No Rivals: The Founders Fund Story

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 ... See more

or Thiel, “mimetic desire” explained the world around him better than anything else. He would return to the concept throughout his career. In the wake of Facebook’s meteoric rise, he watched the venture asset class descend into mass mimesis, looking for the next social hit.

They grew up counter-positioning against the classic 1990s VC model.”

“The default in Silicon Valley was that you would find a technical founder, hire a GM or CEO type, have that guy on top, eventually fire the technical founder, and eventually fire the CEO too. The investors really ran the company. That’s how venture capital worked for its first 50 years until Founders Fund came in.”

Unlike the investors they’d worked with, Founders Fund would never move to oust an entrepreneur from their own company. Such a dictum sounds mundane in today’s market, in which firms compete to show their “founder-friendliness,” but it was genuinely novel at the time.

“Whenever you have these massive up-rounds led by smart investors, almost as a rule of thumb, they are undervalued,” he said. “It’s because when these companies have momentum, people undervalue that momentum. When things change, they underestimate how much things have changed.” A willingness to concentrate on the fund’s winners would become a Thiel... See more