Mark Gagnon

Back to Peter Thiel.

Basically, 1998, he founds PayPal.

He actually founds like a Palm Pilot payment thing before that flops.

In like the late 90s, they called it like the worst company founded that year.

And like he's like in the Silicon Valley world.

He goes to Stanford, yada, yada.

But they see they're like, oh, this is the worst company.

And then that becomes the precursor for PayPal, which becomes the biggest company.

And what's interesting about PayPal, especially in that time, is that we kind of see it now as like, oh, yeah, obviously, like you use it to like send money.

It's easy.

It's like Venmo, right?

At the time, it was almost like crypto because it's unregulated, non-governmentally surveilled crypto.

money so i can send money to you in switzerland and like no one's really checking on it you kind of evade taxes like it like it's gotten more regulations now but in the back of the day it was kind of the wild west and you could just move money around and no one could really see it and paypal was like just the escrow for all of this cash so they became like a bank and like a crypto like it was basically the precursors kind of to the crypto philosophy in a way

So he's in that world.

And then he founds Palantir in 2003, which we'll discuss more.

And then he just founds the Founders Fund.

And then he's the first outside investor in Facebook.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Yeah, because they've all gone on to have rather significant impacts in the world.