He is an early investor of Paypal, becoming a multi-millionaire while still majoring at Stanford University

Worldwebforum speaker Bruce Gibney

Bruce Gibney

Writer & Venture Capitalist, San Francisco, USA

Worldwebforum speaker Bruce Gibney
Worldwebforum speaker Bruce Gibney
Worldwebforum speaker Bruce Gibney
Worldwebforum speaker Bruce Gibney

Why you should listen

Bruce Gibney invested in his roommate Ken Howery’s electronic payment start-up Paypal while still at Stanford University taking up science and technology studies and industrial engineering. He worked as a litigator and then  managed Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital where he supported Thiel’s decision to invest in Facebook. 

Shaped by the visionary thinking of Thiel, Gibney believes that startups should not only focus on building businesses but in changing the world as well. This philosophy, he goes on to champion as Partner in Founders Fund, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture firms.

His personal investments include companies that help change society like Lyft, SpaceX, and AirBnB. 

A litigator, venture capitalist, and writer, Bruce is known to be a staunch critic of America’s decrepit systems. He wrote A Generation of Sociopaths which examines American stagnation under Baby Boomer politics and The Nonsense Factory which explores the incoherence of America’s legal system.

Meet Bruce at Worldwebforum 2020 where he will be a moderator.

A Generation of Sociopaths

What happens when society is run by sociopaths? That’s the question A Generation of Sociopaths answers, analyzing the experiences, behaviors and politics of the Baby Boomers – for decades, the largest and most influential generation in America. The book dispels conventional notions of the Boomers as a progressive generation and reveals them for what they truly are: a generation relentlessly devoted to their own enrichment at the cost of their country and children. (www.brucegibney.com)

The Nonsense Factory

Does America’s legal system work as advertised? Does it work at all? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce argues that the entire legal factory—from law schools, to judges, bureaucracies, police, and the presidency—is falling apart, for two straightforward reasons: the system likes to make rules more than it likes to follow them, and none of its workers understand each other particularly well. The results are chaos, expense, frustration and injustice. Bruce shows how tragedies like police abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and an inert Congress are the consequences of a legal system that becomes weaker as it expands, and one that has forgotten its basic purposes. (www.brucegibney.com)

Biography

Bruce Cannon Gibney is an American writer venture capitalist and investor. He was one of the first investors at PayPal, and went on to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium and his venture capital company Founders Fund.

Gibney wrote Founders Fund’s controversial statement of ideology, What Happened to the Future? in 2011, which called for more aggressive investments in breakthrough technologies and became a widely cited article in the technology community.

After leaving the Founders Fund in 2012, Gibney continued making investments while starting writing full time in 2015. His first book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, linked American stagnation to the baby boomers, characterizing the generation as being unusually prone to anti-social personality disorder.