peter-thiel
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Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Whop, a New York-based digital marketplace where people buy and sell software, courses, communities, and other digital products. He started building and selling iOS sneaker bots from his bedroom at 13 with future co-founder Cameron Zoub, ran through roughly two dozen side hustles, and launched Whop in 2021. The company reached a reported $1.6 billion valuation, processes billions in annual commerce, and Schwartz says it has minted over 650 millionaires. Backed by Peter Thiel, Insight Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Tether, he pitches a future where work is fun and money worries are obsolete.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson
Garth Sheldon-Coulson is the co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon company building free-floating, wave-powered nodes that generate clean electricity in the open ocean and pair it with onsite AI computing. A Harvard-trained lawyer with an MIT master's and a Bridgewater investing background, he pivoted from finance to spend nearly a decade inventing marine energy hardware. In May 2026 Panthalassa raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel, pushing its valuation near $1 billion, on a bet that the open ocean is one of only three energy sources on Earth with tens of terawatts of untapped capacity.
Gleb Chuvpilo
Gleb Chuvpilo is an American serial entrepreneur, engineer, and venture investor who is co-founder and CEO of Thor Dynamics, the maker of Laser Armor, an AI-driven directed-energy system built to detect, track, and burn drone swarms out of the sky within seconds from a kilometer away. A graduate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Wharton School, he was an early Palantir engineer, traded quant strategies at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, invested alongside Peter Thiel at Thiel Macro, and co-founded startups including Authy (Y Combinator 2012, acquired by Twilio), Ride, and Pager. He also runs deep-tech VC firm Thundermark Capital and is known in AI circles for his annual AI Research Rankings analyzing publication output at NeurIPS and ICML.
George Sivulka
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Mike Solana
Mike Solana is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, the technology, politics, and culture publication that became required reading inside Silicon Valley's investor class. He doubles as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, where he runs the firm's creative output, including the Anatomy of Next podcast and the Hereticon conference for ideas that get exiled from polite conversation. The Atlantic dubbed him 'the most opinionated man in America.' Operating from Miami, he writes and broadcasts a contrarian, often combative take on tech, the press, and California governance.
Trae Stephens
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Brian Singerman
Brian Singerman spent 16 years as a General Partner at Founders Fund - Peter Thiel's celebrated contrarian VC firm - backing SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, Stripe, and Scale AI before the world knew what they would become. He founded iGoogle at Google in 2005, built one of the first YC-focused investment vehicles (XGYC), and developed a reputation as one of the most conviction-driven investors of his generation. In late 2024, he transitioned to Partner Emeritus at Founders Fund, then co-founded GPx - a $500M debut fund with a structural twist on the VC model - with Lee Linden, backed significantly by Peter Thiel.
Luke Nosek
Luke Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, where he served as VP of Marketing and Strategy. He later co-founded Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, before launching Gigafund in 2017, a venture firm focused on transformative technologies. As the first institutional investor in SpaceX and board member since 2008, Nosek has championed ambitious, decades-long investments in space exploration, AI, and frontier technologies, embodying a contrarian approach to venture capital that prioritizes world-changing impact over short-term returns.
Auren Hoffman
Auren Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur, data-industry pioneer, and hyper-connected Silicon Valley networker who turned a $60 million exit (LiveRamp to Acxiom, 2014) into a second act as a venture capitalist at Flex Capital, founder of location-data company SafeGraph, and co-founder of the invitation-only Dialog society with Peter Thiel. He publishes the Summation newsletter and podcast - reaching 41,000+ Substack subscribers - exploring non-obvious ideas at the intersection of data, technology, and business.