Thiel Mentees, pt. 1: Delian
A unique element of a powerful network
One might describe Delian Asparouhov as many things: a proud Bulgarian-American, a genius, or a cultural warrior. A more interesting way to understand him is as a second generation Thiel acolyte.
A mentee of Keith Rabois, himself a mentee of Peter Thiel, Delian has experienced an exponential rise over the last decade under Rabois’ mentorship, first as his CoS at Khosla, and later under him at Founders Fund.1 Now, Delian’s gone to strike out on his own with Varda. Teaming up with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey, the two produce a potent combination of engineering prowess and, perhaps more importantly, networks with deep pockets that can de-risk the capital hurdles needed to successfully build an ambitious space drugs company. It is this latter point, networks, that I want to discuss today.
Of course, Delian is among the less prominent and youngest millennials in the Thiel orbit. Peter has an immense knack for not only discovering but more importantly cultivating young talent. To name a few, he’s found or accelerated JD Vance, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerburg, Joe Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, and even—to an extent and right at the millennial cutoff—Garry Tan to superstar status at the national or Valley level. Other millennials in his circles, including Blake Masters, Jacob Helberg, Trae Stephens, Stacey Ferreira, and Brian Schimpf might be considered largely separate, though no doubt successful.
Delian obviously lacks superstar Thiel millennial status; such celebration is all but exclusively reserved for those with hundreds of millions liquid or national level elected office. Yet I remain hesitant to lump him with the latter group of individuals. In many ways, he’s carving out a unique niche as a superb venture investor and driven entrepreneur. In his half-decade collaboration and support of Rabois, he’s tacitly avoided the pressures of Thiel mentorship.
What pressures, you might ask? I’m reminded of one paragraph from Max Chafkin’s 2021 unauthorized biography of Thiel, The Contrarian:
“On the day the company announced it was shutting down, he invited Andregg over to his house, where he mercilessly crushed him in a game of chess, and then used it to teach a business lesson. He pointed out that several turns before he’d gotten Andregg into checkmate, the younger man had more than a dozen possible moves. “When you’re deciding what to do next, you should be very careful about making moves, because you’ll end up in a situation where you’re constrained,””
Why haven’t we heard of William Andregg? Why hasn’t he reemerged after over a decade? I would argue it’s because Thiel mentorship in its modern form is positively exacting. Thiel—the one that has emerged following the creation of Founders Fund & Palantir, and thus well after he began mentoring Tan, Lonsdale, and Zuckerburg—places immense pressure on young founders. Many falter. Distance can help insulate from such pressure, while also enabling mentees to ascertain his lessons that now amount to a bible for entrepreneurs. Delian, as a protégé of Rabois, has such distance. Sam Altman did too.
Altman actively railed against Thiel’s Stanford Review while an undergraduate student, and presumably held some animosity towards him during his early years in the Valley. He served as an éminence grise to the Collison brothers as Stripe raised their Series A, fending off the circling hawks of Sequoia and tellingly, Founders Fund. As Patrick put it:
“We were these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed naifs from Ireland dealing with Peter Thiel and Michael Moritz, who were to us kind of deities. And Sam, as usual, was completely unintimidated and uncowed by any of them. And his counsel was really very helpful.”
Altman obviously later became quite close to Thiel; he would sit right next to him at (Peter’s husband) Matt Danzeisen’s birthday in 2023. Yet I posit that his early distance, like Delian’s, has allowed him to learn and grow without being smothered.2 Delian has been able to fail freely at Nightingale, Teespring, and in his early angel investments (Eaze, Naytev).3 It set him up with the knowledge and networks he needed for a meteoric rise at Varda. His recent markups on investments in Sword, Eight Sleep, Ramp, and Senra (just to name a few) further reflect such a trajectory.
In other words, Delian has just enough distance from Thiel to access his network without being overwhelmed by it. Regardless of what anyone thinks of it, his support of Trump in 2016 was incredibly prescient, echoed almost exclusively by Thiel himself. Unlike Andregg, Delian has stayed in the game long enough. He is evidence of the fact that you can just do things, if you stay in the arena. With his footing now firmly established, I expect Delian to become among the most prominent figures in the Valley in coming years. Much more on him to come.
Any exponential rise is not without its hiccups; Asparouhov’s 2016-17 stint at failing Silicon Valley darling Teespring embodies this. One cannot forget—ever—that what hindsight construes as a smooth rise is always anything but that.
To extrapolate this idea way too far, this trend can also be observed within the PayPal mafia. The most financially successful folks other than Thiel—Musk & Hoffman—were initially the most diametrically opposed to him either personally or ideologically (Musk detested him for coordinating the coup and ousting him as CEO, Hoffman is pretty damn left). Plus, they knew him earlier.
I don’t know the specific details of these firms, but they have all downsized considerably or shut down, and I don’t believe any of them had an exit. Please correct me if I’m wrong.