious.” Thankfully for all involved, Moritz convinced Levchin of his side of the argument, and PayPal stayed independent. Not long after, eBay returned with a better offer: $1.5 billion, five times the figure at which Thiel had advocated exiting.
It made Thiel and the rest of the company’s “Mafia” very wealthy men, while Moritz added another hit to his growing tally. Had they been different people, perhaps time might have sanded down the enmity between Thiel and Moritz, grading into begrudging friendship. Instead, it was the first act in an ongoing battle.
As the thwarted $100 million macro bet suggested, Thiel had never lost the investing bug. Despite PayPal’s demands, he and Howery continued to manage Thiel Capital International. “We worked a lot of nights and weekends, making sure it was still going,” Howery said.
Befitting Thiel’s broad interests, they cobbled together a salmagundi of a portfolio, mixing equities, debt, foreign exchange, and early-stage startups. “We did about two or three deals per year,” Howery recalled, highlighting IronPort Systems as an especially shrewd bet during that period. Founded in 2002, the email security provider later sold to Cisco in 2007 for $830 million.
Thiel’s $60 million windfall from PayPal’s acquisition poured gasoline on his ambition and investing. Even as he scaled assets under management, he seemingly couldn’t help himself from moving in multiple directions at the same time, chasing macro investing greatness, formalizing his venture practice, and founding another company.
Clarium Capital was at the heart of these efforts. The same year the PayPal acquisition closed, Thiel turned his attention to launching the macro hedge fund. “We are trying to pursue a systemic view of the world like that which Soros and others said they pursued,” Thiel explained in a 2007 Bloomberg profile.
It seemed a perfect fit. Thiel naturally thought in grand, civilizational trends and was congenitally disposed to disagree with whatever the moment’s prevailing wisdom happened to be. It did not take long for him to demonstrate how that lens, when applied to market problems, could produce impressive returns. In just three years, Clarium climbed from $10 million in assets under management to $1.1 billion. In 2003, Clarium logged a 65.6% gain betting on a weakened dollar; after a lackluster 2004, it sprang back to life the next year with a 57.1% return.
Around the same time that Thiel set to work building Clarium, he and Howery explored the idea of turning their ad hoc angel investing into a dedicated venture fund. It didn’t hurt that the numbers showed they had a knack for it. “At a certain point we looked at our track record and the IRRs were in the high double digits, in the 60% to 70% range,” Howery said. “We were like, ‘Wow, this is on a very part-time basis, without even focusing on it. What if we formalized this and created a fund around it?’”
It took a couple of years for those discussions to become concrete, but by 2004, Howery got to work raising a $50 million fund, initially called Clarium Ventures. As before, he and Thiel looped in Luke Nosek, who joined on a part-time basis.
Compared with the billion-plus the hedge fund was managing, $50 million seemed like a drop in the bucket. But even with the trio’s PayPal bona fides, it proved a challenging raise. “It was actually super-hard — much harder than I would have expected,” Howery said. “Nowadays, everyone has a VC fund, but back then, that wasn’t the case. It was a very unusual thing to do.”
Institutional LPs showed little interest in backing such a small fund. Howery initially hoped to convince Stanford University’s endowment to anchor, for example, but they stepped away after learning of the fund’s size. That left individual LPs. Even though many of their former colleagues had benefited from the acquisition as well, the trio were able to drum up only $12 million in external capital. Eager to get to work, Thiel decided to make up the shortfall himself, investing $38 million (76%) into Fund 1.
“The rough split was that Peter put up most of the money, and I was doing most of the work,” Howery said of those early days. Given Thiel’s other commitments, that division of responsibility was not so much a choice as a necessity.
2025-06-10 20:03:11
WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.
Brex: The banking solution for startups.
Generalist+: Essential intelligence for modern investors and technologists.
Some ideas spread like wildfire. Others vanish before they take root—too strange, too threatening, too forgettable. In this episode of The Generalist, I sit down with Nadia Asparouhova, author of Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, to explore the category of “antimemes”: ideas that actively resist being remembered or shared. Drawing from science fiction, epidemiology, and her own unusual cognitive wiring, Nadia maps the shadowy terrain of information that doesn’t want to be shared. We talk about taboos, group chat dynamics, and the hidden incentives shaping what spreads and what doesn’t.
