Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5)

All right, good afternoon. Uh, today's speaker is Peter Thiel. Peter was the founder of PayPal and Palantir and Founders Fund, and has invested in, uh, most of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. And he's going to talk about strategy and competition. Thank you for coming, Peter.

Awesome, thanks. Uh, Sam, thanks for inviting me. Thanks for, for having me. Uh, I sort of have a, I have a single thesis that I'm completely obsessed with on, um, on the business side, which is that, uh, if you're starting a company, if you're the founder entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for Monopoly, and, um, and that, uh, and you want to always avoid competition. And so, uh, hence, uh, competition is for losers, uh, something we'll be talking about today.

I'd like to, um, I'd like to start by saying something about, um, the basic idea of, uh, when you start one of the companies, um, how you go about, uh, creating value. And there's this question: what makes a business valuable? And I want to suggest that there's basically a very simple, uh, very simple formula that, um, you have a valuable company if two things are true: uh, number one, that it creates X dollars of value for the world and number two, that you capture Y% of X. And the critical thing that, uh, that I think people always miss in the sort of analysis is that X and Y are completely independent variables.

And so, um, X can be very big; Y can be very small. X can be of intermediate size, and if Y is reasonably big, you can still get a very big business. So to create a valuable company, you have to basically, uh, both create something of value and capture some fraction of the value of what you've created. And sort of just to illustrate this as a contrast, um, there's, if you sort of compare the US airline industry with a company like Google on search, um, if you sort of measure by the size of these industries, you could say that airlines are still more important than search if you just measure it, say, by revenues.

There's 195 billion in, uh, domestic revenues in 2012; Google had, uh, just north of 50 billion. Um, and, and so, and certainly sort of on some intuitive level, if you said, uh, if you were given a choice and said, well, do you want to get rid of all air travel or do you want to get rid of your ability to use search engines? The intuition would be that air travel is something that's more important than search. And this is, of course, just the domestic numbers. If you looked at this globally, um, airlines are much, much bigger than, um, than, uh, than, than, than search or than Google is.

But, uh, but the profit margins are quite a bit less. Uh, you know, they were marginally profitable in 2012. I think the entire 100-year history of the airline industry, the cumulative profits in the US have been approximately zero. No companies make money; they episodically go bankrupt, they get recapitalized, and you sort of cycle and repeat. And this is reflected in, you know, the combined market capitalization of the airline industry is maybe, uh, something, um, of the US airline industry, something like a quarter that of Google. So, you have a search engine much, much smaller than air travel but much more valuable.

And I think this reflects these very different, uh, valuations on X and Y. So, um, you know, if we look at perfect competition, um, you know, there are sort of—there's some pros and cons to the world of perfect competition. Um, on a high level, uh, it's always, um, this is what you study in econ one. It's always, it's easy to model, which I think is why econ professors like talking about perfect competition. Um, it somehow is efficient, especially in a world where things are static because you have all the consumer surplus gets captured by everybody.

And, uh, politically, it's, uh, what we're told is good in our society is that you, you want to have competition, and this is somehow a good thing. Um, of course, there are a lot of negatives. Uh, it's generally not that good if you're, um, you're involved in anything that's hyper-competitive, um, because you often don't make money. I'll come back to this a little bit later.

So, uh, so I think at one end of the spectrum you have, uh, industries that are perfectly competitive, and at the other end of the spectrum, um, you have things that, um, I would say are monopolies. And, um, and they're, you know, they're much more stable long-term businesses; you have more capital, uh, and, um, and if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, I think it's symptomatic of having created something really valuable.

Um, and so I do think this, you know, the sort of the extreme binary view of the world I always articulate is that there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world: there are businesses that are perfectly competitive and there are businesses that are monopolies. And, um, there's shockingly little that is in between, and, uh, this dichotomy is not understood very well because, uh, people are constantly lying about the nature of the businesses they're in.

Um, and this is why this, this is, in my mind, the most important—it's not necessarily the most important thing in business, but I think it's the most important business idea that people don't understand, that there are just the two kinds of businesses.

And so let me say a little bit about the lies that people tell. And so you basically, um, the basic, uh, if you sort of imagine that there was a spectrum of companies from perfect competition to monopoly, um, the, um, the apparent differences are quite small because the people who have monopolies pretend not to. They will basically say, uh, you know, and it's because you don't want to get regulated by the government; you don't want the government to come after you, so you will never say that you have a monopoly.

So anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they're in incredible competition. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you are incredibly competitive, um, and if you're in some sort of business where you will never make any money, um, you will be tempted to tell a lie that goes in the other direction where you will say that you're doing something unique, um, that, um, is somehow, uh, less competitive than it looks because, um, because you want to, you will want to differentiate, you want to try to attract capital or something like that.

