Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm which invests at all stages in companies with revolutionary technologies. The firm’s six partners, Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel

Peter Andreas Thiel is an American business magnate, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. With Elon Musk and Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO...

, Sean Parker

Sean Parker

Sean Parker is an American technology businessman and entrepreneur. He co-founded Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and Airtime, and was Facebook's founding president. His net worth is estimated at $2.1 billion.-Early life:...

, Ken Howery

Ken Howery

Ken Howery is a co-founder and managing partner at Founders Fund.Howery graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a B.A. in Economics. He was a co-founder of PayPal and served as the company's first CFO from 1998 until 2002. His partner within this Paypal project was Peter Thiel at Thiel...

, Luke Nosek

Luke Nosek

Luke Nosek is an American entrepreneur of Polish descent.Nosek received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During college in the summer of 1995, he cofounded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., along with fellow UIUC students Max Levchin and Scott Banister...

, Bruce Gibney, and Brian Singerman have been founders of or early investors in numerous companies such as Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, PayPal

PayPal

PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....

, Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

, and Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tysons Corner, Virginia, New York City and Covent Garden, London, is a software company that produces the Palantir Government and Palantir Finance platforms...

. Founders Fund was formed in 2005 and has launched four suites of funds to date with more than $1 billion in aggregate capital under management.

History

The firm was organized by Peter Thiel and Ken Howery in early 2005 and raised its first fund

Collective investment scheme

A collective investment scheme is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group...

 of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in January of that year. In 2006, Sean Parker, an early employee of Napster and ex-president of Facebook, and Luke Nosek joined as managing partners. In 2007 the firm raised a new fund of $220 million.
In 2010, the firm raised its third suite of funds, with $250 million in committed capital.

Team

The firm is made up of the following partners:

• Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO and Chairman of PayPal
• Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal
• Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal
• Sean Parker, former president of Plaxo
  Plaxo
  Plaxo is an online address book and social networking service originally founded by Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring...
  
  and Facebook
• Bruce Gibney
• Brian Singerman

External links

• The Founders Fund (official website)