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Ken Howery is a co-founder and partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management.
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Career
Howery graduated from Stanford University in 2000 with a B.A. in economics. That same year, he co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Elon Musk, and Max Levchin. From 1998 to 2002, Howery served as PayPal’s CFO. Following PayPal’s acquisition by eBay in 2002, Howery served as eBay’s Director of Corporate Development until 2003. Howery then rejoined Thiel in 2004 at Clarium Capital Management, where he served as vice president of private equity, as well as a member of the research and trading teams.
In 2005, Howery and Thiel, along with fellow PayPal alumnus, Luke Nosek, started Founders Fund. He currently serves on the boards of Quantcast and ZocDoc. In 2010, Venture Capital Journal named Howery one of the Top 10 VCs under 36.
Howery has lectured on entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and Stanford, and has helped students at UC Berkeley and UT Austin's McCombs School of Business to develop business models.
Public Engagement
In March 2012, the World Economic Forum named Howery a Young Global Leader, a community of “socially-minded men and women selected under the age of 40, who operate as a force for good to overcome barriers that elsewhere stand in the way of progress." He is also a member of the Selection Committee for the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers Program.
Howery is a member of The Explorers Club, a non-profit group that promotes scientific exploration. In 2016, Howery stated that he had visited “eighty-six or eighty-seven countries.”
Howery serves as an advisor to Kiva, a 501(c)(3) charity organization which enables people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in over 80 countries. He is a member of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, which has a stated goal of increasing the United States' economic competitiveness in the global marketplace.