By Sarah Lee, The Wall Street Journal • January 10, 2018 12:06:01A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to visit the home of one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, in his hometown of San Francisco.
He lives in the sprawling San Francisco Bay Area, just north of downtown.
Thiel was the CEO of PayPal, the online payments company, and he had recently started building out his Silicon Valley venture, Vantablack, a company that builds and sells security cameras for the real estate market.
Thiel had built the technology and a website for Vantiblack that let him see his neighbors’ house pictures, and now the company was going public.
Thiel, who has been described by The Wall St. Journal as “one of the smartest people I know,” has been investing in startups since his early days at PayPal, which he co-founded with a co-founder, Jaron Lanier.
The pair had already been thinking about starting their own company, but Thiel was particularly intrigued by the potential of his startup, VANTALINK.
Vantablak was an early foray into real estate technology.
The company, which Thiel had launched on the back of a $300,000 investment, had its first users in January 2017.
Thiel says that he didn’t know at the time that Vantalink was going to be so popular.
“It was just a really good idea that I thought was a really clever idea,” he said.
“I was very excited about it, and I thought it would be a really exciting thing to build.
So it was a very easy idea to get on board with.”
Thiel had a vision for VANTBLACK, and it was to help homeowners who live on a dollar a day or less get by.
The startup was focused on selling security cameras to developers and homeowners in the real-estate market, and Thiel wanted to build it as a way to help people on a $200 a month or less salary get by, as well as help them afford the things they wanted.VANTBLAK sold a lot of cameras for $100 a month, Thiel told me.
“They sell them for $20 a month,” he told me, noting that there were cameras for sale for $300.
“So that’s the price we sell for.”
The company’s website says that it sells cameras for about $60 to $100 per hour.
Thiel told The Wall Sta.ws that his company sells about a hundred cameras per week.
He said that VANTBALAKs “price per hour” of sales were comparable to the prices he sold for $10,000 cameras.
“We sell at a rate of $10 for every 100 units sold,” Thiel said.
Thiel said that his salespeople sell for $15 a hour, but he said that they don’t offer “unpaid work.”
“We’re not a retail operation,” Thiel told the Wall Street Journal.
“In fact, we do paid work.”
He said his sales people are paid $100 an hour, which, according to the website, is “the lowest you’ll ever be paid for doing anything.”
He said that most of the cameras sold on VANTABLACK are for homeowners in low-income neighborhoods.
“The neighborhoods we’re selling in, there are no other options,” he explained.
“You have to be poor or at the very least, in a position where you’re going to work hard to make a living, and they don.t have that.”
Thickiel said that he would like to sell his business to a more established company in the industry, but that he has been “very fortunate to be in this position.”
He also said that the company sells cameras in the United States and overseas, and that “there are no foreign markets that we are in.”
Thiel said he also would like VANTAK to sell in China, because it has a market for “beautiful homes that have the right size and right dimensions.”
Thiel told WIRED that VANTHALINK has sold more than 3 million cameras since its launch, and said that it has already built out a “huge inventory.”
The website says, “We don’t just build a product.
We build a team of experts in our community, and we help people in their homes.
That’s what we do.”
The company says that its business is “built on the idea that if you have an idea, you can actually make it happen,” and that it’s not an “idea company.”
Thiel has been the founder of several other companies, including an internet company called TID, which was valued at $40 million in 2016.TID’s CEO, Paul Graham, told me that the business was “building the next big thing.”
He noted that he had spent years building up the company.
“There was never a vision,” he wrote in an email to me.”The
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