Respectable smart people differ on lots of things - or do all top students at Stanford agree with Thiel? Do all chess masters agree with him? All investors? (And investment is such a random thing anyway...)
He is just selling himself, conning the audience – even having fun while at it, self ironically quoting Douglas Adams. There is no truth to it – this is what the whole essay is about. It is BS and BD – there is no BS like HBS, as they say.
How do you know if it's true? Think through it yourself. Don't look for a hook that's going to make you feel better about accepting something as gospel.
How do you know if it's true? Think through it yourself. Don't look for a hook that's going to make you feel better about accepting something as gospel.
I am not looking for a gospel. I am looking for a method so that I can understand if and how he's wrong or right.
Some suggestions:
1) Check for yourself that the facts he puts forward are true.
2) Look for notable examples of success and failure, study them closely, and see if they affirm or contradict his teachings.
That said, apart from "facts", little of what he says can be proven as "wrong or right" - he's just imparting to students what he has learned from his own experiences and observations.
It's a complex world. No individual point-of-view can come close to being 100% right 100% of the time.
But people are getting excited about this class because he seems to have developed particularly profound insights into the fundamentals of modern technology businesses - as compared with the many others who study/speak/write about the topic.
