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Peter Thiel Bio, Founder of PayPal

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, and raised in California, Peter Thiel founded The Stanford Review -- the school's main conservative paper -- as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and continued on to earn his J.D. from its law school in 1992. After four years of practicing law, he founded Thiel Capital Management, his first major financial venture before Confinity, the company that eventually became PayPal. Confinity was founded by Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek, as a cryptography and Palm Pilot payments company in 1998, and in March 2000 merged with financial services company X.com. Both companies included email payments as a feature of their services, and this would be the focus of the new merged company, PayPal.

PayPal was one of the first companies to use a "human verification system" by making users enter numbers from a blurry picture, a system now commonplace online; they may have developed it. The skyrocketing popularity of online auction site eBay created a need for online payment systems, and especially for individuals without merchant accounts with credit companies to be able to accept payments without depending on checks sent through the mail. PayPal went public in late 2001, and was acquired by eBay a year later for $1.5 billion, having soundly defeated Billpoint, the eBay-owned PayPal alternative. Most other PayPal competitors went out of business not long after eBay's acquisition; many of those that remain tend to offer only some of PayPal's services, keeping them out of head to head competition.

Thiel was PayPal's first Chief Executive Officer, and served until its sale. He now sits on the Board of Directors of Facebook, in which he was an early investor, and founded Clarium Capital Management, a $3 billion hedge fund. He's made a number of investments in companies founded by his PayPal colleagues, and recently co-produced the movie Thank You For smoking.

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