Peter Thiel – Understanding Roles in a Startup | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel – Understanding Roles in a Startup

7 pointsScotty1236 comments

Hi all, Everyone knows the story of Zuckerberg coding in his dorm, of the video game Steve Jobs sold as a teenager, Bill Gates creating Microsoft in the garage. These programming prodigies who started these lifechanging companies coding by themselves. In reading about Paypal and learning about Peter Thiel he doesn't seem to be an expert in code or on the technical side of the work. He did not go to school for CS, and I can't find where his expertise in the tech world lies. What is his defining skillset? What made him special to PayPal and eventually Palentir? I know my weaknesses and I want to provide value at a startup level but am struggling to find a space that needs to be filled.

Do you know what each Founders role was in the rise of Paypal?

What are essential roles that every startup needs to fill from the getgo?

Money, legal, strategy, and dealmaking. Thiel was trained as a lawyer, then worked for Credit Suisse and started his own hedge fund.

If you read the Max Levchin interview in Founders At Work, the way PayPal started was that Max wanted to do crypto (back when it meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency) at Stanford, attended a lecture by Thiel, and Thiel said "Go do it. My hedge fund will invest in you." Then there were about 4 pivots, then the company Levchin & Thiel founded (Confinity) merged with its primary competitor, Elon Musk's X.com, in a deal brokered by Thiel. Elon Musk's primary contribution was supposedly trying to rewrite the software in Windows (the interview was with Levchin, it's likely somewhat biased - Thiel is more complimentary towards Musk and says he was a fearsome competitor). Then it found product/market fit amongst E-bay sellers, rode the hyper-growth wave, went public, and was eventually bought by E-bay.

Thanks, can you link to the article/interview?

It's a book (of the dead-tree sort), not an online article:

https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early-...

Author is a co-founder of the site you're posting this on, BTW.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Steve Jobs was not a programmer. He was the marketing guy. Woz was the engineer.

% 100 focus

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