Peter Thiel of PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Founder's Fund

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.

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")

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.

TechCrunch: Hi everybody I'm Josh Constine here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, and I'm here with Peter Thiel of Founder's Fund and Mithril Capital. Now, you've talked a lot about how you need to choose companies that might seem crazy at first to the average person and otherwise it'd be an idea that somebody had already taken. How do you tell the difference between crazy and crazy like a fox, something that will actually pan out? [Nathan: Great question!]

Thiel: Well you try to always evaluate the substance afresh. So, does the technology work? You can ask questions about, "What's the prehistory of the founders? Have they been working together for a while? Are they going to give up at the first sign of trouble?" So I think you want to always focus on the substance. There are no shortcuts.

TechCrunch: So you try to avoid coming in with biases about what can and can't work ahead of time.

Thiel: Yeah, there's always a temptation to come up with all sorts of one-sentence rules and we're as guilty of that as anybody, but what I think what's gone best is, you find something interesting about it, and then you try not to get to a yes-or-no decision right away. You try to really understand the substance, keep an open mind, and understand that. So substance over process, every time.

TechCrunch: So, surely a hard question to answer--because it's very generic and every startup is different--but when you hear an idea and you're wondering if it can really work, what is your go-to follow-up question to ask an entrepreneur pitching you about...what is there philosophy or long-term vision or how likely they are to succeed at it? [Nathan: Great question!]

Thiel: Well, you always want to get the team, the technology, and the business strategy. You have to get all three of those to work. And so if people want to talk about the technology, we'll talk about the people and the business strategy. So you go to the other two topics if they don't want to talk about them that much.

[...]

Thiel: I think the reality is that what's unusual about the tech industry in silicon valley is that the inventors are capturing anything at all. The history of innovation has been one where most of the people who invent things get nothing at all. And so the WRight brothers came up with the first airplane but didn't get rich. Or even the original Edison vs. Tesla, you could say Tesla was the greater inventor and that was the better way to go, but somehow Edison edged out Tesla. And so most innovation has not actually gone to the people who came up with things. To make money you have to do two things: #1 you have to create something of value for the world, and #2 you have to capture some fraction of the value you create. And often people have completely failed at doing the second. So I think Silicon Valley is very unusual in that there's this large class of innovative people that are actually able to capture some fraction of the value they're creating.

Q: What did you think when you first met Elon Musk?
A: Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven -- a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two.
It was kind of scary to be competiting against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000.

Q: What is one piece of advice you have for entrepreneurs today?
A: Start with focusing on a small market and dominate that market first.

Q: Which are your favourite books? (both fiction and nonfiction)
A:Lots and lots of them...
I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

Q: Why do you think more wealthy people don't fund anti-aging research? What do you think could be done to encourage them to do more?
A: Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it.

Q: Peter, what's the worst investment you've ever made? What lessons did you learn from it?
A: Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook.
General lesson: Whenever a tech startup has a strong up round led by a top tier investor (Accel counts), it is generally still undervalued. The steeper the up round, the greater the undervaluation.

Q: What is your view on bitcoin? will it replace the current financial system we have?
A: PayPal built a payment system but failed in its goal in creating a "new world currency" (our slogan from back in 2000). Bitcoin seems to have created a new currency (at least on the level of speculation), but the payment system is badly lacking.
I will become more bullish on Bitcoin when I see the payment volume of Bitcoin really increase. [Nathan - It's very interesting to read his caution here immediately after reading about how he regrets not participating in the Facebook Series B]

Q: What were you trying to say when you claimed you won't invest in founders who wear suits, when you have clearly done so in the past?
A: No absolute and timeless sartorial rules.
But, in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech.

Q: Who was the "Peter Thiel" in your time when you were 22? Would he have taken a meeting with you then? What advice would you have for a 22 year old hustler who wants to meet you.
A: At 22, I didn't think it was important to meet people.

Q: I have heard stories about you at PayPal not wanting to hire MBA's. And now we all know your stance on college. I have 2 questions.
Why did you refuse to hire MBA's?
Do you think there needs to be a change in K-12 education to lessen the demand for college?
A: 1 no absolute ban, just think most MBA's tend to be high extrovert/low conviction people -- a combination that in my experience leads towards extremely herd-like thinking and behavior 2 yes, I think K-12 should give people enough skills to be able to contribute towards our society -- it is failing because it does not even come close to this

Q: How do you feel about large investments going to startups that have many daily active users and no revenue? Why don't investors prefer products that have revenue?
A: The right strategy is often to scale users before scaling revenues.
While some of these startups may be overvalued, we need to resist the temptation to always think that we're seeing a redux of the 90s bubble wherever we look.

Q: Hi Peter, How would you advice founders when they have to split shares? How much for each founders?
A: No hard and fast rules, but if you don't want to split shares evenly then perhaps you should not be co-founders.

Q: Hi Peter, Do you think a successful early startup can be based exclusively outside of Silicon Valley (even outside of the US)?
A: Yes. It's more affordable, in almost all ways.
You miss out on the network effects of Silicon Valley, but sometimes these network effects lead to negatives as people end up behaving more lemming-like in the SOMA hotbed...

