Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services, starting with management training and office space, and ending with venture capital financing. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) defines business incubators as a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. NBIA categorizes its members' incubators by the following five incubator types: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and a combination of the above.
Seasteading is the creation of permanent dwellings in international waters, so-called seasteads, that are independent of established governments. No one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. Proposed structures have included modified cruise ships, refitted oil platforms, and custom-built floating islands.
Jurisdictional arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of discrepancies between competing legal jurisdictions. It takes its name from arbitrage, the practice in finance of purchasing a good at a lower price in one market and selling it at a higher price in another. Just as in financial arbitrage, the attractiveness of jurisdiction arbitrage depends largely on its transaction costs, here the costs of switching legal service providers from one government to another.
Silicon Hills is a nickname for the cluster of high-tech companies in the Austin metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Texas. Silicon Hills has been a nickname for Austin since the mid-1990s. The name is analogous to Silicon Valley, but refers to the hilly terrain on the west side of Austin. High tech industries in the area include enterprise software, semiconductors, corporate R&D, biotechnology, the video game industry, and a variety of startup companies.
Patri Friedman is an American libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and theorist of political economy. He founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies.
Stossel is a weekly American television talk show, hosted by John Stossel, highlighting current consumer issues, with a libertarian viewpoint. It was broadcast between 2009 and 2016. The program debuted on December 10, 2009, on the Fox Business Network and aired on Fridays—originally at 8:00 pm EST, but was moved to 9:00 pm EST. In 2013, Fox News Channel began to replay the show occasionally on weekends.
Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car,Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
East London Tech City is a technology cluster of high-tech companies located in East London, United Kingdom. Its main area lies broadly between St Luke's and Hackney Road, with an accelerator space for spinout companies at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Ocean colonization is the exploitation, settlement or territorial claim of the ocean and the oceanic crust.
The Startup Visa is a temporary conditional residence permit in different countries. It aims at introducing a visa category for entrepreneurs raising outside funding and converts to a permanent residency visa if certain conditions are met.
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components, and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often government-funded, generally take no equity, and rarely provide funding, accelerators can be either privately or publicly funded and cover a wide range of industries. Unlike business incubators, the application process for seed accelerators is open to anyone, but is highly competitive. There are specific accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.
Michael J. Petrucelli is the founder and chairman of Clearpath Immigration, and was deputy director, and later acting director, of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2003 to 2005.
Blueseed is a Palo Alto, California-based startup accelerator. It began as a seasteading venture.
Max Marty is an entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, who co-founded the seed accelerator project Blueseed with Dario Mutabdzija and Dan Dascalescu. He was previously Director of Business Strategy at The Seasteading Institute.
Dan Dăscălescu is a Romanian-American entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, who co-founded the ship-based seed accelerator project Blueseed in an attempt to allow entrepreneurs to start companies near Silicon Valley without US visa restrictions. He is also a public speaker and former software engineer at Google and Yahoo! and ambassador for The Seasteading Institute, a think tank researching ocean communities.
Nailab is a Kenyan startup incubator, located in Nairobi, that was founded in 2010 by Tonee Ndungu and Bart Lacroix. In 2012 Tonee Ndungu left to found Kytabu, and EdTech company based in Nairobi, Kenya. The company incubates technology-based companies and offers 3–6 months entrepreneurship programs with a focus on growing innovative technology driven ideas.
Engine is a non-profit group advocating for public policies that encourage the growth of technology startups in San Francisco, California. Engine is composed of a 501(c)(3) organization called Engine Research Foundation and a 501(c)(4) called Engine Advocacy. Engine Advocacy and Engine Foundation are the two branches of a non-profit organization that conducts economic research and policy analysis research and provides support and advice to technology startups. Engine Advocacy was an instrumental partner in the effort to defeat PIPA and SOPA back in 2012. The organization researches and advocates around the issues of open Internet, intellectual property reform, privacy laws, Internet and spectrum access and immigration reform. Google, SV Angel, 500 Startups, Mozilla, Yelp and the Startup Genome support the organization.
The Founder Institute is an American business incubator, entrepreneur training and startup launch program that was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2009. Although based in Silicon Valley, The Founder Institute maintains chapters in over 180 cities and more than 65 nations. It offers a four-month part-time program for new and early-stage entrepreneurs that helps them develop their business ideas and form a company. Among the key requirements for graduation is the creation of a fully operational company by the end of the four-month program. As of 2018, over 3,500 companies had been created from the program, which raised over $800M funding in total.
The Seasteading Institute(TSI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters (a proposed practice called seasteading). It was founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman on April 15, 2008.
