Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel on what works at work (2014)

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143 pointsbrianchu92 comments

Something I found very interesting was Peter's comment: "You try to hire people you could become friends with." I contrast this with Zuckerberg's approach to only hiring people that he would work for (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/03...).

It's probably not fair to put these side-by-side due to context, but Peter's approach resonates with me now. Here's how I reconcile this: Peter's "friends" concept is about the long-term effect on yourself (and your team around you). Mark's "work-for" concept is about putting the very best people around you to build and operate a company. They could certainly co-exist, depending on your personality.

Mark's approach (for me) makes great sense on paper, but Peter's approach comes with the value of been-there-done-that. Both have their place, but over the long haul, I can really appreciate what Peter is talking about.

I see it as Peter saying hire for culture, Mark saying hire for talent.

The answer is, as always, somewhere in the middle. I reconcile both thinking of culture as an hygienic condition, and talent as an order winner. Explaining: if the culture is poor, talent will go unused (it is irrelevant); if culture is good, talent gets used and only then does it make sense to try and hire the best talent.

That's how I took it as well. I remember reading from Max Levchin (?) that a company should hire people exactly like them, culturally, early on.

This helps reduce unnecessary conflict when the only thing you're focused on is growth. A prime example is why early startup employees come from the same school as the founders.

I think later on, bigger companies focus on talent and culture equally (for the most part).

Hiring people culturally similar may sounds sensible in theory, but it may not be sensible in practice.

I haven't seen stats on startup hiring, but I read this about investment, which in my opinion stands a good chance of having a similar effect:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7069.html

"The probability of a successful exit outcome decreases by 18 percent if two venture capitalists who previously worked at the same company partner up in the syndication.

The likelihood of success drops by 22 percent if co-investors attended the same undergraduate school.

The negative effect of shared affinity is even stronger when it relates to ethnicity: Collaborating with someone from the same ethnic minority group comes at the expense of a 25 percent reduction in performance."

Maybe investors are more properly skeptical about dumb opportunities proposed by someone with a dissimilar background. Founders and employees have a much greater need to work together day-to-day and trust each others' judgment.

It's certainly plausible. I can tell a plausible story from the other side though - the primary feature of being a start up is learning, and if it's an echo chamber you're going to be learning the wrong things and relying on things other than facts to dictate your business strategy.

I agree with this summarization as well. What's implicit in both of these (IMHO), is that the type of friends Peter Thiel looks for will naturally be talented. And likewise for Mark, where someone he respects enough to consider working for is likely someone he would befriend.

Big assumptions, but those guys are in the type of position where that's likely a reliable expectation.

A mantra like this has great appeal because who wouldn't want to hire their friends? But many hiring decisions are already biased with this in some way. Hiring is still a hard and unsolved problem.

It seems that him saying that you try to hire people you could become friends with is opaque. How does he determine someone he would be good friends with? Do they have to share the same political views and hobbies? Without more info, it is hard to not view this as: Hire people Peter Thiel could be friends with.

The main advantage of hiring people you would be friends with is that at least you feel comfortable with them even if they're not an optimal hire. It is almost like admitting you don't have a solution to finding good workers, so if you get a bad hire, at least you get along with them.

"Try to hire people you could become friends with" seems like a really bad idea from the discrimination point of view, since people are most likely to view someone of the same race, age, and gender as a potential friend.

Regardless of gender or ethnicity, if everyone you hire is a 20-something graduate of the same top-10 CS programmes what you get is... Google+ (or Wave or Buzz...)

Diversity means you don't get trapped in an echo chamber.

or maybe it means you get Gmail, Google Web Search, Google Apps, Android and Chrome.

Seems like you are using very selective evidence there, or selectively attributing only unsuccessful products to lack of diversity.

Wave was not by a 20-something but by a 40-something. Age has nothing to do with that (the 40-something that lead Wave also created Maps)

And Wave was pretty cool. As a startup it might have even succeeded.

"You try to hire people you could become friends with" is a profoundly stupid maxim.

People who come from conservative and religious societies will always be pressured by friends to not make new friends who are of different ethnicities.

Thiel is basically ensuring each company Will become a little Island of segregation and this is what I have seen in the bay area: companies that are 90% Indian, 90% Chinese, or 90% white guys.

