Summary: Paypal founders and renowned VCs Max Levchin and Peter Thiel discuss what they foresee as the best and brightest tech industry ventures of 2011. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on February 2, 2011. Visit http://FORA.tv to view full-length video of any program featured in this podcast. For more topics on technology, visit http://fora.tv/topic/technology. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have long been "the masters of the universe," at least in Silicon Valley. They have turned the Valley into the heart of high-tech innovation and development and have the power to make or break some of the world’s largest companies. The 21st century has borne witness to the dot-com bubble, the private equity crash, yesteryear's greentech capital wave, to today's monetary flow into social networking, e-commerce and online game companies. What's next? - The Commonwealth Club of California Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born computer scientist and entrepreneur widely known as co-founder and former chief technology officer of PayPal. Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), he moved to the United States with his family, under a political asylum, and settled in Chicago, Illinois in 1991. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and co-founded two companies that made Internet-tools, NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media. In 1998, he founded Fieldlink with John Bernard Powers (who left the company shortly thereafter) and Peter Thiel. After changing the company name to Confinity, they developed a popular payment product known as PayPal. After a merger with another company, X.com, the combined entity was renamed PayPal Inc. In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Slide was sold to Google in August 2010 for $182 Million and, on August 25, Levchin was named Google's newest Vice President of Engineering. Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist. With Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund with more than $6 billion under management, and a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a $275 million under management venture capital fund he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. He was an early investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and sits on the company's Board of Directors. Brad Stone is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.
