Luke Nosek is a co-founder at PayPal and is a Managing Partner at Founders Fund. Nosek wants to move from the Internet and new media sector and get into science. Nosek is joining Halcyon Molecular, a human genome sequencing firm as a founding president.
Halcyon plans to sequence complete human genomes in less than 10 minutes at a cost of $100. This is a much smaller price and smaller amount of time than currently existing genome sequencing labs. Nosek will continue to lead The Founders Fund’s genomics investing division. Peter Thiel will be joining the board of directors at Halcyon Molecular too.
Halcyon will be competing with 23andme, a genomics company founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Halcyon even received a $2 million aberration corrected STEM electron microscope on loan from the U.S. DoE.
Udorse is a visual endorsement engine that launched at TechCrunch50. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund and Peter Thiel joined the Board of Directors. The idea behind the website is that people endorse items they love in the form of pictures. This could include t-shirts, watches, cufflinks, etc. Udorse encourages users to endorse items and places in photos by tagging them. They places or items in the photos are tagged to websites.
For example, if you want to endorse the new Ray-Ban sunglasses you bought, you are encouraged to tag them in a picture of yourself wearing them to a website where others can buy it. The brands will appreciate the free endorsement too. Udorse even has several partners. If sales are made by your referral picture, then you get a cut too.
Udorse even allows you to connect your Facebook Photos to your Udorse account, making it easier to tag the photos initially. The person that highlights the item receives a 25% commission fee if another person purchases the item. As of yesterday Armani and American Apparel partnered with Udorse. Udorse was founded by Geoffrey Lewis and Trevor Austin.
Co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has opened up why Facebook’s bid for Twitter failed in an interview with BusinessWeek. The primary reason for the failed bid was because the valuation of the social network fluctuated quite a bit. Between Microsoft’s valuation, the settlement with ConnectU, and Facebook employees selling stock at between a $2-$4 billion valuation, it is not actually known what Facebook is worth. So when Twitter was offered $500 million in mostly Facebook stock, they decided to pull out of the deal.
Facebook told Twitter that their stock was worth about $8-$9 billion. And the Twitter team knew that employees were selling stock at $2-$4 billion. Then Facebook offered Twitter $100 million in cash and the rest in stock. Facebook would make $100 million for Twitter by selling stock to outside investors. Twitter would have agreed if Facebook offered stock in the form of what the shares would earn on the open market.
Thiel did not reveal how much he thinks Facebook is worth. “It’s worth more than people think it is,” is what Thiel had to say about Facebook. Facebook is still open to acquiring other companies.
