Peter Thiel
If you haven't been following Peter Thiel's lectures (transcribed by Blake Masters) I envy you. You're in for a treat. These are lectures given at Stanford and the topic is Startups, but whether or not you're looking to jump into entrepreneurship, these are fascinating reads. Heck, even if you know much about technology, you'll enjoy them.
Last night I was reading one that I skipped before as irrelevant to me (it was about giving a pitch to venture capitalists) but even if the topic is distant the content is just so good.
I don't know much about Peter, other than that he's one of the 5-6 co-founders of paypal (together with one Mr. Elon Musk who now bulids electric cars at Tesla Motors and sends stuff to space at SpaceX). Peter is also an early investor in Facebook and sits in its Board of Directors.
In these lectures Peter sometimes invites other luminaries (Paul Graham of YCombinator, Marc Andreessen) and promising startup founders from biotech, artificial intelligence and so on.
Peter makes thought provoking observations and parallels, which often have nothing to do with startups. E.g. that kings and queens are human sacrifices that figured out to prolong the time of their execution. Because scapegoats help restore piece and are worshiped before they are killed. But I don't want to ruin this for you.
Enjoy past, present and future of the human race (and startups as one example) in Peter Thiel's lectures about competition, war, distribution, secrets, luck, life, universe and everything:
- The Challenge of the Future
- Party Like it's 1999?
- Value Systems
- The Last Mover Advantage
- The Mechanics of Mafia
- Thiel's Law
- Follow The Money
- The Pitch
- If You Build It, Will They Come?
- After Web 2.0
- Secrets
- War and Peace
- You Are Not A Lottery Ticket
- Seeing Green
- Back to the Future
- Decoding Ourselves
- Deep Thought
- Founder as Victim, Founder as God
And, keep an eye on http://blakemasters.tumblr.com for the class lectures to come (I hope there's more!)
