A response to Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question….

“What is something you believe to be true that most people disagree with you on?”

Most people believe that originality is the key to innovation, but in fact, it is context that matters more.

To quote the late, great David Bowie:

“What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.”

Some ideas work and some don’t. Most times, it is the thoughtful application of past lessons to new opportunities that create the innovations that truly change the world. After all haggis and snails on the same plate certainly can be classified as original, but is that innovative?

Take the Big Bang for example. The real achievement of the Big Bang theory was not that it was original, though the theory didn’t exist 100 years ago. Stephen Hawking simply applied understandings from two disparate conclusions: that the universe was expanding and that black holes are singular points of infinite gravity that result in the trapping of light. Hawking then married these two theories together and determined that if you moved backwards from an expanding universe to its beginning, you would have a point of singularity similar to a black hole. This understanding formulated the foundation of the Big Bang. Clearly, the Big Bang theory was a new understanding of the beginning of our universe, but it was innovative because it built off of past achievements and applied that understanding to untested scenarios.

This might seem like semantics, but it is an important distinction. Originality implies birth or origin and therefore fundamentally discounts past experience. As such, reverence of originality inappropriately glorifies starting from scratch and actually can serve to hinder the creative process. The real mechanism for change is the astute application of past lessons to seemingly new situations — inspiration and an open mind to test those inspirations.

Applied to technology and venture capital investing, we can see that the most successful ventures follow this model too. Take Uber, perhaps the most revolutionary new innovative product of the last 10 years as indicated by the advent of the freelance economy and the proliferation of the “Uber of x” phenomenon now ongoing. They merely applied the fundamental mechanisms of supply and demand to the new mobile landscape. This allowed for suppliers to derive more appropriate utilization of private widgets (i.e. higher utils derived from people’s cars) and demanders to directly demonstrate the utility that they place on a particular service as demonstrated by their willingness to pay, ultimately creating a classic economic virtuous cycle.

On a smaller scale, Robin Hood — an investing platform that offers its users the ability to trade without commissions — makes it’s money by making its users keep a certain amount of money in their account and investing any excess funds in user accounts that users aren’t actively working in the marketplace in TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities… the safest kinds of securities). Incidentally, this is the same model that Venmo uses, and both are borrowed the model from the traditional way that banks make money on customer deposits.

There are of course relatively greater leaps from past realities or applications of theories from relatively more disparate circumstances: what one might argue is “more of an original thought than others.” This spectrum merely has to do with the number of logical steps one is removed from the given logical inspiration. There are also certainly those who are better at traveling farther from the logical beginning than others. This, I would argue has to do with powers of logical understanding and more importantly a commitment to seeing that logical conclusion through to fruition. But importantly, they are not privy to some innate ability toward creating original thought.

Ultimately, the distinction is important because once we stop revering originality we can approach facilitating change scientifically. We can actionably test “what happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound” and the result can be breathtaking.