Power Player

The VC firm Founders Fund is known for a contrarian approach embodied in its polarising founding partner Peter Thiel. Now Brian Singerman, a games buff from outside the fund’s PayPal mafia origins, is taking it to new heights—as long as Thiel’s controversial politics does not get in the way.

- Alex Konrad

It was just past midnight after a tense day in late March of 2014, and Brendan Iribe’s emotions were raw as he fired off an email to his closest advisors. Iribe, the 37-year-old co-founder and former CEO of Oculus VR, had just gotten off the phone with Mark Zuckerberg, the 32-year-old cofounder and CEO of Facebook. The two young entrepreneurs were on the verge of sealing a blockbuster deal that would shock the tech industry. The world’s largest social network would buy the world’s hottest virtual reality startup. But with just hours to go, the two couldn’t agree on how the purchase price, based on the value of Facebook’s stock, would be spun. Iribe was adamant that it be called a $2 billion-acquisition, but the math, tied to Facebook’s dipping stock price, didn’t quite add up. The deal was suddenly on life support.

Oculus and its headset, the Rift, were already the toast of the tech world, and Iribe had some of the industry’s biggest names on speed dial. Marc Andreessen was on his board, and Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was an investor. But it wasn’t either one who answered Iribe. It was Thiel’s colleague Brian Singerman, a 40-year-old software geek and one of the newest partners at the firm. By 1 am, with Singerman’s help, Iribe had tweaked the announcement so it would make the Oculus team happy without forcing Facebook to renegotiate terms. Hours later, Facebook announced in a press release that it was buying Oculus for “approximately $2 billion” in cash and stock and $300 million in employee earn-outs. For investors in the two-year-old startup, it was a golden outcome, but Singerman, who had salvaged the deal, was kicking himself. “I was the first investor to commit to them,” he says. “But we could have owned so much more.”