When Peter Thiel ventures outside for a run, typically in the early-early morning, when the fog drifts low and slow into the San Francisco Bay, he's often drawn to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "the end of land and land of beginning." That means the San Francisco waterfrontespecially the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of pathway hugging the marshy shoreline from Crissy Field to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aesthetically, the appeal is obviousa postcard view of the bridge and the bay, the lapping tidal rhythm, that sort of thingbut for Thiel, a 43-year-old investor and entrepreneur whose knack for anticipating the next big thing has yielded him a $1.5 billion fortune and an iconic, even delphic status in Silicon Valley, there's a symbolic angle as well. This waterline is precisely where the Western frontier ended, where unlimited opportunity finally hit its limit. It's also where, if Thiel is betting correctly, the nextand most audaciousfrontier begins.
Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. "Way more than is healthy," he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that's his day job: He cofounded PayPal, the online money-transfer service, and, most famously, was the angel investor whose half-million-dollar loan catapulted Facebook out of Harvard's dormitories and into the lives of its 750 million users. (In The Social Network, Thiel was portrayed as the crisp venture capitalist whose investment, and dark questioning, widen the rift between Facebook's cofounders.) He manages a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and is a founding partner in a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund, both of them housed in an airy brick building on the campuslike grounds of the Presidio, not far from Thiel's jogging path. Yet his frontier obsession extends much further than spreadsheets, further than even technology. Political frontiers, social frontiers, scientific frontiers: All these and more crowd Thiel's head as he navigates the shoreline.
"We're at this pretty important point in society," he says during a brisk walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge, "where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we're going to be forced to change in a way that's really tough." Thiel is a medium-size man with a compact and blocky frame, close-trimmed reddish-brown hair, and eyes the limpid-blue color of Windex; he has a small, nasal voice and tends to exert himself as he speaks, frequently circling back to amend or reconfigure or soften what he's saying. Discussing the concept of frontiers, however, animates him to an almost uninterruptible degree; concepts, more than anything else, seem to do that.
"One of the things that's endlessly dazzling and mesmerizing is this question about the futurewhat the world is going to be like in 20 years, and what can or should we do to make it better than the default track that it's on," he says, gesturing with his hands while maintaining a fixed stare on the pathway. "But it's a question you can never quite master. I played a lot of chess when I was growing up, and it's similar to some elements of chess, where you can see some moves but you can't see to the end of the game. Even a computer the size of the universe couldn't actually analyze it. There's, like, 10 to the 117th power possible games and something like 10 to the 80th atoms in the observable universe, so it's off by something like 37 orders of magnitude. And chess is something much simpler than realityit's 32 pieces on an eight-by-eight board. Figuring out the complete future of a chess game is a problem more complicated than anything that can be solved in our universe, so figuring out this planet or just our society in the next 10 or 15 years is just not a solvable problem."
Despite the innovations of the past quarter century, some of which have made him very, very wealthy, Thiel is unimpressed by how far we've cometechnologically, politically, socially, financially, the works. The last successful American car company, he likes to note, was Jeep, founded in 1941. "And our cars aren't moving any faster," he says. The space-age future, as giddily envisioned in the fifties and sixties, has yet to arrive. Perhaps on the micro levelas in microprocessorsbut not in the macro realm of big, audacious, and outlandish ideas where Thiel prefers to operate. He gets less satisfaction out of conventional investments in "cloud music" (Spotify) and Hollywood films (Thank You for Smoking) than he does in pursuing big ideas, which is why Thielalong with an all-star cast of venture capitalists, including former PayPal cohorts Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, and Sean Parker, the Napster cofounder and onetime Facebook presidentestablished the Founders Fund. Among its quixotic but potentially highly profitable investments are SpaceX, a space-transport company, and Halcyon Molecular, which aspires to use DNA sequencing to extend human life. Privately, however, Thiel is the primary backer for an idea that takes big, audacious, and outlandish to a whole other level. Two hundred miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, past that hazy-blue horizon where the Pacific meets the sky, is where Thiel foresees his boldest venture of all. Forget start-up companies. The next frontier is start-up countries.
"Big ideas start as weird ideas." That's Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, and, as of 2008, when Thiel seeded him with the same initial investment sum he'd given Mark Zuckerberg four years earlier, the world's most prominent micro-nation entrepreneur. Friedman, a short, kinetic 35-year-old with a wife and two children, maintains an energetic online presence that ranges from blogging about libertarian theory to tweeted dispatches such as "Explored BDSM in SF w/big group of friends tonight." Four years ago, a Clarium Capital employee came across a piece Friedman had written about an idea he called "seasteading." Friedman was soon pitching to Thiel, a staunch libertarian himself, the big, weird idea.
