this text is annotated click on the highlights to read what others are saying if you d like to add your own insights comments or questions to specific parts of the lecture visit the lecture page on genius highlight the relevant text and click the button that pops up your annotation will appear both here and on genius sam alright good afternoon todays speaker is peter thiel peter was the founder of paypal palantir and founders fund and has invested in most of the tech companies in silicon valley he s going to talk about strategy and competition thank you for coming peter peter awesome thanks sam for inviting me thanks for having me i sort of have a single ide fixe that i m completely obsessed with on the business side which is that if you re starting a company if youre the founder entrepreneur starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition and so hence competition is for losers something well be talking about today i d like to start by saying something about the basic idea of when you start one of these companies how do you go about creating value what makes a business valuable and i want to suggest there s basically a very simple formula that if you have a valuable company two things are true number one that it creates x dollars of value for the world number two that you capture y percent of x and the critical thing that i think people always miss in this sort of analysis is that x and y are completely independent variables and so x can be very big and y can be very small x can be an intermediate size and if y is reasonably big you can still have a very big business so to create a valuable company you have to basically both create something of value and capture some fraction of the value of what you ve created and sort of just to illustrate this as a contrast if you compare the us airline industry with a company like google on search if you measure by the size of these industries you could say that airlines are still more important than search just measured by revenue theres 195 billion in domestic revenues in 2012 google had just north of 50 billion and certainly on some intuitive level if you were given a choice and said well would you want to get rid of all air travel or do you want to give up search engines the intuition would be that air travel is something that s more important than search and this is of course just the domestic numbers if you d look at this globally airlines are much much bigger than search than google is but the profit margins are quite a bit less they were marginally profitable in 2012 i think in the entire hundred year history of the airline industry the cumulative profits in the us have been approximately zero the companies make money they episodically go bankrupt they get recapitalized and you sort of cycle and repeat and this is reflected in the combined market capitalization of the airline industry which may be something like a quarter of google s so you have search much smaller than air travel but much more valuable i think this reflects these very different valuations on x and y if we look at perfect competition there s some pros and cons to the world of perfect competition on a high level this is something you always study in econ i it s always easy to model which is why i think econ professors like talking about perfect competition it somehow is efficient especially in a world where things are static because you have all the consumer surplus thats captured by everybody and politically its what were told is good in our society you want to have competition and its somehow a good thing of course there are a lot of negatives it s generally not that good if you re involved in anything thats hyper competitive because you often don t make money ill come back to this a little bit later so i think on one end of the spectrum you have industries that are perfectly competitive and at the other end of the spectrum you have things that i would say are monopolies and theyre much more stable longer term businesses you have more capital and if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new i think it s symptomatic of having created something really valuable i do think the extreme binary view of the world i always articulate is that there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world there are businesses that are perfectly competitive and there are businesses that are monopolies there is shockingly little that is in between and this dichotomy is not understood very well because people are constantly lying about the nature of the businesses they are in and in my mind this is not necessarily the most important thing in business but i think it s the most important business idea that people don t understand that there are just these two kinds of businesses so let me tell you a little bit about the lies people tell if you imagine that there was a spectrum of companies from perfect competition to monopoly the apparent differences are quite small because the people who have monopolies pretend not to they will basically say and its because you dont want to get regulated by the government you dont want the government to come after you so you will never say that you have a monopoly so anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they are in incredible competition and on the other end of the spectrum if you are incredibly competitive and if youre in some sort of business where you will never make any money you ll be tempted to tell a lie that goes in the other direction where you will say that you re doing something unique that is somehow less competitive than it looks because you ll want to differentiate you will want to try and attract capital or something like that so if the monopolists pretend not to have monopolies the non monopolies pretend to have monopolies the apparent difference is very small whereas the real difference i would submit is actually quite big so theres this business distortion that happens because of the lies people tell about their businesses and the lies are sort of in these opposite directions let me drill a little bit down further on the way these lies work and so the basic lie