The rise of Peter Thiel, the iconic Silicon Valley VC who wants to cheat death

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Peter Thiel is today known as one of the most successful and colorful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

He came to fame and fortune by co-founding PayPal and then as an early investor in Facebook and is now is trying to stop aging and death, find technologies that would let people live forever, and encouraging smart young people to skip college and start companies instead. (He's a famously outspoken libertarian.)

If you take every classic tale of about Silicon Valley and combine them into one human being, you'd get Peter Thiel.

Thiel was born in Germany and moved to the US when he was one year old though his family moved around some more until they settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in fifth grade. He attended Stanford where he studied philosophy and got his JD law degree. At Stanford he met many of the people that would become key players at PayPal (later known as the PayPal mafia) including include Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.

Source: No Death, No Taxes

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Never afraid to share controversial opinions, in 1999, Thiel and his buddy David Sacks wrote a book called "The Diversity Myth" in which they argued that colleges were bowing to political correctness, dumbing down their admissions policies and silencing intellectual dissent in the "name of diversity."

Source: Amazon, "The Diversity Myth" 

Thiel is also a world-ranked chess player who was reportedly once one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the US.

Source: World Chess Federation