Versions Compared

Old Version 43

changes.mady.by.user Nathan Wailes

Saved on

compared with

New Version 44

changes.mady.by.user Nathan Wailes

Saved on

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

Child pages (Children Display)

...

36:52 - His articles have appeared in the WSJ, Washington Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 
37:02 - Also rated a national master in the US Chess Federation
39:30 - He brings up the example of hyperinflation in Argentina
- This talk was less than a year after he had started Confinity (Dec '98), only ~8 months after merging with Elon Musk's X.com.

 - The talk seems to explain how he came to start Confinity. It seems he probably got the idea from working as a trader.
- It's interesting to see Thiel talking before he had achieved his first success.

- He has few instances of saying 'umm' or 'uhh' or 'you know' or 'like'.
- His hair is kept neat, he's got a collared shirt and jacket.
- He uses a lot of ten-dollar words like 'impute', 'conglomeration', 'extent', 'government actors', 'lest', 'apparatus', 'arise', 'consolidation', 'under the auspices of', 'countervailing forces', 'exacerbated'
- He throws out a lot of examples, which is one of the heuristics I use to judge if someone has done their homework on an issue.
49:09 - He talks about just about everybody having internet-enabled cellphones within 5 years.
49:50 - He talks about how governments will have to decide if they're going to regulate the communications network (which we now see happening).


2004 - News story on the book 'The PayPal Wars'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YEXBEq9vJU
- There's a short clip of 


2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel

- the original concept of paypal was to allow for secure transmission of money between palm pilots via an IR link

- when trying to convince someone to move out to Palo Alto, have them come when it's really cold in their home state (e.g. January)
- they only hired friends at first
- they used a stunt to market their product: they transferred $3 million from the venture capitalists to their own account in front of news cameras

- how do you get customers?
1) advertising (billboards) - this wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
2) work with a big partner who will tell the world about your product; they met with mid-level execs at HSBC through a friend(?) and realized they wouldn't be able to help b/c the bank knew nothing about how to reach people (they were just getting into television advertising)
3) selling dollar bills for $0.85 - anyone who joined got $10; if you recruited someone you got an additional $10. they realized it was smarter b/c the cost per customer was $20, whereas the cost of online click ads was $60-100 per new customer.

paypal really started to take off b/c people selling stuff on ebay (another new company at that time) needed a way of paying each other.

they were burning $10 million a month in payments to new customers; rather than reduce the bonus they decided to raise more money
they merged with a competitor before looking for more money

their second round raised $100 million

section: "Coping with Fraud"
the guy on the right said that while paypal's business seems fairly simple on the surface, their real success is the ability to reduce fraud. there's a lot going on under the hood.
peter thiel described how paypal was in an arm's race with russian mobsters; as both paypal and the mobsters got more sophisticated, the mobsters got better at wiping out paypal's competitors, which made it impossible for paypal's customers to go anywhere else

section: "Viral Marketing"
Thiel - "if there's an easy formula, that's not a business you want to go into"

section: "Beating Competition"
Thiel - there are three important factors in UI: privacy, security, and convenience; if you get to 100% on any two of them the other one will be at 0%
- There was a whole academic circle of people who were writing papers about how digital cash would never work. lesson: just because a lot of people are saying something can't work doesn't mean they're right.

section: "Negotiating with Ebay"
Thiel - They were going to function as the cash registers to Ebay's Wal-Mart, but they were worried that Ebay would get some people on the inside to figure out how to handle the cash register portion themselves. Ebay had problems, though, dealing with the fraud-protection and everything else. They tried to create something, and it was secure, but it wasn't convenient, which is why it didn't work.
Thiel - They had a 1.5 year negotiating period, with 5 different rounds. The 4th round lasted 6 weeks straight, with many meetings having people throwing up numbers to back their proposed valuations



