"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing."
Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#12> They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. They're interested in Silicon Valley now. Here's an actual conversation I had recently with a business school student (not verbatim…
What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)
The problem comes when MBAs, generally without technical background, build companies without real value and expand an already existing bubble.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#13The interview is excellent, and has great nuggets of wisdom. The one that particularly stood out was--
"People always say you should live every day as though it's your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it's going to go on forever. You should treat people like you're going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time. And so I want to live every day as though it's going to go on forever." [0]
The one I couldn't agree with (and one that features in his book Zero to One) was about 'Competition is for loosers' I find it ironic that he brings up example of Google and the monopoly it holds over the market... but wasn't Google entering the search market as a competition to multiple other internet firms before they leap-frogged them with all the talent they gobbled up from DEC?
I like the hypothesis about how there is always more than one entity (or a person) that's trying to do invent something almost at the same time-- theory of Relativity [1], the airplane[2], the light blub [3]... and how each of them were competing against time as much as each others to be the first to achieve the breakthrough.
[0] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/218217-work-for-a-better-lif...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Histor...
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#14>Peter Thiel is often described in techno-hyphenated words: ... Techno-utopian. I think the journalist got that characterization wrong. Based on PT's writings and interviews[1], he's not a techno-utopian. My cursory google searches doesn't show that others call him that either. Techno-utopians would be people like Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, and Marc Andreessen. And possibly Elon Musk as well. [1] https://www.youtube.…
I wouldn't even call them tech-utopians. I would call them people who do know that a) the world can be made a better place but that b) for that to happen people must make it happen. I can't speak for any of the three but I don't think any of them are utopians; understanding that progress can be made isn't the same as utopianism.
Journalists seem to like phrases like "techno-utopian" in order to make them sound more like the other and like a different species than their readers.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#15>>A lot of business books are these pseudo-scientific books that say, “These are the five steps to follow and you will make a lot of money.” But if you have no formulas, you will be open to some new possibilities, some new ideas. This is the beauty of capitalism...there is no formula for success, which means no one can monopolize or control that formula, and everyone has a shot :)
Some say "owning the means of production" is such a formula. There's certainly a lot of opportunity in technology right now, but capitalism doesn't guarantee such a state. The net neutrality debate is very explicitly about keeping the market open to newcomers.
The software field is very picky in what it thinks is right... for instance, iron grip of Apple over the entire iOS eco-system is fine with most developers who'd continue to build on their platform, whilst any such move by a company that isn't really in the tech scene as much (like the ISPs) is scrutinized to hell and back.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)
The problem comes when MBAs, generally without technical background, build companies without real value and expand an already existing bubble.
And plenty of devs go and work for such companies and individuals…
One would think we'd come up with better ways by now to lessen the allocation of resources for things in the present that are of marginal utility for most people, but somehow, humans have a knack of creating/engaging red queens races relative to other things that are theoretically possible and feasible.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#17>And I think it’s interesting to explore how unusual that is relative to many other areas of technology, because there are so many innovations that were good for society but the people who came up with them ended up with very little. Okay, co-founders sometimes end up with a fair amount money. However, early employees that actually built the company are often forgotten and given a relatively small sum of money. Not s…
Right. The discrepancy in reward, prestige, and chance of advancement between founders and employees is Silicon Valley's elephant in the room. Founders don't really take on more risk, because they have the social resources to get seed funding right away and because their backers will protect their careers no matter what happens, but they get orders of magnitude more equity and, if the business succeeds, recognition and credibility. It really is a new caste system, and it might be Silicon Valley's weak point right now. The illusion that most people have when they go there is that they'll be founders in 3 years, when the reality is that most will never be founders because they don't have the right social class background and pedigree.
It can still be worth it to be a startup employee if you can get more responsibility and faster promotions than elsewhere. However, if the startup is one of those that always promotes externally, while the engineers who built the original work get shat on for mistakes made in chasing deadlines-- this is a common anti-pattern-- then you're wasting your time and should bounce as soon as possible.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#18>Peter Thiel is often described in techno-hyphenated words: ... Techno-utopian. I think the journalist got that characterization wrong. Based on PT's writings and interviews[1], he's not a techno-utopian. My cursory google searches doesn't show that others call him that either. Techno-utopians would be people like Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, and Marc Andreessen. And possibly Elon Musk as well. [1] https://www.youtube.…
I wouldn't even call them tech-utopians. I would call them people who do know that a) the world can be made a better place but that b) for that to happen people must make it happen. I can't speak for any of the three but I don't think any of them are utopians; understanding that progress can be made isn't the same as utopianism. Journalists seem to like phrases like "techno-utopian" in order to make them sound more l…
>I can't speak for any of the three but I don't think any of them are utopians;
Well, in the context of media awareness and public perception, it's not if they truly __are__ utopians insomuch as other journalists and pundits call them that. Yes, RK, KK, MA, and others like Tim O'Reilly and Dean Kamen may prefer to call themselves the blander title of "techno-optimists" or "tech-progressives". If the outsiders like journalists choose to exaggerate "optimists" to "utopians" for dramatic effect, it sort of goes with the territory of being in the public eye. (Like Michael Jackson the "king of pop", or 1970s babies the "X Generation". The subjects of those labels didn't give journalists permission to call them that.)
The other side of techno-utopians would be tech-cautious writers like Tom Standage (Economist editor) and Evgeny Morozov.
In terms of how public figures are viewed, I still don't think Peter Thiel is in the same category as the other people I mentioned.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)
The problem comes when MBAs, generally without technical background, build companies without real value and expand an already existing bubble.
I don't think I would join a startup that wasn't founded by people with some kind of technical degree.
Re: Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)
#20> They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. They're interested in Silicon Valley now. Here's an actual conversation I had recently with a business school student (not verbatim…
What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)
Most of these people (not all of whom are MBAs) just want to be bosses, not entrepreneurs. Their goal is to be executives ("big picture guys") shouting orders, not worker bees, but they don't have the social resources to make it happen in an existing company so they drum up some seed funding and hire some engineers (usually, scraping the bottom) and try to kick something together. It doesn't work very often.
"I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were. I'd rather be around people who have concrete ideas of what they want to build, and who'll lead when appropriate and follow when appropriate. People who say, "I'm a leader" but don't have a good sense of where they want to lead, are annoying. What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."
I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags. I know plenty whom I like a lot. Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking. When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies. Now you have the worst of both worlds between small companies and big ones, and a high likelihood of failure or, if the connections are there, Knewton-esque mediocrity.
Oddly enough, if I had a child I'd recommend that he go to the highest-ranking business school out there. Harvard is going to open doors that are just ridiculous, whereas the #20 school is probably educationally equivalent, but isn't going to make you a CEO at 30. On the other hand, if I were hiring, I'd be extremely skeptical of the Harvard MBA and less skeptical of the Booth MBA and even less skeptical of the UWash MBA. In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).