| Child pages (Children Display) |
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Questions for Thiel
- He should make the "Vision of the Future" movie.
Books to check out
- The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
- IIRC this is rec'd in the Milken Institute debate
...
1995 - Amazon - The Diversity Myth
1995, 1996, 1998 - Independent Institute - Articles by Peter Thiel
...
Thiel's talk begins at 35:54.
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.
...
- 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.
- A: The strangest were outside the US.
- 9:30 - In the spring of 2000 they had issues.
- 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.
...
- 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 threat 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. [Later: It may also be the case that while countries like the US could impose their will on a seasteading nation, that a seasteading nation could kind of 'fly under the radar' and not draw the full attention of the US public / media to such an extent that it would force US politicians to act against the seasteading nation. So, for example, Asian countries can get away with labor practices that have been outlawed in the US because the US public hasn't been riled up to demand action against those Asian countries for doing those things.]
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| Child pages (Children Display) |
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Questions for Thiel
- He should make the "Vision of the Future" movie.
Books to check out
- The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
- IIRC this is rec'd in the Milken Institute debate
Quora
How did Peter Thiel build such a great team at PayPal?
http://www.quora.com/How-did-Peter-Thie ... -at-PayPal
What strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter / Max / David have at PayPal?
http://www.quora.com/What-strong-belief ... is?share=1
A few key elements that were unorthodox:
Extreme Focus (driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company. (Although I resisted some of this approach during the PayPal years, I am now a proponent of it and have even devised a theory of why it is crucial.)
Dedication to individual accomplishment: Teams were almost considered socialist institutions. Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea. If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation). As a result, David enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient. Our annual review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on "avoids imposing on others' time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary meetings."
Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal: We were expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor. To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to "come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream." Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted: "I was a 22-year-old whippersnapper, and I remember firing off this e-mail that disagreed with the entire executive staff," says Yelp's Stoppelman. "I didn't get fired--I got a pat on the back." Peter did not accept no for answer: If you couldn't solve the problem, someone else would be soon assigned to do it.
Radical transparency on metrics: All employees were expected to be facile with the metrics driving the business. Otherwise, how could one expect each employee to make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration). Even after we had our IPO, Peter impelled our legal counsel to allow us to continue 95% of this practice (basically stripping the explicit revenue line off of the printout).
Meritocratic opportunity & opposition to traditional general management: Just as responsibility for initiatives was frequently re-allocated based upon performance, so was "management." Peter and Max crusaded to replace under-performing senior colleagues, which introduced some fear and less stability into the office, but, also forged new opportunities for new stars promoted from within to thrive. Peter and David also were opposed to general managers or hiring people whose core skill was "managing." People were promoted based upon their technical proficiency at a given role--i.e. the best engineers would manage engineering, the best product people who be running product, etc. I still recall concluding my first week at PayPal by jogging around the Stanford campus on a Saturday afternoon with Peter when he explained this philosophy to me; any other approach he argued would breed resentment by talented employees. This approach was perceived as radical in 2000, by now it is much more "acceptable" in the consumer Internet realm, at least.
We did not invest in many other traditional management techniques (which are poorly suited for managing talented employees anyway). As David summarized, one's prestige at PayPal was measured by how few people could stop you from proceeding with a new idea.
5) Vigorous debate, often via email: Almost every important issue had champions and critics. These were normally resolved not by official edict but by a vigorous debate that could be very intense. Being able to articulate and defend a strategy or product in a succinct, compelling manner with empirical analysis and withstand a withering critique was a key attribute of almost every key contributor. I still recall the trepidation I confronted when I was informed that I needed to defend the feasibility of my favorite "baby" to Max for the first time.
