White House taps Michael Kratsios, formerly chief of staff at Thiel Capital, as deputy CTO
Context & Ripple Effects
After Thiel struggled to recruit the tech elite to the incoming Trump team, the White House turned to someone already inside Peter Thiel's orbit: Michael Kratsios, chief of staff at Thiel Capital, now named deputy CTO. The hire gives the Office of Science and Technology Policy — which the related coverage shows was running without a director — a senior tech-policy hand drawn directly from a Thiel-founded firm.
In hindsight this appointment is the entry point of a long arc: Kratsios went on to be nominated as the first US CTO in 2019, and by 2024 Trump had picked him to lead OSTP outright alongside a16z's Scott Kupor at OPM.
First-order effects
- Kratsios steps into the deputy CTO role immediately, giving the director-less OSTP a de facto tech lead drawn from Thiel Capital rather than from government or big-tech ranks.
Second-order effects
- The appointment validates the Thiel network's recruiting pipeline when broader Silicon Valley outreach stalled, making former Thiel associates a go-to talent pool for White House technology jobs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, venture-capital operators keep ascending to confirmed federal science-and-technology posts — Kratsios's path ended with a Senate-confirmed OSTP directorship focused on countering Beijing on AI, a template for how VC backgrounds become credentials for national tech policy.
The trend: Silicon Valley venture networks, and the Thiel orbit in particular, are becoming a standing recruitment channel for US government technology policy leadership.