Peter Thiel came to talk today at Stanford University about entrepreneurship and how his company that he started, PayPal, became more and more popular. I helped set up the event with BASES volunteers and we got the ball rolling!
He first started with talking of California and Silicon Valley, how its become such a place of entrepreneurship and affluence. He jokes that "why would somebody move to Oklahoma from California". He then moves to which businesses have been successful, those being mainly in the internet business. He makes sure to point out that companies need to look ahead and think of the future. From here, he moves into talks of past man's hopes, those of living on the moon, Mars or even Jupiter. After this is when he really moves into his main focus of his discussion: entrepreneurship slowing down in the past 25 years.
According to Thiel, in the seventies and eighties, progress was quick. "There were far more drug innovations in the seventies and eighties then in the last twenty years..." Thiel's main worry is that people are not really moving forward, innovation is slow at the moment.
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Setting up for the event! |
He moves into the example of China, and of it being great and doing tremendous amounts of work, but it being bad at innovation. It will catch up to the US according to him because it uses the innovations of China.
He reemphasizes "intrinsic growth" and his example that for something to go from zero to one, it takes a lot more effort then from going to one to n. What he means that for some sort of innovation to start, it usually fails or is really difficult to start from zero to one. Such is the example with Facebook. It started from the (1-n) field when other social networking businesses that came before Facebook *cough cough Myspace* started in the (0-1) field when the jump was much bigger and there was a lot more to use.
He later took questions from people... These are some of my favorite. (and not word by word)
If you're going to take a risk, go big on your company.
Be passionate in your company, and take pride in it.
Don't be afraid for risk, and actually do sacrifice.
Successful company's CEOs make under 120 grand!
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