http://www.atrader.com/manager-profile/ ... al-markets
1995 - Amazon - The Diversity Myth
1995, 1996, 1998 - Independent Institute - Articles by Peter Thiel
| Date Published | Title | Main Idea |
| 3/13/1998 - | The IMF’s Big Wealth Transfer | |
| 3/10/1998 - | Internet Shakes Up Complacent Press | |
| 9/1/1996 - | The Case Against Affirmative Action | |
| 6/17/1996 - | Public Relations 101: Cardinal Vices | [Stanford administrators] developed a “Strategic Communication Plan”—a secret document outlining how to deal with alumni, the media, etc.—the plan leaked to local media and prompted an outcry. (...) The centerpiece of Stanford’s marketing strategy is a list of key words for faculty and administrators to repeat when dealing with the public. (...) While urging faculty and administrators to trumpet Stanford’s “diversity,” it warns that “an institution must speak with one voice, not many"...[O]fficials are urged to tout alumni excellence, but the plan itself displays naked contempt for the intelligence of former students. (...) The document identifies Stanford’s “independent skeptical faculty culture” as a major obstacle to conveying a positive image. (...) Official communication “vehicles”...include the slick alumni magazine and sporting events...[to keep] alumni from looking at the actual workings of the university. (...) All in all, not a good reflection on [the] university. |
| 2/15/1996 - | The Cost of Multiculturalism | |
| 12/26/1995 - | Sexual Revolution’s Puritan Perplexities | [A]t the same time the university promotes the values of radical exploration and experimentation, its conduct policy discourages more conventional gender relations. The new puritanism sometimes manifests itself in open hostility to the dating scene. (...) Extreme feminism and 1960s-style liberation are less pursuits in their own right than reflections of the same anti-Western ideology. The underlying goal was best expressed by activists at Stanford several years ago in the form of an angry chant, an opening shot in the culture war that is now a constant reminder of its stakes! “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.” |
| 10/20/1995 - | An Open Letter to President Casper | |
| 10/12/1995 - | Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day | |
| 10/9/1995 - | Tuition $100,000, Education Optional | |
| 9/25/1995 - | Freshman Disorientation | |
| 9/1/1995 - | College Sticker Price: $100,000, Education Optional | |
| 9/1/1995 - | How the West Was Lost at Stanford | (Apparently this an excerpt from "The Diversity Myth", according to a note at the bottom of the article) just as it had been celebrated for Western Culture at the beginning of the decade, so would Stanford, by the end of the Eighties, become notorious for doing away with the commitment (...) A large part of the problem was (and is) generational. Many of those student radicals who had turned their backs on Western values in the 1960s became tenured radicals in the 1980s and 1990s. (...) As was well-reported at the time, this inchoate movement centered its complaints around the fact that most of the books studied in the Western Culture program had been written by “dead white males.” (...) Whereas the Western Culture canon had been based upon a belief in universalism—the belief that the insights contained within the West’s great works were potentially available to everybody—the new curriculum embraced particularism: what one may know is determined by the circumstances of his birth. This was the crux of the whole debate. The Western Culture protestors were attacking not just “dead white males” but the idea of universalim itself. They rejected the idea that certain truths transcend the accidents of birth and these objective truths are in principle available to everyone—whether young or old, rich or poor, male or female, white or black. (...) The course instructors ignored the fact that the raison d’etre of philosophy is the discovery of transcultural truth, and that ipso facto the discipline is predominately a Western pursuit. (...) CIV’s amorphous mission—to “Broaden” the experience of students-should not, however, be confused with “anything goes.” Rather, the new canon is vague precisely so that teachers can canonize their personal beliefs. (Basically they go into great depth on the series of events around the curriculum change.) |
1999.10.20 - The Independent Institute - Virtual Money, Privacy, and the Internet
Thiel's talk begins at 35:54.
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.
- A: The strangest were outside the US.
- 9:30 - In the spring of 2000 they had issues.
- 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 threat 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. [Later: It may also be the case that while countries like the US could impose their will on a seasteading nation, that a seasteading nation could kind of 'fly under the radar' and not draw the full attention of the US public / media to such an extent that it would force US politicians to act against the seasteading nation. So, for example, Asian countries can get away with labor practices that have been outlawed in the US because the US public hasn't been riled up to demand action against those Asian countries for doing those things.]
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- 2011 - BigThink - How to End the Google Monopoly
- 2011 (sometime between Fall of 2010 and Spring of 2011) - Into the night with Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel
- VERY VERY interesting, you get a real sense of what these guys are like to hang out with.
- You get to see Peter play chess (he gives his rating as around 2300)
- At the end Thiel talks about Buffett
- I need to go back through this whole thing and write up a synopsis and write down the main quotes.
- Summary:
- Intro of Gary
- Intro of Peter
- Initial meeting
- 3:50 - Gary tells the camera that they're working on a book that argues that the rate of technological improvement has slowed.
- "We're working on a book with the tentative title, 'The Wall of Fake Values', and we're arguing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the human race goes through the slowest development in technologies. Because in the last 30 years, we have not seen a breakthrough technology at the pace we saw it before."
- 5:15
<Shot from Kasparov's talk at Google>
Kasparov: "I believe that chess is a unique playing field to look for the combination of the machine's power and a human's abilities. So it's like, you know, to solve the Moravec's paradox, because it's exactly what happens, we're good at something that machines are bad at, and vice versa."
</Google talk>
Thiel: "Well, you know, it was the case at PayPal that we found that you needed this human-computer combination to solve the fraud problems. And so I think that it's been very under-explored as an approach."
K: "Oh yeah, absolutely, and the example I brought to Googlers is, it was very natural, so why not, to maximize the effect of the search, by adding a tiny element of human...not intuition...but visualization. (He takes a deep breath.) Great reservations."
T: "The Google ideology is that computers will replace humans in the next 20 years, 30 years."