In our conversation, we explore:
What antimemes are and why some ideas actively resist being remembered or shared
How taboos, cognitive biases, and uncomfortable truths function as self-censoring ideas
The 2x2 matrix of ideas: memes, antimemes, supermemes, and forgettable non-memes
How group chats are changing idea evolution by acting as high-trust, high-density incubators
How internet slang terms like “vibes” and “cringe” reflect deeper shifts in how we share information
Why great innovation often comes from people willing to look foolish
The critical roles of "truth tellers" and "champions" in preserving important ideas
How memory, aphantasia, and synesthesia shaped Nadia’s sensitivity to forgotten ideas
How local knowledge (wisdom) differs from global knowledge (facts), and why it’s harder to pass down
How Nadia’s experience as a parent shifted her thinking from nurture to nature
How to protect your mental space in an age of information overload
(00:00) Intro
(04:45) A brief overview of Nadia’s writing
(06:24) Richard Dawkins’s definition of a meme
(08:02) Antimemes and a brief overview of the book There Is No Antimemetics Division
(11:54) Why daylight savings time is the perfect antimeme
(13:13) How neurodivergence shapes Nadia’s creativity
(16:20) Synesthesia explained
(18:02) Solomon Shereshevsky, a case of extreme synesthesia
(18:52) Why forgetting can be a superpower
(22:45) Why some ideas spread and others do not
(25:11) The 2x2 matrix of ideas
(27:20) A warning about supermemes
(29:43) Group chats and the evolution of ideas
(34:44) Are supermemes organic or engineered?
(40:43) The role of truth tellers and champions
(45:38) What it means to have “purity of purpose”
(46:48) Nadia’s experience with altered states of consciousness, and an example of a champion
(51:02) How Nadia’s fear of sharing has lessened, and a case for examining your own fears
(52:51) Understanding the internet slang words “vibes” and “cringe”
(57:35) Global vs. local knowledge and how it shapes Nadia’s parenting
(1:05:01) Where Nadia finds her ideas
(1:08:40) How Nadia protects her time to allow for deep work
(1:12:38) Final meditations
Newsletter: https://nayafia.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadia-asparouhova/
Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading: https://www.amazon.com/Antimemetics-Some-Ideas-Resist-Spreading-ebook/dp/B0F8J9HHCB
There Is No Antimemetics Division: https://www.amazon.com/There-No-Antimemetics-Division-qntm/dp/B0915M7T61
A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past: https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Forgetting-Getting-Past/dp/0374237212
René Girard's Mimetic Theory: https://www.amazon.com/Girards-Mimetic-Studies-Violence-Mimesis/dp/1611860776
Richard Dawkins’s website: https://www.richarddawkins.com/
Qntm: https://qntm.org/self
Solomon Shereshevsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky
Marc Andreessen on X: https://x.com/pmarca
Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg
Greta Thunberg on X: https://x.com/gretathunberg
Nick Cammarata on X: https://x.com/nickcammarata
Leo Strauss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
Graham Duncan’s blog: https://grahamduncan.blog/
What is Aphantasia?: https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia
Apple test: https://creativerevolution.io/aphantasia-a-blind-minds-eye/
Synesthesia: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/synesthesia
The group chats that changed America: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
The Emperor’s New Clothes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
Memeplexes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex
Nick Cammarata’s post on X about Jhana: https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/1921602562274304470
Exploring altered states of consciousness: https://nayafia.substack.com/p/exploring-altered-states-of-consciousness
Vibecamp: https://vibe.camp/
The Hypnotized Society: https://nayafia.substack.com/p/the-hypnotized-society
Killing Eve on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80177090
Marie Antoinette: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422720/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-06-03 20:03:09
Brex: The banking solution for startups.
Generalist+: Essential intelligence for modern investors and technologists.
While the world fights over chips, one company is building the power supply to run them all. In this episode of The Generalist, I'm joined by Bob Mumgaard, CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), and Vinod Khosla, legendary venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures. With over 800 employees and $2 billion in funding, CFS has accelerated the timeline for commercial fusion from being perpetually "30 years away" to potentially just a few years out. If CFS succeeds, it will unlock limitless clean energy for humanity, powering everything from AI to water desalination.
