Paypal ‘Mafia Don’ to speak in Dublin

Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, co-founder of online giants such as PayPal as well as analytics and security firm Palantir Technologies amongst others, has been confirmed as a speaker at The Summit in November.

Along with his impressive record of start-ups, Thiel was one of the first outside investors in Facebook and his initial $500,000 investment in Mark Zuckerberg's college campus idea helped the social media giant on its journey to a market value of over $150 billion today.

Thiel has been referred to as the "Don of the PayPal Mafia" – a group of former employees and investors of PayPal who have gone on to become some of the most influential people in the tech world today. These include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, the founders of YouTube; co-founders of Yelp Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons; super angel investor and founder of 500 start-ups Dave McClure; and serial investor Max Levchin, who will also speak at The Summit. Thiel's appearance at The Summit follows the successful keynote address last year given by his friend and fellow PayPal founder Elon Musk.

Thiel has an Irish connection already, having invested in Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison's payments company Stripe through his investment firm, the San Francisco-based Founder's Fund.

Outside of his entrepreneurial and investment pursuits, he is involved in a number of philanthropic enterprises including the Thiel Fellowship, which awards a no-strings attached $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years’ old in order to spur them on to become entrepreneurs. He also founded Breakout Labs, an institution that provides mentorship and financial support to innovative early stage scientific and medical research.