I come from a conservative background and I've never been discouraged from hanging out with different ethnicities and cultures. We are not the strawmen you apparently think we are.

Conversely when a few of my friends family found out I was an atheist they were no longer allowed to associate with me. A select few tried to convert me, others acted outright vitriolic towards me. This was in a major metro in CA. Romantic relationships have also ended in the past when family members couldn't get over my lack of faith.

I come from an incredibly conservative family (literally had pictures of Reagan and Cheney on the wall) and they had no problems with my engagement to an Hispanic woman.

Yes but how would they react to your sister dating a black man?

ya'll are taking this maxim and removing it from the context of hiring. I thought it was obvious he meant, you want someone capable and someone you could be friends with. It's not supposed to be a maxim, it's from an interview.

Speaking as a white American from a very conservative/religious family and social group, I think your view is just as generalized as you imagine conservative/religious groups to be. I have multiple aunts and uncles who are Korean, my first serious girlfriend was black, my best friend growing up was Mexican (as well as having many Mexican relatives), so I would say that our conservative and religious views didn't preclude us from not only being open to other ethnicities, but to embracing them as our own. Granted, I don't think my upbringing was typical of conservative/religious upbringings, but I know it wasn't typical of many liberal/non-religious points of view. I don't think it's something you can shoehorn quite like that. (I would say our religion brought us all together more than anything else).

I think the effect you're seeing (where many Asians, such as Chinese, Korean, or Indian) are more isolated has far less to do with idealogical beliefs, than it does with multiple factors, such as being immigrants in a country that has typically has had a harder time identifying with their culture as well as a large trend of pushing towards higher education, especially in demanding fields such as medicine and engineering.

But I digress :)

If you are comfortable being friends with many different kinds of people, it may be just fine.

If not, you may be bad at leadership regardless.

Please don't delete comments and repost them.

Hiring indiscriminately doesn't sound so great either.

I think this advice was given with the assumption that the receiver is an intelligent human being.

There are many intelligent human beings who suffer from many forms of gender and/or race bias. Our very nature as humans is to surround ourselves with people who look, act, and think like us. Hiring people that could be your friends without having the insight to get beyond the inherent bias in all of us could very easily lead to a corporate structure that is extremely myopic. Not that it won't be successful, just ends up looking like Stepford Corp, look at the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 for many examples.

Hiring someone for the sake of diversity is absolutely stupid. Also, not sure what you are on about? The advice is to hire someone who you could get a beer or shoot a game of pool with after work and carry a non-awkward conversation and talk about overlapping interests. A person of any gender or nationality could potentially fit this bill.

Not sure what part of bias you don't understand or that we as humans tend to congregate with those that are like us. All things being equal but race, a white male will tend to hire the white male, even if he could equally socialize with a candidate of another gender or race. That is why I pointed out that it is best to have the "insight to get beyond the inherent bias in all of us", so we could see that maybe grabbing a beer with someone who doesn't look like us is equally viable. Hiring for the sake of diversity is less stupid than hiring just because you like the same team or drink the same beer, that behavior should have been left at the frat house after you graduated.

I wouldn't say it's stupid so much as variable in its value. Some people are naturally attracted to a wide variety of people, ideas, experiences, and so on. For them, following this advice is likely to turn out well. For others, with narrower horizons, results will be a bit more mixed.

It is, but I think it's no more discriminatory than yardsticks that people use to hire and promote people in today's work place. We'd like to think that we're objective, but if you look at the kind of people that get hired and promoted, they all fit certain type of molds, especially personality.

I don't think "friend" is meant in the context of "someone that you would invite to hang out at a local bar to get some wings, beer, and watch the game".

It's more of "a person whose unique experience, drive and motivation can teach you something and who's pleasant and educational to be around in circumstances outside of employment contract".

> Mark's approach (for me) makes great sense on paper, but Peter's approach comes with the value of been-there-done-that.

Keep in mind that Mark only briefly "worked for" anybody in high school and college, and most of these were contracting positions.

In a way, the only example of people he wouldn't "work for" that we know about is the Winklevosses after he decided to "stop working" on "their idea"

If you combine those two you have PG's advice: "Learn a lot about things that matter, then work on problems that interest you with people you like and respect."

If you're not interested in being friends with a person of a certain gender/race/whatever then you probably wouldn't want to work for them either.