So if the monopolists pretend not to have monopolies, the non-monopolists pretend to have monopolies. The apparent difference is very small, whereas the real difference, I would submit, is actually quite big.

And so there's this distortion that happens because of the lies people tell about their businesses, and the lies are sort of in these opposite direction. Let me let me drill a little bit down further on the, uh, the way these lies work. And so, um, you know, the basic lie you tell as a non-monopolist is that we're in a very small market. The basic lie you tell as a monopolist is that the market you're in is much bigger than it looks.

And so, um, and so typically, if you want to think of this in sort of set-theoretic terms, you could say that a monopoly tells, um, a lie where you describe your business as the union of these vastly different markets, and the non-monopolist describes it as the intersection. So that, uh, in effect, um, if you're a non-monopolist, you will rhetorically describe your market as super small; you’re the only person in that market. If you have a monopoly, you will describe it as super big, and, um, and there's lots of competition in it.

So, uh, some examples of how this works in practice. Uh, so I always use restaurants as the example of a terrible business. This always, you know, sort of my idea is, you know, capitalism and competition are antonyms. Um, capitalist is someone who accumulates capital; a world of perfect competition is a world where all the capital gets competed away. So, uh, you're opening a restaurant business; no one wants to invest because you just lose money. So you have to tell some idiosyncratic narrative, and you will say something like, "Well, we're the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto, so it’s British Palo Alto."

And, uh, and of course, that's too small a market because people may be able to drive all the way to Mountain View or even Menlo Park, um, and there probably are no people who eat nothing but British food—at least, no people who are still alive. And so, so that is, um, that's a sort of a fictitiously narrow market.

Um, there's sort of a Hollywood version of this where, uh, the way movies always get pitched is, you know, okay, it's like a college football star, you know, uh, joins an elite group of hackers to, um, to catch the shark that killed his friend. Um, sorry. And so that's now—that is a movie that has not yet been made. But the question is, is that the right category, or is the correct category—it's just another movie? In which case, you know, there are lots of those; it's super competitive, incredibly hard to make money. No one ever makes money in Hollywood, uh, doing movies, or it’s really, really hard.

And so you always have this question about, does the intersection—does it make sense? Does it have value? That one should ask. And of course, there are startup versions of this where you—and the sort of the bad, really bad versions—you just take a whole series of buzzwords, shareable mobile social apps, you combine them, and you have some kind of narrative. And whether or not that's a real business or not, uh, is generally a bad sign.

So it’s almost this pattern recognition; when you have this rhetoric of the sort of intersections, um, it generally does not work. The something of somewhere is really mostly just the nothing of nowhere. And it’s like the Stanford of North Dakota—one of a kind, but it's not Stanford.

Um, so let’s look at the opposite. The opposite lie is, um, if you are, let’s say, uh, the search, uh, company that’s down the street from here and has about a happy 66% market share, um, and, uh, is, you know, is completely, completely dominant in the search market. Um, Google has not almost never describes itself as a search engine these days, um, and instead it describes itself in all these different ways.

So it sometimes says it's an advertising company. So if it was search, you'd say, wow, this, this, like, it has this huge market share—that's really, really crazy; it’s like an incredible monopoly. It's much bigger than—it’s much, a much more robust monopoly than Microsoft ever had in the 90s. Maybe that's why it's making so much money. Um, but if you, uh, if you say it's an advertising market, you could say, well, there's search advertising; it’s 17 billion, and that's part of, uh, online advertising, which is much bigger, and then, you know, all us advertising is bigger, and then by the time you get to global advertising, that's close to 500 billion.

And so you’re talking about 3 and a half percent, um, a tiny part of, uh, of this much larger market. Um, or, uh, if you don't want to be an advertising company, you can always say that you're a technology company. Um, and so, um, sorry, let me see. Um, and so the—and, and so, um, and the technology market is something like a one trillion dollar market.

And the narrative that you tell as Google in the technology market is, um, well, we're competing with all the car companies with our self-driving cars; we're competing with Apple on TVs and iPhones; uh, we're competing with Facebook; we're competing with Microsoft on, um, on Office products; we're competing with Amazon on cloud services. And so we are in this giant technology market where there's competition in every direction you look, and, uh, no, we're not the monopoly the government's looking for, and we should not get regulated in any way whatsoever.

And so I think one has to always be super aware that there are these, uh, these very powerful incentives to, uh, to distort, uh, the nature of these markets one way or the other. So, um, you know, the evidence of narrow markets in the, uh, in the tech industry is, um, if you basically just, uh, if you look at sort of the some of the big tech companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, um, they just, um, they've just been building up cash for, um, year after year, and you have these incredibly high profit margins.

