Peter Thiel's Hidden Network

The billionaire investor launched a student newspaper 36 years ago. It has since become one of the surest paths to success in Silicon Valley.

- JESSICA MATHEWS

IN JANUARY 2000, a young Stanford University student named Paul Martin walked into the office of a fledgling tech company called Confinity on University Avenue in Palo Alto. He was there to see Peter Thiel about an internship. Thiel was not yet a renowned founder or investor, but Martin knew of him through the Stanford Review, the conservative paper Thiel had founded where Martin was a business manager. Indeed another Review alum, Eric Jackson, was already working for Thiel and pitched Martin hard: "You know, this is taking off... And if you come now, then you're going to be a part of something special. If you wait, this might be over." Martin dropped out of Stanford, and off the university's track team, shortly afterward to start working full-time at Confinity which would eventually undergo a name change, to PayPal.

Jackson and Martin were just two of the hires who have followed Thiel on what has quietly become one of the surest paths to an enviable job in Silicon Valley. It all starts at the Stanford Review, the paper Thiel founded with Norman Book, another future early PayPal employee, in 1987.

"We obviously didn't envision it becoming this incredible tech Silicon Valley network decades later when we started back in 1987," says Thiel, who agreed to an interview with Fortune. (Joining Thiel on the call was Sam Wolfe, a former editor-in-chief from 2018 to 2019 who met Thiel via the Review and now works for him as a researcher at his hedge fund.)

"We certainly were not ideologically monolithic in any way," Thiel said in the interview. "But the fact that there were a lot of strong personal connections that not only I had with people, but they had with one another-gave it a certain esprit de corps that helped a lot... [PayPal] certainly had a lot of volatility, a lot of ups and downs-and that kind of intense camaraderie was what was super helpful to get through the boom and the bust."