Peter Thiel is the founder of PayPal, who later merged with Elon Musk, and together they created a unique solution for the payment market, supporting the growing eBay at the time. Later, as an investor, he backed a relatively young Facebook. In short, he has plenty to be proud of. But beyond pride, he decided to share his knowledge and views on business and startups with students at Stanford University. His lectures gained widespread popularity, partly thanks to the efforts of student Blake Masters, who recorded them in detail. Masters’ notes took on a life of their own, spreading far beyond the university. After some time, Peter Thiel decided to turn Masters’ notes into a book (hence, Masters is credited on the cover as a co-author).
The core idea of the work is to create businesses that bring something entirely new, rather than simply copying or slightly improving existing concepts. The reasoning is that existing ideas can only be improved to a certain extent, whereas new ones offer entirely unprecedented opportunities. Thiel supports this idea by sharing his views on what a startup team should look like, what they should focus on, and more.
To jump ahead slightly, I didn’t initially expect the book to offer groundbreaking insights, but it turned out to be less of an instructional guide and more of a stimulus for reflection on the examples provided and the questions posed by the author. Peter Thiel doesn’t try to teach; instead, he shares his perspective on building businesses, the ways in which the educational system and ingrained American beliefs help or hinder this process, and he poses very interesting questions that have no definitive answers:
This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
In this form, the book became not only interesting but also useful for me. I definitely recommend it to anyone involved in business and the creation of unique products in one way or another. But let’s talk in a bit more detail about the points Peter Thiel emphasizes in his book.
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