And I would say that the, the one of the reasons the tech industry in the US has been, uh, has been so successful financially is because it's, it's prone to creating all these monopoly-like businesses, and that's, um, and it’s reflected, uh, by the fact that these companies just accumulate so much cash they don’t even know what what to do with it beyond a certain point.

Um, and so let me say, um, let me say a few things about, uh, about how to, how to build a monopoly. And I think, uh, I think one of the sort of very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of this monopoly, uh, thread is that, um, you want to go after small markets if you're a startup. Um, you know, you want to get to a monopoly; you're starting a new company; you want to get to monopoly.

Um, Monopoly is you have a large share of a market; how do you get to a large share of a market? You start with a really small market and you take over that whole market, and then, uh, and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles. And, uh, the thing that's always a big mistake is going after a giant market on, on day one because that's typically evidence that, um, that you somehow haven't defined the categories correctly. That, and it’s, it normally means that there's going to be too much competition in one way or another.

And so I think almost all the successful companies, uh, in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding. And, you know, if you take Amazon, you start with, you start with, you know, just, um, a bookstore. We have all the books in the world, so it's, it’s a, it's a, it's a better bookstore than anybody else has in the world when it starts in the 90s; it's online, there are things you can do you can't do before, and then you gradually expand into all sorts of different forms of e-commerce and other things beyond that.

Um, you know, eBay, you start with Pez dispensers; you move on to beanie babies, and eventually, uh, it’s, it's all these different, um, auctions for all these sorts of different goods. Um, and, uh, and what was very counterintuitive about what's very counterintuitive about many of these companies is they often start with markets that are so small that people don't think, um, they don't think that they're, uh, valuable at all when, when you get started.

Um, the, the PayPal version of this was, uh, was, you know, we started with, uh, with power sellers on eBay, which was about 20,000 people when, when we first saw this happening in December of '99, January 2000, right after we launched. Uh, there was a sense that, uh, that these were all, um, it was such a small market, it was terrible; we thought these were terrible customers to have. It's just people selling junk on the internet; why in the world do we want to be going after this market?

But, um, you know, you, there was a way to get a product that was much better for everybody in that market. You could, um, and we got to something like 25-30%; you know, market penetration in 2 or 3 months, and you got some walk-in, you got brand recognition, and you're able to build the business from there. So, um, so I always think these, um, these very small markets are quite underrated.

Um, the Facebook version of this I always give is that, uh, you know, the initial market at Facebook was 10,000 people at Harvard. It went from 0 to 60% market share in 10 days. That was a very auspicious start. Um, the way this gets analyzed in business schools is always, um, that's ridiculous; it’s such a small market, it can't have any value at all.

And so I think the business school analysis of Facebook early on, or of PayPal early on, or of eBay early on, is that the markets were perhaps so small as to have, uh, almost no value. Uh, and they, they would have had little value had they stayed small, but it turned out there were ways to then grow them concentrically, and that’s what made them, uh, that’s what made them so valuable.

Um, now I think the opposite version of this is always where you have super big markets. And, um, there's so much, so many different things that went wrong with all the clean tech companies in the last decade, but, uh, but one theme that ran through almost all of them was they all started with massive markets.

And every clean tech PowerPoint presentation that one saw in the years 2005 to 2008, which was sort of the clean tech bubble in Silicon Valley, started with we're in the energy market; we're in a market that's measured in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. And, um, and then, you know, once you're sort of a, a minnow in a vast ocean, um, that's not a good place to be. That means that you have tons of competitors and you don't even know who all the competitors are.

And so you want to be, you know, you want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it's the only one in a small ecosystem. You don't want to be the fourth online pet food company; you don't want to be the 10th thin-film solar panel company; you don't want to be the 100th restaurant in Palo Alto. Um, you know, the restaurant industry is a trillion-dollar industry. So if you do a market size analysis, you'd include restaurants are a fantastic business to go into, and it's often large markets, large existing markets typically mean that you have, uh, tons of competition—very, very hard to, uh, to differentiate.

So, the first very counterintuitive idea is to go after small markets—often markets that are so small people don't even notice them, they don't think they make sense. That's where you get a foothold, and then, um, and then if those markets are able to expand, you can scale into a big monopoly business.

Um, you know, um, a second, uh, sort of, there's sort of several different, uh, characteristics of these monopoly businesses, um, that I like to, um, focus on. And, uh, there's probably no sort of single formula to it, and I always think that, uh, that in technology there's always a sense that, you know, the history of technology such that every moment happens only once.

And so, you know, the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network; the next, uh, the next Larry Page won't be building a search engine; the next, uh, Bill Gates won't be building an operating system. And if you're copying these people, you're not learning from them. But it's, it's—

And so, um, there is always, um, these very unique businesses that are doing something that's not been done before end up having the potential to be a monopoly. If you're, you know, the opening line in, um, Anna Karenina is that all happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. The opposite is true in business, where I think all happy companies are different because they're doing something very unique; all unhappy companies are alike because they fail to escape the essential sameness that is competition.

