Thiel Fund's 10x Returns
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A story about Sam Altman's early investment success with Peter Thiel's backing.
"Peter Thiel gave Sam Altman a $21 million fund, and in about 3-4 years, the fund was up 10x already. That's what people typically want after a 10-year period, but he did it in 4 years.
He made ridiculous bets to achieve this. His thinking was 'if I want to help create trillions of dollars of progress, that's going to come from science and technology, not just the next random app.' So he invested in more science and technology.
Looking at his 5 biggest winners from that early portfolio, 4 of them nobody wanted to fund. They weren't oversubscribed, people generally thought they were bad ideas. He almost got talked out of doing them because smart people were telling him why these were bad ideas. Only one company, Optimizely, was an idea everybody thought was good that turned out to be good."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.