Looking to the future with smarts, money

SAN FRANCISCO - In the movie "The Social Network," the character of Peter Thiel is played as a slick Master of the Universe, a tech industry king and kingmaker with the savvy to see that a $500,000 investment in Facebook could mint millions later.

Reality is a little more rumpled.

On a recent December night, Thiel walked, slightly stooped, across a San Francisco stage to make a pitch to an invitation-only audience of Silicon Valley luminaries - investors and innovators who had scored sometimes huge fortunes through a mix of skill, vision and risk-taking.

The billionaire PayPal co-founder didn't tell them about the next big startup. He wanted them to buy into a bigger idea: the future.

A future when computers will communicate directly with the human brain. Seafaring pioneers will found new floating nations in the middle of the ocean. Science will conquer aging, and death will become a curable disease.

If anything can transform these wild dreams into plausible realities, he believes it is the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley - the minds and money that have conjured the technological marvels that have already altered everyday life.

"Do we try to pursue ideas that are weird and have optimism about the future, or do we give up on all new things and compromise?" he asked.

A breakthrough

Sitting before him in the audience were, among others, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and technology publishing guru Tim O'Reilly.

As venture capital in Silicon Valley chases the next big mobile app or group discount service, Thiel was asking for them to fund technological breakthroughs that some believe in fervently and others see as sheer fantasy.

He even has a name for it: Breakthrough philanthropy.

Instead of just giving to help the less fortunate here and now, Thiel said, his fellow moguls should put their money toward seemingly far-fetched ventures that he believes could improve the lives of everyone for good.

Gathered on the stage were eight groups that Thiel thinks are on the right path.