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 (Joining Thiel on the call was Sam Wolfe, a former editor-in-chief from 2018 to 2019 who met Thiel via the and now works for him as a researcher at his hedge fund.)