And so, one characteristic of a monopoly technology company is some sort of proprietary technology. Um, my sort of crazy, somewhat arbitrary rule of thumb is you want to have a technology that's an order of magnitude better than the next best thing. So Amazon had over 10 times as many books. It's maybe not that high-tech, but you figure out a way to sell 10 times as many books in an efficient online way. You know, PayPal—the alternative for PayPal was using, um, was using, uh, checks to, uh, send money on eBay. It took 7 to 10 days to clear; PayPal could do it ten times as fast.

So you want to have some sort of very, uh, very powerful improvement in some, um, on in some order, maybe an order of magnitude improvement on some key dimension. Um, of course, you know, if you, if you actually come with something totally new, um, it’s just like an infinite improvement. So I would say the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked, and so that's, you know, that's like maybe—not maybe, but it's sort of definitely an order of magnitude or more of an improvement.

So I think, uh, the technology is designed to give you a massive delta over, over the next, the next best thing. I think, um, I think there often are network effects that can kick in that really help. The thing that's very, um, and these, these lead to monopolies over time. The thing that's very tricky about network effects is, uh, they're often, uh, they're often very hard to get started.

And so, um, so even though everyone understands how valuable they are, uh, there's always this incredible tricky question: why is it valuable to the first person who's doing something? Um, economies of scale—if you have something that with very high fixed costs, very low marginal costs, uh, that's typically a monopoly-like business. And then, um, then there's this thing, uh, of branding, uh, which is sort of like just, uh, this idea that gets lodged in people's brains. I never quite understand how branding works, uh, so I never invest in companies where it's just about branding, but it is, I think, a real phenomenon that, uh, that creates, uh, that creates real value.

I think one of the things—I'm going to come back to this a little bit towards the end, but one of the things that's very striking is that software businesses are often, um, are for some reason, uh, very good at some of these things. They're especially good at the economies of scale part because the marginal cost of software is zero. And so if you get something that works in software, um, it's often significantly better than the existing solution, and then you have these tremendous economies of scale, and you can scale fairly quickly.

So even if the market starts small, um, you can grow your business quickly enough to, uh, stay, um, stay at the same size as the growing market and, uh, and maintain the sort of monopoly, uh, power. Now the critical thing about these monopolies is, um, is it's, it's not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment; the critical thing is to have one that lasts over time.

And so, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's the sort of idea that you want to be the first mover. And I always think it's, it's in some ways, um, the better framing is you want to be the last mover. You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable. Microsoft was the last operating system, at least for many decades; uh, Google is the last search engine; Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last social networking site.

And, um, and one way to, one way to think of this, uh, last mover, uh, value is this idea that most of the value in these companies exists far in the future. Um, if you do sort of a discounted cash flow analysis of a business, you look at, you have sort of all these profit streams, you have a growth rate. The growth rate's much higher than the discount rate, and so most of the value exists far in the future.

I did, I did this exercise at PayPal in March of 2001; we had been in business for about 27 months, and, um, and we sort of had, you know, the growth rate was 100% a year; we were discounting future cash flows by about 30%. And it turned out that about 3/4 of the value of the business as of 2001 came from cash flows in years 2011 and beyond.

And, um, and whenever you do the math on any of these tech companies, you get to an answer that’s something like that. So if you are trying to analyze any of the tech companies in Silicon Valley, Airbnb, Twitter, uh, Facebook, um, any emerging internet companies, all the ones in Y Combinator, um, the math tells you that three-quarters, 80-85% of the value is coming from cash flows in years 2024 and beyond—it’s very, very far in the future.

And, uh, and so one of the things that, uh, we always overvalue in Silicon Valley is growth rates and we undervalue durability because, uh, growth is something you can measure in the here and now, and you can always track that very precisely. Um, the question of whether a company's still going to be around a decade from now, that's actually what dominates the value equation, and that sort of is a much more, uh, qualitative sort of a thing.

And so if we, um, if we went back to this idea of these characteristics of monopoly, uh, proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, um, um, you can think of these characteristics as ones that exist at a moment in time where you capture a market and take it over. But you also want to think about are these things going to last over time?

And so there's a time dimension to all these characteristics. So network effects often have a great time element where as the network scales, the network effects actually get more robust. And so if you have a network effect business, that's often one that, uh, um, can become a bigger and stronger monopoly over time. A proprietary technology is always a little bit of a tricky one. So you want something that's an order of magnitude better than, uh, the state-of-the-art in the world today, and that's how you get people's attention; that's how you initially break through.

