This was the most interesting of this series of notes yet.
And the conclusion was the weakest.
Thiel seems like a pretty creepy character. When you have enough FU money, you can indulge a really skewed view of the world (former Intel exec comes to mind). And this series of lectures illustrates Theil's. He thinks someone, a young and naive (pre-university) prodigy, is going to make him a wealtier VC by sharing with him their "secret" idea. He criticizes education and America's lack of meaningful innovation, yet he's made wealthy by vacuous ideas of "innovation" like Facebook. Then look at what he's contributed in the way of innovation. What are his qualifications as an "expert"? An online payments company and a company that analyzes data from the web to try to find "terrorists". This is innovation? We should hope his program participants will aspire to do better.
In his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector? As long as they have lots of capital under their direction, does it matter?
When you are wealthy people will listen to you, no matter what you say. Alas, it may encourage the speaker to believe their own hype even more. Thiel is taking full advantage of this privilege.
Gotta love these ~30 minute old accounts with 7 karma howling at the moon that the neither the first successful online payments company, nor the most successful social network in Internet history, nor a ~$100billion/year big data company are 'innovative'.
They may not be nuclear fusion or the perpetual motion machine, but they're more innovative than 99% of what everyone else will ever do.
Your point about wealth buying you a soapbox was interesting, but you went off the rails with that middle paragraph.
I think this hyper-"ironic" everything-bashing when it comes to innovation is a very low variety of discourse.
It's true that most of these social media startups are overvalued garbage that are going to prove themselves to be career graveyards (or sandtraps, at the least) when the tide goes out. And the people who join these unimaginative VC darlings for 0.02% of the pie (with preferences against that equity) are going to lose big time. That said, the reflexive "<X> isn't a real innovation" attitude when X is the solution to a real problem (e.g. self-driving cars, fraud detection, or even well-designed smart-phone interfaces) is a bit annoying. It may not be the flying car, but this X is usually something that came out of a lot of hard work on a problem that's just much more difficult than it seems it "should" be.
I think there's a resentment that builds in a lot of people due to a discrepancy between the real forces that produce technological improvements and the popular press. Reality: technological innovation is slow and incremental, with one seemingly insignificant change making another step possible, and that making another step feasible... until there is eventual macroscopic change, over time. It's gradual and, on the surface, doesn't appear that interesting. Popular depiction, for a contrast: visionary businessmen and "technologists" and "hackers" are driving the future. The backlash against that is that people single out these "visionaries" (many of whom are overrated) and denigrate everything they've accomplished as "not a real innovation". There's truth in the matter of these "visionaries" being overrated, but on the other hand, that doesn't mean that technological progress isn't happening. It's just gradual and unpredictable, and often fails to emerge where we want it. Technological progress actually pushes through on its own terms, rather than being pulled where wanted. For example, human transportation has been stagnant in price and quality (in the US) since 1960. That's a real morale problem on a national scale. But to single out Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as "not real innovators" because they haven't cured cancer or delivered $40 worldwide airfares is a big of a leap.
So, all you have to say about Peter Thiel is that his ideas are screwed up without reason why and that his credential/track record didn't match up what you think is innovative?
If you're going to criticize Thiel, show us reasons why his ideas are wrong.
If he wants to show his ideas are right, it is on him to prove it with evidence. Anyone with a loud microphone can talk endlessly. It is easy to cherry pick examples to support your idea.
(It's not what I think is innovative. Who cares what I think? I'm just some commenter on Hacker News with a green account. Thiel himself criticized the iPhone and by extension similar Silicon Valley products as not being the type of "innovation" he thinks America is capable of. I'm suggesting he's hardly in a position to make that criticism given that he himself benefits from this meaningless stuff SV churns out.)
his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector?