you tell as a non monopoly is that we re in a very small market the basic lie you tell as a monopoly is the market youre in is much bigger than it looks so typically if you want to think of this in set theoretic terms you could say that a monopoly tells a lie where you describe your business as the union of these vastly different markets and the non monopolist describes it as the intersection so in effect if you re a non monopolist you will rhetorically describe your market as super small you re the only person in that market if you have a monopoly you ll describe it as super big and there s lots of competition in it some examples of how this works in practice i always use restaurants as the example of a terrible business this is always sort of the idea that capital and competition are antonyms if someone accumulates capital a world of perfect competition is a world where all the capital gets competed away so you re opening a restaurant business no one wants to invest because you just lose money so you have to tell some idiosyncratic narrative and you ll say something like well we re the only british food restaurant in palo alto so its british palo alto and of course that s too small a market because people may be able to drive all the way to mountain view or even menlo park and there probably are no people who eat nothing but british food at least no people who are still alive so that s sort of a fictitiously narrow market there is sort of a hollywood version of all of this the way movies always get pitched where its like a college football star you know joins an elite group of hackers to catch the shark that killed his friend now that s a movie that has not yet been made but the question is is that the right category or is the correct category it s just another movie in which case there are lots of those its super competitive its incredibly hard to make money no one ever makes money in hollywood making movies its really really hard so you always have this question about is the intersection real does it make sense does it have value and of course there are startup versions of this and in the really bad versions you just take a whole series of the buzzwords sharing mobile social apps you combine them and give some kind of narrative and whether or not that s a real business or not it is generally a bad sign it s almost this pattern recognition when you have this rhetoric of these sort of intersections it generally does not work the something of somewhere is really mostly just the nothing of nowhere it s like the stanford of north dakota one of a kind but it s not stanford let s look at the opposite the opposite lie is if you are let s say the search company thats down the street from here and has about a happy sixty six percent market share and is completely dominant in the search market google almost never describes itself as a search engine these days and instead it describes itself in all these different ways so it sometimes says its an advertising company so if it was search you would say well it s like it has this huge market share that s really crazy so it s like an incredible monopoly it s a much bigger and much more robust monopoly than microsoft ever had in the nineties maybe that s why its making so much money but if you say it s an advertising market you could say well search advertising is seventeen billion and that s part of online advertising which is much bigger and then you know all us advertising is bigger and then by the time you get to global advertising that s close to five hundred billion and so you re talking about three and a half percent so a tiny part of this much larger market or if you don t want to be an advertising company you could always say youre a technology company the technology market is something like a one trillion dollar market and the narrative that you tell about google and the technology market is well we re competing with all the car companies with our self driving cars were competing with apple on tvs and iphones were competing with facebook were competing with microsoft on office products were competing with amazon on cloud services and so we re in this giant technology market where there s competition in every direction you look and no were not the monopoly the government s looking for and we should not get regulated in any way whatsoever so i think one has to always be super aware that there are these very powerful incentives to distort the nature of these markets one way or the other the evidence of narrow markets in the tech industry is if you basically just if you look at sort of the big tech companies apple google microsoft amazon they have just been building up cash for year after year and you have these incredibly high profit margins and i would say that the that one of the reasons the tech industry in the us has been so successful financially is because it s prone to creating all these monopoly like businesses and it s reflected by the fact that these companies just accumulate so much cash they don t even know what to do with it beyond a certain point let me say a few things about how to build a monopoly and i think one of the sort of very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of this monopoly thread is that you want to go after small markets if youre a startup you want to get to monopoly youre starting a new company you want to get to monopoly monopolies have a large share of the market how do you get to a large share of the market you start with a really small market and you take over the whole market and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles the thing that s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that s typically evidence that you somehow haven t defined categories correctly that normally means there is going to be too much competition in one way or another so i think almost all the successful companies in silicon valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding if you take amazon you start with just a bookstore we have all the books in the world it s a better bookstore than anybody else has in the world when it starts in the 1990s it s online