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

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

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.

Seth Klarman's Warning for "The Everything Bubble"

3 Sources of Water on the Moon

View All

STOICISM | How to Worry Less in Hard Times

Worse than war is the very fear of war. Seneca Human history has never been free from adversity. Events like war, the outbreak of plagues, and natural disasters have caused dark times tainted by suffering and death. Without a doubt, the ancient Stoics ha…

Fraction multiplication as scaling examples

This right over here is an image from an exercise on Khan Academy, and it says compare using greater than, less than, or equal to. On the left, we have one fourth times five thousand, and we want to compare that to five thousand. On Khan Academy, you’d c…

Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann)

Part two of culture and team, and we have Ben Silberman, the founder of Pinterest, and John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe. Um, founders that have obviously sort of some of the best in the world at thinking about culture and how they build t…

Introduction to "Meet a chemistry professional"

Have you ever wondered what a chemist really does? In this series, we asked people with chemistry backgrounds to share their stories. We have people from all different fields and careers. For example, we have an interview of someone who works in forensics…

Photo Ark | Series Trailer

[Music] All right, this’ll work. Okay, we’re ready for the cobra. [Music] He’s running away from me. There we go, that’s just the first one. I’m all worn out. Okay, for the past 15 years, I’ve made a thousand trips to photograph over 10,000 species and s…

Rewriting before integrating | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Let’s say that we wanted to take the indefinite integral of ( x^2 \times (3x - 1) \, dx ). Pause this video and see if you can evaluate this. So you might be saying, “Oh, what kind of fancy technique could I use?” But you will see sometimes the fanciest …

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

More Articles