Blake Masters

After graduating from Stanford in 2008, Blake started his career in Silicon Valley working at Box, as the company’s third salesperson. The next year he went to law school, and after summer gigs at law firm O’Melveny & Meyers and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, he received his JD from Stanford Law in 2012.

After school, Blake co-founded Judicata, a software company that makes legal research and analytics tools for lawyers. In early 2013, having raised $7.8M in funding and built out the team, he pitched Peter Thiel on writing a book based on Blake’s blog notes from Peter’s 2012 Stanford class on startups, which had circulated widely on the internet.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Create the Future was published in September 2014. It quickly became a #1 New York Times bestseller in the U.S. and the #1 best-selling book in China, and went on to sell more than 1.75 million copies worldwide.

Blake joined Thiel Capital as Principal in 2014, where he works with Peter on various strategic initiatives. In 2015 Blake also became the President of The Thiel Foundation, Peter’s private non-profit foundation.

Blake lives in San Francisco with his wife and two boys, ages 6 months and 2-and-a-half. When he’s not busy changing diapers or playing with Brio trains, he’s also working on a new startup called SPAR.