I read it differently. There's two ways to deal with trust:

1. you can try and hedge yourself against employees doing bad things. Like quitting for the competition or passing information. In this model, employees are paid mercenaries and none are crucial to the company. This is favored by corporations as it is good risk management.

2. you only hire people whose values align with yours, and where one strong shared value is sticking together.

The prisoner's dilemma is a good framework to see why either can work.

1. assumes defect/defect, which results in poor but positive outcomes. Corporations are inefficient, but they are profitable. You keep good people by paying them more than the competition, not by building trust and values-based friendship.

2. is cooperate/cooperate, which results in large positive outcomes for as long as you can maintain it, but the first breach of trust (the first instance or even possibility of a defect) results in a catastrophic negative outcome. For example, if you're having a few rough months and your CTO - who built 80% of the site and is the only one who understands the data model - leaves for a better paid job.

This is part of why it is so rare for more efficient upstarts to win against large corporations in their own market - by the time they get big enough, the startup looks too much like a corporation to maintain its cooperate/cooperate environment.

Where things get interesting is Andreesen's "Software Eating the World" essay. Some companies have recently surfaced (Instagram, Whatsapp, most hedge funds) where a small number of people highly trusting each other have managed to scale the outsize outcome to corporation levels.

And I think this is what Thiel is trying to say (or at least what he makes me think about): if your co-founders are practically "family", you might be more likely to go down that path. Whereas Zuckerberg prefers playing it safe, and assuming people will defect and scaling his company accordingly - especially since there is no shortage of capital to keep the best.

> They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000.

They're interested in Silicon Valley now. Here's an actual conversation I had recently with a business school student (not verbatim obviously, but accurate as far as content):

Me: What are you doing after you graduate from HBS this spring?

MBA: I want to do startups.

Me: Oh cool, do you know which one you're going to work for?

MBA: Oh no, I want to start a startup.

Me: Oh okay, what's it going to do?

MBA: Don't know yet!

Me: Oh...

What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)

The problem comes when MBAs, generally without technical background, build companies without real value and expand an already existing bubble.

And plenty of devs go and work for such companies and individuals…

One would think we'd come up with better ways by now to lessen the allocation of resources for things in the present that are of marginal utility for most people, but somehow, humans have a knack of creating/engaging red queens races relative to other things that are theoretically possible and feasible.

Becomes hard to turn down a compensation that could be 1.5-2x larger than others.

More likely: 0.8 times what you'd make elsewhere but a significant chunk of equity (0.0001% or so, vesting over 5 years...).

Most start ups (and large co's) are offering devs to work on pretty much the same thing, which in my opinion is very easy to turn down and actively avoid… 1.5x, 2x (at best for most) to ship marginally interesting projects that will probably provide not much more than marginal utility for most people while being around people who will pretend (or believe) otherwise… yeah…

I don't think I would join a startup that wasn't founded by people with some kind of technical degree.

Same here. But it seems to be a thing.

Best email I got from a start-up that wanted to hire me went something like this: "We are a team of 5 MBAs with an idea and need you to be our employee #1 to build it!"

I mean 5 founders seems rather excessive to me but all of them MBAs and the only technical person will be an employee and not a co founder.

Maybe it's not such a bad idea. Someone has to do the no-fun work of sales, promotion, taxes, etc., might be nice to have a bunch of MBAs around to do that. Could also ask for 40% equity or so.

For some companies the core value is the tech they produce, and thus having non-tech people at the helm makes little sense.

Others, usually also dubbed "tech startups" due to their Silicon Valley location, use generic pieces of technology to achieve their purpose. There are entire sectors (ad tech, Uber for X), where basic building blocks have been built and now it's sell, sell, sell.

What about MBAs WITH technical backgrounds? Are they allowed to build companies?

I get the impression from HN commentary that the minute you receive your MBA you become a sociopath whose IQ drops 40 points.

MBAs with technical background usually have a BS in STEM and go work to a bank/corporation in finance/management positions.

Hence, they are not actual engineers actively building a product.

Please do build a company, but not a money-making scheme treating developers like dispensable tools.

Indeed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wharton_School_alumni with all due respect it's a bit tiring to hear about all those 'uselss MBA' stereotypes. There's a substance to it but I start to feel that 9 out of 10 comments like this one reflect the insecurity of the author rather than anything else.