In our conversation, we explore:
How fusion could transform everything from AI to water desalination and agriculture
The fundamental science behind fusion energy and how it differs from traditional nuclear fission
The breakthrough in magnet technology that changed the timeline for fusion
The strategic approach of partnering with existing power plant operators to rapidly scale fusion deployment
Why fusion is essential for powering AI and other energy-intensive innovations
CFS’s method for creating fusion using magnetic fields
The final hurdles to completing SPARC, the company’s demonstration reactor
The six-stage roadmap for fusion development, where CFS currently stands, and when they expect to begin delivering power to the grid
What clean energy could make possible for future technologies and industries
The geopolitical implications of a world with abundant clean energy
Much more
(00:00) Intro
(04:13) An overview of fusion energy, and why it’s so important
(08:23) The connection between AI and fusion energy
(10:20) How Bob became interested in fusion
(13:06) The importance of entrepreneurs in bringing crazy ideas to life
(14:55) The advancement in magnets that caused the leap in fusion technology
(17:33) The extreme conditions required for fusion
(19:46) What made Vinod interested in funding CFS
(21:30) The alternatives that CFS looked at if the magnet hadn’t worked
(25:18) Different methods for creating fusion
(27:43) Bob’s entrepreneurial lens for fusion at scale
(31:52) CFS’s strategy of partnering with existing power infrastructure
(35:32) An overview of ARC and SPARC
(40:03) Final hurdles to complete SPARC
(42:29) The six-stage roadmap for fusion development
(46:11) What clean energy unlocks
(48:06) Entrepreneurial opportunities for supporting fusion power
(50:43) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-khosla-65387416/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mumgaard/
Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder: https://www.amazon.com/Unweaving-Rainbow-Science-Delusion-Appetite/dp/0618056734
The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Trinity-Robert-Important-Company/dp/0062226762
Elon Musk on X: https://x.com/elonmusk
Commonwealth Fusion Systems: https://cfs.energy/
Sun Microsystems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
Moore’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
The Hunt for Red October: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099810/
Magnetohydrodynamic drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
ITER: https://www.iter.org/
ARC: Putting fusion energy on the grid: https://cfs.energy/technology/arc
SPARC: Proving commercial fusion energy is possible: https://cfs.energy/technology/sparc
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-05-29 21:02:37
“Amazing in-depth insights.” — Deepen P, a paying member
Friends,
In 1992, Steve Jobs gave a lecture at MIT that included an intriguing detail: for virtually every one of his best hires, it took about a year to get them on board. “What happens is I usually meet somebody that I think is very, very good and you can’t get them,” Jobs explained. “Then you go and try to find other people and nobody measures up.”
Not every founder follows that same playbook, and what works for one company may fail in a different environment. In this final correspondence with Marc Lore, the Wonder CEO shares his playbook for identifying, attracting, and retaining “superstar” employees. After 25 years and thousands of hires, he’s developed what he calls “X-ray vision” for identifying the top 5% of talent, learning the hidden patterns that mark someone out as a high performer.
Beyond scanning for superstars, we explore how Marc builds effective cultures, what he learned from Amazon and Walmart, and why you should hire a Chief People Officer earlier than you think.
Culture must be consistent, not necessarily unique. Marc has worked at Amazon and Walmart – two companies with radically different but successful cultures. The key insight: great cultures aren’t about being different; they’re about being consistent. You need to know who you are, understand what types of people thrive in your system, and build structures that motivate them accordingly.
Superstars are recognizable but rare. After hiring thousands of people and reviewing tens of thousands of resumés, Marc has developed “X-ray vision” for identifying top talent. The pattern: true superstars (top 5%) appear only once every twenty candidates, but they’re easily recognizable by their track record of demonstrable success in every role.
Tenure and trajectory matter more than experience. Marc looks for candidates who stay long enough at each job (4-5 years) to prove impact and get promoted multiple times. He also analyzes career moves: superstars make moves that are undeniably upward – better company, bigger role – not lateral transitions that suggest settling.
Performance management isn’t optional at scale. While early-stage startups can operate informally, scaling requires systematic performance management. Marc’s team at Wonder can forecast promotions 12 months out based on peer scores and time in the role, giving employees clear visibility into their advancement pathway.
Interview superstars differently. When Marc identifies a genuine superstar candidate, he shifts his interview focus from assessing competence (already proven by their track record) to evaluating culture fit and selling them on the opportunity. The conversation becomes about mission alignment, role definition, and why this company will win.
Transparency as a competitive advantage. Wonder’s radical transparency – sharing everyone’s compensation, board materials, and financial data – isn’t just cultural virtue signaling. It’s a strategic choice that attracts people who thrive in high-information environments and creates deeper employee engagement through trust and context.
