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, who had yet to become a renowned founder and investor, was already a familiar face, thanks to the dinners he had hosted for staff of the Stanford Review, a conservative student newspaper on Stanford’s campus that Thiel had cofounded as an undergraduate studying philosophy. Martin, a business manager for that paper, had been struck by one dinner in particular at a steak house in Palo Alto, where he recalls Thiel discussing how China would become a substantial threat to the future of American interests, as part of a wider discussion ranging from religion to politics, economics to entertainment.