But then, um, you don’t want to be superseded by somebody else. And so there are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation but no one made any money. So, uh, you know, disc drive manufacturing in the 1980s, um, you could, you could do a better disc build a better disc drive than anybody else; you could take over the whole world, and two years later someone else would come along and replace yours.

And in the course of 15 years, you got vastly improved disc drives, so it had great benefit to consumers, but, um, it didn't actually help the people who started these companies. And so there's always this question about having a huge breakthrough in technology but then also being able to explain why yours will be the last breakthrough, uh, or at least the last breakthrough for a long time.

Or will you make a breakthrough and then you can keep improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up? So if you have a structure of, um, a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on, um, that's great for society; it's, um, it's actually not that good for your business typically.

Um, and then, um, economies of scale, uh, where I talked about. So, so I think anyway, so I think this last mover thing is, is very critical. I'm always tempted, you know, I don't want to overdo the chess analogies, but you know, the first mover in chess is someone who plays white. White is about a one-third of a pawn advantage, so there's a small advantage to, uh, going first. You want to be the last mover, um, who wins the game. And so, so was the Capablanca, uh, world champion, uh, chess champion.

Capablanca's line—you must begin by studying the endgame. And, and I do think that's, um, well, I wouldn't say that's the only thing you should study. I think this, uh, the sort of perspective of asking these questions: why will this still be the leading company 10, 15, 20 years from now—is a, uh, is a really critical one to, to try to think through.

Let me, um, let me sort of, uh, I want to sort of go in two slightly other directions with this monopoly versus competition idea. And I think, um, so I think this is the central idea, uh, in my mind for, for business, for starting a business, for thinking about them. And, um, and there are some, some very, um, interesting perspectives I think it gives on the whole, you know, on the whole history of innovation and technology and science because, um, you know, we’ve lived through, um, we’ve lived through, um, you know, 250, 300 years of incredible technological progress in, you know, many, many different domains—uh, you know, steam engine to railways to telephones, refrigeration, household appliances, um, you know, the computer revolution, aviation, all sorts of different areas of technological innovation.

And then there’s sort of an analogous thing that one can say about science where, uh, we’ve lived through centuries of enormous amounts of innovation in, in, in science as well. And, um, and the thing that I think, um, people always miss when they think about these things is, um, is that, um, because X and Y are independent variables, um, some of these things can be extremely valuable innovations, but, uh, the people who invent them, who come up with them do not get rewarded for this.

And, uh, and certainly, if you go back to, um, you need to create X dollars in value; you capture Y% of X. I would suggest that the history of science has generally been one where Y is 0% across the board—the scientists never make any money. Um, they're always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions, and this is probably the fundamental delusion that, uh, that scientists tend to suffer from in our, in our society.

Um, and even in technology, there are sort of many different areas of technology where, um, where there were great innovations that created tremendous value for society, but, uh, but people did not, uh, did not actually capture that much of the value. And so I think there is this sort of whole, uh, history of, um, science and technology that can be told from the perspective of how much value was actually captured.

And, um, and certainly there are entire sectors where people didn't capture anything. So you're the smartest physicist of the 20th century; you come up with special relativity; you come up with general relativity; you don't get to be a billionaire; you don't even get to be a millionaire. Um, it just somehow doesn't work that way. Um, the railroads, incredibly valuable; most of them just went bankrupt because there was too much competition. Um, the Wright Brothers—um, you fly the first plane; you don’t make any money.

And so I think there is sort of the structure to these industries that's, uh, that's very important. Um, and I think the, uh, the thing that's actually rare are the success cases. Most—the—so it’s actually, you really think about the history in this, in this 250-year sweep, um, it’s almost always Y is 0%. It's always zero in science; it’s almost always in, in technology. And so it's very rare where people made money, you know, the early, uh, the late 18th early 19th century, the first Industrial Revolution was the textile mills; you had the steam engine; you sort of automated things.

And you had these relentless improvements that people improved the efficiency of textile factories, of manufacturing generally, at a clip of 5 to 7% every year, year after year, decade after decade. You had 60, 70 years of tremendous improvement from 1780 to 1850. Um, but even in 1850, most of the wealth in Britain was still held by the landed aristocracy.

Uh, the workers didn't, you know, the workers didn't make that much; the capitalists didn't make that much either. It was all competed away—there were hundreds of people running textile factories; it was an industry that just, uh, the structure of the competition prevented people, uh, from making any money. Um, and so I think there are, in my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last 250 years where people have actually, uh, come up with new things and made money doing so.

Um, one is, uh, these sort of vertically integrated complex monopolies, which people, uh, did build in the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. And so this was like Ford; it was the vertically integrated oil companies like Standard Oil. Um, and what these vertically integrated monopolies, uh, typically required was this very complex coordination; you got a lot of pieces to fit together in just the right way.