  • 2004.04.21 - Thiel talk @ Independent Institute - Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Global Marketplace
    • 9:30 - In the spring of 2000 they had issues.
      • Customers were calling in non-stop.
      • Russian mobsters were stealing. One of the core innovations was coming up with a way to stop this.
    • 12:00 - The biggest challenge was government regulation.
      • The government didn't help with the fraud issues.
      • Arcane, unworkable banking systems.
      • They were spending $500k a month in legal fees to deal with regulatory issues.
    • 15:00 - They effectively became the cash register for eBay: 2/3 of their volume was on eBay, and 2/3 of eBay's volume was via PayPal.
    • 15:30 - In the middle of the IPO
      • The SEC evaluator assigned to their IPO was looking for a reason to reject their IPO.
      • Thiel had to track down the bank commissioner in LA in the middle of Mardi Gras.
    • 19:30 - The way politics works is to identify a common enemy. It's only possible to achieve political benefits against enemies. It isn't possible for goods.
      • 20:30 - There isn't any way to identify a common enemy at a global scale.
    • 23:40 - End of Thiel's opening remarks.
    • 53:13 - Beginning of the Q&A period
    • 58:19 - Q: What's your take on outsourcing?
      • A: He quotes Adam Smith. There are a lot of internal challenges, but if we are to remain competitive we need to outsource.
    • 1:03 - Q: How do you ___ something spiritual practice (??)
      • 1:05:10 - A: Something about the Enlightenment.
    • 1:06:04 - Q: Would you describe the US as neo-mercantilist?
      • 1:08:30 - A: Mercantilism doesn't make sense.
    • 1:09:10 - Q: What are the stranger ideas you come across?
      • A: The strangest were outside the US.
        • A startup in France was called "Z-Bank" and had monkeys on the webpage and had an even shorter workweek.
        • Who do you want to copy? Who do you want to emulate? (this quote is worth writing up)
        • At the tail end of the boom people were copying crazy things from other people.
  • 2007.11.01 - WSJ - Interview with Peter Thiel
    • he thinks old-media companies should just try to k
    • "I tend to invest in companies because I think the people are intelligent" ("he's creative, he works hard, and he's smart")
    • 05:29 - Q: What do you think is overhyped? What worries you?
    • 06:40 - There are two big questions Facebook has: 1) will the growth continue, and 2) can they figure out a revenue model that is more-targeted, and that's the holy grail.
    • 08:25 - I think people talk too much about there being a bubble. You can't have a bubble if there are no IPOs. The venture capital industry is still living in 1999.
    • 09:50 - We had a boom and a bust. And people remember the bust more than the boom, so people are dominated by fear.

 [in 4 parts]
- Observation: "if [the tech sector in Silicon Valley] is not enough to actually drive things in California, is it really enough to drive things in the US and the world as a whole?"
- Observation: People talk about exponential growth in technology and yet median wages have remained stagnant. [My response: but you can have the same wage and yet be able to purchase more with it; e.g. buying stuff at Wal-Mart, having a computer exponentially faster than 20 years ago, having tons of free stuff on the internet, having an iPod instead of a tape deck, having an iPad instead of a notepad]
- His Q: Why has there been such an incredible disconnect between our technological innovation and the changes in our standards of living [time spent working, etc.]?
- His Q: Do you really know that things will continue to grow the way it has over the past 100 years?
- Him: If there was no growth people would need to work until they were 80 and save 40% of their income.
- His Observation: We have 30-50 times as many scientists and yet he doesn't think we're progressing much faster than at that time.
- He thinks investing in Google is basically a bet against new search technology
- He thinks China's big strength over the US is that they think 30-40 years ahead
- In Part 4 he seems to agree with John T Reed that things are seriously messed up in the world economy and there is going to have to be a correction in how the markets view the value of the dollar; he calls it the "disconnect between the real economy and the financial economy". He says this in response to a question on why his fund performed poorly in a particular year; if you look it up on wikipedia it was because he bet that the dollar would drop in value, and it didn't. John T Reed is making the same prediction [he thinks people are going to stop lending the US money, at which point the US will have to inflate its currency or say "we can't pay you guys who we owe money to, so we're not going to even try", aka defaulting on its debt].

terms referred to in the speech:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_ ... _recession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIX


  • 2008.12.05 - Hoover Institution - The U.S. Economy with Peter Thiel
    • "there's less volatility as a result of the shift to a service economy, but there's probably also less growth [because unlike a factory owner who can create a larger factory, it's harder to scale up your services] [I noticed the very same thing when thinking about the difference between working as a tutor and creating a factory]
  • 2009.04.13 - Cato Unbound - The Education of a Libertarian
    • "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
    • "Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane."
    • "The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
    • "I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms (...) Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom."
    • "Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans."
      • What I don't get about seasteading is that countries already exert tremendous pressure outside their borders through the use of sanctions and thread of military force (drones, etc.). What leads Peter to think that that wouldn't also hold true for seasteading? I guess it depends on what exactly he wants to do offshore.

------

...