One of the people not mentioned on the list is founder of Warby Parker - surely he contributed to the bubble by building the 2nd most profitable retail stores and one of the few startups that are actually profitable.

With all due respect, if you're a MBA, you've just followed such stereotype.

So what I didn't even graduate college? I'm proud to have built a company whose employees are happy and treated with dignity. Diligence, respect and passion drove people like me to success, not a HBS MBA.

From experience, that's not what usually happens with MBAs. Because of an 'alumni list' or a privileged network, many feel entitled to success and will do anything to reach their goals(often unethically).

Most of these people (not all of whom are MBAs) just want to be bosses, not entrepreneurs. Their goal is to be executives ("big picture guys") shouting orders, not worker bees, but they don't have the social resources to make it happen in an existing company so they drum up some seed funding and hire some engineers (usually, scraping the bottom) and try to kick something together. It doesn't work very often.

"I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were. I'd rather be around people who have concrete ideas of what they want to build, and who'll lead when appropriate and follow when appropriate. People who say, "I'm a leader" but don't have a good sense of where they want to lead, are annoying. What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."

I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags. I know plenty whom I like a lot. Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking. When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies. Now you have the worst of both worlds between small companies and big ones, and a high likelihood of failure or, if the connections are there, Knewton-esque mediocrity.

Oddly enough, if I had a child I'd recommend that he go to the highest-ranking business school out there. Harvard is going to open doors that are just ridiculous, whereas the #20 school is probably educationally equivalent, but isn't going to make you a CEO at 30. On the other hand, if I were hiring, I'd be extremely skeptical of the Harvard MBA and less skeptical of the Booth MBA and even less skeptical of the UWash MBA. In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).

"linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image"

What do you mean here by linear combination? If you wrote the same thing and said nonlinear combination would we have come away with a different interpretation? Is this just injecting random math terms to raise the status and credibility of the speaker?

It's a problem I see in a certain non-MBA culture (and am guilty of myself all the time too).

Or maybe I'm just missing something about what you meant.

> "linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image"

> What do you mean here by linear combination?

I suspect that Michael means that the people who claim on leadership position without having proved themselves will justify their self entitlement x % by their pre-existing social resources and (1-x) % by what they think of themselves.

Yes, you don't have to hold an MBA to think like that, but a diploma from a prestigious institution sure helps boost your ego, and being born from wealthy parents helps as well.

You're reading too much into it. I could have taken out the word "linear" and it would have been fine, but it wasn't exactly a random math term.

A linear model is the simplest model, which is sometimes an asset (in some cases, linear regression is the best statistical model for its simplicity) and sometimes makes it crude and underfit to the problem. I was focusing on the latter.

"douchebaggery"...Sweet. My new favorite word.

It starts even earlier than business school, with the kids who campaign to be president of ten different school clubs just for the sake of being in a leadership position and being able to put it on their resumes. American culture really encourages this shallow sort of leadership by entitlement, while truly great leaders almost always earn their authority through a medium to long period of hard work side by side with other people, not necessarily as a follower, but at least as an equal.

In what way is becoming president of school clubs a form of entitlement?

Becoming president of school clubs isn't entitlement. What I mean is that the culture around leadership positions in high school incubates the attitudes that Michael was complaining about. Some students do legitimately learn a lot being the president of a high school club and are able to do good stuff with it. Many students, though, just run for the resume item, to help themselves rather than really to serve the organization and help it do interesting things. And because of the way our culture treats leadership, as if it were something that can exist without context, that becomes part of their identity. They've been the "leaders" of organizations all their life (which in some cases involves little more than organizing social events), they've gone to these fancy schools, and now, as a result, they ought to be in charge later in life, because that's who they are and because Harvard doesn't train followers, it trains leaders. But just because someone is the president of a social club or an a capella group in college (not to say that this is not a worthwhile thing to do), it doesn't give them any more right or qualification to be the leader of a law firm, or an engineering firm, or an advocacy group, or a theatre troupe. Leadership isn't a single skill or quality; it exists entirely within a context.

I don't have any problem with club presidents in general. I do have a problem with some of the ideas U.S. culture (or at least middle class upward-aspiring culture) has about leadership, and I think those attitudes do lead to a destructive form of entitlement.