there s things you can do that you could not do before and then you gradually expand into all sorts of different forms of e commerce and other things beyond that ebay you start with pez dispensers you move on to beanie babies and eventually its all these different online auctions for all these sorts of different goods whats very counterintuitive about many of these companies is they often start with markets that are so small that people don t think they are valuable at all when you get started the paypal version of this was we started with power sellers on ebay which was about twenty thousand people when we first saw this happening in december of 1999 january 2000 right after we launched there was a sense that these were all it was such a small market it was terrible we thought these were terrible customers to have it s just people selling junk on the internet why in the world we want to be going after this market but there was a way to get a product that was much better for everybody in that market and we got to something like twenty five thirty percent market penetration in two or three months and you ve got some walk in to brand recognition and are able to build the business from there so i always think these very small markets are quite underrated the facebook version of this i always give is that if the initial market at facebook was ten thousand people at harvard it went from zero to sixty percent market share in ten days that was a very auspicious start the way this gets analyzed in business schools is always that s so ridiculous it s such a small market it can t have any value at all so i think the business school analysis of facebook early on or of paypal early on or of ebay early on is that the markets were perhaps so small as to have almost no value and that they would ve had little value had they they stayed small but it turned out there were ways to grow them concentrically and that s what made them so valuable now i think the opposite version of this is always where you have super big markets and there is so many different things that went wrong with all the clean tech companies in the last decade but the one theme than ran through almost all of them is that they all started with massive markets every clean tech powerpoint presentation that one saw in the years 2005 to 2008 which is the clean tech bubble in silicon valley started with where the energy market where the market was measured in hundreds and billions of trillions of dollars and then once you re sort of like a minnow in a vast ocean that is not a good place to be that means you have tons of competitors and you dont even know who all the competitors are you want to be a one of a kind company you want to be the only player in a small ecosystem you dont want to be the fourth online pet food company you dont want to be the tenth solar panel company you dont want to be the hundredth restaurant in palo alto your restaurant industry is a trillion dollar industry so if you do a market size analysis you conclude restaurants are fantastic business to go into and often large existing markets typically means that you have tons of competitions so it s very very hard to differentiate the first very counterintuitive idea is to go after small markets markets that are so small people often don t even think that they make sense that s where you get a foothold and then if those markets are able expand you can scale into a big monopoly business there are several different characteristics of these monopoly businesses that i d like to focus on there is no single formula in technology there is always a sense that in the history of technology every moment happens only once the next mark zuckerberg wont build a social network and the next larry page wont be building a search engine and the next bill gates wont be building an operating system if you are copying these people you are not learning from them there are always very unique businesses that are doing something that has not been done before and end up having the potential to be a monopoly the opening line in anna karenina that all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way is not true in business where i think all happy companies are different because they re doing something very unique all unhappy companies are alike because they failed to escape the essential sameness in competition one characteristic of a monopoly technology company is some sort of proprietary technology my sort of crazy somewhat arbitrary rule of thumb is you want to have a technology that s an order of magnitude better than the next best thing so amazon had over ten times as many books it may not have been that high tech but you figure oh well it can sell ten times as many books and be more efficient along the way in the case of paypal bill turner was using checks to send money on ebay it took seven to ten days to clear and paypal could do it more than ten times as fast you want to have some sort of very powerful improvement some order of magnitude improvement on some key dimension of course if you just come with something totally new it s just like an infinite improvement i would say the iphone was the first smart phone that worked it may not be in fact but it s so definitely an order of magnitude of an improvement so i think the technology needs to be designed to give you a massive delta over the next the next best thing i think there often are network effects that can kick in and that really help the thing and these are linked to monopolies over time the thing that is very tricky about network effects is they re often very hard to get started and so you know everyone understands how valuable they are there s always this incredibly tricky question why is it valuable to the first person who s doing something economies of scale if you have something with very high fixed costs and very low marginal costs that s typically a monopoly like business and then there is this thing of branding which is sort of this idea that gets lodged into people s brains i never quite understand how branding works so i never invest in companies where its just about branding but it is i