  • 2013.07.01 - Effective Altruism Summit
  • 2014.01.16 - Churchill Club - World Chess Champ Magnus Carlsen, in conversation w/ Peter Thiel
    • You can find my full summary of the talk here: Magnus Carlsen
    • I'll just list Thiel's comments / questions here:
    • - This is all about asking Carlsen questions. Thiel asks great, great questions. Carlsen gives some great answers to Thiel's questions, some OK answers to audience questions.
    • The first few minutes are all 
    • 7:30 - Thiel: I was 7th in the US in the under-13 age category, but someone like Carlsen would be expected to beat me 100 times for every time I beat him (if we were both the same age).
    • 8:50 - Q from Thiel: When did you start playing chess? What year did you start to really improve?
    • 10:45 - Q from Thiel: At what point did you decide to focus on playing chess for a living?
    • 11:30 - Q from Thiel: Is there something you can tell us about the process by which someone becomes a great chess player?
    • 13:10 - Q from Thiel: Were there any chess players you particularly looked up to?
    • 14:30 - Q from Thiel: Has does one go about improving when you're at the level you're at today?
    • 15:30 - Q from Thiel: Do you think you have to learn chess as a kid, or can you learn it at any time in your life?
    • 16:10 - Q from Thiel: Is chess a sport, an art, or a science?
    • 17:00 - Q from Thiel: Is there any psychological aspect to chess?
    • 18:20 - Q from Thiel: Is there a physical fitness component? Do you find you play better if you're healthy?
    • 19:13 - Q from Thiel: How have computers changed chess in the last 30 years?
    • 21:50 - Q from Thiel: Have computers made chess more tactical?
    • 23:50 - Q from Thiel: You generally don't play against computers?
    • 24:38 - Q from Thiel: Do you learn the most from games you lose, or games you win?
    • 42:10 - Q from Thiel: How much do you think chess carries over to life?
      • 44:00 - Q from audience: 
      • 48:50 - Q from Thiel: Do you find you learn more from studying than from playing? Or is it a combination of both?
    • 50:30 - Q from Thiel: Where do you think chess is going to go in 20-30 years? Do you think it'll be fully solved?
    • 1:00:00 - Q from Thiel: Is playing too much blitz bad for your full game?


first few minutes are a profile of Thiel
05:00 - Q: How do we stop the NSA and other government agencies from tracking us?
A: We need to track what the government is doing.
- He says Snowden is both a traitor and a hero, and

07:00 - Q: Brave New World or 1984; which one is right?
A: He thinks BRNW is more likely (people controlled through pleasure)

08:15 - Q: Does a company like Google fear the government or vice versa?
A: The government is much bigger than Google. The government abuses are much bigger. The government has guns, Google does not have guns.

8:50 - Q: You talk about going beyond politics. You're not sure if the political system works anymore.
A: I have a schizo view on politics. It's very important, but it's also very hard to change.
He characterizes Bernanke's moves as money-printing.

10:15 - Q: When I first met all these Silicon Valley guys I thought they were liberals, but now I see them as more libertarian.

Glen Beck talks about how he hopes the gov messes with SV techies so they push back.

~13:00 - Thiel

13:45 - Q: Are entrepreneurs just in it for the money?
A: They're mostly in it for other reasons. [bs answer]

15:00 - Q: The people in the valley, what are their underlying principles?
A: They're generally politically naive. They're instincts are libertarian, but their politics end up liberal b/c that's what's cool.

16:00 - Q: How do we go from Marx / Che being cool to having Jefferson being cool? [bs phrasing of the question IMO, choosing the most controversial lib and the least controversial conservative]
A: I'm not sure.

18:00 - Thiel gives his common point about the masses fearing technology, with the popular movies being an example.

19:00 - Beck says something like "people are just tired of virtual everything"

20:00 - Beck rambles for a few minutes, I think he's talking about people being afraid of change

23:30 - !! Thiel talks about what replaces college. 

24:30 - Q: Do you know David Glertner?

24:50 - Thiel: I don't think there's a single answer. I don't think there's going to be a single alternative system.

25:20 - Q: You're talking about not having one system anymore. That gives people a lot of discomfort; I've been thinking about the shared experiences we used to have that are now gone. It seems everything is heading in that direction. Can you keep a culture together when it's fragmented that much.

A: I don't know.

27:30 - Thiel: One of the biggest political problems we have is political correctness. We need a diversity of ideas.

28:30 - !!! - Thiel: When people use the word "science" that's often a 'tell' like in poker, we have "social science" and "political science" but not "physical science". So I think "climate science" is a bit exaggerated.

30:00 - !!! - Beck points out that Thiel is a gay evangelical Christian. I didn't know he was Christian (or I forgot). That's bizarre.
Q: When people rip you apart from both sides of the political spectrum, how do you deal with that?
A: You try to ignore it.

