The 3: Peter Thiel
This piece is part of a series that details three ways in which famous entrepreneurs, inventors, and world-changing people set themselves apart from the crowd, in the hopes that you can benefit from their techniques in your own life.
“I think that one of the most contrarian things one can do in our society is to try to think for oneself.” — Peter Thiel
Background
Peter Thiel is 50 years old and was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He is a founder of Thiel Capital, Clarium Capital, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, and the Thiel Foundation. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital, The Stanford Review, and was a partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017. He was also Facebook’s first outside investor in 2004 and is worth an estimated $2.6 billion.
“Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.” — Peter Thiel
Free-Thinking
Peter Thiel is not afraid to go against the norm. One of his most controversial ideas is the foundation of the Thiel Fellowship — a program that rewards students who drop out of college. Students who choose to forego an institutionalized education can apply for a $100,000 fellowship grant that will help them fund their dream.
Thiel created this program because he feels that the education system in America is broken. He believes that the cookie cutter approach to education creates an environment where we end up losing some of our best talent, instead of forcing it to the top. Our current system rewards those who do well at one level, but then are forced into another level where the competitive nature of the grading system makes them have to excel against their peers — even if it’s not to the natural strengths of the child. Eventually, these students end up focused on beating the competition in order to be the best in a field that they never wanted to be in in the first place.
By creating this program, Thiel is hoping to encourage youth who have the drive and initiative to follow their dreams. It’s not so much a play against higher education, but a move to allow students to avoid fighting to become the best “investment banker” or any other mainstream career. Allowing these students to avoid the traditional education rat race, he hopes, will pay off big for the future of society.
“As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.” — Peter Thiel
Recognizing Great Opportunities
It can be said that almost any famous entrepreneur will have this trait. However, in a typical Silicon Valley success story you have an underdog who decides to follow their dream by working on something in their garage or dorm room, eventually making it big. They usually aren’t excelling in a career where giving up everything is an actual loss. However, that’s exactly what happened with Peter Thiel.
Thiel was a Stanford Law School graduate working towards a Supreme Court clerkship. When that fell through, he worked for several years in New York as a securities lawyer and derivatives trader. After returning to California, he recognized the effect personal computer and the internet was having on the economy and decided to start a venture capital firm.
One major gap noticed by Thiel was in the slow and unreliable online payment industry. He, along with some friends, decided to start PayPal as an “internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” Thiel recognized this opportunity and eventually capitalized on it by selling PayPal to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
As a venture capitalist, Thiel’s entire success revolves around his ability to properly assess and take chances on new companies. He recognized the great opportunity Facebook presented in August of 2004, and became its first outside investor. Through his VC company, Founders Fund, he has since invested in AirBnB, SpaceX, Spotify, and Lyft, to name a few.
“How you can achieve your 10-year plan in the next 6 months?” — Peter Thiel
Radical Goal Setting
Thiel is famous for setting bold goals. PayPal was set up to replace the American dollar. Palantir was designed to find terrorist networks and discover financial fraud. Both of these companies have been valued at over $1 billion. There is one thing, however, that Thiel regrets about the decision to start PayPal — that he waited so long.
Thiel says that if there was one thing he could go back and tell his younger self is that it would be to “not wait”. When you set a goal, you pick a time frame that you feel is reasonable. The problem with reasonable, sometimes, is that it allows for procrastination. Thiel states that while some goals do take a long time to realize, many are slowed down by not taking real action to complete. There’s no reason to wait. Just start.
Takeaways
- Don’t do things just because it’s the way it’s always been done. True creativity and growth come from doing things outside of the norm. The world doesn’t initially reward those who go against the social grain, but in the end those are the ones who progress society. Be unafraid to question the world around you. Most of the people operating in it are no smarter than you.
- Take a chance. If you recognize that there is a gap that should be filled, work to fill it. Bet on yourself. You may not know how to do it when you initially recognize the opportunity, but those who desire to change the world learn as they go. In the words of Sir Richard Branson, “If someone offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes — then learn how to do it later!”
- Set audacious goals. Most of us believe that things take much longer to accomplish than they actually do. Pick a goal, and then ask yourself why you picked the timeline you did. Then pretend you only have a tenth of the time to do it, or there will be major repercussions. What could you do today that would guarantee success on the advanced timeline? Chances are good that you can accomplish your goals much faster than you realize.
Thanks
Many thanks go out to the following resources that helped me develop this short piece:
Wikipedia, The Thiel Fellowship, Founders Fund, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
Thank you to you for reading this piece, as well. Please feel free to comment or clap if this piece is relevant to you, and you would like to see more in this series featuring other entrepreneurial leaders.
