Peter Thiel on "Founder as Victim, Founder as God" (opens in new tab)

This was the most interesting of this series of notes yet.

And the conclusion was the weakest.

Thiel seems like a pretty creepy character. When you have enough FU money, you can indulge a really skewed view of the world (former Intel exec comes to mind). And this series of lectures illustrates Theil's. He thinks someone, a young and naive (pre-university) prodigy, is going to make him a wealtier VC by sharing with him their "secret" idea. He criticizes education and America's lack of meaningful innovation, yet he's made wealthy by vacuous ideas of "innovation" like Facebook. Then look at what he's contributed in the way of innovation. What are his qualifications as an "expert"? An online payments company and a company that analyzes data from the web to try to find "terrorists". This is innovation? We should hope his program participants will aspire to do better.

In his last lecture on biotech where he talks about a panel of VC making predictions about the future. Were any of these VC actually in the biotech sector? As long as they have lots of capital under their direction, does it matter?

When you are wealthy people will listen to you, no matter what you say. Alas, it may encourage the speaker to believe their own hype even more. Thiel is taking full advantage of this privilege.

What a tripe! There are a lot of cultures where scapegoats were never present (India and China come to my mind). Polarizing figures with leadership qualities polarize the people around them. That doesn't make them founders! They are two different sets which intersect sometimes.

And Bill Gates is NOT being forced to do charity, especially not by those who criticized him before. Most people in third world countries idolized him when geeks hated his guts.

Theil shows that he is an ahole and too much wealth has just reinforced his petty view of the people around him.

The victim/god identity, along with the scapegoat theory of culture described in the lecture, derives from the interesting French thinker (and Stanford prof) René Girard.

You have 2 sailors - one weak, the other great. They have the same wind behind their sails. Who will finish the race first?

The great sailor, of course.

Now, same experiment, except the weak sailor now gets a 1000 km/hr wind and the great one gets a 1 km/hr wind (hypothetically of course). Who wins the race now?

The weak sailor.

Now, who was responsible for winning the race? Was it the wind or was it the person who captured the wind? What's more important - the person who captures, or the gust that fills his sail? Replace sail with society and sailor with founder (adjust for time/economy/education/family). Now who's responsible for the success of the company? Was it the single factor person? Or the inumerable factor society?

What's more likely - that people are special (you're all special - just like mother told you), or that the situations they are placed in are? Are there really great men (or women), or are there in fact merely extraordinary situations that produce, as a side effect, those self-same "great" men/women?

Why do inventions have multiple origins, why are there always multiple companies in the same spaces being founded at the same time, why does innovation happen in specific situations rather than with specific groups of people? There were hundreds of search engines/social networks. The telephone was patented on the same day by multiple people. The radio has one of the most messy histories of invention I have ever seen.

"Founder as Victim, Founder as God" sounds a great deal like humans have a poor understanding of randomness. 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs are replaced every single year. Why is that? Maybe it's because people don't understand randomness and the astounding complexity inherent in large systems (the Earth for example).

Replace the CEO - that'll fix all our problems! Change strategy, that did it! We just need more synergy, better management, great leadership!

Let's ignore global macro factors like extraneous lowering of energy/technology costs, the economic cycle, geopolitical risk, time between war, sex, age, race, strong laws, strong defence, personal networks, position in society, number of humans alive, access to education, access to capital, actions of third parties, chance meetings and all the other things that go into these systems.

  Yeah, the founders, that's who's important!

Just wave away everything else - we do love our narratives don't we (imagine life without films!).

This is fundamental attribution error at work. The world is more complex than the people in it. CEOs don't cause great companies as much as you'd like that to be true. People don't cause great things to happen as much as people want that to be true. The world is very complex and humans are incredibly stupid.

Most people have trouble getting their heads around controlled static experiments in physics/AI. That's a tiny, tiny system. It takes a great deal of arrogance to talk of the world in such a generalized, grandiose way, without a shred of evidence apart from personal biases and inductive reasoning.

  The plural of anecdote is not data. 

You only see the winners people. Randomness is more important than you think it is.

  All the world's a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players;

I've never read as much BS in my entire life...just because someone has made right decisions in the past doesn't give them a platform to spout gibberish in future...

  PayPal’s founding team was six people.
  ...
  Four of them built bombs when they were
  in high school.

Surprised no one picked up on this (not that I could see anyway).

When we hear about a kid who got caught building a bomb these days we never think Wow - they'll make a great entrepreneur some day!

Maybe we should learn not to judge children too harshly?

The scapegoating of Thiel in this thread is an amusing proof of concept, whatever the value of his ideas.

This is actually pretty interesting, not necessarily because I think it provides any particularly profound insights, but because it gives an indirect account of how Thiel sees himself. Being an extreme insider and yet at the same time an extreme outsider implies a polarizing personality. For someone to think they see this trait in themselves is seemingly a contradiction, it's almost doublethink to consider oneself both repulsive and charismatic at the same time, or both an idiot savant and a polymath.

Most intriguing read I had in days.

I am still thinking whats true and whats not in the text though...

Modern day scapegoats e.g. founders are just humiliated (Gates) and fired (Jobs) but not killed compared to earlier times scapegoats, who were actually sacrificed. So the question is, what kind of forces brought about the changes that made present times more civil?

So in a guaranteed civil environment, where the sacrificial lamb will never actually be sacrificed, but the most likely risks are not being able to make it (failed venture) or getting blamed and fired in a venture going downhill after hitting a peak, won't it make the averages go and try out things with a mind set 'if it works great, if it doesn't well the next time...'?

Heck even Google founders did try to sell it to Yahoo very early on. That's my chosen example of an average behavior, to counter the chosen examples in the OPs text.

So its all very interesting to read. But don't know what to do with it. But one thing I am sure of is that dedicated work and self sacrifice (like not wasting too much time enjoying here, and instead actually coding/working) does pay in some form down the line!

Addendum: Would want to add though, that my take away from the notes was extending the innovation period of a Startup. Not yielding to beaureucracy. If the intrigue was built to just drive in that point, it was well worth then.

It is interesting how he choose only hero-like characters to exemplify extremes in character... I could imagine many other historical figures that would fit in his stereotype... that were heroes for THEIR supports and monsters to us.

It's an entertaining read but my it's really a bunch of unfounded ideas with lots of pretty figures :) Weird that this is the kind of education that some founders are getting.

Seems like the x-axis of founder distribution is characterized by external perception - is this person "like" me? do I see characteristics in them that I relate to myself? Liking is mentioned at least once in the article, ie "lest the people in the crowd get introspective and realize that the sacrificed was essentially just like them".

Early in a startup, founders will attract other who are like them (paypal a documented example). However, when the startup is big enough the perception of the founder compared to everyone else in the company has the naturally emergent property that the founder will be seen as different than everyone else. Now, the tipping point of this difference becoming a "dislike" could be company performance or bad luck. So the theory all seems to come together in V.B and V.C in article.

I did however, find some of the background to be confusing, particularly section I.D seems to make the case that king-ship is a matter of perception outside of the organization.

"Anecdotally, we can apply this framework to any founder figure."

"Any" founder?

Yet another attempt to say something profound and reverse engineer success based on cherry picking examples.

Wondering when we will read the big study of everyone who has succeeded and failed in the world to be able to see to what extent any of this matters.

That was weird.

Found this really fun to read, a sort of 'how to found a company best practices' for the people who keep dreaming wistfully about armoured elephants and Alps.