Uh, when you assembled it, you had a tremendous advantage. This is actually, uh, done surprisingly little today, and so I think this is sort of a business form that, um, when people can pull it off, is very valuable. It's typically fairly capital-intensive. Uh, we live sort of in a, in a, in a culture where it's very hard to get people to buy into anything that's super complicated and takes very long to build.

Uh, but I, you know, when I sort of think about my colleague Elon Musk from PayPal's success with Tesla and SpaceX, uh, I think the key to these companies was the complex vertically integrated monopoly structure they had. So if you sort of look at Tesla or SpaceX, if you ask, you know, was there sort of a single breakthrough, I mean, they certainly innovated on a lot of dimensions.

I don't think there was a single 10x breakthrough in battery storage, or, you know, maybe working on some things on rocketry, but they hadn't, there was no sort of single massive breakthrough. But what was really impressive was integrating all these pieces together and, um, and doing it in a way that was more vertically integrated than most of their competitors.

So Tesla, you also integrated the car distributors so they wouldn't, uh, steal all the money, as has happened with the rest of the car industry in the US. Or SpaceX, um, you basically, uh, pulled in all the subcontractors, um, uh, where most of the large, uh, aerospace companies have single-source subcontractors that are able to sort of charge monopoly profits and make it very hard for the integrated aerospace companies to make money.

Um, and so, uh, vertical integration, I think, is sort of a very underexplored modality of, of technological progress that people, uh, would, uh, would do well to look at more. And then I think there is, there is something about software itself that's very, very powerful. Um, software has these incredible economies of scale; these low marginal costs, and there is something about the world of bits as opposed to the world of atoms where you can often get very fast adoption.

And, and the fast adoption is critical to capturing and taking over markets because even if you have a small market, if the adoption rate is too slow, there’ll be enough time for other people to enter that market and compete with you, whereas if you have a small to mid-sized market and have a fast adoption rate, you can, uh, take over this market.

And so I think this is one of the reasons Silicon Valley has done so well and why software has been of this phenomenal industry. And what I would suggest, what I would want to leave you with is there are sort of these different rationalizations people give for why certain things work and why certain things don't work. And I think these rationalizations always obscure this question of, um, creating X dollar in value and capturing Y% of X.

So the science rationalization—we're always told is that the scientists aren't interested in making money; they're doing it for charitable reasons and that not a good scientist if you're motivated by money. And I’m not even saying people should always be motivated by money or something like this, but I I think we should, we should be a little bit more critical of this as a rationalization; we should ask, is this a rationalization, um, uh, to obscure the fact that Y equals 0% and the scientists are operating in this, uh, in this sort of world where all the, uh, all the innovation is effectively competed away and they can't capture any of it directly?

And then the, uh, the software distortion that often happens is because people are making such vast fortunes in software, we infer that this is the most valuable thing in the world being done full stop. And so if people at Twitter make, uh, billions of dollars, it must be that Twitter is worth far more than anything Einstein did.

And, um, and, uh, and what that sort of rationalization tends to obscure is, again, that X and Y are independent variables, and there are these businesses where you capture a lot of X, and there are others where you don't. And so, uh, and so I do think, um, I do think the history of innovation has been this, uh, this history where, uh, the microeconomics, the structure of these industries has mattered a tremendous amount.

And when, um, and, and there is sort of this story where some people have made vast fortunes because they were in industries with the right structure and other people, uh, made nothing at all because, um, because they were in these sort of very competitive things, and we shouldn’t just rationalize that way. I think it's worth understanding this better.

And then finally, let me come back to this, this, uh, this sort of overarching theme for this talk: this competition is for losers idea, which, um, is always this provocative way to, to title things because we always think of the losers as the people who are not good at competing. We think of the losers as the people who are, um, slow on the sports on the track team in high school or who do a little bit less well on the standardized tests, um, and don't get into the right schools, and so we always think of losers as people who can't compete.

Um, and I want us to really rethink and, and revalue this and consider whether it's possible that competition itself, um, is off—that we're sort of, it’s not just the case that we don't understand this monopoly-competition dichotomy intellectually. So sort of been talking about why you wouldn’t understand it intellectually because, um, people lie about it, it's distorted. We have all these, uh, the history of innovation rationalizes what happens in all these very, very strange ways.

But I think it's more than just an intellectual blind spot; I think it's also a psychological blind spot where we find ourselves, you know, very, very attracted to competition in one form or another. Um, we find it reassuring if other people do things. The word "ape" already in the time of Shakespeare meant both primate and imitate, uh, and there is something about human nature that's deeply mimetic, imitative, apish, sheep-like, lemming-like, cd-like. Um, and it's this very, very problem, uh, thing that we need to always think through and try to overcome.