It’s a classic story: You start a company to become a founder, make your big idea happen, and escape the tedium of the regular workday. But you didn’t count on having to do the work of a whole team, spend your day on tedious financial tasks, and keep pushing big-picture work to tomorrow.
Enter Mercury, banking* that does more than hold your money, so you can get more done in the day. Mercury provides tools, calculators, and templates, like their free balance sheet template, so you can get a clear picture of your company’s finances without building it from scratch. Quickly populate the sheet with your numbers in a few clicks, and you’re on your way to making better big-picture decisions for the road ahead.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
Subject: The ‘P’ in ‘VCP’
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Marc Lore
Date: Monday May 19, 2025 at 16:43 PM GMT
Marc,
I always learn something important from these correspondences, but your last two letters have delivered some of the most actionable advice of any guest so far. You have a real gift – earned through experience – of breaking down strategic challenges into crisp, rational frameworks. I am certain that I’ll be sharing your prioritization methodology and capital plan with many future entrepreneurs.
In this final letter, I’d love to focus on the thorniest aspect of company-building: people. We’ve touched on aspects of people management in our previous correspondences without digging in deeply yet. Given its importance in your “VCP” (Vision, Capital, People) methodology, it strikes me that there’s more for us to discuss.
As you know better than I do, so much of a startup’s success depends on its people. You cannot hope to outcompete better-resourced incumbents or create an entirely new paradigm with subpar talent. You need to find differential talent, motivated to work beyond themselves in service of the company’s mission. Often, you need to discover these people before they’ve fully demonstrated their value to the broader market, after which point you’ll likely face greater competition to hire them.
Because of this, the best CEOs inevitably become obsessed with talent. Many of the best startup founders I’ve met end up spending at least two days of the week just on this aspect of the job, fanatically looking for great people, discovering which signals to pay attention to and which to ignore, and convincing talent to join them.
Recruiting the best people is often an exercise in patience. In his incredible MIT lecture in 1992, Steve Jobs explained that for virtually every one of his best hires, it took about a year to get them aboard. “What happens is I usually meet somebody that I think is very, very good and you can’t get them,” Jobs said. “Then you go and try to find other people and nobody measures up. You know you’re going to be settling for second-best if you compromise. I’ve always found it best not to compromise.”
This seems to be a lesson that other exceptional entrepreneurs have learned. Patrick Collison noted that “the biggest thing [Stripe] did differently...is just being ok to take a really long time to hire people.” That meant taking more than six months to bring aboard its first two employees, and spending several years snagging others.
Does this chime with your experience? Across your 25 years as a venture-backed entrepreneur, I imagine you’ve discovered your own preferences and devised your own efficiencies. How do you find exceptional people that the rest of the market might not have noticed? What non-obvious signals do you pay the closest attention to? And when it comes to closing someone, what techniques have you learned?
Thank you for joining us for this series. It has been a real pleasure!
Best,
Mario
Subject: The ‘P’ in ‘VCP’
From: Marc Lore
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Monday May 25, 2025 at 18:15 PM EST
Mario,
My job as a CEO is to identify, attract, and retain the very best people in the world. And not just retain them but get the very best that they’ve got to give. When you do that and put them into a solid VCP structure with a strong Vision and a good Capital plan, they’re ready to run. As a CEO, you sit back and watch the magic happen. (And, of course, keep tweaking the VCP.)
When it comes to building a great People function, it starts with setting the right cultural foundation. You have to spend time defining this early in your company’s life. Otherwise, you regret it. That’s one of the reasons why, when founding Wonder, I brought aboard our Chief People Officer Kristin Reilly really early – to help set those foundations.
Somebody once asked me: What defines a great culture? I’ve had a chance to be a part of a few high-performance organizations at Amazon and Walmart. Both have great cultures, but they’re very, very different. What I’ve come to realize is that, above all, great cultures are consistent. You know who you are, you know the types of people that work well in your system, you find those people, and you build a structure that motivates them. The people who work in Walmart’s system are very different from those who work at Amazon, but that’s okay. If you don’t know your culture early on, then you’ll end up hiring the wrong people.
Building a culture starts with having the right mission and values. Unlike your vision, your mission is never achievable. It’s the ultimate why driving your company – a North Star to run towards that never changes. It should be something that gets people fired up to work every day.