Peter Thiel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…What do you hope to spend the next year thinking about, ideas or questions you haven’t thought through already, that will be your focus in the next year or two to come? Things that we haven’t talked about already. I don’t know if it’s ever really this top-down agenda that I try to set. A lot of what I end up doing is somewhat serendipitous. You talk with a lot of interesting people. You try to figure out what are some great technologies, great entrepreneurs to work with in different ways. That’s how you end up getting very interesting perspectives, and how you change your mind on things. The overarching agenda is always to try to figure out some way to get out of the stagnation by literally helping people to start companies that will change the world. Before we get to audience Q&A, final question from me. You’ve done many start-ups, funded many others, you’ve written Zero to One on start-ups. If you think of the Institute for Humane Studies and Mercatus Center as a kind of start-up: we are together in one location. We have a critical mass of people here, studying notions of liberty and individual responsibility. We have, more or less, a common intellectual background in some ways. I wouldn’t say we have a monopoly, but the space of doing liberty-oriented ideas in a university setting is by no means what everyone is jumping at doing, to say the least. If you think of us as a start-up, embodying at least some characteristics which have something to do with what you’ve praised, what advice would you give us at the margin, for being successful in the future?…

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