How investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel finds the most talented people. #shorts

Peter Thiel has been one of the great talent finders in American history. So he was an early funder of Mark Zuckerberg. He was early on allied with Elon Musk and Reed Hoffman.

I think Peter likes to ask the question of people he's interviewing: "How successful are you going to be?" Now on the surface, that sounds like a silly question. Like, everyone's going to say, "I expect to be successful."

But if you measure the detail in the answer, the enthusiasm in the answer, you can get really quite a good sense of just how successful the person expects to be. The people who really have thought through their ambitions with real detail—that will come out when they respond.

I think another secret Peter has is it's not just who he finds, but it's who comes to him. There are ideas associated with Peter Thiel out there, and the idea is they're actually pretty difficult; they're not so easy to digest.

I think the resulting filter ends up attracting to Peter those who are like the right people that he might want to be investing in.