Just looked at it and it would seem that they were, presuming that you mean Brian Slingerland of Stem CentRx, Balaji Srinivasan of Counsyl, and Brian Frezza of Emerald Therapeutics from the lecture;
No, I meant a panel of VC's that occured some time prior to the date of the lecture, not the panel at the lecture. The speakers at the lecture were not VC. But I can't find the reference to it now. So I guess ignore that comment.
This is actually pretty interesting, not necessarily because I think it provides any particularly profound insights, but because it gives an indirect account of how Thiel sees himself. Being an extreme insider and yet at the same time an extreme outsider implies a polarizing personality. For someone to think they see this trait in themselves is seemingly a contradiction, it's almost doublethink to consider oneself both repulsive and charismatic at the same time, or both an idiot savant and a polymath.
I am still thinking whats true and whats not in the text though...
Modern day scapegoats e.g. founders are just humiliated (Gates) and fired (Jobs) but not killed compared to earlier times scapegoats, who were actually sacrificed. So the question is, what kind of forces brought about the changes that made present times more civil?
So in a guaranteed civil environment, where the sacrificial lamb will never actually be sacrificed, but the most likely risks are not being able to make it (failed venture) or getting blamed and fired in a venture going downhill after hitting a peak, won't it make the averages go and try out things with a mind set 'if it works great, if it doesn't well the next time...'?
Heck even Google founders did try to sell it to Yahoo very early on. That's my chosen example of an average behavior, to counter the chosen examples in the OPs text.
So its all very interesting to read. But don't know what to do with it. But one thing I am sure of is that dedicated work and self sacrifice (like not wasting too much time enjoying here, and instead actually coding/working) does pay in some form down the line!
Addendum: Would want to add though, that my take away from the notes was extending the innovation period of a Startup. Not yielding to beaureucracy. If the intrigue was built to just drive in that point, it was well worth then.
The victim/god identity, along with the scapegoat theory of culture described in the lecture, derives from the interesting French thinker (and Stanford prof) René Girard.
Expanding on what you're saying, I think it's important to get people to curb the knee-jerk soccer mom reaction "OMG MY CHILD IS MAKING BOMBS" and find out if the child is making bombs because they have a serious psychological problem, or they're interested in science.
One child needs a therapist, one child needs a chemistry book.
Speaking as the child who made bombs, and got the chemistry book :)
It is interesting how he choose only hero-like characters to exemplify extremes in character... I could imagine many other historical figures that would fit in his stereotype... that were heroes for THEIR supports and monsters to us.
What a tripe! There are a lot of cultures where scapegoats were never present (India and China come to my mind). Polarizing figures with leadership qualities polarize the people around them. That doesn't make them founders! They are two different sets which intersect sometimes.
And Bill Gates is NOT being forced to do charity, especially not by those who criticized him before. Most people in third world countries idolized him when geeks hated his guts.
Theil shows that he is an ahole and too much wealth has just reinforced his petty view of the people around him.
How about Buddha? At no point was he an outcast or object of hatred for normal people. He was at every point supported in his quest.
More I think about it, more I realize that it is western culture of 'our way or the highway' that Theil is talking about. Point to note that the killer(s) of Gandhi were a fan of Nazis.
You can scapegoat groups or individuals, the word itself applies in both contexts. If you want to find examples of scapegoating of individuals in India, then that isn't particularly hard either. Not that India is special in this regard.
It's an entertaining read but my it's really a bunch of unfounded ideas with lots of pretty figures :) Weird that this is the kind of education that some founders are getting.
You have 2 sailors - one weak, the other great. They have the same wind behind their sails. Who will finish the race first?
The great sailor, of course.
Now, same experiment, except the weak sailor now gets a 1000 km/hr wind and the great one gets a 1 km/hr wind (hypothetically of course). Who wins the race now?
The weak sailor.
Now, who was responsible for winning the race? Was it the wind or was it the person who captured the wind? What's more important - the person who captures, or the gust that fills his sail? Replace sail with society and sailor with founder (adjust for time/economy/education/family). Now who's responsible for the success of the company? Was it the single factor person? Or the inumerable factor society?
