Peter Thiel: We Would Be A Lot More Careful About Funding Facebook Today. But…
But interestingly, Thiel told Lacy that looking back he would be a lot more careful about funding a Facebook-like idea today. In 2003, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for 10.2 percent of the company. What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.”
But, Thiel of course is a strong believer in Facebook as one of its early investors and he clearly belives the company is worth more than its current valuation. And Thiel also said that Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is a product visionary that resembles Apple CEO Steve Jobs. As long as Zuckerberg stays at Facebook, the company will be about building new products.
This browser does not support the video element.
Continuing live coverage can be found at our day one omnibus post. Don’t forget to tag your disrupt-related posts and media with #tcdisrupt!