K: "It's a bit odd, because certain things you could very quickly, if you accept that man plus machine is a solution."
- 3:50 - Gary tells the camera that they're working on a book that argues that the rate of technological improvement has slowed.
- At the Colombia robotics lab
- At the chess club
- At the Empire State Building / Human Rights Foundation
- Eating dinner
- 2011.10 - IntelligenceSquared Debates - Too Many Kids Go To College
- Overview of the debate.
- The pro-college argument:
- 0:35 - College grads earn ~$20,000/yr more than high school graduates, ~$500,000 over their lifetime.
- 0:45 - 9.7% of HS grads are unemployed, only 4.2% of college grads. "So going to high school and not college doubles your chance of being unemployed." ← Hmm....
- 0:59 - With globalization, many of the manufacturing jobs that HS grads used to be able to get are gone forever, "and employers are looking for the kinds of cognitive skills we associate with college graduates."
- 1:22 - A liberal arts education is likely to produce a superior electorate, better able to adapt to change.
- 1:50 - The con-college argument:
- 1:55 - Only a small percentage of people have the aptitude to do well at colleges of reasonable quality.
- 2:15 - For the students who are not qualified, college becomes an extended adolescence, and at best a remediation for bad high schools.
- 2:20 - They're not becoming employable with the skills of expository writing, quantitative reasoning, the scientific method, or primary research.
- 2:30 - Such students would do better at vocational schools, like those in Germany in Switzerland. In those countries only 20% of students complete four-year degree programs.
- 2:55 - For the most-elite students, college may prove an impediment to creative thinking or a distraction from their entrepreneurial drive.
- The pro-college argument:
- 3:50 - Intro of the speakers and explanation of the debate format.
- 7:50 - Peter gives his opening remarks.
- 7:50 - When he was starting PayPal he heavily favored people from good schools.
- "Throughout the '90s I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount, we should only hire people who went to the best schools, and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal, and I thought this was the most important thing in our society."
- 8:25 - "I saw so many very-talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinarily well; in some ways they were often more creative. They were not laden down with these enormous college debts that were somehow forcing people to take better-paying jobs that were more remunerative but were more boring and track them into things that were not as interesting or important. That were discouraging people from doing things in nonprofit work, or on the more-entrepreneurial side."
- 9:00 - The cost of college has gone up tremendously. After inflation, it costs ~4x as much (inflation-adjusted) as it did 30 years ago to go to college.
- 9:45 - We are experiencing something of a bubble in education. (...) It is characterized by two things: 1) runaway costs, (...) 2) an incredible psycho-social dynamic where you cannot question it. (...) This is the one thing people still really believe in our society.
- 11:10 - "an enormous misallocation of resources"
- 11:15 - Student debts at this point total over $1 trillion. And when you look at how well people are doing who come out of college, they're still doing pretty well, they're still doing better than they used to, but the outperformance has been going down. It's been going down since about 2000.
- 11:50 - The median wage for lawyers is $62,000, which isn't that great when you've taken on $250,000 in law school debt.
- 11:57 - There are only about 9% of the people who study pre-med have slots available to them in medical school; the other 91% are wasting their time. And somebody should have told them that their freshman or sophomore year, and not waited until their senior year or several years post-college to figure that sort of stuff out.
- 12:20 - There are millions of people who have college degrees who are doing unskilled work. (...) There are 6100 people in the US who have PhDs and are doing janitorial work.
- 12:45 - We need to figure out, how do we create more jobs, how do we create more good-paying jobs, we don't have enough of either in our society. While education is linked to them, it's not this absolute thing. What we want to question is that education is an absolute good, or an absolute necessity.
- 13:27 - We're not saying that nobody should go to college. We're not saying that college is categorically a bad thing, we're not saying that everyone should drop. We're just saying that too many people are going to college. (...) We need to make this a much more deliberate and careful choice. (...) Think more about your future. Do not think about education as something that's an automatic ticket to the future.
- 14:09 - If I had to do something over again, having gone to Stanford, I probably would still go to college, even with the higher costs, I didn't have any great ideas of what to do instead, I would probably have done the exact same thing as I did in the late '80s, even with all the problems, but one thing I would try to do very differently, is not accept the answer that this was the automatic thing. That this was the thing you should do without thinking. I would have tried to think about what I want to do with my life as a senior in high school and a senior in college and not simply have more education be the automatic default answer for everything.
- 7:50 - When he was starting PayPal he heavily favored people from good schools.
- Overview of the debate.
- 2011.11.28 - New Yorker - No Death, No Taxes
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- 2012 - Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012
- 2012.02.21 - Harvard Business School - John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum - A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Niall Ferguson
- 2012.02.21 - Panel w/ Peter Thiel and Aubrey de Grey
- It's a bit of a meh discussion.
