After graduating from high school, he gave college a go but dropped out when he was 19. Ryan Holiday was born in 1987 in California. If you’re looking for a full list of all Ryan Holiday books before and after his big career shift, you’ve come to the right place! But in that year, he also published The Obstacle Is the Way, his first book talking about Stoic philosophy, and I, like many others, thought that was a lot more interesting. He talked about the media industry and about growth hacking, and his job was director of marketing at American Apparel. Gawker’s outing of Peter Thiel was just another example of their boundary-pushing journalism.When I first discovered Ryan Holiday in 2014, he was a marketer, not a philosopher.

However, for all Nick Denton’s media savvy, he gossiped about the wrong person on that day in 2007. By 2012, Gawker’s revenues were close to $40 million. By 2005, Gawker and Denton’s other websites were making $120,000 in monthly advertising revenues. Using an army of young, hungry writers with a gift for witty yet contemptuous writing, Denton encouraged his bloggers to expose and ridicule public people and institutions they felt were hypocritical or hiding something. Whose secrets? Particularly those of the rich, powerful or famous. Specifically, exposing other people’s secrets via his websites, in the name of entertainment and transparency. Though it was billed as a tech-news site, Valleywag took its editorial direction from its parent company, the notorious gossip website, Gawker.īoth the Gawker and Valleywag websites were owned by an Englishman named Nick Denton.ĭenton’s background may have been in the tech industry, but his true interests were secrets and gossip. Now let’s examine the website that published the blog post. Indeed, when it came to any aspect of his personal life, Thiel was intensely private.

Despite coming out to his friends, family and colleagues, Thiel was still discreet about his sexuality in 2007, preferring to keep it a somewhat open secret in Silicon Valley. Having made his fortune as a founder of the online payments system PayPal, Thiel had also gained recognition as Facebook’s first major investor. In 2007, Thiel was already a wildly successful entrepreneur. To understand why this post was so significant, we must first learn a little more about both its subject, Peter Thiel, and its publisher, Gawker Media. Just 400 words long, this post is the genesis of a conspiracy that cost millions of dollars and lasted over nine years. That small beginning was a blog post published by a gossip website in 2007, which outed a tech investor named Peter Thiel as gay. So it was with the conspiracy at the heart of this story. “The beginnings of all things are small,” the Roman politician Cicero once said.

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