think a real phenomenon that creates real value i think one of the things i m going to come back to this in a little bit towards the end but one of the things thats very striking is that software businesses are often are for some reason very good at some of these things they are especially good at the economies of scale part because the marginal cost of software is zero so if you get something that works in software it s often significantly better than the existing solution and then you have these tremendous economies of scale and you can scale fairly quickly so even if the market starts small you can grow your business quickly enough to stay at the same size as the growing market and maintain the monopoly of power now the critical thing about these monopolies is it s not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment the critical thing is have one that lasts over time and so in silicon valley there is always this sort of idea that you want to be the first mover and i always think in some ways the better framing is you want to be the last mover you want to be one of the last companies in that category those are the ones that are really valid microsoft was the last operating system at least for many decades google was the last search engine facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last of social networking site and one way to think of this last mover value is this idea that most of the value in these companies exists far in the future if you do a discounted cash flow analysis of the business you ll look at all these profit streams you have a growth rate the growth rates much higher that the discount rate and so most of the value exists far in the future i did this exercise at pay pal in march of 2001 we d been in business for about twenty seven months and the growth rate was a hundred percent a year we were discounting future cash flows by thirty percent and it turned out that about three quarters of the value of the business as of 2001 came from cash flows in years 2011 and beyond and whenever you do the math on any of these tech companies you get to an answer that is something like that so if you are trying to analyze any of the tech companies in silicon valley airbnb twitter facebook any emerging internet companies all the ones in y combinator the math tells you that three quarters eighty five percent of the value is coming from cash flows in years 2024 and beyond it s very far in the future and so one of the things that we always over value in silicon valley is growth rates and we undervalue durability growth is something you can measure in the here and now you can always track that very precisely the question of whether a company will be around a decade from now thats actually what dominates the value equation and thats a much more qualitative sort of a thing and so if we went back to this idea of these characteristics of monopoly the proprietary technology network effects economies of scale you can think of these characteristics as ones that exist at a moment in time where you capture a market and take it over but you also want to think about are these things going to last over time so theres a time dimension to all these characteristics so networks in fact often have a great time element where as the network scales network effects actually get more robust and so if you have a network business it s often one that can become a bigger and stronger monopoly over time proprietary technology is always a little bit of a tricky one so you want something that is an order of magnitude better than the state of the art in the world today that s how you get people s attention that s how you initially break through but then you don t want to be superseded by somebody else so there are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation but no one made any money so disk drive manufacturing in the 1980 s you could build a better disk drive than anybody else you could take over the whole world and two years later someone else would come along and replace yours in the course of fifteen years you got vastly improved disk drives so had a great benefit to consumers but it didn t actually help the people who started these companies there s always this question about having a huge breakthrough in technology but then also being able to explain why yours will be the last breakthrough or at least the last breakthrough for a long time or if you make a breakthrough then you can keep improving on it at quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up so if you have a structure of the future where there s a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things and the thing you re working on that s great for society it s actually not that good for your business typically and then economies of scale weve already about i think this last mover thing is very critical im always tempted i don t want to overdo chess analogies but the first mover in chess is someone who plays white white is about a one third of a pawn advantage so there is a small advantage to going first you want to be the last mover who wins the game so theres always world chess champion capablanca line you must begin by studying the end game i wouldn t say thats the only thing you should study i think perspective of asking these questions why will this still be the leading company in ten fifteen twenty years from now is a really critical one to try to think through i want to go in two slightly other directions with this the monopoly versus competition idea i think this is the central idea on my mind for business for starting a business for thinking about them there are some very interesting perspectives i think it gives on the whole history of innovation in technology and science we ve lived through 300 years of incredible technological progress in many many different domains steam engines to railways the telephone refrigeration household appliances the computer revolution aviation all different areas of technological innovation then there s sort of an analogous thing to say about science where we ve lived through centuries of enormous amounts of innovation in science as well