With a background both in technology and finance, Thiel founded the global payment system Paypal.

Question: What do you do?

Peter Thiel: I have a background both in technology and finance.  ________ high profile ________ starting a company called PayPal.  People know it as PayPal at this point, which has become this global payment system.  And we built it sort of from scratch to this massive business in the course of a number of years.  It’s now owned by eBay. 

Over the last five years I’ve been focused more on the technology and finance as an investor, and both as a venture capitalist and as a hedge fund manager. 

On the venture capital side, I invest in early stage companies where people have new ideas.  And the basic challenge is can we figure out better ways to allocate resources towards very talented people and help them build the next generation of things that are emerging.  

On the hedge fund side, it’s more big picture questions about what are some of the things that are missing in this world economy?  What’s being mispriced, and how do we we reallocate resources in that context?

Recorded on: Sep 05, 2007