Q: How much of Zero to One was an organization of your thoughts from CS183 and how much was new content?
A: In the class, I wanted to teach everything I knew about business.
In the book, the goal was to pack this three-month class into a very disciplined 200 pages. There's a fair bit of new stuff, but the material is organized much better.
And, btw, I think that "organization of thoughts" is often the key to producing great content -- so they're not really separate categories.

Q: You mentioned in the Tim Ferriss Podcast that you think when startups fail it is simply a tragedy. Do you think anything can be taken out of it when the unfortunate does happen?
A: Unfortunately, not very much... Failure is typically so overdetermined that people never learn all the reasons for which they failed.

Q: 2 parter...1) Do you think everyone should learn to code, or at least startup founders? 2) What has been the most difficult mental barrier to your success?
A: I think people should start learning to code in junior high school. I am still a fan of the two-person founding team, with one more on the business side and one more on the technical side.
Second part: Even when one understands that exponential growth and exponential forces are incredibly important, it is still hard to internalize this. PayPal was growing at 7%/day at the time of the launch (Oct 99-Apr 2000, from 24 users to 1 million), and we did not fully fathom the rocket we were riding.

Q:"There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible." - Henry Ford
Do you agree with this rule? If so, what do you think will happen to companies in the long term as a result of not paying the highest wages possible?
A: Great rule, but you need a monopoly for this to work in practice. In super-competitive businesses, you cannot afford to pay people above-market wages -- e.g., a restaurant that does this will go out of business fast.
I think Google is implementing it the best in Silicon Valley today.

Q: Do you think that children are biased towards their parents' [potentially harmful] opinions because parents provide entirely for their livelihood (food, house, recreation, school, college, etc.)? Is this a problem with society? What can be done about this?
A: Yes, this is a problem -- but I suspect all alternatives to it are much worse.
In practice, the greater problem is horizontal, runaway peer pressure.

Well, it's always an important question how much of a role luck plays in startups or entrepreneurial success, and I think we're always a little bit too fast to say that it's all a matter of luck. As a venture capitalist, when I invest in these companies, when I've had high levels of conviction on companies, those have always been good investments, and when I thought to myself, "I don't really know if this is going to work, I'll just invest a somewhat smaller amount", those almost always fail. When I think of things as being like a lottery ticket, that's often an excuse for not thinking hard enough about what's really going on. I'm not saying there's no role for chance or luck in our universe, I am saying we shouldn't use it as an excuse to stop thinking when we can actually be thinking a lot harder about things.

At PayPal in March 2001 we did this discounted cash flow analysis and we concluded that three-quarters of the value of PayPal came from profits in the years 2011 and beyond. You have to somehow think about the distant future, because that's where most of the value exists, and if you say that it's just hazily uncertain and fundamentally unknowable, then you're sort of saying that most of the value of your company is completely...you have no handle on it at all. And that seems like a very odd thing.

Having a plan, thinking about the future is I think is always better than not doing it. When I learned to play chess in junior high school, one of the lessons was that 'a bad plan was still better than no plan at all'. And I don't think that everything in chess carries over to life but I think that's one idea that definitely carries over. [Nathan: A very similar idea was mentioned by Eisenhower: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."]

~14:00 - he talks about the old maps that made it clear where you could explore
- there are many secrets left to be discovered
25:30 - It's a team-effort.
26:00 - One of the most important questions is how well the people get along together. One of the most common reasons for these things to fail is that people don't get along.
26:30 - It's good for people to have known each other for a while.
28:00 - He thinks the slight correlation with asperger's is because "normal" people get talked out of their ideas.
29:00 - He says that people tend to follow these trends too late: people wanted to work for Milken in '89, 2 years before he went to jail; everyone wanted to work in the Valley in '99, right before it all blew up.

30:20 - One of the big mistakes people make is to have one of their first slides is the one that talks about how big their market is. He says this is a problem because you then have to compete a lot of company.
33:40 - Q: Why have there been so many successful companies started by PayPal veterans? A: I think it's because the people learned that it's 1) hard, but 2) possible to build a great business. People who have worked at other companies have the problem of learning the wrong lesson about point 1 or point 2.

51:30 - Q: What do you think about the valuations going on? He doesn't think there is a bubble going on because the public hasn't really gotten involved. He thinks the real bubble is with the government.

56:11 - The steeper the upround, the more the company is undervalued.
1:01:50 - He generally looks to the developed world for innovations because in the developing world you can just copy an existing idea.

1:05:12 - Q: Could you describe your first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg? A: He was 19, very quiet / introverted. We had done quite a lot of research before we knew about him on social networks, so the meeting wasn't really a make-or-break thing. The big question is, "Why didn't anyone in Boston invest?" Thiel thinks the reason is that many older people resent younger people who are going to outshine them.
1:07:40 - Q: What's your opinion of MOOCs? A: I think there's a huge problem with the education system but I'm not sure what exactly sure what the replacement is going to be.
1:09:50 - Thiel thinks the existing system is very similar to the church in the middle ages. He gives a GREAT explanation of his analogy.

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?"