Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…In order to go from zero to one in a nonprofit organization, or a political advocacy group, what would one have to do? What would be a key differentiator, or angle, to approach with it? The contrarian business question is what are great businesses no one has started, the contrarian investor question is what great investments does nobody like — the contrarian nonprofit question is what great causes are deeply unpopular? This is how I always deflect requests for money, is I ask people, “Why is your cause popular? Why is your cause unpopular?” Because I only want to fund unpopular causes. I assume popular causes are funded relatively well. Relative to good, unpopular causes. If you are able to push unpopular causes, that’s very good. Then, the Zen-like problem, the paradox, is that you have a lot of impact, if you are able to push a good, worthwhile, but unpopular cause. The Zen paradox, is that it’s very hard to market it and get money to do it. That’s the tension that it’s worth thinking through really hard. I think most nonprofits fail at this, where they end up supporting things that are super conventional, they can get funding for them, but if they didn’t do it, there’d be 100 other people doing it. Always having a counterfactual sense of mission is important. If we weren’t doing this, nobody else in the world would be doing this. To the extent that’s not true, you want to make that more true. Maybe it’s a spectrum, but you want to always tilt more in that direction. On the business side, on the nonprofit side, I always differentiate mission-oriented businesses, which have this counterfactual sense of importance, from social entrepreneurship. Anything that has a social element to it — the word social is very ambiguous. It can mean, number one, good for society. It can mean, number two, good as seen by society. In practice, the second meaning always ends up dominating the first. Then, you end up with the “me too,” lemming-like, sheep-like clones, where you lose every raison d’être. In an age increasingly dominated by intellectual ability, what should a person of modest cognitive ability do with his life, to find meaning or make a contribution? Related to that, what person of average, or modest, intelligence do you admire most? [laughter]…

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