Ken Howery

Ken is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital group founded in 2005 with several hundred million dollars under management, which seeks to provide the capital, insights and support required to build a company from the ground up with a non-traditional, pro-founder focus. Ken has led or co-led investments in a number of companies at Founders Fund including Facebook and Quantcast. Ken is a co-founder of PayPal and served as the company's first CFO. While at PayPal, Ken helped raise over $200 million in private financing, worked on the company's public offerings, and assisted in the company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay. Ken has also been a member of the research and trading teams at Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco, and at Thiel Capital Management, a multistrategy investment fund, where Ken made venture investments beginning in 1998, including leading the seed round in pioneering anti-spam firm IronPort (acquired by Cisco for $830 million). Ken has lectured on entrepreneurship at Stanford and Harvard Business School and has helped students develop business models at UC Berkeley and UT Austin's McCombs School of Business. Ken is a member of the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers Selection Committee and a member of the Council on Competitiveness. Ken received a BA in Economics from Stanford.