Show Notes
As regular listeners will know, I’ve wanted to cover Thiel for some time now. He’s going to warrant a three-parter at least because, love him or loathe him, Thiel is without doubt one of the most interesting, controversial and polarising people in business over the last 30 years. For listeners who don’t know him, Thiel was part of what became known as the PayPal Mafia - this group of supersmart guys who founded and built PayPal. The company survived the dot-com crash, it almost went under because of Russian fraudsters and they eventually cashed out in 2002. And then a lot of the people involved went on to even more success. We’re talking Thiel himself, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Reid Hoffman. So this episode focuses on Thiel’s early life and brings us right up to the sale of PayPal in 2002. It is a cracking story. Enjoy.
More from Great Business Stories
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I have a very clear memory of this story because it became public 15 years ago in 2011, and I remember watching the news and seeing Michael Woodford, the whistleblower being mobbed by the media in Tokyo after he had found out and exposed a 20 year $1.7 billion dollar fraud in Olympus the company where he had just been promoted to the CEO role. And what I love about this story is that it gives us a great insight into Japanese corporate life, how saving face was, and maybe still is prioritised over everything else. This story has drama, strong characters and even the hint organised crime in the form of the Yazuka- it’s a brilliant story- enjoy
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The RIP part, well you’ll see what I’m getting at by the end of the episode. I wanted to dig into this story for a while now because like most of you, I knew the outline -you know, 2 hippy type guys who did things a bit differently, who were never really interested in money or success and yet they built one of the biggest and best known ice cream brands in the world.