Founders Fund: The Disciples - by Mario Gabriele

Founders Fund would not have achieved a fraction of its success had Peter Thiel not succeeded in winning others to his cause. None have been more important than two largely unheralded figures: Napoleon Ta and Lauren Gross. Ta is the investor behind Founders Fund’s best-performing growth investments. A former poker player, Ta prefers to keep such a low profile that he has repeatedly asked his team not to submit his returns to Forbes’ Midas List. Meanwhile, Gross is Founders Fund’s most important operator. As COO and head of IR, Gross scaled the firm’s AUM into the billions of dollars, staffed its world-class team, and executed Thiel’s vision. In Part 2 of “No Rivals,” our series on Founders Fund, we chronicle Thiel’s major disciples and their impact on the firm. In the process, we tell the stories of its investments in Spotify, Airbnb, DeepMind, Stemcentrx, Stripe, and several others. Part 1 quickly became The Generalist’s most popular piece ever. If you missed it, you can catch up by r

Founders Fund would not have achieved a fraction of its success had Peter Thiel not succeeded in winning others to his cause. None have been more important than two largely unheralded figures: Napoleon Ta and Lauren Gross. Ta is the investor behind Founders Fund’s best-performing growth investments. A former poker player, Ta prefers to keep such a low profile that he has repeatedly asked his team not to submit his returns to Forbes’ Midas List. Meanwhile, Gross is Founders Fund’s most important operator. As COO and head of IR, Gross scaled the firm’s AUM into the billions of dollars, staffed i