

Peter Thiel on "Founder as Victim, Founder as God" - bgmasters
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes-essay
Class 18 of Stanford CS183:Startup
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lla0ajj
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.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Gotta love these ~30 minute old accounts with 7 karma howling at the moon that
the neither the first successful online payments company, nor the most
successful social network in Internet history, nor a ~$100billion/year big
data company are 'innovative'.

They may not be nuclear fusion or the perpetual motion machine, but they're
more innovative than 99% of what everyone else will ever do.

Your point about wealth buying you a soapbox was interesting, but you went off
the rails with that middle paragraph.

~~~
lla0ajj
"$100billion/year big data company"?

That's like saying a "$100billion/year products company". Incredibly vague.
What's the product? Yes, it does make a difference.

I remind you that Thiel himself pulled an iPhone from his pocket and said
"This is innovation?"

If we are going to measure innovation by income produced, then we can come up
with all sorts of interesting examples of "innovation".

~~~
SkyMarshal
Oops, meant $100 million/year company. Obviously they're not a $100b/y.

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unimpressive
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.

------
rehack
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.

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gruseom
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.

~~~
elderberry
it actually comes from batman

vengeful, vigilante, uses fear and intimidation, but fights crime and never
kills people

paranoid, schizoid, extremely brilliant

orphan billionaire philanthropist

extreme insider+outsider

~~~
jlipps
I actually think Christopher Nolan or whoever else was involved in writing the
recen batman movies are also familiar with Girard:

[http://www.jonathanlipps.com/blog/2008/07/the-dark-knight-
an...](http://www.jonathanlipps.com/blog/2008/07/the-dark-knight-and-rene-
girard/)

------
donohoe

      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?

~~~
malux85
Expanding on what you're saying, I think it's important to get people to curb
the knee-jerk soccer mom reaction "OMG MY CHILD IS MAKING BOMBS" and find out
if the child is making bombs because they have a serious psychological
problem, or they're interested in science.

One child needs a therapist, one child needs a chemistry book.

Speaking as the child who made bombs, and got the chemistry book :)

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joseflavio
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.

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cubancigar11
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 a __hole and too much wealth has just reinforced his
petty view of the people around him.

~~~
jfarmer
Er...Gandhi typifies almost everything Thiel is talking about.

Extreme outsider to extreme insider to victim.

~~~
cubancigar11
How about Buddha? At no point was he an outcast or object of hatred for normal
people. He was at every point supported in his quest.

More I think about it, more I realize that it is western culture of 'our way
or the highway' that Theil is talking about. Point to note that the killer(s)
of Gandhi were a fan of Nazis.

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

~~~
mag487
I don't see how he's being scapegoated. What failure is he being held
personally responsible for?

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arkitaip
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.

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confluence
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;

~~~
zt
I always find it interesting when a contemporary argument boils down to old
ones. (This isn't a criticism). Your argument against the Great Man Theory is
best expressed in War and Peace, where Tolstoy goes on long discussions on the
imaginary significance of great men, including obviously Napoleon. Or, as
Isaiah Berlin says in the "Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of
History," Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life:

...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them
can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the
orderly movement of which is the history of the world...

~~~
confluence
Oh man and here I was thinking I was being slightly original with my little
parable quoting Shakespeare :D.

Happy to be a modern rehash of Tolstoy's thoughts - I still haven't gotten
around to reading War and Peace so I had no idea.

Everything is a remix is it not?

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10dpd
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...

~~~
kiba
Now show us why it is BS?

~~~
trevelyan
please define the X axis.

------
jonmc12
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.

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larrys
"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.

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staunch
That was weird.

------
ktizo
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.