The rest is here:
The Billionaire King of Techtopia: Critical Eye : Details
- Seasteading Book - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Erwin Strauss - How to Start Your Own Country - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- David D. Friedman - Legal Systems Very Different From Ours - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- it's always ourselves we find in the sea - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- New Faces Mean New Developments at TSI - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- New Residential Cruise Ship - Samsung signs $1.1B LOI with Utopia Residences - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Sean Hastings - Experiences with HavenCo and SeaLand - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ibsen on the sea - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Jim O'Neill - Health Innovation at the Frontier - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Russ George: Ocean Stewardship - December 22nd, 2009 [December 22nd, 2009]
- Eelco Hoogendoorn: Seastead Engineering Overview - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Happy 2009 From The Seasteading Institute! - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Mikolaj Habryn: Residential Shipsteading - December 31st, 2009 [December 31st, 2009]
- M.U.L.E. - steading - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle Documentary - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- Jorge Schmidt - Legal Aspects of Seasteading - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- James is ready to move! - January 19th, 2010 [January 19th, 2010]
- Seasteading is the cure for post-Avatar Depression? - January 23rd, 2010 [January 23rd, 2010]
- Dominique Roddier - Clubstead Engineering - January 26th, 2010 [January 26th, 2010]
- Engineering Parallels Between Ephemerisle & Seasteading - January 29th, 2010 [January 29th, 2010]
- Will Chamberlain - Thinking Structurally About Government - January 29th, 2010 [January 29th, 2010]
- Nice EEZ layer for Google Earth - February 2nd, 2010 [February 2nd, 2010]
- Na'ama Moran - Medical Tourism on Ships - February 5th, 2010 [February 5th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute February 2010 Newsletter - February 6th, 2010 [February 6th, 2010]
- Seoul, South Korea, Launches Floating Island - February 14th, 2010 [February 14th, 2010]
- Research Update: TSI Engineering Assessment Report (part 1) released - March 2nd, 2010 [March 2nd, 2010]
- Countries & Cruise Ships - March 5th, 2010 [March 5th, 2010]
- Viver no Mar (Living in the Sea) - March 5th, 2010 [March 5th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter - March 12th, 2010 [March 12th, 2010]
- WindWard Looks Seaward: Incremental Developments in Energy and Community - March 18th, 2010 [March 18th, 2010]
- Fun with Google Earth - March 18th, 2010 [March 18th, 2010]
- Website Downtime - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- The Plastiki Sets Sail to Glorify Waste - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Internships at TSI - March 26th, 2010 [March 26th, 2010]
- Patri Friedman Appears on Freakonomics Podcast - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Seasteading R&D Company Looking For Investors - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute April 2010 Newsletter - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Pioneering Undersea Life in Legoland? - April 10th, 2010 [April 10th, 2010]
- TSI Argonauts: Benefits for Leading the Way - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- Freedom in Brazil - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- Francesca Galea Improves Understanding of the Legal Standing of Artificial Islands - April 28th, 2010 [April 28th, 2010]
- How Ephemerisle 2010 Will Bring Us Closer to Seasteading - May 4th, 2010 [May 4th, 2010]
- Learn Something New About the Ocean - May 12th, 2010 [May 12th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle 2010 tickets now on sale! - May 12th, 2010 [May 12th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute May 2010 Newsletter - May 14th, 2010 [May 14th, 2010]
- Let Freedom Ring! Reception and Conversation on June 9th, 2010 - May 22nd, 2010 [May 22nd, 2010]
- Container Cities - May 28th, 2010 [May 28th, 2010]
- Recommended Reading for The Seastead View Of Politics - May 28th, 2010 [May 28th, 2010]
- Recycling the gyre - May 31st, 2010 [May 31st, 2010]
- Sorry for the downtime! - June 8th, 2010 [June 8th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle: A Floating Festival of Freedom on Humanity's Next Frontier, July 22-25 - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle: Evolving Society on Humanity's Next Frontier, July 22-25 - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Ephemerisle 2010 Cancellation - June 20th, 2010 [June 20th, 2010]
- Secession Week 2010 at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom - June 30th, 2010 [June 30th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute July 2010 Newsletter - July 9th, 2010 [July 9th, 2010]
- Latest Seasteading Talk Video: Mises Brazil - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- It's The Love Boat...For Ideas: Reason/TSI cruise - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- Sink or Swim 2010 Business Contest - July 13th, 2010 [July 13th, 2010]
- Ideas wanted: Seasteading Book PR - July 15th, 2010 [July 15th, 2010]
- Seasteaders to attend the 2010 Singularity Summit - July 27th, 2010 [July 27th, 2010]
- TSI August 2010 Newsletter - August 4th, 2010 [August 4th, 2010]
- Short video from UCSD - August 13th, 2010 [August 13th, 2010]
- Documentary on micronations, featuring seasteading, premiering 9/11 at Toronto Film Festival - August 17th, 2010 [August 17th, 2010]
- TSI Welcomes its New Director of Engineering, George Petrie - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI seeks Oceanography Researcher - up to $500 referral bonus - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Answers to some basic seasteading questions about strategy - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Patri Says: Help Us Create A Compelling Book Proposal! - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI September 2010 Newsletter - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Judges Selected for TSI's Sink or Swim Business Plan Contest - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- TSI Doubles Sink or Swim Prize Pool & Extends Deadline by Two Weeks - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Global Wave Heatmap - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- The Seasteading Institute Fall 2010 Newsletter - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Watch Patri's Talk From The Feast - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Update To Oceanographer Position - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Seasteading: An Audacious Vision of Diversity and Innovation In Law - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Review of Micronation Film Highlights Seasteading Vision - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Reminder: Active review work happening on seasteading book! - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- O. Shane Balloun on American Law Enforcement Jurisdiction Over Seasteads - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- How does Patri spend his time? - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]