Peter Thiel at Stanford

PETER THIEL 

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!

BASES Peeps!

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. 

Peter Thiel and I :D

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.

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. 

Peter Thiel

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!

So up here studying at Green

Things are quiet! QUIET! I can hear zombies outside, but they are being kept at bay thanks to these awesome peeps! But anyways, I'm working on CS assignment little schemer. I'm not cool like the other kids that finish it so fast, but I am attempting to finish it by today so I can work on my other CS assignment due Friday as well. Hmmm, I'm a little behind work but that's ok :D

Tonight I'm going to a BASES event in which Peter Thiel is coming to talk at Tressidor. For you guys that don't know Peter Thiel, he is the cofounder of PayPal and is the first primary investor in Facebook. He is an amazing individual whose networth is currently estimated at 1.3 Billion Dollars. That's a lot of dough! Amazing! Well anyways better be going to some awesome CS! ADIOS, and remember, zombies do not like light! Use a bike light!