the thing that i think people always miss when they think about these things is that because x and y are independent variables some of these things can be extremely valuable innovations but the people who invent them who come up with them do not get rewarded for this certainly if you go back to you need to create x dollars in value and you capture y percent of x i would suggest that the history of science has generally been one where y is zero percent across the board the scientists never make any money theyre always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions this is probably the fundamental delusion that scientists tend to suffer from in our society even in technology there are sort of many different areas of technology where there were great innovations that created tremendous value for society but people did not actually capture much of the value so i think there is a whole history of science and technology that can be told from the perspective of how much value was actually captured certainly there are entire sectors where people didn t capture anything you re the smartest physicist of the twentieth century you come up with special relativity you come up with general relativity you don t get to be a billionaire you don t even get to be a millionaire it just somehow doesn t work that way the railroads were incredibly valuable they mostly just went bankrupt because there was too much competition wright brothers you fly the first plane you don t make any money so i think there is a structure to these industries thats very important i think the thing that s actually rare are the success cases so if you really think about the history in this and this two hundred fifty years sweep why is almost always zero percent it s always zero in science it s almost always in technology it s very rare where people made money you know in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century the first industrial revolution was the textile mills you got the steam engine you sort of automated things you had these relentless improvements that people improved efficiency of textile factories of manufacturing generally at a clip of five to seven percent every year year after year decade after decade you had sixty seventy years of tremendous improvement from 1780 to 1850 even in 1850 most of the wealth in britain was still held by the landed aristocracy and the workers didn t make that much the capitalists didn t make that much either it was all competed away there were hundreds of people running textile factories it was an industry where the structure of the competition prevented people from making any money there are in my mind probably only two broad categories in the entire history of the last two hundred and fifty years where people actually came up with new things and made money doing so one is these sort of vertically integrated complex monopolies which people did build in the second industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century this is like ford it was the vertically integrated oil companies like standard oil and what these vertically integrated monopolies typically required was a very complex coordination you ve got a lot of pieces to fit together in just the right way and when you assemble that you had a tremendous advantage this is actually done surprisingly little today and so i think this is sort of a business form that when people can pull it off is very valuable it s typically fairly capital intensive we live in a culture where it s very hard to get people to buy into anything that s super complicated and takes very long to build when i think of my colleague and friend elon from paypal success with tesla and spacex i think the key to these companies was the complex vertically integrated monopoly structure they had if you look at tesla or spacex and you ask was there sort of a single breakthrough i mean they certainly innovated on a law of dimensions but i don t think there was a single 10x breakthrough on battery storage they may be working on some things in rocketry but there was no sort of single massive breakthrough but what was really impressive was integrating all these pieces together and doing it in a way that was more vertically integrated than most other competitors so tesla also integrated the car distributors so they wouldn t steal all the money as has happened with the rest of the car industry in the us or spacex basically you pulled in all subcontractors where most of the large aerospace companies have single sourced subcontractors that are able to charge monopoly profits and make it very hard for the integrated aerospace companies to make money and so vertical integration i think is sort of a very under explored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more and then i think there is something about software itself that s very powerful software has these incredible economies of scale these low marginal costs and there is something about the world of bits as opposed to the world of atoms where you can often get very fast adoption and fast adoption is critical to capturing and taking over markets because even if you have a small market if adoption rate is too slow there will be enough time for other people to enter that market and compete with you whereas if you have a small to midsize market have the fast adoption rate you can now take over this market so i think this is one of the reasons silicon valley has done so well and why software has been this phenomenal industry what i would suggest that we will leave you with is there are these different rationalizations people give for why certain things work and why certain things don t work and i think these rationalizations always obscure this question on creating x dollars in value and capturing y percent of x so the science rationalization were always told is that the scientists arent interested in making money theyre doing it for charitable reasons and that you re not a good scientist if youre motivated by money i m not even saying people should always be motivated by money or something like this but i think we should wish to be a little bit more critical