31:30 - Thiel talks about his favorite interview question ("What's something that's true that most people don't agree with")

There's this interview question I always like asking people, "tell me something that's true that very few people agree with you on". It's a very hard question to answer. And it's not because people don't have answers, they actually have lots of answers to it. It's because they're uncomfortable answering it in the context of an interview, because the answer has to be something that the person asking you won't agree with, and we're always nervous about doing that. We always want to fit in, and this pressure to fit in is really powerful. 
32:50 - Q: How do we get libertarians and religious people to make peace?

Thiel talks for a few minutes about christianity

The last few minutes are them talking about how it's good to spend some time around people with different political opinions.

...

...


2014.09.10 - Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
http://danwang.co/why-is-peter-thiel-pe ... nnovation/
- good selection of quotes from talks Thiel has given
- also, good links to other talks by Thiel. I should merge that into this list.


2014.09.14 - BusinessInsider - Peter Thiel: Luck Is Just An Excuse For Not Working Hard Enough
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-th ... z3RyPRl21m
http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-th ... ard-2014-9

...



2014.10.07 - Stanford - Lecture 5 - How to Start a Startup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0dVHMpJlo
- This seems to be the same set of ideas found in Zero to One.

- Yay! Andrew Rohn (a YouTube user) summarized the talk:

00:53 Talk topic: If you're starting a company you always want to found a monopoly. Hence, "competition is for losers". 

1:00 Capturing value: Basic idea is to create x dollars of value and then capture some percentage y of that. e.g. Airlines have a much bigger pie than Google but Google has larger profit margins and so does much better.
4:30 The advantages of a monopoly.
10:15 How Google lies about their search/advertising monopoly position.
13:27 How to build a monopoly: Start with a small market and expand. Go after a small market that is ignored. e.g. Amazon went from books to a general store.
18:46 Characteristics of a monopoly: 1) proprietary technology - a technology that's an order of magnitude better 2) network effects 3) economies of scale 4) branding
23:05 Last mover advantage: most value exists far in the future. We overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability. Will the company still be around in a decade?
28:00 History of innovation: Historically, scientists never make money off their inventions. Their value was never actually captured. 
38:00 Critically examining the concept of competition itself.

Q&A
43:03 "Which aspects of a monopoly does Google et al have?"
44:55 "What do you think of lean startups and its iterative methodologies?"
46:42 "You talk about last mover advantage but that doesn't imply a pre-existing market i.e. no monopoly to be had?"
48:00 "How do you recommend stop seeing competition as validation?"

...