And there is always this question about, um, competition, um, as a form of validation where we, we go for things that lots of other people are going for. And, um, it's not that there is wisdom in crowds; it's not when lots of people are trying to do something that that's proof of, um, it being valuable. I think it's when lots of people are trying to do something that is often, um, that is often proof of insanity.

There are 20,000 people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars; about 20 of them make it. Um, I think the Olympics are a little bit better because you have a, you know, um, you can sort of figure out pretty quickly whether you're good or not. So there's a little bit less of a dead weight loss to society.

Um, you know, um, your, the sort of educational experience at a place, uh, the, the pre-Stanford educational experience, um, there's always sort of a non-competitive characterization. I think most of the people in this room had machine guns; they were competing with people with bows and arrows, so, um, it wasn't exactly a parallel competition when you were in junior high school and high school.

Um, there's always a question: does the tournament make sense as you keep going? And this is, uh, and so, um, there is always this question if people go on to grad school or post-doctoral educations, does the intensity of the competition really make sense? There's the classic Henry Kissinger line that, um, describing his fellow faculty at Harvard, that the, uh, um, the battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small—describing sort of academia.

And, um, and you sort of think on one level this is a description of insanity. You know, why would people fight like crazy when the stakes are so small? But it's also, I think, simply a function of the logic of the situation: when it's imp—really hard to differentiate yourself from other people, when the differences are, when the objective differences really are small, then, uh, you have to, uh, compete ferociously to maintain, uh, a difference of one sort or another.

Um, that's often more imaginary than real. There's always sort of a personal version of this that I, I tell where, um, you know, I was sort of hyper-tracked. I, you know, my eighth-grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends wrote in, you know, I know you'll get into Stanford in four years as a sophomore.

I sort of went into went to Stanford four years later; uh, at the end of high school, uh, went to Stanford Law School; uh, you know, ended up, um, at a big law firm in, uh, New York, uh, where from the outside, everybody wanted to get in; on the inside, everybody wanted to leave. Um, and you had—

And it was this very strange dynamic where after I, uh, sort of realized this was maybe not the best idea, um, and left after seven months and three days, you know, one of the people down the hall from me, uh, told me, um, it's really reassuring to see you leave, Peter; I had no idea that it was possible to escape from Alcatraz, which, of course, all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back.

But, um, but so much of people's identities got wrapped up in, um, in winning, uh, these competitions that, uh, they somehow lost sight of what was important, what was valuable. Uh, you know, competition does make you better at whatever it is that you're competing on because when you're competing, you're, um, comparing yourself with the people around you; you're figuring out how do I beat the people next to me; how do I do somewhat better at whatever it is they're doing?

And you will get better at that thing; I'm not, I'm not questioning that; I'm not denying that. But, um, but it often comes at this tremendous price that, uh, you stop asking some bigger questions about what's truly important and truly valuable.

And so I would say that don't always go through the tiny little door that everyone's trying to rush through; maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one's taking. Thank you very much! I guess we have time for—you want to take a few questions or—sorry, oh yeah, people want to take—I’ll take a few questions; we have a few minutes. Time? Yeah, go ahead.

Um, since, yeah, as you mentioned earlier, often monopolies and competition often look similar because the narratives people tell, the narratives we tell ourselves—do you have any ways to easily determine the difference when you're looking at an idea or evaluating your own idea?

Well, I'd say the question I’m, I always try to focus on is what is the actual market? So not what's the narrative of the market because you can always tell a fictional story about a market that's much bigger or much smaller but what's the, what is the real objective market? So it's always, yeah, you always try to figure it out, and you realize people have incentive to distort things.

Yeah, so which of the aspects of monopoly that you mentioned would you say is like Google? Um, well, they have, uh, they have network effects with the ad network; they had proprietary technology that gave them the initial lead because they had the page rank algorithm which was, uh, sort of an order of magnitude better than any other search search engine. You have economies of scale, uh, because of the need to store, you know, all these different, uh, sites, and at this point, you have brand.

So Google has all four—maybe, maybe the proprietary technology is somewhat weaker at this point, but definitely, it had all four and maybe three and a half out of four now.

Yeah, how does this apply to Palantir? And second, what's your like second is what, what with the iPhone? Uh, oh this is—that's, that's a—there's sort of a set of companies that are doing different copycat payment systems on, on mobile phones. There's Square; there's PayPal—sort of they have just, they just have sort of different shapes; that's how they differentiate themselves. One is a triangle; one is a square.

And so, you know, um, maybe at some point the apes will run out of shapes or something like that, but, um, but I think, um, no, Palantir, we started with a focus on, on the, um, intelligence community, which is a small submarket. Um, you had a proprietary technology that used a very, very different approach, um, uh, where it was focused on the human, um, computer, uh, synthesis rather than the, uh, uh, substitution, which I think is the dominant paradigm.