of this as a rationalization we should ask is this a rationalization to obscure the fact that y equals zero percent and the scientists are operating in this sort of world where all the innovation is effectively competed away and they cant capture any of it directly the software distortion that often happens is because people are making such vast fortunes in software we infer that this is the most valuable thing in the world being done full stop and so people at twitter make billions of dollars it must be that twitter is worth far more than anything einstein did what that realization tends to obscure is again that x and y are independent variables and that there are these businesses where you capture a lot of x and others where you don t so i do think the history of innovation has been this history where the microeconomics the structure of these industries has mattered a tremendous amount and there is sort of this story where some people made vast fortunes because they worked in industries with the right structure and other people made nothing at all because they were in these very competitive things we shouldn t just rationalize that way i think it s worth understanding this better then finally let me come back to this sort of overarching theme for this talk this competition is for losers idea which is always a provocative way to title things because we always think of the losers as the people who are not good at competing we think of losers as the people who are slow on the track team in high school or do a little less well on standardized tests and don t get into the right schools so we always think of losers as people who can t compete and i want us to really rethink and re value this and consider whether it s possible the competition itself is off it s not just the case we don t understand this monopoly competition dichotomy intellectually so weve been talking about why you wouldnt understand it intellectually because people lie about it its distorted the history of innovation rationalizes it in all these very strange ways i think it s more than just an intellectual blind spot but also a psychological blind spot where we find ourselves very attracted to competition and in one form or another we find it reassuring if other people do things the word ape already in the time of shakespeare meant both primate and imitate and that is something about human nature it s deeply imitative ape like sheep like and this is very problematic thing that we need to always think through and try to overcome there is always this question about competition as a form of validation where we go for things that lots of other people are going for it s not that there is wisdom of crowds it s not that lots of people trying to do something is the best proof of that being valuable i think it s when lots of people are trying to do something that is often proof of insanity there are twenty thousand people a year who move to los angeles to become movie stars about twenty of them make it i think the olympics are a little bit better because you have you can sort of figure out pretty quickly whether youre good or not so there s little less of a deadweight loss to society you know the sort of educational experience that at a place the pre stanford educational experience there is always sort of a non competitive characterization i think most of the people in this room had machine guns and they were competing with people with bows and arrows so it wasnt exactly a parallel competition when you were in junior high school in high school there is always the question does the tournament make sense as you keep going there is always this question if people going on to grad school or post doctoral educations does the intensity of the competition really make sense there is the classic henry kissinger line describing his fellow faculty at harvard the battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small describing academia and you sort of think on one level this is a description of insanity why would people fight like crazy when the stakes are so small but it s also i think simply a function of the logic of a situation when it s been really hard to differentiate yourself from other people when the differences are when the objectives differences really are small you have to compete ferociously to maintain a difference of one sort or another that s often more imaginary than real there is always sort of a personal version of this i tell where i was sort of hypertracked in my eighth grade junior high school yearbook one my friends wrote i know youre going to get into stanford four years later i went to stanford law school ended up at a big law firm in new york where from the outside everybody wanted to get in and on the inside everybody wanted to leave and it was this very strange dynamic where i realized this was maybe not the best idea and i left after seven months and three days other people down the hall told me it s really reassuring to see you leave peter i had no idea that it was possible to escape from alcatraz which of course all you had do was go out the front door and not come back but so much of people s identities got wrapped up in winning these competitions that they somehow lost sight of what was important what was valuable competition does make you better at whatever it is that you re competing at because when you re competing you re comparing yourself with the people around you im figuring out how to beat the people next to me how do i do somewhat better than whatever it is they re doing and you will get better at that i m not questioning that i m not denying that but there often comes this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what s truly important and truly valuable don t always go through the tiny little door that everyone s trying to rush through maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that nobody is taking q do you have any ways to determine the difference when looking at an idea or thinking about your own idea a i would say the question i always focus on is what is the actual market so not what s the narrative of the market because you can