I don't think you're going to get an accurate view of people at Harvard, even people that were involved in student government or were club presidents, if you generalize them like that. If I were to generalize, I'd think that most people that were high school club presidents and leadership camp-goers were really cynical about it, not entitled. (That's just based on the people that went to my high school.)

I also don't think the cause-and-effect story is really there. The one startup founder that I know personally that I've heard be called a douchebag is somebody that started the company early on in high school, that bootstrapped it up with his brother from money made by selling bootleg CD's at soccer practice, and never went to college. And the other >bad person< I know that started a startup isn't your generic entitled club president type -- he is, far more specifically, your basic clinical psychopath.

Also, to the degree that these people do exist, or to which this attitude has been inculcated into a group of people, the sink-or-swim situation of running a startup seems like a great place for them.

> Most of these people (not all of whom are MBAs) just want to be bosses, not entrepreneurs. Their goal is to be executives ("big picture guys") shouting orders, not worker bees, but they don't have the social resources to make it happen in an existing company so they drum up some seed funding and hire some engineers (usually, scraping the bottom) and try to kick something together.

That seems like a very mean way to say they don't want to be a cog in a machine.

> "I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were.

By "I want to be an executive" do you mean "I'd rather not work for a boss"? Is there a difference in those two desires? How is that fucking [sic] lame?

> What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."

Actually, "I have the right" is your words, not theirs.

> I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags.

Whoa, whoa. Nobody said they were douchebags.

> I know plenty whom I like a lot.

And I have a lot of gay friends (but I wouldn't say I like them "a lot").

> Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking.

What is a culture of entitlement? People just go to business school and... sit there and be entitled? What is a culture of position-seeking? Do they seek positions in companies? Does engineering school also have a culture of position-seeking, or is that different somehow?

> When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies.

So some MBA's aren't that good. I think we all already know that some startup founders suck. But others must be good, or turn out to run successful companies, or investors would just unilaterally cease funding any MBA's. The phenomenom of bad founders is not limited in any special way to people that got MBA's, either. So in what way is the problem with business schools, or the people that go to them? (Aside from the usual complaint you hear from a lot of people, that you're repeating, about MBA's that don't really know what they're doing because they don't have experience, which we get when people make stereotypical complaints about management consultants too.)

> In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).

It would be helpful if you could point us to an academic study that makes these measurements of douchiness. I don't hang out with enough law school graduates and business school graduates from these respective schools to be able to tell if what you are saying is true, but I guess you hang out with enough of them from each major business school and law school to have figured this all out.

Obviously, the person from your anecdote is representative of MBAs in general, right? If not, what's the point of the comment? I have a stupid conversation with someone from some occupation every day.

In a couple of years, your conversation will sound like this:

You: so, what are you doing these days?

MBA: well, I've been at McBainCitiGold for a couple years, but I'm getting bored, I'd like to start up!

You: oh really? Go for it! I really don't regret doing it myself.

MBA: yeah, but I'm just waiting for the right idea. And the salaries are too low. The kids, school, car, condo... By the way, do you have any ideas?

Wait a few more years and this time they'll tell you about how they'd like to invest in startups, but the entrepreneurs ask for too much, so they just had to invest it in property instead. Or are on their 17th meeting with a poor founder who for some reason (location, CV, lack of connections) is stuck raising from this type of amateur angel, unable to pull the trigger and "keeping options open".

This being said, I don't blame them. Startup life (outside the megafunded) is tough, has low expected value, requires sub-optimal life decisions (goodbye family) and, I think, only fits certain types of people who are very independent minded and enjoy that kind of challenge. The MBAs I know who did it with the express intent of getting on with a company fit that type, and one of them has hired his 100th employee last year.

When I hear a corporate type say "oh, I'd like to do startups" I think it's pretty similar to hearing many people say "I'd love to try the military". A passing thought, either being polite (admiring your life choices) or to be rapidly dismissed once encountering what those career paths entail.

The interview is excellent, and has great nuggets of wisdom. The one that particularly stood out was--

"People always say you should live every day as though it's your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it's going to go on forever. You should treat people like you're going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time. And so I want to live every day as though it's going to go on forever." [0]

The one I couldn't agree with (and one that features in his book Zero to One) was about 'Competition is for loosers' I find it ironic that he brings up example of Google and the monopoly it holds over the market... but wasn't Google entering the search market as a competition to multiple other internet firms before they leap-frogged them with all the talent they gobbled up from DEC?

