Hereticon

Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by Mike Solana, a partner and the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund, self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programming spans immortality and life-extension research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, the ethics of defense technology, and ideological heterodoxy on questions the mainstream press is treated as having closed. Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel venture firm, bankrolls the conference.¹²³

Founding and the Solana Organizing Role

Founders Fund announced Hereticon in October 2019 through a launch that framed the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums. The Business Insider and Gizmodo coverage of the announcement described the planned program as including sessions on immortality, UFOs, and doomsday prepping. The inaugural event was delayed by the pandemic and held January 10 through 13, 2022, at a site kept private to facilitate what Solana described as a spirit of openness among attendees.¹²

Mike Solana is the conference's organizer and the public face of the project. Solana is a longtime Founders Fund executive who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, the Substack-based media outlet that covers the intersection of technology and politics from the Thiel-network perspective. The Atlantic profiled Solana in October 2024 as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading in what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. Solana's role at Hereticon places a single individual in control of the conference's programming, the Founders Fund media arm (Pirate Wires), and a senior position at the venture firm itself.³⁴⁵

Programming and the Thoughtcrime Frame

The conference tagline, "a conference for thoughtcrime," is drawn from the George Orwell 1984 concept and signals the programming posture: topics are selected on the basis that the mainstream institutional consensus has declared them closed, disreputable, or beyond discussion. The Reason magazine interview with Solana in May 2022 covered the framing in detail, with Solana arguing that deplatforming and tribalism had narrowed the range of ideas the mainstream press would entertain and that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse.⁴

The documented programming includes sessions on life-extension and immortality research (a long-running Thiel interest), UFO claims (including promoters of the extraterrestrial-hypothesis framing), doomsday prepping and civilizational risk, the ethics of defense technology development, and revisitations of Thiel's own 1995 essay The Diversity Myth on its thirtieth anniversary. The Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next has published Hereticon sessions including one titled "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel on The Diversity Myth. The UFO and life-extension programming overlaps with the broader Thiel-network interest in topics that sit at the edge of mainstream institutional credibility.³⁶

The Startups-as-Cults Frame

The conference's heterodoxy programming sits within a documented Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics as an organizing model. In Zero to One (2014), Thiel and Blake Masters write that "the best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults," distinguishing a successful startup from a cult only in that the startup is "fanatically right about something those outside it have missed." The Dialog society, the wider Thiel convening vehicle, placed a session on "cult-building" on its 2026 retreat agenda alongside sessions on artificial intelligence, sexuality, and preparation for war.⁷⁸

Hereticon's immortality, life-extension, and artificial-intelligence programming overlaps with the transhumanist and artificial-intelligence-risk concerns of the Rationalist Community, the Bay Area subculture Thiel funded from 2005 through the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Singularity Summit. That subculture produced its own formations described as cults, including Leverage Research and the Zizian group, and supplied part of the heterodox-intellectual population from which conferences of this kind draw.⁹

The Founders Fund Portfolio Overlap

The conference audience and speaker roster overlap with the Founders Fund portfolio and with the broader Thiel convening network. Founders Fund portfolio companies, the Dialog conference's technology-side membership, and the PayPal Mafia network all supply the population from which Hereticon's invitation list is drawn. The conference is private, with no published attendee list and no press access, which places it structurally closer to the Dialog format than to an open industry conference.¹⁷

Dialog, founded in 2006, convenes a wide invitation list across U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, and the military. Hereticon, founded in 2019, convenes a narrower list oriented to ideological heterodoxy and to the Founders Fund portfolio. The two share the Founders Fund financial base and the Thiel reputational base, and the smaller conference is more selective than the larger one.⁷