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He runs a newsletter that Silicon Valley reads before its own group chats. He also runs the marketing for the venture firm that helped build half of them.
Every week, a few hundred thousand people in technology open an email that tells them what the rest of the press will be arguing about next month. The byline says Mike Solana, and the masthead says Pirate Wires.
It started in 2020 as a one-man newsletter. It is now a publication with a podcast, a staff, and a beat that runs straight through the middle of technology, politics, and culture. Solana is the founder and editor-in-chief, and the publication carries his temperature: fast, combative, allergic to consensus. The Atlantic spent October 2024 trying to bottle it and settled on a label - "the most opinionated man in America." He treated it as a press release.
The work has a thesis, repeated until it sticks. Building things is good. The press treats technology companies as villains by default. And the word "misinformation," in his telling, is less a description than a muzzle - "an excuse to stifle speech." Reason magazine called him a "hybrid creature," half writer and half insider, the rare person who can both report on Silicon Valley's closed-door conversations and be sitting in the room when they happen.
Because he is. Solana's other business card reads Founders Fund, the venture firm Peter Thiel built. There he is Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President, in charge of the firm's creative output - the Anatomy of Next podcast, the F50 Symposium summit, and Hereticon, a conference assembled entirely around ideas that get a person un-invited from dinner parties. The two roles are not a conflict so much as a closed loop: the operator who shapes how a marquee fund talks about the future, and the editor who reports on the people building it.
The path did not start in venture or in journalism. It started in books. After Boston University handed him an English degree in 2007, Solana went into publishing, editing non-fiction at Penguin Group, where he worked on titles that landed on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2014 he published his own: a science-fiction novel, "Citizen Sim: Cradle of the Stars." The man who would later be cast as a tech-world pugilist arrived through the slush pile and the manuscript.
The politics arrived earlier and moved around. He has said he got curious about libertarianism in high school, drifted leftward for a stretch in college, then kept walking until he reached anarcho-capitalism. The throughline is a suspicion of institutions telling people what they may say - a suspicion that became the editorial spine of Pirate Wires a decade later.
The Thiel connection traces to 2009 and a venue that fits the rest of the story: a meetup for the Seasteading Institute, the project to build floating, self-governing communities at sea. A conversation there eventually carried him into Founders Fund, where he turned a marketing role into a media operation. By the time Pirate Wires arrived in 2020, he had already spent years learning how to make ideas travel.
Graduates Boston University with a B.A. in English.
Enters publishing. Meets Peter Thiel at a Seasteading Institute meetup - the conversation that eventually opens the door to Founders Fund.
Edits non-fiction at Penguin Group, working on New York Times-bestselling titles.
Publishes the science-fiction novel "Citizen Sim: Cradle of the Stars."
Joins Founders Fund, rises to Vice President and CMO. Builds the Anatomy of Next podcast and launches Hereticon.
Founds Pirate Wires as a technology newsletter. It grows into a full publication.
The Atlantic profiles him as "the most opinionated man in America."
Keeps hosting the weekly Pirate Wires podcast on the politics of the tech elite.
Founded 2020. A newsletter that became a newsroom covering technology, politics, and culture - read closely by the investor class it covers.
CMO and VP at Peter Thiel's venture firm. Runs the creative engine: the Anatomy of Next podcast and the F50 Symposium summit.
A conference built around heterodox and taboo ideas - the ones, as the name promises, considered heretical.
A worldview that fits on an index card: make things, distrust the gatekeepers, say the quiet part out loud.
Beyond the page, Solana hosts the Pirate Wires podcast - weekly, opinionated, and built around the politics of the tech elite. A sampling of episodes and guest appearances: