Peter Thiel: preference

Transcript context

…This is why you like Hegel? I don’t like Hegel that much. [laughter] I think if you focus too much on one or the other end of it, you would tend to get it completely wrong. I like to get things where you get these combinations of unusual traits, so if you have people with some really interesting, very different ideas, that suggests we’re in the idiosyncratic category. Then the important question becomes, OK, would they actually be able to function socially and execute? Then maybe the teamwork question you’d ask would be, what’s the prehistory of this company? How did you meet, how long have you been working together, and if there’s a long prehistory, that would be good on the other side. I think it’s always getting these combinations right. There’s an interview with you when someone asks, “What’s the Straussian reading of your book, Zero to One?” You say something like, “The Straussian reading is don’t be an entrepreneur.” Yet at the same time, society has this problem, which many of us would recognize, that too many people go down tracks of conservative career choices. You work for a consulting firm, or you go to finance if you come out of a top school. It’s now become a new kind of conservative choice, maybe, to go to Silicon Valley in certain ways. Given the difficulties of becoming an entrepreneur, and the pull of conformity, how is it actually, socially? What kind of intellectual or ideological reconstruction do we need to get people out of so many of these conservative career choices?…

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