What's more likely - that people are special (you're all special - just like mother told you), or that the situations they are placed in are? Are there really great men (or women), or are there in fact merely extraordinary situations that produce, as a side effect, those self-same "great" men/women?
Why do inventions have multiple origins, why are there always multiple companies in the same spaces being founded at the same time, why does innovation happen in specific situations rather than with specific groups of people? There were hundreds of search engines/social networks. The telephone was patented on the same day by multiple people. The radio has one of the most messy histories of invention I have ever seen.
"Founder as Victim, Founder as God" sounds a great deal like humans have a poor understanding of randomness. 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs are replaced every single year. Why is that? Maybe it's because people don't understand randomness and the astounding complexity inherent in large systems (the Earth for example).
Replace the CEO - that'll fix all our problems! Change strategy, that did it! We just need more synergy, better management, great leadership!
Let's ignore global macro factors like extraneous lowering of energy/technology costs, the economic cycle, geopolitical risk, time between war, sex, age, race, strong laws, strong defence, personal networks, position in society, number of humans alive, access to education, access to capital, actions of third parties, chance meetings and all the other things that go into these systems.
Yeah, the founders, that's who's important!
Just wave away everything else - we do love our narratives don't we (imagine life without films!).
This is fundamental attribution error at work. The world is more complex than the people in it. CEOs don't cause great companies as much as you'd like that to be true. People don't cause great things to happen as much as people want that to be true. The world is very complex and humans are incredibly stupid.
Most people have trouble getting their heads around controlled static experiments in physics/AI. That's a tiny, tiny system. It takes a great deal of arrogance to talk of the world in such a generalized, grandiose way, without a shred of evidence apart from personal biases and inductive reasoning.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
You only see the winners people. Randomness is more important than you think it is.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
I always find it interesting when a contemporary argument boils down to old ones. (This isn't a criticism). Your argument against the Great Man Theory is best expressed in War and Peace, where Tolstoy goes on long discussions on the imaginary significance of great men, including obviously Napoleon. Or, as Isaiah Berlin says in the "Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life:
...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world...
I've never read as much BS in my entire life...just because someone has made right decisions in the past doesn't give them a platform to spout gibberish in future...
Seems like the x-axis of founder distribution is characterized by external perception - is this person "like" me? do I see characteristics in them that I relate to myself? Liking is mentioned at least once in the article, ie "lest the people in the crowd get introspective and realize that the sacrificed was essentially just like them".
Early in a startup, founders will attract other who are like them (paypal a documented example). However, when the startup is big enough the perception of the founder compared to everyone else in the company has the naturally emergent property that the founder will be seen as different than everyone else. Now, the tipping point of this difference becoming a "dislike" could be company performance or bad luck. So the theory all seems to come together in V.B and V.C in article.
I did however, find some of the background to be confusing, particularly section I.D seems to make the case that king-ship is a matter of perception outside of the organization.
Found this really fun to read, a sort of 'how to found a company best practices' for the people who keep dreaming wistfully about armoured elephants and Alps.
And the conclusion was the weakest.
Thiel seems like a pretty creepy character. When you have enough FU money, you can indulge a really skewed view of the world (former Intel exec comes to mind). And this series of lectures illustrates Theil's. He thinks someone, a young and naive (pre-university) prodigy, is going to make him a wealtier VC by sharing with him their "secret" idea. He criticizes education and America's lack of meaningful innovation, yet he's made wealthy by vacuous ideas of "innovation" like Facebook. Then look at what he's contributed in the way of innovation. What are his qualifications as an "expert"? An online payments company and a company that analyzes data from the web to try to find "terrorists". This is innovation? We should hope his program participants will aspire to do better.
In his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector? As long as they have lots of capital under their direction, does it matter?
When you are wealthy people will listen to you, no matter what you say. Alas, it may encourage the speaker to believe their own hype even more. Thiel is taking full advantage of this privilege.