David Bloom

“What I’m there for is to have a strategy discussion with the founder — for them to be totally ruthless and put me in my place. And not in a bullshit way. At this point, I’m pretty good at spotting the delta between bravado and actual competence.”

“I do completely reactionary investments. The way to do good reactionary investments is to be open to anything and have a way of judging a company that is not based on specific expertise, like sectoral expertise.

“I try to live my life by what I call my ‘freedom quotient’: the numerator is money and the denominator is fame,” he said. “I’m trying to maximize money and minimize fame.”

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