Mr. Thiel, you are one of the best-known investors in Silicon Valley.

What have been your greatest successes and failures in business and politics?

Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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Well, I'm not someone who thinks you always have to be against the prevailing opinion. But one of the places I think it's healthy to be against is in Silicon Valley. There is what can be called a cult of failure there. People there always talk about how many times they failed before they succeeded. There is almost a form of failure in pornography. Conversely, I think it doesn't help to think too much about failure. I don't think there's much to learn from them. For example, when I was in my mid-twenties, I was studying law at Stanford and applying for an internship at the Supreme Court in the United States, where nine judges each selected four employees per year. And I was about to get it, but then I didn't get it.That was an extremely traumatic failure for me, I didn't have a midlife crisis, but a quarter life crisis.

How did you get out of it?

In a way, I was a very conventional person. In eighth grade, a friend of mine wrote in my high school yearbook, I know you'll be going to Stanford in four years. Four years later I went to Stanford, then Stanford Law School, that was all of these standard things. Sometime in my mid-twenties, I realized that these career paths, which I wouldn't say didn't work at all, weren't working as well as they looked. So if you didn't get a clerkship at the Supreme Court, there may still be a good career as a lawyer. But it didn't seem enough to sell your soul for something like that. I ended up in a big Manhattan law firm, one of those weird places that everyone on the outside wanted in and everyone on the inside wanted out.

Then you became an entrepreneur.

I wouldn't say I became an entrepreneur, but in the mid-1990s this internet revolution happened. And probably the only lucky thing about going to Stanford was the proximity to Silicon Valley. In 1999 there was a crazy dot-com bubble. Much of it exploded. However, the underlying phenomenon was very important: there were many opportunities for people to do completely new things. It was a real borderline situation in a western world where there wasn't so much unexplored terrain. So there was a lot to do. Through Stanford I knew a number of people who did, like in the gold rush. And that probably overwhelmed me a bit and took it with me. We built PayPalI became an investor after the 2002 sale and have invested in a number of companies over the past two decades.

Always successful?