- ~11mins -
- 1) He says that he was very serious about chess in high school, and it was when he saw the computers getting better than the humans that he realized that maybe he wasn't spending his time in the most valuable way.
- 2) He thinks that there are too many smart people in physics (ie some of them should be in other fields)
- 12:45 - If you try to chase status or money for their own sake, you probably won't succeed. It's the guys who love the process who make it.
- 2012.03.30-31 - World Affairs Council - Peter Thiel and Charles Bolden on The World in 2050: What is the Next Big Idea?
- 2012.07 - Fortune - Dinner and Debate with Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel
- There's an AMAZING segment where Thiel rips into Schmidt for not spending more of their $50 billion in cash to innovate. Schmidt responds very candidly: "What you find out when you get to our level is that there are barriers that aren't cash barriers." (hiring, regulation)
- 2013.03.19 - Credit Suisse - Developing the Developed World
- 2013 - SXSW Interactive - Peter Thiel: You Are Not a Lottery Ticket
- 24:40 - He shows his graph of how nobody knows what to do with money:
- 1) sell company shares, make money
- 2) give money to large bank
- 3) large bank gives money to portfolio of institutional investors
- 4) institutional investor gives money to portfolio of stocks
- 5) each company seeks to generate free cash flows
- 6) repeat
- 26:30 - We prefer investing in companies that are able to reinvest all their profits. If a company is just accumulating money it suggests they don't know what to do next.
- 24:40 - He shows his graph of how nobody knows what to do with money:
- 2013.04.29 - Milken Institute - In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen
- General:
- The issue to be debated: "Is innovation accelerating or decelerating?"
- IMO Andreessen does a much better job of presenting his opinions. The nature of his evidence feels more convincing, and I like how he pre-emptively acknowledged weaknesses in his evidence.
- In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Marc admits that he spent weeks preparing for the debate. You can see in the debate that he has a lot of notes, while Peter doesn't have any notes.
- 1:19 - The moderator explaining Thiel's side: "Nobody recently has come up with an invention that's had as much impact as the lavatory, with its clean lines and its sort-of intuitive user interface. And although there have been advances in communication and computing, elsewhere there's been little to match the car, the telephone, the radio, and antibiotics, as well as the humble loo, and they all sprang from late 19th century and 20th century minds."
- One thing to note about the inventions the moderator mentions is that people may be unconsciously discounting the amount of time it took those inventions to reach their current state from the year they were "invented".
- Also, I suspect that people tend not to be aware of the way life was before the inventions came out, and how people had been able to serve the same need that the invention serves. So, for example, I think I've heard people ask, "Wow, what did people do before there was television?", and not know that before television existed, the radio was basically the television; the family would gather around the radio and listen to shows in the evening, the same way they watch television. So when people are considering the impact of an invention, they try to imagine what their lives would be like without the invention nowadays, which isn't an accurate picture of how the invention changed the lives of the people who were alive when the invention first came out.
- The fact that mobile phones can be afforded by some of the poorest people in the world seems like a pretty significant advance.
- 4:30 - Thiel makes the point that "almost all" movies portray technology as a bad thing.
- My response: Movies try to make people feel emotional, and one of the emotions they like to tickle is fear. People also like novel experiences, and science fiction is a good way to tickle that desire. So when you put those together, you can end up with a situation where some new technology is used as a source of fear. It seems likely to me that this isn't a result of malice or fear felt by the movie's creators.
- 5:10 - Thiel hypothesizes that one reason the public feels antipathy towards technology is that it hasn't been "delivering the goods".
- Ex: Phones are used for games (Angry Birds), sending pictures of cats to other people, Foursquare. And he contrasts that with "riding a subway from the 19th century".
- General:
- 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?
- 2014.02.04 - 5.16 - Thiel Macro v. David Ryan Brumberg
- If you look at Exhibit 1 of the complaint, it has the employment / compensation agreement, and the agreement seems to mention (some of?) the money in the fund: "Your 'Trading Bonus Amount' means an amount equal to 10% of (x) your team trading account's balance as of December 31, 2013, minus (y) $49,820,482 which was your team trading account's balance as of January 1, 2013..."
- I'm not sure what a "team trading account balance" is. If these guys were hired to start some new 'quant' subteam within the larger 'Thiel Macro' fund, then the $50 mill may just be a fraction of the total amount in the fund.
- 2014.05 - The Veritas Forum - The Merits of Indefinite Life Extension
- 2014.08? - Glenn Beck Interviews Peter Thiel
- Beck doesn't give a great interview IMO, he doesn't seem to know enough about Thiel to ask very interesting questions.
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.
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- 2014.09.10 - TechCrunch Disrupt (SF) - Interview
- Great back-and-forth
- She asks him what he thinks about the SV tv show
- 2014.09.10 - TechCrunch Disrupt (SF) - Backstage
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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
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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?"
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