Founders Fund

Lauren is a Partner and COO at Founders Fund. She works closely with the investment team and leads all non-investment activities, which include running internal operations and overseeing the firm’s legal, finance and branding teams. Lauren works with the partnership on key strategic decisions and investments and also leads fundraising and management of the firm’s limited partner relationships. Prior to Founders Fund, Lauren spent four years at Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund. She began her financial career at Citigroup Investment Bank, where she was an analyst in the technology group. Lauren graduated with honors in Economics from Stanford University.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He cofounded PayPal, led it as CEO, and took it public; he made the first outside investment in Facebook; and he cofounded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the 'PayPal Mafia.' He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies including SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Napoleon is a Partner at Founders Fund. He sits on the boards of Cognition, Persona, and Rippling. He holds an MBA from Stanford and a BS from the University of Colorado.

Scott is a Partner at Founders Fund. He works with mission-driven founders rearchitecting industries. Scott supports Synthego, Collective Health, Modern Animal and over a dozen more engineering-driven startups across biotech, crypto, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing and transportation. Prior to Founders Fund, Scott was an early employee at SpaceX, where he helped develop the original Falcon propulsion systems and multiple Dragon subsystems. After SpaceX, Scott worked at Bain & Company with its private equity clients and co-founded a consumer internet company built on the Facebook Connect API. Scott earned Bachelor and Master degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell in under four years and received his MBA from Stanford University, where he was co-president of the Entrepreneurs Club and voted 'most likely to drop out' by his peers.

Trae is a Partner at Founders Fund. He is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion, helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. While at Palantir, Trae also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University. Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government. Trae graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.