I like the hypothesis about how there is always more than one entity (or a person) that's trying to do invent something almost at the same time-- theory of Relativity [1], the airplane[2], the light blub [3]... and how each of them were competing against time as much as each others to be the first to achieve the breakthrough.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/218217-work-for-a-better-lif...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Histor...

The competition is for losers, in my understanding is saying don't enter a competitive market where you're not going to change it. For example, don't start a restaurant or a store -- unless you're going to be extremely different.

"Competition is for losers" seems like pretty weak reasoning to me. As far as I can tell, it goes something like:

Success is not random. Therefore, if you are successful, there is something different about you. Therefore, you are a monopolist. Therefore, competition can't make you successful.

But that's not very helpful. Every business on the planet can claim some kind of differentiation -- maybe their supply chain is more efficient, or their company structure is superior, or their sales channels are smarter, or...

More differentiation might be "better" in some sense, but differentiation is often decided after the fact. It wasn't obvious that Google was differentiated until they took over the market.

That is not remotely the whole argument. The argument is really about the fact that competition ultimately drives profit margin to zero. See his other writings for details.

>> I find it ironic that he brings up example of Google and the monopoly it holds over the market... but wasn't Google entering the search market as a competition to multiple other internet firms before they leap-frogged them with all the talent they gobbled up from DEC?

Google was Page and Brin's research project. Search engines at the time ranked websites based on a simple method of counting how many times a search term appeared on the site. Google's method, PageRank, was technologically superior and helped them differentiate themselves from the competition in a major way.

>Peter Thiel is often described in techno-hyphenated words: ... Techno-utopian.

I think the journalist got that characterization wrong.

Based on PT's writings and interviews[1], he's not a techno-utopian. My cursory google searches doesn't show that others call him that either. Techno-utopians would be people like Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, and Marc Andreessen. And possibly Elon Musk as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yztBoNQRYo

I wouldn't even call them tech-utopians. I would call them people who do know that a) the world can be made a better place but that b) for that to happen people must make it happen. I can't speak for any of the three but I don't think any of them are utopians; understanding that progress can be made isn't the same as utopianism.

Journalists seem to like phrases like "techno-utopian" in order to make them sound more like the other and like a different species than their readers.

>I can't speak for any of the three but I don't think any of them are utopians;

Well, in the context of media awareness and public perception, it's not if they truly __are__ utopians insomuch as other journalists and pundits call them that. Yes, RK, KK, MA, and others like Tim O'Reilly and Dean Kamen may prefer to call themselves the blander title of "techno-optimists" or "tech-progressives". If the outsiders like journalists choose to exaggerate "optimists" to "utopians" for dramatic effect, it sort of goes with the territory of being in the public eye. (Like Michael Jackson the "king of pop", or 1970s babies the "X Generation". The subjects of those labels didn't give journalists permission to call them that.)

The other side of techno-utopians would be tech-cautious writers like Tom Standage (Economist editor) and Evgeny Morozov.

In terms of how public figures are viewed, I still don't think Peter Thiel is in the same category as the other people I mentioned.

People nowadays like to use the word "utopian" as a snarl-word for someone who hasn't gotten the memo that people are So Totally Over This Whole "Progress" Thing.

>>A lot of business books are these pseudo-scientific books that say, “These are the five steps to follow and you will make a lot of money.” But if you have no formulas, you will be open to some new possibilities, some new ideas.

This is the beauty of capitalism...there is no formula for success, which means no one can monopolize or control that formula, and everyone has a shot :)

This may be the prime reason that the next Google may not be born out of an incubator like Y Combinator which has a certain way of mentoring start-ups? I have watched all of their mostly awesome 'How to Start a Start-up' on YouTube and the string of advices they give come off as a sort of a rough formula. Although, there are multiple instances where PG and Sam are pretty clear that some of the best ideas are so absurd that most will dismiss it without a thought.

Some say "owning the means of production" is such a formula.

There's certainly a lot of opportunity in technology right now, but capitalism doesn't guarantee such a state. The net neutrality debate is very explicitly about keeping the market open to newcomers.

For software...not so much for ISPs. Aside from that though, I'm also referring to sports, arts and entertainment, healthcare, etc. Industries that are driven by cultural trends, such as fashion or music, what I said above is especially true.

