Mike Solana

Mike Solana is a Founders Fund executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication Pirate Wires, who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years. Solana holds three documented positions within the Thiel network: chief marketing officer of Founders Fund (formerly vice president), founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires (the media arm), and organizer of Hereticon (the "conference for thoughtcrime"). Across the three roles he operates the media-and-propaganda layer of the Thiel Influence Network, distinct from the commercial layer (the Founders Fund portfolio) and the convening layer (Dialog and Hereticon).¹²³

The Founders Fund Role

Solana's senior position at Founders Fund places him inside the operational core of the Thiel commercial network. His official title has evolved from vice president to chief marketing officer, and his tenure spans more than ten years of working directly with Peter Thiel. The Founders Fund team page lists him as CMO, and his role encompasses the firm's external communications, the Anatomy of Next podcast that Founders Fund produces, and the programming for Hereticon. The CMO role at a venture firm is structurally the position that controls the public framing of the firm's thesis, which in Founders Fund's case is the Zero to One monopoly-and-defense argument.¹

The Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next has published Hereticon sessions including "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel revisiting his 1995 essay The Diversity Myth on its thirtieth anniversary. The podcast functions as the audio-distribution channel for the conference programming that Solana curates, and the cross-publication (the podcast releasing sessions from the private conference) carries the Hereticon content to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees.¹

Pirate Wires and the Media Layer

Pirate Wires is the media outlet Solana founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, originally launched on Substack and later migrated to its own domain at piratewires.com. The publication covers the intersection of technology, politics, and culture from the Thiel-network perspective and has positioned itself as the in-house media voice of the Founders Fund network. Solana's own Substack bio describes him self-mockingly as "billionaire media tycoon and mayor of san francisco," a posture consistent with the publication's bombastic editorial register.³⁴

The launch mission statement, published as "Welcome to Pirate Wires," declared the outlet "an American media company writing at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture." The Atlantic profiled Solana in October 2024 as "The Most Opinionated Man in America," describing him as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading among what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. The Digg coverage of the launch characterized Pirate Wires as a "Founders Fund-backed media franchise" intended to replace the traditional venture-capital communication model (the polite TechCrunch launch piece) with direct ideological combat.³⁴⁶

The media-layer function is distinct from the convening function. Pirate Wires produces the public framing of the Thiel-network positions on tech-policy questions (deplatforming, content moderation, AI regulation, defense procurement) and distributes that framing through a subscription model that reaches a broader audience than the Dialog or Hereticon invitation lists. The Solana Reason interview (May 2022) laid out the editorial posture directly: Solana argued that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse, and the framing has structured Pirate Wires' subsequent coverage. The publication has run pieces defending portfolio companies and network principals under media scrutiny, including the "Substack Billionaire" piece defending Coinbase against New York Times coverage, and the recurring editorial line tracks the Founders Fund commercial and political positions across defense tech, cryptocurrency, and the anti-regulation frame.²³

Hereticon and the Convening Layer

Solana is the organizer and public face of Hereticon, the Founders Fund conference self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, with programming spanning immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, defense-technology ethics, and ideological heterodoxy. The Reason interview with Solana around the inaugural event covered the deliberate privacy of the venue, the refusal of press access, and the framing of the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums.¹⁵

Solana's role across the three positions (Founders Fund CMO, Pirate Wires editor, Hereticon organizer) places a single individual in control of the firm's public communications, the media outlet that frames its positions, and the private conference that convenes the principals. The Anatomy of Next podcast, which Solana also controls, distributes selected Hereticon sessions to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees, including the "Apocalypse Ball" session and the Thiel session revisiting The Diversity Myth on its thirtieth anniversary. The cross-publication carries the private conference's content into the public layer that Pirate Wires serves, and the combination of the three properties constitutes an integrated media-and-convening operation under a single editor.¹

The Atlantic Profile and the Public Persona

The Atlantic profile (October 2024) is the most detailed public record on Solana's role and worldview. The profile describes him as the public-facing voice of the Thiel network's positions on culture-war and tech-policy questions, positioned against what he frames as a captured mainstream institutional press. The profile documents the relationship between Pirate Wires' editorial line and the Founders Fund portfolio interests (defense tech, cryptocurrency, anti-regulation), and the recurring pattern in which the outlet's positions track the commercial and political positions of the network whose media arm it is.³

The profile's framing of Solana as "not an obvious fit for Founders Fund" when he joined documents the career trajectory: a humanities-and-media background figure who entered the venture firm and built the media infrastructure around it rather than building a portfolio of investments. The trajectory is the inverse of the Blake Masters or JD Vance pattern (operatives placed into electoral politics from inside the commercial orbit); Solana was placed into the commercial orbit to build its media arm, and the Atlantic profile is the document of that role.³