Notes from Peter Thiel's class at Stanford

[sam22]

Essay versions of class notes from CS183: Startup, with Peter Thiel (cofounder of Paypal). http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Not mine. Just found them.

 

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[theBiz]

First time reading anything of Thiel's, this is very good stuff, smart guy.

Suppose you want to start a restaurant in Palo Alto that will serve only British food. It will be the only such restaurant in Palo Alto. “No one else is doing it,” you might say. “We’re in a class of our own.” But is that true? What is the relevant market? Is it the market for British food? Or the restaurant market in general? Should you consider only the Palo Alto market? Or do people sometimes travel to or from Menlo Park or Mountain View to eat? These questions are hard, but the bigger problem is that your incentive is not to ask them at all. Rather, your incentive is to rhetorically shrink the market. If a bearish investor reminds you that 90% of restaurants fail within 2 years, you’ll come up with a story about how you’re different. You’ll spend time trying to convince people you’re the only game in town instead of seriously considering whether that’s true. You should wonder whether there are people who eat only British food in Palo Alto. In this example, those are the only people you have pricing power over. And it’s very possible that those people don’t exist.

In 2001, some PayPal people used to go eat on Castro Street in Mountain View. Then, like now, there were all sorts of different lunch places. Whether you wanted Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, American, or something else, you had several restaurants to choose from. And there were more choices once you picked a type. Indian restaurants, for instance, divided into South Indian vs. not, cheaper vs. fancier. Castro Street was pretty competitive. PayPal, by contrast, was at that time the only e-mail based payments company in world. It employed fewer people than the Mountain View restaurants did. Yet from a capital formation perspective, PayPal was much more valuable than all the equity of all those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian food restaurant on Castro Street was, and is, a hard way to make money. It’s a big, competitive market. But when you focus on your one or two differentiating factors, it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not.

Movie pitches unfold in much the same way. Most of them are the same in that they all claim that this movie will be truly unique. This new film, investors are told, will combine various elements in entirely new ways. And that may even be true. Suppose we want to have Andrew Luck star in a cross between “Hackers” and “Jaws.” The plot summary is: college football star joins elite group of hackers to catch the shark that killed his friend. That’s definitely never been done before. We’ve had sports stars and “Hackers” and “Jaws,” but never anything at the intersection of that Venn diagram. But query whether that intersection would be any good or not.

 

[arcola]

First time reading anything of Thiel's, this is very good stuff, smart guy.

Its really one of the best things I have ever read. The guy is really good. His business is falling apart right now (Clarium Capital), but man he is smart!.

I love your sig, thats one of my favorite quotes by Bonaparte, hes my hero.