Tech Changing Culture
By Amy O. Williams, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.
Oct. 9–PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel says his college reflections on how to change the world are in part what led to his starting the Internet site in the late 1990s.
The question he asked himself while an undergraduate at Stanford University in the 1980s was, “Are there ways to bring about change that don’t involve politics?”
Mr. Thiel answered his own question with one word — technology.
“People underestimate the ways in which change through technology (is) going to change the structure of the world,” Mr. Thiel told a packed house at the University Center Auditorium at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Monday afternoon.
“And technology is something where you don’t need to have elections, you don’t need to convince people to vote for capitalism, and you can basically implement it unilaterally if you just figure ways to build the best new technologies that are going to just change the world in and of themselves.”
PayPal is an Internet-based company that facilitates online transactions and money transfers. The basic principle behind PayPal, Mr. Thiel said, was that if you have money sitting in an electronically coded account, you could move that money anywhere in the world.
He said he wanted to have a way for people to shift money into different currencies, creating competition among currencies.
Mr. Thiel’s lecture was part of the Burkett Miller Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the Scott L. Probasco Jr. Chair of Free Enterprise in the College of Business at UTC.
It was during his years in college that Mr. Thiel said he began to wonder if one could change the government’s control over money itself. This was one of the grandiose visions he said he and partners Max Levchin and Elon Musk had when they started the company in late 1997 and early 1998.
The partners took the company public in 1999 and sold the site to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Dr. Edward Stringham of San Jose State University responded to Mr. Thiel’s lecture by stating he admires Mr. Thiel’s passion and understanding of business because he understands markets and works to advance them.
Dr. Stringham recalled a meeting that he had with Mr. Thiel several years ago.
“He was telling me about this Web site I had never heard about before,” Dr. Stringham said, describing the first time he heard of the social networking site Facebook. “Microsoft is talking about buying 5 percent for $500 million, and (Mr. Thiel) was the primary investor in it.”
Mr. Thiel is managing member of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund company he founded that manages more than $2 billion.
E-mail Amy O. Williams at awilliams@timesfreepress.com.
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