So there's a whole set of things I would say on the, on the market approach and the proprietary technology.

Uh, yes? Um, we have design thinking methodology and, uh, lean, uh, startup thinking, um, which is used to mitigate risk by not creating things that people don't want. But how do young innovators, uh, have inspiration to create complex systems that last through time?

Can you repeat the question? Yeah, so the question is, um, what do I think about lean startups, uh, um, iterative thinking where you get, uh, feedback from people, uh, versus, uh, complexity that may not work?

So I, I am personally quite skeptical of all the, uh, lean startup methodology. I think the, the really great companies, um, did something that was sort of somewhat more of a quantum improvement that really differentiated them from everybody else. Um, they typically did not do massive customer surveys; the people who ran these companies, uh, sometimes, not always, suffered from mild forms of Asperger's, so they were not actually that influenced, not that easily deterred by what other people thought or told them to do.

Um, so I do think we're way too focused on, um, iteration as a modality and not enough on trying to, um, have, um, you know, um, a virtual ESP link with the public and figuring it out ourselves.

Um, I, I would say that, uh, let me see, um, I would say that, uh, the, um, I’m not quite—the risk question, I think, is always a very tricky one because there are, um, you know, there, there, it’s often, I think it's often the case that you don't have enough time to really mitigate risks.

If you, if you're going to take enough time to figure out what people want, um, you often will have missed the boat by then. Um, and, um, and then of course there's always the risk of, of doing something that's, uh, that's not that, uh, significant or meaningful. So you know, you could say a track in, um, in law school is a low-risk track from one perspective. It may still be a very high-risk track in the sense that maybe you not, um, have a high risk of not doing something meaningful with your life.

So we have to think about risk in these, uh, in these very complicated ways; I think risk is sort of this very, uh, complicated concept.

Yes? You talked about the last move advantage but then doesn't that imply that there's already competition to begin with? Chest pieces on the chessboard.

Um, yeah, so there's always this, uh, terminology thing. So I would say that, uh, there are, uh, there are categories in which people sort of are bundled together. I would say the monopoly businesses were, in effect, they, they really were a big first mover in some sense. You could say you could say Google was not the first search engine; there were other search engines before, but on one dimension they were dramatically better than everybody else.

So they were the first one with page rank—with, with sort of an automated approach. Um, Facebook was not the first, uh, social networking site; my friend Reed Hoffman started one in 1997; they called it Social Net. So they already had the name social networking in the name of their company seven years before Facebook.

Uh, their idea was that it was going to be this virtual cyberspace where I’d be a dog and you’d be a cat and we'd have all these different rules about how we’d interact with each other in this virtual alternate reality. Facebook was the first one to get real identity.

So it was, so I’d say, I hope Facebook will be the last social networking site. It was the first one in a very important dimension. People often would not think of it as the first because they’d sort of lump all these things together.

I have one more question. Okay, one more question. Let’s take one here. Uh, if theoretically someone who, uh, worked at Goldman Sachs out of college and left out six months and is now studying computer science at Stanford, uh, how would you recommend rethinking that?

Um, you know, I don't, I don't have a—I don't have a great, um, I'm not great at the psychotherapy stuff. So I don't, I don't quite know how to—I don't quite know how to, uh, how to solve this. That there are these, um, you know, there are these very odd studies that they've done on people who go to, um, business school. There are ones they've done at Harvard Business School where, um, it's sort of the anti-Asperger, um, personality where you have people who are super extroverted; uh, generally have low convictions, uh, few ideas.

And you have sort of a hot house environment—you put all these people in for two years, and at the end of it, uh, they systematically end up—the largest cohort systematically ends up doing the wrong thing. They try to catch the last wave. You know, uh, 1989, everyone at Harvard tried to work for Mike Milken; it was one or two years before he went to jail for all the junk bond stuff. They were never interested in Silicon Valley or tech except for 99, 2000 when they timed the bubble peaking perfectly.

Um, they did, uh, and then, you know, 05 to 07 was housing, uh, private equity, stuff like this. So, so I do think, um, I do think this, uh, tendency for us to see competition as validation is, um, is very deep.

Um, I don't think there's any sort of easy psychological formula to, uh, to avoid it. So I don't, I don't quite know how to, uh, what sort of therapy to recommend. But, um, but my, my first, my first starting point, which is only like it’s maybe 10% of the way, is to never underestimate how big a problem it is. We always think this is something that afflicts other people.

So, it's easy for me to point to people in business schools, or people at Harvard, or people on Wall Street. I think it actually does afflict all of us to a very profound degree. We always think of advertising as things that work on other people—how, how, who are all these stupid people who fall for all those ads on TV? They obviously work to some extent, and they work, uh, to a disturbing extent on all of us.

And it's something we, we all should work to overcome. Thank you very much!