  • 2014.10.24 - Uncommon Knowledge - Peter Thiel on markets, technology, and education
    • 00:00 - 1:30 - Intro of who Thiel is
    • 1:40 - Thiel: My main idea is that there are going to be two main drivers of progress in the 21st century: globalization (copying things that work) and technological development. The west isn't creating new technology as rapidly as they should be.
    • 4:00 - Standing still isn't an option for the west.
    • 5:00 - Once we stop having growth, our democratic system starts to get very polarized. Democracy works better when everyone can agree 
    • 5:30 - Robinson: Zero-to-One is a how-to guide, but you also throw in lots of ideas that go against the consensus in Silicon Valley.
    • 7:17 - Quote from the book to prompt discussion: "Competitive markets destroy profits."
    • 8:00 - Paraphrasing of an idea: "There are only two kinds of businesses: monopolies, and those that never make any money." Thiel: "I think this is the fundamental difference in business."
      • 9:10 - Robinson brings up a counterexample: Ford had periods of profitability and unprofitability over its lifetime. So did they periodically have monopolies?
        • Thiel responds by saying that Ford did have a monopoly over their process at the beginning, but lately they've been reduced to a brand-monopoly, which is a weak form of monopoly.
      • 11:40 - R: How do you think through the question of brand when you're investing?
    • 12:20 - Conventional SV wisdom is to focus on the product; in the book, you say sales are as important as the product.
      • Thiel: There's just a general bias for people to overvalue what they're good at and undervalue what they're not good at. And SV is full of engineers.
    • 14:20 - Another piece of conventional wisdom is that planning isn't necessary; you say, "A bad plan is better than no plan."
      • Thiel: If your starting point is, "We have no idea what we're doing, we're going to figure it out as we go along", that's a very bad idea.
      • 15:27 - A good business plan is quite a bit more rare than talented people, so it's quite valuable when it comes along.
      • 15:30 - R: Do you apply this advice to your personal life? Did you have a 5-year plan when you were coming out of law school?
        • Thiel: Actually, no, I didn't, and that would be one of the piece of advice I would give to my younger self: plan a lot more. My bias was to not think about them; I treated education as a substitute for thinking about my future.
  • 2015.01.27 - The Independent Institute - Peter Thiel | Developing the Developed World: Entrepreneurship, Liberty, and the Future
    • 4:40 - 7:50 - Bio of Peter Thiel
    • 8:00 - "One of the challenges in writing a book about entrepreneurship or teaching a class on this is that there is sort of no formula. I think science always starts with the number '2'. It starts with experiments you can repeat, things you can do over and over again. But there's sort of a sense that every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be starting a social networking company; the next Larry Page will not start a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be starting an operating system. And so if you're trying to copy these people, you're in some sense not learning from them. And so I think one of the really big challenges in teaching or writing about entrepreneurship is, what can you say about being an entrepreneur at all when the key thing is always to do something new, different, that's not precisely been done before?"
    • 9:00 - He gives a good quote about his famous interview question.
    • 12:00 - He says he was once talked into trying to create a restaurant in San Francisco.
    • 12:45 - The monopoly issue isn't well understood because no company wants to talk about it. If you have a monopoly you don't want to talk about it (eg Google). 
      • 14:10 - The people who are in really competitive environments say that they will have a monopoly?
    • 14:50 - All happy companies are different because they found something unique to do, whereas all unhappy companies are alike because they're all doing the same thing.
    • 16:20 - He talks about how incredibly tracked his life was before he went into entrepreneurship.
    • 17:30 - People's identities were so wrapped up in their situation that they 
    • 18:10 - What does it mean for society that people who don't have Asperger's get talked out of their ideas?
    • 18:50 - He gives some anecdote about how Harvard MBAs tend to all end up gravitating to the same industry.
    • 19:55 - We find competition validating but it's counterproductive.
    • 20:50 - One of the questions he gets asked is, "What are the trends you're aware of?"
      • The general answer is, "All trends are overrated." (he seems to be referring to fads)
      • And the reason these "trends" or "fads" tend to be bad is that the very fact they're referred to as a trend is a sign of lots of companies going after the same opportunity, which indicates lots of competition.
    • 23:00 - He seems to say Google and Facebook were misclassified.
      • 24:26 - The big breakthrough was having your real identity on the Internet, and Facebook was the first company to break through that barrier.
    • 25:00 - You want to start with small markets and take that market first.
      • 25:33 - They got to 35% market share in the first 3 months.
      • 25:50 - Facebook got 60% market share in the first 10 days.
    • 26:00 - He talks about the clean tech companies.
      • 26:30 - One of the mistakes they made was to go after the entire market at once (?)
    • 27:30 - He thinks we need to have technology improve alongside globalization
      • He thinks the problem is the amount of regulation.
      • He thinks another problem is a general attitude of fear of new technology.
      • 30:50 - He uses the example of there not being a movie created in the past 25 years with a positive view of the future.
    • 33:20 - Switch to Q&A
    • 33:35 - Q: Let's hear about your failures.
      • A: It's not that clear how much people can learn from failure. (This is worth transcribing.)
      • 35:20 - He talks about how lots of people at PayPal learned that it's hard, but possible, to succeed. Whereas if you end up at a company that fails, you end up giving up. If you learn the lesson that it's easy, that's also not good. (This is worth transcribing.)
    • 36:40: Q: What companies do you think are worth betting on? What advice would you give an entrepreneur to help them unlock secrets?
      • Investing in most companies in the stock market, you're betting against technology, because these companies are not innovating.
      • (He doesn't address the second question.)
    • 38:50 - Q: What's something that you think is right that most people don't agree with you on?
      • He already gave a bunch of examples.
      • There is an imitation aspect to human nature that makes it difficult to be original.
      • "I don't think there's a formula." (This is worth transcribing.)
      • "Having some sense of mission is very valuable." 
      • He makes a very interesting point about how social entrepreneurship allows
    • 42:20 - Q: What's your opinion on Bitcoin?
      • (This is worth transcribing.)
      • Bitcoin created a new currency but they need to work on the payment system.
    • 43:30 - Q: What will happen when the education system blows up?
      • (This is worth transcribing.)
      • Bubbles always involve an abstraction. For example, education is not seen solely as an investment.
      • Education is a combination of an insurance policy with a zero-sum tournament.
      • [NW: I see it as a loan of credibility. It serves to account for the fact that we don't yet have a good global reputation system. In a village everyone would know how competent you are.]
      • The university is some kind of atheist church.
      • I don't think it will be replaced with a single alternate system.
    • 48:20 - Q: Is California a monopoly?
      • A: Yes.
      • The scary thing is that the regulators can go very, very far, and 
    • 51:00 - Q: What about your upbringing made you think differently?
      • A: Having different political opinions gives you practice being apart from the rest of society.

...