always tell a fictional story about a market it s much bigger much or smaller but what is the real objective market so you always try to figure it out and you realize people have incentives to powerfully distort these things q so which of the aspects of all these you mentioned you would you say is applicable to google a well they have they have network effects with the ad network they had proprietary technology that gave them the initial lead because they had the page rank algorithm which was an order of magnitude better than any other search engine they had economies of scale up because of the need to store all these different sites and at this point you have brand so google has all four maybe the proprietary technology is somewhat weaker at this point but definitely it had all four and maybe three and a half out of four now q how does this apply to palantir and square a that s sort of a set of companies that are doing different copycat payment systems on mobile phones there s square there s paypal they have different shapes that s how they differentiate themselves one is a triangle one is a square maybe at one point the apes run out of shapes or something like that but at palantir we started with a focus on the intelligence community which is a small submarket we had a proprietary technology that used a very different approach where it was focused on the human computer synthesis rather than the substitution which i think is the dominant paradigm so there is a whole set of things i would say on the market approach and on the proprietary technology q what do you think about lean startups a so the question is what do i think about lean startups and iterative thinking where you get feedback from people versus complexity that may not work i m personally quite skeptical of all the lean startup methodology i think the really great companies did something that was somewhat more of a quantum improvement that really differentiated them from everybody else they typically did not do massive customer surveys the people who ran these companies sometimes not always suffered from mild forms of aspergers so they were not actually that influenced not that easily deterred by what other people told them to do i do think we re way too focused on iteration as a modality and not enough on trying to have a virtual esp link with the public and figuring it out ourselves i would say the risk question is always a very tricky one because it s often the case that you don t have enough time to really mitigate risk if you re going to take enough time to figure out what people want you often will have missed the boat by then and then of course there is always the risk of doing something that s not that significant or meaningful you could say that a track in law school is a low risk track from one perspective but it may still be a very high risk track in the sense that maybe you have a high risk of not doing something meaningful with your life we have to think about risk in these very complicated ways i think risk is this complicated concept q doesn t the last mover advantage already imply that there s competition to begin with a yes there s always a terminology thing i would say that there are categories in which people sort of are bundled together the monopoly business i think they really were a big first mover in some sense you can say google was not the first search engine there were search engines before but on one dimension they were dramatically better than everybody else they were the first one with page rank with an automated approach facebook was not the first of social networking site my friend reid hoffman started one in 1997 they called it social net so they already had the name social networking in the name of their company seven years before facebook their idea was that it going to be this virtual cyberspace were i d be a dog and you d be a cat and we d have all these different rules about how we interact with each other in this virtual alternate reality facebook was the first one to get real identity so i hope facebook will be the last social networking site it was the first one in a very important dimension people often would not think of it as the first because they sort of lump all these things together q if someone worked at goldman sachs out of college and left after six months and is now studying cs at stanford how would you recommend rethinking their competitive advantage a i am not great at the psychotherapy stuff so i don t quite know how to solve this there are these very odd studies they have done on people who go to business school this one was done at the harvard business school where it s sort of the anti asbergers personality where people are super extroverted generally have low convictions few ideas and you have sort of a hothouse environment you put all these people and for two years and at the end of it they systematically end up the largest cohort systematically ends up doing the wrong thing they try to catch the last wave in 1999 everyone tried to work with mike milken this was a few years before he went to jail for all the junk bond stuff they were never interested in silicon valley or tech except for 1999 2000 when they timed the dotcom bubble peaking perfectly 2005 to 2007 was housing private equity stuff like this this tendency for us to see competition as validation is very deep i don t think there s some easy psychological formula to avoid this i don t quite know how what sort of therapy to recommend my first starting point which is only going to be maybe ten percent of the way is to never underestimate how big a problem it is we always think that this is something that afflicts other people we always point to people in business school people at harvard or people on wall street but it actually does afflict all of us to a very profound degree we always think of advertising as this thing that works on other people for all the stupid people who follow ads on tv but they obviously work to some extent and they work to the disturbing extent on all of us and it s something we must work to overcome thank you very much 32
['clean comedy', 'comedy', 'comic']