Peter Thiel, no doubt, wears many hats. He's an entrepreneur, startups investor, hedge fund manager, and astute businessman who co-founded Paypal -- on top of that, he's just knocked out a new book Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.
Speaking with Wired magazine editor David Rowan in London at an event on 25 September, Thiel said that "uniqueness", "secrets", and a monopoly on the marketplace were the key to successful startups.
Placing importance on the singularity of top-notch business ventures, Thiel explained that, "all happy companies are different, and all unhappy companies are alike in that they fail to escape the sameness that is competition."
According to Thiel, "every moment in the history of business and the history of technology happens only once." Breakthrough "zero to one" companies such as Google and Facebook have nailed this approach, as their succes means they're "not in direct competition with other companies". Essentially, they have a monopoly on the market, and their value as franchises stem from their possession of a product that is unique and non-existent in other parts of the world.
Thiel flagged top entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg as people who had built their businesses on unique ideas, and advised future innovators that, "if you're copying these people, you're not learning from them".
So for Thiel, a business based on original thinking, possessing the courage to debunk well-worn notions of truth is what's essential. "We've been taught that truth is conventional, but it's simply something that people agree on." What's important, Thiel said, is to "discover a new truth."
Thiel remained adamant that such truths are "hard but possible to discover". And although it might not always be obvious where to look, "there is always a secret at the core of every business," and that positive thinking and a belief in the future of innovation was key to unlocking it, and accelerating progress.
Capitalism and competition are antonyms in Thiel's eyes, and he stated that in order to avoid competition, as an entrepreneur or founder, "you always want to be building a monopoly". The business scene's a dog-eat-dog world, and according to Thiel, the last thing you want is to be "doing something where you're in ferocious cut-throat competition".
Sometimes it's also due to "psychological reasons" that entrepreneurs are "trapped in competitive cycles". Noting that there was something disturbingly "lemming" and "sheep-like" about human nature, Thiel said that it's because of such shortcomings that, "we are drawn to the reassuring nature of the crowd, to do things that lots of other people are doing".
He warned, however, that this collectivised behavioural pattern wasn't conducive to starting top-notch businesses, as when you're in a crowd, you'd be competing with the very same people whose presence you initially found reassuring.
Higher education -- of which Thiel is a long-standing critic -- is conversely one of the hotbeds of such "sheep-like" thinking.
These institutions promote an "ideology of competition" by fostering a competitive environment composed of various tests and hoops. Students must hoop-jump in order to get onto the same shortlist of elite US universities and jobs. This, according to Thiel, drives people to succeed without them questioning the value of their actions. "When you're focused on competition, you're always focused on beating the person next to you," he said. "You often lose sight of what's truly important, and what's truly valuable."
Ever the optimist, Thiel asserted that globalisation and the progress of technology were two important trends that needed to continue for a successful and peaceful 21st century. He stated that these were two very different vectors of progress -- the "x axis" standing for technology as it connotes intensive progress and going from zero to one; and the "y axis" for globalisation as it "involves copying things that work".
Giving a brief historical overview of the impact of technology and globalisation throughout the past century, Thiel stated that in the 50s and 60s, the notion of the world as divided into the "first" and "third world" was common. The "first world" represented the place where "change was happening," and the "third world" was the place which was "permanently screwed up or broken."
Thiel said that such notions had since been overturned and replaced by the terms "developed" and "developing" world. While derogatory and distancing "first" and "third" world terminologies have been debunked, Thiel stated that -- though they be pro-globalisation -- concepts of "developing" and developed" applied to different parts of the world were still dichotomous. "[These terms] are also implicitly anti-technological because they tell us that we are living in the part of the world that is developed, that is done and finished, where nothing new is going to happen," he said. "I think this is a conception of our world which we should resist very strongly. We should not even accept the idea that we are living in the developed world -- that we're living in some sort of end of technology era."
Stating the importance of pushing forward innovation in the West, he concluded, "we should always go back to the question, how do we go about developing the developed world."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
