Joining the Mafia 101
come up with new ideas, he took a random lecture at the
Stanford University. The subject was “The link between
market globalization and political freedom,” and the guest
lecturer Peter Thiel gave the lesson.^393
While Thiel was born in 1967 in Germany, his family
moved to California when he was young. Stanford was the
school of his choice before he began trading derivatives at
the Credit Suisse Group. In 1996, he founded the hedge-
fund Thiel Capital Management, and he’s also famous for
being the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel has also
donated $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation – a life-
extension-research organization that believes humans will
one day live to be 1 000 years old. One of the founders
argued that the first human to live a 1 000 years is already
born.^260
Only six people showed up to the lecture at Stanford.
After the lecture, Levchin walked up to Thiel. They began
to talk. Something clicked so they decided to meet again
at the restaurant Hobee’s to continue their discussion.
Levchin had some ideas about what kinds of companies
he wanted to found, Thiel took the bait and decided to
invest in one of the ideas. “Take this idea, because this one
is better, and you go start a company around it, and then I
can have my hedge fund invest a little bit of money in it,”
Thiel said.^186
The new company Fieldlink was born. They would
later change the name of the company to Confinity –
a name that originates from the words confidence and
infinity.^393 But Levchin couldn’t find a CEO to run the