The software field is very picky in what it thinks is right... for instance, iron grip of Apple over the entire iOS eco-system is fine with most developers who'd continue to build on their platform, whilst any such move by a company that isn't really in the tech scene as much (like the ISPs) is scrutinized to hell and back.

One has a choice on whether to use Apple or not. In the US, at least, one rarely has choice in their ISP, especially if they want something with any kind of speed. Hence, them trying to exert an iron grip over what people are allowed to access is far more damning.

>And I think it’s interesting to explore how unusual that is relative to many other areas of technology, because there are so many innovations that were good for society but the people who came up with them ended up with very little.

Okay, co-founders sometimes end up with a fair amount money. However, early employees that actually built the company are often forgotten and given a relatively small sum of money. Not sure if SV really changed that.

Right. The discrepancy in reward, prestige, and chance of advancement between founders and employees is Silicon Valley's elephant in the room. Founders don't really take on more risk, because they have the social resources to get seed funding right away and because their backers will protect their careers no matter what happens, but they get orders of magnitude more equity and, if the business succeeds, recognition and credibility. It really is a new caste system, and it might be Silicon Valley's weak point right now. The illusion that most people have when they go there is that they'll be founders in 3 years, when the reality is that most will never be founders because they don't have the right social class background and pedigree.

It can still be worth it to be a startup employee if you can get more responsibility and faster promotions than elsewhere. However, if the startup is one of those that always promotes externally, while the engineers who built the original work get shat on for mistakes made in chasing deadlines-- this is a common anti-pattern-- then you're wasting your time and should bounce as soon as possible.

If you're an employee hoping to make it rich by working on someone else's startup you're doing it wrong. Work for someone else because you need steady pay. Work for someone else because you appreciate what they're doing.

If you want to make a lot of money you need to take risks. Start your own startup. Go 4+ years without a salary. The co founders might not be the ones actually building the product but they're the ones taking the risk. They're the ones not sleeping at night. Trust me. It's a far better gig to just get paid as an employee than spend years on a startup that eventually fails. If Silicon Valley has done anything it's give young people the false impression that starting a startup is a way to get rich.

Well...it is. In the same way that playing the lottery is a way to get rich. One is much easier than the other.

Why are we rewarding someone who's "taking a risk" rather than the people who are actually doing the work?

It's not like the people doing the work are doing it for free. They're not sacrificing much. The people taking the risks are the ones sacrificing and enabling the creation of something, so they're the ones who gain from it.

But what, exactly, are they enabling? What couldn't the people doing the actual work do without them?

Early employees of Google and Facebook made pretty good money.

Instead of living everyday as if it was your last or as if it was going to go forever, how about living everyday as if you're going to die at around 80-85?

It really depends for people. You can keep track of all your thoughts and ideas meticulously, to ensure that none of them are a quantitative exaggeration or minimization of a linguistic translation of your present perceptions of the objective state of 'things'. But if you do that long enough, it is very hard to have an imagination, and you also can easily squash desire and fear this way as well. Dreams may also come out weird, and mathematical, logical, and computational terminology may seem to express multiple meanings about your conscious awareness (implicit metaphor - because logic + truth = ?, which gets very weird when you describe emotions or familial/friendly relations).

You can live assuming everything everyone tells you is correct, and you can assume this collectively forms your information sphere and consequently, your image of the world, and even then project that image onto something you call 'reality'. But it's a bubble. People change those bubbles because even though everything in reality tells them that they can not change the bubble, they know that it's still a bubble that you have to be convinced into in the first place.

The map is not the territory. -Alfred Korzybski

> "There are all these things that you never know whether they’re features or bugs—in a company or organization, or even in a personal trait."

Very true, and one can defend either side of it as per the situation.

"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing."

That point about employees not having friends at work being at risk is true in my case - if I don't have friends where I work I don't feel at home, and am indeed more likely to leave. Which is a force for anti-diversity, since I only rarely make friends with Asians (of either sort). And I'd bet that this is the rule, not the exception.

> Q. Some people outside Silicon Valley see it as a place that is not really in touch with the rest of the country. Does that ring true to you in any way?

> A. There is a big disconnect, because you have this sense of stagnation and slow growth in many other places, and you have this incredible boom in Silicon Valley.

This makes me think he doesn't get it...

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