Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned Facebook a few minutes ago. In the back, we were talking about good and bad names for companies. If you could tell us your view on this, how important is the name of a company? What are a few good names, and why, and what are a few bad names? A slight aesthetic thing I believe in very strongly is the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success. PayPal was a very friendly name. It was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name. It was the music sharing site. You nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing. [laughter] It’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down, within a few years. You want to be very careful how you name companies. In the sharing economy context, I like Airbnb, way more than Uber. Airbnb sounds like this very innocent, virtual bed and breakfast. It’s [a] very light, nonthreatening company. Uber, it sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. [laughter] What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? [laughter] This is probably something that, again, from government regulatory perspective, Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber. On the social networking side, I would say that I actually think Facebook was a very good name. MySpace was a more problematic name. You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing. Unlike real life, you have to write, before you read. You first have to write some things about yourself, then you read more about other people. Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you. About the real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves, and then a lot of other people in LA, who are generally like that. Because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole product arc was implicit in the names. How about United States? Overrated or underrated? And consider the name. [laughter]…

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