Titans on each side agree polarization bad for tech
Sitting onstage together at Stanford University on Wednesday night, two tech moguls with intertwined pasts but opposing political views — Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman — faced a question about their relationship: In today’s political environment, would they still have become friends like they did in philosophy class nearly 30 years ago?
Maybe, they both said. But only if they took the time to get to know each other beyond their politics.
That friendship had big consequences, leading to them working together at PayPal and going on to take central roles in the modern tech industry, with Thiel backing Facebook as a startup and Hoffman co-founding LinkedIn, which he sold to Microsoft in 2016. Both became billionaires as a result.
Thiel, who co-founded Paypal, and Hoffman, an early employee at that company, spoke at a new Stanford University speaker series, “Cardinal Conversations,” which focused on the intersection of technology and politics. Both attended Stanford together in the ’80s, and have both since become outspoken on politics, Hoffman on the left and Thiel on the right.
Thiel, the only major Silicon Valley figure to back Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, chided Silicon Valley for being a “one-party” state: “The other side doesn’t care for you, and your side doesn’t care for you because they don’t need to.”
Hoffman, who has spent heavily on Democratic candidates, said there is “unquestionably a crisis of democracy” in today’s society, and everyone from Silicon Valley tech companies to individual citizens has a responsibility to do something about it.
Both agreed that the current political polarization of the U.S. will ultimately hinder Silicon Valley.
Hoffman said the best way to bridge this gap is to engage in conversations with people who have differing views — similar to how he and Thiel did at Stanford.
Many of the conversations they had, he said, focused on questions like, “What are the ways to try to get to the better version of ourselves? What is the way that we can evolve our humanity?”
For Thiel, bridging that gap means understanding what exactly Trump means when he says “Make America great again” and “not just telling Trump voters to hurry up and die.”